While I find it’s pretty generic to end a year with a recap of significant events, I don’t think it’s cliche at all to provide it from a different perspective. It’s been a brutal year for some of us, myself included, and I think that it’s often healthy to approach things with a humorous mindset - dark as it may be.
If you’re reading this, you probably already have an idea of my vibe, but I want to lay out my approach to this infinitely strange thing we call existence we are collectively experiencing. My view of this plane of existence in and of itself is pretty fucking basic: it’s a cold and pointless void in which there is literally zero meaning. My view of why we’re here is a little more complex; I think we all choose to give meaning to things. This is essentially our super power as sentient entities in this dimension/world/realm we inhabit these meat sacks in. Art, in my opinion, encompasses the highest languages of meaning.
We are movers and makers, in an otherwise vast and inert lacuna. From art and culture, to industry and social mechanics, we are essentially leveraging our ability to give not just form, but sense to anything and everything around us. Is/are there god/s? I’m not here to get into a philosophical debate about metaphysics - you can go check out Hume, Descartes, and Kant to get started on that whole clusterfuck on your own.
What’s with all the esoteric preamble, you may ask. Welp, it’s mostly because I wanted to set the mood for the sarcastic breakdown of how this year went for me and my creative social circles, especially in the NFT scene. A lot of bad shit went down from Putin waging war, to markets crashing, and fuckwads like SBF fucking millions of people over, to massively influential supposed humans rugging thousands of people across various projects. But fuck all of that; we all continue to hear and read about these things almost daily at this point, and we’re all exhausted in one way or another. So, here’s how things went for me on a personal level, and how that’s contributing to what’s next for my art, and the communities I’m a part of. Let’s take it from the top:
Year of the Twitter Shitter
This fucking bird app already sucked assholes before Elon got here and single handedly wrecked years of development. Yes, a lot of shit was already broken. No, he did not have to fix the parts that were not broken as well. I mean fuck, why are we even remotely okay with this whole thing moving towards a paywalled environment, when the services they are offering up don’t actually benefit us non-corporate peasants? Maybe I’m just in an echo chamber, and all the changes are benefiting some folks somewhere else, idfk.
All of that to say, 2022 started off with my suspension from Twitter, right when I was gaining some serious momentum with engagement and visibility for my artwork and NFTs. I’m still unsure what the shit caused the suspension specifically. I appealed the decision 14 times until finally i checked some random boxes in the appeal process for shits and giggles, and they unbanned my ass. Of course, since then, the account has been permanently in “restricted” purgatory mode unless you specifically choose to see my posts. I was even posting pictures of the Twitter logo at one point just because I was amused by how that was censored by their algorithm. sob/cry.
Note: the irony of being suspended for my suspension work is not lost upon me.
Also worthy of note, below is the last thing I posted before my account was suspended! The tone in those articles I wrote on AI the last 3 weeks suddenly feel kinda different, huh. (Read them here: part 1, part 2, part 3)
I’ve seen so many people posting about “where do we go from here,” and “what social network should we move to?,” etc. You’re all out of your gourds. All social media is a dumpster fire. We all collectively decided to fork crypto Twitter into the NFT Twitter variant, and it isn’t doing shit for most artists in this current market, so why not just accept that all social media is a fucking dumpster fire and just use whatever suits you.
I’ve been actively posting on Instagram, and my engagement is really healthy there without all the shilling and weird influencer behavior. It’s still a shit medium, but hey, come connect with me there if you want to see a steady stream of art! Let’s connect everywhere, so we’re not stuck in the middle of nowhere alone. Active communities are the only way we’re going to make it out of this intact. Help each other, and fuck glorifying social media networks. Meta has a Twitter account. Twitter has an Instagram account. What/why the fuck would any of us want to be maxis about any one service?
Multi-K Soup
2022 was the year of my indoctrination & subsequent departure from the Multi-K PFP cult. That sounds worse than it is, considering I’m still active with projects that have PFP collections. I would love to stop calling them PFPs; they’re collectible art from artists who busted their asses making them. So did the teams working on all other facets of the project(s).
Here’s my 2022 timeline:
Winter: my first “web3” job, working with Kiki City
Winter: started writing lore for Stacy Pills
Spring: marketing/copywriting/community management/stategy with 5-6 projects
Spring: Project manager for Dumpster Kittens, that never fully launched
Spring - Summer 2022: Pillheads Generative
Fall: started working on NFD projects
Fall - Winter: consulting and admin work with various projects
All 12 months: minting my personal photography and generative art
I am eternally grateful to Kiki and Flash for bringing me into this realm of NFTs. It has been pretty life changing. Even though the market ate shit, and the NFT bubble kind of imploded (I still think it’s more like a sad party balloon that deflated before our eyes) over the past year, the sheer quantity of things I have learned to do in this space, and the relationships I cultivated are integral to the path I have found myself on. It might be crypto winter or whatever you want to call it right now, but it is also the peak of those serious about this technology building out some amazing things against all odds.
