CENTS and conceptual art on Bitcoin
CENTS is a becoming, a gesture that unfolds continually through the actions of its participants in time.
Rutherford Chang began this project with a simple value discrepancy: the difference between the value of ¢1 ascribed to copper pennies by
@spiderfoods
he genuinely doesn't seem know that calling a person's being an "ideology" is dehumanizing, but he also seems to want to act as a kind of judge to whom we should plead for our existence
It's still quite early in ordinals in terms of major art collections that are representative of the medium (like Autoglyphs, Synth Poems, Chromie Squiggles, IKB are for Ethereum), and I think we have a shot at making this into a historical moment.
a guide to Right Click Share by
@XCOPYART
x
@0xDecaArt
🟥🟪🟩⬛ including rarities & a cheat sheet 👀
- each NFT is a pixel in the master image
- each holder must attest¹ their pixel each year in order to invoke its color (the blank pixels you see are unattested
- rarities:👇
CENTS by Rutherford Chang is, to my knowledge, the 1st conceptual art on Bitcoin.
It performs the conceptual gesture of Bitcoin itself: the digital transformation of capital, as well as that of Ordinals: transforming the sat, the BTC cent, into a vessel for cultural value.
3 things the NFT scene has in common w the trad art world:
- leading art critic is a fictitious Italian guy who lives in the 15thC & is also a zombie
- aesthetics are defined by dudes w a background in finance
- history is irrelevant (except for 2016-2018 mints)
wen MoMA
This is
@0x113d
's talk at the Modular Summit on 12 July 24.
I think this is important stuff to hear, so I pulled his 20 minutes out of the 8-hour video and am also posting a transcript here below.
Claimed this gorgeous AI piece by
@kevinabosch
Abosch has been working with AI since 1993.
He uses latent space as a medium in itself by corrupting the input data to create what he calls 'nascent space' - a kind of data map designed to emphasize process rather than result.
An interesting quality of CENTS perhaps is that it's part of the artwork to imbue the humble penny with value, just as ordinal theory serves to imbue the humble sat with value.
The full reality of CENTS is just beginning to unfold.
CENTS antecedents
The artistic lineage of Rutherford Chang's work
L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)
Marcel Duchamp
Duchamp challenged concepts of authorship & ownership as they relate to mass reproduction. As is the case in CENTS, the use of commonplace objects highlights the misbalanced
your NFTs are going to 0 & their metadata will disappear/decay & rational nodes will delete them & they'll turn up in half-assed metaverses & they'll be ignored by art historians & they'll be declared securities & someone will probably steal them anyway
I unabashedly think of CENTS as a potentially iconic work in the medium of Bitcoin inscription.
It's too early to speak of this on a greater cultural scale, but the earliness in the particular medium of the ordinal creates a space for artworks that will establish themselves
An iconic artwork possesses certain qualities that elevate it beyond the ordinary, making it memorable and influential. Here are some factors, imho, that contribute to an artwork achieving iconic status.
Today is my Punk anniversary 🥂
Cryptopunks was my 1st NFT.
To quote the Southebys vid: "When we look back at the history of digital art... it's very likely that we'll look at it as the pre-Cryptopunk era & post-Cryptopunk era"
This is certainly true for me.
let me tell you why it's an honor to be working on
@VanArman
's Reflection w/
@sovrnart
- it is truly AI-native art: with his robotic systems, PVA is putting forward a synthetic embodiment of a creative thought process, which I find fascinating
- it posits a substantial new
RCS 🟥 🟩 ⬛️ 🟪
one of the most interesting
@XCOPYART
pieces out there. so a word about what it is:
belief expressed in the language of contract dynamics
this is achieved through an elegant mechanism: each owner attests each pixel with the attestToken function each year, or
Many of you know this already, but
@mikeywoodbridge
is my partner, so I've seen the evolution of This Was Presence not just in its outward manifestation, but through the presence that has gone into it as well.
