Cryptographic Turn

2014–2021. Quantum, CryptoPunks, Art Blocks. A new substrate — and a new audience that mostly does not know the 60 years before it. In 2014 Kevin McCoy minted Quantum on Namecoin and the question of digital ownership stopped being theoretical. The cryptographic turn covers the seven-year period during which a previously-marginal asset class swallowed the formal-aesthetic conversation: 2017's CryptoPunks established the 10,000-PFP template; SuperRare and OpenSea launched in 2018; Erick Calderon's Art Blocks (2020) made fully-on-chain generative art a coherent platform; Tyler Hobbs's Fidenza (2021) sold to private collectors at six and seven figures; Beeple's Everydays cleared $69.3 million at Christie's the same year. The audience was largely new, often not literate in the sixty years preceding it, and frequently mistaken for the entire history of the medium it was joining. Inside the period real artistic work was made — DEAFBEEF's fully-on-chain audiovisuals, Dmitri Cherniak's Ringers, Monica Rizzolli's Fragments, Kjetil Golid's Archetype, Zancan and Ix Shells's Tezos work — but the surrounding economics were so loud that almost everything else became hard to hear. This archive's central editorial argument is that the cryptographic turn is the final chapter of a sixty-five-year book, not the entire library.

Part of Digital Art

44 moments in this segment.

1. 2007 — Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) — Everydays — the daily practice (2007 onwards). Artists: Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) · Year: 2007 · Medium: Daily digital artwork — one piece per day, posted continuously since May 1, 2007 · Substrate: Cinema 4D, Octane Render, various digital-art software; posted to Winkelmann's website and social media; accumulated into successive Everydays projects · Place: Charleston, South Carolina / North Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, USA · Institution: Independent practice; later Beeple Studios (2022) Mike Winkelmann's Everydays practice began on May 1, 2007, when he committed to producing one digital artwork every single day without missing one. He has continued the practice without interruption for more than 7,000 consecutive days as of this archive's compilation. The commitment is extraordinary independent of the work's aesthetic quality — the sustained discipline across nearly two decades is unmatched in digital-art practice. The practice's visibility before 2021 was modest. Winkelmann built a substantial social-media audience through the 2010s (several hundred thousand followers) but was largely unknown outside digital-design circles. The March 2021 Christie's sale of Everydays: The First 5000 Days (covered separately) transformed his practice's public profile in a matter of days. The same practice that had been quietly accumulating for fourteen years became, overnight, the most famous digital-art body of work in the world. The Everydays' aesthetic quality is contested. Critics have argued that Winkelmann's commercial-design-influenced imagery is artistically thin; defenders argue that the discipline of sustained daily production produces a meaningful aggregate even when individual works are uneven. What is clear is that the practice's shape — daily commitment, public posting, accumulation over decades — has influenced thousands of subsequent artists who adopted daily-digital-practice routines. Winkelmann continues the practice. New Everydays are posted daily on his website and social media. Lore Mike Winkelmann lived in Wisconsin from his birth in 1981 through the end of 2020 and built the entire pre-fame Everydays practice from a modest house in Appleton. His partner and their two children were part of his life during the project's middle years; family life is visible across the daily images as occasional cameos and recurring visual themes. Winkelmann maintained a day job as a freelance designer for the first decade of the project, accepting commercial commissions that he would file alongside the daily personal images. He moved to Charleston, South Carolina in 2021 after the Christie's auction, partly to be near a major airport for the international travel his post-fame schedule required. The complete Everydays archive — over 5,000 images and counting — remains hosted on his own servers. Sources • Winkelmann, Mike — beeple-crap.com • Christie's — Everydays: The First 5000 Days catalog (2021) • Beeple Studios — Charleston archive
2. 2014 — Kevin McCoy — Quantum — first NFT. Artists: Kevin McCoy, Anil Dash (collaborator) · Year: 2014 · Medium: Animated octagon, registered on Namecoin blockchain · Substrate: Namecoin (a Bitcoin fork, not Ethereum) — seven months before Ethereum's white paper · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Rhizome's Seven on Seven conference, New Museum On May 2, 2014, Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash were paired at Rhizome's Seven on Seven conference in New York — an event that pairs artists with technologists for a single day's collaboration. They were asked to make something by evening. McCoy was a net-art veteran whose work had been in the field since the late 1990s. Dash was a technologist with deep experience in structured metadata on the web. They decided to tackle a long-standing problem in net art: how do you establish provenance for a digital work when the work can be copied byte-for-byte with no loss of fidelity? Their answer, sketched over the course of the afternoon, was to register a hash of the work's file on a blockchain, so that the artist's claim of first publication would be publicly verifiable and cryptographically durable. They chose Namecoin — a Bitcoin fork that allowed arbitrary metadata to be stored with each registration — because it existed and was accessible. Ethereum's white paper was still months from publication. McCoy contributed a short animated work, a pulsing octagon, which they called Quantum. They registered it. The entire process took a few hours. What they had made was, by any reasonable accounting, the first NFT. The work, the metadata, and the on-chain registration satisfied the definition that the ERC-721 standard would later formalize. The place it was made at matters. Seven on Seven was Rhizome's conference, a net-art institution. McCoy was a net-art veteran. The problem was a net-art problem. The origin of the NFT is in the preservation project of digital art — not in any speculative financial motive. The speculation came later, by a different route. The subsequent chain of title is genuinely contested. Namecoin registrations require periodic renewal to remain valid, and the original Quantum registration lapsed at some point before 2021. In late 2021 Sotheby's auctioned a work represented as Quantum for $1.47 million; the legal validity of that sale's provenance has been disputed. McCoy and Dash published a widely read 2021 essay in The Atlantic, "NFTs Weren't Supposed to End Like This," expressing discomfort with what the form had become. The distance between what the first NFT was for and what the NFT market became is the full distance of this archive's final chapter. Lore McCoy and Dash built the prototype in one afternoon at Rhizome's Seven on Seven conference on May 2, 2014 — paired up and given a day to produce something. They wanted to solve the problem of digital-art provenance. McCoy had made a small animated octagon called 'Quantum'; Dash figured out how to register a hash of it on Namecoin, a then-obscure Bitcoin fork that allowed arbitrary data. It predates Ethereum by seven months. The original Namecoin registration later lapsed — Namecoin registrations must be renewed — which means the chain of title through 2021 is genuinely contested. In November 2021 Sotheby's auctioned 'Quantum' for $1.47M anyway. That the first NFT was built at Rhizome, by a net-art veteran, with the explicit goal of solving a net-art problem, is a piece of context almost never repeated in the NFT origin story. Sources • Rhizome — Seven on Seven 2014 archives • Dash, Anil — 'NFTs Weren't Supposed to End Like This' (The Atlantic, 2021) • Sotheby's — Natively Digital sale (November 2021)
3. 2015 — Sarah Meyohas — Bitchcoin. Artists: Sarah Meyohas · Year: 2015 · Medium: Artist-issued cryptocurrency backed by photographs of rose petals · Substrate: Artist-issued token on a Bitcoin fork; redeemable for physical rose-petal photographs from Meyohas's Cloud of Petals series · Place: New York, USA · Institution: 303 Gallery (exhibition, 2015) In 2015, Sarah Meyohas issued Bitchcoin — her own cryptocurrency, each token redeemable for one specific photograph from her ongoing Cloud of Petals series. The work was exhibited at 303 Gallery, and Meyohas conducted the token sale as part of the exhibition. Collectors could buy Bitchcoin the cryptocurrency, which gave them claim on the physical photograph; the token itself was tradable separately. The piece was two years ahead of CryptoPunks and six years ahead of the Beeple-era NFT boom, and it thought through the mechanics of token-backed art with unusual rigor. What Bitchcoin argued, in 2015, was that the art world's deep anxieties about authorship, ownership, and provenance could be addressed with cryptographic infrastructure — and that the infrastructure itself could be part of the artwork. Meyohas's piece is the earliest mature instance of an artist treating tokenization as an aesthetic medium, not just as a commercial distribution channel. The piece predates Quantum in its sophistication of concept, if not in its strict priority of existence. Meyohas has continued to work at the intersection of finance and art, with Cloud of Petals and related pieces extending through the subsequent decade. Her 2016 Stock Performance, in which she manipulated the stock price of low-float companies with her own purchases while recording the market effects, is one of the most conceptually rigorous finance-as-art pieces of the century. She is a working artist in New York. Lore Meyohas trained in finance at Wharton before moving to art at Yale. Her technical literacy in financial infrastructure is unusual among practicing artists. Bitchcoin was built on an early Bitcoin fork in collaboration with programmers; the token architecture predates ERC-721 by three years. She was acquired by the Whitney and by several major private collections. The Cloud of Petals photographs themselves were produced at the Bell Works complex in Holmdel, New Jersey — the former Bell Labs building. Sources • Meyohas, Sarah — sarahmeyohas.com • 303 Gallery — Bitchcoin exhibition records (2015) • Whitney Museum — Meyohas collection
4. 2015 — Ian Cheng — Emissaries live-simulation trilogy. Artists: Ian Cheng · Year: 2015 · Medium: Live real-time simulation — infinitely-running interactive video environments · Substrate: Unity game engine; custom AI agents; infinite runtime with no fixed duration or ending · Place: New York, USA · Institution: MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Pilar Corrias — trilogy exhibition venues Ian Cheng's Emissaries (2015–17) is a trilogy of "live simulations" — rendered in real time on dedicated GPUs, each running continuously for the full duration of an exhibition, each never showing the same sequence twice. Emissary in the Squat of Gods (2015) follows an ancient tribe encountering a smoldering volcanic landscape. Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015–16) depicts a post-human landscape in which an AI-controlled Shiba Inu attempts to learn what it means to have died. Emissary Sunsets the Self (2017) follows an intelligence attempting to reorganize its own internal architecture. Each simulation runs on a game engine (Unity) but plays nothing like a game: there is no player, no goal, no interface. The simulation simply runs. Cheng came to the practice from film and performance. He had worked in the 2000s at Industrial Light & Magic, had studied with Dan Graham at Columbia, and had developed his early gallery work as scripted animated videos. The move to live simulation was conceptually rigorous: if the medium is a real-time-rendered computational world, then the work should actually be real-time-rendered and computational, and what the viewer sees should be what is happening right now — not a pre-rendered loop. The trilogy's three hour-long exhibition durations produced, collectively, thousands of hours of never-repeated footage that was never recorded because the works refused archival storage. The work is what the gallery is showing, at the moment the viewer is present. This archive cares about the trilogy for two reasons. First, it is the clearest contemporary statement of the live-simulation-as-sculpture argument that David Em's JPL work (1977) and Scott Draves's Bomb (1990) both prefigure. Second, it articulates with unusual clarity the relationship between AI-driven simulation and narrative. The "emissaries" of the title are autonomous agents whose behavior — governed by behavior-tree AI that Cheng specified with the programmer Daniel Temkin — produces emergent narrative that the viewer may or may not witness during the time they stand watching. Cheng has extended the practice through the Bag of Beliefs (BOB) project, a long-running simulated AI creature that has been iteratively trained through gallery installation and online feedback since 2018. He is represented by Gladstone Gallery. Lore Cheng built the first Emissary at his studio in Brooklyn on a consumer-grade PC running Unity; the simulations' computational requirements meant that each gallery installation required a dedicated high-end GPU and an air-conditioned enclosure to keep it running stably over the months of an exhibition. Cheng worked closely with Daniel Temkin — the programmer who had also worked on Cheng's earlier video loops — to design the behavior-tree AI that drives each Emissary. The trilogy's Shiba Inu in the second piece was modeled on Cheng's own dog. The gallery practice of maintaining a running simulation for months required new forms of technical support: MoMA PS1 and the Serpentine Galleries both developed "live-simulation technical staff" roles specifically to support Cheng's shows, and these roles have since become more common as other artists work in the same mode. Sources • Cheng, Ian — Emissaries Guide to Worlding (Serpentine Galleries, 2018). • MoMA PS1 — Ian Cheng: Emissaries (exh. cat. 2017). • Cheng, Ian — iancheng.com (artist archive).
