This Week in Writing AND NFTs

This is the second newsletter of This Week in Writing & NFTs that is native to my personal Mirror log. In the previous post, and across social media, I called this section as This Week in Writing NFTs, however, as of this week I re-fined it as “Writing and NFTs” since it is about non-fungible environs where text matters.

Weekly Mumblecore

People who follow me might be aware of the fact that when I refer to the non-fungibles (NFTs) with regard to text-based arts, textual experiments regardless of their media, and good old writing; I usually imply ecosystems in which the written word, or the text, is itself the primary agent-object, and in which blockchain technology supports the works by offering conceptualizations in a needed context for practicers to experiment, produce works, and fill any gaps in any media questionable.

It would not be a far-fetching wishful thinking that writing NFTs is about to garner more attention not necessarily just because of their profitability in a market that has consumed other genres to monstrous plays of saturation and insincerity but also their plaintext-like role in the emergent cultural and digital infrastructures and protocols & platforms & products etc., that is, the written word is vinegar mother—and, you all are about to witness the gradual affect thereof.

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Weekly Spotlight

This week, I feature three individual cases.

• Fake it Till You Make it by Maya Man on Art Blocks
• Beggars Belief by Mitchell F. Chan
• Pearson textbook NFTs
• Off by Sarah Friend
• Work of the Week: Book of Jacob by Jacob Horne
• News of the Week: Zora introduces on-chain .svg edition creator

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Fake it Till You Make it

Majority of the people will most probably shunning at the forthcoming Art Blocks project Fake it Till You Make it. Ordinary art connoisseurs are kind of dried up their liquidity morale at even the abstract levels during this so-called Björn market, or Crypto Winter—I do resist using the English word for that animal, and for the Global South, it is in actual winter.

According to the project website, FiTYMi,

borrows from the bubbly language and pastel aesthetics of text driven instagram graphics to scrutinize the promotion of wellness, self-care, and confidence on social media

and

[t]he system contains a list of 250 phrase structures as well as lists including 145 nouns, 194 adjectives, 213 adverbs, and more. All phrases and words were found via scrolling and saving graphics of this style on Instagram, then typing up this found language to create a collection of arrays labeled by their word class for the program to pull from.

There are 80,202,368,730 (over 80 billion) possible phrases that may be generated.

For me, it is such a good generative novella maker in the form of imperative feel good post-its. There is this association that strikes my taste and situate the project unto the same level with any Godwin work.

Rarely do we see generative art employing writing. Projects and works that come to my mind include Myers’ Token Equal Text, Deafbeef’s ironical First Firsts, Segal’s Code of Holes, and *NFT Affirmations *by Daily—aye, I also believe there are many associatable works across the betaverse of ours.

I assume that it is not too soon to expect generative novels to be “published” on-chain with their on-chain and generative prompts that will be painting scenes off the content. However, what I wonder about the most is who Toadex Hobogrammathon of the chain will ever be the first. Remember there was a time when people thought horse ebooks was a bot.

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Beggars Belief (demo)

MCF is one of the most alluringly original names out there on-chain for my personal standards as to what art should do with itself, and how an artist should be performing their duties for art’s sake. Hold my monocle as I utter more metallic Bauhaus fonts outta my Beckettian mouth please.

For me, any written contract is a text art whether in word dealery, rhetoric, or the quality of Finnegans Wakeness thereof. Chan’s re-mediation/ re-modeling/ contextual appropriation of Klein’s zones via *Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility *is for me also a writing NFT by its nature, let alone the accompanying 33-page essay alongside.

Today, as I was scrolling Twitter to procure more noise for my wee brains—why is Urbit more peaceful, one ponders—, I encounter Chan’s Beggars Belief demo which is a sort of interactive everything on, around, through, off, and about the chain. It is of playism, of a critical gamification-in-cheek, narratives, story-telling on narratives, almost an RPG, a flâneurship hoisting along the block height of the tallest degen, a mediation and meditation on the characteristics of human-driven sectors of crypto-markets.

According to the website, it will be a 4-season experimental act starting from Q2 2023. I hope Mitchell will let us mint the air, and some frenz who cannot stop about reveals can finally think about it.

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Pearson NFT Textbooks

Although the Guardian article tries to blockhain-101 their readers, I believe even a granny on the Highlands is aware about the basics of non-fungibles, ownership economy, and the like.

Education publisher Pearson is about to create a secondary market for their titles. IMHO, this is a good thing. One of the comments in the news article is that traditional publishers will possibly not be welcomed unto the chain since it is all about decentralization. I don’t think that decentralization is about discarding the valuable knowledge of previous market makers. As long as an actor is well willing, and a good one; they’ll be adding to the ethos of decentralization.

For profit is not necessarily of centralization.

🌴

Off

There was a time not long ago that people were coordinating to solve crypto-puzzles, and those puzzles were the favorite stars of these constellations that make up the multi- and cross-chain world. Prizes were juicy. One of the most intriguing puzzles was The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto: TORCHED H34R7S (2015) aka 1Flamen6. It was puzzle designed and created by Rhea Myers and coin_artist.

The solver took the 5 BTC, and we are left with the beauty of logic gates of speculation.

Earlier this year, I was reminded by Siri that I need to nurture my Lifeform in three days, or it would die, and it died, being the second ever on-chain life-form that I accidentally killed. The first one was my very rare Crypto-orchid from a Sam Bauch project.

Lifeforms is a project by Sarah Friend, however, today we are focusing on Off by the creative.

Off is all about vantablack squares of existence. An essay exists:

Within each secret image is hidden two things: an encrypted sentence and a shard of the private key that was used to encrypt it. This is done using a form of steganography. Across the full edition of 255 images, an entire essay and the entire private key are hidden. A majority of the private key shards (2/3) are required to decrypt any of the sentences, therefore the essay can only be read if a majority of collectors collaborate to share their images.

[…]

Think of this as a multiplayer game that you are playing with the other purchasers of this artist edition, or perhaps, a massively multiplayer prisoner's dilemma. Will you choose to cooperate or defect?

This is purely textual, and people such as myself would love the pre-erasure without reveal tension of such a textuality be prolonged for more than necessary. Friend’s projects are more meta-friendly than many a work that claims to be operating on the aetheral shoegaze skies of metaplex. There is a Kantian outsideness to those works.

Work of the Week

Book of Jacob

Diagram poetry exists, and it is on-chain:

NEWS

Zora Introduces .svg editions creator