Nothing to see here.
Netherlands
Joined August 2018
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mr. Fundamental retweeted
We are looking at one of the first more serious multi-scene world setups right now. We have 4 scenes active and one big scene joins later today. Most people do not understand what this means for #Decentraland and how far this platform has come just in the last couple of months. It's too early to invite people to inspect but for those who are really impatient you can come at your own risk decentraland.org/jump?realm=…
mr. Fundamental retweeted
spent the afternoon mapping @artblocks_io collectors
Still many more to add
@OriginArtMuseum @MonkMatto @Punk9512 @Vince_Van_Dough @FLAMINGODAO @Zeneca @pixelpete @BlueFlame2021 @derekedws @neffnet @thomasp85 @JordanLyall @delronde @metamixio @VonMises14 @Greekdx @niftynaut_eth @6529capital @cdb_vault @robdixon @ENICOLL @jivvvaguan @LorenBednar @Talmage_ETH @HeinerBuhr @0xjwpe @durtis @blockbird @satman78704554
Explore who holds the first 500 Art Blocks series.
Many ways to sort, no of series held, total works etc, my favourite is abTDH
ab5d.xyz/register/
mr. Fundamental retweeted
i asked every major AI model the same simple question:
if you can collect only 5 early historical ai collections, which will it be?
all of them picked the same ones…
-Lost Robbies (2018)
-Deepblack (2019)
-Realiti (2019)
-Bitcoin (og artist) (2019)
seems like financial advice bro
mr. Fundamental retweeted
Did you know? 💡
Two software artists who are also musicians, Adrian Ward and Alex McLean, wrote a Generative Art Manifesto in 2000.
It was geared toward music, but their observations are apt for generative art too:
• Code dictates output, the artist dictates code
• Code allows artists to go deeper into creative structures
• Code provides for realtime output and compositional control
• Code reflects human activity; artwork reflects human narrative
• Code is unambiguous, giving direct insight to process
mr. Fundamental retweeted
1/ On NFTs are Network Art
One common piece of feedback from TradArt (museums, curators and so on) is along the lines of:
"We have been collecting and curating digital art for decades. we know this field and, maybe a few NFTs are good digital art, and many, of course, are terrible digital art, or even not art at all, but collectibles really.
So we are charmed that you are so excited about your digital art NFTs but we have been excited about this field for decades."
This sounds totally reasonable but it is also totally wrong.
The fundamentally important thing about NFTs is not that they are digital art, but that they are network art.
2/ Digital Art is art of the computer, in its many forms.
Mainframes are computers. PCs are computers too.
But modern digital SLRs are also computers, as are tablets and phones.
3/ Computers, of course, have been the defining technology of the last 50 years, they have reshaped society, how we work, think, play, communicate, organize, love.
So, of course, artists, collectors, curators, casual viewers have been influenced and changed by digital art.
And the museum curators are right. Digital art has been interesting since the 1960s and is on its fifth generation at least: algorithmic, generative, graphics, interactive, immersive.
4/ OK, so great - "There has been digital art for 60 years, NFTs are digital, it is the latest of a long line of digital art, this is what we are saying, we will slot it into the "net art" category"
No! It is a trap. The fact NFTs are digital art is not at all the important thing about them.
5/ Digital Art is made on computer (broadly defined) or may live on a computer or both.
NFTs may or may not have been made with a computer but they definitely do not live on a computer.
NFTs live on the internet!
6/ What I am saying here is not a vibes concept. It is a hard technical fact.
People sometimes look at a hardware wallet and get confused and think that their NFTs (or ETH or BTC) are "in the hardware wallet" like it is some form of USB drive or something
7/ Of course that is not where your BTC, ETH, cool cartoon character with a hoodie and flashing xcopy NFT lives.
It does not live in your Trezor.
It lives on ~10,000 Bitcoin or ~10,000 Ethereum nodes that each form a special purpose global network called Bitcoin or Ethereum
8/ Whether your NFT is 100% on-chain (like a generative art ETH NFT) or 100% in the optional but not required to hold but most do anyway part of BTC (Ordinals) or partially on the Solana network and partially on the IPFS or Arweave network, the main picture is exactly the same.
