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NFT Artist References

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Fewocious

Fewocious, AKA Victor Langlois, is an 18 year old digital artist, born in Las Vegas, USA, now based in Seattle known for his bold and emotive recreations of his memories growing up. Fewocious first began to create pieces of art at the age of 13 as an escape mechanism for his struggles as a transgender youth living in an abusive household. Due to this, Fewocious aims to replicate his emotions from these memories and translate them into his art, with most of them showing a sense of sadness and despair during his difficult times. He also incorporates aspects of his personal journal entries from these time periods to enhance these past representations of himself. Over the span of a year Fewocious has become one of the world’s leading digital artist, whilst also grossing over $17 million from his NFT artworks in under a year. In addition, Fewocious’ work comes to life through his slight use of animation in the NFT pieces, where aspects of the image move around in a GIF like manner. Fewocious claims that he draws his inspiration from various different artist such as surrealist Salvador Dali and Daniel Johnston’s children’s book illustrations.

Analysis

FEWOCiOUS (b. 2003), Year 1, Age 14 — It Hurts To Hide, 2021.

This piece of digital art created by Fewocious displays an abstract depiction of himself at the age of 14, consisting of a collage of different objects, shapes, words and expressions that remind him of this time in his life. Fewocious communicates this through the use of bright and almost luminescent tones in this piece. The focal point of this image appears to be the morphed face in the centre, expressing a sense of fear and fragility through the wobbled lines drawn in the eyes. The leading lines in this piece are created by what looks life a border surrounding the focal point, drawing the viewers eye across the top of the image, then down past the focal point into the far more busy bottom half of the piece, which contains most of the smaller and more hidden messages of the artwork. Fewocious has arranged this piece by leaving some areas of empty space at the top and then incorporating more and more artwork as you move down the image, in turn producing what feels like a bottom heavy piece.

The name of this artwork by Fewocious ‘Year 1, Age 14 — It Hurts To Hide, 2021‘ is referring to the first year of his journey as a trans youth, explaining the pain he had to endure whilst hiding his true identity, for the sake of his family, who refused to accept his need to become his genuine self. Fewocious has stated that “It goes from hiding, to accepting myself, and then realizing that I can just be myself.” about his artwork, with this piece being in the stage of hiding. It can be said that the focal point of the morphed face is looking up as it is searching for someone to help them escape and save them from their suffering. In addition, this morphed reality could be a reference to Fewocious’ sense of confusion in his gender identity accompanied by the rejection of his future self, causing him to feel as if he is caught in-between and unable to latch on to a secure sense of character and identity. Furthermore, the cluttered and bottom heavy aspect of this piece could be a signifier of his weighed down and possibly depressive feelings at this time of despair.

This links artist links with one aspect our group project idea that revolves around the communities of religion and LGBTQ+. This is due to the fact that the creator Fewocious is a part of the LGBTQ+ as he is a trans male. Moreover, we are aiming to display a similar sense of fear of to show your true identity in our work, as Fewocious does, however this will be through the repressive aspects associated with religion around the LGBTQ+ community, rather than a struggle that is more focused on family.

Hackatao

Hackatao, formed in Milan, Italy in 2007, is an artistic duo consisting of Sergio Scalet and Nadia Squarci who are known for their illustrative style artwork that comments of a variety of social issues, such as the environment, politics, humanity, cryptocurrencies and more. In addition, they also include elements of art history within their work. The duo got their artistic alias Hackatao from the combination of the two words ‘hacker’ meaning someone who overcomes challenges with creativity and ingenuity, and ‘tao’ for the principles of the Ying and Yang. Known as pioneers of the NFT world, Hackatao’s work is composed of two styles shown through two dimensional acrylic paint, and the black and white expressions of graphite. Furthermore, the duo are known to take inspiration from artists Takashi Murakami and Andy Warhol in order to create their surrealist pop like pieces. With this style, the duo have went on to collaborate with people such as Blondie, commenting on how the boarders of art and creativity need to be pushed and tested.

