A simple understanding of NFT from the perspective of generative art

A Simple Understanding of NFT: From the Perspective of Generative Art

Original author: Blue Fox Notes

Today's NFT is similar to Bitcoin in 2012

This is not to say that THE PRICE of NFT is similar to bitcoin in 2012, because the two are completely different things that cannot be compared in terms of price or value. The point here is that the world probably still understands NFT in a similar way to how it understood Bitcoin in 2012.

When people talk about NFT, they tend to talk about bubbles, hype, knock-on deals (one user trading multiple accounts back and forth, driving up prices), worthless, etc. In short, NFT is worthless to many people.

That's how the world saw bitcoin back in 2012. Not much use of itself has ever existed in this world. Famous paintings, diamonds, jewelry, watches... .How useful and valuable were they when they first appeared?

How to understand NFT simply?

NFT is a large category, and any content with unique characteristics can become NFT. In addition to artwork, collectibles, items in games, etc., even domain names, LP tokens that provide liquidity, tickets to football games, etc., can become NFT. Therefore, it is not realistic to include all NFT in one article. Different types of NFT have different values and uses. Some have no obvious uses, such as pixel heads and generated artwork. Some have very specific uses, such as tickets, domain names, in-game items. For NFT, see blue Fox Notes from three years ago to recent articlesWhat is a Non-homogeneous Token?, Crypto Games and NFT, NFT's Fury,DeFi Bubble, NFT, and Market CorrectionWhy does NFT have a Chance to Explode in the crypto world?.

To be sure, NFT was a big bubble, a hype, a deal, and not much use in itself, all of which is true to some extent. However, we should also see that behind human behavior, there are needs to support itself. There is demand, there is trade, and there is something hidden behind it.

In this paper, mainly from the perspective of art generation, to discuss NFT, to see the combination of art generation and blockchain, will there be something new?

Soil that generates artwork NFT

* 生成艺术并非是新事物

Generative Art, or Generative Art, is a combination of computer technology and Art. Its generation is not directly created by human beings, but through algorithms to generate works of art, algorithm has a set of rules, within the rules can be free to play, finally come to a unique work, also to some extent represents a certain concept of the artist.

Generative art itself is not a new phenomenon; it began in the 1960s. It is also related to the development of various artistic trends at that time. For example, it coincides with Dadaism in some aspects. Dadaism pursues an interesting state: the irrational state of wakefulness, the art of spontaneity. Dada itself was "anti-art", disliking the traditional aesthetic order and being more interested in randomness and chance itself.

In 1984, the Museum of Modern Arts gave the pioneer of generative art, Plpan Schwartz, an opportunity to show, which made generative art enter the world stage.

* 生成艺术与计算机技术的结合

First of all, from the perspective of art development itself, generative art itself has been an important theme of art development in the past 50 years. Secondly, with the development of computer technology, generative art and computer have found a joint point, which gives generative art a new way of expression.

· Generative art has its own artistic soil

Cezanne, the pioneer of modern art, was a major painter in the history of art, influencing the likes of Matisse and Picasso later on. Modern art began to move towards modern expression rather than copying and similarity. In this process, art has entered a diverse stage, including futurism and constructionism, which are keen on machine aesthetics and technology. There was Dadaism, which focused on autonomy and randomness; There was neoplasticism with its bold use of geometric shapes...

These are the soil for the development of generative art. It does not come from nowhere.

· The development of computer technology gives generative art a new way of expression

Nowadays, digital information has been embedded in people's lives, and people have become familiar with digital objects. Along with all of this, the transition from an industrial society to a digital one, and the fundamental changes in how people work, live and play, have also reshaped people's view of art.

At the end of 1990s, Murial Cooper, Ben Fry, Casey Reas and others promoted the birth of digital art platform "Processing". It has greatly lowered the threshold for artists to enter generative art. Artists don't have to worry about expensive hardware or clever programming skills. "Processing" software promoted the development of generative art. One of the artists, Jared Tarbell (one of the cofounders of Etsy), uses "Processing" to create some amazing generative art.

Bubble Chamber,Jared Tarbell,2003

In the view of art history expert Jason Bailey, Tarbell's work is "the archetypal embodiment of chaos and control duality, with a strong visual complexity that emerges from simplicity more as if it grew out of the soil rather than an algorithm". In other words, generative art has reached a point where it seems natural.

In recent years, with the gradual development of artificial intelligence, the evolution of generative art has continued. In the creation of artist-based artificial intelligence, some works have also been born. In 2014, the GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) uses machine learning algorithms to construct new forms of literature, poetry, and art, including Generative art. GAN consists of two neural networks. One is "generator" and one is "discriminator". The generator takes a large amount of painting material and creates the work, while the two-discriminator identifies the uniqueness of the work. With AI, unique works can be created.

Robbie Barat used GAN to create some very lively art, such as the following paintings:

AI Generated Landscape #6, Robbie Barrat, 2018

In a word, with the development of computer technology, generative art has new practical tools and new ways of expression. In the context of modern art, art is eclectic and creative, not beautiful. The unique creation is the art itself.

As a result, the combination of computer technology and art has produced interesting new art forms, including generative art. Every age has its Da Vinci and Van Gogh, and maybe a hundred years from now, crypto artists like Beeple, Tyler Hobbs, and perhaps others, could be considered the Michelangelo of the first half of the 21st century. Who knows?

Generative art itself makes full use of computer technology, but it is not to say that it is completely random. It's designed by artists with certain rules, but with controlled rules, there's a certain amount of randomness. This is an artistic expression in itself.

In this case, the creator does not have complete control over the direction of the art. Although the code is written, there is a certain amount of machine autonomy and randomness that makes the art unique by chance. At the same time, it also reflects the idea of the artist, which is not entirely generated by the machine.

Therefore, generative art is a new artistic expression formed by the fusion of machine and artist's inspiration in the digital age.

One of the benefits of using generative art is that the artist can make more complex attempts. When the artist wants to repeat something, using a machine can save a lot of time. According to art history expert Jason Bailey, in the late 1960s, some artists began to try this kind of art, such as Georg Nees and Frieder Nake. They printed their work on a printer.

Hommage a Pap Klee, Frieder Nake,1965

In addition, one of the last century artist Vera Molnar said: "without the help of computer, it is impossible to exist before the artist in mind, the image appears so faithfully. This sounds contradictory, but people think it is cruel and inhuman machines can help to realize human's subjective and most cannot be achieved, and the most profound things." This is an artist's view of what computers do to art.

Untitled, Vera Molnar, 1985

* 生成艺术遇上区块链

Generative art is the inevitable outcome of the development of digital age. In the industrial age, people used industrial materials (steel, concrete, glass, plastic) to produce all kinds of industrial products, etc. These are the industrial materials that make up our buildings and our everyday goods. In the information age, human beings have spent a lot of time in the software environment. Social contact, games, reading news, shopping, taking a taxi and so on all depend on software. Coding is reshaping various relationships in human life and production.

For generative artist Tyler Hobbs (creator of Fidenza series), material is important to art, it is not neutral, it is as deeply influential as the architect. Steel and concrete, he argues, build the modern city, and its density shapes the way we live. The soaring steel and concrete walls exude hardness, strangeness and ruthlessness.

Tyler Hobbs also argues that computer programming is not a neutral medium. It has modern CPU architectures, operating systems, programming languages, Web browsers, UIs, etc., and it has its own limitations and preferences. For artists, it is the core material of the information age. In this situation, artists are forced to use computer language to complete their expression. In this process, the artist and the software run in and struggle with each other, and finally gain a deep understanding. As a result, Tyler Hobbs believes that artists have broadened the meaning of steel, concrete and glass in the past and will change our concept of software in the future.

Among them, a very important part is the generative art. You can see recycling, you can change things by combining them with different elements, and you can introduce a sense of beauty that is unique to computers: hard, clean lines. The interesting thing about generative art is that it develops alongside world-eating software.

Tyler Hobbs Fidenza#313, sold for a whopping 1,000ETH, worth over $3.2 million. (of course, is it right knock trade, who also say not clear, here do not guess and discussion).

From The work of Tyler Hobbs, he took a lot of careful design, but gave the program a certain randomness. The program focuses on structured curves and building blocks, but the possibilities for texture, color, scale, organization, and more make it varied and not entirely under the control of the artist.

Fidenza #313, generative art by Tyler Hobbs

As the blockchain infrastructure continues to mature, artists are experimenting on the Ethereum blockchain. Generative art in the age of encryption is an emerging art form. Generative art has been around since the 1960s, and now it has encountered blockchain, giving it unprecedented opportunities for expression.

In the past, in generative art, artists would first have a "selection" process in order to obtain "good" works. Artists try a variety of outputs, then choose a favorite set before presenting it to the public. Now on Art Blocks, artists create build scripts that write to the Ethereum blockchain, making them immutable and verifiable, with the option of generating output as many times as they want. In Art Blocks, it's usually around 500 to 1000. These outputs become NFT, which is then generated for collectors. No one knows exactly what's going on in these multiple outputs, there's a certain amount of randomness.

Of course, this also faces the problem of how to achieve high-quality works of art. Tyler Hobbs believes that the average output of a program is important. Artists make sure that "bad results" are rare. This requires good design of the generated algorithm, which is itself a quality assurance process and requires the system to process the possible outputs. In creating Fidenza, Tyler Hobbs himself spent about two months experimenting with the process, improving the room for improvement. He believes that artists need to balance the quality and diversity of standardization, planning some kind of wholeness on the one hand and achieving individuality on the other. This is not an easy task.

Art Blocks, a generative Art platform in the age of encryption

Art Blocks is a platform for the creation, collection and curation of generative Art, focusing on programmable works of generative Art that are stored on blockchain.

At its core, it has two aspects: one is to help artists create and generate artworks, and the other is to help collectors buy these works. The artist defines input parameters through p5.js and other generation scripts, and generates encrypted artworks through algorithms. These input parameters are limited, such as color and shape, and can be simple or complex, as few as one or two, or as many as a dozen. Art Blocks links this code up. Due to a certain amount of randomness, any user-generated artwork will have different results.

Art Blocks includes curators, playgrounds and factories. Among them, the curatorial part will strictly examine the artists; Part of the artist playground pushes some artists; The factory is an open platform with less stringent audit requirements.

Its artwork, NFT, has racked up more than $100 million in transactions, most of it in the past 30 days. This shows that the NFT market for generated artwork is currently in an explosion stage. Here are some data on transaction volume and so on for Art Blocks. How long it will last is unclear, of course.

At the time of blue Fox's writing, NFT, a generative artwork from Art Blocks, was second only to CryptoPunks in OpenSea sales over the past 30 days.

Art Blocks' generative Art NFT has some popularity, OpenSea

Current floor price trends for Art Blocks works on Opensea:

Floor Price Trends for Generative Art works by Art Blocks, Dune Analytics

Some people say: Great art is not a picture on the wall, but a picture on the blockchain. That's a statement, right? The digital age will give us the answer.

CryptoPunks was the first successful encryption-generated artwork

CryptoPunks gradually came to be known through auctions at traditional auction houses (such as Christie's), participation in art exhibitions and coverage by traditional media, plus its original novel concept.

CryptoPunks auctioned at Christie's, Larva Labs blog

At an exhibition in Zurich, Cryptopunks managed to attract influencers who aren't necessarily keen on the crypto punk culture, such as Joe Lubin (ConsenSys founder, Former ethereum founding team member) and founder Niklas Nikolajsen (Bitcoin Suisse). In addition, digital art aficionados, art collectors and wealthy businessmen are beginning to take notice of crypto collections.

CryptoPunks at Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich, photo by Gerog Bak

According to blue Fox notes when writing, Cryptopunks floor price is 123ETH, equivalent to $389,000.

Bottom price of CryptoPunks, Larva Labs

The most expensive Cryptopunks cost 4,200ETH, or more than $7.5 million.

The highest price of CryptoPunks, Larva Labs

CryptoPunks has a cumulative trading volume of $1.17bn, with $633m traded in the past four weeks. As you can see, CryptoPunks sales are mainly driven up recently.

CryptoPunks transaction data, Larva Labs

Cryptopunks in different eyes is not the same, some people see it as a hype pixel JPG picture, in addition to speculation and speculation, there is no use; Some people regard it as the original classic application of generative art in blockchain, and think CryptoPunks is a new work of art; Some see it as a collectible; Some see it as a status symbol of the circle...... .

So what are CryptoPunks in a nutshell?

CryptoPunks was created by two software developers (Matt Hall and John Watkinson) using a pixel art generator, which creates 10,000 "punk" avatars with random features, including skin tone, hair, sunglasses, and so on, all 24 by 24 pixels. Of the 6,039 men and 3,840 women, 696 wore lipstick and 303 had muttonchops; There are 286 punks with 3D eyes, 128 with red faces, 94 with pigtails, 78 with teeth, 44 with beanie hats, 8 with no distinctive features, and a rare one with seven attributes, #8348, He has a big beard, buck teeth, smokes, earrings, a mole, classic color, top hat. In addition to the human punks, CryptoPunks also have 88 green zombie punks, 24 hairy ape punks, and nine light blue alien punks.

