On minting, burning, and re-minting Pixel Sorters
A few weeks ago we announced the minting four works from the catalog of Harm van den Dorpel on Folia; three works from the “Pixel Sorters” series: Blob.gif (2017), Dansemacabre.gif (2017), and Bison.gif (2005) as well as a separate work, Lasso.swf (2007).
Full press release on these works is available here: https://folia.substack.com/p/harm-van-den-dorpel-pixel-sorters.
We’re announcing today that the first two of these works, Blob.gif and Dansemacabre.gif, will be available for bidding from Saturday, 20 March @ 9pm CET on folia.app.
There’s a few things worth knowing upfront about this which make it interesting going forward as we explore new ways of recording, storing, and accessing works as NFTs.
Firstly, the genesis of the “Pixel Sorter” series of works is over 15 years old. Bison.gif was first created from the “Pixel Sorter” script in 2005. But it has only ever existed as a file and has never had a permanent, physical counterpart. It’s also never traded hands on the primary market.
Secondly, Harm minted these on Rarible in January. So these are not the first ERC-721s that ever existed of these pieces.
Those Rarible pieces are now burned and permanently unrecoverable in the notorious Ethereum BurnAddress which as of this writing has approximately 14,000,000,000USD in tokenized — and mostly illiquid — assets and 100s , possibly 1000s of assorted ERC-721s and other non-fungibles. Fascinating.
The original burn address
Thirdly, as mentioned above, we re-minted them after having discussed with the artist about how best to preserve these going forward.
This brings up two interesting conversations. One, about the nature of digital files and their relationship to their corresponding NFTs. Two, about the mutability of an artwork.
The first point has been discussed breathlessly elsewhere, so we’ll skip that for the moment.
On the second point of mutability, even physical works have always been considered as essentially and fundamentally changeable by artists, at their discretion, far past the date of completion, to various and different degrees.
On the extreme end, artists have “disavowed” works with consequences for the work’s value and recognition by scholars (though rarely without offended collectors mounting a legal battle).
Restored, Refabricated, or Fake?
On the other end of the spectrum, certain works (and, in fact, most works) need to be repaired / replaced or even “updated” as time goes on and the original materials degrade, a process which is often at the discretion and direction of the artist.
How it started
How it’s going
While these are generally very rare events, they are useful in illustrating the fact that even physical artworks have always been subject to change.
While immutability with certain artworks on-chain is a concept we plan on exploring more fully (and has already been done so by projects like Autoglyphs), it’s worth considering that current obvious technical limitations that some degree of mutability will remain a technical necessity for proper storage of larger and more complex works into the near future. The author of our contracts and architect of our general thinking on this, Billy Rennekamp, expanded on this in a very concise tweetstorm.
Perhaps more importantly, this will also leave space for the creative prerogative of the artist far past the date of minting, opening up new artistic possibilities. More mutable works mean new creative processes that are able to incorporate time, off-chain events, and a flurry of other conditionals into the concept and development of the work.
Some aspects will be useful; upgrading, say, resolution on an older image as picture standards improve; And destructive: Will an artist, someday, ask to ‘destroy’ the IPFS endpoint of the metadata because of perceived misbehavior on the part of the collector? Even further, could this even increase the value and notoriety of the artwork? In the case of an on-chain art heist, NFTs stolen from a compromised wallet could be officially disavowed and re-minted pending artist approval.
20 years in the making, upgrade or downgrade?
Spoiler Alert: the artist’s act of destruction only increased the perceived value of the work
Of course, as stewards of precious metadata, platforms will bear much of the responsibility for arbitrating this until more delegated and accessible standards are developed (especially when it can potentially damage their reputation and/or market). And as token standards are consistently improved upon, updated, and optimized for an interchain environment, we’d expect more and more complex ways of storing and handling NFT works to develop: original, precious ERC721s kept in cold storage with wrapped versions circulating for promiscuous use among various protocols and chains of all types.