Generative Art, a new wave of NFT’s

When most people think of NFTs, they probably think of monkey cartoons or 8-bit pixel avatars. The main driving force to collect these digital assets seems to be some sort of get-rich-quick fomo hype. But after the famous $69M Beeple JPG was sold at the peak of a collector gold rush, the value of these JPGs has fallen disastrously, some by 90% of their value.

These NFT excesses make for nice news headlines, but there are more interesting things going on under the radar.

First and foremost, the act of collecting NFT’s in itself is gaining popularity amongst a bigger group than the early enthousiasts. This year Reddit enabled an NFT avatar collection for its 430M users. They didn’t mention the word NFT anywhere and call them “collectibles” instead. But NFT’s they are, and Reddit users created more digital wallets in a few months than OpenSea did in a few years, until then the biggest NFT platform around.

So a whole new population is getting familiarized with collecting digital assets. I expect that at least a small part of this population will venture into collecting other assets, like NFT’s of digital art. And at this moment, one digital art form specifically is very much alive.

It’s called Generative Art.

Generative art is made from code. Instead of being merely digitized illustrations like the monkey JPGs, these works are often generated on-the-fly with software algorithms. They’re not static JPGs, but computer programs written by developers. When artists develop a generative artwork, they’re creating a system for the sole purpose of creating individual artworks. It’s like painting with code.

Programmers interested in creating beauty with code have been around since computers were built. In the 60’s, when computing time was expensive, computer operators experimented outside peak hours by creating interesting visuals, for which they were reviled by their professors.

Later on in the 80’s, a subculture of software hackers competed with each other by writing computer programs to create the most interesting visuals. This resulted in the so called demo-scene, where the sport was to create maximum visual results with the least amount of code. Key to value these programs was that the quality of the work can be appreciated by looking both at the clever algorithms and their visual output.

Does this all sound like art for computer nerds to you? Maybe that used to be the case, but times have changed.

In Germany, the demo-scene recently has been recognized as official UNESCO cultural heritage. This means that this digital culture is now appreciated and understood as important in a cultural historic context. And, as digital culture doesn’t really have a physical location, the door is now open to official world wide appreciation. More importantly for generative art, several NFT platforms have been launched that are specifically focused on this art form. Art Blocks is a notable example. It’s a curated platform that runs on the Ethereum network and has been very successful since its inception. So far it recorded $1.4B total sales volume.

But Art Blocks seems to be only targeting a specific group of people. Artists are only accepted after a thorough vetting process, and collectors often drop down thousands of dollars worth of ETH for a single artwork. While this is a valid strategy, it simply makes collecting and publishing art out of reach for most.

A platform focusing on the very same art form, but one that’s very different in spirit, is Fxhash. It doesn’t have any barriers for publishing art, it’s therefore 100% inclusive, runs on the energy efficient Tezos chain and is generally very affordable. It’s possible to collect an artwork for a couple of Tezos, the equivalent of a couple of dollars.

Fxhash is run by a bunch of young people from London, Berlin, Rotterdam and a small village somewhere in France. It has been around for barely a year and already is a lively gathering of artists and collectors. In its first year, 1.2M+ works have been collected. For the first time in history there’s an open and accessible marketplace for generative art, where the overall quality improves every month and where artists continue to amaze each other. Because of its open nature, not everything is of equal quality, but market mechanisms filter out the cream of the crop. There is a noticeable kind of energy, and everyone is pushing each other to new frontiers.

This energy turns out to be a strong attracting force in real life as well. In London, over three days in July 2022, Verticalcryptoart organized the Proof of People event in the iconic Fabric venue. It was a gathering of all kinds of artists and collectors that came together to attend talks and meet each other. Having published multiple works on Fxhash, I went there too, and met with artists and collectors that until then, I only knew via either their artworks or their Twitter names.

And again, during a sunny October weekend in Paris, artists, collectors and programmers traveled to meet each other at Paris+ par Art Basel. I talked with other artists, collectors of my work, with curators from online galleries and Sotheby’s, and with the people of Fxhash. There’s no substitute for meeting people in real life and discover who the people are from whom you’ve been collecting all this time.

These gatherings are fun for people already in the generative art bubble, but Fxhash does not go unnoticed in the traditional art world either. At their third Art Basel presence, joining forces with Tezos, they had one of the more interesting gallery booths. A new wave of computer artists was being featured, some of whom can easily compete with traditional artists. The fact that the established art fair shows serious interest indicates that appreciation for generative art is growing. And, according to Fxhash, with every new physical presence more people know about NFT’s and Generative Art.

The first wave of JPG NFT’s might be in decline. But under the humus layer of devalued monkey illustrations and decaying pixels a new art form is brewing and waiting to burst out.

Get ready for Generative Art.