NFT art: How do you get paid for a meme?

You can’t get paid for memes…right?

Until recently, that may have been true, but something strange has been bubbling up in the digital art world the past few years that could change all that.

An example of one of the earliest crypto-art projects, “Rare Pepes”, shown here

The NFT, or “Non Fungible Token”.

By creating a new type of one-of-a-kind digital currency, art, collectibles, games and yes, even memes, can finally be as unique as their real world counterparts, and potentially be just as valuable.

Artists, developers and entrepreneurs can create NFT collectibles without anything physical attached, and more importantly, use the power of the blockchain  to help get fairly compensated when their work appreciates in value.

The purchase of an NFT (an extension of the Ethereum crypto-currency), is registered on the blockchain, which provides a permanent record of that purchase and provides proof of ownership.

Virtual galleries have sprung up across the web, offering NFT artists a e-commerce marketplace worth millions of dollars and worldwide exposure for their exclusive “drops”.

Clever marketers and hypebeasts alike have flocked to this burgeoning new format, with licensed deals and weird memes alike exploding across the web in a Darwinian race for digital clout supremacy.

NFT Art: what the heck is a non-fungible token?

Before we dive into the weird and wild world of ‘virtual art’, let’s start with the basics: What the heck are NFTs and how do they work?

Pronounced “Nifty”, the “fungible” in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) describe something that is identical to something else. So one US dollar, or gram of cannabis or a GameStop stonk, for example, is the same as any other. This is how, in the simplest terms, the world economy works: A dollar is a dollar.

However, some clever and/or bored hackers flipped the idea of cryptocurrency on it’s head to create something wholly unique: a one of a kind currency.

When you buy an NFT, you are buying that virtual token and the work of art linked to it. The transaction is registered on the blockchain, (A digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the same platform), and the creator’s share is paid for immediately, as a “smart contract” digitally compensates them at the time of any sale.

If you own, for example, a rare pepe NFT, it’s ownership is public, proving it’s provenience and allowing for it to be sold, traded or auctioned, without the original owner being cut out of the process.

The work can be unique (like a painting), or in editions (like a book or trading card) but each token is unique to that work. Unlike “coins”, which require massive amounts of computing horsepower to create something of value, the art is what gives value to the collectible, and the token is more like a receipt that proves who made it and what it’s worth when you bought it.

Once you buy your “art”, you can display it on your computer or TV, inside a special digital frame, print it out, resell it, whatever.

And, while yeah, anyone can print out or display an image from the internet, that image does not belong to them and they cannot trade or sell it, so NFTs can go a long way to help attribute copyright, get collectors to invest, and help artists get paid. It’d be like selling a bootleg “Palyboy” T-shirt…not quite the real thing.

In December, nearly $9m worth of NFT-based art was sold in that month alone, according to the cryptocurrency news website Be[in]Crypto, more than three times the value of sales the previous month.

The web portal nonfungible.com, which measures the NFT market history and statistics shows there have been 5,094,912 NFT sales to-date worth over $146 million.

That’s right…146 million, real dollars, for digital art. To say this could be a game changer is an understatement.

NFT Art: It all started with cats…

Created by AxiomZen, CryptoKitties went viral in 2017 after being birthed at an Etherium ‘hack-a-thon’

Canadian studio Axiom Zen is credited with kicking off the NFT craze with their game, CryptoKitties, a game where players breed and trade little digital cats with unique looks…sort of like a Cyberpunk Beanie Baby.

Each CryptoKitty has a “digital genome” that holds the genetic sequence to all the different traits they can have. These include things like colour, whiskers, beards, stripes, little hats and so on.

Initially, the game was seeded with 100 “Founder Kitties”, some of which have approached over $300,000 in value.

Using the game, anyone can sell their kittens via an auction, where they pick a starting price and an ending price and once again the price declines over time until someone buys it. These automated “market value” adjustments create scarcity and compel ‘players’ to ‘buy low, sell high’…like any other collectible.

And here’s where the democratic nature of the blockchain comes into play”: AxiomZen doesn’t do anything to assign value to the NFT after it’s “minted” the community assigns a premium value to a certain Kitty by simply paying more for them. If more people want cats with hats, then cats with hats cost more… capitalism at it’s simplest.

After it went viral, CryptoKittes became so popular that it was accounting for 10% of ALL commercial transactions using Ethereum, and with this breakout success, other artists and creators began to take notice.

NFT Art: Drops, Galleries and Auctions

Sites like Nifty Gateway (now owned by billionaire Facebook investors the Winklevoss twins) and SuperRare have created a culture of ultra-exclusive ‘drops’ as part of their curation, where digital artists and meme-lords unleash new collections after days or weeks of hype, some times paired with real-world digital frames, merch or other items, often with an irreverent attitude reserved for street artists.

