TENDER Insights #15

Letter from the Editor

I admire the superpowers of the collectors in our community. Some have an exceptional eye, fine-tuned over many years of looking at art. Others are terrific artists in their own right and can recognize many of the individual decisions that went into creating a work as a result. Still others are blessed with the ability to foster community consensus, advocate on behalf of specific artists, or raise the profile of a particular style or movement.

This week, I've been preoccupied with a different type of superpower: a healthy relationship with time. In this week’s Movements, I reflect on some moments that have brought me back to the importance of that trait.

As always, it's an absolute pleasure to be on this journey with all of you, and I hope you're having a wonderful week. 🙂

All the best, Stephen Stanwood (sandcat)

Movements

Pull up a chair: let’s talk about the current state of your relationship with time. While that might sound abstract or intimidating, it shouldn’t be – and it’s a case where small shifts in perspective can go a very long way.

First, a disclaimer: I've been an active art collector for one year. It has been one heck of a year, but that's just not a very long time. I know a lot of you have been collecting art in one form or another for ten or twenty times as long as I have. All that’s to say, I’m not a wizened elder with unique insights into the fundamental nature of collecting. I’m just a normal guy who is fascinated by what we have going on here and who has been pouring a lot of his mental energy into figuring out exactly what this is and where it might be going.

I’ve definitely learned some things on my journey so far, and the one that stands out right now is this:

Acquiring + Hoarding ≠ Collecting

One thing that being a young whippersnapper does qualify you to write about is what it feels like to discover this space for the first time. It’s intoxicating. It’s addictive. I loved every moment of those first few days, weeks, and months.

It’s also incredibly unhealthy.

Hearing others’ origin stories, I know I’m not alone in this. I went in hard and spent an untold number of hours in those first few months acquiring new pieces and trying to wrap my head around what was coming around the next corner. It just felt like there was so much going on all the time. I did everything I could to stay on top of the day-to-day of it all, but none of it made much sense at first, so I defaulted to “Accumulate Now” + “Ask Questions Later.”

Then I started to discover how the technology worked, which artists I liked, and who I could trust. I started to see patterns. I was having a great time, and I couldn’t get enough. The acquisition pace and time commitment continued.

I don’t regret any of this. I think there’s a natural overextension that happens when we first get here – just like there is for any other new area in our lives. New relationship, new job, new kid? Yeah, it’s going to take much more time and mental energy at the outset.

As we move past that initial infatuation, though, we have to slow down to settle in for the long haul. That’s what I’ve been up to recently: instead of thinking about what I might want to pay attention to and collect day-to-day, I shifted to a week-to-week mentality. Rather than running back that old “acquire, hoard, repeat” playbook, I like to think that I’m now taking the work of curating a collection much more seriously.

Weighing different options rather than just jumping at each shiny new thing lets me ensure that I spend my attention and funds where they really need to be – rather than just on whatever happens to be the newest and shiniest.

Lengthening Your Time Horizons

You don’t need me to tell you that patience in not a strong suit for a lot of people in cryptoland. And for anyone who came here to make money, that’s fair enough: crypto has the unique power to take people from “in debt” to “millionaire-on-paper” – or back the other way 😬 – in the span of days or hours. There just aren’t a lot things in our society that work like that.

On some level, I “knew” about crypto’s unhealthy relationship with time all along. But I had been marinating in it day-after-day, so I had lost sight of just how extreme it really is. That is, until a couple of months ago – when I had the chance to travel to Copenhagen.

Travel is wonderful, and you probably don’t me to tell you that either. I’ve always found that one of the specific delights of going on a trip is how it serves to break me away from the mindsets and assumptions I’ve built up in my normal day-to-day life. As an American, traveling to Europe in particular always makes me slow down and think about the past and the future rather than the busyness of the here and now. Not sure whether it’s the old buildings or the longer-term orientation of the culture or what, but it works every time.

As I left on this particular trip, I was told repeatedly I had to go see something called Jens Olsen's World Clock:

This is, as it turns out, an astronomical clock displayed in Copenhagen’s city hall. It seems like nothing too crazy – until you learn that it has a gear that is specifically designed to rotate only once every 25,753 years.

If that’s not a reminder from the universe that not everything is measured in hours and days, I’m not sure what is.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve tried my best to keep that clock in mind. And once you start lengthening your time horizons – even just a little – you gain the ability to tune out so much of the day-to-day noise that sounds urgent or apocalyptic or critical but really isn’t.

Two Simple Steps

So what do we do, exactly?

A listener on a podcast I came across earlier this week called in with a simple question. She had, many years earlier, discovered her artistic passion and reported that it had consistently brought her deeper and more profound satisfaction than anything else she had ever done. She was fully convinced that this was the reason she was alive.

"But how long should I keep doing it?" she asked, citing worries about whether that passion ever could or would bring in enough income to support her family.

