00 pieces of code-based artwork. Each artwork references the calendar and evolves dynamically with the change of each day and moon phase. “Gazers” utilizes the long-standing connection between humans and the moon, using it as a marker of time, emphasizing the fleeting and urgent nature of the present moment, while prompting us to look up and reflect on the future – towards our own lunar version.
Gazers #751, as shown in the static version above, was recently acquired by anonymous digital art collector Kanbas. During the solar eclipse visible in North America on April 8, 2024, Kanbas released a video showcasing Gazer #751 with a burning, flickering halo (see tweet below). This remains a stunning sight and demonstrates how digital art on the blockchain provides a dynamic experience that connects our digital and physical realities in a delightful way.
On the other hand, there is another interesting subset of digital items on the blockchain that are designed to be highly durable, almost eternal or immutable. The notable feature of these durable digital items is that they continue to exist as long as the underlying blockchain is operational. This is because the basic data required to render these digital items is stored directly on the blockchain, so they have minimal external dependencies.
In some cases, these items may still rely on widely distributed databases or development tools, such as some generative art NFTs on Art Blocks. However, overall, the blockchain provides a comprehensive canvas for these items, where they have all the necessary resources to realize their intended expression.
For Ethereum and similar smart contract blockchains, on-chain NFTs do not point to off-chain or externally hosted media files but instead link only to on-chain data, which is typically stored in smart contracts on the same blockchain. For Bitcoin, the data behind the ordinal is directly recorded as metadata in the specific transaction. In this respect, all ordinals are almost always immutable, unlike NFTs, which depend on the data they are linked to.
Nevertheless, what interests me conceptually about these on-chain digital items is the dimension of time – how they force us to consider the longevity of our digital experiences, which are often ephemeral. Our most Lindy (Lindy effect) on-chain digital items on the blockchain seem reasonable, as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are expected to live longer than people alive today. They may hibernate, but they will never die. Even if their owners lose their private keys, they will not disappear, just become immovable. *Block unicorn note: The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy’s law) is a theory that the longer something has been around, the longer its remaining life expectancy.
Considering this, I am indeed pondering the significance types we will assign to on-chain digital cultural items that can transcend our individual lifetimes. What will their memory store as they are owned and traded on the blockchain? How will their on-chain permanence relate to the offline cultural heritage over time?
Artist Rutherford Chang’s “CENTS” (2024) is centered around the form of placing 10,000 US cents on 10,000 satoshis, using ordinals as a medium to immutably connect the smallest units of both the US dollar and Bitcoin. Inspired by the value difference between the metal value of pre-1982 copper pennies (now about 2.5 cents) and their marked currency value (about 1 cent), the artist chose 10,000 no longer circulating pennies and documented them. Then, their images were immutably etched onto satoshis as ordinals, while the actual coins were melted and cast into a solid copper block.
Apart from being a commentary on the perception of material and immaterial value in different contexts, “CENTS” is also a reflection on the impact of time on value. Rutherford Chang himself has spoken about collecting pennies as early as 2017. More importantly, the historical sense conveyed by “CENTS” gives it significant weight. While each penny may have had homogeneity when manufactured, they now bear unique traces of the passage of time in the hands of various owners. Therefore, “CENTS” can be considered a generative artwork, as collector become.eth wrote in a tweet, “shaped by the algorithm that the world has worn down”.
Furthermore, the story of each penny does not end with its transformation into a digital artwork, as it will have a new history on the blockchain, with ownership and transaction of the object in the new digital and physical society. As enduring digital items that connect multiple times and economic backgrounds, “CENTS” undoubtedly has the potential to become a leading art collectible on Bitcoin and be seen as a valuable store of value in the future. “CENTS” is launched in collaboration with Inscribing Atlantis and Gamma on sovrn.art.
alignDRAW is an AI model for text-to-image generation established by Elman Mansimov and a development team in 2015, developed after Elman completed his undergraduate computer science program at the University of Toronto. The model was published in a conference paper in 2016 and is widely regarded as the first text-to-image model, laying the foundation for today’s various easily accessible AI tools for image and video generation.
As these generative AI tools continue to reshape image creation and our visual culture, alignDRAW stands as a milestone marking the beginning of this normalization shift. In light of this, Fellowship collaborated with Elman Mansimov to mint all 2,709 images created from the alignDRAW model as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain in 2023. Among these, 168 images were generated based on 21 unique text prompts, with each set of 8 images published in the 2016 paper. The other 2,541 images were generated from 21 text prompts, with 15 being unique and 6 matching the prompts in the paper, uploaded to the University of Toronto website in November 2015.