9/ Your NFT is not on your PC, it is not on the PC of the MoMA, it lives on a specialized, permissionless, open to everyone in the world, network.
When you "own" your cryptopunk, what you actually have is the password to move a specific cryptopunk to somewhere else in the network.
You can't remove it from the network, you can't move it to the safe in your house.
Your NFT is of the network, in a way that the Picasso in your living room is not.
10/ Before everyone says "aha, I knew NFTs were a scam, just a receipt" I would like to kindly remind you that Bitcoin works this way too.
You don't "own" a bitcoin, what you actually have is the password to move certain "Unspent Transaction Outputs" to somewhere else in the network.
You can't remove your bitcoin from the network, you can't move it to the safe in your house.
Your bitcoin is of the network, in a way that the gold coin in your safe is not.
11/ All of the interesting things about NFTs emerge from their networked nature.
The fact that they are default public. The fact that they are composable and programmable. The fact that they are transparent. The fact that their provenance is 100% perfectly pristine. The fact that they can make rock solid assertations of truth (this NFT was created right now, randomly, based on this algorithm). The fact that they can organize groups of people.
None of this emerges because they are "digital art"
All of this emerges because they are the first and only natively network art.
They are art that is quite literally of the network, that lives in a network, that does not live in a computer, a home, a gallery and museum
12/ My curational mental model is very different from TradArt on this topic.
They split as follows:
(Non-Digital) Art | Digital Art (including NFTs)
I split like this:
(Non-Digital) Art and Digital Art | NFTs
13/ In other words I think a cool digital graphics installation at the MoMA is fundamentally no different than a Lichtenstein at the MoMA
By their nature, they are physical, individual, assets tied to a specific place, time and owner.
It is cool and interesting that one was made with a computer and one was not, but this does not change their fundamental physical nature.
Whether the MoMA owns an oil on canvas or a hard disk with the graphics files, it is still personal property of the MoMA in the way we have understood property for tens or hundreds of thousand of years
14/ NFTs (and BTC) are something different altogether. They are everywhere at the same time. If the MoMA buys a Fidenza, it does not have exclusive physical possession of the actual colors and lines of that Fidenza.
Those lines are represented as data within a certain block of the Ethereum blockchain, which has been replicated to 10,000 plus computers around the world.
Anyone can see them, anyone read them, anyone can render them. Anyone can download an Ethereum node and copy them. Anyone can write a smart contract that interacts with them.
Nobody has to ask the MoMA's permission. Nobody has to ask the artist's permission.
15/ This is not radical, this is beyond radical.
If I strolled into the MoMA and hooked up my art project that interacts with their digital exhibition or their canvas on the walls without their permission, I would be arrested and banned for life.
If someone deploys a smart contract that says: "you can mint this NFT if you have a Fidenza and if your Fidenza is a spiral, your mint will look like this", nobody can stop them and nobody will stop them and, because of this, everyone will actually say "great, have fun"
16/ NFTs are a breakthrough of the exact same order of magnitude as Bitcoin is. They are not a continuation of digital art.
They are a fundamentally different type of property, in the same way that Bitcoin is a fundamentally different type of property.
17/ Do the examples look trivial right now?
"this mint is derived from this other mint - who cares?"
This is because every important new thing looks like a toy.
18/ We barely have understood what can be done with NFTs, let alone done it.
The next few years will be full of amazing experiments and, by the end of the decade, we will start getting a hang of what can be done.
There will be so much more to come on this.
19/ But to close this thread off, let's go back to where we started, to the most simple explanation of NFTs.
NFTs are network art (and collectives and games and identities)
The first time in human history this was possible was in the early 2010s.
We are the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of such a grand adventure. It is going to be so much fun.
mr. Fundamental retweeted
gm
Insane to think it’s now been 5 years since my life was forever changed by the release of Fidenza by @tylerxhobbs.
I’m forever grateful for the financial freedom it gave me and the opportunity it provided to step into this space full time. It’s still unfathomable to think that something I minted for 0.17 ETH would go on to sell for 250 ETH just months later.
