**After the great welcoming that the Dynamic and Conceptual canons had, we decided that for our third canon, we would be taking experimentation to the next level, both within the canon and in the meatspace. **

JPG’s upcoming canon, Crypto-Social Aesthetics, is the product of the community’s dialogue. This category, even if it takes inspiration from the art historical Relational Aesthetics movement, is something that we all helped define on the JPG discord. With the canons, we’re building something that has never been built before, so why not try experimenting with new categories?** **

To double down on the experiment, we will be taking the canonized NFTs to an IRL exhibition in our NFT Paris booth, from February 24th to 26th, at the spectacular Grand Palais in the French capital. The most voted NFTs within the Crypto-Social Aesthetics category will be curated into the exhibition. More details on this soon, we’re in the process of designing the layout. For the time being, you, and the rest of the Canonites, are tasked with researching, discussing and submitting proposals that will be voted for inclusion in the canon. ** **

While cryptoassets are inherently networked and likely to foster social groups and communities, some NFT projects specifically seek to facilitate or call attention to crypto-social interactions. To break down the terminology, a social interaction is a voluntary or involuntary interpersonal relationship between two or more individuals within and/or between groups. 

The nature of an ‘individual’ within a crypto network is fundamentally different than that of meatspace or the internet, as every address (be they bot, human, or group) within the network is built upon the same rules of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), in the case of Ethereum-based assets. But we must also be aware that there exists an off-chain layer of relationships, for example shared private keys, that can directly lead to on-chain execution. A resulting definition of crypto-social interactions would be a cryptographically secured relationship between two or more blockchain addresses within and/or between the private key holders of those addresses.** **

** **NFTs that exhibit crypto-social characteristics beyond that which is inherent to a networked asset. The work must codify specific relational protocols and effects, either on-chain directly built into the NFT, or off-chain in such a way as to result in an on-chain impact.

In this context, to give you some examples of NFTs and collections that would fall into this criteria, we can look at Straylight Protocol by Paul Seidler (2022) - a multi-player game where agents play within worlds and create patterns that are rendered into SVGs that become the artwork. 

An artist that has been working in this field is the brilliant Sarah Friend. We have all enjoyed Lifeforms (2021), the live entities that need to be transferred within 90 days of reception in order to continue to live. And on the realm of off-chain Crypto-Social aesthetics, Sarah’s Off (2021) sets up a collective problem solving exercise, that starts upon the reception of a plain black rectangular NFT in the size of a device (ipads, phones, laptops) and instructions to join a Telegram group, where collectors are supposed to coordinate to solve Sarah’s riddle (as a collector I can unfortunately say that success has not been achieved just yet, but maybe one time!) 

To launch the canon, we have selected three collections that we have classified as belonging to it, which will serve as a reference for Canonites to propose other collections. Alongside the aforementioned Straylight Protocol (2022), The Wrapture by Dmitri Cherniak (2021) and Nouns (2021).

The Crypto-Social Aesthetics canon, as well as the rest of the canons, does not have a submission deadline. However, since we have the exhibition on NFTParis coming up, we would like to encourage everyone that wants an NFT included there to propose and vote within the next two weeks. After that period, we will keep adding collections to the canon (as it’s happening with Conceptual and Dynamic) but they won’t be able to be included in the exhibition. ** **

Let’s see where this all takes us! 

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