The Cryptographer
Came to SuperRare as an AI Artist working with crypto. Over last three years, however, I have slowly realized that I am actually a cryptoArtist working with AI. The Cryptographer 10,101 is a semi-autobiographical work about the journey that brought me to this realization.
My time in crypto began in the early days of SuperRare. Was one of the first artists and came in as roboticist that used AI to paint with brush on a canvas. A sample of my early work can be seen in these 3 pieces owned by Hackatao, matrix, and XCOPY (who has gone on the record to say that it’s his favorite NFT).
In the early years (which were only couple years ago), we were all exchanging ideas, collecting each other’s work, and exploring what cryptoArt was all about. While I was in the middle of all this, I had the problem that my work didn’t quite fit in. Everyone else was natively digital and taking advantage of the new medium with all of its advantages for digital artists. For me, however, it didn’t completely make sense. My finished canvases were still physical paintings created by robots, and my NFTs were simply photographs of them. There was nothing natively crypto about my cryptoArt, and I often wondered if there was even a reason to make my paintings NFTs.
Spent several years bothered by this, but plodded along, watching and following all the trends, even creating a couple. Then around my three year SuperRare anniversary, a crypto-native idea came to me. People were beginning to identify with their CryptoPunks and using them as profile pics (PFPs). So I thought that in an homage to my earlier work where my robots studied 10,000 celebrity faces and try to paint them (seen above), what would happen if they studied 10,000 CryptoPunks and tried to paint that. From this thought the ongoing AI Imagined Series was created, a limited series of 10 crypto portraits exploring identity in the cryptoArt space through the lens of AI.
While this series began with painting punks, the robot and I only did handful of them since we didn’t want to encroach on Larva Lab’s art and vision. I felt that each piece needed to be unique not just visually, but also in it’s commentary on crypto. Have only completed first 6 of the series to date and am finishing one every other month as PFP and crypto culture evolve. To briefly explain the work to date chronologically from left to right:
The 1rst was simply an AI Imagined painting trained on the 10,000 CryptoPunks (before ROBNESS burned one of course).
2nd was a self portrait of my punk at the time.
3rd was comment on the male dominance of crypto culture where women are underrepresented even in the number of cryptoPunks. This one got me lots of unfollows on twitter and even a couple blocks.
4th was an AI Imagined Ape acknowledging how PFP flexing was beginning to extend beyond punks.
5th was a derivative based on what I found to be one of the most profound PFP’s, nouns.
& 6th was the birth of the bitGANs, my own completely realized crypto world.
While I didn’t realize it at the time, everything I had done in course of my cryptoArt career has lead to bitGANs, and by extension The Cryptographer 10,101.
Since you are on this site, you probably know what bitGANs are. But if this is your first visit, they are a collection of animated GANs based on 8bit pixel art. They dance around and have rarity traits that go along with a story that is unfolding live on this site and in the discord.
An example of a bitGAN can be seen below. This one is called The Artist (2/128).
At this point in the bitGAN narrative, The Artist has been burned alongside a Flaming skullGAN, a bitGAN with a Flaming Property. The Flaming Property is important because it is trait needed to start the burn. Yes, each of these bitGANs have properties like the Rarity Traits currently popular on ArtBlocks. The burn itself was initiated by sending the two OpenSea minted bitGANs to the META Gallery Vault, where they will be trapped forever. As a result of removing the 2 OpenSea bitGANs from circulation, a new SuperRare 1/1 bitGAN was created called The Cryptographer, that combined the traits of The Artist with that of the Flaming skullGAN.
Don’t believe this is happening? You can see it live in cryptovoxels at the META Gallery of Portraiture.
For my “normie” friends and family, everything I just described makes no sense.
But for anyone that owns an NFT, however, it makes perfect sense in context of the broader narrative. The bitGANs are about supporting art, flexing, gamification, collecting, burning, trading, and speculation, all on the blockchain.
I began by describing my transformation from an AI Artist into a cryptoArtist. One way to see the conversion of The Artist (2/128) into the The Cryptographer 10,101 (a SR 1/1) is as a self portrait documenting my journey over the last three years.
The Cryptographer 10,101 is available now only on SuperRare. As with all my SuperRare 1/1s, the winner of the auction has the option to taking possesion of the physical.
https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/the-cryptographer-10,101-28895
