Decentralized Arts: DAOpunks | Rinascimento.io
BanklessDAO Weekly NFT and Cryptoart Newsletter
Dear Bankless Nation,
DAOPunks was a success that saw the participation of the BanklessDAO and beyond. Success is never taken for granted, but is the result of the work, passion and collaboration of many people, in this case led by Crypto Bushi and Sinjun. Well done!
The innovation in the field of NFTs does not stop at PFP, but extends to the field of art: can we imagine being able to mint the NFTs of Leonardo, Durer, or other great masters of the Renaissance? Rinascimento.io shares his point of view on the matter.
These are all new steps in our continuous search for the relationship between art and technology.
Welcome to Decentralized Arts.
Authors: BanklessDAO Writers Guild (Grendel, Kouros, nonsensetwice)
This is the official newsletter of the BanklessDAO. You are subscribed to this newsletter because you were a Premium Member of the Bankless Newsletter as of May 1, 2021. To unsubscribe, edit your settings here.
Artist of the Week
🧑🎨 Artist: RedCrystalDragon
🏦 Auction Type: Open Edition
💰 Price: 0.02 ETH
Artist, Ogress, Weirdo. Artist for Tapestry of Gaia. #DAOversity Champion, Bankless Black Flag Bearer.
bDAO: How did you became a cryptoartist?
RCD: I have been interested in art for as long as I can remember. I went to school for Graphic Design and Video Game design. I hadn't been actively supporting myself as an artist, working side jobs to afford to do the art. This past year has been hard for everyone and especially hard on those of us who lost people. I chose to start illustrating a comic with my son to help keep me too busy to fall apart. While I was doing that, a friend suggested I join a project's Discord. It was there I met some people from Bankless and joined the DAO. I was introduced to NFTs and cryptoart by the NFT group and Crypto Bushi. I got hooked and joined in the DAO Design Guild.
bDAO: Define what cryptoart is for you.
RCD: Another way to get my art seen. I have my comic and my website, but I think NFTs are the way of the future.
bDAO: What evolution do you see in the world of cryptoart?
RCD: I see a way for artists to get more out of their own art than just making it. The art becomes a bigger thing. Historically, artists have been important, but not supported well. We've been used for our art and paid pittance to survive on. I think NFTs will change that.
bDAO: What do you think about the combination of cryptoart and DAOs?
RCD: Cryptoart and the DAO are hand-in-hand, making the world a better, more fun, place to be.
bDAO: Tell us about the works we are dropping.
RCD: They began as ideas for another project, but I decided to make them their own thing. They were originally going to be traditional tattoo style but I decided to go with vector graphics to make them stand out. The phrase "What is this voodoo" was the concept. I made them green to take away specific racial features, however, I did keep with the traditional concepts behind voodoo priests and priestesses. Adding the steampunk aspects to them makes them more timeless, as steampunk has been a thing since H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. There's a lot of little ETH and BTC symbols in both pieces as well and the little puppet makes me giggle waaaaay too much.
Curated NFT News
NYC Hosting NFT.NYC
November 1-4, 2021
One of the largest NFT conferences in the world is starting today in Times Square with more than 500 speakers from the crypto space.
The first NFT.NYC took place in 2019 as a one-day event. Back then, NFTs were not as popular as they are today, so the conference was a fraction of the size compared to this new event which has been extended to four days.
Speakers include a wide variety of people, including artists; marketplace representatives, like OpenSea, Rarible, and Shoyu; layer 2 representatives; and NFT gaming projects, like Axie Infinity. What is clear is that there will be a lot of action and there will be plenty of interesting topics for everyone’s tastes.
This year, satellite and remote events, many of which are free to enjoy, will surround the main, ticketed event.. For instance, the "Crypto Art Fair" will take over the streets of Times Square and will display the works of some of the artists and projects on a 15,000 square-foot, high-definition, LED billboard. NFT.NYC is also holding an awards happy hour with categories like "Best Blockchain Gaming Company," "Most Innovative NFT Project," and "Best Blockchain for NFTs."
What is certain is that this is the perfect occasion to socialize, and for this reason many projects—like Bored Ape Yacht Club, Axie Infinity, or even BanklessDAO—have organized meetups across the city for people to come together and to get a deep sense of the community.
Adobe to introduce new NFT features to Photoshop
Adobe announced several crypto related updates at its MAX conference last week. These include adding a “prepare as NFT” option to Photoshop, along with being able to add crypto wallets to Photoshop and Adobe’s portfolio website Behance.
