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collected pieces were primarily minted on the hicetnunc contract, and were priced under 0.5ꜩ. The collection expresses, and showcases what I appreciate about the medium. While simultaneously showing off the quality of work individuals have minted to the tezos blockchain, and the breadth of a collection which can be built with a 5ꜩ budget.
I have been blown away by the quality of a collection I have been able to construct with such limited funds, and the range of emotion I have felt while doing so.
I hope there is something others can gain from this, it slightly spiralled further than I could have foreseen. I ended up having so much more to say than I was expecting.
a derive in photography and the lens-based medium
Why Photography
In my opinion NFTs or tokenised technologies marry perfectly with photography, or the photographic medium and its outputs. There is something of an analog to physical editions, provenance certificates, and the issuing of disparate edition sizes over time, such as with different print runs, of different sizes or times.
I was initially drawn to minting NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) or LEFTs (Limited Edition Fungible Tokens) [1][2], from a desire to publish my work in a more meaningful way than I felt I got posting on Instagram at the time.
There's a relationship I think in the tokenisation of information, in this case primarily photographs, to the technical nature of the medium itself. Wherein a photograph takes the form of a crystallisation of light into a frozen moment in time, the token takes a similar form of a crystallisation of data into a frozen moment in time. The immutability of the minted token bears an analogue to the capturing of a fragment of time on a light-sensitive material. Mostly in my own case digital images, but more directly in my view with analogue processes.
I think the capacity for blockchain technologies, and tokenised publishing to produce secure and immutable records of provenance for photographic artists is an invaluable step in the provenance of photographic works. Especially in the context of the rise of AI-art, post-photography, or faux-photography; whatever it ends up being referred to as.
The association of the photographic creator, their camera, and the digital outputs ultimately minted to the chain will over time become more and more important.
For these reasons and more, I have chosen for this event/experiment to attempt an exclusive focus on photographic works, or lens-based artworks, (lens-based being a term I first encountered through Ephimera, and one I like to use when referring to photographic works as it feels to me to encompass the medium more appropriately in the age of digital tools, being as I am, or can be quite a snob.
Why primarily hicetnunc (or teia)
I believe hicetnunc was a paradigm shift in the production of NFTs, not only for the Tezos blockchain, but blockchains more broadly. I had minted a single NFT on the Ethereum chain a few weeks before I discovered hicetnunc, and had nearly given up on the idea, 10s of £s just to mint, let alone list, set up an auction and then finalise such auction.
Cost of entry to the space is a significant factor to the eventual success of the medium itself, and an element of that is what this experimental collector event is striving in part to demonstrate. Not only did the idea come from the tezos commons #freetez initiative [1][2] in the form of a 5ꜩ 'gift' to Ethereum gas users, but arose naturally by conversation and action in the fxhash discord, those early few galleries were really enjoyable to take a look through. While I did not hit that threshold of gas on Ethereum, as frankly, I cannot face using the chain (and have done nothing more than mint a single NFT and transfer my remaining Ethereum to Tezos); the initiative seemed interesting, and I wanted to have a go, but didn't really have the time.
The hicetnunc platform itself was born as an experiment, a revolutionary moment in the publishing of digital artworks, the ownership of those artworks, and the facilitation of trading in them. And one that I believe went in a completely different direction to its creators intentions, as I expect probably whoever it was who initially had this idea (I don't remember who else pushed this idea initially, my apologies) probably didn't expect or intend for the idea to become what it has.
The fundamental spirit which imbues much of the Tezos space with such vigour in my view progenated from a philosophy of hicetnunc, of communal striving, of presence and of expanding - the taking up of available space; and thereby producing features and functions derived from the desires of the users of the technology itself.
fxhash, fx(text), objkt, and teia are I think descendants, in a way, of this creative spirit, where what is required is built, and while these things take time, but do arise.
I wanted to imbue the collection itself with a through thread in terms of the way in which the data is stored on the chain. In that regard all of the tokens in this collection take the form of OBJKT#[token_id], or GENTK#[token_id].
So in part the overarching themes of the collection are hicetnunc, photography, and my aesthetic tastes therein.