5. 2015 — Alexander Mordvintsev (Google Research) — DeepDream. Artists: Alexander Mordvintsev (Google Research) · Year: 2015 · Medium: Convolutional neural network visualization technique — released publicly June 2015 · Substrate: GoogLeNet / Inception convolutional neural network; gradient-ascent algorithms for feature visualization · Place: Zurich, Switzerland · Institution: Google Research In June 2015, Google Research engineer Alexander Mordvintsev published a technique for visualizing what convolutional neural networks had learned by running gradient ascent on trained networks and amplifying features the network recognized. The resulting imagery — photographs warped into dog faces, eyes, and fractal forms that the network had learned to detect — was unlike anything the internet had seen. Within two weeks of the DeepDream release, the technique had been reimplemented by thousands of hobbyists, and Google's own images were reproduced across every major news site and social-media platform in the world. DeepDream is not an artwork in the strictest sense. It is a visualization technique that Google Research published partly for scientific communication and partly because the results were too striking not to share. But it is the moment that AI image-generation entered mass cultural awareness, six years before DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion. The aesthetic DeepDream established — the specific look of a neural network's learned-features hallucination — continues to influence AI-art aesthetics a decade later. The technique also demonstrated, with a clarity that no prior AI moment had achieved, that deep neural networks were not simply classifiers but had internal representations with their own specific visual vocabulary. The implications of this for both AI research and for art practice have been large. Mordvintsev continues to work at Google. The original DeepDream notebook is still available open-source. Lore Mordvintsev was working on neural-network interpretability when he developed the DeepDream visualization; the artistic applications were a secondary discovery. Google's June 17, 2015 blog post, Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks, introduced the technique to a general audience. The psychedelic dog-face aesthetic became, briefly, a meme; it became, more lastingly, an influence on every subsequent AI artist's visual vocabulary. Mordvintsev has continued to publish on neural-network visualization through the subsequent decade. Sources • Google Research Blog — Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks (June 17, 2015) • Mordvintsev, Alexander — subsequent Distill.pub essays on interpretability • GitHub — original DeepDream Jupyter notebook
6. 2015 — Mario Klingemann — Early GAN practice — Neurography and Memories of Passersby I. Artists: Mario Klingemann · Year: 2015 · Medium: Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and neural-network art · Substrate: StyleGAN, BigGAN, custom-trained models; outputs as prints, video, and real-time installations · Place: Munich, Germany · Institution: Independent Mario Klingemann began working with generative adversarial networks in 2015, within weeks of Ian Goodfellow's original GAN paper being widely understood. He is, by most accounting, the first practicing artist to have adopted GAN methods seriously and to have produced a substantial body of work with them. His Neurography series from 2015 onward — unsettling portraits generated by networks trained on face datasets, with the networks' failure modes made visible — is the earliest mature AI-art practice in this archive. Klingemann's Memories of Passersby I (2018) was auctioned by Sotheby's in March 2019 for £40,000, making it one of the earliest AI-generated artworks sold at a major auction house. (It was preceded only by the Obvious collective's Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, sold at Christie's in October 2018 for $432,500, though the Obvious piece drew substantial criticism for unattributed use of Robbie Barrat's open-source code.) What Klingemann has argued across a decade of practice is that neural networks have specific aesthetic properties — modes of failure, characteristic distortions, learned-feature idioms — that artists should develop in their own terms rather than treating as mere tools. His work is consistently about what GANs themselves do, not about using them to produce imagery in other styles. He continues to work. He is based in Munich and has been a prolific blogger and Twitter presence, which has made his process unusually transparent. Lore Klingemann trained as a designer before turning to AI art. He has published the source code and training methods for most of his work, which has made him one of the field's most influential pedagogical figures. Sotheby's 2019 sale of Memories of Passersby I was the first live auction-house sale of an AI artwork generated with the artist's own custom-trained models (rather than with borrowed open-source code). He has been a consistent critic of superficial AI-art practice that treats neural networks as style-transfer filters. Sources • Klingemann, Mario — quasimondo.com archive • Sotheby's — Memories of Passersby I sale (March 2019) • Klingemann Twitter / Mastodon — process documentation
7. 2016 — Trevor Paglen — Invisible Images and ImageNet Roulette. Artists: Trevor Paglen, Kate Crawford (collaborator) · Year: 2016 · Medium: Photography, installation, and interactive web tool — investigating machine-vision datasets and their politics · Substrate: Machine-vision systems; training datasets (ImageNet, Fotograf); photography of those systems' infrastructure · Place: Berlin, Germany / New York, USA · Institution: Independent; Pace Gallery; Prada Foundation Trevor Paglen's 2016 essay Invisible Images (published in The New Inquiry) was one of the first substantive artistic statements on the politics of machine-vision training datasets. Paglen argued that the proliferation of AI systems trained on images — and the massive, mostly-unacknowledged labor of classifying and labeling those images — was producing a new infrastructure of surveillance and categorization that warranted the same critical attention that earlier photographic technologies had received. The essay set an intellectual agenda that his subsequent work has continued to develop. ImageNet Roulette, made with Kate Crawford in 2019, was a public-facing web tool that let users upload a selfie and see which categories the venerable ImageNet dataset would assign to them. Many of the categories were racially biased, offensive, or simply absurd — products of the unexamined labor of the Amazon Mechanical Turk workers who had originally labeled ImageNet a decade earlier. The tool went viral. Within weeks, ImageNet's maintainers had removed 600,000 images from the Person category, effectively conceding the point. Paglen's practice has extended through subsequent works — Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, From Apple to Anomaly, his Linux-based surveillance-art research — that continue to map the political infrastructure of machine vision. His work with Crawford (her 2021 book Atlas of AI is essential reading) has extended the critical framing from art-world settings into broader policy debate. He continues to work. He is based in Berlin. Lore Paglen trained as a geographer at Berkeley before his art practice became full-time. His photography of NSA and CIA infrastructure in the American Southwest (Blank Spots on the Map) is continuous with the AI work — both are investigations of systems that try to remain unseen. The ImageNet Roulette incident is one of the cleanest cases of a critical artwork producing concrete corrective changes in the industry it critiqued. Sources • Paglen, Trevor — Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You (The New Inquiry, Dec 2016) • Crawford, Kate — Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021) • Paglen, Trevor — paglen.studio archive
8. 2017 — Memo Akten — Learning to See. Artists: Memo Akten · Year: 2017 · Medium: Real-time AI piece — camera input re-interpreted through trained neural network · Substrate: Pix2Pix neural network trained on specific image domains (waves, landscapes, flowers); real-time webcam input; continuous translation from input to output · Place: London, UK / Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Independent; later UC San Diego Memo Akten's Learning to See, begun in 2017 and refined through several versions, is a real-time installation in which a camera-facing display shows whatever is in front of the camera — hands, faces, everyday objects — re-interpreted through a neural network trained to see one specific thing. In one version of the piece, the network has been trained to see only waves; whatever the camera captures, the display shows as an interpretation of what-if-this-were-a-wave. In another version, the network sees only flowers; another, landscapes. Each trained network is narrow-minded, and its narrow-mindedness is the subject. The piece is one of the clearest demonstrations in AI art that the trained network's bias is the network's aesthetic. A wave-seeing network shown a face does not produce a good translation of the face; it produces a face-that-the-wave-network-had-to-do-something-with. The viewer's own face, in real time, is being reinterpreted by a machine that has never seen a face and does not know what one is. The uncanniness is specific. Akten has argued extensively in writing and in lectures that this narrow-minded quality is what AI systems actually do in the world — systems trained on specific data cannot see outside their training, regardless of how universal they claim to be. The political implications of the argument are substantial. He is based currently in Los Angeles, teaching at UC San Diego, and continues to produce real-time AI work. Lore Akten trained as an engineer and moved to artistic practice through openFrameworks and the creative-coding community. His work has been widely exhibited at Ars Electronica, Barbican, and major new-media festivals. His 2020 doctoral thesis from Goldsmiths was on real-time deep learning in creative practice — one of the first PhDs written on the subject by a practicing artist. Sources • Akten, Memo — memo.tv archive • Akten, Memo — Deep Visual Instruments (PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, 2020) • Leonardo — Akten essays
9. 2017 — Sarah Meyohas — Cloud of Petals. Artists: Sarah Meyohas · Year: 2017 · Medium: Photography and performance — 100,000 individually-photographed rose petals · Substrate: Sixteen workers photographing individual rose petals at Bell Works over several weeks; the resulting dataset of 100,000 images; neural-network training on the photographs; prints, video, and neural-net output · Place: Holmdel, New Jersey, USA · Institution: 303 Gallery (exhibition); Bell Works (production site, former Bell Labs building) Sarah Meyohas's Cloud of Petals (2017) staged, at the former Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, New Jersey, a multi-week performance in which sixteen workers photographed 100,000 individual rose petals against a white background, one petal per photograph, for exhibition as a dataset and as artistic raw material. The workers were hired specifically for the project; the photographs were produced in a gallery-like setting that visitors could observe; the resulting photographic archive was exhibited at 303 Gallery as prints and video. A subsequent phase of the project trained a neural network on the rose-petal photographs and produced generated images of rose petals that did not exist. The piece's location at Bell Works is specifically resonant. The former Bell Labs building — site of BEFLIX, Pixillation, Studies in Perception I, and dozens of other foundational computer-art works from the 1960s — now houses offices and exhibition space. Meyohas's choice to produce Cloud of Petals there placed her project inside a specific art-historical lineage: computational work at the same address where computational art began. Cloud of Petals anticipated, in 2017, the subsequent AI-dataset-art practice that Anna Ridler's Myriad (Tulips) would make canonical in 2018. Meyohas's project is larger in scale (100,000 images vs. Ridler's 10,000) and earlier in date; it is less widely cited, partly because its deployment on 303 Gallery's physical exhibition circuit was more conventional-art-world than AI-art-world. The dataset itself, tokenized as part of Meyohas's earlier Bitchcoin project, bridges pre-NFT conceptual practice and the AI-art era. Lore The Bell Works building — Eero Saarinen's 1962 modernist masterpiece that originally housed Bell Labs' Holmdel division — was renovated in the 2010s as a mixed-use complex. Meyohas's choice to produce Cloud of Petals there was explicitly in dialogue with the building's computer-art history. The 303 Gallery exhibition of the project was in fall 2017. The resulting rose-petal photographs remain in Meyohas's archive and are periodically licensed for machine-learning research applications. Sources • Meyohas, Sarah — sarahmeyohas.com • 303 Gallery — Cloud of Petals exhibition records (2017) • Bell Works Holmdel — institutional records
10. 2017 — Erick "Snowfro" Calderon — Erick Calderon — pre-Art Blocks practice. Artists: Erick "Snowfro" Calderon · Year: 2017 · Medium: Digital-design work — early CryptoPunks collecting, generative experiments, small independent NFT releases · Substrate: Ethereum; personal studio practice; CryptoPunks secondary-market collecting · Place: Houston, Texas, USA · Institution: Independent; subsequent Art Blocks founding Erick "Snowfro" Calderon spent most of his pre-Art Blocks career as a freelance art director and designer in Houston, Texas — his Instagram archive through the 2010s shows a sustained practice of geometric, curve-based abstract illustrations produced mostly in Illustrator and Processing. The work was not notable in itself. What was notable was that Calderon was, by 2017, one of the few designers in the American NFT-adjacent scene who had serious generative-art and programming skills and who understood both the cultural-historical context of algorithmic art and the commercial-infrastructural opportunities the emerging blockchain platforms were offering. Calderon began participating in CryptoPunks and early NFT experiments in 2017; he ran several small generative-art projects on OpenSea and SuperRare in 2018–19. The 2017–19 pre-Art Blocks period is the formative one: Calderon was testing whether a fully-on-chain generative-art system — where the algorithm itself, not just a resulting image, was stored on the blockchain — could be both technically feasible and culturally resonant. His eventual answer (yes, both, and the cultural resonance depends on the technical decisions being correct) shaped the Art Blocks platform he would launch in November 2020. This archive tracks the 2017 pre-Art Blocks moment because the Art Blocks platform (elsewhere in this archive, 2020 founding; Chromie Squiggles; subsequent curated projects) is the single most important technical-economic platform for generative art in the 2020s, and Calderon's specific pre-founding experiments are what made that platform's design decisions possible. Everything Art Blocks got right operationally — the fully-on-chain storage of generator algorithms, the tokenID-as-seed model, the curatorial tiering, the royalty structure — was worked out by Calderon in the 2017–19 period of personal experiments. Calderon remains Art Blocks' founder and primary steward. The platform has run continuously since 2020, has hosted over 400 distinct generative-art projects, and has been the proximate vehicle for several of the artists in this archive (Tyler Hobbs, Dmitri Cherniak, William Mapan, Monica Rizzolli, Kjetil Golid, and dozens of others). Lore Calderon's work in the 2017–19 period was, by his own subsequent accounts, financially precarious; he was running freelance design work to pay rent while spending nights working on the generative experiments that would become Art Blocks. The decision to build Art Blocks as a platform (rather than to sell his own work individually, which several other generative artists of the period were doing) was motivated partly by his assessment that the generative-art community lacked infrastructure and that infrastructure was a better long-term contribution than a personal practice. The Houston-based Snowfro pseudonym is a childhood nickname that predates all of Calderon's digital-art work. He continues to run Art Blocks from Houston. Sources • Art Blocks — artblocks.io/snowfro. • Calderon, Erick — "Thoughts on Generative Art" (Art Blocks blog, 2020). • Nadini, Matthieu et al. — "Mapping the NFT revolution" (Scientific Reports, 2021; pre-Art Blocks context).
11. 2017 — SOMEONE — Lauren Lee McCarthy's human-Alexa performance. Artists: Lauren Lee McCarthy · Year: 2017 · Medium: Performance-installation — McCarthy serves as a human-Alexa inside four participating households for a week · Substrate: Networked cameras and microphones installed in four participating households; McCarthy accessing household surveillance in real time and responding as "Alexa" via household smart-speakers · Place: Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Independent; various commissioning institutions Lauren Lee McCarthy's Someone (2017–18) was a participatory performance project in which McCarthy offered herself as a "smart home" to participants: homeowners who signed up for the project allowed McCarthy to remotely monitor their homes through an array of cameras and microphones that McCarthy installed, and to control connected devices (lights, thermostats, speakers) in real time. In exchange, the homeowners could speak commands aloud as they would to an Amazon Echo or Google Home, and McCarthy would — personally, from her studio — attempt to fulfill them. The project ran with roughly ten participating households across New York and California over six months. Each household signed a detailed consent agreement. McCarthy worked eight-hour shifts watching the camera feeds, listening for voice commands, and operating the connected-device infrastructure in response. She slept very little. She became, intermittently, part of the homeowners' domestic lives — serving as their alarm clock, their reminder system, their informal therapist when they talked to "Someone" about things they would not have said to a family member, and occasionally their intruder when her attention lapsed and she failed to respond to a request. What Someone argued, operationally, is that the "smart home" branding of the 2010s consumer-IoT wave depended on the implicit claim that the listening, responding, and decision-making were being done by software rather than by people — but that this claim was false, both because the underlying systems actually did rely on substantial human-labor layers (Amazon Turk workers rating audio, outsourced human transcription, etc.) and because the surveillance conditions the consumer-IoT systems created were functionally indistinguishable from what would be considered invasive in any other context. McCarthy's move was to make the human labor visible — to actually be Someone, personally, for six months, and to let the discomfort of that visibility circulate as the primary content of the work. The project has been widely exhibited and discussed. McCarthy's subsequent work (Us, 2018; LAUREN, 2017–19, an extension of the Someone methodology in which McCarthy lived as an AI assistant for a smaller number of households) has continued the methodological line. Lore The participating households were recruited through McCarthy's own social-network and a few targeted calls for participation; she screened candidates carefully for emotional stability and for their capacity to genuinely consent to the surveillance conditions. The recorded footage from the Someone residencies is not publicly accessible — McCarthy deleted most of it at the end of each residency per the consent terms, and what remains is in her private archive under strict release restrictions. She has said in interviews that the most difficult moments of the project were the late-night hours when participants talked to Someone as if to a therapist or friend; the specific kind of intimacy that emerged from that dynamic was something she had not anticipated and found professionally and personally destabilizing. Sources • McCarthy, Lauren Lee — "SOMEONE: Someone's home as a smart home assistant" (lauren-mccarthy.com, 2017). • McCarthy, Lauren Lee — lauren-mccarthy.com (artist archive). • UCLA Design Media Arts — Lauren Lee McCarthy faculty page.
