Disclosure: no interest in trying to replicate my Mirror work here atm.
At the beginning of the year I decided I wanted to work on another cryptoart project. I did HYPERSPEEED, CRTM, BLOCKS, BLOCKS V2, Memetics, & DEGΞNS in the first half of 2023. The rest of the year was spent on protocol design thinking, writing, etc - my cycle was spinning on untraditional art focuses.
Enter Zaibs
A collection that mixes a few things:
my love for Zorbs by Zora
high quality art collections at scale
using ai to express resonant interests
inspiration from a podcast episode w Zora's cofounder (yet to be released) about early cryptoart on SuperRare and the bet that ai will have a large part to play in future cryptoart
Beyond the inspiration for the idea, I take pleasure in creating art in territories yet to be plowed (even at the expense of recognition). A fun fact to those that read this - Kenshiro and I were the original creators of the 'fat Bayc' meme and Abstraverse (a project of mine under the name Sync now) was home to the first onchain wallpaper NFTs (done on the OS shared contract).
I enjoy art projects that articulate new things. Zaibs is that for a layer 2 pfp collection, using quality ai coherence, done within a proven hyperculture constraint (the zorb).
Collectible Toys
Also inspired by KAWS, Bearbricks, Beanie Babies, and the ideology of digital collectibles, Zaibs are my attempt at creating digital toys. In a perfect world there will one day be physical counterparts.. yet working within current constraints each Zaib comes with an additional avatar
Only about 25% through the collection's supply (444 total - a nod to Zora protocol rewards), the current thinking is to treat zaibs like a vertex for digital toys. A zaib currently comes with a little avatar fellow.
With 6551 standards my intuition is now playing with what it would look like to continue building a toy chest around these eccentric spheres.
Tangential Context
Zaibs is the first art project I've felt a desire to explain. I can't fully place why that is, and yet the childlike enthusiasm of wanting to show off my toys sits with me as I work on the collection.
It's emergent. One text string is used to produce the zaib. Only thing that changes is whom or what it is "designed by/as."
In this manner, Zaibs is a permissionless collaboration with:
Kanye West
Andy Warhol
Basquiat
Da Vinci
Picasso
XCOPY
The Catholic Church
KAWS
Murakami
Hajime Sorayama
Grass
The Sky
Ocean
Appliances
Technology
Nike
and whomever or whatever my imagination conjures in real time
Zaibs is a collection that expresses my influences, tastes, emotions, perspectives, and ability of thinking of something new 444 times. It is a love letter to the zorb, memetics philosophy, and zora's layer 2/rewards-system.
Zaibs is a masterpiece - and the way I use that term is that "I must master myself to make it."
344 more to go..
Browse here:
