Hi Crowd!
Apologies to anyone who replied to the last (or the last last) note I sent and hasn’t received a reply. I fat fingered some email sorting in a frantic bout of Craigslist gear postings and somehow deleted a week or two of emails permanently. While I’d ultimately like to delete all my email permanently this might feel like a step in the right direction, in the actual moment there were emails there I wanted to read and people I wanted to reply to, so that’s an ooops.
It’s getting to be foggy season here in the PNW and I love that for photos, both early morning and late night variations. Above is one from somewhere along this morning’s run route which was lovely at the time but sadly burned off to a full blown sunny summer like day a few hours later.
Old news for anyone following along on Instagram but I’m really delighted by this new compressed and minimalized noise generation system that I’ve scaled down to. I know this, but often lose my way and end up with a mess of dozens of things all interlinking and then I give myself 10,000 options and get stuck not knowing what to do. Simplifying down to a few core pieces feels so much more freeing, creatively. When I got this going I thought, oh yeah, duh. And then looked around to see where else I could instantly start editing.
Speaking of edits, I’ve made real progress on a conceptual piece I’ve been working on which was previously called 500×500 and now has a new a better name. Hoping to finish and release it soon as I think it will turn into a very interesting piece of digital art. Speaking of digital art the incredible team over at Le Random have published possibly the most comprehensive timeline of generative art ever. You can get lost in this for hours, and really see how vast the idea is. Last week also saw Larva Labs publish an updated catalog showing off their efforts in this genre, and it’s both beautiful and informative. I even learned a few things which when talking about CryptoPunks at least is pretty rare.
Speaking of rare CryptoPunks, this guy is the hot topic of the week. If you are not immersed in the digital art / NFT space and only go by what you hear on the news you might be thinking “Aren’t all those monkey pictures worthless now?” The answer is no, and also these aren’t monkey pictures. This CryptoPunk is special in that it’s the only one in the entire 10,000 piece collection with 7 traits. A trait is the hat, the cigarette, the beard… that kind of thing. Anyway, it sold last week for what we now know was $5.9 Million US Dollars. Some people reading this might be surprised at the number but as I know a bit of the not yet public info I can tell you this was bought by a living breathing art collector after some significant negotiation, and that a significant bit of the conversation around this sale was questioning if that number was too low. It’s possible that the previous owner having stated publicly over the last few years that he wouldn’t sell it for less than $1B may have influenced that discussion, but I’ll note that he bought it 6 years ago for $18k, so $5.9M is not a bad return. I let the dust settle for a few days before posting thoughts on it myself, which I did this morning. There’s a lot to think about with this sale which I get into there, but I do think the price is probably fair. Number of traits is a fairly divisive way to rank CryptoPunks, so buyer and seller actually agreeing on what the piece is in context of the collection was always going to be the hard part. I’m curious to see where the next chapter for this punk goes. It’s complicated for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it’s so deeply connected to the identity of the seller. I mentioned in a comment this is kind of like someone buying and moving into Graceland. Sure it’s a nice house, but it’ll always be Elvis’s house and you’ll always be the guy living in Elvis’s house. So I’ll be interested to watch where this story goes next.
And now I have to go make my daily mid day decision: nap or coffee?
-s