Why do I love digital art?
Maybe it's because it does so much with so little. I mean little literally here as in the single little files that digital art comes in allowing for internet-scale impact.
When combined with blockchain tokenization the little digital art files become universally ownable and verifiable, forever.
Pure incorruptible culture available to the whole world in a single click. That's a bright future.
At least that's the future I've seen illuminated by the bright moments that've erupted and been collected onchain by other seers of the digital future including, fortunately, yours truly.
Out of all the places I've collected digital art, I find myself returning to my personal Tezos collection again and again. To me it's the single best example of the bright moments I’ve managed to collect onchain.
While great digital art collections from afar may appear more furnace-like ablaze with fire art, up close they tend to resemble the growth and change of a well tended bonsai tree. That’s how I’ve come to think of my collection of art on Tezos.
Every artist is like a branch, of which over 100 exist in my Tezos collection at this point. Each branch has its own fantastic shape that's a function of specific collector decisions of what to collect.
I pour over this collection more often than any other. There a many reasons why. But every artist in my collection is unique and special to me. Some are incredibly well known, while many others are not, at least not yet.
While I wish I could have easily captured the liveness of many of the moving works, the following list of 20 artists captures the spirit of what’s led me to go deep collecting these artists. So please, when your eye gets caught, click through to the artist's complete works on Tezos, peruse, and with any luck you'll find a work or ten to collect.
Helena's art is ethereal. It's otherworldly yet human, and always - always - distinctly Helena. When I first came across Helena's art on SuperRare I never had a chance to collect. When HEN launched early 2021 and I saw Helena releasing editioned work there I jumped in and have been adding more works of hers (including prints) to my collection since.
Marcelo creates art depicting ancient futures. Their works are rich with ancient symbols presented within a psychedelic set, looping infinitely, awaiting their next viewer. It's hard to overstate how amazingly intricate and detailed Marcelo's creations are, but if you are unaware of Marcelo's process it's easy to simply get lost in the spell binding visuals, so please make sure to watch this process video by Marcelo.
Richard is an American artist based in the Pacific Northwest who has been creating found art for decades. Most of their work is created physically by hand on top of found materials like cardboard that are then digitally transferred and manipulated until they are finished. Intentionally de-skilled his works are like potent bursts of dankness highlighting primitive emotions and fragmentary episodes taken from everyday life.
I came across this artist when a fellow collector shared them. For as long as I can remember I've been a fan of architectural / interior design renders. Joji's art is that, just very dank.
There's nothing more badass than a talented artist with a fuck you attitude. When I first came across Ben's work (a frog smoking a joint titled "Frog Smoking") on the Twitter timeline back in 2021 I raced to HEN to collect. I was devastated to see that someone else collected it already, but I was introduced to an array of dank very limited to super rare work by Ben. He created one of my all-time favorite works called "Tubes."
When I think of surrealist video art that stops me in my tracks, two artists come to mind: Joe Pease and Renato Marino. Joe's artworks are Melvillian in their symbolic density whereas Renato's creations are hypnotically simple poetic vignettes.
"The pixels are alive." Every time I encounter a work of pixel art by figmentz I am always struck by how alive and energetic the pixels look and feel; a sharp contrast to the dead, dull, small, and static associations most folks who even think of pixels may have. The interconnections and digital energy conveyed by the pulsating infinitely looping pixels reminds me of the energy behind all of our interconnected digital experiences with one another.
I've always appreciated the process that artists - not all, but many - go through on their way to finding their signature style. One common element that's stuck out to me admiring this artistic journey is that, no matter how divergent works separated by time, experimentation, and refinement may seem, often there is a thread common across most of their body of work. When it comes to the ai artist don't buy, their use of sky blue immediately stuck out to me across their minted works leading up to their most recent computer window x cursor x blue screen creations that imho feels like a signature style, and I wanted to collect works that while stylistically all different, help show that progression and change with that constant through line.
Lulu creates sexy, seductive, and often playful looping gifs that are just pure...dankness.
The era of tube TVs was full of glitchy interference. Max's art reprises that "bug" of a bygone era, injects it with dank color distortion, and makes art that punches you in the face.
Early cryptoart is full of digital art that applied stock glitch filters. No comment on the merits or demerits of artists that used and may still use that approach, but I've always been a fan of hand crafted work. As soon as I first came across the Chicago-based artist David Koblesky's work on the old Cent, my first thought was, "Omg this is artisanal glitch work," so naturally I cold DM'd David to jump on a call to confirm and share his process. All of the work I've collected highlights his approach to hand crafted glitch work.
Video art. Vibey aesthetic. Glitched out. Dankness. Sometimes that's all it takes.
Mek.txt and their art perfectly embody the "doing a lot with a little" ethos of digital art. They typically create works of pixel art depicting poignant and emotive scenes using 1~2 colors max. Excitement around the metaverse and virtual worlds has cooled significantly, but many of mek.txt's works look and feel how I imagine being physically inside the internet would.
I have no idea what is going on in Dacosta Works artworks or what inspired them, but that doesn't matter. They look dank, and that's enough for me.
No, ??? is not the name of this artist. I'm still trying to identify their socials to tag them accurately, but that doesn't change anything about the art. The color popping illustrations gave me Jenisu vibes when I first saw them.
This is one of the unknown artists I mentioned above. Terrible joke, a thousand apologies. But I digress. There may be no more important American artist alive today than diewiththemostlikes. Full stop. The prolific Indiana-based artist may have minted their first digital artwork on Ethereum mainnet in early 2021, but their seminal style - the baggy eyed silhouettes, skin melting down to the ground - along with the bulk of their early work including the iconic Consume Your Adoration series all happened on HEN. Before VVD hoovered up most of the listed work I managed to collect some iconic limited editions (including TWO editions of "fuck your energy") and a (free)based 1/1 from the Consume Your Adoration series.
Obxium has minted or inscribed their artwork on basically every chain that supports it. They also give zero fucks. I will collect everything they mint, so I always have to restrain mayself. But if tokenized sarcasm lathered in dankness is your thing, you'll dig Obxium.
Tezos is basically a sandbox for tokenized experimentation. A lot of artists that started minting in a particular style on Ethereum mainnet came to Tezos to mint in a new style using the digital distance of a new blockchain to distinguish their art on Tezos from their other work. Pop Wonder is a great example of this. His Tezos mints are almost unidentifiable from his manner mints featuring his iconic Poplins - almost. The same restraint he practices in terms of using a limited color palette for mainnet mints is woven through all of his Tezos mints as well.
PLEASE click through to Objkt to see these hAyDiRoKeT works in their full animated glory. They are out of this world. Hallucinating hallucinations with 16 bit video game vibes.
I came across Yuri_jjj thanks to the stellar curation that Fakewhale has been engaged in with their Fakewhale Gallery on Objkt. What struck me most about Yuri_jjj's work, outside of the dank still-life they capture in their art, was the textured veneer that coats many of the objects in her work. That veneer reminds me of the Korean handicraft of ë‚˜ì „ì¹ ê¸° where shells from abalones, for example, are combined with black lacquer and applied to the surfaces of furniture. It's a very particular style that I never would have expected to encounter digitally, but thankfully it's become a defining element of Yuri_jjj's art.