There was a long pause after the voicemail played and I held my breath, wondering if the host had the same answer in mind that I did. He did.

"For the rest of your life."

As the host then thoughtfully explained, the listener was asking wasn't really a single question.

One part of what she was after was about making money: what do we need to do to acquire the resources to make ends meet? The answer to that is highly individual and – yes – almost certainly demands compromises along the way. Very few people find a way to cover all the costs of life strictly with income from their particular passion.

But the second part is what's relevant to our conversation here. Once you've identified something that you truly love – whether it's writing poetry or cooking or woodworking or swimming or collecting art – you just keep doing it. It doesn’t have to always be intensive, or even always rewarding, but the power of consistency can lead to local equilibriums and long-term gains that no other strategy can consistently yield.

So I leave you with that: the best prescription for relating to time that I’ve managed to come across over the course of my young life.

1. Find something you really, really love.

2. Don’t stop doing it.

Everything else will work itself out.

Project Love

Generations by Anna Lucia x the The Quilters of Gee's Bend (ARSNL)

It’s safe to say that Generations has been a long time coming.

Anna Lucia’s fascination with textiles runs runs throughout her work. As we recounted in our TENDER Editorial for her December 2021 Art Blocks project Loom, she previously drew inspiration from the textile artwork of female artists who were part of the Bauhaus school in Germany in the early twentieth century.

But why stop there?

This time, rather than drawing on historical artifacts from Germany, Anna turned to a source of living history in the United States: the quilters living and working in the town of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. By working with a group rooted in a place that has been quilting for over a hundred years, Anna has now taken her long-running passion for the kinship between textiles and generative art further than ever before.

The result of this special collaboration between old and new is “a fusion of generative NFTs and physical quilting that spans generations.” We urge you to spend some time browsing the full spectrum of outputs, but here’s one physical-inspiration paired with digital outcome to get you started:

The royalty split on this project is a wonder in its own right: 30% goes to the Gee’s Bend-based quilters (Louisiana P. Bendolph, Loretta Pettway Bennett, Lucy “Lunky,” T. Pettway, and Essie Bendolph Pettway), 25% to Anna Lucia, 25% to Arsnl.art, 10% to Refraction DAO, 10% to Seed Club DAO, and 5% to the Alabama’s Freedom Quilting Bee Cooperative.

The fact that we have the power to split sales of artworks so efficiently reminds us of just how important these blockchain mechanics will be as online-offline collaborations like this become commonplace.

As always, we are here for it 🙌 

Universal Rayhatcher by Piter Pasma (fxhash)

When fx(params) first launched two short months ago in March, everyone knew that it would open new spaces for artists to explore. But none of us knew exactly what those spaces would be or how exactly that would play out.

The month of May brought us two jaw-dropping examples of the power that comes from allowing artists to create a parameter space for others to explore.

Universal Rayhatcher is one of those examples. Piter Pasma has been hard at work refining his signature raythatching algorithm for the past several years. In short, that particular piece of coding brilliance now allows him to create highly textured outputs with incredible efficiency. His Industrial Devolution project, for instance, required just 3930 total characters of code.

With Universal Rayhatcher, Piter has used fx(params) to do something incredible: allow anyone who is up for a challenge the chance to put it to use to create whatever they could imagine.

How did it go? Well, the results speak for themselves 👇

Claus Wilke:

x0y0z0:

Liam Egan:

Monotau:

Laurent Houdard:

ella:

Piter himself:

New mints continue to roll in day-by-day as more and more people try their hand at creating a function to run through Piter’s algorithm. If you make one of your own or sport a new favorite, we want to know about it in discord!

Pensado a mano by Alejandro Campos (fxhash)

Universal Rayhatcher wasn’t last month’s only project inviting us to push the boundaries of what “collector input” might mean.

With Pensado a mano, Alejandro Campos invited us to do something some of us have neglected to do for a long time: pick up our (digital) pencils and draw.

While other early fx(params) projects have allowed us to switch the outputs’ palettes, densities, shapes, or all of the above, Pensado a mano (“think by hand”) takes a more personal angle by posing an open-ended prompt:

“Draw… anything.”

Alejandro’s algorithm then takes the shapes we give it and transforms them into a unique output. Again, the results speak for themselves:

#9, based on input by Maxwell White:

#335, based on input by Lisa Orth:

#453, based on input by Sean Yost:

#605, based on input by Ida Belle:

#667, based on input by Greene:

There are still spots for a few hundred more mints, so if you haven’t had the chance to sit down with this project yet, go click the “mint ticket” tab, see if you can grab one, and give it a try!

Don’t Miss This

• May 18: Generations by Anna Lucia x the quilters of Gee’s Bend (ARSNL; secondary: 0.39 eth; full details about physicals, etc.). Anna Lucia’s collaboration with a group of quilters who have refined their craft over generations has us thinking about time, technology, and the special relationship between digital and physical. Much more about this one in Project Love towards the top of this newsletter!