The following is largely a replication (in terms of ordering) of the gallery.so I've also created to go with this experimental collection. However the fx(text) medium allows me to explain more (at least in a more functional format, I found the gallery platform quite intricate and unintuitive, and so is more of a discrete overview of the collection ordered better than it is here (as I can't work out how to put some of the images side by side), or would be on for example objkt or teia) about what I was thinking as I collected, why I collected certain pieces, along with other pieces I think relevant to the experiment. My hope is that the disparate methods of displaying such content becomes more functional over time - the embedding of the tokens themselves in this article didn't work as I had expected, but would be a valuable method of presentation, and tool towards a standardisation of placement. The fxhash token block in the article editor is neat, and I like the way it displays. I feel there is room for extension in this area, and look forward to its eventual development.
In a way I would feel remiss were the collection to be without an image of a camera itself, and I was ever so glad when I hit something like the 54th page of OBJKTs tagged photography sorted low to high.
Immediately I tried searching for others, but to no avail, and knew that this one had to be the one to act as a cover, or as starting point to the collection.
But it is a permanence machine generating moments or freezing time so we can return to the past, or travel across the world, or even to other worlds. There is so much to say about cameras, photography, and the images they and the process creates. I'm going to avoid writing too much more than I have already here, and continue directly with the collection.
Collections need starting points, and I saw no reason to not just start somewhere - these are the first images I put into the Gallery.so layout and so they are the start of this article, or rather, the collection breakdown and narrative proper.
I find juxtaposition, polyptychs, and other such similar ideas of particular interest I think. I found the pair of lake or watery features complimenting each other in a juxtaposition of style, harsh digitality, and smooth longer exposure. The, in a way, crass digital manipulation sat aside the more, potentially, refined serenity of the black and white harkening towards a more analogue technique. Both (I assume) digital photographs, manipulated in their own ways - the reduction of defect; aside the corrosion, or degradation by way of digital manipulation.
There is a disguising of the 'real', or the actual, in both, separated in their directionality. While collected separately, and purely on the basis that I liked them, I have placed their pairing to begin the presentation of this collection in their vista's looking outwards; over and into separate visions of the or an ideal.
This trio emerged during the layout process in Gallery.so, all three grabbed my attention while I was exploring, and seem to suggest to me a narrative journey through the human touch in the world. From 35mm photography, street corners, American farming, out over a dry lake bed with horses through a faded mirage due to the expired deterioration of film quality (I assume).
There's a naturalistic touch to the pair of film pieces suggestive of a nostalgic view, as if in a disintegrating memory or fading dream brought back towards a stark reality of life as a fucking blessing.
Gazing out as a passenger in someone else's road trip, escape, or meditation. If you could even see one bird...and run off toward Denver.
I am as fascinated by what we construct as a species as the spaces where we've barely left a mark, or appear to have barely left a mark. Stepping out of fading memories into the stark overbearing construction of high rise surrounded city living and working - oppressive angles and stacked levels of activity overpower. Seemingly devoid of an actual present humanity, our industriousness is ever present, and endlessly implied by monoliths of steel and glass, almost labyrinthic.
I was captured by these pieces, and in general the photography on this account, and could've spent all the 5ꜩ here, but I restrained myself to only five pieces, the three here and the two which close this collection. Abstract photography, light-painting or unintentional/intentional camera movement photography completely absorbed me for a few months in 2022 and culminated in an abstract collection of photographs of my own. I always find more figurative, or less discretely light-trail photography of great interest due to the faster shutter speeds, and more difficult (in my opinion) technique to pull off well. Together I think the camera movements in colour, reflections, and the black and white piece, paint an unbelievably surreal view into the world of the artist themselves, something which is again highlighted in the final pair of images, in a much less abstract manner.
I was feeling the collection as a whole lacking in a certain humanity, or an element of a present humanity, a distance or a meditative disconnection which I felt was encapsulated by this pair of pieces, which I'll leave to speak for themselves.
