Zigmarillion

Im happy to reveal "Carte Blanche"! My new phase of art! My origin is photography and where I always will be, it's the place I feel most comfortable and at ease But I always looked to push myself into "discomfort" because there lies progress and also new fun and rewarding experiences Carte Blanche is built on my night photography as a base. But have for a long while played with forms of expanding my ability to express things through my art in new ways that gives more creative freedom It is my night photography inverted. Turning dark into light , on top of that double exposure that brings shape in the lightness. Where you can tell a story through the subject of the piece and how it reveals what's beneath. To add even more ability to say something through my art, animation comes in to make the piece come to life, to tell a story, to address a topic or just bring energy into it. Lastly there are elements of illustrations. Might be the whole piece that's contouring the photography, also lines that add a rawness and also make it more dynamic even when the piece is less animated Carte Blanche stand for to be able to do what you want, and that is what my exploration into this from came form. An increased freedom of expression with less limits and using more of my artistic skills. But shortened Blanche becomes Blanc which stands for white. A blank slate to start from , and also the white bright visuals that for me is a path to also express "darker" emotions and topics and have it be delivered in a form that might hit people differently and more off guard. Just as animation often can address topics that normal video cant This drop is the first step but it will be part of more things as it rolls out. My piece for Formosa is part of Carte Blanche, as well as something that's revealed tomorrow I'm hoping you want to come on this journey with me! This is just the start. More works will come and it will grow in other ways as well

@MadaCollects Wish you the best in your "transition"

After much thought, I have decided to permanently switch my social media names from Animated to MadaCollects. Ever since I was a child, collecting has always been a part of my life. Rocks, coins, cards, paintings, and now NFTs. I simply love and have loved searching out unique and beautiful artifacts that bring beauty and joy into my life. Part of this identity shift is to mark a change in my approach. My goal moving forward will be to do a significantly better job displaying the collection I have amassed. This means build out a website, work with local business and museums to display the works, and look to new ways I can proudly share these works to friends and family. This name change also more accurately reflects who I am as a person (iykyk) and who I want to be. I have obviously been vocal about collecting art in this space, but also collecting memories and friendships. I will prioritize people, projects, and artists that embody the idea of p^p. I have always said that my favorite thing about the NFT space is how remarkable the people are. Let’s not forget that this space can be so so much fun. Overall, my direction won’t change all that much but the intentionality certainly will. I am excited for the future and hope you are too. Per usual, be careful of scammers. My wallets are the same and will only use verified platforms for buys/trades.

@EstebanAmaroArt Gm Esteban!

@zigmarillion Gm Zig

Gm! Have a fantastic Start to the week and get that win!

@rosstintexas @suparno67 Let's go indeed

@zigmarillion @suparno67 Lets go, Monday!

@newlightvisuals @goodvibesclub Gm right back!

Gm

@jennadixonphoto Gm and a great day to you Jenna!

@zigmarillion Gm

@LFGweb3 Gm! Have the best day Hustle!

@zigmarillion gm zig 🌲☕️

@IkertjeNFT Best day to you!

@zigmarillion Gm, same!

@Loulanweu And gm right back to you Loulan!

@zigmarillion Gm zig 💙✨

@art_icu_late Thats awesome man! And thanks!

@zigmarillion Let’s go!!! Seeing OUTSIDERS on 24 Hours of Art was one of the highlights of my 2025

What a complete honor to have my art be part of 24 Hours of Art interpretation! 🙏

@nftlisa Did a quick scroll and thought it was real for a sec. Not that art needs to look real to be great. Still great one!

My fathers box of fish lures were as fascinating and beautiful as my mothers jewelry box (Watercolor on paper) Good morning 🎣

@joelle_lb Just like art. Easier to critique it than to do it yourself well

I really don't understand why anyone would enjoy watching other people play sports like how tf do you guys even get excited when you're not participating, I don't get it lol

@AdamWeitsman @Mr_Anchovy_ Hehe nice Gm and may your week be a great one!

Woke up early and just bought a rock :) Wanted to show some support to the community 🙏 #Rockateral @Mr_Anchovy_

@rocketgirlART @SuperRare Good luck!

First ever self-portrait series and naturally I made it about the moments that fucked me up in useful ways. FAULT LINES - five works, five pivot points. Friday on @SuperRare as a curated drop. This week: daily behind-the-scenes on each piece. The moment, the fallout, the work.

@GarryB1rd Tell an artist to paint a piece that includes x,y,z. Then ask them to change it a bit to get the piece you want and pay them. = Commission Tell an LLM to paint a piece that includes x,y,z. Then ask them to change it a bit to get the piece you want and don't pay them = Artist

Peak delusion. People who can’t Art, think they’re now as good as people who can Art, because apparently AI tools can Art very well now.

@eitzisart Gm and a great day to you!

Gm and happy new week☀️☕️ ART IS ALL WE NEED

@dsoeirosanches @0xzar_ Huuuuuge congrats my friend! Hope you celebrate bigly!

Very late gm world… …I have been absent from my regular posts here but IRL has gotten very very busy in a good way… …but definitely wanted to put this out there… …@0xzar_ and I finally made it… …”The Antifragile Bazaar” got voted in to be tomorrow’s meme card…

@ilovedecay Love this shot!