• May 22: Destructures by Nicolas Daniel (fxhash; secondary: 38 tez). As Nick puts it, “I create things that create,” and we’re happy to see him bring those skills to fxhash. His debut on the platform is a series of 512 (mostly!) colorful patterns that – depending on the output – evoke rolling hills, microchip architecture, or something in between.

• May 24: Human Unreadable by Operator (experiential artists Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti; Art Blocks; secondary: 2.07 eth). Phase 1 ("Reveal"): complete! You can now browse the digital works here. But what happens next is what really sets this project apart. At the end of this month, it's time for Phase 2 ("Decipher"), where collectors can use their pieces to unveil a unique score that outlines a series of movements. Then, later in the year, Ania and Dejha will bring the first hundred pieces to life at a live performance. Intrigued? Read on.

• May 24: Composition #86: It is what it is by Marcel Schwittlick (Foundation; minting: 0.25 eth). Marcel seeks to "pay homage to the concrete photography movement, a form that seeks freedom from representation, focusing on the materiality of the medium itself, to create art that is simply itself." Continuing his efforts to tie digital together with physical, Marcel has ensured that each digital token holder can claim a corresponding physical original silver gelatin print – which they then agree to transfer to any future owner.

• May 25: ESCAPE by Iskra Velitchkova (TONIC; secondary: 0.39 eth). Art offers us mental freedom. Not convinced? Go lose yourself in Iskra’s new abstract structures for a while – then come back and tell us what you think : )

  

  Escape #035

• May 30: Meaningless by Amy Goodchild (Art Blocks; minting: 0.06 eth). "Optimistic nihilism embraces the idea that life's inherent meaninglessness is, in fact, positive." If that sentence doesn't get your attention, I'm not sure what else we can do ; ) Amy’s Art Blocks debut and wonderful accompanying blog post play with the idea that joy comes precisely from searching for and ascribing meaning to our world.

• May 30: Blockchain Automaton by Landlines (fxhash; secondary: 13 tez). Just when you think you’d seen it all, how about an fxhash project that you can’t mint on fxhash? Navigating his way around various technical obstacles, Landlines brings us the “first project on fxhash that generates the artwork completely on chain.”

• May 31: Drift by Paolo Čerić (Verse; minting: $33). The artist who we got to know on fxhash as patakk brings his work over to Verse. As another collector-selected work on that platform, this project immediately attracted the attention and imagination of many members of the Tender community. Paolo’s pieces pair rigid geometric shapes with gentle movement in unexpectedly beautiful ways.

• June 1: Speak To Me by Lisa Orth (Art Blocks; auction). “Speak To Me experiments with layering and interrupting repetitions of basic geometric shapes, exploring their interplay and movement when placed in relation to one another. Drawing loose inspiration from historic art movements such as Suprematism and Constructivism, [Lisa is] seeking to investigate the potential of these simple forms to create dynamic and complex visual arrangements.”

• June 7-8: Non Fungible Conference in Lisbon. The self-described "experimental web3 event" coming to Portugal and features speakers like 6529, Claire Silver, Zeneca, Farokh, Aleksandra, and more.

• June 12: Generative Architecture. The making of a room. (Verse). We’re looking forward to this exhibition curated by Alejandro Campos and ismahelio, who will draw on their professional training to provide us with some glimpses of the burgeoning GenArch field.

• July 14-15: NFT Show Europe in Valencia. This blockchain and web3 conference is back for its second edition – this time on the eastern coast of Spain. Full lineup of artists here, including plenty of our favorites like Zancan, Piter Pasma, Studio Yorktown, Ivona Tau, Danielle King, Ana M. Caballero, and Jacek Markusiewicz.

• As always, a quick reminder to go check on & use any fx(params) mint tickets you have sitting around before they expire!

Collector Spotlight: DocSciFi!

Hey, thanks for chatting with us!

So, “DocSciFi” – what's the origin of the name? I just made it up; I thought it sounded cool! I didn’t realize how locked into my screen name I would become around here. I had a different name when I first got into NFTs, but I changed it as I started to realize it was becoming more permanent than I intended.

What is your current state of mind? NFT-wise? Just chillin’. IRL? Also chillin’!

In terms of collecting, it’s definitely a time of less excitement – but I think that’s good. It gives time to really think about the pieces I’d like to add and what I may be able to let go of down the road.

What is your most treasured piece in your collection, and why?

Impressions of Order #144:

This was my favorite piece of the project even before I owned it. nbswwit [the artist] owned it and generously allowed me to buy it on offer because I liked it so much – even though it was also one of his favorites. That exchange led to us chatting quite a bit about the collection and to me ordering signed prints for all eleven of the outputs I own.