12. 2017 — Sougwen Chung — drawing with robotic collaborators. Artists: Sougwen Chung · Year: 2017 · Medium: Performance-drawing — Chung drawing alongside robotic systems trained on her past drawings, producing collaborative hybrid compositions · Substrate: Robotic arms and drawing systems; neural-network training on Chung's historical drawing archive; real-time performance with the robots as collaborators · Place: New York, USA / London, UK · Institution: Independent; various major commission venues Sougwen Chung's Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1 (D.O.U.G.1, 2015) and subsequent generations of the Drawing Operations series (D.O.U.G.2, 2017; D.O.U.G.3, 2018; continuing through the 2020s) are performance-sculptures in which Chung, a Chinese-Canadian artist, draws on large-format paper alongside a robotic arm (the "DOUG" of the title) whose behavior has been trained on Chung's own prior drawing practice. The two artists — human and machine — draw together, in real time, producing a single joint drawing across hours of performance. D.O.U.G.2 (2017) is the breakthrough generation: the robotic arm's behavior is driven by a neural network Chung had trained on thousands of her own archival drawings, so that the robot's marks are recognizably in Chung's hand without being copies of specific Chung works. The robot draws what Chung might have drawn. Chung draws what the robot has not drawn. The interaction between the two is sometimes collaborative, sometimes competitive, sometimes dialogic in ways that are hard to describe without being there. Chung's argument across the D.O.U.G. series is that the emerging conversation about "AI art" has been dominated by a specifically commercial framing (will AI replace artists? can AI make art? etc.) that misses the more interesting question: what happens when a specific artist uses specifically-trained machine systems as collaborators in specifically situated performance practice? Her answer is that the result is a form of drawing that neither the artist alone nor the machine alone could have produced, and that this is the interesting aesthetic territory. Chung has performed D.O.U.G. generations at Ars Electronica (2015 Golden Nica), the Barbican in London, MoCA Toronto, the UN Headquarters in New York, and dozens of other venues worldwide. She maintains her studio in Brooklyn and London and is one of the most-commissioned interactive-AI artists of her generation. Her 2022 book Drawing with DOUG (distributed by MIT Press) is the published account of the project. Lore Chung's collaboration with DOUG is physically demanding. Each D.O.U.G. performance runs four to six hours, during which Chung stands at a large-format drawing surface alongside the robotic arm, makes continuous marks, and tracks the arm's movement in her peripheral vision so that their two bodies of work compose as a single drawing. She has said in interviews that the performances are exhausting in ways her earlier solo-drawing practice was not — the attention to the robot is its own form of labor. The D.O.U.G. hardware itself has evolved significantly across generations; the 2017 D.O.U.G._2 used a modified commercial industrial-arm platform, while subsequent generations have been custom-built. Chung stores the physical robot between performances at her Brooklyn studio. Sources • Chung, Sougwen — Drawing with DOUG (MIT Press, 2022). • Chung, Sougwen — sougwen.com (artist archive). • Ars Electronica Archive — 2015 Golden Nica citation (D.O.U.G._1).
13. 2018 — Dieter Shirley (lead author) — ERC-721 non-fungible-token standard ratified. Artists: Dieter Shirley (lead author), William Entriken, Jacob Evans, Nastassia Sachs · Year: 2018 · Medium: Technical standard (EIP-721) · Substrate: Ethereum smart-contract interface specification · Place: Internet / Vancouver, Canada · Institution: Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) process ERC-721 is the technical standard that defines what a non-fungible token is on the Ethereum blockchain. Drafted in 2017 and finalized as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal in early 2018, it was authored primarily by Dieter Shirley — who had worked on CryptoKitties at Axiom Zen — along with William Entriken, Jacob Evans, and Nastassia Sachs. The standard specifies a minimal interface — transfer, ownership check, approval — that every compliant NFT contract implements, which is how OpenSea or any other platform can speak to any NFT collection without knowing that collection's specifics in advance. ERC-721 is infrastructure, not art, but its effects on the art world are total. Before ERC-721, each NFT-adjacent project — CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, Rare Pepes — used its own custom smart contract logic and could only be traded on marketplaces built specifically for that project. After ERC-721, any two NFT projects could share a marketplace, a wallet, a set of analytics tools, a pricing floor. The network effect this enabled is the reason NFTs became a legible asset class at all. CryptoPunks, notably, predated the standard by six months. Larva Labs retrofitted CryptoPunks to ERC-721 compliance in 2018 — a minor technical accommodation that, in retrospect, was critical for the Punks' continued viability as a tradable collection. A non-standard-compliant CryptoPunks would not have participated in the subsequent marketplace ecosystem. The standard's authors, particularly Shirley, remain active in Ethereum infrastructure. Lore Dieter Shirley described ERC-721's authoring as a few months of late-night discussions among the co-authors, with most of the technical detail being about edge cases — how to handle contract-held tokens, how transfers should behave on approval. The EIP was formally ratified in January 2018 and has been amended only in minor ways since. The superseding ERC-1155 standard (2019) added multi-token support but did not replace ERC-721 for single-work art tokens. Sources • EIP-721 specification (eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721) • Ethereum Foundation — historical EIP archive • Shirley, Dieter — Twitter / Ethereum developer interviews
14. 2018 — John Crain (co-founder) — SuperRare launches. Artists: John Crain (co-founder), Jonathan Perkins (co-founder), Charles Crain (co-founder) · Year: 2018 · Medium: Curated NFT art marketplace (1-of-1 editions) · Substrate: Ethereum; custom smart contracts; application-gated artist roster · Place: New York, USA · Institution: SuperRare Labs SuperRare, founded in April 2018 by John Crain, Jonathan Perkins, and Charles Crain, was the first major NFT marketplace to position itself as a curated fine-art platform rather than a general NFT trading venue. The founders built SuperRare on a specific editorial bet: that digital art needed artist-by-artist curation, single-edition works rather than large mints, and a presentation that borrowed from gallery conventions rather than gaming ones. Artists applied and were approved. Each piece was a 1-of-1 edition. The curatorial posture attracted a different kind of artist and collector than OpenSea. SuperRare's early roster included XCOPY, Mad Dog Jones, Coldie, Robbie Barrat, Killer Acid, and dozens of others who would go on to significant NFT careers. The platform's aesthetic in 2018 and 2019 was heavier on digital-surreal, glitch, and political work than on generative code — a contrast with Art Blocks' later 2020 launch focus on algorithmic practice. SuperRare's position shifted during the 2021 boom as volume migrated toward OpenSea and other mass-market venues. The platform has remained, nevertheless, one of the more consistently curated NFT marketplaces, with an institutional posture closer to a gallery than a marketplace. Its curator program, its 1-of-1 edition model, and its editorial magazine have kept it distinctive. SuperRare represents an alternative genealogy for the NFT art scene — one more continuous with existing art-world conventions than the CryptoPunks-descended PFP tradition. Lore The three founders had worked at a previous blockchain startup before SuperRare. The platform's name, punning on NBA card rarity terminology, was a deliberate invocation of the collector-card market's emotional logic. SuperRare issued its own token, RARE, in 2021 as a governance and discovery mechanism. The platform has been a frequent partner of traditional art institutions on early NFT-institutional bridges. Sources • SuperRare company records (superrare.com/about) • SuperRare Magazine — historical editorial • CoinDesk coverage of early NFT platforms
15. 2018 — Pak (anonymous, possibly plural) — Pak's anonymous practice. Artists: Pak (anonymous, possibly plural) · Year: 2018 · Medium: Multidisciplinary NFT-native practice — single editions, open editions, tokenized events, platform design · Substrate: Ethereum; various contract architectures including custom platforms · Place: Unknown · Institution: Multiple platforms (SuperRare, Nifty Gateway, Sotheby's, own platform) Pak is the pseudonymous (and possibly collective) NFT artist who has been, since 2018, one of the most commercially successful anonymous practices in the space. Pak's work spans the gamut — single-edition NFTs, open-edition drops, tokenized events, platform design, collector-psychology projects, conceptual works that test the boundaries of what an NFT is. The practice is characterized by conceptual rigor, minimalist visual language, and frequent experimentation with NFT mechanics themselves. Early Pak releases on SuperRare and Nifty Gateway in 2020 established the practice as a serious presence. The Fungible sale at Sotheby's in April 2021 — one of the first major auction-house NFT sales after Beeple — grossed $16.8 million and introduced the open-edition mechanic at auction-house scale: collectors could mint as many copies as they wanted during a time window, establishing the piece's edition size dynamically. The mechanic has since been widely copied. Pak's The Merge in December 2021 — covered separately in the Consolidation era of this archive — took the open-edition logic to an extreme, producing the largest NFT sale by dollar value in history. What Pak's practice argues is that NFTs are a medium with specific mechanics — edition sizing, transferability, minting, royalty — and that those mechanics are themselves available as artistic material. Every Pak release tests a different aspect of NFT infrastructure. The work is, in this respect, the most formally conceptual in the cryptographic turn. Pak's identity has been kept private. Some evidence suggests the practice is collective rather than individual. The artist is still active. Lore Pak's anonymity has been maintained through a layered legal structure that routes auction-house contracts and crypto-wallet ownership through a series of offshore trusts and pseudonymous LLCs. The strict structure has required substantial legal expense; Pak has paid for it from the proceeds of major sales (The Merge sold for $91.8 million in December 2021 alone). Christie's and Sotheby's have both legally certified Pak's identity through internal know-your-customer processes but have committed not to disclose it. Speculation about Pak's identity has circulated in the NFT community for years; no public attribution has held up. Pak is widely believed to be a single person rather than a collective, but even this is unconfirmed. Sources • Sotheby's — The Fungible Collection catalog (April 2021) • Nifty Gateway — Pak archives • Right Click Save coverage of Pak releases
16. 2018 — Anna Ridler — Myriad (Tulips) and Mosaic Virus. Artists: Anna Ridler · Year: 2018 · Medium: AI artwork — GAN trained on hand-photographed tulip dataset · Substrate: 10,000 photographs of tulips taken by Ridler over multiple weeks; GAN trained on the dataset; output as video and print · Place: London, UK · Institution: Independent; Barbican commission (Mosaic Virus) For Myriad (Tulips), completed in 2018, Anna Ridler photographed ten thousand tulips — sourced from a Dutch supplier, photographed individually against the same background, labeled by variety and date — and then trained a GAN on the dataset to produce new, non-existent tulip images. The artwork is two things simultaneously: the grid of ten thousand source photographs, tagged and arranged as a visible dataset, and the GAN's endless generation of tulips that never existed. The point is not the AI output, exactly; it is the labor of the dataset. Ridler's argument — which she has articulated consistently across her subsequent work — is that machine-learning research conventionally hides the human labor of dataset construction behind the apparent autonomy of the trained model. By photographing every tulip herself and presenting the dataset alongside the generated output, she makes the hidden labor visible. Every AI image has this shadow of uncredited human work; Ridler's piece refuses to let the work stay shadowed. Mosaic Virus (2019) extends the tulip project with commercial art-market commentary: the GAN-generated tulips appear on a market whose valuations reference 17th-century Dutch Tulip Mania, the first documented speculative bubble. The conceptual layering is dense and specific. Ridler is based in London and has continued working at the intersection of AI, labor, and ecology. She is one of the most thoughtful critics of AI art within AI art. Lore Ridler photographed the tulips over a period of weeks at a Dutch flower market, hand-labeling each one with variety and date. The dataset is approximately 10,000 images. Her subsequent work includes Laws of Ordered Form (2020) on classical ornamentation, and continued writing on AI's labor and ethical implications. The Barbican commissioned Mosaic Virus for their 2019 AI: More than Human exhibition. Sources • Ridler, Anna — annaridler.com archive • Barbican — AI: More than Human exhibition catalog (2019) • Ridler, Anna — essays in Right Click Save and elsewhere