Analysis

Kim Jong Un – “Dead and Alive” Edition – Hackatao

This image, originally a GIF, created by the duo Hackatao displays a two dimensional caricature style portrayal of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, surrounded by missiles in the background of the piece. Here the vibrant, solid red background strongly contrasts against the black and white sketches and texts within the overlapping missiles. The framing of this piece allows for symmetry, due to the depiction of Kim Jong-Un being positioned in the centre. This is further accentuated by the line on the jacket of the caricature, dissecting the image in two symmetrical halves, also being continued by the parting of the hair and finally the point of the central missile. In addition, due to this busy centre of the piece, it leaves a large amount of empty space around the edges of the top half of the image.

This simplistic approach to political commentary by Hackatao could be said to be an attempt to showcase the rising tensions that existed between the USA and North Korea during the Trump administration. In its original animated GIF form this piece by Hackatao displays a skeleton form of the ‘supreme leader’ flashing in and out of the image above. With this it could be argued that Hackatao intended to show what the future could look like for these world leaders, and their countries, if they allowed their egos get the better of them and start a devastating nuclear war. In addition, it can also be said that this nuclear topic is presented in a comical manner, due to the fact that some phrases in the missiles state things such as ‘Keep calm and nuke them all’ and ‘Kaboom’. This may be a reference to the way Hackatao and others may perceive these leaders as infantile and uncapable of leading a country, due to their tendency to have tantrums when they are refused power.

As well as the fact that this artistic duo deal with humanitarian, social and political issues, this style of art links with our NFT group project aim as it incorporates written quotes and texts. This relates to our work as in our still images and our film we are wanting to incorporate protest signs that contend the overlay of the LGBTQ+ and religious communities, in order to display the challenges people who belong to these two groups face in society.

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contextual study 2

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Bayeux tapestry deal agreed by UK and France - CNN Style

The Bayeux tapestry is an embroidered cloth which is nearly 70 metres (230 ft) long. It depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England. It is presumed to date back to the 11th century, within a few years after the Battle of Hastings. It tells the story from the point of view of the conquering Normans but is now agreed to have been made in England. The cloth consists of some seventy scenes, many with Latin embroidered on linen with coloured woollen yarns. It is likely that it was commissioned by Bishop Odo, William the Conquers half-brother, and made in England – not Bayeux – in the 1070s. In 1729 the hanging was rediscovered by scholars at a time when it was being displayed annually in Bayeux Cathedral. The tapestry is now exhibited at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in Bayeux, Normandy, France.

The Bayeux tapestry is embroidered in crewel (wool yarn) on a tabby-woven linen ground 68.38 metres long and 0.5 metres wide (224.3 ft × 1.6 ft) and using two methods of stitching: outline or stem stitch for lettering and the outlines of figures, and couching or laid work for filling in figures. Nine linen panels, between fourteen and three metres in length, were sewn together after each was embroidered and the joins were disguised with later embroidery. Later generations have patched the hanging in numerous places and some of the embroidery (especially in the final scene) has been reworked. The tapestry may well have maintained much of its original appearance – it now compares closely with a careful drawing made in 1730.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry#Construction,_design_and_technique

ARTIST REFERENCES – YULIA MAKEYEVA

Yulia Makeyeva

Yulia Makeyeva grew up in Russia and is now based in Jersey, Channel Islands. With a Linguistics degree, an education in Art History, silversmithing and jewellery making background, she turned her full attention to art in 2019. She experiments with different mediums, spanning photography, installations, video, collage, printmaking and traditional domestic crafts. She continually seeks and displays beauty through her work by arranging a contrasting array of materials from the household, industrial to organic matters collected outdoors into abstract forms. She participated in a Textile-based art exhibition in February 2020 in Jersey curated by the RampArts collective. For this exhibition, the curator had chosen works where the artist experimented with drapery, single threads, recycling, and objects covered with fabric.

https://yuliamakeyeva.co.uk/about/

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animation-Gif

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GIF

I created my first GIF following these instructions:
1. Create layer for each image
2. Window > timeline
3. Select > Create Frame Animation
4. Drop Menu > Make frames from Layers
5. Timeline > select Forever
6. File > Export > Save for Web Legacy > reduce image size to 720x 720 pixels

