(Night Café, Van Gogh)
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Today's NFTs Are Similar to Bitcoins in 2012
This is not to say that the price of NFT is similar to that of Bitcoin in 2012, because the two are completely different things and cannot be compared in terms of price or value. What I want to say here is that the world's understanding of NFT may be similar to the understanding of Bitcoin in 2012.
In 2012, the world saw Bitcoin in the same way. Not much use itself has always existed in this world. Famous paintings, diamonds, jewelry, famous watches... how useful and valuable were they when they first appeared?
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How to understand NFT simply?NFT is a large category. Any content with unique characteristics can become an NFT. In addition to artworks, collectibles, game items, etc. that people see, even domain names, LP tokens that provide liquidity, and game tickets. etc. can become NFT. Therefore, it is unrealistic to cover all NFTs in one article. Different types of NFTs have different values and uses. Some have no obvious use, such as pixel avatars, generating artwork, etc.; some have very specific uses. , such as tickets, domains, in-game items. Regarding NFT, you can refer to Blue Fox Notes from three years ago to the most recent article "》、《What are non-fungible tokens?》、《Encrypted games and NFT》、《The Rampage of NFTs》《DeFi Bubbles, NFTs, and Market Corrections》。
Why NFT has the opportunity to explode in the encryption world?
In this article, we mainly discuss NFT from the perspective of generating artwork, and see if there will be something new in the combination of generating artwork and blockchain?
The soil for generating artwork NFT
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* Generative art is not new
Generative Art, English is Generative Art, it is the product of the combination of computer technology and art. Its generation is not directly created by humans, but through algorithms to generate artworks. Algorithms have a set of rules and can be played freely within the rules, and finally come up with unique works, which also represent a certain concept of the artist to a certain extent.
In 1984, the Museum of Modern Arts (Museum of Modern Arts) gave Lillian Schwartz, a pioneer of generative art, the opportunity to exhibit, bringing generative art onto the world stage.
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*The combination of generative art and computer technology
First of all, from the perspective of art development itself, generative art itself has been an important theme of art development in the past 50 years. Secondly, with the development of computer technology, generative art and computers have found a joint point, which gives generative art a new way of expression.
Generative art has its own artistic soil
Cézanne, the pioneer of modern art, is an important painter in the history of art, and he had an important influence on later Matisse and Picasso. Modern art began to move towards modern expression, instead of pursuing copying and similarity. In this process, art has entered a variety of stages, including Futurism and Constructivism, which is keen on machine aesthetics and technology; Dadaism, which focuses on autonomy and randomness; and Neoplasticism, which boldly uses geometric shapes...
These are the soils for the development of generative art, and it does not come out of thin air.
The development of computer technology has given generative art a new way of expression
By the end of the 1990s, under the impetus of Murial Cooper, Ben Fry, and Casey Reas, the digital art platform "Processing" was born. It greatly lowers the threshold for artists to enter generative art. Artists don't have to worry about expensive hardware or sophisticated programming skills. "Processing" software pushes the boundaries of generative art. In it, an artist named Jared Tarbell (also one of Etsy's co-founders) uses the "Processing" software to create some pretty awesome generative art.
（Bubble Chamber,Jared Tarbell,2003)
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According to art history expert Jason Bailey, Tarbell's work is "a classic example of the duality of chaos and control, with a strong visual complexity that slowly emerges from simplicity, making it feel more like it emerges from the soil." It grows out, not from an algorithm." In other words, generative art has reached a certain level, and it looks like a natural work.
Robbie Barat used GAN creation to generate some very lively artwork, such as the painting below:
（AI Generated Landscape #6，Robbie Barrat, 2018）
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All in all, with the development of computer technology, generative art has new practical tools and new ways of expression. In the context of modern art, art is eclectic, it is creation, not beauty is art. The distinctive creation is art itself.
Thus, the combination of computer technology and art has resulted in interesting new art forms, including generative art. Every era has its "Da Vinci" and "Van Gogh". Maybe a hundred years later, encryption artists like Beeple, Tyler Hobbs (and possibly other artists) may be considered as the top artists of the 21st century. Half leaf of "Michelangelo". Who knows?
Generative art itself takes full advantage of computer technology, but that doesn't mean it's completely random. It is designed by artists, setting certain rules, but under the controlled rules, there is a certain degree of randomness. This is also an artistic expression in itself.
In this case, the creator does not have complete control over the direction of the art, although the code is written, there is a certain degree of machine autonomy and randomness, these accidents make the art unique, at the same time, it also reflects the artist's ideas , is not entirely machine-generated.
One of the benefits of using generative art is that the artist can do more complex experiments, and when the artist wants to repeat something, using a machine can save a lot of time. According to the description of art history expert Jason Bailey, at the end of the 1960s, some artists began to try this kind of art, such as Georg Nees, Frieder Nake and so on. They print their work on a printer.
