CryptoKitties

This is a photo i took of my son playing around in one of our cat carriers, redressed to express the concern and damage the continuation of the trump administration could bring to the world in 2020 and beyond. Unlike the majority of my historic work found on opensea, all content was conceived and taken by me, so felt perfect to use as my first piece on Known Origin.

The idea for this piece was borne out of a tweet of mine that caused a bit of a stir. I’d posted a link to a blog article I’d written a number of months previous titled ‘Who is the Creator’ discussing various types of creative collaborations and why I hire people to work on my animations. It generated a lot of debate around creation and attribution with the community split on whether it’s right or wrong for an artist to hire other professionals to help them realize their art projects. I decided to push the boundaries even further and see how the cryptoart community responded. What if I quite literally had nothing to do with the physical or digital elements of the work other than coming up with the concept and coordinating it? I decided there was one artist in the space who could add huge value to this idea on levels that none other could and so I gathered my courage and contacted the great José Delbo to ask him if he’d be interested in a very unique collaboration. I explained to him that to make this piece ‘work’ he couldn't have any say in what I produced and moreover, he wouldn’t even be allowed to see the animation until it was dropped on MakersPlace. To my surprise, Mr Delbo agreed to my proposal. The animation tells the story of the creative process, which includes my roles as writer, director, and producer working with a team and making edits and changes ‘in real time’. The dialogue between myself and my ‘hired guns’ plays out in front of the viewer. The music written for the piece adds to the nostalgia of the comic book superhero theme but other elements such as the snapping and kicking of the pencil and the signing of my signature at the bottom incorporates further layers and challenges the viewer to ask important questions, such as, is the ‘Art’ the final animation (the creation) or is the ‘Art’ the concept/credit for the creation itself?

Cypher::Prophet is an artwork dedicated to the punk origins of blockchain designed and realized by hackatao and hex6c. In the transposition into images we started from the iconographic canons of the hacker (hoodie, laptop, cryptographic elements) and associated them with the figure of the prophet, thus highlighting the predictive nature of the works of Eric Hughes (Cypherpunk Manifesto, 1988) and Timothy C. May (Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, 1993) as well as of the blockchain inventors Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta (How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document, The Journal of Cryptography, 1991). Read the full story on https://medium.com/@hex6c/cypher-prophet-the-punk-origins-of-blockchain-1e8fce311e72

First Christmas-themed Visual Toy. For this work the artist has created a fantastic sleigh, ornamented in detail and with all the Christmas spirit that transports us to childhood, illusion, innocence. With its gift wrapping machinery, its Santa, a snow globe, the nutcracker, the European-style village and its soundtrack (first time with music) it is a whole Christmas mosaic for the imagination.

The term “Fuku” refers to fortune or good luck. “Shiva” refers to the Hindu deity who represents strongly polar qualities, both severe and delicate. On a beach inspired by adventures on Phi Phi island in Thailand, three youths cavort. Two are representational figures and the third is psychologically rendered. A dynamic relationship ensues between the triad; a reciprocity of active and passive states. The boy on the right engages in maneuvers of evasion, defense, and is dressed in a speedo which reiterates the colors and symbolism of the caution tape on the left and upper right frame of the composition. In concurrent reaction the psychedelic figure shoots out a rocket powered paper airplane. The nude boy seated in the froth and sand approaches in passive repose, and is met with active attention but equal physical reserve by the psychedelic being. Perhaps the most naked figure is also the least representational. Looming large, dynamic, and active, it engages its companions playfully. Various symbols interject into the otherwise naturalistic scene, most notably a beach ball and two contaminated barrels nested in the sand. The upright barrel reads “FukuShima” in Kanji. The barrel laying down reads “Dharma”. To the left the scene is bounded by caution tape, reiterating the danger of the nuclear waste while also hosting alien archetypes, whose presence, as is the nature of these entities, runs up and just behind the consciousness of the psychedelic figure’s eggshell-like skull.

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