Embroidery

We used embroidery with Yulia Makeyeva and we recorded an image using our iPhone of every step when we creating our embroidery by cutting our figures, shapes, words and re-stitching. Our embroidery had to be related to our groups project which is feminism. I chose carefully my fabric, I chose a fabric with flower pattern to demonstrate that women were compared to flowers because of how “delicate” they were. I also went for a satin white fabric to represent how women had to keep their virginity to be considered as pure, or fit for marriage. And pink for a “for the colour of femininity”. the pieces of frabrics are attached with a red thread that means the blood that women lose once a month. in the middle there is the word Femmes which means women in French.

First intent:

Seconde intent:

After we finished taking several images we re-assembled our images as a GIF on a timeline using Adobe Photoshop. This first intent wasn’t successful since the video wasn’t long enough and didn’t much detail into it. So for the seconded GIF I decide to have a minimum of 10 photos so it could be longer, I ended up putting 14 photos in my GIF and I prefer it than the first one.

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NFT Community – Artist Reference

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Davy Evans

Davy Evans is an award winning multi-disciplinary artist and designer based in Brighton. With a background in graphic design, Evans fuses practical effects and digital techniques to create ethereal abstract imagery. He often manipulates light and liquid to replicate colour, form, and distortions inspired by natural phenomena. His work is combined into beautiful still, eyewatering creations:

Davy Evans - WuKa

And also animated distortive art visuals:

His works combine real life natural elements such as flowers with hyper realistic and futuristic astrophysical elements into one hypnotic visual. His work makes me use big words like I just did; to describe what is to be seen in Davy’s work is quite a challenge as it is so out of this world. Davys work sets a bar for what is possible for the future of digital art and the world of NFT’s.

https://www.davyevans.co.uk/work

His work inspires th efuture of art, not only for how evolutianary and digitaly advanced it is but also for how he creates it, remembering the basics of the creative process.

“I try to play with new materials and photography techniques whenever I can, allowing for happy accidents to form organically,” he says. “I like the challenge of making something out of nothing; for example, I’ll often try to use everyday household items to create effects.”

I want to include the digital design and colourful abstract elements of Davy’s work into my NFT project.

The above image is from Evans latest series during the UK’s lockdown from the Covid Pandemic. He created this work using the simplicity of flowers, water and glass. The simplicity of the arrangement adds to the absurdity of the artwork. Turning simple elements into such a complex looking, hypnotic piece.

The composition of the piece is chaotic with many elements for the eye to take in. The water droplets forming perfect cell like structure in the foreground combined with the colour they adapt taken from the flower in the background, make for a staggering piece. The image looks like a digital artwork with how supernatural it looks. Colour leaks into every corner of the composition, leaving no pixel monochrome. For how abstract the image is, Davy still manages to include tonal elements, some of the pink/salmon areas of the flower are bright and highlighted, while in the centre of the composition and the frames of the waterdrops, we see shading. I also like the blend of cool and warm temperatures in the same composition.

William Kentridge

William Kentridge contemplates history and creation | The Economist

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/william-kentridge-2680

William is an artist from my hometown Johannesburg, South Africa. Unlike the majority of successful white South Africans, he still lives there, and operates out of the heart of ‘Jozi’. He makes drawings which he often turns into animated films. Sometimes there are also performers in front of the animated film and his work integrates into a theatrical piece. He describes this as a ‘drawing in four dimensions’. His process all starts from charcoal drawings. He uses charcoal for a varied number of reasons but mainly its flexibility, room for change and experimentation in the animation process. “You can change charcoal as quickly as you can change your mind”.

Charcoal is easy to erase and it has an abundant granularity to it. Its tonal range is good for photographing. It is also not as meticulous as other art mediums and has a speed and flow that the artist can adopt. William creates his animations frame by frame. This means his process involves making slight adjustments, step by step, and making photographs in between each adjustment. This proves to be a timely method and therefore the speed the charcoal adapts it important.

