Playman

Art on @solana matters. As capital markets continue to churn into more profitable vehicles and the overall price of Solana rises with it this will become even more apparent. Art is a store of value, a signal of taste & culture, and a shared experience unlike anything else on chain. If Solana matters culturally so too will its art. Why would the asset class act any differently here than anywhere else in the world? It won’t. Time will continue to mature us. Pressure will make diamonds. The folks at @bonk_inu had this long game foresight in the acquisition of @exchgART and many others within the community are working their hardest to showcase the talent, the importance, and the legacy of the artists who utilize the chain for all it is. It’s up to all of us to mold this into something better than it was yesterday, something that reverberates deeper than sales that are instantly forgotten. Artists deserve it. Solana needs it. Onward.

My thought's on @fx_hash_ 's recent launch. I share this not to criticize, rather to provide any morsel of feedback that the fx(hash) team may find useful. 🚀First off, a hearty congrats on how well the launch went. Nearly flawless execution from a technical and communications standpoint. The amount of novel infrastructure you’ve built and successfully deployed is incredible. The core logic of everything seems to be working very well. Given that the smooth operation of the core protocol is mission critical, some leeway should be given for the quality of the collector experience, but that's what the bulk of my feedback has to do with. 📖 For a bit of context, I'm a generative art lover. I wouldn't consider myself an NFT lover. I wouldn't even necessarily consider myself an art lover in a broad sense. There's just something about generative art that is magic to me. The collector's experience with generative art has been like a drug. For all you trading card collectors out there, it feels a lot to me like ‘rippin’packs’. Some might find that mindset unhealthy, or something we shouldn’t strive for with generative art, but I couldn’t disagree more. It taps into some core elements of human nature. And when you pair this experience with getting to own a beautiful piece of generative artwork on the other side of it, you have something really special. 👉So how well does Open Form recreate this experience? In my experience so far, not so well. I may be a Luddite, but I just don’t see it. At least not yet. Perhaps it needs more time to play out, and benefit from more robust discovery tools. To provide an even deeper context of myself as a collector, let me opine on the collector experience I fell in love with. I’ll also contrast that experience with my experience with Open Form so far. 🗣️If you’re a collector and it resonates with you, speak up, because I believe that over the long term, the collector experience is really the only thing that matters for the success of any generative art platform. 🟢First off, I think that the core way my love for gen art could be summed up is that I think generative artists are rock stars. They’re virtuosos. I’m fascinated by their expertise. Things like being forced to craft a closed algorithm, hiding traits in the algorithm, choosing the proper iteration cap, and of course crafting beautiful artwork through code, all go into my fascination with generative artists. 🔴I don’t want collector curation, I’m not fascinated with other collectors frankly. I don’t want to be able to crank the algorithm to get the art I like, I actually want and demand the mint that the algorithm gives me. If I don’t like it that’s tough shit. I’ll go to secondary. That’s the magic of it. If I open a pack of trading cards I can’t rub one of the cards and have it magically turn into the card I actually wanted. 🟢I respect and admire the process a generative artist has to go through to release a generative art project. All of the contemplation and fine tuning that has to go into creating an algorithm that produces beautiful art. Just the idea of code transforming into art is so special. I love the fact that it has to be a closed system that the artist has to ‘perfect’ before releasing control of. I imagine that releasing that control can be very difficult for some artists, and it’s a very special moment. 🔴With Open Form, as I understand it, artists are able to fine tune their algorithms over time. Less magical to me. Also, very confusing from the perspective of the history of the project. 🟢I love traits and rarities. There I said it. To me, it’s one of the core things that I fell in love with in my early days of collecting gen art. They provide such amazing context for a collector. Both for the moment of minting, and for secondary collecting. And again, the idea that the artist has to think about what traits they want to define in their algorithm, how rare they want them to be, and then tune the algorithm to align with that is just so magical. 🔴With Open Form, from what I’ve seen so far, traits and rarities are either non-existent or pushed to the background. 🟢I love capped edition projects. The idea that the artist needs to decide how many iterations their algorithm can handle is special to me. 🔴With Open Form so far, supply is technically capped, but it’s capped at such a large number it’s effectively uncapped. 🟢I love smaller generative art collections (<1000 iterations). I love being able to sit down and look at every single iteration in a project and get a sense of the overall collection. I love being able to discuss projects with people and know that we likey both have an overall sense of the collection because it’s of reasonable size. I love that having a context for the entire project better allows me to collect on secondary. Collectors like exploring mints together, in real time, as they are minted. 🔴Open Form creates too much of a frenzy. With ‘Generations’ there were over 500 mints before I even realized it was minting. One hour after the launch of ‘Undeniable Failure’ and ‘Slips’ there are over 400 mints for each. As a collector, I don’t feel compelled to go and look at all of the mints because it’s too overwhelming. We are awash in a sea of mints. Nothing seems special because there’s just so many of them. I have little interest in collecting on secondary. ⚖️I suppose the counter argument to this is that Open Form is meant to quickly express 99% of the artist’s algorithm and that discovery and curation is meant to occur through social dynamics. I can see the vision for that, but, with that vision two things are critical: 1⃣ We need better discovery and sharing tools at the social layer 2⃣Artists must be educated and challenged to create algorithms that leverage Open Form, especially with respects to evolution. There must be rare and visually novel elements that can emerge. Something that compels me to share it. I suppose it’s ok if 1000 iterations at depth 0 all look very similar. But evolved artworks need more novelty. Though ideally rare and novel traits can emerge at any depth. Honestly, I'm hesitant to even give advice on how to improve open form because for me personally, I don't think tweaking it will get it to a point where it recreates my preferred collector experience. That said, I'm definitely hoping to be wrong about this as we see its dynamics play out over time. If I know anything about artists it's that they're amazing explorers. Perhaps we just need more time for them to explore this new medium. Btw, I’m not selling. fx(hash) is clearly one of the best and hardest working teams in web3. I’m happy to stand behind them and very excited for their future. ❤️