Market pulse on Artblocks NFTs post-hype; Spotlight on Trossets; Upcoming NFT market catalysts
Artwork: Title: Lettre; Artist(s): Vera Molnar
Welcome to Painting with Blocks ❏
This is a newsletter to help anyone learn about and follow blockchain-based generative art and creators' artistic process. In each issue we aim to cover a few topics -
Pulse check on Artblocks/NFT art market volume & price dynamics
Spotlight on a generative art collection and its creator
Readings on learning generative art / blockchain commerce
Noteworthy NFT sales
If you find any of the content insightful, please subscribe to the newsletter via https://buttondown.email/paintingwithblocks, or follow @paintwifblocks on twitter.
DM me for any topics or trends you'd like us to uncover or analyze more in depth with data analytics.
🧭 Pulse check on NFT art secondary market
Artblocks post-hype - first signs of volume pick-up
While August marked a year-to-date high for Artblocks sales volume, sales volume & pricing slowed down across NFT platforms to a lull over the first 2 weeks of September (following a run-up in Ether price and a broader crypto market flash crash in early September).
In the past couple of days however, there are some early signs of a revival in the NFT secondary market, as seen in the transaction volume & price floor charts below. Part of the pick-up in activity could have been spurred by the Artblocks drop of Fragments of an Infinite Field by Monica Rizzolli on Sep 13, which initiated transaction activity for other Artblock collections.
From figure 2 on crypto art market sales volume (USD) across platforms by month, we can see although Artblocks sales volumes in September to-date (US$103+ m) have slowed to a fraction of August's volumes (US$626+ m), the full month of sales in September is still on track to be higher than in July. Further, we think periods of frenzy and quiet are likely to be on rinse & repeat for NFT markets going forward.
Fig. 1: Artblocks 7-day cumulative sales. Source: Masterpiece.so
Fig. 2: Crypto art market sales volume (USD) across platforms by month. Source: CRYPTOART MARKET DATA
Some AB price floors more resilient than others
First, price floors are important barometers to track as measures of demand & valuation levels of an NFT project. The price floor is defined as the lowest ask price for NFT pieces of a collection that are available for purchase on the secondary market. It is an approximate indicator of an NFT collection's minimum recent transacted value.
While price floors for many Artblocks collections (both high-end or mid-end) have fallen considerably from their recent August peaks, price floors for some have held up better, such as CENTURY by Casey Reas.
Lastly, it's probably reasonable to expect "blue-chip" or higher end NFT collections to see more resilient price floors during periods of market contraction. With that said, during the recent market correction, floors of even "blue-chip" Artblocks have similarly come down by over 50% in tandem with the rest of the market.
Source: Dune Analytics
Notable pick-up in sales activity - top 5 collections
Top Artblocks sales by collection in the past 24 hours is shown below:
Fragments of an Infinite Field
Chromie Squiggle
Trossets
Fidenza
CENTURY
Source: CRYPTOART MARKET DATA
Collection spotlight: Trossets by Anna Carreras
In this section, we highlight a discussion between Jeff Davis and Anna Carreras on Anna's first recent Artblocks Curated release Trossets from this post - Artblocks in conversation with Anna Carreras.
Anna Carreras is a creative coder and digital artist interested in experimentation on interactive communication focusing her work on the use of generative algorithms, creative code and interactive technology as a means of communication and an experience generator.
She is interested on complexity that emerges from small simple behaviors, from the balance between order and chaos. She tries to capture the diversity and richness of complexity working with generative algorithms and visuals.
Artwork: Title: Trosset; Artist(s): Anna Carreras
Jeff Davis: Hi Anna! It’s great to speak with you. I’m really excited for your project on Friday. Tell me how you first got started with art.
Anna Carreras: I originally wanted to study Fine Art but I ended up studying Engineering. At University, I started to use all the technical knowledge with a creative approach, as a way to return to my vital path. And I found myself merging art and technology, fascinated by the early digital artists and the generative art pioneers. After ending my studies, I’ve been developing interactive installations for the last 17 years. I like to explore new narratives and encourage the audience to participate. Interaction adds human behavior to the experience, fostering unexpected visuals and richer generated outcomes.
JD: How did you discover NFTs?
Anna Carreras:
Working on interactive installations got me progressively interested in digital art and generative art. Actually, I’ve always been coding the visuals of my projects, so I was already into generative art. Last year lock-down gave me the opportunity to share all my knowledge, expertise, and visual explorations with the community. I started coding generative art almost every day and posting my work in progress and drawings on Twitter.
JD: And did that lead to any new opportunities for you?
AC:
In January of this year, Casey Reas contacted me to create an art piece for the inaugural exhibition for Feral File platform. He found me and my work on Twitter and I ended up exhibiting together with huge artists and friends like Manoloide, Dmitri, Lia and all the rest of incredible artists of Social Codes exhibition. After that, everything has rushed! It has been an incredible half year.
JD: That’s awesome, such a great exhibition. Alright, let’s talk about Trossets! What was the inspiration for the project?
I found Anna's comment on the push and pull between complexity and limitations imposed by system rules super intriguing.
AC:
I’m interested in diversity. I’ve been doing some research on how generative systems can be built to foster very diverse outcomes.
How complexity can emerge by coupling a small set of construction blocks and using limited system rules. It’s a way to look and try to understand our universe.
For me, some building blocks are at the core of everything. Combining them in a way that we still don’t understand creates biodiversity, materials and everything we know. It’s about all of us having a common core substance, while maintaining differences, that makes us unique and diverse.