Light leaks, first shots of the roll, faded expired stock, and other artefacts of the analogue process of film photography is something else I find enticing about the photographic medium. There's a destruction inherent to the process, and the imposition of darkness, and controlled exposure of technical ability is absorbed away by defects, or age which cannot in my view be found in digital processes of lens-based art - there's a fragmentation of the hope towards a permanence I find in the annihilation of parts of the frame attempted to be captured. Where perhaps what was intended to be captured has been destroyed, and the fleeting moment of time reduced to white and fire-y tones. Or as in the expired film pieces previously, fading away, slowly ageing out of existence, tonality shifting as the colour layers in the film break down; there is always seemingly a disintegration of the persistence of memory, which, with photographs, we seem to try to stave off.
In a similar way to light leaks, or film destroyed by light or time. This (Flying Over Qatar) kind of piece also captures me, as do those fleeting moments of beauty in a gradient painted by the day turning across the sky; or those shots directly out to sea; where the water, or here, the land melds into the sky, the image as if gently folded or often also seemingly torn across by a horizon line. Where what cannot be seen is hidden by a curvature obliterating the light by shadow rather than directly being obliterated by the light.
I skipped over this piece a few times, but never quite closed the tab and after a few rounds of narrowing pieces down it made its way in, I wasn't sure how or where it would fit, but in writing over my thoughts I feel it fits into this series better than I had initially considered, and am glad it wasn't entirely skipped over.
There's something fantastical, edging on a kind of nostalgia in this piece for me. Watching birds fly, and clouds pass, and forging the light through lens and aperture to produce the image or levels of contrasting shade. I can imagine an elation suddenly arising on review of the image, whether on the back of the camera itself or away from the place in another mindset. The discovery that you did in fact get the shot is something else, and I can almost feel it emanating from Solitude, it's sublime.
This piece speaks to a technical proficiency and mastery of the medium. I have found birds extremely difficult subjects to get right, and the satisfaction of doing so is brilliant. The description lists the camera as the T3i which is a series or two above the camera I shoot on (the 400D or Rebel XTi, a little google suggested the T3i is the same or equivalent to the 600D) - and I think goes to demonstrate the adage that it's not what camera you have but how you use it; as well as making the whole creation seem familiar to me, I don't expect the camera's to feel too different in the hands.
This piece feels like a homecoming, as the sunlight drifts out of your hands towards a twilight. There's that moment of golden brilliance, that turning that last corner as the dregs of the day flow out accentuates so much. It's a fleeting feeling of just in time, this time. Minted well over a year ago, the only piece minted to the wallet, it surprised me in a few ways, as it feels familiar, as if by another creator I already know.
It extends further another theme of the collection, that of a nostalgic or set of nostalgia imbued windows into memories from other worlds or other lives - literally in the case of photography, places I am unlikely to ever see, they could be anywhere, or anywhen - the situationality of the place is abstracted - yet, the feelings and atmosphere feel instantly recognisable.
The last piece in this short section on memory, obliteration, nostalgia, and windows into other times and places; combining all of these themes really nicely and in a way, literally. It is as if a window into a secondary time is being projected into the space. Ultimately, a space probably not that interesting a photographic subject, unlikely to have caught my eye if not for the creative layering of time and place obliterating what could be an interesting subject, together with the scene from elsewhere; or producing that interesting subject, by layering the same scene onto itself.
The 'postcarding' of another scene into another place reminds me of another creator whose identity escapes me - (which I'll include here if I come across it again). JP Colacioppo has produced a whole series of them, which imply to me that they're an almost physical double exposure, wherein the photograph inside the photograph is of the same scene at a different time, presumably taken by him, but primarily, functionally, unified by the place itself. I imagine they're not trivial to create, and it's something I really want to try myself.
Film grain abstracted city life - stark digital black and white city view
What's more to say - the grain in the pair of film pieces bookend the set abstracting the view of the city, and their parts, and pieces. The NY Bridge seem stark in its clarity - I find the breadth of emotion capable of being expressed with such a short range of colour or shade incredible, and considering we see constantly in colours, often highly saturated - I wonder to what extent I or we find black and white, or other monochrome styles so enchanting because it allows us to see things we would not or might not even see for the vibrancy of the everyday.
This pair is where the overall title was generated, while both distinctly outside. It feels as if the open-ness, and closed-in-ness of the pair suggestive of another space - inside the walls, or outside the frame.