Mikey is an artist who performs an elemental role in creation – going
ON-CHAIN ART
terraforms by
@mathcastles
oorand by
@nopsta_
synth poems by
@_deafbeef
(also depicted are the oraand emulator & the hypercastle visualizer)
The final Right Click Share pixel was just minted.
What is RCS?
🟥🟩🟪⬛️
-
@0xDecaArt
's genesis art release
- a collaboration between
@XCOPYART
,
@bonafidehan
& you, anon
- XCOPY's first conceptual art piece
- Deca's ontological avatar
🟥🟩🟪⬛️
Learn more in the thread below
@krassenstein
look at your comments full of people giving justifications for why this child deserved to be brutalized and using it as a justification for why all youth should be "taught their lesson" this way and tell me you've done something good today.
Proud to be joining the Decurator Council at
@0xDecaArt
We'll be shortlisting nominations for acquisition by the DECA over the next 5 days.
I'd like to hear about what selection criteria you think are important.
Please share your thoughts with me here or in the Deca discord.
1/ Presenting the Council members for Decuration II
Ten beacons of the Decaverse who will continue to guide our MVG & DECA journey
Presenting the latest masters of curation…
(Sound on! 🔊)
my piece from
@ClaireSilver12
's new
@brtmoments
Tokyo collection!
paracsom
#8
A set of 100 windows into the imaginary worlds of the artist's childhood
Each piece is cropped until the exhibition is done, then the full dream reveals
ty
@mikeywoodbridge
for being my delegate 💜
Ted Chiang has some very valid points here.
The main shortcomings in this article are that he doesn't address artists who use AI systems as a medium, and that he doesn't consider the potential for synthetic media as part of larger processes of meaning-making. However, he does
machine creativity by
@VanArman
from the Reflection presale
It's been amazing seeing the resonance this project has cultivated. I think this is Van Arman's moment - when the broader public finally has enough understanding of AI to see the real power of what he's doing.
@bookofflesh
isn't want he saying tho is it
and the "ideology" you're referring to is something invented by politicians who want to use hatred of us to bolster their careers. Idk tho maybe you're talking about gender theory or something as if it were the underpinning of our existence.
This will probably sell for a lot less than it's worth
& I like that. Why?
It fits Mr. Chang's concept that the first collector can basically steal the Block. This is true for the same reason that we released CENTS for free -- like Bitcoin itself, this project is meant to be a
When
@ClaireSilver12
makes a collection, she gives some pieces a "Qualia" trait. She's described these Qualia as a curated set of her personal favorites.
I like to pair the Qualia with poems.
corpo | real has 11 Qualia
& this
@0xDecaArt
gallery has 11 poems.
behold below
Transcript:
This is a great privilege. So I'm 113. Some of you may know me from this project called Terraforms, from the studio Mathcastles. It's a dense iceberg of thinking on Ethereum. Today I want to talk about a notion of third eras. I'm going to talk about two, and this is
thank you so much
@OmarZRobles
for this filming!
@brtmoments
has crossed so many thresholds of becoming & being. The final city culminated with grace, glory, tears, warmth and magic.
My gratitude to each of the people who have been its reality doulas, especially to
@0xAllen_
@BrantlyMillegan
@AmosRendao
exactly - free speech means you're free to face the consequences of your speech. And this is the same guy who's constantly going on about taking responsibility.
proud to mint this
@VanArman
fr/ the
@brtmoments
Tokyo AI Collection.
This set of 100 is a 100% on-chain reimagining of PVA's iconic AI Imagined Faces, which is now in the LACMA permanent collection.
The BM AI Collection is a powerhouse, all 11 artists are stellar.
The ANONS of
@MattKaneArtist
are a paragon of what excellence in cryptoart can mean - refined technique paired w/ poetic vision that faces both the history of image-making & the specific context of this emergent culture.
Mr Kane is elevating us all.
