Hi Crowd!
I made a thing, that relates to a thing, and is driven by another thing and very much out of my hands by design. It’s abnormal. I’ll try to explain…
Sterling released an NFT project a few years ago called Wiiides. The pieces changed every time they were transferred, and I always loved this idea, of a thing that is on-chain but always changing. Serc released an NFT project a few months ago called Normies. His project has a lot of interesting on-chain mechanics, but is ultimately an editable canvas which can be bound to an agent identity. I found a lot of this interesting and started playing around with the concepts and some of the data that was being surfaced as people interacted with his project.
I love the idea of networked art – pieces that are influenced and connected to others. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the ephemeral a lot in relation to my “Static” photo series I mentioned previously, the clouds I’m making images of exist that way for only that brief second. I think there’s an interesting tension between something ephemeral and the blockchain which is indelible – and if something is there forever but always changing, that’s a fun contradiction worth exploring.
So I reimagined the canvas Serc used for his monochrome avatars as the sky, pixels as shades of clouds. I thought if I could tie the placement of those pixels to events happening elsewhere, by others, that would be something very interesting. And turns out, I could do just that. I called it Abnormies.
Each Abnormie is seeded by a Normie. What happens with that Normie determines what the related Abnormie looks like. At generation, each Abnormie is fairly minimal. A sky with some scattered cirrus pixels across it. How many is determined by how many times the seed Normie has been transferred. If the Normie has been customized, or even burned then there might also be darker Altocumulus and Nimbostratus pixels in the mix. As time goes on, those continue to change. Each Normie seed movement, generates Abnormie evolution. Some Abnormies can also be burned, allowing the holder to pick another Abnormie (that they don’t own) and freeze it, so it will never change again. But this act of destruction has impacts, Thunder or Lightning which ripple across the collection impacting every other (non-frozen) Abnormie in the collection. But it’s not only additive, pixels can erase each other too, so this becomes an eternally evolving work, that changes almost entirely outside of the control of the holder of that work. It’s an experiment in so many ways, social as much as network.
The rarest, hardest to accomplish thing is also impossible to capture. The ERC-8004 standard for agent identities essentially allows agents to own NFTs that are in the same wallet as their identity, so I thought for Normies that have been “awakened” (bound to an agent identity) if someone was able to collect the Abnormie derived from it, and put them together then they would become aligned, and the Abnormie would invert to represent that connection. But unlike the previous traits which are part of the piece, this is dependent on that relationship. Move either NFT away from the other, and the inversion reverts. In this, perhaps the most desirable version becomes one you can’t just buy, but have to do the work yourself to arrange.
I don’t know if this is as exciting and interesting to anyone else as it is to me, but I love it, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out as people mint them and the begin to reveal in the following days. There are 10k Normies and for this concept to work the pieces have to be 1:1 so this is the largest collection I’ve personally ever released. The public mint opened today, as as of right now about they are about half sold. If you are into this kind of thing, take a look. I’d love some feed back from anyone thinking about these concepts or playing around in these spaces. I’m excited to see how this unfolds, because in a way the moment I hit publish on the smart contract, it’s been out of my hands. What ever happens next happens without my say or control. Just like the clouds.
Enjoy!
-s