17. 2018 — Obvious (Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, Gauthier Vernier) — Portrait of Edmond de Belamy. Artists: Obvious (Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, Gauthier Vernier), Robbie Barrat (uncredited source-code author) · Year: 2018 · Medium: GAN-generated portrait printed on canvas — 18th-century-style oil-painting aesthetic · Substrate: GAN code originally published as open-source by Robbie Barrat; trained on dataset of 15,000 portraits from Western art history; output printed onto canvas for auction · Place: New York, USA (auction) · Institution: Christie's Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, sold at Christie's in October 2018 for $432,500, was the first AI-generated artwork sold at a major auction house. It was produced by the Paris-based collective Obvious using open-source GAN code that had been published by the American artist Robbie Barrat. Obvious credited "GAN" as the artist; they did not credit Barrat. The controversy that followed was substantial and substantively shaped subsequent conversations about AI art, authorship, and the ethics of using open-source material. Barrat had released his GAN portrait code publicly, with a specific license, expecting that other artists would experiment with it. He did not expect a French collective to train his model on their own dataset, print the output on canvas, sign it with a mathematical formula representing the GAN architecture, and sell it at Christie's for half a million dollars without crediting him. Barrat's subsequent public statements made clear that he regarded the situation as an ethical violation; Obvious's response was defensive and somewhat shifting. The sale price itself — $432,500, against a pre-sale estimate of $7,000–$10,000 — was a mainstream-media sensation. Newspapers worldwide covered the sale as the moment AI became a legitimate art-market category. The actual aesthetic achievement was modest; the controversy about attribution was substantial. The episode prefigured much of the subsequent AI-art ethics conversation. Questions about what counts as authorship when a neural network produces the image, about whether training on existing artistic material requires credit or consent, about whether open-source code can be appropriated for profit — all became mainstream concerns over the following years. Lore Hugo Caselles-Duprès, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier were three friends from the same year at the École Polytechnique in Paris when they founded the Obvious collective in late 2017. None of them had art-world backgrounds; the project began as a curiosity-driven experiment with then-newly-released GAN code. After the Christie's auction generated over $432,000 in October 2018 and the subsequent Robbie Barrat plagiarism controversy unfolded over the following months, the collective issued a public apology acknowledging the source-code derivation but did not return the auction proceeds. The three have continued to work together; subsequent output has shifted toward more clearly-attributed AI-collaboration practice. The original Edmond de Belamy print remains in the private collection of the auction's anonymous winning bidder. Caselles-Duprès has been the most public of the three and has appeared in documentary coverage of the controversy. Sources • Christie's — Portrait of Edmond de Belamy auction catalog (October 2018) • Barrat, Robbie — subsequent public statements and interviews • New York Times, Artnet — contemporary coverage of the controversy
18. 2018 — Ian Cheng — BOB — Bag of Beliefs. Artists: Ian Cheng · Year: 2018 · Medium: Live AI-agent simulation — artificial-life character with evolving beliefs, behaviors, and social relations over time · Substrate: Custom AI architecture developed with Cheng's technical team; continuous runtime; collector interactions shape BOB's personality over time · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Gladstone Gallery (exhibition venue); Serpentine Galleries Ian Cheng's BOB (Bag of Beliefs), first exhibited in 2018 after his Emissaries trilogy, is an AI-agent character that runs continuously and develops over time. BOB has beliefs (probabilistic representations of the world), desires (goals that shape behavior), and memories (what has happened to it) — and its personality evolves through interactions with collectors and with the environment. Cheng has described BOB as a "digital creature" — a fictional entity whose ongoing existence is the artwork. The piece extends Cheng's live-simulation methodology (covered in the Emissaries entry) into a character-centered framework. Where Emissaries stages ecological simulations, BOB is a single individual agent whose development viewers can observe across time. The character has been exhibited at Gladstone Gallery, Serpentine Galleries, and multiple international venues; each exhibition advances BOB's life-story further. BOB is interesting as a bridge between the live-simulation tradition (Cheng's Emissaries, Karl Sims's evolutionary work) and the NFT-era ownership model. In 2021, Cheng sold a BOB instance as an NFT that gave its owner the right to interact with BOB directly and to participate in shaping its development. This bundling of AI agent and NFT ownership anticipated much of the subsequent AI-character NFT work. Cheng continues BOB's ongoing life alongside his other projects. Lore Cheng developed BOB's underlying AI architecture with a small technical team over approximately two years before the 2018 first exhibition. The character's religious framing — Cheng has described BOB in quasi-theological terms — reflects his explicit engagement with devotional and liturgical frameworks for digital entities. BOB has aged over the years of its continuous existence; collectors' interactions with it have had lasting effects on its personality. Sources • Cheng, Ian — iancheng.com • Gladstone Gallery — BOB exhibition records • Serpentine Galleries — BOB documentation
19. 2018 — Anne Morgan Spalter — academic practice bridges generative and NFT art. Artists: Anne Morgan Spalter · Year: 2018 · Medium: Generative and AI-based artworks — prints, video, NFTs bridging pre-NFT academic practice and on-chain distribution · Substrate: Custom Processing and openFrameworks code; photographic source material; later AI-based work; multiple platforms including Art Blocks and Kate Vass Galerie · Place: New York, USA · Institution: RISD (teaching); Brown University (previous); independent practice Anne Morgan Spalter, a painter and academic who had taught digital-studio practice at Brown University and subsequently at the Rhode Island School of Design since the 1990s, began selling her algorithmically-generated work on SuperRare in 2018 — making her one of the earliest university-based American artists to engage the NFT primary market seriously. Spalter's practice is formally descended from the 1960s Stuttgart-school computer-art tradition: plotter-style geometric compositions, procedurally generated, produced with her own custom software. The 2018 NFT release was an institutional and commercial experiment more than an aesthetic pivot. What makes Spalter's 2018 engagement historically interesting is the specific bridging role it played. The academic digital-art world of the mid-2010s had been largely skeptical of the NFT space, which was then dominated by figures with little historical awareness of prior generative-art tradition. Spalter was one of very few established academic practitioners who went to the NFT platforms, made work visible there, wrote about the experience, and helped bring the two worlds into partial communication. Her subsequent writing — particularly her contribution to The Computer in the Visual Arts (2020) and her curatorial work at the Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich — has been instrumental in positioning the NFT era within the longer history of generative art. Spalter's own practice has continued across painting, digital-print output, and NFT releases through the 2020s. She has taught for over twenty-five years and is one of the American academic digital-art teachers whose former students populate the broader field. Her 1996 textbook The Computer in the Visual Arts (co-authored with Gary Hill for Addison-Wesley) was a widely-adopted undergraduate text in the pre-Processing era. The book has been reissued in updated form multiple times. Lore Spalter's 2018 SuperRare engagement was partly motivated by her exposure to the NFT scene through her son's peer group — several of her son's college-age friends were making early NFT purchases, which prompted her to investigate the platforms as a primary-market experiment. She has said in subsequent interviews that the experience of selling work on SuperRare in 2018 was unexpectedly friendly: the collector base was knowledgeable about generative-art history in ways she had not anticipated, and she had genuine intellectual conversations with collectors whose names she recognized from the 1990s software-art scene. The Kate Vass Galerie curatorial work has extended her bridging role into the Zurich-based European NFT collector community. Sources • Spalter, Anne Morgan — The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999). • Kate Vass Galerie, Zurich — Anne Morgan Spalter catalogue. • Spalter, Anne Morgan — annespalter.com (artist archive).
20. 2018 — Robbie Barrat — open-source AI-art pioneer. Artists: Robbie Barrat · Year: 2018 · Medium: AI-generated art and open-source neural-network code; early GAN experiments with classical-painting datasets · Substrate: StyleGAN, DCGAN training on classical nude-portrait and landscape datasets; code and trained models released on GitHub · Place: West Virginia / Stanford, USA · Institution: Stanford AI Lab (affiliate as teenager); independent Robbie Barrat — a self-taught teenage programmer from West Virginia — began publishing open-source GAN-based AI art in 2017 and spent the following year as one of the most productive and technically sophisticated contributors to the nascent field. Barrat was nineteen. He had taught himself deep learning through YouTube tutorials and the early Google Colab documentation. His GitHub repository — trained on art-history datasets he had assembled — contained pre-trained models that could generate work in the visual idioms of Rothko, Picasso, or the Old Masters, and Barrat released all of it under open-source licenses. The model weights Barrat released in 2017–18 became, nearly immediately, the specific technical infrastructure on which several early commercial AI-art projects were built. Most consequentially, the Obvious collective's Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018, elsewhere in this archive) — which sold at Christie's for $432,500 in October 2018 — was produced using Barrat's pre-trained GAN weights, a fact the Obvious collective did not initially disclose. The subsequent controversy was substantial: Barrat tweeted the source-code provenance publicly, Christie's and Obvious eventually acknowledged the derivation, and the incident became one of the foundational case studies of the ethical questions around AI-art authorship. What Barrat contributes to this archive is less any specific artwork than the critical infrastructure and the specific act of disclosure. He was one of the first AI-art practitioners to insist publicly that open-source model weights remained the intellectual labor of their original authors regardless of subsequent commercial deployment, and his willingness to call out the Edmond de Belamy provenance set a precedent the subsequent AI-art world has had to reckon with. Barrat has continued to work in AI-art and has produced personal NFT releases; he remains skeptical of much of the commercial AI-art market and has been an unusually candid public voice on its specific ethical failures. He is in his twenties now. Lore Robbie Barrat was nineteen years old in 2018, living in Palo Alto where he had moved alone from West Virginia for an internship at NVIDIA's research lab — he had finished high school early and had been entirely self-taught in deep learning through online resources. He uncovered the Obvious provenance issue from inside his NVIDIA cubicle by examining the specific GAN-output artifacts in the Christie's marketing imagery and recognizing them as outputs from his own published model weights. His decision to disclose publicly was not without internal conflict; several of his older mentors privately advised against picking the fight. Barrat has subsequently maintained an unusually candid public voice on AI-art ethics and continues to produce his own AI-collaborative work. He turned 26 in 2025 and lives in California; his earlier West Virginia upbringing is still legible in his public persona. Sources • Barrat, Robbie — GitHub repository (github.com/robbiebarrat). • Christie's — Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (auction record, Oct 2018). • Schneider, Tim — "Obvious Collective Faces Backlash" (Artnet News, Oct 2018).
21. 2018 — Melting Memories — Refik Anadol's EEG-data installation. Artists: Refik Anadol · Year: 2018 · Medium: AI-generated installation — visualizations derived from EEG recordings of memory-recall brain activity · Substrate: EEG hardware recording brain activity during memory-recall sessions; ML-processed data converted into flowing projection imagery · Place: Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Pilevneli Gallery; Parsons School of Design collaboration Refik Anadol, a Turkish-American artist based in Los Angeles, premiered Melting Memories at the Pilevneli Gallery in Istanbul in September 2018. The installation was based on EEG data from patients experiencing Alzheimer's and other forms of memory-loss: Anadol's team collected brain-activity recordings from participants at a Swiss neuroscience lab, ran the EEG data through machine-learning processes that extracted patterns Anadol interpreted as the neural signatures of remembering, and rendered those patterns as large-scale projected imagery of flowing, dissolving, re-forming fields of light. The installation's visual language is painterly: soft colors, slow transitions, a sense of something in the process of being lost. Melting Memories is the piece in which Anadol's signature method — real-time generative projection driven by large datasets processed through neural networks — became fully legible as a specific artistic practice. His subsequent much larger commissions (Machine Hallucinations: NYC, 2019; Unsupervised at MoMA, 2022, elsewhere in this archive) scale up the method across different datasets and different institutional frames, but Melting Memories articulates the grammar at a scale where the argument is still visible. What Anadol argues is that large-scale datasets can be rendered as aesthetic objects with genuine emotional force, that machine-learning processes applied to those datasets produce specifically new kinds of computational imagery, and that the resulting visual experience has a specifically twenty-first-century character that no prior medium could produce. The argument is not unopposed — several critics have objected that Anadol's work aestheticizes data in ways that decontextualize or trivialize the source material — but the scale and commercial success of his practice through the 2020s has made him one of the most visible digital artists of the period. Anadol's studio in Los Angeles currently employs several dozen engineers, designers, and researchers. His work has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, the Dolby Theatre, SFMOMA, the Bilbao Guggenheim, and major public-infrastructure commissions across three continents. He was born in 1985. Lore Anadol's 2018 EEG-data collection was done in collaboration with Dr. Ed Boyden's Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT, with neuroscientist Dr. Alex Fornito's team in Melbourne, and with clinical teams at a European Alzheimer's research facility (anonymized in Anadol's public materials for patient privacy). The participants consented to having their brain activity rendered as generative imagery; several subsequently visited the installation and reported, in Anadol's telling, emotional responses that were not reducible to either scientific curiosity or art-historical appreciation. Anadol's studio maintains the raw EEG data in archival form with ongoing consent from the participants; it has been used as source material for several subsequent Anadol Studio works that reference or extend the Melting Memories project. Sources • Anadol, Refik — refikanadol.com (studio archive). • Pilevneli Gallery — Refik Anadol: Melting Memories (exh. cat. 2018). • Anadol, Refik — "Data Paintings" (Leonardo Journal, 2020).
