Hey fx fam! Welcome to the seventh edition of the fxhash newsletter. For those celebrating, we wish you a warm and joyful Thanksgiving!

As 2024 comes to a close, the season is at its busiest and we’re hard at work wrapping up a bunch of stuff ahead of the holiday season, in preparation for a smooth transition into the new year.

As mentioned in a previous issue, we’re putting together a yearly recap, and we’d love to hear about your standout fxhash moments from 2024. While our personal shortlist includes Puneyvr’s G L Y P H, the incredible Entangled that we got to exhibit at Wintercircus, and the opportunity to participate in Paris Photo 2024, we know there are many more moments worth celebrating. Please share your highlights with us on Discord or TwiX—we’d love to hear from you!

In this issue, we bring you some more updates about the overhaul and share some behind-the-scenes. We’ll also want to recap our collaboration with Galerie Data debuting Marc Maurer’s project, Glance, and highlight some of the other incredible releases from the past two weeks.

Prefer reading this newsletter directly in your inbox? Sign-up to our mailing list here for an update every second Friday!

Queue the news 👇

Platform Updates

So, what’s new on our end?

Over the past couple of weeks, ever since we’ve announced an open beta for the new fxhash website, we’ve actually slowly invited a few power users to stress test an early version of the new site, simultaneously looping them into our testing pipeline alongside our internal tests. This way we’ve already received quite valuable feedback, and confirmed that we have a good flow in place for this. Here’s what this looks like behind the scenes—our big testing/debugging sheet:

An unexpected twist during this pre-testing phase? A few testers may have accidentally (or not-so-accidentally) shared the beta site with other already 😱. While it’s exciting to see the community’s curiosity, it’s also a sign for us to turn on the jets and polish the last couple of things to finally open the floodgates for everyone to take part in testing. We’re also playing with the idea of a little thank you token for all those that end up taking part in this testing phase! Three years after the original beta launch, we yet again find ourselves in a different kind of beta phase!

While we’re thrilled about the new design, we also know that aesthetics aren’t everything. There a few more concrete things that you can expect releasing with this new iteration of fxhash—and we’ve already scheduled the dev team for a big session to document all of it in form of a technical write-up—we’re aiming to push that in the next newsletter, and it should shed light on some of these new things. What we can share at this point, is that it’ll be of particular interest to those who have been looking for a way to build on top of fxhash, without having to go through fxhash directly.

Beyond the overhaul, we’ve also heard the community loud and clear, some of the most requested features that we know are wanted, and that currently lined up at the top of our ever-growing to-do list, are: wrapped tez, ranked auctions, and fiat pricing!

All of these things are coming, now it’s just a question of WEN. Once the overhaul’s out of the way, we’ll have cleared out the pipeline to focus on these new features. Ranked auctions are planned for early to mid Q1, fiat pricing and wrapped tez shortly after that. Thanks to the new codebase that’s now in place we’re well positioned to implement these features swiftly.

Besides this, we’re also working on something that we think will be of big value not just to the artists on fxhash, but to the entire generative art community—a new kind of content that’s likely going to be a first of many in the coming year. It’s an idea that we came up with during the making-of CYMATIC which we presented at Paris Photo. Keep your eyes peeled for a bigger update next week, for now we’ll just share a little graphic that might already reveal what it’s about:

In other news, another cool development in the space that’s very much relevant to fxhash and the community, is from our friends over at Verse: they’re currently in the process of working on a full Tezos integration! This means that it’ll be possible to view and browse fxhash projects over on Verse as their teaser post reveals over on TwiX.

Link to Post

In one of the replies to the post Jamie Gourlay states: “We’ve been aiming for a full Tezos integration by Nov 28. We’re likely running a little behind - 99% before Christmas though” which means that the Tezos integration is just around the bend. Chapeau, class act from our friends over at Verse! 🎩👏

And before we forget, it seems that Qubibi is cooking something for fxhash—we’d really love to tell you more about it—but Qubibi is making it just as interesting for us as he is making it for the rest of the community. We did however get a very first preview just yesterday, and from the looks of it, it seems like it’s something we haven’t seen on fxhash before:

Link to Qubibi's Post

Glance at Galerie Data

Marc Maurer’s debut on fxhash kicked off last friday in tandem with the physical exhibition of his plotter works at Galerie data. The release was a big success, in just a few minutes the project quickly accrued over a 100 minted editions with many collectors directly opting for a batch of 15 to redeem a physical pen plot. The collection now sits at almost ~400 mints, and we’re likely to see a few more until the generator closes on the 10th of December:

If you’re in Paris, also make sure to stop by the gallery to admire the 12 pieces that are displayed as part of the Interlace exhibition, where you’ll find some previous works of Marc, as well as plotted pieces from Lenia Mascha, a Greek architect and generative artist.

