Today I’m excited to partner with the team at Wild.xyz to share a breakdown and my review about a special collection that combines my favorite hobbies and pastimes. The Boys of Summer by Michell F Chan employs NFTs to construct a game, experiment, and artwork that combines baseball, crypto culture, statistics, decision-making, and the blockchain.
The team at Wild is offering exclusive allowlist access to all Kaloh’s Newsletter community members. Participate below.
As a kid, I spent hours playing a baseball simulation game1 where you could manage your team, develop the players and compete against others over the years (every day counted as a week in the game). Mitchell F Chan created an experiential artwork using a very similar concept.
This collection is a creative model of how NFTs can be more than static art.
The Boys of Summer by Mitchell F. Chan via Wild.xyz
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There will be 999 pieces which are generative 3D PFP (profile pictures) that represent the characters in the game. Having the NFT lets you connect your wallet to access the imaginary world, where you can make decisions that drive your character development.
Interesting facts:
Each token has an intrinsic potential, which is not immediately apparent to the collector.
In the quest to ‘win’ and become a professional baseball player, you’ll be asked to make a series of decisions about your character– your hitting, power, and other baseball-related traits, but also personal choices such as sleeping time, cleaning, and eating habits.
At the end of the game, collectors can assign their scores to their players as metadata.
Mitchell highlights three essential elements in today’s culture with this collection: PFPs, the quantification of self, and sports. As described by the artist, these three elements are critical to a participatory experience, as they bring rarities, personalities, and a fun and accessible entry point for collectors.
The Boys of Summer by Mitchell F Chan is a decision-making game and a market performance that uses data as the centerpiece of the whole experience.
Collection Size: 999
Allowlist spots: 50
Mint Price: 0.12 Eth
Release date: August 16, 2023
Mitchell isn’t new to exploring new forms of artistic expression in the digital realm. In 2017, he released Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility at InterAccess in Toronto2.
The artwork is significant not only for being one of the earliest NFT artworks to be exhibited and minted in a legacy art gallery, but also for imagining, in 2017, the ways that non-fungible tokens could advance the conceptualist project of separating the commodity form of an artwork from the experienced form. It also explored the ways the separation changes a collector's relationship to art.
Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility by Mitchell F. Chan.
Chan explored the generative coded medium in 2021 with the release of the LeWitt Generator Generator on Art Blocks.
Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #118 instructs executors to connect randomly-placed points with straight lines on a continuous surface of the wall. Art Blocks Project #118 imagines that seminal artwork executed on complex, algorithmically-generated walls.
LeWitt Generator Generator #46 by Mitchell F. Chan on Art Blocks.
Just a few days ago, I had the chance to chat with Mitchell on my Podcast. We had an exciting discussion about his art career, which started in 2006 and evolved from creating sculptures and art for public spaces to conceptual digital games3.
If you want to learn more about The Boys of Summer and Mitchell’s previous collections, listen below.
Would you like to get access to the allowlist? Follow the link below to participate in the exclusive allowlist spot. Remember, this is a unique link for Kaloh’s community members only.
The collection will be available on August 16 via Wild. I can’t wait to mint my character, play the game and see how my character attributes and potential develops.
Until next time,
- Kaloh
Baseball Mogul — https://www.sportsmogul.com/
Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility — https://chan.gallery/ikb/
Winslow Homer's Croquet Challenge — Buffalo AKG Art Museum
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