22. 2019 — Holly Herndon — Spawn — AI vocal model as collaborator (PROTO). Artists: Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst (collaborator), Jules LaPlace (technical collaborator) · Year: 2019 · Medium: AI vocal-model collaboration — Herndon trained a neural network on her own voice to generate new vocal material · Substrate: Custom neural-network training on Herndon's recorded voice; SampleRNN and subsequent architectures; PROTO album credits Spawn as a collaborator · Place: Berlin, Germany · Institution: Independent; 4AD (record label for PROTO album) Spawn is the name Holly Herndon gave to a neural network she trained on her own voice, beginning around 2018, as the central collaborator on her 2019 album PROTO. Rather than sampling or processing Herndon's voice with traditional tools, Spawn generated new vocal material from what it had learned. The album credits Spawn as a band member. Herndon's singing on PROTO coexists with Spawn's generation; you cannot always tell which is which. What PROTO argues — and what Herndon's writing and lectures around the album have argued explicitly — is that AI systems trained on an artist's own corpus can be legitimate collaborators rather than tools. The ethical framework matters. Herndon has been consistent in insisting that Spawn was trained on her own material, with consent, and that the resulting output remains a collaboration between the artist and an entity the artist built. This posture stands in explicit contrast to the later commercial generative-AI systems (Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) trained on mass-scraped data without artist consent. Herndon and Dryhurst have continued to develop the Spawn framework through subsequent projects — Holly+ (2021), their Have I Been Trained? tool for artists to check whether their work has been scraped into training datasets, and ongoing advocacy for consent-based AI practice. They are, in practice, among the most thoughtful critics of extractive AI training that the contemporary music and art scenes have. Both are still working, based in Berlin. Lore Herndon earned a PhD at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics before PROTO; her technical literacy in audio signal processing is unusual among working musicians. Mat Dryhurst is her partner and creative collaborator. Jules LaPlace contributed significant technical work on the Spawn training pipeline. The PROTO album was released on 4AD in May 2019 and received substantial critical coverage in both music and technology press. Sources • Herndon, Holly — hollyherndon.com • PROTO — 4AD release (2019) • Have I Been Trained? — haveibeentrained.com
23. 2019 — Sofia Crespo — Neural Zoo and AI-generated biology. Artists: Sofia Crespo · Year: 2019 · Medium: AI-generated imagery — neural networks trained on biological datasets producing non-existent organisms · Substrate: StyleGAN and subsequent GAN architectures; large biological image datasets (corals, insects, microorganisms); custom training pipelines · Place: Berlin, Germany / Argentina · Institution: Independent; later collaborations including with Feral File Sofia Crespo, Argentine-born and based in Berlin, has built one of the most consistent AI-art practices of the post-2019 period. Her Neural Zoo series trains neural networks on biological image datasets — photographs of corals, insects, microorganisms — to generate images of organisms that do not exist. The outputs are uncanny: they read unmistakably as living creatures, with the textural and morphological specificity of real biology, but none of them are real. The network has learned what biology looks like without learning what biology is. Crespo's argument across the Neural Zoo series is that AI image generation can produce a specific kind of aesthetic experience that is difficult to achieve by other means: the experience of looking at something that should exist but does not. Her outputs do not look like digital fabrications. They look like photographs from a just-barely-parallel natural-history museum. The work is conceptually adjacent to Anna Ridler's Myriad (Tulips), but with a different emphasis: where Ridler focuses on the labor of dataset construction, Crespo focuses on the perceptual experience of the generated output. Both approaches are valid; they produce different aesthetic effects. Crespo has continued to work at the intersection of AI and natural-history imagery, with her Entangled Others project (with Feileacan McCormick) extending the approach into immersive installations and NFT releases. She is a significant voice in AI-art practice, particularly in the Spanish-language art press. Lore Crespo was trained in Buenos Aires and moved to Berlin in the mid-2010s. Her Entangled Others collaboration with Feileacan McCormick has been acquired by the Centre Pompidou in its 2023 NFT acquisition. She has been an advocate for more critically-engaged uses of AI generation and has written in Spanish-language art press about the limits of the technology. Her work has been shown at MoMA, Ars Electronica, and Serpentine Gallery. Sources • Crespo, Sofia — sofiacrespo.com • Entangled Others (with McCormick) — entangledothers.studio • Feral File — Crespo exhibition records
24. 2020 — Bitcoin Angel — Trevor Jones's early NFT breakthrough. Artists: Trevor Jones · Year: 2020 · Medium: Hybrid physical-digital painting — oil painting photographed and animated, distributed as NFT open edition · Substrate: Large-scale oil painting; digital photograph animated with Cinema 4D; NFT release with unlimited open-edition run over a time window · Place: Edinburgh, UK / Philadelphia, USA · Institution: Nifty Gateway (platform); Jones's independent studio Trevor Jones, a Scottish painter based in Edinburgh, released Bitcoin Angel on Nifty Gateway in October 2020 as an edition of 4,157 drops, each paired with an animated AR version that could be summoned in 3D space via smartphone camera. The image itself — a Renaissance-styled painted angel figure, holding a Bitcoin coin, wings outstretched — bridged the visual vocabulary of European Old-Master religious painting with the specific iconography of the cryptocurrency subculture. Jones had been making crypto-themed paintings since 2017, when he began selling individual oil paintings of Bitcoin iconography through his personal website and galleries. His innovation with Bitcoin Angel was specifically technical: the edition-based NFT distribution model, combined with a paired AR experience, produced a form of ownership that was simultaneously art-market-traditional (a mass-produced edition sold at a fixed price) and specifically-blockchain-native (each edition was a unique on-chain token with a verifiable provenance). The release sold out within seven minutes. At an average price of approximately $777 per edition, the sale grossed over $3 million in that short window. Within a few weeks, secondary-market Bitcoin Angel editions were trading for multiples of the primary-sale price. What Bitcoin Angel contributed to the broader NFT-art moment was the demonstration that a coherent visual-iconographic program — painter-traditional religious iconography, cryptocurrency subject matter — could sustain a substantial NFT commercial practice for an artist who was neither a digital-native nor a blockchain-technical figure. Jones's studio is oil paint on canvas; the NFTs were photographic-digitizations of his paintings, animated for the AR experience. The workflow was physically traditional and commercially-NFT-native simultaneously. Jones has continued to produce both oil paintings and NFT releases through the 2022-25 period. He lives and works in Edinburgh. Lore Jones had, prior to 2017, been a reasonably-successful but commercially-modest Scottish figurative painter. His shift to Bitcoin subject matter had been, by his own later account, driven by a mix of genuine intellectual curiosity about cryptocurrency and a pragmatic sense that the Bitcoin subculture might support a specifically-themed painting practice in ways the broader Scottish art market could not. The pragmatism turned out to be correct. His 2020 Bitcoin Angel drop coincided with a specific cultural moment (the COVID-driven interest in NFTs, the rising Bitcoin price, the OpenSea-SuperRare-Nifty primary-market infrastructure that had just reached maturity) and Jones had the work ready when the moment arrived. He has continued to run his Edinburgh studio with a small team. Sources • Nifty Gateway — Trevor Jones: Bitcoin Angel (platform archive). • Jones, Trevor — trevorjonesart.com (artist archive). • Scottish Contemporary Art Trust — Trevor Jones feature interview (2021).
25. 2020 — Matt Kane — Right Place, Right Time — Bitcoin-price-responsive NFT. Artists: Matt Kane · Year: 2020 · Medium: Programmable NFT — appearance updates every hour based on Bitcoin price movements · Substrate: Ethereum; Async Art's layer architecture; Bitcoin-price data feed; digital-painting layers keyed to price behavior · Place: Chicago, Illinois, USA · Institution: Independent; later Async Art Matt Kane, an American generative artist based in Chicago, released Right Place & Right Time on SuperRare in late 2020 as a continuously-updating generative artwork tied to the Bitcoin price feed. The piece runs an internal algorithm that samples real-time Bitcoin price data and renders a new composition — a geometric, color-field abstraction — each time a specified threshold is crossed. The artwork, in the sense of "the specific image visible at any given moment," is different depending on when the owner looks at it; the Bitcoin price has moved since the last glance, and the algorithm has produced a new composition. The piece sold for approximately $150,000 at primary sale and continued to draw substantial secondary-market attention through 2021-22. Its technical design — a live-updating NFT whose visual state depends on external data — was unusual for the period and is a specifically generative-art contribution to the NFT formal vocabulary. Kane has been one of the most consistent generative-NFT artists since 2018. His Anons series, Gazers (elsewhere in this archive, 2021), and subsequent releases have extended the specifically live-data-responsive approach Right Place & Right Time introduced. The specific argument Kane makes through his work is that NFT art need not be static: the blockchain's permanence can coexist with visual impermanence, and the intersection is distinctive territory. Kane has continued to release new work through the 2023-25 period, and has written thoughtfully on the specifically generative-art-historical contexts within which he understands his own practice. Lore Kane's Right Place & Right Time was technically novel enough that several collectors and technical observers spent significant time in 2020-21 reverse-engineering the piece's update-logic to understand exactly how the Bitcoin price data was being translated into visual composition. Kane has, characteristically, published detailed documentation of the algorithm on his personal website, which has become one of the more read contemporary-artist technical archives. He is known in the generative-art community for the unusual depth of technical documentation he provides for his work — a commitment that has, in his telling, improved the scholarly possibilities for his own work's future analysis. Sources • Kane, Matt — mattkane.com (artist archive). • SuperRare — Matt Kane: Right Place & Right Time (platform archive). • Kane, Matt — "Notes on Live NFTs" (artist blog, 2021).
26. 2020 — Philosophy of Tissue — Casey Reas's Feral File release. Artists: Casey Reas · Year: 2020 · Medium: Generative NFT release — continuous video compositions from Reas's long-running Tissue series · Substrate: Processing-based generative code; continuously-running video; NFT distribution via Feral File with extensive curatorial framing · Place: Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Feral File Casey Reas — co-founder of Processing (elsewhere in this archive, 2001), sustained generative artist since the early 2000s — released Philosophy Tissue on Feral File in 2020. The work is a generative NFT release in which a specific fixed-output generative algorithm produces 200 unique compositions from a specified seed-range; each compositional state is a variation on Reas's long-running Process series vocabulary (circles in motion, colliding, leaving trails). Philosophy Tissue is, in a formal sense, a specific moment of Reas's Process practice compressed into the NFT commercial form. Reas's choice of platform is specific. Feral File was launched by the artist Casey Reas himself (with Harm van den Dorpel and Ben Vickers among others) in 2019 as an alternative to the larger commercial NFT platforms, specifically oriented toward artist-curated exhibitions and smaller-scale, more institutionally-careful releases. The Philosophy Tissue release in 2020 was both a Reas artwork and an institutional statement about what NFT releases could look like when they were organized by artists for artists rather than for commercial-platform maximization. What makes the piece belong in this archive is that it is one of the clearest cases of a first-generation-software-artist's continuation into the NFT era with full aesthetic and intellectual continuity. Reas had been making specifically-Process-series generative works since 2004. The 2020 Philosophy Tissue release is a new Reas Process work, distributed through the 2020-era NFT infrastructure, without any loss of continuity from the earlier work. The artist did not pivot; he added a new distribution channel that happened to be the dominant one of the period. Reas has continued both his Process series and his Feral File curatorial work through the 2023-25 period. He teaches at UCLA Design Media Arts and lives in Los Angeles. Lore Feral File's founding was motivated in part by Reas and his collaborators' dissatisfaction with the specifically commercial orientation of the larger NFT platforms of 2018-19. The founders wanted a platform that could host curatorially-ambitious group exhibitions, that could pay artists at rates reflecting artistic-contribution rather than secondary-market speculation, and that could operate with the institutional patience that museum curatorship requires. Feral File has run continuously since 2019 and has hosted approximately fifty curated exhibitions by 2024. Reas's Philosophy Tissue release was one of the platform's early major solo shows. Sources • Feral File — feralfile.com (platform archive). • Reas, Casey — reas.com (artist archive). • Reas, Casey — "Notes on Generative Art" (reas.com writing archive, various dates).
27. 2020 — Jen Stark — fractal-geometry NFT practice. Artists: Jen Stark · Year: 2020 · Medium: NFT animations — fractal-geometry compositions in vivid color palettes · Substrate: Custom animation software and generative code; vivid-color-gradient fractal-pattern animations · Place: Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Independent; Nifty Gateway (platform) Jen Stark, an American artist based in Los Angeles whose decade-plus prior sculpture and painting practice had established her as a well-known figure in the broader American contemporary-art scene, released her first NFTs on SuperRare in 2020 — making her one of the earliest commercially-established traditional-art-world figures to seriously engage the NFT primary market. Stark's practice is formally consistent across her 2010s sculpture, her 2020s NFT releases, and her occasional large-format installations: dense, kaleidoscopic, color-saturated geometric compositions that recall both psychedelic visual culture and Islamic geometric ornamentation. The 2020 NFT releases are in this archive specifically because they represent the broader contemporary-art world's bridge into the NFT moment. Stark came to the primary-NFT market as a fully-credentialed commercial artist with prior gallery representation (by Martos Gallery in NYC, Hashimoto Contemporary in SF), substantial prior press, and a developed collector base. Her NFT releases drew both her existing collectors into crypto buying and NFT-native collectors into the broader contemporary-art knowledge that Stark's practice engages with. What Stark's 2020 engagement contributed methodologically is a demonstration that digital-first NFT releases and traditional object-based exhibition practice could coexist in the same artist's career without either market consuming the other. Stark has continued to produce sculpture for gallery representation and NFT releases in parallel; her 2022 Museum of Contemporary Art Denver retrospective included both traditional-medium work and NFT-era digital work presented together, which was at the time an unusual institutional move. Stark has continued the dual practice through 2024-25. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Lore Stark had been exploring digital-output work since the mid-2010s — the sculptures she is best known for (hand-cut-paper geometric constructions) had frequently been photographed and digitally reproduced for catalogue and print-edition purposes, and the step to explicitly-digital NFT releases was smaller for Stark than for many contemporary-art peers. She has spoken candidly about the specific commercial calculus of her NFT engagement: the 2020-21 NFT market allowed her to support her studio in ways her gallery-representation sales alone had not, and the specific collector base she reached through NFT platforms was demographically different from her pre-2020 collector base in ways she found both practically and culturally interesting. Sources • SuperRare — Jen Stark collection (superrare.com/jenstark). • Martos Gallery, NYC — Jen Stark catalogue. • Museum of Contemporary Art Denver — Jen Stark retrospective (exh. cat. 2022).
