NFTs (thread now extremely NSFW)

Deeply strange pic.twitter.com/ycilbi1iNL

— James Kelleher (@etienneshrdlu) January 25, 2022

This Fallon clip is legitimately odd, like they’re being held hostage. Dude is so obnoxiously enthusiastic about everything but he just seems so dead inside talking about this

I get it now! Celebrities all instinctively hate each other so Bored Apes are a desperate attempt to manufacture ice-breaking small talk https://t.co/IVqDTofBCc

— KonstantinBoristovich🐮🛠🧝🏼‍♀️🐗👜 (@HardSciFiMovies) January 25, 2022

Somehow I missed that Kickstarter was going Blockchain and the founder that used to post here now tweets about NFTs

Is that true? I was just wondering about him the other day for some reason.

She tells the same old story to everyone that she sees
She's just sitting in her room reading tweets about NFTs

I looked into the NFT malware and it seems that users had to click on two boring-looking confirmation boxes after interacting with the NFT for it to work. OpenSea "fixed" this by putting unsolicited mail into a spam folder.

I bought an ape
I bought an ape too
This is your ape
This is my ape
I like the blue
They're buddies
(Applause)

Apelause

I watched the Fallon clip again and the worst part is when Paris says "I actually bought one too" Fallon acts surprised and goes "You did?" even though there's a print out of it RIGHT NEXT TO HIM. That kind of shit bothers me so much!!

anyway, I finally started delving into that 2 hour video - most of it is stuff I already knew, but it's good. dude has done his homework

https://henrydiltznft.com/

Even when I read apparently smart, creative people talk about NFTs, it still evaporates into this aspirational haze.

Why are you entering into the NFT space right now?

Holly Herndon: That's a really good question. We've been working with machine learning for a long time, and with the last record we framed our ML work as a baby as it was still so nascent. As our tech has matured, we came up with this idea to create “Holly+” as a kind of digital twin of myself, which we will be sharing in the coming weeks. This was exciting for many reasons, especially since the idea of vocal ownership is something that I was researching in my PhD pretty heavily. In the future, I think people will be selling models of themselves, or of their vocal and physical likenesses. Similar to the way that my own voice has been under contract for the last 10 years with my record label, I see things heading towards an AI version of that.

It's an interesting legal and cultural question of, ”What does it mean to have a voice and own it?” Our solution to that question was to share it. We thought that this would be a great opportunity to create an actual DAO as a culmination of years of different research threads, many of which have collided now that a lot of infrastructural tech has come about—meaning it’s now something that we can actually implement.

https://foundation.app/blog/holly-herndon-and-mat-dryhurst

In the future, I think people will be selling models of themselves, or of their vocal and physical likenesses. Similar to the way that my own voice has been under contract for the last 10 years with my record label, I see things heading towards an AI version of that.

this doesn't sound aspirational or vague to me (or smart). it seems very cynical and unhuman. one basic thing about NFTs is that it's about making everything imaginable a token and putting it on the market for trading. for a lot of people (me), that alone triggers an incredibly negative reaction. but for a lot of other people, i guess holly herndon, that's a feature. she seem her "own voice" under contract for the last 10 years and wants to explore that more by creating additional contracts that she can benefit from. cool

So can you buy Holly+ and use her voice to make your own albums? And if so will we be here arguing about the authenticity of the songs and calling people fleshists?

the article writes itself. don't forget to mention autechre's current practice

holly herndon probably admires jeff koons

We thought that this would be a great opportunity to create an actual DAO as a culmination of years of different research threads, many of which have collided now that a lot of infrastructural tech has come about—meaning it’s now something that we can actually implement.

vs

"Do you suffer from rheumatism? Lumbago? Acute, chronic, sciatic, uh, neurologic, or inflammatory pain? Well, I represent the only company that makes the genuine article that cures, headaches, neuralgia, uh, earache, toothaches, backaches, swellings, sprains, sore chest, swelling of the throats, contracted chords and muscles, anxieties, and ravaged nerves, stiff joints, wrenches, dislocations, cuts and bruises! And, it adds vitality and vigor to the healthy man."

So can you buy Holly+ and use her voice to make your own albums?