Somewhere in Kyiv at night

@DarrenSRS Gm Darren!

Gm frens

@halecar2 @pridesai Very on point here🤝

I agree with you there. I also think the structural mechanics are genuinely different and some of those differences absolutely mattered. Transparency mattered. Royalties mattered. Direct access mattered. The ability for artists to bypass certain institutional bottlenecks mattered. I’m not dismissing that at all. Seeing the hierarchy instead of pretending it doesn’t exist does change behavior. It changes how collectors move, how artists strategize, how communities form. Traditional art hides power behind discretion and cultural language. But I think where I still hesitate is in assuming those native mechanics necessarily led to deeper artistic experimentation. Did we actually get riskier art because of transparency, liquidity, royalties, and community-native distribution? Sometimes yes, absolutely. But I think a lot of the “native” mechanics eventually started shaping production in ways that narrowed experimentation too. Constant visibility, constant market feedback, floor-price psychology, collector expectation, performative community maintenance; all of that created its own gravitational pull toward repetition and recognizability So I think the question for me is less whether the mechanics were different (they clearly were) and more whether those mechanics ultimately expanded the conditions for meaningful artistic risk over time or whether they just accelerated another form of cultural capitalism optimized for visibility and liquidity. Some incredible art emerged from our space, no doubt. But I’m still not sure the system itself favored all ambitious art experiments as much as we wanted to believe...

Visibility, attention, and support are not decentralized. I think this idea that NFTs somehow escaped gatekeeping is one of the biggest myths the space keeps telling itself. It sounds good because blockchain infrastructure is technically open; anyone can mint, anyone can buy, and everything is transparent on-chain. Fine. But visibility is not decentralized. Attention is not decentralized. Support is not decentralized. And those are the things that mostly determine (especially online) who gets to exist culturally. The reality is that NFTs reproduced a lot of the same social structures as the traditional art world almost immediately. A small group of artists became canonized early, collectors clustered around them, platforms amplified them, and then everyone else was told the ecosystem was “open” while competing for scraps of attention in an economy driven almost entirely by visibility algorithms and insider networks. The success rate for artists experimenting natively in NFTs is not radically different from the traditional art world (something I personally have experimented with first in my trad art career because I am Mexican and not in the USA or Europe, and secondly in NFTs because I was late and not doing generative art). We act like this was some mass liberation event for artists, but how many actually built sustainable careers? How many received long-term support? How many got to keep experimenting after the speculative wave cooled off? Very few. The artists who succeeded were largely the ones who were selected early, platformed early, supported by collectors early, or given enough visibility to build communities around themselves. That’s not an insult, it’s just reality. It mirrors traditional art structures much more than people want to admit. In both systems, a very small number of artists are given enough oxygen to continue evolving publicly while most others remain invisible despite producing meaningful work. And I think this obsession with “nativeness” sometimes ignores how much of NFT culture was financially accelerated by speculation rather than by some fundamentally new social model. The transparency argument is interesting technologically, yes, but transparency of transactions doesn’t eliminate power structures. You can see the hierarchy more clearly, but the hierarchy still exists. Maybe even more aggressively because everything becomes publicly quantified. You can literally watch social consensus form in real time around a chosen set of artists and collections. You can watch people chase wallets, mimic buying behavior, perform affiliation, and build prestige loops. That’s not the disappearance of the art world. That’s just a faster and more financialized version of it (which is fine!). And this idea that traditional art is slow and NFTs are somehow more democratic because they circulate faster, I don’t fully buy that either. Fast circulation often benefited speculation more than artistic depth. A lot of artists became trapped producing for velocity, relevance cycles, timelines, floor prices, and engagement. The market rewarded constant visibility, not necessarily sustained artistic thinking. This I would also argue, is one of the biggest problems of our space. One could argue that great gestures take time, not just efficient network distribution. I also think people romanticize “community” in NFTs without acknowledging that communities are often formed around asset performance first and art second. Not always, but often. If prices collapsed, communities frequently disappeared too. That might tell us something important about the underlying structure of our space. What drew myself and many traditional art people into crypto initially wasn’t simply that it was “new.” The art world is constantly exposed to novelty. What was compelling was the temporary feeling that alternative forms of circulation and patronage might emerge. This felt like I was going to skip the gatekeeping I had experienced for being born in the South. But over time, what actually I saw emerged was another status economy with its own elites, its own language, its own institutions, and its own mechanisms of exclusion. Partly why I decided to create the projects I create was because I saw the massive opportunity that existed but that artists would need help to be seen, supported, and collected. NFTs are the most exciting space for contemporary art right now IMO. I fully believe blockchain has meaningful implications for provenance, digital ownership, artist royalties, and online-native cultural forms. But I think we have to stop pretending the ecosystem escaped human behavior or escaped the concentration of power. It didn’t. The same dynamics exist everywhere: a few artists become legible to the market, a few collectors shape discourse, a few platforms dominate visibility, and most artists remain structurally peripheral no matter how “open” the infrastructure is. That’s not failure. That’s just culture. The mistake is pretending that code dissolved it 🤔🫣🥺