But more importantly, the friendships that came out of it and the impact it had on the way we view art moving forward are what I value above all else. I didn’t mint my Fidenza thinking I’d be able to sell it for life-changing money a few months later. In fact, I thought it would be at least 5–10 years before anyone really cared about the project, or this breakthrough medium that uses code itself as the canvas.
Fidenza changed my perception of what’s possible and, on its artistic merits alone, will withstand the test of time. But its importance goes far beyond anything I could have imagined.
More than anything, though, this anniversary is a celebration of Tyler and the impact he has had on the space. His artistic vision helped define an entire movement, and I’m incredibly grateful not only for the work he created, but for the friendship that followed.
Despite the market taking many turns since then, I’m more convicted today than I was 5 years ago. The lesson I keep coming back to is the importance of thinking beyond the short term. When I minted Fidenza, I wasn’t thinking about quick profits. I was thinking about the bigger picture and what the project represented.
Zoom out. Believe in something. Support the people building the future you want to see. That’s how conviction is formed. This is how we build.
mr. Fundamental retweeted
This 1968 artwork "Interruptions" by Vera Molnár is one of the earliest and most powerful predecessors to today’s generative AI art. Using punch cards and FORTRAN, she programmed perfect algorithmic order then deliberately added randomness and interruptions to create organic chaos. It’s exactly the same core idea we now explore with AI models, only 55+ years earlier /1
mr. Fundamental retweeted
I benchmarked 7 AI models on @artblocks_io knowledge.
Results:
- Opus 4.6: 57%
- o3: 56%
- GPT-4.1: 46%
- Sonnet 4.6: 42%
- DeepSeek V3: 40%
- Haiku 4.5: 36%
- Llama 4 Scout: 24%
Built an RL training environment on @PrimeIntellect's hub: 207 questions across 12 categories. Project-to-artist lookups, edition sizes, script libraries, on-chain traits, contract addresses, platform mechanics. Zero-shot, no tools.
57% ceiling across two model families. Every model fails on the same things: project indices, script types for non-famous projects, recent mints, MCP tool knowledge. The stuff you can't get from a blog post.
We launched the Art Blocks MCP a couple weeks ago: structured API access for agents to browse and transact generative art. The environment is the other half: it's how you make agents actually good at it.
Environment is live on the Prime Intellect hub if you want to run your own evals or train against it.
app.primeintellect.ai/dashbo…
mr. Fundamental retweeted
Touch some virtual grass in Nifty Island. You need it 🏝️
The metaverse is for healing.
mr. Fundamental retweeted
There's already flourishing scene of artists who are using AI to create art, as well as collectors who respect and value the art they create.
Some artists use generative AI tools to bring to life the seeds of imaginary worlds and ecosystems they have been harbouring. (e.g. Auntieverse by @niceaunties, The Vault of Wonders by @edbyus)
Others deploy them to confront established mediums like photography and videomaking, and forge novel compositions out of their materials. (e.g. Life in West America by @rainisto, Terrestrial Factors by @bagdelete, Real! by @BennettWaisbren)
Or to remix our forgotten visual heritage and breath new life into older artistic traditions. (e.g. Empire by @sheldrick_ai, Relic and Muraqqa by @orkhan)
Then there are also artists who tap on AI to interrogate the broader techno-economic and social structures that mediate or determine our visual culture. (e.g. xhairymutantx by @hollyherndon and @matdryhurst, Critically Extant by @soficrespo91, Bloemenveiling by @annaridler and @pfau)
And those who were early to "see" from the perspective of the machine, sculpting datasets from the ground up to test their expressive potential and explore previously unseen spaces within (e.g. DeepDream by @zzznah, A Book from the Sky by @genekogan, Realiti by @tyaagnliu)
Or intentionally directing AI to excavate and reveal the inherent contingency of our visual media. (e.g. Learning to See by @memoakten, Evolved Hallucinations by @trevorpaglen)
There are also artists who use AI against the grain. (e.g. @kev_esh stopping the diffusion process prematurely in In Utero and I'm With You, or @Terrybroad implementing GANs without any training data in (un)stable equilibrium).
And those who embraced the inherent multimodality of AI to build bridges across different senses, mediums and languages. (e.g. Being Borges by @CaballeroAnaMa, Blind Camera by @dtpisanty).