（Hommage à Paul Klee ，Frieder Nake,image description
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（Untitled，Vera Molnár，1985）
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*Generative art meets blockchain
Generative art is an inevitable product of the development of the digital age to a certain extent. In the industrial age, people used industrial materials (steel, concrete, glass, plastic) to produce various industrial products, etc. These industrial materials construct our buildings and everyday objects. In the information age, human beings spend a lot of time in the software environment. Social interaction, games, reading news, shopping, taxis, etc. all rely on software. Coding is reshaping various relationships in human life and production.
In the view of generative artist Tyler Hobbs (creator of the Fidenza series), material is very important to art, it is not neutral, it has the same profound influence as architects. He argues that steel and concrete form the modern city, and its density shapes the way we live. The soaring walls of steel and concrete exude an air of hardness, strangeness and unforgiving.
Tyler Hobbs also believes that computer programming is not a neutral medium. It has modern CPU architectures, it has operating systems, programming languages, web browsers, UIs, etc., and it has its own limitations and preferences. For artists, it is the core material of the information age. Under such circumstances, artists are forced to use computer language to complete their expressions. In this process, the artist and the software engage in a mutual struggle, and finally gain a deep understanding. Therefore, Tyler Hobbs believes that artists who have broadened the meaning of steel, concrete and glass in the past will also change our concept of software in the future.
Among them, a very important part is generative art. Among them, you can see the use of recycling, which can be changed by combining with different elements, and introduces a unique aesthetic feeling of computer: tough and concise lines. The interesting thing about generative art is that it evolves alongside software that eats the world.
From the creation of Tyler Hobbs, he did a lot of careful planning, but gave the program a certain randomness. The program focuses on structured curves and building blocks, though it has a lot of possibilities in terms of texture, color, scale, organization, etc., which makes it varied and not completely under the artist's control.
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(Fidenza #313, generative art by Tyler Hobbs)
As the blockchain infrastructure continues to mature, artists are conducting various experiments on the Ethereum blockchain. Generative art in the crypto age is an emerging art form. Generative art has existed since the 1960s, and now it meets the blockchain, which gives it unprecedented opportunities for expression.
Of course, this also faces the problem of how to achieve high-quality artwork. According to Tyler Hobbs, the average output of a program is important. Artists want to make sure that "bad results" are rare. This requires a good design of the generated algorithm, which itself is a quality assurance process and requires systematic handling of possible outputs. In the process of creating Fidenza works, Tyler Hobbs himself spent about 2 months trial and error in this process, from which there is room for improvement. He believes that artists need to balance standardized quality and variety, planning a kind of wholeness on the one hand and realizing individuality on the other hand. This is not an easy task.
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Art Blocks, a Generative Art Platform in the Crypto Era
Art Blocks is a platform for the creation, collection and curation of generative art, focusing on programmable generative art works and stored on the blockchain.
Its core is two aspects: one is to help artists create generated artworks, and the other is to help collectors buy these works. Artists write generation scripts to define input parameters through p5.js, etc., and generate encrypted artwork through algorithms. These input parameters have certain restrictions, such as color and shape, which can be simple or complex, there can be only one or two, or there can be more than ten. Art Blocks puts these written codes on the chain. Due to a certain amount of randomness, any user generated artwork will have different results.
Art Blocks includes curation, playground, and factory. Among them, the curatorial part will strictly review the artists; the artist playground part will push some of the artists; the factory is an open platform, and the review requirements are not so strict.
As of the writing of Blue Fox Notes, in the past 30 days, the sales volume of generated artwork NFT launched by the Art Blocks platform is second only to CryptoPunks on OpenSea.
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The current changing trend of the floor price of works on Opensea on Art Blocks:
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Some people say: Great works of art are not paintings on the wall, but paintings on the blockchain. Such a statement, right? The digital age will give us the answer.
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CryptoPunks has gradually become known to people through auctions in traditional auction houses (such as Christie's), participation in art exhibitions, and reports in traditional media, coupled with its original novel concept.
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In an exhibition in Zurich, Cryptopunks successfully attracted some people who are not necessarily keen on the encrypted punk culture, but these people have certain influence, such as Joe Lubin (founder of ConsenSys, former member of the founding team of Ethereum) and Niklas Nikolajsen ( Attention of the founder of Bitcoin Suisse). In addition, some digital art fans, art collectors and wealthy businessmen have also begun to take notice of these encrypted collectibles.
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At the time of writing according to Blue Fox Notes, the floor price of Cryptopunks was 123ETH, equivalent to $389,000.
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The price of the most expensive Cryptopunks is as high as 4,200 ETH, which is more than 7.5 million US dollars.
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The cumulative transaction volume of CryptoPunks has reached 1.17 billion US dollars, and the transaction volume in the past 4 weeks has reached 633 million US dollars. It can be seen that the sales of CryptoPunks are mainly driven recently.