🔍 Upcoming NFT market catalysts
Upcoming market catalysts to watch for -
NFTs to be featured at Christie's Post-War to Present auction
An upcoming auction at Christie's on October 1 to feature Artblocks NFTs will mark a watershed moment for NFT generative art as the selected artists and their NFT projects would be brought to the attention of TradArt patrons and a wider non-crypto audience.
A number of Artblocks artists and their works are slated to be included in this auction per a sneak preview provided by Noah Davis in late August -
@artblocks_io Curated 1, 2, 3. Full sets. One lot. @ChristiesInc New York October 1 after Curio Cards pic.twitter.com/tNG9FFZe4Q
— noah (@CryptoPunkNoah) August 30, 2021
FTX platform to introduce cross-chain Ethereum/Solana NFT trading
Leadership at FTX announced that the crypto trading platform will soon launch an industry first cross-chain NFT marketplace on FTX.
In my view this should be a bullish market catalyst as it can bring on a wave of new NFT participants into the NFT market, who up to this point may not have been very active on the leading NFT marketplace, Openseas or been exposed to NFTs.
Second, this should be a first-time marketplace featuring cross-chain Ethereum/Solana NFT trading, although it remains to be seen how smooth that user experience is. Currently, NFTs on different blockchains exist and trade on their respective chains.
All NFTs will be cross-chain ETH/SOL!
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) September 6, 2021
Deposits/withdrawals opening up in the next couple weeks.
You'll also be able to deposit outside NFTs then!
📚 Worthy reads on appreciating generative art and creator tools
PROOF podcast - Artist Spotlight: Ringers with Dmitri Cherniak
This podcast interview with the creator of Ringers, Dmitri Cherniak by Kevin Rose is worth a listen for insights on Dmitri's journey in generative art and on his creation of Ringer, a defining generative art project.
Some highlights from the interview -
On three waves in the generative art movement:
Dmitri: ...where it stands it is kind of like 3 waves...the real innovators are the folks doing this in the 50s & 60s - often before they even had a computer they were imagining what it would be like if you gave instructions to a computer to create art. And they were the true innovators. They faced serious backlash even the idea of having a show with computers that made art...
the next wave - 80s, 90s, early 2000s. These are folks, some of them are doing Artblock drops, but these are the folks who found refuge in academia and built all of the tools that made these things possible...Processing, open frameworks - a lot of these software that make generative art more accessible.
The third generation is where we are at right now - very internet savvy, social media native, extremely prolific...a lot of it exists because of what came before.
On the genesis of Ringers:
Dmitri: Ringers was 3 years into the making...Ringers was based on a design system that [Dmitri] didn't create. Have seen it conceptually a few times. If you trace it back, the first usage is Armin Hoffman and he has a book called Graphic Design Manual and it shows him as a graphic designer using this system and he did it by hand it wasn't automated at all.
...and what I did, this is why I said automation is my artistic media, I took that system and played with it for a long time. Ringers what you're seeing is the output of that design system - it has to be very flexible, but also it has to be able to withstand all this randomization where I don't have control over it.
Dmitri dives into the technical aspects of creating the Ringer algorthym which is so interesting because behind the aesthetics there is also a lot of work in constructing a mathematical method to generate the Ringer design with code.
Dmitri: From an intuitive standpoint, what you're doing is you're taking pegs and wrapping a string around them. From a mathematical standpoint, what is happening is I am taking a number of pegs..placing them on a grid...I am sampling a certain percentage of the pegs, I am finding the centroid of all those points, then I doing tangent to tangent calculations between each of those pegs, and understanding the ordering that I want to do with the wrapping.
...mathematically it is actually quite complicated. I learnt that there is something called Dubins curve which can do a lot of this and people use it in self-driving and understanding the path to get a car out of a driveway...but I just did it myself geometrically. and so that's the thing about Ringers which is so great, it is so intuitive, but the math to actually make it happen is actually a little bit annoying.
Why Love Generative Art?
August 26, 2018 Jason Bailey
This is a blog piece I found helpful in getting a sense of the rich history of generative art going back to 1960s and seeing a sampling of important shakers in the gen art genre. Enjoy~
Jason's thoughts on randomness versus control by generative artists:
One overly simple but useful definition is that generative art is art programmed using a computer that intentionally introduces randomness as part of its creation process. This often brings up two common but misguided viewpoints that hold people back from appreciating the beauty and nuance of generative art.
Myth One: The artist has complete control and the code is always executed exactly as written. Therefore, generative art lacks the elements of chance, accident, discovery, and spontaneity that often makes art great, if not at least human and approachable.
Myth Two: The artist has zero control and the autonomous machine is randomly generating the designs. The computer is making the art and the human deserves no credit, as it is not really art.
The truth is that generative artists skillfully control both the magnitude and the locations of randomness introduced into the artwork.
Controlled randomness may sound contradictory, but if you are an artist or an art historian, you know that artists have always sought ways to introduce randomness into their work to stimulate their creativity. Thinking about the process of coding generative art as being similar to painting or sketching is actually spot on. In fact, we will see that the tool favored by most generative artists refers to the individual artworks produced as "sketches.”
Noteworthy sale
4 of 4 algorithmic editions. The system to generate the piece was coded in Javascript and rendered as SVG in the browser. Created 3/4/2020.
Artist(s): dmitricherniak
Collector: edgar_eth
Last Sold: 01 Sep 2021
Price: $1,361,856.26 (388.35 ETH)
Gallery: SuperRare
❒ See you around the block