Sept. 18, 2020 — I’m pleased to announce that in TokenAngels I found the right collector for “Right Place & Right Time, Bitcoin Hourly Price Offset,” my first Async Art master NFT. This event triggers the launch of a new NFT project and website Volatility.art. This website is the new home of this artwork, where a new composition is created daily based on Bitcoin price volatility. Or if you prefer, follow the site’s Twitter-Bot, @VolatilityArt, tweeting a new artwork daily at 12am GMT.
FIRST NFT GENERATING NFTs
I’m most excited to announce the birth of my new NFT project; one I will maintain a direct hand in minting and maintaining its creative direction. Over the course of what I anticipate to be the next 10+ years, there will be 210 generative edition NFT’s minted, featuring images generated by the artwork and curated by the artist. Having minted an NFT titled “Artist Intent Token,” I’m excited to explore what treating a digital artwork as a work-in-progress over such a length of time can mean, reporting the history to come of Bitcoin and visualizing its most important days and events.Additionally, this project expresses in a tangible form my commitment to and belief in proven scarcity and provenance established on blockchain.
COLLECTOR’S CUT – A NEW PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN ARTIST AND COLLECTOR
There are many innovative economies being experimented with in the NFT space ( Fractioning, Lending, Social Currency). It’s worth risking to try something new in an effort to discover whether there’s something in this model that could work for other artists in the future. The collector will receive 21% of profits generated by sales of NFTs and prints featuring the Master artwork he owns. As both an artist and collector, it makes sense to me that a benefit of digital art ownership on the blockchain can mean holding a financial interest in the future success of an artwork via prints, nfts, other merchandising avenues, and certainly any concept an artist dreams up. And should the collector sell the master nft in the future, our agreement will be transferred and inherited by the new owner.
MORE APPRECIATION. LESS SPECULATION.
In the interest of transparency and respect for all collectors in the space, I wish to explain why the sale of this artwork was direct, circumventing auction. Because this artwork is a larger enterprise that I am interacting with over a lengthy period of time, it feels like the collector owns a piece of the artist. This is why it became imperative to locate a collector relationally, not speculatively. The function of auctions is largely to speculate and to perform price discovery. And of course, the highest bid wins. A gamble on whom might own the work would be contrary to my values and larger vision for this particular artwork, so I sought to find a collector relationally. I needed to follow my heart, gut, and goosebumps.
M.K. & T.A.
Every now and then since December, TokenAngels and I exchanged messages. Usually short, but sometimes very in depth and meaningful. After speaking the first time, what struck me was how we both came into caring deeply about positively contributing to this community and emerging technology. Where I’d taken up the petition with other artists to set a fair minimum secondary sale royalty across platforms, TokenAngels imagined what it might mean to an emerging market if early collectors also got a small % of secondary sale royalties. The question intrigued me. That innovation, bringing the first collector into the lifetime economy around an artwork, gripped my imagination. I’d certainly be more apt to buy an artwork if I got a lifetime stake in it. As early adopters, we are here to experiment, try new things, take risks, and certainly not let traditions of the past prevent progress of the future.
“So Matt, when do you think the Async auction will be? I wanna be sure I’ll be in front of my screen that day.” In August, I showed TokenAngels a soft launch version of Volatility.art and explained I’ve been thinking I might not do an auction and instead locate the right collector another way. He asked how much I’m thinking. Never imagining he would respond in an affirmative, but seeking if he thought I was of sane mind for how I valued the work, I told him 100K. To my great surprise, he said “Okay. I really want this. But let’s make sure we do this right and make this something special, something revolutionary, that will remain in the books.”
The conversation that happened next gave me goosebumps. Without ever explaining to him that I wanted the collector to be more of a partner with a financial interest in NFTs and prints that the artwork generatively created, TokenAngels proceeds to tell me his vision. It was nearly identical to mine. And why not? It was a tweet he made in December which must have inspired my thinking in the first place. I knew then how special this partnership was and that the collector had to be TokenAngels. How else could I know a collector was truly on board with a concept unless they tell me the concept without hearing it from me first?
For the collector, 100K is a large sum of money and in no way a trivial amount to spend. In his own words, TokenAngels explains his patronage this way: “This is one of the perfect artworks that has Crypto Art ingredient, programmable art, generative art, the pumping heart of Bitcoin. It is in my opinion the first artwork that has all of this and I’ve been looking for one artist to do something like this. This is the artwork I’m waiting all this time to buy.”
LIKE A BEAUTIFUL FLOWER
We think of this larger project like a beautiful flower. It will grow with time to have 210 petals. Bitcoin volatility is like wind. Stronger winds threaten to blow off more petals. And the artist must tend to his flower– watering it and changing out the soil at appropriate times. Each petal is precious and the artist collects them when they fall off to make sure each finds the right home. These petals will tell the history of the biggest financial, economic, social experiment probably in human history. A maximum of 210 collectors will have the possibility to join in this artwork, collecting a special moment in the life of Bitcoin, as this revolutionary currency brings forth life changing events into countless more lives.
Finally, what MK and TA wish for the most is that this new artist & collector partnership is seen as an honest experiment between virtual friends that respect each other and are trying to create something new, beautiful, and historically important while opening the possibility for other collectors to become part of this humble little project.
Sincerely,
MK & TA