You can play with Holly+ now: https://heardsounds.com/holly-plus

It's fun but I haven't heard of anything particularly interesting being made with it. I've already expressed my disappointment about Holly Herndon getting into NFTs on her dedicated thread, so just popping in here to give you that link really.

Even when I read apparently smart, creative people talk about NFTs, it still evaporates into this aspirational haze.

well for one this has nothing to do with NFTs. AI/Generative art/"Who owns your voice?" stuff may be worth thinking about but NFTs don't, and really can't, offer a solution to any of those questions

idk if it's covered in the video (I'm 2/3rds through) but it's really striking how straight a line there is from Trumpism -> crypto -> NFTs, like all this talk about giant MMOs and transferable NFT avatars and an ecosystem where everyone wins is all shit that's never gonna happen, and could not possibly happen, but the whole system collapses once people stop believing, so the only thing to do is stick your head in the sand. it's no different from Trump's "I'm gonna build a wall, deport every single undocumented person, give out great healthcare to everyone, cut taxes, and arrest every single Democrat"

It’s not covered in the video, but yes there is a very strong element of people attracted to both get rich quick schemes and Trumpism.

well for one this has nothing to do with NFTs.

I'd agree except that that was her answer to a question about NFTs. I think it just illustrates how even nominal enthusiasts have a hard time explaining why they'd do anything with NFTs.

Joined @BoredApeYC ready for the reveal? Thanks @moonpay concierge pic.twitter.com/gzm1JQEHHF

— Gwyneth Paltrow (@GwynethPaltrow) January 26, 2022

they deserve each other

always got a strange aspirational cult leader sense from holly herndon and her twitter egg guy

I don't know why, of all the dystopic shit that's been vomited into the world over the past several years, NFTs stoke the most queasy anxiety in me. It's like watching reality melt away in real time.

anyway, has anyone seen actual nfts they think are interesting in any way?

David Rudnick's made quite a bit of money selling his older minidisc art as nfts and they were pretty cool images, so I guess it was a way for him to make money from old work. He's doing some time released project where you can buy lines of a poem as they're revealed but the poem itself is dumb as shit and the whole concept behind that project doesn't make sense, he's just cashing in again.

idk, I guess I haven't really seen any work where the nft concept makes sense

that paltrow tweet makes me believe in qanon ngl

I don't think there's any possible type of art where an NFT makes sense. I think there are some *concepts* where an NFT is *kinda* a solution...maybe some stuff in gaming, maybe like...deeds to a property or something, but nothing where just like...there aren't already much better solutions already available

what all the crytocurrency nonsense has revealed is that herndon is not actually very smart or insightful, despite having one or two tunes

nothing where just like...there aren't already much better solutions already available

'deeds to a property' and anything related to gaming are both obviously going to make much more sense in a traditional centralised database rather than blockchain nft nonsense

right but lets say I know nothing about databases or anything else, maybe those use cases would make some sense, I just cannot for the life of me think of a way NFTs make sense as art for any reason other than "maybe some dumbass will pay me a lot for it later"

I truly would love to see actual use cases for nfts that go beyond mlm shit

I took a look and Herndon and crew just launched some sort of project today I think that I don't understand but you get access to a podcast if you buy an nft that's ugly as shit, with the possibility of having input in further podcasts or content or something because you bought your way into their chatroom? Still seems like an mlm rather than a use case for nfts.

-----

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Holding the s0 Founder token grants open-ended access to all Channel content, which initially includes an RSS bundling the Joshua Citarella, Interdependence, and New Models podcasts. It also gives entry to the Founder region of the Channel Discord, a direct line to the Channel creators and developers, and a voice in the project's evolution toward a fully decentralized protocol.

NFTs in gaming are horse armor and that shit sucked then

as much as I think Hirst is a fraud and a huckster, his scheme of having people pay the same amount for either a physical piece of art or an NFT linked to a digital image was at least an interesting experiment. too bad the art sucked.

ha this reminds me of when I went to an electronic poetry exhibit, and some well-known LANGUAGE poets were in the audience (Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman.) I'm pretty sure it was Bernstein who said something like, "There experiments are really interesting. I wonder what they'd be like if the poetry was any good. Or maybe it can't be good for the effect to work."