The distance, and the lack there in both expands and compresses a view. Both sets of architecture expressing their own ideals - of an austerity, and an extremity; Or an Outside, and, or, an Inside - I leave it to you to decide which way is which
Again I found the curation and organisation in gallery.so to be a largely emergent phenomenon and find it extremely interesting that the pair on the outsides come from either ends of the Earth, from my perspective, being of a scene in Japan, Indonesia, and America - while I am sat nearly in the middle of the world (in time) in London.
Each in the set becomes a kind of Abstraction, as if visions, or portals into the City; in pattern, view, and time implied by disjointed architectural features - small, tiny segments of worlds well away from where I am.
or, Abstractions of the City from the ends of the Earth.
These are further pieces I almost considered not collecting as a part of this as I couldn't decide which of the three I liked the most, and kept going to theirprofile, closing the one I had open, and opening a different one. Once I'd gone round and round a few times, I remembered that this is about collecting, and making hard decisions, and that all of the pieces I was looking at were less than half a tez, and these in particular just 0.1ꜩ apiece and I couldn't really justify just getting one, I'd feel like I'd somehow missed.
I also spent a while reordering them on gallery.so and love how the triptych works exceptionally well sort of regardless of order.
I do not have a lot of words for them aesthetically or technically, just that they're great together, not apart.
I think in many ways these pieces are not necessarily of the vein of photography I would perhaps personally have collected, it's often hard to tell, however, they stood out in their own ways, in terms of a coherence towards an emptiness, or a nostalgia for unvisited places. Snow covered fields, long walks in the mountains, and golden sunsets at the seaside feel ubiquitous in a view of unifying human experiences, at least in my experiences. A continuation of the quality of photographs minted on tezos, and well fitting to the overall collection's context, so as in part to highlight a broader breadth of what is or has been minted on the hicetnunc contract photography-wise - as well as an extension of the other themes discussed previously.
And aside, to highlight a secondary point which has entered my mind more generally while collecting for this, or, the line of thought I have had for a while on editions, prices, and publishing.
In the trio of pieces above, they take the form of 25 @ 0.04ꜩ, 500 @ 0.01ꜩ, and 2000@0.0001ꜩ, being in total 1ꜩ, 5ꜩ, and 0.2ꜩ.
Ultimately, completely free tokens are usually collected in huge numbers by bots, or accounts which behave like bots, and from my experience with the tokenised art space, lower edition number better/more desirable because 'scarcity' and I have long wondered why, it's certainly true in certain places, or for certain creators in a way.
There's something in pricing psychology that I'd like to write on more, although here is not necessarily the right place. Although, the free-token meta, and treating a full editioned piece as 'equivalent' to a 1/1 is really interesting to me, and I'm not sure to what extent the implementation of editions as has become prevalent on Tezos in their relative fungibility, as opposed to, for example, the implementation of a more true non-fungibility of Kalamint's limited editions, has effects in the market.
To preclude the culmination, or a conclusion of what has evolved further beyond what I was initially expecting to produce as a result of this experimental collection. I have three pieces which drift between the themes of memory, obliteration, nostalgia, and windows into other times and places; via hicetnunc, photography, and my aesthetic view.
A nondescript street of empty crates, almost devoid of any place, or presupposed purpose.
An obliterated crowd, a seeming non-person separated from face or identity, a walking shirt and trousers.
A note devoid of its owner, contents lost, or no longer cared for.
I have collected many objects from the street, or photographs of them. I am like many others online, a largely faceless individual, not quite a walking shirt and trousers, but not far away either. Alongside many suchlike photographs of notes, graffiti tags, or paper scraps discarded for unknown reasons, often containing a recognisable form of information from another's life, even if partially destroyed.
I find myself wondering how interesting I am to others, whether the detritus which falls from my life or being affects them as others' affect me.