(wave 1 still live btw)
Today I will walk down the aisle with these two and become a CryptoVenezian.
Congratulations
@brtmoments
on making the creation and collecting of digital art into a new kind of theater, an ephemeral presence & an indelible mark on the mind.
From Venice to Venice -- 10 cities
on Thursday I'll be speaking about conceptual art on Bitcoin w/
@amandaterry
&
@huuep
of
@osura_com
I'll talk about some historical conceptual art pieces on BTC & will relate these to CENTS by Rutherford Chang & Certificates of Ownership by
@OnChainMonkey
.
Below, I falsely
most unhinged collector
most subdued collector
🎭😜
It's very true what
@phantom_scribbs
says here. And to me this makes
@punk3606
's reception of Rutherford Chang's CENTS project w/
@sovrnart
incredibly meaningful.
He is also an actual archivist (check some of his writings &
@NotlouisCk
Strawman issues all - designed to frame the conversation in a way that leverages a common-sense response to a limited range of questions in order to reject the validity of trans people's lives.
Intrinsically dehumanizes trans people into "The Trans Problem" and lays the ground
@avsa
This was me 😳 and
@mikeywoodbridge
:p
Gas was so low back then that you could do this kind of thing!Fortunately the experience made me so paranoid that I quadruple check every transfer now ahaa.
We ended up just registering mikeyw.eth :P
My gallery has been nominated for MVG!
These are 33 of my poems paired with the 33 Qualia pieces from
@ClaireSilver12
's Genesis collection on
@braindrops_art
.
Pls give it a vote if you dig it!
Just drop a ❤️ on it in the page linked below.
🙏 for the nomination
@faavidel
!
Announcing the nominees for Most Valuable Gallery (MVG)
The Decurators have chosen. Now it’s *your* decision on which gallery becomes our 17th MVG
❤️ the posts of galleries you think should win by Sep 21 @ 18:00 UTC
Vote here ➡️
Nominated galleries
early work by Rutherford Chang, creator of CENTS
from Portraits by Tone
a series of newspaper images rearranged by tone
Chang's work follows precise rule sets to transform & recontextualize sets of images, objects and data. In Portraits by Tone, the underlying material, the
Proud to have my poem "Ghost Prism" selected in the top 10.
It was inspired by the art of
@VanArman
. The Etch is linked to "AI Imagined Portrait Painted by a Robot
#2
," which has since been donated by
@CozomoMedici
to the
@LACMA
.
Thank you
@0xDecaArt
and
@MattKaneArtist
!
Morpheus has leaked out of the Louvre & spilled a trail of
@bitGANs
into the Musée D'Orsay.
[art by Odilon Redon & Le Pindar, augmentation by
@thatbloom
]
this morning I greet
How to Embody an Object with Significance
by
@kevinabosch
from his new series MOD
Almost all of Abosch's work since the early 90s has incorporated machine learning, often using modification and corruption of training data as an expressive gesture. Within
Mikey brought back these beautiful publications by
@brtmoments
from Mexico City
These two are Cone Gradients by
@zachlieberman
I've never felt so close to these artworks as I do in the presence of their ink & grain on paper in sunlight.
w/ great interviews by
@maltefr_eth
seeing
@ripcache
out there ripping it up, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate this collab he did w my friend
@baggins_fomo
.
Replicant
by ripcache x FomoBaggins
.
Both of these artists are exemplary of what makes this space ✨. I believe this is the first minted rip collab?
I'm rather proud that
@sovrnart
is releasing
@MLOdotArt
's first serial work, Noctilucent Mementi this Friday.
- MLO is truly a foundational figure in the cryptoart scene, creating, educating and chronicling since the early days.
- I believe that serial collections like this
CENTS is a prism of the Ordinal, the most humble unit as a vessel of cultural value.
CENTS is a prism of Bitcoin, performing a digital transformation of capital.
CENTS is potentially iconic art of the Digital Megalith.
