simondlr #35 - Building Expansive NFT Universes: CC0, Fidelity, & On-Chain Bundling
Hi friends!
I'm really excited what's happening in some of the NFT creative universes. There's an interesting interplay happening with 1) permissive licensing, 2) emphasis on metadata & low fidelity, and 3) on-chain bundling. It's gotten a huge response when I shared it on Twitter. Thank you so much and I'm glad you all also resonate with the potential.
Simon de la Rouviere
Something looks different?
Yes. I've moved the newsletter to Ghost. Every once in a while I like to mix things up and try new platforms, especially due to Substack's questionable moderation policies. Didn't need to switch, but I wanted to try Ghost anyway. Also, there's a new subdomain too now!
Links!
Craving Canon
I've been a huge fan of Jay's writing and exploration at a similar intersection to my recent writings. Also being more into storytelling recently, I really enjoyed this take on the trend of modern day desire to "crave canon". I think a big factor for craving canon also comes from a new era where we've lost mediated shared culture. We want congruent, authoritative storytelling because it helps us to connect with others in a volatile, filter-bubbled world.
Harberger Tax NFT experiments
Call me biased, but I think there hasn't been nearly enough experimentation with Harberger tax-based NFT collectibles. Two new recent experiments popped up: one by BeetsDAO + Jonathan Mann & a pixel map project called The Space.
Collective Action Tools
Always been a fan of Niran's work in promoting collective action tools using blockchains. This was a great talk that summarised such a potential future.
On-chain NFTs & OKPC
NFTs as medium becomes substantially broader when you realise that NFTs themselves are programmable objects. On the one side, you have on-chain NFTs whose image are drawn from the smart contract itself. This can add novel dynamism that's still unexplored.
See a basic overview of on-chain NFT from technical pioneer Emily Williams:
John Palmer also has a great summary on the exploration, showing that dynamic NFTs are still very unexplored.
mental model for nfts; abridged slides from a talk i gave last week, hoping to deliver publicly sometime soon pic.twitter.com/2qS5eHwrgl
— John Palmer (@john_c_palmer) February 6, 2022
A great recent example is okpc: basic drawing app + canvas as an NFT.
Generative Art + Copyright
The US Copyright refuses to register AI generated art. This conundrum plays into the growing tension between copyright, ownership and new novel technologies like AI art + NFTs. Maybe copyright just won't matter in time (see my blog post for why). Still, interesting to follow and interesting question to ask.
Bonus: Silhouettes
I have to shill my brother's first generative art drop on ArtBlocks. I enjoy the simplicity of it! Go take a look. :)
This is my favourite one. It feels like a sunset.
And with that: thank you for reading! Remember to take time to watch a sunset.
Simon