I watched all two hours of that Canadian guy’s video and the big takeaway for me is that NFT’s exist to get you to buy Cryptocurrency, to keep “the line” on that grift going upupUP!!!

yeah the not-very-well-kept secret of crypto is that it's not zero-sum, it's massively negative-sum

one interesting thing I learned from that video is that once your NFT wallet address is known people can dump all sorts of fake NFTs in there, including ones that are pretty much exact copies of NFTs you own, except they direct to some malware that will steal everything in your wallet

the vid does go into this a few times but the fact that there's no way to reverse transactions or really counter fraud at all is so remarkably shitty and Reason #1 why this stuff will never be "currency" in any real sense of the word. it literally works the way I imagined banks did when I was 9, where if you forgot your account number you couldn't access your money, and if the bank got robbed then everyone just lost everything. no regular person is ever gonna want to buy into a system like that!

also when you withdraw money from your bank half the time they give you counterfeit bills and if you try to complain they say "sucks to be you, dude!"

We've been talking a lot about this in the poet group chat, there's some stuff about NFTs and art over at Caesura that's pretty interesting

https://caesuramag.org/posts/caesura-roundtable-nft

crypto, bitcoin, the blockchain, NFTs, web3...

welcome to the Scam Economyhttps://t.co/adHAVnROAn

episode 1 drops tonight @ 9pm EThttps://t.co/pCw8hKtbDK pic.twitter.com/vOMnkuHhZV

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) January 27, 2022

After the NFT Takeover of Art Basel Miami Beach 2021

It has been a very long time since anything that felt genuinely new happened in the art world. Twenty years into the 21st century, we are still chasing the tail of the past one in a hodgepodge of relational aesthetics, new media, and installation passing for art of the present. Finally, an odd contender for genuine novelty has emerged not from within art, but within the emergent cryptocurrency market: the non-fungible token, or NFT. But the tokens’ apparent novelty has proved disorienting for an art world not as well versed in blockchain/crypto tech as it believes itself to be and desperate to call any slight reconfiguration a utopian opportunity (just as it did with relational aesthetics).

The lessons of the past have not been learned. Just fifteen years ago, we were all in a flurry about the democratizing potential of social media, especially after the Arab Spring, the liberatory trajectory of Second Life, and the liberating decentralization of post-Fordism/late neoliberalism, only to be embarrassed upon the discovery that populism does not lead to utopia, Second Life was a dud, and post-Fordism is largely responsible for current supply chain issues. Oops. But here we are again, titillated by blockchain, alternatives to museums and traditional galleries, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), the post-human metaverse.

NFTs on their own are boring. They are digital ledger lines on the blockchain designating ownership. They are not a new medium. In fact, their connection to the JPEGs and GIFs whose sale and transfer they enable is a tenuous one: the code itself contains no metadata. They’re a tool, not a revolution, and they aren’t a utopian art project; they’re the technology that allows the sale and purchase of immaterial commodities, a precondition for any possible success of the metaverse.

For digital art, which emerged decades ago from the tradition of postmodern new media art, NFTs represent a solution to a longstanding problem: the difficulty of selling and displaying a GIF as one would a painting. Its proponents insist that it is a critical intervention as an immanent critique in the full proliferation of digital existence, but how critical is it when it requires its viewers to create digital wallets and jump on the crypto wagon? This sector too often appears naive about reality.

For cryptocurrency investors and tech workers, they represent financial opportunities and the ground on which to create an art world all of their own. They are deeply naive about art and often disarmingly sincere in their excitement about it. The pervasive infantile aesthetic preferred by this group is a reflection of its emergent character. Is there any potential in this new art market, which seems poised to edge out the old as it is integrated into art fairs, galleries, and auction houses? Is capital, even in its present decrepit form, more progressive than art theory?