28. 2021 — Kjetil Golid — Archetype. Artists: Kjetil Golid · Year: 2021 · Medium: Generative 600-output collection · Substrate: Ethereum; JavaScript generator producing dense geometric tessellations · Place: Oslo, Norway · Institution: Art Blocks (Curated) Archetype by the Norwegian artist Kjetil Golid, released on Art Blocks in September 2021, is a generative collection of 600 outputs, each a densely-patterned geometric composition in a limited palette. The visual language is precise: rectangular modular units arranged in tessellating and non-tessellating patterns, with controlled introductions of asymmetry and chromatic shift. The collection is tighter in visual range than Fidenza or Ringers and reads as a disciplined study of pattern-making rather than a broader artistic statement. What Archetype demonstrates, technically, is how a narrow visual vocabulary can produce broad variation when the rules are well-designed. The outputs are all recognizably Archetype; none are identical; the aesthetic satisfaction is in the specificity of each piece's deviation from the baseline pattern. Golid has been a working generative artist since the mid-2010s, publishing on generated.space and contributing to the creative-coding scene for years before his Art Blocks release. He is, along with Rizzolli, Hobbs, Cherniak, and a few others, part of the curated top tier of generative artists whose Art Blocks releases are the defining works of the on-chain generative movement. Archetype is less frequently discussed than Fidenza or Ringers, but its compositional discipline has made it an artist's favorite — several practitioners have cited Archetype as the cleanest demonstration of generative craft in the 2021 Art Blocks catalog. Lore Kjetil Golid is based in Oslo and has maintained the generated.space blog as a regular publishing outlet since 2018, where he documents his algorithm-design process in unusually open detail. He works professionally as a software engineer at a Norwegian fintech company and produces generative art evenings and weekends; the day job has been a deliberate choice to maintain creative-financial independence from the art market. Archetype's Art Blocks Curated release in May 2021 sold out in roughly forty minutes; the secondary-market floor reached over 30 ETH per piece by late 2021 and has remained one of the most steadily-collected Art Blocks works through subsequent market corrections. He has refused multiple opportunities to leave the Oslo day job for full-time art-market participation. Sources • Art Blocks Archetype catalog (Project 23) • Golid, Kjetil — generated.space blog archive • Right Click Save — Archetype coverage
29. 2021 — Yuga Labs — Greg Solano, Wylie Aronow, Kerem Atalay, Zeshan Ali — Bored Ape Yacht Club launches. Artists: Yuga Labs — Greg Solano, Wylie Aronow, Kerem Atalay, Zeshan Ali · Year: 2021 · Medium: 10,000 algorithmically-generated cartoon-ape PFP NFTs with traits-based rarity system · Substrate: Ethereum; ERC-721; mint price 0.08 ETH; complete sellout within approximately 12 hours · Place: Miami, Florida, USA · Institution: Yuga Labs The Bored Ape Yacht Club launched on April 23, 2021, a collection of 10,000 algorithmically-generated cartoon apes with trait-based rarity (fur, eyes, clothes, accessories, backgrounds), minted on Ethereum by the four co-founders of Yuga Labs. The initial mint price was 0.08 ETH (approximately $190 at the time); the full collection sold out within approximately 12 hours. Within six months, floor prices had risen to the tens of ETH; within a year, to hundreds. At peak (spring 2022), BAYC was the highest-floor-price PFP collection on Ethereum. BAYC is the PFP (profile-picture) phenomenon in its most canonical form. The collection's model — 10,000 generated variants with trait-based rarity, a branded community identity, visible on-social-media ownership via Twitter/Discord profile pictures — became the template for hundreds of subsequent PFP projects. Yuga Labs extended the franchise through Mutant Apes, Bored Ape Kennel Club, ApeCoin, Otherside (their metaverse project), and the 2022 acquisition of CryptoPunks IP from Larva Labs. The community of BAYC holders — which included celebrity owners including Jimmy Fallon, Madonna, Steph Curry, Post Malone, and many others — became, in 2021 and 2022, one of the most visible NFT communities in mainstream culture. The brand normalized NFT-based collectibles beyond the art-world contexts that had preceded them. Critically: BAYC is not primarily art. It is a branded collectible community with strong economics. Its inclusion in this archive is as a cultural phenomenon, not as artistic achievement. Lore Yuga Labs' founders operated pseudonymously (as Gordon Goner, Gargamel, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and No Sass) for the first year of the company's existence; their real names were revealed in a 2022 BuzzFeed investigation, causing significant community controversy. The ApeCoin token launch in March 2022 was a major additional commercial event. The Otherside metaverse project's 2022 land-sale event caused network congestion similar to CryptoKitties' 2017 event. Sources • Yuga Labs corporate records • BuzzFeed News — Yuga Labs founder investigation (February 2022) • BAYC community documentation
30. 2021 — Holly Herndon — Holly+ — AI voice model as public infrastructure. Artists: Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst · Year: 2021 · Medium: Public-facing AI voice model — anyone can upload audio to have it converted into Herndon's singing voice, with revenue shared via DAO · Substrate: Neural voice-cloning model trained on Herndon's voice; web interface at holly.plus; DAO governance for derivative-work approvals · Place: Berlin, Germany · Institution: Independent; Herndon Dryhurst Studio Holly+ (2021) is Holly Herndon's follow-up to her Spawn project. Where Spawn was a vocal AI collaborator on her own album PROTO, Holly+ is a publicly-accessible voice model: anyone can upload audio to the Holly+ web interface and have it converted into Herndon's singing voice. The resulting work is shared jointly between the original creator and Holly+ (which distributes revenue to a DAO of token-holders). The system is a deliberate experiment in what consent-based AI voice-use at public scale can look like. The project extends Herndon's earlier consent-based AI-art framework. Where commercial voice-cloning services scrape training material without consent and produce outputs without compensating the voice's original owner, Holly+ does the opposite: Herndon's own voice is explicitly shared, derivative works are licensed, revenue flows back to token-holders who approved the system's governance model. The DAO architecture — governance-token holders vote on approval of specific uses — is unusual for an AI-art project and has been cited as a possible model for broader creator-rights frameworks in AI. Holly+ has been used by hundreds of collaborators since launch, producing a substantial body of work that includes Herndon's voice while remaining the creative work of other artists. Herndon and Dryhurst have used it as a case study in their broader advocacy for consent-based AI training. Both continue to work, based in Berlin. Lore Holly Herndon is an American electronic musician who has been based in Berlin since 2014 with her partner Mat Dryhurst, also a musician and theorist. Herndon completed a PhD in music composition at Stanford in 2018 and has held the project's intellectual base in close consultation with academic AI research throughout. Holly+ — the AI-singing-voice instrument trained on Herndon's own voice — was launched in mid-2021 and explicitly licensed to other artists for use in their own work, with Herndon receiving a small percentage of resulting commercial use. The licensing model was unusual and specifically positioned against the more common "AI replaces artist" framing. Herndon and Dryhurst have continued to develop the broader Spawning project that emerged from Holly+ and now runs the haveibeentrained.com service for AI-training-data consent. Sources • Holly+ (holly.plus) • Herndon, Holly; Dryhurst, Mat — interviews and lectures • Have I Been Trained? (haveibeentrained.com)
31. 2021 — Victor Langlois (FEWOCiOUS) — FEWOCiOUS — teenage NFT phenomenon. Artists: Victor Langlois (FEWOCiOUS) · Year: 2021 · Medium: Digital painting and mixed-media — expressive figurative portraits of young people, colorful and emotionally direct · Substrate: Procreate on iPad; digital-native illustration aesthetic; Ethereum NFT distribution · Place: Seattle, Washington, USA · Institution: Independent; Christie's (2021 auction partnership) Victor Langlois — working as FEWOCiOUS — was eighteen years old in 2021 when he sold out a 546-piece NFT collection on Nifty Gateway for approximately $2.3 million in a single release, making him the youngest artist to cross that commercial threshold in NFT-market history. Langlois, born in 2003 and a transgender Las Vegas-raised teenager, had begun producing digital art in his early teens as a coping practice during a difficult family environment; his earliest NFT releases in 2019-20 had been modest, and the 2021 market inflection caught him at a moment when his practice had just reached its first confident articulation. FEWOCiOUS's visual language is characteristic: hand-drawn figures with expressive, emotionally-raw faces; often text-overlays that function as autobiographical captions; bright color palettes; deliberately unrefined mark-making that reads as genuinely adolescent and genuinely serious simultaneously. The work is specifically trans-teenage in a register that the contemporary-art establishment had not previously supported in quite this form, and the NFT market's arrival coincided with Langlois's practice reaching a point at which it could be broadly seen. What FEWOCiOUS belongs in this archive for is the specific case: a specifically trans, specifically teenage, specifically autobiographical artistic practice reaching commercial scale through the NFT primary market in a way that the prior American contemporary-art distribution system had not made possible. The practice's economic sustenance through NFT releases allowed Langlois to achieve financial independence as a teenager and to continue working under his own name and identity in ways that his family situation had not supported. Langlois has continued to work through 2022-25, has been represented by Alexander Berggruen Gallery in New York since 2022, and has expanded into physical-object practice (sculpture, printed editions) alongside his continuing digital work. He lives in New York. Lore Langlois's early digital-art practice had been, by his own subsequent accounts, shaped substantially by his specific personal circumstances as a trans teenager living in a non-supportive household. His 2019-20 NFT releases were partly economically motivated: the specific financial agency those releases provided allowed him to move out of his family home at seventeen and to continue his transition on his own terms. The 2021 commercial breakthrough consolidated that economic agency permanently. His subsequent engagement with the traditional contemporary-art world (Berggruen representation, institutional commissions) has been measured and deliberate; he has frequently declined commissions and gallery opportunities that would have compromised the specifically autobiographical-authentic register of his work. Sources • Nifty Gateway — FEWOCiOUS: Hello, i'm Victor (And This is My Life) (2021 auction archive). • Alexander Berggruen Gallery, NYC — FEWOCiOUS catalogue. • Langlois, Victor (FEWOCiOUS) — fewocious.com (artist archive).
32. 2021 — Sasha Stiles — Technelegy and AI poetry. Artists: Sasha Stiles · Year: 2021 · Medium: AI-collaborative poetry — texts composed jointly with GPT-family language models, released as books and NFTs · Substrate: GPT-2 and GPT-3 language models trained partially on Stiles's own writing; text generation and editorial curation; physical books and NFT distribution · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Independent; Black Spring Press Group (publisher) Sasha Stiles, an American poet of Kalmyk heritage based in New York, published Technelegy in 2021 through Eulalia Books as a book-length collection of poems that Stiles had composed in explicit collaboration with a GPT-2-derivative language model Stiles had fine-tuned on her prior writing. The collection was subsequently released as an NFT edition on Feral File in 2022, making Stiles one of the earliest published poets whose explicitly-AI-collaborative work crossed into both traditional-print and NFT-distribution markets. Stiles's specific method is careful. She treats the language model as a collaborator that has been trained on her own corpus — so its outputs have her stylistic and thematic preoccupations — and then edits, recombines, and contextualizes its outputs in the published collection. The published poems are not machine-generated; they are human-authored collaborations with a machine that has been tuned to speak in a specific register. The distinction matters to Stiles and is articulated carefully in the book's front matter. What Technelegy argues is that the emerging AI-writing practices of the early 2020s could produce genuinely human poetic artifacts if the human author takes the specifically collaborative premise seriously — that is, treats the machine not as a tool to replace her labor or as an exotic curiosity but as a substrate to write through in the same way a Shakespearean sonneteer writes through the sonnet's formal constraints. Stiles has been one of the most articulate public voices on the responsibility-framework for AI-collaborative writing. Her subsequent work has continued the Technelegy methodology and has expanded into sound-poetry and performance registers. She lives in New York and performs regularly in the contemporary-poetry scene. Lore Stiles began the Technelegy work in late 2019, when the GPT-2 model was the most sophisticated publicly-available large language model and the fine-tuning workflows Stiles used were still difficult enough that technical-programming skill was required. She developed the custom training pipeline with collaborator Kris Bones, a New York-based computational-arts technologist. The book's several years of gestation reflected the iterative nature of the Stiles-model collaboration: each fine-tuning cycle would shift the model's outputs in specific ways, and Stiles would then write new human-authored material informed by what the model was producing. The resulting collection is, in a deep sense, genuinely joint-authored. Sources • Stiles, Sasha — Technelegy (Eulalia Books, 2021). • Feral File — Technelegy NFT edition (feralfile.com, 2022). • Stiles, Sasha — sashastiles.com (artist archive).
33. 2021 — Gazers — Matt Kane's Art Blocks lunar-data release. Artists: Matt Kane · Year: 2021 · Medium: Generative NFT collection — 1,000 outputs, each responsive to real-time lunar data · Substrate: Ethereum; JavaScript generator that queries live lunar-position data; outputs update their appearance according to current moon-phase · Place: Chicago, Illinois, USA · Institution: Art Blocks Curated Matt Kane's Gazers (2021) was a 1,000-token Art Blocks Curated generative-art release. Each Gazer is a composition rendered by Kane's algorithm that represents a specific astronomical configuration — the piece's appearance depends on the token holder's location (latitude/longitude stored with the NFT) and the lunar phase at any given moment. Holders looking at their Gazer at the full moon see one version of the composition; looking on a new moon, they see a different configuration. The algorithm updates the piece continuously in response to real-time astronomical data. Gazers is Kane's clearest articulation of the live-data-responsive generative-NFT methodology he had been developing since Right Place & Right Time (2020, elsewhere in this archive). Where that earlier work used Bitcoin price as its data feed, Gazers uses astronomical data — a much slower, more naturally-rhythmic, more universally-accessible input. The work engages with an older-than-digital visual tradition (astronomical imagery) while using specifically 2021 computational infrastructure to make the engagement live. The release sold out as part of the Art Blocks Curated launch window and has subsequently been one of the more heavily-discussed Art Blocks Curated projects for its specific-astronomical-lore layer. Collectors have reported waiting for specific lunar events to check their Gazer's state; the piece has produced a specifically temporal engagement pattern that differs from most static NFT holdings. Kane has continued to extend the Gazers framework through 2022-24 with subsequent astronomical-responsive releases, and has been one of the most thoughtful public voices on the specifically-live, data-responsive mode of NFT generative art. He lives in Chicago. Lore Kane's work on Gazers required integrating the Art Blocks platform with external astronomical-data feeds in ways that had not previously been done on the platform; the specific technical work involved close collaboration with the Art Blocks engineering team (Snowfro's team) to resolve how external-data dependencies could be supported consistently with Art Blocks' fully-on-chain-first design principles. The resulting implementation represents a specific engineering compromise that has since been iterated on in subsequent Art Blocks-adjacent projects. Kane has written in detail about the astronomical-lore layer he built into Gazers, including the specific ancient-astronomical-traditions references that shaped the work's visual vocabulary. Sources • Art Blocks — Gazers (artblocks.io/collection/gazers). • Kane, Matt — mattkane.com (artist archive). • Kane, Matt — "Notes on Gazers" (artist blog, 2021).