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(CryptoPunks transaction data, Larva Labs)
In the eyes of different people, Cryptopunks are different. Some people regard it as a hyped pixel jpg picture, which is useless except for speculation and hype; It is a new artwork; some people regard it as a collection; some people regard it as a status symbol of the circle...
So in simple terms, what are CryptoPunks?
CryptoPunks is completed by two software developers (Matt Hall and John Watkinson) using a pixel art generator. It has random features, including skin color, hair, sunglasses, etc., and a total of 10,000 are generated, all of which are 24*24 pixel "punks" Avatars, 6,039 men, 3,840 women, 696 with lipstick, 303 with muttonchops; 286 punks with 3D eyes, 128 red faces, 94 braids, 78 toothy, 44 Wearing a beanie, there are 8 punks with no obvious features, and one is very scarce, with 7 attributes at the same time, it is #8348, has a big beard, buck teeth, smoking, wearing earrings, and a mole , classic color wear, top hat. In addition to human punks, CryptoPunks also has 88 green-skinned zombie punks, 24 long-haired ape punks, and 9 light blue-skinned alien punks.The avatars are a tribute to pioneers in the crypto space, with cypherpunks being created by pioneers like Timothy May. Blue Fox Notes mentioned an article related to Timothy May's concept "》。
Tim May's vision for a crypto world
Each of the 10,000 "Cryptopunks" is unique, but with random characteristics, some punks are even rarer. For example, there are only 9 "alien" punks.
When it was launched in 2017, through the introduction of KOL, within 20 hours, 8,600 Cryptopunks were claimed, and these were claimed for free.
Judging from its debut process, it is far less famous than CryptoKitties, which caused congestion in Ethereum at that time. But these CryptoPunks have an important feature: there are only 10,000 of them, which conforms to the crypto community's instinctive preference for non-inflation, and is also given a cultural interpretation by the community. CryptoPunks had a certain popularity among the early crypto art circles, and most people who participated in it: either already had one or wanted one. This was an important support for the early development of CryptoPunks.Some people set these punk pixel avatars as Twitter avatars, which remind them of themselves, family members, friends or famous people. These associations can have a significant impact on their purchases. There are also some users who simply like these "punk" avatars very much. They think that these avatars excite them, so they just like them. On this point, you can refer to the previous article of Blue Fox Notes "》。
NFT in the eyes of early players
Back then, Matt Hall and John Watkinson were conducting a small experiment on the Ethereum blockchain: personal ownership of digital goods. They chose the password friend pixel avatar as the practice direction. In their view, the spirit of punk is independent and nonconformist. Its aesthetic core comes from the punk movement in London in the 1970s. Some movies and novels have also deepened these aesthetic connotations, such as the movie "Blade Runner" and William Gibson The novel "Neuromancer" and so on.
The two founders also mentioned when talking about generative art: "The advantage of generative art is that once the process starts, it will produce results that surprise us. We run the generator hundreds of times, look at the results and make adjustments." After the contract was later deployed on Ethereum, the last CryptoPunks were set in stone.
It is also different from traditional collectibles. Its transaction records run on the chain and cannot be faked. In addition, it was endowed with the cultural core of the crypto community, and driven by the crypto community, it eventually became a groundbreaking work of crypto generative art.
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Behind NFT is the eternal demand of human beings
Human beings are social beings, and human satisfaction comes from group approval. And this recognition runs through all kinds of behaviors and activities since the birth of human beings. An underlying driving force in humans is genetic expansion. This underlying need transcends human consciousness and dominates human behavior. It will be externalized through various human behaviors, one of which is to show that you are different.
This is true even in the animal kingdom, where the males of birds have very fine feathers, which are good for attracting the attention of females.
To make an analogy that may not be appropriate, the avatar of Cryptopunks is like a famous watch worn by some rich people. It represents a position of people in the encrypted world and a display of the status of the encrypted community. The idea of punk doesn't necessarily fit.
Other NFTs, such as users buying collectibles such as NBA Top Shot, have their community display value for the basketball fan community. This is to some extent similar to the behavior of some rich people who buy famous paintings, collect luxury cars, and various limited edition luxury goods. Currently, in some rich encrypted circles, if you don’t own a punk, you will feel embarrassed to stay in their circle, which forms a symbol of circle status.
This is also a social interaction behavior. Some people may not understand the so-called punk spirit, nor are they interested in understanding it, but there is a conformity behavior in a circle. This behavior affects people's final choices.
NFT conforms to the characteristics of collectibles in the digital age:
1. NFT is built on blockchains such as Ethereum. It is non-tamperable and can verify the authenticity, which is very important for collectors;
2. The total amount of NFT has an upper limit. For example, there are only a maximum of 10,000 CryptoPunks, a maximum of 8,888 Pudgy Penguins, and a maximum of 100 Ethereum Stones, which guarantee their scarcity. And this scarcity has special significance for the display in the community, which can satisfy the satisfaction of its display.
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High Risks of NFTs
High Risks of NFTs