Williams normal animation setup in his studios include a physical walk from the camera to the canvas where his drawings are made. His frame by frame process involves his walking between the camera and the canvas hundreds of times. He describes this process as a physical but also mental process when new ideas are suggested.

William believes that art needs an initial impulse which has to be enough to get the first drawing done and then in the physical activity of making the drawings, new ideas emerge and new possibilities engaged with until the piece takes shape.

William Kentridge - That which we do not remember | Solo Show | Artfacts

Williams position as an artist is one of self awareness, this is prevalent in every piece from start to finish. Williams art holds political and polemic weight. He describes himself as a child of privilege – he grew up a white middle-class South African who had the first 40 years of his life under the white privileging apartheid regime and the other 20 living in the South African democracy. He is highly aware of his privilege and also the lack of privilege the majority of South Africans experience. His work highlights both his insider and outsider aspects. This is why he choses to stay in South Africa and not flee the madness of it, is envelopes him in his work focusing on the community.

https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/south-african-politics-8463

These two artists have two different takes on digital art. Davy’s work encapsulates a movement of new ideas and forward thinking. This is represented in his very colourful and digitally advanced work. His work is much more futuristic and out of this world. His work is very much a part of the metaphysical and futuristic aesthetic that is emerging in modern times. Williams work, however, uses a much more tactile form of art, and one that is very much a classic method of expression dating back to when cavemen would draw on walls. He uses this dated method and gives it new life by going through a digitisation process and animating it. Unlike Davy, his art reflects on events that have already, or are currently raking place, instead of focusing on movement into the future. His work is a lot less colourful; for the most part William only works black on white.

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NFT Community – Research

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Recap Ideas of Identity and community in Jersey

Before embarking in the research of my NFT project I want to recap on the foundations of the project: community in Jersey.

The Government of Jersey is currently consulting the public about what makes Jersey special through a project called Island Identity.

I brainstormed a reaction to what the above question was asking to set a foundation for my NFT project.

The ISLAND IDENTITY project has produced a website and a report that has identified distinctive qualities of island life in Jersey. It discusses:

Constitution & Citizenship
Communities
International
Economy
Education & Sport
Heritage, Culture & the Arts
Environment

I want to keep these themes prevalent throughout our NFT project.

What is an NFT

An NFT is a “one-of-a-kind” digital asset that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property. As with crypto-currency, a record of who owns what is stored on a shared ledger known as the blockchain and maintained by thousands of computers around the world.

FTX, Dolphin partner for NFT Marketplace - Ledger Insights - enterprise blockchain

NFTs can be used to represent items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files. This therefore marries the art and photography with the digital, crypto realm.

CoinDesk: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Crypto News and Price Data
CryptoPunks – one of the first non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The project was developed by American studio Larva Labs.

In economics, a fungible asset is something with units that can be readily interchanged – like money.

With money, you can swap a £10 note for two £5 notes and it will have the same value.

However, if something is non-fungible, this is impossible – it means it has unique properties so it can’t be interchanged with something else.

It could be a house, or a painting such as the Mona Lisa, which is one of a kind. You can take a photo of the painting or buy a print but there will only ever be one original painting.

NFTs are “one-of-a-kind” assets in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property, but which have no tangible form of their own.

The digital tokens can be thought of as certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets.

Traditional works of art such as paintings are valuable precisely because they are one of a kind.

But digital files can be easily and endlessly duplicated.

With NFTs, artwork can be “tokenised” to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold.

Most expensive NFT sold to date ($69 million):

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/03/30/crypto-investor-metakoven-beeple-nft-art.html

2 Lives Exhibition:

https://2lives.world/

The idea theme that this digital art exhibition is going to fixate on, is the idea that we all live two lives and these lives co-exist between tangible and virtual worlds.

2 Lives was created by Francesco Vincenti & Claudia Runcio

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artist reference 2; textiles & embroidery

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The textile artist that I chose to study for this topic is Yulia Makeyeva. Our class was lucky enough to have a textile learnng workshop with her , which allowed us to learn more about her and her unique work that she produced through many different ways of stitching.