Lost Twins #346 is another standout: that has always been my favorite project on fxhash, and #346 is half of a “perfect twin” set. Yazid holds the other half and refuses to sell it me because he enjoys holding it with the resident Lost Twins maxi. That really means a lot to me.

And Telomeres by Studio Yorktown: it’s a large edition released on 8bidou, but it’s seriously one of my all-time favorite pieces. Something about that piece just really fulfills my love of minimalism, balance, and the Mondrian palette.

Finally, quick shoutout to some gifts I’ve received: Hatched Forms X(COPY) by Yazid and Alp 1638237470 by Leander Herzog, both given to me by my buddy Mithrandir. And my Tender Pass, of course: Rich Poole gave me that. I’ve loved the generosity of the Tezos community from my very first days here.

If you could own any artwork, which would it be? Something ridiculously expensive like The Mona Lisa or The Eiffel Tower [*editor’s note: not Seurat’s, not Delaunay’s – he wants the building 😂], so I could sell it and then do and collect whatever I wanted for the rest of my life. I know, I know, that’s like asking the genie for unlimited wishes.

On the generative art side, I’d have to say Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak. Just a humble three-pack: one blue, one beige, and one red. I also love FOLIO by Matt DesLauriers. I often go and browse through those and daydream about what a print of one might look like hanging up in my home.

Finally, Automatism #287 by Yazid:

What is your idea of the perfect drop? Something amazing by an artist I love that totally goes under the radar – or is a surprise drop that I happen to be in the right place for! It’s priced way too low and I’m able to mint way more than I could ever need, then the secondary goes crazy and I don’t sell a single one.

As a collector, what’s been your greatest success? Well, I minted Garden, Monoliths. Is that a success? I’ve just been able to collect a lot of great art from amazing artists, make some friends, and learn a bunch along the way.

What about your greatest regret? There are many, of course. But specifically as it relates to collecting on fxhash, I don’t think I put myself out there in the community soon enough. At first I was watching the mint reveals feeds and buying the stuff others weren’t. I should have asked more questions in Discord chat because I probably would have ended up with a lot more of the great early fxhash pieces and a lot less of what I minted. Discord was still pretty new to me at the time, and I was – and still am! – a bit internet shy. I definitely could have tapped into the community knowledge more in those early days.

What three artists, dead or alive, do you most want to have dinner with Xer0x, 5tr4n0, nbswwit, Yazid, c3naaX… wait, how may can I pick? 😉

Through collecting I’ve been able to chat with several artist in the space. I would like to have dinner with the people I know and have become friendly with. Not sure how much I’d have in common with Warhol, Rembrandt, or Picasso. But would love to be able to meet up with some of the people I’ve met in this space and get smashed in proximity to a table of fine food.

What's the most important quality in an artwork to you? I’m not sure there is one. I love minimalism, but nothing is a requirement – the work just needs to be compelling. I barely know how to describe art, let alone articulate what I like about it. Just looking for a feeling, mostly.

How do you like to relax? It’s not always that relaxing and may be a bit cliché, but I love hanging out with my son. He’s two and a half years old and an absolute wild man. He lets me be a lot of the things I want to be in other areas of my life. It’s a totally spiritual recharge to get down with him, and he’s really good at having fun.

Thanks for chatting with us! What two collectors should give this questionnaire to next? mithrandir and void.

Hot Picks of the Week

The Piece: FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT #211 by Maya Man
The Price: .99 eth (inspiring & sensical statement at floor)

The Piece: horizon(te)s #67 by Iskra Velitchkova & Zach Lieberman
The Price: 2350 tez (well above floor, but hot Zach Me as you as me)

The Piece: September #332 by teaboswell
The Price: 543.21 tez (great piece on floor)

The Piece: Microplastics #13 & 23 by Kelly Milligan
The Price: .2 eth (complementary pieces on floor)

The Piece: Gossamer #411 by Lars Wander
The Price: 249 tez (at thin floor)

The Series: 80s Pop Variety Pack - for experts only 🕹 by Daniel Catt
The Price: .063 eth floor (best value on Art Blocks?)

The Piece: Lemon Princess #32 by Presstube
The Price: 50 tez (just above floor, nice color)

The Piece: CHX-1 #170 by Thomas Noya
The Price: 44 tez (just above thin floor, good grief please someone buy this to stop the relisting)

Tender’s community-based editorials on iconic generative art projects add rich context to those incredible works. If you’d like to write about a Tender Icon that doesn’t have an editorial yet, DM Adam (@ajberni) or Stephen (@sandcathype) on Twitter or Discord and we'll make it happen. 🙌

TTFN 👋

We’ll see you out there on Discord & Twitter and will be back in two weeks with another issue of our TENDER Insights Newsletter. Feel free to reach out anytime with comments or suggestions. 🙂

— Adam, Stephen, and the whole TENDER family