tormential

i released an experimental artwork that allows the viewer to create collaborations with me in realtime and mint the resulting 1/1 artworks on tezos

it takes in your camera stream through a DOS/ASCII style filter created by 0x10 and there are some controls where you can configure colours and character sets

when you're happy with the creation you can press mint and a preview of the final artwork will be displayed. this is where you can add a title and description for the token

all minted artworks appear in the collection on objktcom and rarible and are marked as collaborations between the minter and 0x10

on-chain artworks and viewer

each artwork has a 100% on-chain ASCII version that is stored alongside the artwork on the blockchain and can be used to reconstruct the artwork without ipfs

for this we pay per byte, so there is an associated storage cost for each selfie that increases depending on the complexity of the final output - the more colours, characters, and overall noise in the scene the higher the on-chain storage costs

i created an accompanying token viewer application which is also 100% on-chain, and this came with a whole heap of problems i had to figure out in order to achieve

it can be installed via a single terminal command available inside the artwork. the same command is minted at typed.art/8280

running the command installs and optionally opens a local viewer app. this app is extremely basic because it was written from scratch, by hand, and optimised to fit inside a single tezos blockchain transaction, which also brought about a lot of limitations i had to get around to achieve this part of the artwork

technical information

the artwork consists of 6 smart contracts. 3 of them are utility contracts that do things like checking signatures, domains, and token balances, and the other 3 are the mintery, the on-chain asset storage, and the tokens themselves

when you access the site for the first time you need to request a "mint access token"

this token is an NFT that will appear in your wallet from the mintery contract, and is your key to minting selfies. it's not possible to call the minting functionality without this special access token in your wallet

you also require a tezos domain linked to the wallet. both the tezos domain and the mint access token are used to create a unique signature that gets signed and attached the each mint request and gets verified on-chain during the mint process as part of a bot-resistant proof-of-concept minting technique

fun facts

the entire artwork is to be considered a self-portrait of 0x10

the artwork is 100% web3 - there are no servers, the primary artwork site is hosted on ipfs with the dns running through the linked tezos domain page (0x5E1F1E.tez.page)

i initially created the entire artwork to use gzip compression for storing the on-chain data and then at the very end when i was writing the on-chain viewer i could not fit my gzip decompression code into a single blockchain transaction, so had to scrap and re-implement the entire engine using a basic LZW implementation instead of gzip to achieve my goal of having a self-contained transparent on-chain viewer application that fits into a single transaction

there is a super-secret glitch mode hidden inside the artwork that can lead to some pretty amazing creations - however, the complexity of the final results can lead to very expensive storage costs for the on-chain versions of glitched creations and they can even deviate slightly from the original (below example would cost over 5tz in on-chain storage alone)

there's on-chain documentation for reconstructing a selfie from the raw on-chain data

the hex representation of the red colour in the access token and logo is #5E1F1E

there is an upper max limit of 0x5E1F1E (6168350) selfies available

you may use outputs from 0x5E1F1E or even 0x5E1F1E itself as an input into new artworks provided attribution of some sort to either 0x5E1F1E or 0x10 is included with the new artwork

my versum genesis is one of my earliest glitch-mode outputs created while i was developing selfie

Alice Smeets: The Guetto Tarot

Welcome to the Ghetto Tarot, a project from award-winning documentary photographer Alice Smeets and a group of Haitian artists known as Atis Rezistans. The idea was to take the classic Rider-Waite tarot deck of 78 cards and create a photographic version of each card using settings and objects in the vibrant ghetto of Haiti.

As Smeets says, “The spirit of the Ghetto Tarot project is the inspiration to turn negative into positive while playing. The group of artists ‘Atiz Rezistans’ use trash to create art with their own visions that are a reflection of the beauty they see hidden within the waste. They are claiming the word ‘Ghetto,’ thus freeing themselves of its depreciating undertone and turning it into something beautiful.”

Alice Smeets: The Guetto Tarot

Welcome to the Ghetto Tarot, a project from award-winning documentary photographer Alice Smeets and a group of Haitian artists known as Atis Rezistans. The idea was to take the classic Rider-Waite tarot deck of 78 cards and create a photographic version of each card using settings and objects in the vibrant ghetto of Haiti.

As Smeets says, “The spirit of the Ghetto Tarot project is the inspiration to turn negative into positive while playing. The group of artists ‘Atiz Rezistans’ use trash to create art with their own visions that are a reflection of the beauty they see hidden within the waste. They are claiming the word ‘Ghetto,’ thus freeing themselves of its depreciating undertone and turning it into something beautiful.”