She is an emerging multidisciplinary artist. She grew up in Russia and is now based in Jersey, Channel Islands. With a Linguistics degree, an education in Art History, silversmithing and jewellery making background, she turned her full attention to art in 2019. Yulia has always used photography as a means of observing textures, patterns and shapes from everyday objects, constructing unique, sometimes unexpected images.

some images of her work;

Fleeting: Installation View

She uses different types of stiches in her work such as a running stich, back stich and a few others that we actually got to do when working with her in her workshop.

Graphology, 2020
embroidery on cotton canvas

Yulia is also the founder of Connect with art an online network that provides a platform for artists and art lovers to connect, interact, meet and discover. It also includes an Exhibition space in St Helier where the work produced by students will be exhibited as part of 2 Lives NFT Art Project.

Her work will be helpful when it comes to producing our work as if we chose to stich in our images we will know how to do it confidently due to her work shop.

my experience working with her and my experiment;

this is what I produced when Julia showed me how to stitch. I used the first method as it was the quickest way of stitching, knowing how to do this is beneficial for when we want to stitch onto our work.

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contextual study 1

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2 LIVES is the first exhibition ever that aims to educate and connect traditional art to digital art and the finance world to the art world, by showcasing NFTs through their multi-businesses opportunities to artists, students, curators, collectionists, stakeholders, creators and whoever involved in the NFT space.
2 LIVES is an homage to the island of Jersey through its best-renowned artists and their stories, in order to create a forever lasting exhibition in the virtual world (The Metaverse) and accessible from everywhere to become a blueprint for the future of exhibitions, jobs and community building in NFTs.

An NFT is a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos. They are bought and sold online, frequently with cryptocurrency, and they are generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos. Although they’ve been around since 2014, NFTs are gaining notoriety now because they are becoming an increasingly popular way to buy and sell digital artwork. A staggering $174 million has been spent on NFTs since November 2017. NFTs are also generally one of a kind, or at least one of a very limited run, and have unique identifying codes.

The metaverse is a network of always-on virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects while operating virtual representations – or avatars – of themselves. Think of a combination of immersive virtual reality, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and the web. The metaverse is a concept from science fiction that many people in the technology industry envision as the successor to today’s internet. It’s only a vision at this point, but technology companies like Facebook are aiming to make it the setting for many online activities, including work, play, studying and shopping.

NFT ARTISTS

MAD DOG JONES

Michah Dowbak aka Mad Dog Jones is an artist from Thunder Bay, Ontario. His work combines cyberpunk, dystopian imagery whilst exploring the themes of beauty, nature and technology. Dowbak rose to fame in the world of crypto art with the recent success of his Crash + Burn series of NFT artworks, and he is now a headliner in the first major NFT art exhibition at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

‘I think that there’s a lot of misunderstanding and confusion floating around the traditional art collecting community about what NFTs are exactly and how people should go about acquiring these works and supporting these artists,’ he said. ‘By having a traditional auction house sell the artworks it really opens up the door to a much larger community that is not fully immersed in the crypto space. The idea of NFTs is so new and the themes around REPLICATOR are reflecting on past innovation,’ Jones said. ‘It felt right to house this new artwork in an institution so firmly grounded in the past.’

PAK

Pak, whose real identity is a closely guarded secret, has become one of the foremost digital creators and was the first NFT artist to earn $1 million with his work. Throughout the Fungible Collection, he challenges the relationship between scarcity and value while pointing to the future of digital art. Pak has a very active and successful market: the total value of his digital works is around $ 17,536,770.67 (8,457,896 ETH). To date it has sold 1,691 works and the most expensive was Metarift purchased in March 2020 on Makerplace from an anonymous collector – whose nickname is “danny6” for $ 1,013,902.38 (489 ETH).

“I see this collection as the first digitally native mindset of works that’s presented to the traditional art world through a global auction house,” Pak said in a statement. “With this kind of a scale, I expect it to play a major cultural role in telling the narrative of the digital world to the traditional world in terms of the medium definition and value creation. People may be able to right click save as a “jpeg” but how would they save as a digital performance?”