We take the NFT phenomenon not as a technological one with technical problems and technical answers, and even less so as a potential embodied in the software it uses. Blockchain may be decentralized, but Sotheby’s and Christie’s, where NFT stars like Beeple have been taking their work direct to market, certainly are not. Art-for-NFT may eschew elite curation from MFAs and PhDs but relies instead on other hierarchies that have more to do with celebrity and straightforward access to money than visual quality, let alone conceptual positioning. It has already proven itself not to be the very thing its digital art proponents hoped it would be: an equitable market (as if such a thing exists) cleared of undesirable barriers. To the contrary, the majority of transactions are concentrated in the top 10% of market actors and the average artist has nearly no shot at making a buck let alone an impact by minting an NFT and posting their work on OpenSea, the most popular NFT marketplace.

The NFT phenomenon is a social, not technological, phenomenon emerging from the new money of the 21st century — the tech sector — working out its own culture and aesthetic tastes as an alternative to the self-critical or self-defeating aesthetic culture that has been dominant since the emergence of liberal society in the 19th century. If there is any potential in this trend it is there, not in lines of code. Perhaps it is better to be naive about art than about reality.

https://caesuramag.org/posts/caesura-roundtable-nft

I work at a pretty big art museum. Our contemporary art curator has the worst fucking judgement and the running joke is that when she goes to visit an artist's studio she will find something awful in the back of the closet to buy because we often have terrible works by great artists. She has a good academic grounding and understands historical import but no sense of what LOOKS good, in terms of individual artworks or how to install them. We live in fear of her "discovering" NFTs. Let's call her Mary.

I was installing in a gallery with a much younger, bitchy (in a good way) curator and another art handler who is big on NFTs. He was going on about them and I said "You haven't told Mary about NFTs, have you?"

Bitchy young curator: "Oh PLEASE. Nobody's told Mary about PDFs yet."

Meanwhile, the BoredApe crew is ready to cash in with their own currency. Watching all of this unfold in real time is kind of amazing. The fleecing right before your eyes.

Source close $APE coin developers were able to confirm the following:

1) definitely coming Q1

2) IT WILL BE GENEROUS

Grateful for the creators @BoredApeYC
🦍👨‍🚀🚀

— NFT-PAPI 🍌 (@NFT_Papi_) January 20, 2022

lol

Been a long time lurker supporting APE products, and just not able to "Flip" my way up into the kind of numbers BAYC extended into on SUUUUCH a Short Notice.

Would love to see some benefits "Trickle Down" to the rest of the Ecosystem users who helped build the brand.

— ChangeTheGame.eth 🦇🔊 (@GametheChange) January 20, 2022

Lmao

enjoy your supreme brick

hey that two-hour video was good

This is not important for the thread obviously, but this bit from that Caesura piece was disqualifying for me:

The lessons of the past have not been learned. Just fifteen years ago, we were all in a flurry about the democratizing potential of social media, especially after the Arab Spring, the liberatory trajectory of Second Life, and the liberating decentralization of post-Fordism/late neoliberalism, only to be embarrassed upon the discovery that populism does not lead to utopia, Second Life was a dud, and post-Fordism is largely responsible for current supply chain issues.

To be nitpicky, the Arab Spring began in 2010, Second Life in 2003, post-Fordism in the 1970s (or earlier depending who you ask), and "late neoliberalism"...well I'm not sure what that is trying to refer to, but if your main problem with post-Fordism is "current supply chain issues" you are a sociopath.

This is also nonsense:

The NFT phenomenon is a social, not technological, phenomenon emerging from the new money of the 21st century — the tech sector — working out its own culture and aesthetic tastes as an alternative to the self-critical or self-defeating aesthetic culture that has been dominant since the emergence of liberal society in the 19th century.

There are some solid points in the rest, but idk

I finally looked up the etherium NFT standard today. Turns out you don't even have to include an URL or a description.

"We remind implementation authors that the empty string is a valid response to name and symbol if you protest to the usage of this mechanism. We also remind everyone that any smart contract can use the same name and symbol as your contract. How a client may determine which ERC-721 smart contracts are well-known (canonical) is outside the scope of this standard."

That last sentence means, I think, that how you know the NFT is the One Official NFT is not in the standard.

correction: they do need to include an URI, which as of this year is always an URL.

xp rob

second quote definitely is nonsense, ha. first quote, remember they're writing about the relationship between decentralization and digital art, not about the history of presidential administrations.