A
@0xDecaArt
square for all the Open Editions!
Please add the OEs you love.
I made this 🔳 on the occasion of The Queen Painting OE by my partner
@mikeywoodbridge
& have kicked it off w/ a gallery of historical OEs.
Thank you to all the Decans who helped launch this!
(🔗⏬)
Nominations for MVG are open until this Friday at 3pm UTC
Please comment any galleries that you dig
I'll be looking for
✍️ meaningful writing
🤯 rigorous contextualization
🎨 creative design
Rocking my RCS'd punk by
@thatbloom
to celebrate being a
@0xDecaArt
Decurator 🟥🟩⬛️🟪
This is a collection I'm extremely proud to be working on w/ Sovrn.
I find it to be a prismatic concept -- one can look at these cents through any facet & find integral substance: a conceptual art gesture about materiality and value, a minimalist visual presentation of the marks
Over the last years,
@VanArman
has shown how an indie artist can deliver more than most so-called utility projects.
- created bitGAN Collabs, sharing his AI art knowledge w/ collectors
- established bitGrants w/ revenue from success of the above
- established the Sovrn Open to
It's July and before I announce how to get byteGAN Physicals, here are the Free Physical Art drops:
They include:
64 Signed Prints for owners of complete byteGAN sets
100 Signed PostPrints for people that staked in $RARE
And 2 Free byteGAN Physicals for random Collectors...
One quality of CENTS I find fascinating is that it's equal parts art and collectible.
Intrinsic to the concept is its use of "collecting as an art practice" as pointed out by
@SHL0MS
, in relation to the work of artists like Song Dong, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Christian Boltanski,
A common question I've received over the past 24 hours: How are collectibles different from art?
I know some people collect both and/or don't see the need to separate the categories. But I personally find it helpful to distinguish between the two.
I define collectibles as items
art movements arise in response to cultural shifts
eg
- baroque : counter-reformation
- romanticism : industrial revolution
- pop : consumer culture
@VanArman
's Reflective AI approaches the shift that synthetic creative systems introduce & how they might change the way we see
the value of culture-makers cannot be underestimated
these are the people who make the rails of meaning
you can have the best infrastructures in the world, but they are nothing without the people who make it meaningful to interact with them, to be there
not all culture-makers
Quite proud to be releasing a collection by
@BardIonson
with
@sovrnart
today.
I've long admired Bård for his fresh experimentation, his respect of history & lineage, and his sense of poetics.
One reason for curating Bård was that I believe his body of work represents a
Thank you to
@Lucy2Scribbles
for this article in
@artnews
that brings up important points about the absurd shortcomings of the book Token Supremacy, and adds vital context such as:
- relevant work in cryptoart that addresses the economic issues surrounding tokens (ostensibly
The monopoly on money is also a monopoly on meaning.
If the source of truth & ground of consensus is central authority, then meaning can only be assigned rather than generated emergently.
It produces a stagnation, an inability accommodate value structures to new realities.
come join me,
@OG_crookedwest
&
@VanArman
to talk about Reflection in about 20 min (2pm ET)
This is quite a special project & would mean a lot to see you there.
Theory: the attachment to photorealism in AI art will fade as people come to integrate an understanding of latent space as a medium in itself.
Using the visual language of preexisting media will soon no longer be necessary in order for concepts to be culturally legible.
I always freak out & think this is me for a second :p
my 1-atty
@cryptopunksnfts
sister nearish floor, pretty much a no-brainer at this point
if bald were a listed trait you'd see how rare this one really is
This 2018 series by
@VanArman
has become a legend in the AI/Cryptoart world & I always wanted one
but you could never get them!! because they were arcane certificates on BTC
Very cool that
@SuperRare
is finally bringing "First Sparks of Artificial Creativity" onto the scene.
Big congrats to
@NorrieHarman
and
@sovrnart
on selling out Perimeter Town 🔥
Dig an interview with NH about this collection while you watch the secondary: