Sputniko! (Hiromi Ozaki) — The Nursery — generative life cycle on Tezos and Ethereum

2022

Artists: Sputniko! (Hiromi Ozaki), Misaki Nakano · Year: 2022 · Medium: Time-based generative NFT — flower-like organisms whose traits evolve over a one-year lifecycle · Substrate: WebGL / Three.js (creative coding by Misaki Nakano); Ethereum · Place: Tokyo, Japan · Institution: Bright Moments / OpenSea Sputniko! is the artist name of Hiromi Marissa Ozaki, a British-Japanese artist trained in mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London and in design at the Royal College of Art (MA Design Interactions). She founded the Design Fiction research group as Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab (2013–2017) and is currently Associate Professor at Tokyo University of the Arts. Her practice has run for more than a decade at the intersection of speculative design, gender, and biotechnology — Menstruation Machine—Takashi's Take (2010), held in the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and works held in the Victoria & Albert Museum and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa anchor a body of work that treats technology and reproductive politics as a single subject. The Nursery, released in 2022 in collaboration with the Tokyo-based creative coder Misaki Nakano, is Sputniko!'s most fully developed work in the on-chain generative idiom. One hundred unique organisms — flower-like forms with petal counts, frill traits, color systems and layer structures determined at mint — were released, and crucially, each NFT continues to develop after minting. The forms grow, change, and stabilize over a one-year lifecycle, with traits that emerge or recede on a schedule encoded in the work itself. The piece is closer to a generative pet than to a static collectible: the artwork's subject is its temporal development, not its initial state. The collaboration is significant in itself. Misaki Nakano is a Tokyo-based WebGL and Three.js developer (subsequently Senior Design Engineer at GitHub) whose creative-coding practice gave The Nursery its technical scaffolding. Crediting her on the work — rather than absorbing the code into Sputniko!'s authorship — followed a pattern that the on-chain field has been slower to adopt than the gallery world, where engineering collaborators are still routinely uncredited. Lore Sputniko! has discussed The Nursery as partly a meditation on the framing of women in their thirties as biological-clock subjects — a theme that runs through the piece's lifecycle structure. The choice to keep the organisms changing for a year, rather than releasing a static collection, was deliberate: she has said in interviews that NFTs as a medium were drifting toward static-image culture in 2022 and she wanted to use the format for something that could only exist as software. Sources • MIT Media Lab — Sputniko! faculty page. • Bright Moments — The Nursery by Sputniko! • Kate Vass Galerie — Sputniko! artist page. • Sputniko! — sputniko.com (artist site). • Nakano, Misaki — mnmxmx.github.io (collaborator portfolio).