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NFT- artist research

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Beeple

Beeple is an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator, known for using various mediums in creating comical, illusive works that makes political, social commentary while using pop culture figures as references.

Beeple sold a piece of work for $69 million called ‘The First 5000 Days’. It is a collage of his work starting at the beginning of his project over 13 years. This sale positions him “among the top three most valuable living artists”, according to the place his NFT was auctioned at. Vignesh Sundaresan, known to the cryptocurrency community as ‘MetaKovan’, purchased his NFT.

Beeple says – ” I do view this as the next chapter of art history”

Beeple’s work has become so popular and valuable due to his large fan base of 2.5 million followers across social media platforms.

Grimes

In her NFT’s, she explores the theme of Anthropocene, this is where relating to the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

Grimes made a video called ‘Delete Forever’. The video includes a queen counting jewels as the world burns around her

Grimes has sold $6 million worth of digital artworks as NFT’s. She auctioned her WarNymph digital collection featuring a total of 10 artworks created in collaboration with her brother Mac Boucher on a platform named Nifty Gateway. – “This past year, grimes put a piece of her soul up for sale, and developed her ‘WarNymph’ avatar, a completely digital version of herself. “- Gateway. Some digital artworks in the WarNymph collection by Grimes were accompanied by exclusive music created by the artist herself: ‘earth’ features the unreleased Æryth, ‘mars’ has its own mars theme, and ‘death of the old’ carries a demo of anhedonia. The collection was divided into seven limited editions and two open editions – ‘earth’ and ‘mars’ which sold around 700 copies for USD $7,500 each. 

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Bayeux Tapestry Research + Artist Refrence – Michael Crompton

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Bayeux Tapestry

The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth nearly 70 metres long and 50 centimetres tall that depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England concerning William, Duke of Normandy, and Harold, Earl of Wessex, later King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings.

It tells the story of the events surrounding the conquest of England in 1066 by the Duke of Normandy. Crossing the sea in longships, long cavalcades on horseback, shields and coats of mail, fantastic creatures and battlefields.

It is a masterpiece of 11th century Romanesque art, which was probably commissioned by Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror’s half-brother, to embellish his newly-built cathedral in Bayeux in 1077.

Diplomacy and Propaganda: The Enduring Power of the Bayeux Tapestry - Fine Art Connoisseur

This picture really shows how long the tapestry is, as it spans the entire room.

Michael Compton

Michael Crompton has been weaving since the early 1960’s. he had twenty six solo exhibitions throughout the UK and abroad, and his first tapestry studio was in the Weardale, Co Durham village of Ireshopeburn in 1977 until he moved to the area of Morecambe bay in 2004.

His work has developed continually from these early years but has always been inspired by nature, its cycles and seasons with associated colour and textual changes. He uses curved lines to emphasise movement and the passing of time.

In recent years he’s spent more and more time in researching, reading, writing, drawing and painting before moving to high warp frame looms.

As you can see, Compton really makes use of the seasonal colours. For example, the orange correlates to autumn. The impressive factor is how the lines are curved and have a flow like attribute to them. Even thought Compton’s work is more abstract it still embraces the story telling aspect through the use of colours.

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NFT

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What Is An NFT? How Do NFTs Work? – Forbes Advisor

what is an NFT?

An NFT is a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos. They are bought and sold online, frequently with cryptocurrency, and they are generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos. They have been around since 2014 and are becoming increasingly popular. NFTs are also generally one of a kind, or at least one of a very limited run, and have unique identifying codes. NFT’s can be attached to anything from an MP3 to a single JPEG image, a tweet, or a video clip.

what are NFT’s used for

Artists no longer have to rely on galleries or auctions to sell their art. Instead, the artist can sell it directly to the consumer as an NFT, which also lets them keep more of the profits. Artists can program in royalties so they’ll receive a percentage of sales whenever their art is sold to a new owner. This is an attractive feature as artists generally do not receive future proceeds after their art is first sold.