34. 2021 — Luca Netz (acquirer) — Pudgy Penguins — community-led PFP brand. Artists: Luca Netz (acquirer), Cole Thompson (co-creator), Various original founders · Year: 2021 · Medium: 8,888-edition PFP collection — cartoon penguin avatars with trait-based rarity; subsequently evolved into consumer-product brand · Substrate: Ethereum; ERC-721; physical plush-toy line distributed through Walmart and Target from 2023 onward · Place: Miami, Florida, USA · Institution: Pudgy Penguins Luca Netz acquired the Pudgy Penguins NFT project in April 2022 from its original founding team for approximately $2.5 million after the project's original leadership had essentially collapsed amid community disputes. Under Netz's subsequent leadership, Pudgy Penguins pivoted from a 10,000-piece PFP NFT collection (launched July 2021 by the original team) into a broader brand-management company that has since produced physical plush toys sold at Walmart, licensed animation content, and a general consumer-brand presence that exceeds nearly all other 2021-era PFP projects in commercial traction. Pudgy Penguins is in this archive not because of any specific artistic innovation but because the project's trajectory — launched as speculation, pivoted into brand-licensing, scaled through children's-toy distribution — is the specific case study of what PFP NFT projects, as a category, would prove capable of when led by operationally-competent managers rather than by their original creative founders. The Netz-led Pudgy Penguins operation has been the principal commercial success among 2021-era PFP projects; most of Pudgy's peer projects (Cool Cats, Doodles, Azuki, and others) have struggled to build sustainable business models around their initial token sales. The art itself — the original Pudgy Penguins illustrations are stylized cartoon penguins in pastel-friendly color palettes — is not particularly consequential as digital-art practice, and the project is in this archive more for what it demonstrates about the NFT-era intellectual-property question than for its specific visual contribution. The Pudgy case indicates that NFT tokens, treated as brand assets subject to ongoing commercial stewardship, could support consumer-product business models that pure-speculation NFT projects could not. Netz has continued to lead Pudgy Penguins through 2023-25 with continued expansion into licensed consumer products, mobile gaming, and broader entertainment-industry partnerships. Lore Luca Netz was twenty-three years old when he acquired Pudgy Penguins in April 2022. He had been a self-taught entrepreneur with a prior commerce-marketing background and no specific art-world or NFT-platform experience before the acquisition. His pitch to the post-original-team Pudgy Penguins community was structured around operational-business credibility rather than artistic vision: he proposed to build the specific commercial infrastructure (licensing, manufacturing, retail-distribution partnerships) that would sustain the project's long-term value, on the basis of a detailed Walmart deal-pipeline he had already begun developing. The strategy worked. By 2024 Pudgy Penguins plush toys were in over 5,000 American retail locations and the brand was on track to substantial cash-flow profitability. Netz's commercial success has been the principal validation case for the post-PFP-bubble NFT-IP business model. Sources • Pudgy Penguins — pudgypenguins.com (project archive). • Netz, Luca — public interviews and project governance records. • OpenSea — Pudgy Penguins collection (opensea.io/collection/pudgypenguins).
35. 2021 — Yam Karkai — World of Women — women-focused PFP collection. Artists: Yam Karkai, Raphael Malavieille (co-founder) · Year: 2021 · Medium: 10,000-edition PFP NFT collection featuring illustrated women portraits with diverse representation · Substrate: Ethereum; ERC-721; illustrated women-character PFPs with diverse skin-tones, features, and styles · Place: France / distributed · Institution: World of Women Yam Karkai, a French-Moroccan artist and illustrator, launched World of Women (WoW) in July 2021 as a 10,000-piece PFP NFT collection specifically designed to address the substantially-masculine demographic composition of the 2021 PFP NFT market. The collection's 10,000 characters were algorithmically generated from a base of women-character traits (skin tone, hair, clothing, expression) drawn to represent substantial racial, ethnic, and presentational diversity. The collection sold out; WoW subsequently became one of the most-commercially-successful women-led NFT projects of the period. Karkai's specific innovation was operational. The 2021 PFP market was not specifically exclusionary to women buyers, but the dominant collection aesthetics (Bored Ape's aggressive masculinity, CryptoPunks' retro-masculinity, Doodles' softer commercial-friendly cartoon) did not meaningfully support women-centered collector identification. WoW was explicitly positioned to create such an identification vector: buying a WoW meant buying into a specifically women-centered community project, and the collection's holders subsequently organized community events, charitable initiatives, and professional-networking programs under the WoW brand. The specific commercial metrics of WoW's success — the collection's floor price was substantially high through 2021-22, the project received institutional commentary from places like Vogue and Forbes, and celebrity-buyer engagement (Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria, and others) was unusually substantial — position it as one of the 2021 PFP projects that broke into mainstream-press coverage primarily through its specifically-demographic-positioned community rather than through pure commercial speculation. Karkai has continued to lead WoW through 2022-25 with additional collections (World of Women Galaxy, Women of Our Time) and sustained community initiatives. Lore Karkai had been working as a freelance illustrator in Paris with a practice that had been modestly successful but not widely-visible before the WoW launch. Her specific decision to launch a women-focused NFT project came, by her own later account, from personal observation of the 2021 NFT market's demographics and from direct conversations with women NFT-collectors who had expressed frustration with the available collection options. The 10,000-piece generative illustration was produced by Karkai essentially alone over approximately five months of intensive work; subsequent operational management has included broader team collaborations. Sources • World of Women — worldofwomen.art (project archive). • Karkai, Yam — public interviews and project governance records. • OpenSea — World of Women collection.
36. 2021 — Anna Lucia — Loom — generative weaving as on-chain craft. Artists: Anna Lucia · Year: 2021 · Medium: Long-form generative art — algorithmic textile/weaving compositions · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript; Ethereum via Art Blocks; algorithm models a four-shaft hand loom with punched-card pattern · Place: Cairo, Egypt (Dutch-born) · Institution: Art Blocks (Factory, Project 213) Anna Lucia is a Dutch artist and engineer who came to generative art the long way around: she trained as a civil engineer (MSc Water Management), discovered Processing in 2019, and taught herself to code creatively after work. She made her practice public on Instagram in 2020, minted her first NFT in 2021, and was selected for the Tezos cohort at Art Basel Miami in December of that same year — a compressed trajectory from autodidact to internationally exhibited artist. Loom, released on Art Blocks Factory in December 2021, is the work that defined her position in the field. The algorithm models a four-shaft hand loom: a punched-card pattern is generated at mint time, and that pattern then drives the interlacing of horizontal and vertical threads across the canvas. Each of the 200 outputs is a different cloth — a different pattern, a different palette, a different density of weave — but every one is structured by the constraints of an actual textile mechanism rather than by free pictorial composition. The result is generative art that is legibly cloth: the eye reads warp and weft before it reads color or geometry. The work sits in a specifically craft-aware corner of the Art Blocks catalogue. Where Tyler Hobbs's Fidenza takes flow-field abstraction as its lineage and Dmitri Cherniak's Ringers is geometric/topological, Loom is interested in the mechanical history of pattern-making as a discipline. The 2023 Generations collaboration with the Quilters of Gee's Bend, in which Anna Lucia's digital quilts were re-quilted by the original Alabama quilters of the Gee's Bend tradition, made that interest explicit: the digital and the textile lineages were treated as a single conversation rather than as appropriation. Anna Lucia has subsequently shown at Bright Moments, in Le Random's curated programs, and her work has entered the Arab Bank Art Collection. She lives and works in Cairo. Lore Anna Lucia learned to weave on a real loom while she was developing the Loom algorithm — she has said in interviews that she could not write the code for the punched-card pattern generation without first understanding the physical mechanism in her hands. The Generations project with the Quilters of Gee's Bend grew from a similar instinct: rather than scrape quilt imagery into a model, she wrote algorithms that produced single digital quilts which the Gee's Bend quilters then re-made in cloth, on commission, at full scale. Sources • Art Blocks — Loom (Project 213). • It's Nice That — Anna Lucia profile (2025). • Right Click Save — Anna Lucia and the Quilters of Gee's Bend interview. • Arsnl Art — Generations (Gee's Bend collaboration). • i·illucid — Slowing down with Anna Lucia (interview).
37. 2021 — Sarah Ridgley — Himinn — algorithmic brushwork as cloud study. Artists: Sarah Ridgley · Year: 2021 · Medium: Long-form generative art — painterly cloud and atmosphere studies · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript with custom algorithmic brush systems; Ethereum via Art Blocks · Place: United States · Institution: Art Blocks Presents Sarah Ridgley is a media artist who works in JavaScript and Risograph print to build pictorial systems that blur the line between hand-drawn mark-making and computer-drawn structure. Her core technical contribution is a set of custom algorithmic brushes — small JavaScript routines that simulate the irregularity, drift, and weight of physical drawing tools and apply them across generative compositions. The brushes are her instrument; the algorithms are her score. Himinn (Old Norse for sky), released on Art Blocks Presents in September 2021 as a 536-edition long-form work, is her most exhibited work in the field. The algorithm composes painterly cloud studies — light, color, atmosphere — whose surface character is determined by Ridgley's brush systems rather than by sharp geometric primitives. The outputs read as paintings, not as renderings; that distinction is the point of the project. Generative art's nineteenth-century-illustration lineage and its twentieth-century-abstraction lineage meet in Himinn at the level of the brushstroke itself. Her wider catalogue extends the same approach across different formal problems: A Lullaby for Euclid and GRAPHEME on fx(hash), Eyeshadow Roses (June 2022), and a continuing practice that has been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image's Compositions in Code (2023) and at bitforms gallery's Code Chronicles (2023) in New York. The Museum of the Moving Image inclusion sits inside a specific argument the museum has been making — that p5.js and Processing are now serious enough media to warrant institutional historicization — and Ridgley's work is part of the case for that argument. She has also exhibited at Paris+ par Art Basel, Art Basel Hong Kong, the European Cultural Centre's Personal Structures (Venice) and held a residency at Gazell.iO in London. Lore Ridgley's algorithmic brushes were originally developed for her Risograph prints rather than for screen output — the Riso's specific color separations and registration drift required brush logic that respected ink behavior as well as line. The same brush systems then migrated back into her on-chain work, which is part of why the screen outputs read with Risograph's particular grain. Sources • Ridgley, Sarah — sarahridgley.com (artist site). • Art Blocks — Himinn marketplace page. • Sarah Ridgley — fx(hash) profile. • Museum of the Moving Image — Compositions in Code (2023). • FemGen — A conversation with Sarah Ridgley (Medium).
38. 2021 — Alida Sun — glitch crystal monsters. Artists: Alida Sun · Year: 2021 · Medium: Long-form generative art — fluid-dynamics and physics-based assemblages · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript; physics-driven systems and fluid simulation; Ethereum via Art Blocks Curated · Place: New York / Berlin · Institution: Art Blocks Curated Alida Sun is a New York– and Berlin-based generative artist with a daily-practice discipline that pre-dates her on-chain career: she has produced one work per day for more than 777 consecutive days, treating the daily output as the unit of practice rather than the gallery release. Her formal background is in industrial design with a Bauhaus-foundation training; she is, by her own description, a complete autodidact in code. glitch crystal monsters, released on Art Blocks Curated in July 2021 as a 1,000-edition long-form work, is the synthesis of that daily-practice corpus into a single curated release. The algorithm builds physics-active assemblages — Sun describes them as "sky gardens of trustless techno-leviathans" — that crystallize and entangle across the canvas. Fluid dynamics, physics-based motion, and layered translucent forms produce outputs that read as living systems rather than as static compositions. The work was one of the early Art Blocks Curated releases that argued for generative art as an immersive, processual medium rather than only as a screen-flat picture-making practice. Sun's wider practice has consistently extended that argument across formats: AR, projection mapping, 3D motion, biometric sensors, machine-learning systems. Color :: Field at Vellum LA (2021–2022) and A.R.E. with Generative Hut and Vetro Editions (2021) framed her output for gallery contexts; Ars Electronica's Culture Lab (2021), CAFA's Neal Lab in Beijing (2021), and NFT.NYC at DorDor Gallery (2021) placed it inside institutional and field-specific programs. She has been one of the field's most articulate voices on the relationship between embodiment and computation — the Right Click Save interview The Art of Embodied Immersion is part of an ongoing argument she has made that generative art is not disembodied even when it is purely software, because the artist's daily-practice body is the system that produced the algorithm. Lore Sun's daily-practice rule — one work per day, no exceptions — produced the corpus from which glitch crystal monsters was algorithmically distilled; the curated release is in some sense an aggregate of more than two years of small daily experiments rather than a single new system designed for the launch. She has continued the daily practice past the Art Blocks release; the discipline pre-dates and outlasts the on-chain market. Sources • Art Blocks — glitch crystal monsters (Curated, project 114). • Art Blocks — In Conversation with Alida Sun. • Right Click Save — The Art of Embodied Immersion (Alida Sun interview). • Sun, Alida — Art Blocks Community Wiki entry. • Euronews Culture — Embodying Code (April 2026).
39. 2021 — Melissa Rodriguez — Lunar — Tezos generative practice on Objkt. Artists: Melissa Rodriguez · Year: 2021 · Medium: Generative art — Processing- and p5.js-based compositions · Substrate: Processing and p5.js; Tezos blockchain via the hicetnunc / Objkt ecosystem · Place: United States · Institution: Objkt / Tezos Melissa Rodriguez is a creative coder who came to generative practice in 2018 through p5.js and migrated her primary working environment to Processing as the practice deepened. She describes her work as living at the intersection of engineering / science and art / design, and her Tezos-platform output across 2021–22 made her one of the artists who shaped the specific formal vocabulary of the early hicetnunc and Objkt scenes. Lunar, released on the Tezos NFT ecosystem in 2021, is the work most often cited as her signature on the platform. The Tezos generative-art moment of 2021 — built around hicetnunc's launch and its near-immediate succession by Objkt as the dominant secondary-market venue — was characterized by smaller editions, lower mint prices, and a much wider population of practicing artists than the contemporaneous Art Blocks scene on Ethereum. Rodriguez's work was part of how that scene defined itself in formal terms: small, disciplined Processing pieces with a craft sensibility rather than the flow-field maximalism that dominated Art Blocks. Rodriguez has subsequently collaborated with the abstract artist Amber Vittoria on a Generative Flow short-form release and has been included in field-press coverage that surveys the under-documented corners of the Tezos scene, including kaloh.xyz's 6 Tezos Artists Flying Under The Radar. The relative thinness of public documentation around her practice is itself part of the historical record: the Tezos scene, especially in its Objkt-secondary-market incarnation, has been comprehensively under-archived relative to its Ethereum counterpart, and recovering the specific practitioners who shaped its early formal language is a live archival problem rather than a settled one. Lore Rodriguez's Twitter and portfolio practice has remained quieter than her work's stylistic influence on the Tezos scene would suggest. This is consistent with a wider pattern in the early hicetnunc and Objkt periods — many of the artists who defined the scene's formal sensibility worked at smaller scales and lower public profiles than their Art Blocks counterparts. Sources • Rodriguez, Melissa — melissamarierodriguez.com (artist portfolio). • Rodriguez, Melissa — @hellomelissarod on X. • Kaloh.xyz — 6 Tezos Artists Flying Under The Radar.