The company will also partner with NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, Rarible, SuperRare, and others to display metadata from the “Content Authenticity Initiative” that Adobe has introduced to several of its products.
Adobe is looking forward to protecting creators by verifying that the artist that created the piece is the same one that minted it. The “Content Credentials” feature is now in beta testing across Adobe Creative Cloud solutions.
DAOPunks, Chronicles of Success with Sinjun
DAOpunks was a huge success, with the collection selling out during the pre-sale in a few hours. Sinjun will help us analyze what happened and talk about the roadmap going forward.
bDAO: DAOpunks sold out a few hours after the pre-sale opened: is this something you expected? What emotions have you felt and are experiencing?
DPunk: We hoped to sellout, but we did not expect the demand would be so high. It was surreal watching the mints come in. It feels like a weight has been lifted from all the pressure to get this right. So many steps needed to happen just right for the launch to work. I’m really proud of how our team came together and I’m impressed by how talented everyone was that worked on this.
bDAO: Now that the sale is complete, you can look at all the work you have done. Was it as you expected or did things happen that you did not take into account?
DPunk: It’s been quite inspiring to see the connection our community feels with DAOpunks. We’re pleased that everyone is happy with the artwork, as we spent a lot of time ensuring the quality was high. People are sharing their stories of going from corporate, traditional jobs into wild new DAO jobs. Someone shared their story of how they minted an ultra-rare DAOpunk and it was also their last day at their TradFi job before going full-time DAO!
The project grew so much from the initial ideas. We were not sure if we could actually make over 1k individual artworks, yet here we are. We hit roadblocks continually, especially when trying to find a manufacturer that would work with us, due to the complexity of our project. Many would not return our messages. Yet we kept going and pushing forward.
bDAO: Unlike many NFT PFP projects, you have clarified in advance what the next steps for the collection will be. Do you want to talk about the roadmap?
DPunk: Next, we will be launching our merch redemption system which will allow any DAOpunk holder to redeem their NFT for one free shirt with their exact NFT and QR code that will pull up the NFT. When redeeming, you will still keep your NFT and this will not burn the NFT—this is important to note.
Members of the DAOpunks community are sharing some very innovative and cool ideas. We will turn some of these into projects and initiatives. Many of the DAOpunks have apparel designs that we plan to use for future merch drops.
There will be more NFT and merch drops in the future… stay tuned 😉
bDAO: What can we expect instead from the two artists, Crypto Bushi and Sinjun?
DPunk: It was a pleasure to work with Crypto Bushi and our team. I’m excited to work together again. Expect more creativity and innovation—that’s where all the fun is, and having fun is essential to being a DAOpunk.
bDAO: Can we imagine a future metaverse of the DAOPunks, or the DAOPunks strolling in the metaverses?
DPunk: Anything is possible 😉
bDAO: BanklessDAO was born, among many things, to educate people entering the crypto world. We know how many of these people would like to start their own NFT collectibles: what advice would you give them?
DPunk: Connect with a community. Think long-term. NFTs are here to stay and you are still early. Get clear on your intentions. Challenge yourself to grow and seek discomfort. Give first. Join a DAO, squad up, and build something you can be proud of. Challenge yourself to do something different than what is out there. This is a wild new space that thrives on creativity and new ideas. Good luck!
Rinascimento.io, a Derivative Art Project.
By Grendel
The Rinascimento.io project starts from multidisciplinary research in the History of Art that favors an approach never used before to decrypt Renaissance works using, in some cases (as in Leonardo for example), what was written by the authors themselves. Leonardo, de facto, never stopped painting and creating: Leonardo is contemporary and, using Rinascimento.io, creates NFT in the Metaverse, in the Metatime.
Following the path traced by these giants has led Rinascimento.io to unveil and decrypt a world that until now was mysterious, and forgotten, to which it has given new life.
#BelieveYourEyes. The great masters of the Renaissance unveiled. The immense patrimony of perspective illusions, of anamorphosis, brought back to contemporaneity. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Durer, write with us and with the #NftCommunity, the manifesto of the Renaissance. I, because that I is you, the reader. We all are.
Technology is the chisel capable of extracting the true cognitive and artistic project from the pictorial material and doing it in a short time, trying to overcome that constant familiarity with the work that would otherwise be the only method. Renaissance is the pattern through which we perceive the good and the bad in the world. Man is the non-fungible token, and we, through this principle, re-establish its centrality.
