Blockchain Bumper Stickers
Early last month, we made our first foray into the world of crypto-art by sequentially auctioning off puzzle pieces of a new song, “They Want To Eat Your Lunch,” as NFTs. As an experiment, it worked: five generous bidders unlocked the song piece by piece, making the song freely available to everyone. For us, it was a crash course in the fundamentals of the cryptoverse. We learned how to use a wallet, how to mint and list NFTs, and about the economic, ecological, and cultural impacts of this emerging marketplace. It was really worthwhile, but it wasn’t fun.
In fact, it was stressful. The stakes felt high. The crypto-art world’s eye-popping celebrity auctions felt way out of our league. We suffer from punk brain, and it made us anxious to think that the attention economy’s previous obsession with visible metrics—like views, plays, and follower counts—was being replaced by a much more brutal assessment of financial worth. Don’t get us wrong, it’s amazing to see artists getting paid. But the sense that we’re competing with one another for eyeballs and money is still there.
And then we discovered hic et nunc.
hic et nunc is a Brazilian-born experimental NFT marketplace that runs on the energy-efficient Tezos blockchain. The costs of minting and listing NFT artworks on Tezos are negligible (on the Ethereum blockchain, it can cost $50-$100 just to mint an NFT) which makes it way more accessible; as such, hic et nunc is home to a diverse, global community of artists. It’s scrappy and buggy and very punk, and we feel like we’ve found a new home in cyberspace. In fact, we haven’t had this much fun online in years.
We’ve been collecting art on hic et nunc—as well as minting video stills, 1-bit GIFs, and other ephemera of our own—for a month or so. Yesterday, we launched our first big group project on the platform.
We got 15 of our friends together and formed an art collective we’re calling cali4nia club. For cali4nia club’s first group show, we decided we’d make the world’s first NFT bumper stickers. We liked the idea of making something silly and accessible to everyone. Our NFT stickers cost the same as IRL bumper stickers—about $6 a pop—but you don’t need to buy them to enjoy them. The ultimate beauty of all of this is that all the stickers and the show’s accompanying PDF catalogue are completely free to view, download, and use to decorate your reality tunnel however you see fit.
These are the incredibly early days of NFTs. We’re pretty sure that what we’re seeing now is not what they’ll eventually become. It’s helpful to look at other paradigm shifts we’ve experienced in our lifetimes: buying MP3s of songs you already had on CD seemed weird in 1999, right? But thanks to desktop players like Winamp (and Audion) and IRL players like iPods, everything changed. In retrospect, it all seemed so obvious.
Of course, we don’t love where that path eventually led—down with the streaming platforms!—but this time, at least, we have a chance to shape what shakes out. Decentralized community-driven marketplaces exist now. What happens when some of this new cryptocurrency gets siphoned out of rich tech bros’ wallets and redistributed to artists, who then can afford to support themselves—and one another? Who knows, but we want to be part of it, and we want to have some fun along the way.
By now you probably know we’re crash test dummies. We learn by going into things head-on. But that doesn’t mean we have to take everything so seriously—these bumper stickers are part of a paradigm-shifting economy, but they’re also a total goof.
xo
YACHT
More news for ya:
Claire just launched her own Substack newsletter, Wild Information, which she’ll be using to share her thoughts and discoveries as she researches the convergence of technology and biology. Her first mailing is about Xenobots, the first living robots.
Claire also just published a piece on One Zero about 70s phone phreak culture—think pirate conferences, party lines, Dial-a-Joke services and other underground signals that thrived before the Internet. These were proto-social media spaces that existed in broken parts of the phone network.
We’ve been hopping onto a weekly livestream hosted by Vertical Crypto, where artists and developers get together to talk about what’s going on in the space. This week’s chat with artists Mario Klingemann, Sterling Crispin, Helena Sarin, and Tim Exile was an especially interesting one.
All three of us are half-vaxxed!