I’m pretty upset that Dumpster Kittens never worked out. It got shelved by the founders of the project for personal reasons, and I refuse to work on something that does not have a solid foundation. Forcing something to work out is fucking stupid, and there are a myriad of projects I can point a finger at that ate shit and fucked the creators’ reputations because of how money hungry they were. I hope that one day DK can launch. Who knows.
The lore I started writing for CFW’s Stacy Pills was the first time in my entire fucking life that I made some money off of my writing. Life changing, and confidence inspiring. I probably wouldn’t be here writing this article if it wasn’t for that. NFT communities are where I discovered that folks actually like some of the crazy shit that I write, and my copywriting skills are actually valued. Insanely humbling, and forever thankful to CFW for his encouragement, support, and friendship. Please check out this podcast I recorded with him to get an idea of how insanely awesome he is as a person.
Also thanks to bossmanguy CFW, I ended up getting back into web design after a 6 year break from it. I ended up designing & building my first web3 integrated website for Pillheads Generative, and gaddang am I proud of the minter we built with the dream-team, 0xDaemon & Whitelights. CFW delivered design assets, and we implemented the dopest minting interface I’ve seen to date, in my not-so-humble opinion. I clearly enjoyed it because I wasn’t working for stress inducing clients. Now I’m still building web stuff, though I’d rather be managing projects than actively entrenched in dev, to be perfectly honest.
Nowadays, I advise, build schedules for, and do all manner of project management for a slew of projects. One I’m really stoked about is Retro Doge, who I connected with through the NFD community. I’m so stoked to be a part of it all; it’s one of the healthiest groups of people I’ve encountered in the space. I’ll also be dropping my own project very soon, and it’s very difficult for me not to start writing and talking about it right the fuck now. So, moving on…
Finessing the Visceral
I might be frustrated with how marketplaces and clout works in NFT spaces, but I’ll tell you one thing with absolute conviction: if you have a healthy community, this scene is insanely good for boosting not just your confidence, but skill levels with your creative skills. I am eternally thankful to the community of friends I have found myself in through SidewaysDAO. Massive shoutout to La+ch: thank you for bringing us all together just by being yourself. You are a fucking genius and your humility is a lesson we all learn on the daily just by engaging with you. I don’t care what anybody says, you are truly a magical being, and connecting with you and our NFT family in person has been a huge highlight for 2022.
Thanks to this most excellent group of people, I have been able to not just clear up, but actually finesse the narratives and aesthetics in my work this past year. I think taking a forced break from building very elaborate work allowed me to really step back and look at what I want to do next. My ambition is as strong as ever, but I think I have a better set of expectations with which to manage the next stage of my journey with my work. This isn’t just about NFTs; it’s about leaving my comfort zone to create more challenging work in a way that isn’t defined by all the things I got complacent with over the years.
So far I have waded deep into the sea of generative art, and dragged my raw AF work with me. I have created and successfully sold my first ever digital animations on Makersplace. I have sold a ton of editions as well as 1/1s of my seamless loops, based on a versatile script I developed by myself that maps pixels to HSL values in images and outputs GIFs. Additionally, the other generative code-based project I keep hinting at is going to assplode minds.
I am also leaning into my erotic photography really hard. I am bridging some of my suspension work with nudity and eroticism. I am used to being censored, and re-remembering what it means to say fuck that and create exactly what I need to create. I am creating digital variants of my work that are passed through generative code I wrote, and adding previously non-existent dimensions to my work. 2023 will be the year where I take my raw aesthetic, and merge it with everything I have learned in the past decade. As always, I will continue to focus on quality, and not quantity, though I won’t say no to my generative projects I’m going to be dropping selling the fuck out!
I have so much to share, and looking back at this objectively rough year, I can now clearly see the seeds that were sown along the way. I really don’t give a shit about people’s perception of time and how we think about things linearly, and I try to make my work timeless because of this. I do however, respect the importance of cycles, and this orbit around the exploding ball of fire we are orbiting around in the cold depths of infinite space has taught me so much.
Depression, anxiety, and frustration all contribute to growth if we can overcome them. With healthy communities, we can transition through these fucked up periods in our lives with reduced pain, and come out the other side having embraced and accepted the only permanent thing in our lives: change.
Let’s shoot back around old sol in a year and see how well this post aged 😅
Happy New Year to those that celebrate the Gregorian calendar, and here’s to a new orbit together in 2023 for everyone. This ride is way more bearable with all of your support and genuine engagement. I hope my words and art bring some color to your life.