#BeRenaissance, NFTs are the bridge through which reality is constantly reworked.
The NFTs of Rinascimento.io are original works of the great Renaissance masters and the sublimation of their original project: So our NFTs are in a sense "beyond ours":
Only for special occasions, such as the collaboration with Hackatao, we allow ourselves to create Disney fantasies, divertissements. But otherwise, our products are philologically pure; our NFTs allow the contemporary collector to decant and sublimate the greatest artists, thinkers and geniuses of Western art: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Raphael etc.
It is the attempt to explode that critique of digital art that it defines as derivative from many sides, without a true creative inspiration. The derivative inspiration (from the depths of compositional truth) is art. Art, always derived, but profoundly unique; the Masterpiece becomes democratic through the NFT.
Rinascimento.io collaborated with a cryptoartist of international standing, Hackatao. Hackatao has opened a door in the Metaverse that has allowed all that climate to flow, all that synthesis between great Renaissance art and contemporary art that is the basis of the work of Rinascimento.io. When you meet a duo like Hackatao—so political, so sensitive—you connect very deeply to this community, which is so alive and so resistant, so intelligent. This is the NFT community.
Hackatao was an opportunity for us to escape from the Ivory Tower and to be adopted by the most incredible and wonderful community that is the artists of now and today. Hackatao was the Plato of our Academy.
Crypto artists are the peaceful evangelizers of the Metaverse; today the community involves the 0.1 percent of the world population. What would happen if it were 0.2 or 0.3%? Cryptoart is the language, the tongue in its becoming, the Koiné, and the NFTs are the letters that make up this communicational galaxy. DAOs are the political project of the meta-human engine just described. DAOs represent the highest idea of democratization and self-sufficiency of the cryptoart and NFT movement; in a certain sense they are the seed that can overcome a creatively sterile and oppressive society, through equal and horizontal participation. They are the platonic Republics (Politheia) in their realization today.
We want to create the NFT that unveils one of the greatest mysteries in the history of art! Five hundred years of the Mystery of Mona Lisa, the #davincicode but without inventions. Only Leonardo and his story.
And so #BelieveYourEyes, #BeRenaissance!
Anamorphosis-7: The Window And The Garden by G.Contro
On the black background of the Stalingrad kessel, in the winter of 1942, the chaplain and military doctor Kurt Reuber drew a Madonna with child on the back of a military card stolen from the Russians. The work was accompanied by a very singular epigraph: Light, Life, Love.
In that pestilential and icy cesspool of dead and torn flesh—a living cemetery of hunger, thirst, lice, rubble and filth—the German officer, who came in the wake of a horde of bloodthirsty killers, produced an incongruous act, out of space and over time, a construct of meaning detached from any semantic referentiality, a unicum of art or a gesture of metaphysical hypocrisy. Was that an attempt to restore a moment of humanity?
The question, in all evidence, has no sensible answers: Reuber was human while he advanced with the XVI Panzerdivision in a whirlwind of bloody sadism, and equally, it was when he rediscovered in himself the never withered bud of tender theological love. War, after all, is the paradise of technology, and at the same time it is the cradle of arts. Enthusiasm in which the amateur philosopher struts while leafing through the treatise by Sun Tzu, and that only the sight of a child beheaded by the shrapnel can perhaps dampen. War, then, becomes the realm of alienating technology and the disfigured face of a mankind that has been overthrown and defeated. What a labyrinth of mirrors!
In 1925, the Spanish thinker Ortega y Gasset had already found a key to this problem. “To see an object, we must properly arrange our visual apparatus,” he observes in his La deshumanización del arte. “The reader can imagine that we are looking at a garden through a window pane. Our eyes will arrange themselves so that the ray of the gaze penetrates the glass without stopping there ...”. But for the art of his time, what must be the object of gaze is precisely that transparency, in its materiality. Not the emotional stimulation that is added by the color and perfumed shapes of the flowers—not the "popular and sentimentalistic" component, engaging and immediately internalizable, but the technical frame—the idea in itself of making art, in its specific articulations and formal mediations. To be understood (provided that being understood is its end), art must be cleaned of what is strictly inherent to human interest.
It must be dehumanized.
Bankless DAO NFT Updates
🖼 Last week’s weekly showcase numbers: The collaboration with @UmbaDaima, with the pieces “A Bankless Future” by @OrganicStonez, “ABUNDANCE” by @IamNariscia, and “We Bankin’ on The Moon” by @eyesackudawgoo, made a total of 0.6 ETH in sales.
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