Drifting out into unknowing, reflected in a different window, from a separate time. In another's eyes.
a brief aside on process, and a 'generative' artwork.
fxhash & objkt.com
Given the guidelines by objkt and fxhash seemed different, and it appears required to collect something from fxhash - and the end of my 5ꜩ only allows me to include something that costs less than 0.26ꜩ including gas, and the only piece on the market at such a price is the following, and makes me glad in a way that I was short something in the order of 0.016ꜩ in storage (I think) from collecting the final piece I had had opened for this, being 0.25ꜩ, ironic given where all this started about Ethereum gas fees.
I disliked this requirement initially, and felt it limited in general my impression of the spirit of the idea, there's a celebration of the ecosystem in my view present throughout my collection and it would not exist without fxhash, for the ideas; nor objkt, for its part in being, in my view, the place to collect photography. I would have felt remiss to include something that would preclude me from being included in some way in the review process of this thing.
There are many good, and interesting photography or lens-based pieces on fxhash, from the collaborative Metamorphosis' projects, to fedecanovari's or artpadini's takes on generative lens-based works (in particular 1888 - Tint & Random-Babylon series); or even this still open to mint collaborative piece between k4leido_k1d and serminmin, which would've taken the entire collections budget, and I had a very limited budget of ~0.26ꜩ when I had come to the realisation on the requirements for being considered in the review process, and potential for the prize put up by the platforms, and so none of these fantastic examples of generative forms utilising photographic work that sprung to mind were available to me.
So I turned to searching the whole fx market, on fxhash itself, as filtering to the fx collections on objkt didn't seem to be working from me.
There was a single piece within my remaining budget - I had created a brand new wallet, sent 5ꜩ from my main there, and got to work - I think in reality there's still budget left in terms of wallet reveal fee, and gas fees in general (batch collect from a premade list wen?), but this feels to me to be the best place to finish it. From an on-chain perspective it is in my view a very neat experimental collection. Only one receiving transaction of exactly 5ꜩ, followed by the entire collecting process - the wallet has been left with 0.042932ꜩ - with which I am sure I could squeeze something else in - there were significantly more pieces in the 0 - 0.05ꜩ range than I was expecting, but my collection feels complete.
The single piece was from a collection that had escaped my memory, and it was nice to see the familiar name, if less nice to recall the history of its existence.
A flagged piece by a good photographer, and creator in the space, Ashmit.
Flagged, if memory serves, for someone else's script or process to disintegrate the photograph into lines of flight and hazes of coloured lines as if scribbled together; and attempting to disguise that fact, I think the allure of the ꜩ flowing around fx(hash) at that time drew people to extend themselves into situations a more considered approach would've prevented, I'll forever remember the Adam Meyerowitz situation in that regard.
I had initially written a short passage which I am going to keep here for posterity, despite my feelings having changed somewhat upon a longer reflection.
I feel in general this limits the effect, overall theme, and general presentation of this work, and consider this a needless aside in the production of selection of pieces for this experimental collection, and overall oeuvre of the curatorial work.
I no longer feel this way, having re-read through my article to edit it, fix typos etc. I think there's something poetically ironic that to close the entire collection, from a narrative, and requirement fitting point of view, I have found a generative piece of art arising from some fantastic portrait photographs, based on the destruction and obfuscation not only of image, but also of process. Not only is the piece flagged, making it harder to see, interact with, and fleetingly appreciate. But it is of an artwork deliberately making it harder to see, interact with, or fleetingly appreciate the portraiture hidden within. Which I have extracted from the generative token as I think most won't spend the time to find them, and think they're really high quality pieces, for which it is a shame they are hidden within this fx project that ultimately has been hidden, although not entirely, as it showed up in my search for "photography" on the fx(hash) front end.
And, finally, to conclude, the other set of Systembroiler pieces I referred to towards the beginning of this, now, rather long piece of work.
Expressing for me, a drifting away - a hand on an invisible window, watching a world go by that cannot be reached, or communicated with.
The march of time continues, creation continues, alongside unstoppable destruction. The fleeting moments we spend here are made brighter by the artworks and creators who make them.
This has been such an invaluable experience, an idea to return to...
Thank you so much for taking the time to read any amount of this, I cannot believe how long it has ended up getting. I could go through and spend more time reducing the content, making elements more digestible and coherent in their meanings, but I think a part of this experiment has been to see what happens.