In the classic tradition of trailblazing digital-art weirdos, these artists themselves are hardly traditional—Beeple, for instance, one of the best-selling NFT artists and a legend in 3D animation world, introduces a “drop” (a hyped up sale when new works are released at a certain time, sort of like Supreme clothing or the Apple iPhone) with a statement that starts:

“hahahah, ok so we’re going balls deep on this motherfucker…”.

His last drop generated an estimated 3.5 million is sales, according to NFT news site Loop.

Internet famous graffiti artists Lushsux, credited for bringing memes to the street-art world, has recently launched “Lushsux’ Lambo Fund”, which sold out immediately on Nifty Gateway for prices reaching $15,000 for digital editions of his infamous murals.

But it’s not just crypto-kiddies and weirdos making NFT’s: NYC artist, writer, dealer and art-world gadfly Kenny Schachter has also been producing NFTs, recently offering three digital works on the Nifty platform. His most famed work (and one that kicked off mainstream attention to the format) is his take on Donald Trump’s defeat: titled That’s All Folks, a digital work based on the end title of a Looney Tunes film.

Schachter released a special edition of five for $500 USD each, all sold, and they have all been traded a number of times; one had received a bid of $1,111 at the time of writing. Like all other NFT auctions or sales, each resale receives a small commission for the artist.

But is this only the domain of silicon valley investors or an art-world effete?

Hell ‘naw.

Where can I get my own NFT art?

The NFT “scene” is still in it’s infancy, but the 5 best known ‘marketplaces’ below will give you a good place to start if you want to dive into the weird world of digital ownership.

1. OpenSea

The first NFT marketplace and the largest, OpenSea hosts more than art. Ddomain names, sports trading cards as well as items used in gaming are all available from their site.

2. SuperRare

Home to highly curated, digital artworks, SuperRare is a trendy virtual curated gallery where only hand-picked artists are hosted. Part of the appeal is the limited selection, rather than OpenSea’s endless catalogue of, well, everything.

3. Terra Virtua

By creating a series of virtual dens called ‘Fancaves’, Terra Virtua aims to capture the obsessive, more hyper-masculine collectors market. NFT owners can show off their collections in their very own digital crib. They offer classic collectibles like movie posters, 3D figurines and music, all in NFT form.

4. Rarible

Rarible might be the easiest site to jump into the world of NFTs. Offering a curated collection of everything from art to memes to domains, their shopping experience is fast and easy and much less daunting than the others listed here.

5. Nifty Gateway

Highly curated and backed by billionaire investors, Nifty Gateway showcases some of the highest profile collections on the web. While most of the big-ticket collections are our of range for all but the wealthiest collectors, works from well known artists like Filip Hodas and Rick & Morty creator Justin Roiland are easily accessible to regular art collectors.

What’s the future of NFT art?

With all the hype NFTs have been making, major companies and big brands have already begun taken an interest and gotten involved in the industry.

Several of the biggest brands on the planet are now developing blockchain based games, collectibles and virtual worlds, including Samsung, Nike, the UFC, just to name a few.

But while these major players may bring more awareness to the format of NFT art, the steady supply of new creators, new marketplaces and new ways to tweak the “smart contract” system originally hacked by Axiom Zen allows for a nearly infinite ceiling to where this strange new world can grow.

Unlike Bitcoin or other ‘fungible’ tokens, creating a one of a kind token isn’t nearly as difficult as creating a new bitcoin, something only available to the most powerful “miners” left standing.

With a low barrier to entry and a dedicated subculture of collectors looking to “get in early” on unique artworks, NFT art may finally be a way for you meme makers to get paid.

Heading image: ‘Ether in the Sky’ by Yog Joshi

Ubawareta Houkago – PC-98 (1995)

Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past. Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia. Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset. Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle. Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space.

All captured in a eerie palette of 4096 colours and somehow, you’re sure, from some alternate 1980s world you can’t quite remember…

The Style of ‘PC-98’

Now beloved by legions of obsessive artists and collected by accounts like Noirlac, ITEM, and Densetsu.ch, this now-forgotten art style native to Japan is known, shorthand, as “PC-98”

X-Girl PC-9801 (1994)

With it’s unique style of colours and hand-made gradients, it has spawned an underground subculture of collectors and creators dedicated to keeping the unique PC-98 art form alive.

Drawn painstakingly one pixel at a time, with a palette of 4096 possible colours, pushing the limits of these 80’s era machines memory, these early graphic artists and hackers alike have left an indelible mark on the world of digital art and internet culture, only to be forgotten in the passing of time.

But what made this boring business computer from Japan so special?

What is a ‘PC-98’ anyway?