Or push the creative potential of AI decisively into the physical realm via robotics. (e.g. Emerging Faces by @VanArman, Drawing Operations by @sougwen)
We also can't forget those who were at the cutting edge of AI research, creating artefacts that eventually take on the aura of artworks. (e.g. alignDRAW by @elmanmansimov)
And of course, AI-based artworks with incredible lore, emerging from the ash heap of rejection and catapulting into a life of its own as a positional asset. (e.g. The Lost Robbies by @videodrome)
Neither can we ignore those who attempt to nurture non-human artists with AI who can make their own creative decisions autonomously, often tapping on crypto-economic affordances to finance their practice. (e.g. @bottoproject by @BottoDAO and @quasimondo, @abraham_ai_ by @genekogan, @DeepBlackAI, @keke_terminal by @dark_sando, @hi_flynn)
This is just a non-exhaustive stream-of-consciousness outline of some of the artists whose use of AI tools I've been inspired by. There are definitely many more who elude my faculties of immediate recollection, and I'm certainly biased by my aesthetic preferences and conceptual inclinations.
Nevertheless, my point is that in spite of the prevailing cultural propaganda, there are already many artists seriously and credibly engaging with AI. And I agree with you, it's truly beautiful to behold.
mr. Fundamental retweeted
Everyone’s talking about AI. Few are collecting the actual legacy. Early AI Art is the blueprint collect it before the institutions catch up.
mr. Fundamental retweeted
Due to popular demand, here is your guide to collecting digital art with the great @batsoupyum... Enjoy!
mr. Fundamental retweeted
With Animoca Brands, your future shines bright!
These four together? Just the beginning.
RT/QRT now — something special is coming for the early birds. 👀
mr. Fundamental retweeted
Early AI Art masterpieces weren’t created for market, for followers, or for liquidity.
They were created for exploration, visual, philosophical, and computational. And because they were born before the market’s gaze, they remain pure for it.
mr. Fundamental retweeted
Art Blocks today is a very different organization than it was just a year ago.
And the stuff we are working on and thinking about reflects that.
In fact, pretty soon @artblocks_io will feel very different than it has up until now, in various ways. We have already made a bunch of changes and progress this year, but lots more to come, both functionally and conceptually.
One big step towards that is a (candidly long overdue) collector profile. One that aggregates all your wallets and brings your Art Blocks collection, from our six flagship collections (Curated, Factory, Playground, Presents, Explorations, and Collaborations) to everything Studio and Engine (still only L1 ETH for now), to one place. Email login. Recognized achievements and honors. Preliminary set building (starting with also long overdue Curated Series 1–8 and expanding as it makes sense). Embedded wallets and, soon, simple showcase functionality.
This went live today. Take a moment and check it out and claim some achievements (bonus points if you can tell me the inspiration for the animation you see when claiming your achievements). Really just a starting point that puts us in a position to both celebrate the past and embrace the future.
In general, it is likely that we see a major transformation not just at Art Blocks, but across this ecosystem and in a lot of tech in general. I’m personally super excited about the future and simultaneously terrified by the rapid pace of change. But very much here for it. Super excited about how initiatives like PostParams will play a role in giving Art Blocks and creators that release on AB the flexibility to explore new territory.
Anyways, I know it’s a bit tough and dreary out there. But we are still here. Building. Thinking. Staying true to ourselves and what we set out to do in the first place. And we are not going anywhere.
Huge, huge thanks to the team for the tremendous amount of thought and work and polish and dialogue and research that led to this update. I’m personally just so damn proud to work with each and every one of them, and grateful for their passion for what we do.
Hope y’all enjoy these and all the upcoming updates.
🍻
Here is why I think early GAN-art such as @DeepBlackAI , @refikanadol and #Eponym will be relevant in the future.
We tend to think that AI art is easily repeatable and endless copies will flood the market, which is kind of what happened during the first NFT boom.
I asked Chat to make something resembling the original work, thinking this would be an easy task.
The result differ wildly from the abstract look of the original. Chat explains why, and thereby gives a great argument for the uniqueness of early GAN-art. What do you think? 3/4
Post to my conversation with ChatGPT about GAN-art here: chatgpt.com/share/68643b62-6…
