Existence & Immortality

In 2022, I minted an NFT every day using Manifold on ETH L1.

I was inspired by On Kawara's Today Series/Date Paintings where he painted around 3,000 paintings over 40 years with an unvarying set of rules. I was captivated by the meticulous, machine-like detail in his paintings and also his lifetime dedication to the series.

In viewing the collection, I realized blockchain is an excellent medium for for this concept as it captures time of creation by default, so I resolved at the end of 2021 to create an NFT every day of 2022 and maybe longer.

That collection I called Existence & Immortality, and can be found on Manifold Gallery or OpenSea. I gave myself a set of rules that allowed me to complete the series:

• The date had to be in the artwork, as homage to Kawara

• I used the same set of attributes on each work, that required adding manually by hand per mint

• If I missed minting on the date (which I did for ~33% of days that year), I would add a tag indicating it as such

• I follow UTC time, as ETH does, which means 7PM EST is the cutoff for my mint to be late

With these rules I was able to mint a work for each day of that whole year, which was more than I expected.

Looking back

Viewing the collection now, there are a few things that stand out:

• AI creation tools were just becoming accessible
  I got access to Midjourney on May 5, 2022, owned by Juan, and you can see Midjourney's immediate impact on me. This was an incredible, incredible unlock for me and continues to be as I write this on Jan 1, 2025. The rest of the collection includes a lot of early Midjourney creations, and you can see the models evolving rapidly in those seven months, culminating in the abstract circles of December.

• Contract costs are way lower thanks to L2s
  I thought I would use this contract to house a bunch of different NFTs and sub-segment it by the "Collection" attribute, which is why my wife's wedding ring is in there, and sets the total token count to 366. At the time, standing these contracts up was pretty expensive so I was planning to reuse it. Now I stood up a whole contract and minted the first work for ~10¢ total. Thanks, Base!

• Creator tooling has come a long way in the last two years
  Manifold has seriously leveled up, and I'm very thankful for that. They were solid then and they're solid now. I own my contracts and have a lot of flexibility in there. I am definitely on the more crypto-tech side than a lot of creators I think, and simultaneously there are a lot of more friendly options now for web3-curious people, like Zora or Rodeo, but Manifold is the right choice for me.

• Lens & Farcaster were not around when I started in 2022
  Since late 2022, I've spent a lot of my online community time on Farcaster. It's largely a technical community, although there is definitely appetite and appreciation for artists. I have been told Lens is the place for creatives but it just hasn't stuck for me – it's felt spammy when I've visited, and I don't really love the Orb client. I'm excited to embed Frames into my workflow this round, and expect that distribution will be much easier than in 2022 thanks to those.

• Simplify, simplify, simplify
  Even though I had a set of rules for the daily mints, they were still too overbearing. I am reducing the rules even further, and also working to stay more thematically consistent by the month, and perhaps even for the entire year. This is a creative workout exercise, and reflection on being alive at this point in time, pre-AGI.

• Minting is fun / Stamp the void
  I like to mint. The most important thing to me is stamping the blockchain with my address. The art is for fun. This is my favorite way I can think to yell "I was here!" into the digital void. Stampers gonna stamp. This is not a change from 2022. This is play, practice, and experimentation.

Overall, the landscape dramatically shifted in the last two years and I'm excited to take advantage of the advances in AI, NFT tooling, and my own focus to create an interesting conceptual work on blockchain.

Everything must go!

I just listed the last 30 of 2022 for 6 months at 0.003e / $10 each. I didn't promote these at all as I was minting them. My goal is to get them into people's hands, and if I even sell a few then I will be covered for multiple years of minting on Base.

I still have 268 of the tokens total. If there is one you like, please DM me on Warpcast or X and I'll sell to you for 0.003.

Hello, 2O25

I was not even thinking about resuming the practice until three hours before 7PM UTC today. I really like starting on January 1 of the year though, so with two hours left, I scrambled to get my new contract together.

First mint

The first mint is available until 7:00 PM EST on January 2, 2025:

01 JAN 2O25

01 JAN 2O25 - NFT (Digital Object): we begin again this is a continuation of my 2022 daily mint exercise. this year, i am focusing on simplicity and consistency. so much has changed since that time!

https://app.manifold.xyz

I'd already been in the habit of taking these 10-30 second videos, and had one I really loved from today, so I used that. I was totally captivated by this little container in a puddle in the Lower East Side that reminded me of floating paper boats down the river as a kid, and the wind was blowing it around in an animated way. I'm happy with this video style and also making it black-and-white. This should be an easy way to start out with a consistent look and feel.

New rules

My new rules for 2O25 dailies are as follows:

• No requirement to put the date in the artwork

• The date is always the title

• The description is whatever is on my mind at time of mint

• I will apply the Late attribute if I am late

• The required attributes are now only Location and Type (video, photo, etc)

• AI is allowed

• Collaborations are allowed

• I must work in the same style for the entirety of the month

• There is no rule about subject matter, but cohesion is preferable

What I still don't know:

• Not sure if there will be single token mints or every day will be an open timed claim

• Not sure if I will switch style at the end of January or not TBD

Original contract or new contract?

I decided not to re-mint into the original j4ck contract, which is on L1, and instead start a new contract on Base. This is obviously way cheaper, and thanks to that and the improvements on Manifold, I was able to airdrop this first token to everyone who holds any of my previous smart contract work.

The ability to immediately share this artwork as a reward to previous collectors feels amazing, and I can't believe it cost me just $5 to airdrop. Two years ago, this would take days, a dev, and a few hundred bucks to complete.

Thank you!

We are truly living in the future, and I can't wait to see what 2O25 brings.

Maybe someday someone will be inspired by this contract and clone me into an AI to continue this work forever, who knows. Maybe I'll do that.

A big thank you to everyone who has collected one of the original works, and some special shoutouts in my artistic journey to Christiania, dacopolis, Dan Stone, Winslow Porter, Shivani Mitra, Emily Edelman, Michael Mills, bedtimes, and all the supportive friends on Farcaster.

Happy New Year!