One of Japan’s earliest and most dominant computer makers, electronics giant NEC arrived early on the home computer market, pretty much obliterating domestic competitors like Hitatchi and Fujitsu and swallowing a whopping 60-70% of the market up from IBM by the mid 80s with their PC-88 / series of computers.

The reason? The Japanese market needed hardware much more capable than the business built IBM PC, anemic early Macintosh computers or the home consoles of the era where it counted most: graphics.

Then came the PC-9800. Using custom chips designed to deliver rich colour and complex Japanese characters, the NEC machines had 16x the video memory of their American counterparts, leading to an explosion of new game creators putting these features, and their limitations, to use.

‘Virgin Angel’ PC-9801 – 1994/95

While there were countless models in the near 20 year history of the NEC platform, and thousands of programs designed for them, their unique hardware (while capable of many colours, the machines were still extremely slow and incompatible with MS-DOS computers at the time) combined with the style of games created for the PC-98 led it to be  jokingly dubbed “The Anime Computer”.

Possessor PC-9801 (1994)

Countless simulation games like Sim City, darker fare like cyberpunk adventures and bullet hell shooters lived alongside stranger, slice of life simulators closer to titles like “The Sims” starring popular comic characters from the world of Anime. The machines speed limits produced a more adult, story driven style of game called a “visual novel” that became a mainstay of the scene over the more arcade driven games coming from the world of Sega and Nintendo.

Macross Love Stories PC-9801 (1994)

Metal Gear creator / problematic gaming legend Hideo Kojima got his start on the platform with his classic potboiler “Policenauts”, and perennial weirdo favourite “Corpse Party” started way back in the 90s as a PC-98 game.

So if the PC-98 was so popular, why don’t we remember it like the Super Nintendo or Playstation, or even more obscure computers like the Sinclair, so lovingly honoured in Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch.

Well, the thing about these games is that they’re…weird.

Like, really weird.

Obscenely weird.

Enter the Doujins: PC-98’s rebels

Never heard of classics like “Variable Geo 2: The Bout Of Cannibalistic Goddess?” or “Dead Of The Brain”?

Haven’t played battleship against Space Hitler in Void Vanity Fleet or dodged a sex-crazed Captain Hook in an all female Peter Pan parody called “Neverland”?

I’m guessing not.

Neverland (1994)

Equally important to the early success of the PC-98 as the corporate users were what are known as “Doujins“.

Named from the Japanese slang for “hobby group”, these dedicated legions of game designers, artists and pixel pushing perverts created literally thousands of titles for the platform (At last count their were over 6000 PC-98 games in the world.)… with new games still released to this day.

A wild west of avant-garde adventure games and bizarre digital storybooks, these developers operated in the fringes of late 80s and early 90s popular culture in Japan. Wildly popular with the Otaku (Japan’s culture of hermetic male obsessives…sort of an primordial Incel, if you will), these games are… intense to say the least.

‘Rusty’ – PC-9801 (1993)

Constantly skirting the threat of copyright infringement, Doujin or “Fan-Softs” put popular anime or game characters in strange, very often sexual, situations, yet were wildly popular among even mainstream audiences.

Not content with simple cut and paste jobs, Doujin PC-98  developers and artists pushed the limits of what these early machines could do, and the limits good taste, one upping each other with each release.

Kurayami PC-9801 (1996)

Themes like rape, torture and cannibalism were among many taboo subjects shadowy developers of the PC-98 scene created in parallel with safer, more mainstream titles like Might and Magic, and imports of American games like Doom and Alone In The Dark.

Writer Kyle Bradford called the PC-98 Eroge or “Erotic Game” culture “a relic from an age of Japanese Otaku culture seemingly obsessed with the obscene”

Studios with nonsensical names like “Software Creation Tips” or “Apple Pie Coffee Break” would announce titles in a chatroom or magazine classifieds, release a handful of bizarre or pornographic PC-98 games mailed directly on disk, then disappear months or even weeks later, never to be seen again.

Some of these developers even went on to create classic franchises in mainstream gaming, funded in part by their X-Rated fundraising in the PC-98 scene and the lessons learned squeezing performance from these now near ancient machines.

End of the PC-98 era

So what happened?

Windows based machines quickly sailed past the early performance lead of NEC’s PC-9800, and the sheer variety of clones and new hardware displaced their monopoly. The market share of the PC-98 standard fell from 60% to 33% in just five years, and NEC finally abandoned the PC-98 in favour of the global standard.

By the 2000s, NEC had completely abandoned their computer platform and developers had long moved on to new systems with far superior hardware and 3D graphics.

Developers still operating on the fetishistic fringes of Eroge migrated en masse to the uncontrolled world of Microsoft and Apple machines, free from the ban on adult games from major publishers like Sega and, eventually NEC themselves.