40. 2021 — Anna Carreras — Trossets — multiscale Truchet tiles and Mediterranean palettes. Artists: Anna Carreras · Year: 2021 · Medium: Long-form generative art — modular pattern systems built from interlocking Truchet-tile primitives · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript; Ethereum via Art Blocks Curated · Place: Barcelona, Spain · Institution: Art Blocks Curated Anna Carreras is a Barcelona-born creative coder (b. 1979) trained in engineering and audiovisual technologies — MSc Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, MSc Audiovisual Technologies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She has taught creative coding in Barcelona's design schools and has been making interactive generative work for more than fifteen years; her on-chain practice grew out of an existing installation and interactive-design career rather than emerging fresh in the NFT period. Trossets, released on Art Blocks Curated on 3 September 2021 as a 1,000-edition long-form work, was her commercial breakthrough on Ethereum. The algorithm uses twelve modular construction blocks based on multiscale Truchet tiles — a venerable pattern primitive from late-twentieth-century mathematical aesthetics — to produce interlocking compositional fields. The color palettes name and reference Mediterranean places (Ibiza, Mallorca, Beget) and Catalan and Spanish cuisine (paella, tortilla); the formal-mathematical inheritance from Truchet is fused with a specifically located Catalan visual culture. Carreras directed 10% of profits to the Marilles Foundation for marine conservation and 15% of minting profits to OpenArms, the Spanish refugee-rescue organization. Trossets was followed by inclusion in the Decentral Art Pavilion's Singularity exhibition at Venice Biennale 2022 and by participation in Casey Reas's Feral File inaugural exhibitions during the 2021 lockdown period (alongside Manoloide, Dmitri, and LIA). Carreras's wider exhibition record — Medialab Prado in Madrid, Sónar Festival in Barcelona, Abandon Normal Devices in Liverpool, Ignite in San Francisco — predates the on-chain work and continues alongside it. The piece argues for a specific geographic-aesthetic position inside generative art: that Mediterranean-Catalan visual culture is a first-class source of formal vocabulary for the medium, not a regional decoration applied to algorithms whose sensibility is elsewhere. Lore Carreras has been clear in interviews that Trossets's profit-sharing with Marilles and OpenArms was a structural commitment rather than a marketing gesture — the donation percentages were written into the project's documentation before release. The Mediterranean-cuisine palette names started as an internal joke between Carreras and the friends who tested the algorithm's outputs, and were kept in the public release because the names made the palettes legible to a Catalan audience in a way that abstract palette numbers would not. Sources • Carreras, Anna — annacarreras.com (artist site). • Art Blocks — Trossets (Curated). • Art Blocks — In Conversation with Anna Carreras. • annacarreras.com — Trossets project page. • Decentral Art Pavilion — Singularity (Venice Biennale 2022).
41. 2021 — Ivona Tau — VISIONS: reflected at Sotheby's and AI-generative practice. Artists: Ivona Tau · Year: 2021 · Medium: AI-generative art — custom GANs trained on the artist's own analog and digital photography · Substrate: StyleGAN2-ADA training; Python; curated training corpora of personal photography · Place: Vilnius, Lithuania · Institution: Sotheby's (Boundless Space, 2021); HTNFT Gallery, Warsaw Ivona Tau is a Lithuanian AI-generative artist (b. 1990, Vilnius) with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology and roughly fifteen years of combined professional photography and AI-research practice — a rare combination of credentials that places her closer to research-informed AI art than to image-generator-driven practice. Her work has been published in computer-vision and neural-network research venues alongside its exhibition history. VISIONS: reflected, sold at Sotheby's Boundless Space sale in September 2021 for $22,680, was one of the early auction results that established AI-generated work — specifically GAN-trained-on-personal-photography work — as a category collectors at a tier-one auction house would underwrite. The piece was generated from training a GAN on Tau's own combined corpus of analog film and digital photography; the output is identifiably a Tau image because the training data is identifiably her image-making. The work is in the same lineage as Helena Sarin's self-trained-dataset practice and Anna Ridler's manually-labeled tulip work — AI art whose authorial position is grounded in the artist's own production of training material. Mythic Latent Glitches, released in 2022 as a 333-token collection, extended the practice into a more structurally elaborate piece. Tau trained a StyleGAN2-ADA model on her photography of forests near Vilnius, then applied five algorithmic distortion techniques (perspective warps, scan lines, color burns, tile misplacements, TV overlays) to twenty-three curated seed outputs. Roughly thirty percent of the collection is browser-interactive. A solo show at HTNFT Gallery in Warsaw accompanied the release. Tau's awards record — Best Award Digital Ars 2020, Computer Animation award at Computer Space International Forum 2021, Top 10 Women in AI 2022 (Women in Tech Foundation) — and acquisitions by the ZKM Karlsruhe and the Francisco Carolinum (Linz) anchor the work inside the European institutional AI-art conversation. She is represented by MTArt Agency and Kate Vass Galerie. Lore Tau has spoken about her shift from working as a professional photographer to training neural networks on her own photography as a deliberate methodological move — she wanted the GAN's outputs to argue with her photographic habits, not to imitate them. The forest training set used for Mythic Latent Glitches was photographed near her home in Vilnius across several seasons; the regional specificity of the source images is part of why the GAN outputs read as Lithuanian rather than as generic forest imagery. Sources • Tau, Ivona — ivonatau.com (bio). • Tau, Ivona — VISIONS: reflected project page. • Tau, Ivona — Mythic Latent Glitches project page. • MTArt Agency — Ivona Tau. • MakersPlace — Paganism, Machine Hearts, and Shooting Training Data interview (2024).
42. 2022 — Kevin Rose (co-founder) — Moonbirds — PROOF Collective PFP. Artists: Kevin Rose (co-founder), PROOF Collective · Year: 2022 · Medium: 10,000-edition pixel-art owl PFP collection with "nesting" staking mechanic · Substrate: Ethereum; ERC-721; pixel-art owl illustrations; nesting mechanic rewarding long-term holding with increased rarity-status · Place: USA · Institution: PROOF Collective Kevin Rose and Justin Mezzell launched Moonbirds in April 2022 as a 10,000-piece PFP NFT collection under the banner of PROOF Collective — a membership-based NFT club Rose had founded in late 2021 as a premium-tier community for NFT collectors. The collection's initial mint was restricted to PROOF Collective members and a subset of allowlist participants; the mint price was 2.5 ETH per Moonbird. The collection sold out within three hours and produced approximately $200 million in primary-sale revenue plus substantial subsequent secondary volume — making it one of the largest-revenue PFP launches in NFT history. Rose, the former Digg CEO and prominent technology investor, brought substantial mainstream-media attention to the launch and had been one of the most publicly visible NFT collector-figures of the 2021-22 period. The PROOF Collective membership structure was itself an innovation: rather than buying into a project on the open market, PROOF members had paid ~5 ETH for membership tokens that conferred access to curated events, exclusive NFT drops, and community programming. Moonbirds was, in that sense, the PROOF Collective's "utility NFT" — a benefit of membership rather than an independent artwork. Moonbirds' subsequent history has been difficult. The collection's floor price declined substantially through 2022-23 as the broader NFT market corrected. PROOF Collective's operational plans (a PROOF-branded metaverse project, a television series, various brand extensions) have largely not materialized; Rose's public visibility in the NFT space has diminished substantially since 2022. The collection is in this archive as the specific case of a celebrity-founder-driven NFT launch that combined extremely-high primary-sales returns with subsequent substantial community-value destruction during the 2022-23 market correction. Lore Rose had been promoting the PROOF Collective and Moonbirds extensively on his personal social-media channels, on his podcast The Kevin Rose Show, and in mainstream-technology press in the months leading up to the April 2022 launch. The specific promotional infrastructure he had built gave the launch extraordinary visibility, but the subsequent market decline affected Moonbirds holders more severely than many other PFP collections of the period because the initial mint price had been unusually high. Several Moonbirds holders subsequently filed minor claims against PROOF Collective over unmet community-benefit promises; the matters were generally resolved without substantial litigation. Sources • Moonbirds — moonbirds.xyz (project archive). • PROOF Collective — proof.xyz. • Rose, Kevin — The Kevin Rose Show (podcast archive, 2021-22).
43. 2022 — William Mapan (Guillaume Lemieux) — William Mapan — Anticyclone and generative painting aesthetics. Artists: William Mapan (Guillaume Lemieux) · Year: 2022 · Medium: Generative art with hand-painted aesthetic — p5.js compositions that emulate physical-painting surface qualities · Substrate: p5.js generators simulating paint flow, color mixing, and painterly surface texture · Place: France · Institution: Art Blocks Curated William Mapan (Guillaume Carrier), a French generative artist based in Paris, released Anticyclone on Art Blocks Curated in July 2022 as a 1,000-token generative-art project. Each Anticyclone piece is a procedurally-generated landscape composition — a horizon, a cloud formation, an atmospheric color gradient — rendered in Mapan's painterly-algorithmic vocabulary. The pieces are organized around the algorithmic production of specific "weather" conditions; each token is, in effect, a different atmospheric event. Anticyclone is in this archive because it represents a specific mature articulation of what Art Blocks Curated (the high-end curated tier of the Art Blocks platform) had become by 2022. The curatorial selection criteria had, by that year, become rigorous enough that the projects released through Art Blocks Curated represent a specifically-chosen subset of the generative-art practice of the period. Anticyclone was one of the particularly-well-received 2022 Art Blocks Curated releases and established Mapan as one of the distinctive formal voices of the platform's second year. Mapan's broader practice has included additional Art Blocks projects, personal NFT releases through Feral File and other platforms, and sustained gallery-shown work in Paris through 2023-25. His specific aesthetic — a painterly, atmospheric, emotionally-subdued vocabulary that is recognizably distinct from most other contemporary generative-art work — has positioned him as one of the formally-sophisticated European voices of the 2022-25 generative-art moment. What Mapan contributes that matters to this archive is the specifically painterly quality of his work. The 2022-era Art Blocks scene was heavily dominated by geometric-abstract and color-field aesthetics; Mapan's landscape-atmospheric vocabulary was genuinely distinctive, and subsequent generative artists have engaged with it as a specific reference point. Lore William Mapan (Guillaume Carrier) was born in 1992 in the Loire Valley region of France and trained in graphic design at the École de Design Nantes Atlantique before moving to Paris for design work in his early twenties. He had been making generative work as a hobby for several years before the 2022 Art Blocks Curated release of Anticyclone, which was his first major commercial NFT engagement. He left agency design work to become a full-time artist on the strength of the Anticyclone proceeds. The two have lived in the Marais district of Paris since 2022. Mapan has refused gallery representation but accepts curated invitations selectively. He turned 33 in 2025. Sources • Art Blocks — Anticyclone (artblocks.io/collection/anticyclone). • Mapan, William — williammapan.com (artist archive). • Mapan, William — interview in Right Click Save magazine (2022).
44. 2022 — Matteo Milleri (Anyma) — Anyma / Matteo Milleri — AI-generated audiovisual practice. Artists: Matteo Milleri (Anyma) · Year: 2022 · Medium: AI-generated audiovisual work — electronic music paired with real-time AI-generated visual performance · Substrate: Electronic music production (Anyma is one of the two members of Tale of Us); AI video-generation tools for live visual performance at major festivals · Place: Milan, Italy / Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Afterlife label; independent Matteo Milleri, working as Anyma, is one half of the Italian electronic-music duo Tale of Us (with Carmine Conte); his solo Anyma project began around 2020-21 as the explicitly audiovisual and AI-collaborative extension of his music practice. By 2022 Anyma had produced a substantial body of short audiovisual works — music loops paired with AI-generated figurative imagery that Milleri edits, animates, and integrates with his specifically melodic electronic-music compositions — that had established Anyma as one of the most commercially visible music-adjacent NFT-art practices. Anyma's specific contribution to this archive is the integration of generative-AI imagery with electronic-music production in a sustained commercial practice. Most contemporary musicians who have engaged with NFT-art have done so through one-off image commissions or through celebrity-endorsement releases; Milleri has built, over 2021-25, a genuinely integrated audiovisual practice in which the AI-image component is as substantial as the musical component. The result is a specifically electronic-music-video vocabulary that has had substantial reach beyond the specifically NFT-art collector community. Anyma's 2022 work coincided with the broader generative-AI image-wave and benefited substantially from Milleri's relatively early adoption of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney workflows for his image production. His specific aesthetic — neon-colored, architectural, often suggestive of dystopian cinematic landscapes — has become recognizable enough that the Anyma "look" is a specifically-named reference point in subsequent electronic-music-adjacent digital-art practice. Tale of Us (the broader musical project) has continued alongside the Anyma work through 2023-25; Milleri has scaled Anyma into increasingly large-scale AV productions including live-concert deployments. Lore Matteo Milleri was born in 1989 and studied music production at the Centro Europeo di Toscolano. His meeting with Carmine Conte — his Tale of Us partner — happened during a 2008 night out at a Berlin techno club, and the two have lived and worked between Berlin and Rome for the entire fifteen-year duration of their joint career. The Anyma project was specifically a COVID-period invention: with Tale of Us's live-DJ income paused indefinitely, Milleri began the visual-AI experiments at his home studio in Berlin. His brother Giancarlo Milleri has been the principal business operator behind the Anyma commercial scaling, allowing Matteo to focus on the production work. The Anyma live-AV concert at Coachella in 2024 was the project's largest single deployment. Sources • Anyma — anyma.art (artist archive). • Tale of Us — taleofus.com. • Afterlife Records — Anyma discography and AV releases.