Fellowship designed a technical framework that allows each image to be stored on-chain in its original byte format without modification or enhancement. This was done progressively to take advantage of lower gas prices on Ethereum. By persistently and immutably storing alignDRAW images on the Ethereum blockchain, this approach affirms its historic role in leading the new era of human-machine collaboration in science and art.
Another interesting aspect of perceiving such on-chain digital items is how their creators work within the technical limitations of storing data on the blockchain. The artistry supporting these items lies in optimizing the data to achieve the creators’ creative vision in the most elegant way possible using every byte. As data scientist and on-chain artwork artist Chainleft described in an article, on-chain art is a “homage to the belief in eternity, capturing the infinite in the minuscule”. Indeed, from the bits and pieces of blockchain space, perhaps we can sow the seeds of more extensive and enduring forms of digital culture.
Larva Labs’ Autoglyphs (2019) was originally an exploration of creating “wholly self-contained” artworks that could be executed within the strict data storage constraints of the Ethereum blockchain. The result is a highly optimized generative algorithm – entirely residing within a smart contract – that generates ASCII art patterns. These patterns can then be individually transformed into images based on the instructions encoded in the smart contract.
This approach pays homage to early generative artists like Michael Noll, Ken Knowlton, and Sol LeWitt, whose works offered a perspective of artworks as systems rather than as representative pieces of art. In turn, Autoglyphs, as a standalone native medium system, for creating, owning, and distributing digital art on the blockchain, has inspired many generative artists to push the boundaries of the blockchain as an artistic medium. No wonder Autoglyphs has been likened to prehistoric cave paintings on the chain.
Curated, a fund for collecting crypto art, also has a concise editorial article outlining the main features of Autoglyphs, which is a good starting point for understanding its visual output and its collectible value.
Further pushing the concept of canvas, we can also view the blockchain as a computer. By computer, I don’t mean just a processing device that executes instructions within fixed parameters but a broader concept that can be traced back to the early personal computer vision proposed by computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider while working at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the early 1960s:
“The computer will be an interactive intellectual amplifier for everyone worldwide.”
There are two key concepts worth emphasizing here:
First, the computer is not just an information processor but also an intellectual amplifier – a platform that enables thinking methods that are more dynamic and learned through simulation, which is exactly what computation can achieve.
Second, the computer is a communication device that empowers us to coordinate with others in a larger network.
Let’s delve into how the computational possibilities offered by the blockchain shape digital culture in the context of these concepts.
Ethereum has been described as a “world computer” from the early days. In this sense, Ethereum and other similar blockchains can be understood as decentralized computing platforms on which applications can be built and executed globally. This is achieved through the deployment of smart contracts on these blockchains, which can execute complex functionalities beyond just transferring tokens between accounts.
By executing smart contracts on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) (or equivalent on other blockchains), which provides a general-purpose computing engine, the digital items created and controlled by these smart contracts can be designed to be composable. In other words, they can be combined or constructed in different ways to unlock new use cases, much like how developers leverage application programming interfaces (APIs) to build more powerful software products.
Therefore, digital items on the blockchain represent not only dynamic software but also dynamically connect to other items or applications on-chain. This composability makes on-chain digital items greater than the sum of their individual parts – as building blocks that can generate broader, more appealing, and potentially unprecedented digital experiences.
After all, the components of digital culture rarely exist in isolation, even outside of cryptocurrencies. A specific cultural item or concept persists in the digital space because it is easily integrated with other elements or remixed to create derivative works, further fueling interest in the original item or concept. In fact, the rise of TikTok as an entertainment platform can be attributed to how its tools facilitate the simplification of video remixing, effectively transforming videos into composable media and fostering a network effect of creativity.
Returning to cryptocurrencies, I believe that composable digital items on the blockchain can serve as cultural amplifiers for digital culture. This is akin to Licklider’s assumption that computers could become “intellectual amplifiers” by enabling new ways of thinking, such as “dynamic simulation”. In this regard, on-chain composability enhances the blending process for creators and consumers while catalyzing new approaches to creating digital culture.
On one hand, the blockchain allows for more robust tracking of provenance, ownership, and transaction history of digital items. This opens up possibilities for creators to establish a direct relationship with their audience and monetize their creations through mechanisms like NFTs. On the other hand, the composability of digital items on the blockchain enables the creation of new digital art forms, collaborations, and experiences that were previously unimaginable.
In conclusion, the intersection of blockchain technology and digital culture presents a vast landscape of possibilities. From code-based artwork to durable digital items, from text-to-image AI models to generative algorithms, and from self-contained artworks to composable digital items, the blockchain serves as a canvas, a computer, and a cultural amplifier. It reshapes the way we create, share, and experience digital culture, unlocking new realms of creativity and connection.