Widespread broadband internet meant the Otaku of Japan could satisfy their fetishes without need for disks or “Doujinsoft” direct mail, and, within a few years most PC-98 machines were relegated to junk shops and basements, left to collect dust.

But a culture dedicated to preserving the platform holds on.

With small teams, sometimes a single developer, Doujins still compete in hack-a-thons and game competitions turning out games in as little as 24 hours.

New games continue to pop up, and a small emulation scene translates some of the better titles to be enjoyed by new generations of weirdos, never to be truly forgotten.

While it’s focus on the obscure, obscene and downright strange, it’s probably likely you’ll never play any of these games, but their influence continues to be felt today in modern sub-cultures like Vaporwave music, animators like the infamous Paul Robertson, and modern developers that are bringing some of the platforms DNA to modern games like “World Of Horror“.

Long live the weird and wonderful world of the PC-98.

Specifically, why nature is seemingly so hell bent on ensuring that on a long enough timeline all creatures will, eventually, become crabs.

This is not a new phenomenon.

The process, which is called carcinisation (from the Greek karkinos, meaning both cancer and crab…a lovely thought) is a unsettling expression of the way animals can live in wildly different habitats, but end up evolving the same characteristics.

The term was coined by evolutionary biologist L. A. Borradaile, who described carcinisation as “one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab”.

But this is where it starts to get weird.

You and I understand that animals that live in similar areas face challenges that can point them all toward the same evolutionary advantages. It’s obvious when we see it.

Birds and bats can both fly using mechanical wings. Birds and bats are both warmblooded, otters and ducks both have webbed toes, and so on. Seems totally normal and not at all horrifying. Right?

But not crabs. Oh no, not crabs.

Instead of being isolated like Darwin’s famous Galapagos inhabitants, they formed almost spontaneously instead of being geographically “imprisoned”.

Think about it: Different oceans. Different predators. Different eras. Nature sighs and gives us the same answer:

“You should really think about just like…being a crab, man…”

For those of us aware of the threat of crab people and/or space crabs, this is not good.

One of visionary author Guy N Smith’s many warnings about a crab adjacent future.

I can tell you’re surprised. Faced with different challenges, nature’s go to answer is to make you …a crab?

Yes. Five recorded times in fact.

And it’s not just the sometimes cute (but more likely horrifying) crab shape that unifies these five separately evolved crabs.

A 2017 paper that went viral details all the ways evolution is really just, like, obsessed with crabs: neurological development, circulatory systems, body shape, claws, mobility… it’s all crabs all the time.

Curiously, not only did the crab-like habitus evolve independently from the ‘true’ crabs (Brachyura), it also evolved three times independently within anomurans. […] Although enormous morphological disparity is observed in the internal anatomy of the crab-like taxa, reflecting the fact that the evolution of the crab-like habitus was indeed convergent, various corresponding dependences are found across the different lineages between the external characters of a crab-like habitus/morphotype and inner structures. In other words, as a result of carcinization certain structural coherences led to the specific internal anatomical patterns found in crab-like forms.

In fact so…many…things… have become crabs over time that it’s hard to tell where they originally came from. And it’s still happening now.

The paper dives into the fact that gigantic king crabs are the descendants of the tiny hermit crab, whose progenitor which may not have even BEEN CRABS AT ALL.

And this is not new: as far back as 1818 scientists have been trying to figure out even what exactly a crab is, because so many things are, well, crabs.

If all this crab talk has you unsettled about our evolutionary fate, you should be.

The authors of the paper end with this chilling note: “There is no reason to assume that ‘evolutionary tendencies’ or any such vague concept played a role.”

So it’s settled: no matter what happens, no matter where, nature is gonna make you a crab.

Photo by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash

Our mysterious protagonist, Georges, hits the road looking for a very Particular jacket. Played with a rumpled charm by Oscar winner Jean Dujardin (best known for his silent, scene stealing performance in ‘The Artist’) as a man in the throws of an undefined mid-life crisis, he drops nearly 10,000 euros on a vintage Deerskin jacket, and checks into a run down hotel in rural France.

After a hilariously self absorbed interaction with the locals, and a bemused bartender (Adèle Haenel), Georges sets off on his quest, to take his “Killer Style” to the world, by any means necessary. As he spirals into madness, enabled by his newly discovered love of “Filmmaking” and the enthusiastic bartender as his editor, the film seems at time to be both an absurd commentary on filmmaking, of French cinema, and a self-aware shot at film directors themselves, while simultaneously being a pretty great slasher at it’s core.

Fully committed to it’s fantasy, Deerskin is often disturbing, steadily hilarious and never boring, it’s brisk 85 minute run time all that’s needed to peek into the lurid and hyper violent world of self-aware clothing and brutally effective DIY weaponry. Highly recommended to Horror fans, comedy fans and film nuts alike, check the trailer below to see for yourself.