Harm van den Dorpel: Mutant Garden
Folia is pleased to announce the launch of Mutant Garden, a new project from Harm van den Dorpel. Mutant Garden will go live for minting at 6pm UTC on Friday, July 23rd at https://seeder.mutant.garden/
Though adoption is still locked, the seeder is currently live and birthing new mutants each block!
Mutant Garden Seeder from seeder.mutant.garden
Mutant Garden is a series of 512 generative unique NFTs. The transaction hash of the birth block is taken as a seed for a deterministic random function, used to populate a cartesian genetic network (“chromosome”) and functions as a Turing complete machine, which executes to generate the visual artwork (“phenotype”). Additionally, mutants mutate over time based on the similarity of the birth block hash and the current block hash. Harm has written an in-depth FAQ for those interested in taking a deeper dive into the project mechanics here.
Mutant Garden has its origins in Harm’s earlier series Death Imitates Language from 2015 which, using a similar sort of genetic algorithmic processing, bred over 100,000 digital paintings.
Death Imitates Language, 2016
He later expanded upon this in 2020 with the first iteration of the Mutant Garden project + software. An early (and interactive!) version of the software can be played with at https://mutant.garden/. A new series of mutants were most recently shown pin-person at Mutant Garden at Upstream Gallery, with mutants handpicked by the artist and “frozen” as physical prints. While these works were always somehow meant to be NFTs, it is only in the last few months that bringing this project fully to fruition has become possible. And, after a long period of development, is now finally available in this endlessly variable edition.
There were 65 pre-mints of the series chosen and minted by the artist, distributed to early supporters of the project as well as several kept by the artist, Folia, and Muse0 which are viewable here: https://seeder.mutant.garden/mutants
Many of these mutants have already undergone multiple mutations, giving viewers + future collectors a better sense of how the multiple traits affect mutant development. Those planning on adopting several mutants would be wise to take a look at some of these juvenile mutants to get a better sense of their long-term development.
Aigette mutating (age: 1 month, complexity: responsive, color mode: complex, mutation frequency: daily)
Important note to collectors + adopters: each mutant can only be adopted once, and only one mutant can be birthed per block. Mutants must be adopted within 50 blocks, otherwise they will perish and be made unavailable to mint. In the case of high traffic during launch, there will be a high possibility of rejected transactions when collectors are competing to adopt the same mutant. Mind your gas!
Harm van den Dorpel is a Berlin-based conceptual artist. His broad practice includes the creation of sculpture, collage, computer animation, computer generated graphics, and interaction design and is regarded a key figure in Post-Internet art. In addition, Harm was an early pioneer in NFTs, as the founder of left.gallery and the first artist to have an NFT acquired by a museum. His work has been exhibited in museums such as the New Museum in New York, MoMA PS1 in New York, Chicago New Museum of Art, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He currently has works in the permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum, the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and Museum of Applied Arts Vienna.
All questions and support can be directed to the Folia Discord