If you’re an artist, one big favor you can do your collectors—if the piece allows for it—is building in an SVG exporter, so that those who have access to a plotter can plot their collected iterations. That’s exactly what Rob Scalera did with his iteration of Glance, and we think that he really nailed it:

Link to Rob Scalera’s Post

If you’re looking for a way to add an SVG export functionality to your sketches, particularly if you use P5, we can recommend checking out p5.plotSVG, an add on library that Golan Levin recently released. On that note, a little bird also told us that Rob might be working on something new for fxhash—and that’s coming rather soon-ish. Here’s two sneek-peaks he’s already shared over on TwiX:

Link to Post

Release Roundup

A whole slew of new projects dropped on fxhash these past two weeks, and we saw the return of several OGs to the platform:

— My Space by Volatile Moods: known for hit projects like Slumbers, Rough Cuts, and many more, Volatile Moods makes his return with a new abstract geometric exploration titled My Space. Unlike the title might suggest, it’s not a cheeky nod to the early-2000s social network (maybe it is? 🤔), but rather a study in shape and form. And we’re really fascinated by the absurd geometry the algorithm is capable of producing; what at first seems like a tiled plane of interlocking shapes quickly reveals itself to make less and less sense as you focus on how the shapes align and where their shadows fall. Our guess is that there is some sort of layering at work here, but we’re not entirely certain how that creates this trippy alignment!

My Space #6

— Constructiones Mentals by Hevey: we also observe the creator of the legendary fxhash drop Dencity make a return to fxhash this past week. Hevey’s Constructiones Mentales is a project that’s as visually stunning as it is conceptually intriguing.

Constructions Mentales #21 & #7

"Constructions Mentales" (Mental Constructions) depicts a chaotic array of eroded architectural fragments, symbolizing the mental structures shaped by memories, societal conditioning, and emotional wounds. Barred windows and scattered figures represent limiting beliefs and repressed emotions, while a hanging figure suggests moments of stagnation and reflection. The piece invites viewers to reflect on the internal forces that shape their psyche and the potential for transformation.

— Uprising by Salviado: For those who may not know, our favorite shader wizard and demoscener Pablo Andrioli, aka Kali, has a secondary fxhash account where he shares his concise, generative explorations. His latest project, Uprising, is one such piece, described simply as: a p5.js 2D drawing is passed as a texture to a raymarching shader—with a twist. And it shows that collectors had just as much fun with the project as Kali had making it, the 50 editions minted out quite rapidly!

While we’re seeing a steady flow of really great projects being released on fxhash, we strongly encourage artists to carefully consider both pricing and edition size—these two factors are really what’s making and breaking projects these days—while we still see some exceptions from time to time, the reality is that it’s difficult to get your project in collectors hands when the key elements have not been carefully considered.

Wrapping Up

One last thing we wanted to share is this cool post we were tagged in over on TwiX by Samuel Javelle—generative reefs are coming to fxhash! And apparently there’s a physical (redeemable?) component to them that’s facilitated by the Forgio workshop. Forgio specializes in 3D printing digital artworks in a variety of materials, such as bronze, marble, wood, as well as an array of different 3D resins, you can check out Forgio’s website here.

Link to Post | Did you know that David Palancus, co-founder of Forgio is also an avid fxhash collector?

That’s all for this week. We hope you’ve enjoyed this edition as much as we enjoyed putting it together. If you have feedback for the structure and/or content of this newsletter—let us know how we can improve!

Did we miss something important? Is there an interesting project you think should be featured here? Any particular topics you’d like us to cover?

Come join the discord and let us know!

The fxhash discord is where the community regularly gathers to discuss all sorts of generative art-related topics.

Cheers, see you in the next one ✨