The avatars are a tribute to the pioneers of cryptography, and cypherpunk was founded by pioneers such as Timothy May. Blue Fox Notes mentioned Timothy May's concept related article "Tim May's Vision of a Crypto World."

Each of these 10,000 "Cryptopunks" is unique, but random, and some punks are rarer. The "Alien" punks, for example, only had nine.

When it was launched in 2017, 8,600 Cryptopunks were claimed for free within 20 hours of KOL's introduction.

Its debut was far less famous than the CryptoKitties that caused ethereum's congestion at the time. But these CryptoPunks have an important feature: There are only 10,000 of them, and they fit with the crypto community's instinctive preference for non-inflation while being given a cultural interpretation by the community. CryptoPunks had a certain popularity among early crypto players, and most of the people involved either already owned one or wanted one. This is an important support for the early development of CryptoPunks.

Some people set up these punk pixel avatars as Twitter avatars that remind them of themselves, family, friends or celebrities. These associations can have a significant impact on their purchases. There are also some users who simply like the "punk" avatars because they think they are excited and just like them. For this, see blue Fox Notes' previous article, NFT through The Eyes of Early Gamers.

Back then, Matt Hall and John Watkinson conducted a small experiment on the Ethereum blockchain: personal ownership of digital products. They chose pixel avatars of password friends as a practical direction. In their opinion, the spirit of punk is independent and non-conformist. Its aesthetic core comes from the punk movement in London in the 1970s, and some films and novels have also deepened these aesthetic connotations, such as the film Blade Runner and Wilpam Gibson's novel Neuromancer.

The founders also said of generative art: "The great thing about generative art is that once the process starts, it surprises us. We run the generator hundreds of times, looking at the results and tweaking them." After the contract was later deployed on Ethereum, the final CryptoPunks remained unchanged.

What makes crypto punk a crypto collectible is that unlike Crypto Cat or any other game, it has a fixed cap of 10,000 collectibles. At the same time, like any OTHER NFT, each is different, untampered with and verifiable.

It also differs from traditional collectibles in that transactions run on a chain and cannot be faked. In addition, it was endowed with the cultural core of the crypto community, and eventually became a pioneering work of crypto generative art under the promotion of the crypto community.

Behind NFT is an enduring human need

Human beings are socialized and their satisfaction comes from the recognition of the group. And this recognition has permeated every behavior since the birth of humanity. One underlying human drive is genetic expansion. This underlying need transcends human consciousness and governs human behavior. It externalizes through a variety of human behaviors, one of which is showing that you're different.

This is true even in the animal kingdom, where birds, for example, have beautiful male plumage, which helps attract the attention of females.

To make a probably inappropriate analogy, Cryptopunks are now like a watch worn by some rich people. It represents a place in the crypto world, a kind of demonstration of the status of the crypto community, even if it doesn't necessarily fit with the idea of crypto punk.

Other NFTS, such as user purchases of collectibles such as NBA Top Shot, have their community display value to the basketball fan community. To some extent, this is similar to the behavior of some rich people who buy famous paintings, collect expensive cars and various limited edition luxury goods. Currently in some rich crypto circles, if you don't own a punk, you feel embarrassed to be in their circles, which is a status symbol of the circles.

It's also a social interaction. There may be some people who are not familiar with the so-called punk spirit and have no interest in learning about it, but there is conformity in a circle. This behavior influences people's final choices.

NFT fits the collectible nature of the digital age:

1.NFT is built on blockchain such as Ethereum, which is immutable and can be verified for authenticity, which is very important for collectors;

2. The total NFT is capped. For example, CryptoPunks have a maximum of 10,000, Pudgy has a maximum of 8,888, and Ethereum stones have a maximum of 100, ensuring their rarity. This kind of scarcity has special significance for the display in the community, which can satisfy the satisfaction of its display.

If punks become useful, for example, to reproduce, to produce more punks and so on, the more variable and useful they become, the less welcome they may become. Its biggest roots lie in its rarity, coolness and simplicity.

This may be a human myth: sometimes the more useful, not necessarily more expensive, not more expensive.

High risk of NFT

Finally, it's important to note that the NFT space is so full of bubbles, hype, and counterdeals in the early days that most NFT will probably go to zero and only a few will survive. The investment threshold in this area is high and requires a deep study of NFT itself. Therefore, this field is not suitable for most people, unless there is a deep understanding or sufficient risk tolerance, otherwise it is easy not to enter, so as not to cause significant losses.

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