Democratizing on-chain creation
RMX.PARTY (🔀,🔀)RMX Presents: Choodle & its private beta launch at FWB FEST
Hey there! A version of this post was previously shared as part of an internal investor update, but now we want to share it with you. TL;DR, we’re working on a mobile onchain drawing utility called Choodle. We think you’ll love it. -Joe ♥( ˆ⌣ˆԅ)✨ So Much Depends on a Doodle ✨We’ve always been doodlers. In the margins of notebooks, on scraps of paper, or on the back of old receipts – doodles are pure spontaneous forms of expression that allow thoughts, often submerged and overlooked, to rise t...
RMX.PARTY (🔀,🔀)3 Ways Account Abstraction Can Make Web3 Better for Creators
Let’s be honest. The user experience of web3 is shit. Onboarding is intimidating. Crypto wallets are confusing, and transaction management is clunky. But there’s hope. With the innovation of account abstraction, enabled by ERC-4337, we’re seeing web3’s usability evolve into more familiar interfaces and user-friendly features. Account abstraction allows for a wider range of wallet account use cases on the Ethereum blockchain. This affects the democratization of on-chain creation in three pivot...
RMX.PARTY (🔀,🔀)An NFT by Any Other Name Is... A Prize!
Each week RMX.PARTY sources a meme template for our caption contest. You, our community submit captions, and the winner gets a prize. Sometimes it’s ETH, sometimes it’s an NFT, and soon it’ll be a minted remix. It’s all a big experiment meant to be loads of fun while we iterate and test product ideas. This is the very beginning of our product story, and we’re writing it every week we learn, test and experiment. Our mission is to support creators and their audiences as they explore new forms o...
RMX.PARTY (🔀,🔀)RMX Presents: Choodle & its private beta launch at FWB FEST
Hey there! A version of this post was previously shared as part of an internal investor update, but now we want to share it with you. TL;DR, we’re working on a mobile onchain drawing utility called Choodle. We think you’ll love it. -Joe ♥( ˆ⌣ˆԅ)✨ So Much Depends on a Doodle ✨We’ve always been doodlers. In the margins of notebooks, on scraps of paper, or on the back of old receipts – doodles are pure spontaneous forms of expression that allow thoughts, often submerged and overlooked, to rise t...
RMX.PARTY (🔀,🔀)3 Ways Account Abstraction Can Make Web3 Better for Creators
Let’s be honest. The user experience of web3 is shit. Onboarding is intimidating. Crypto wallets are confusing, and transaction management is clunky. But there’s hope. With the innovation of account abstraction, enabled by ERC-4337, we’re seeing web3’s usability evolve into more familiar interfaces and user-friendly features. Account abstraction allows for a wider range of wallet account use cases on the Ethereum blockchain. This affects the democratization of on-chain creation in three pivot...
RMX.PARTY (🔀,🔀)An NFT by Any Other Name Is... A Prize!
Each week RMX.PARTY sources a meme template for our caption contest. You, our community submit captions, and the winner gets a prize. Sometimes it’s ETH, sometimes it’s an NFT, and soon it’ll be a minted remix. It’s all a big experiment meant to be loads of fun while we iterate and test product ideas. This is the very beginning of our product story, and we’re writing it every week we learn, test and experiment. Our mission is to support creators and their audiences as they explore new forms o...
Democratizing on-chain creation
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Emmett Shine is a multi-hyphenate creative and serial co-founder who’s out-of-the-box thinking and keen eye for design has contributed to the success of countless projects, including Pattern Brands, Gin Lane, JaJa, Fallen Grape, LOLA, and of course RMX.PARTY. Emmett works closely with the RMX design team, led by Madeline Bouton and Paige Libadisos, and recently he shared the following thread detailing what’s currently inspiring him.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
The Internet Superhighway’s Accessibility Problem
What is on the internet is accessible to almost anyone, anywhere, at any moment.
A consequence of this reach is the ephemeral, niche, and sub-culture ennui from the perimeters of society is also accessible to almost anyone, anywhere, at any moment.
Expanding knowledge and community is great in many ways. But for those that seek safety from the spotlight, or prefer to trade in the fringe and the offbeat, this accessibility can turn a seemingly soft flame of a campfire into a global, four-alarm blaze overnight.
In addition to being accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any moment, it all feels the same. And maybe that’s because easily accessibility breeds homogeneity. The rise of apps and algorithms has provided (forced) much of what we see and interact with in the everyday.
As Priyanka Desi recently tweeted, Rene Girard's mimicry theory states, ‘If people imitate each other's desires, they may wind up desiring the very same things; and if they desire the same things, they may easily become rivals, as they reach for the same objects.’
Is it us or the ghosts in the machine imitating us imitating each other?
-
The internet wasn’t always colloquially called ‘the internet.’ In the ‘90s, there was a coalition pushing for the nomenclature for our new connection to the world to be ‘the information superhighway.’ Luckily, that terminology didn’t win. Yet, today, it does feel like we have internet superhighways - dominant social apps, monolithic search engines, and a handful of media platforms. In some ways the massive superhighways of today have given new life to the shadows and quiet corners of the internet, enabling fringe culture.
In the shadows under these digital eight-lane freeways are gray overpasses, dusty off-ramps, and where RMX likes to hang out.
Design Reveries of a Nonexistent Past
In thinking about design for RMX, the Greek term, Anemoia comes to mind. It means, ‘nostalgia for a time one has never known.’
I find myself often longing for what the internet promised to be. Even though I grew up online in chat rooms talking to friends and strangers, alone, staring at a screen in the dark — proud to have not gotten caught by the anxiety-inducing 56k dial-up modem’s scream …I still feel like in hindsight, I wasn’t there.
The early 90’s were an era driven by the pre-internet mantra of not being a ‘sell-out,’ all the while living in a world being sold-out. Grunge, an alternative rock genre and subculture unto itself, became the biggest selling form of music in the world. Chuck Klosterman in his 2022 book ‘The Nineties,’ called this ‘a period of communal cognitive dissonance.’
Read 3,751 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The Nineties: a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge iro...
The same happened for the internet. The homebrew computer club became the dot-com boom. Today, at the end of 2022, post-post-Covid, I find myself back on the computer at home, hours on end, sometimes not sure what day or time it is.
With RMX, I find myself reminiscing back on the ideals, aesthetics, and design of the pre-superhighway internet. I wanted to share some links that are helping me teleport between then, and now. All of the below, in one form or another, help inform how Paige, Madeline, and myself think of our visual language of expression at RMX:
Never taking ourselves too seriously, but being students of what came before. Having a perspective for everything we do, but also trying to have a good time.
Embracing that we are sometimes stuck in traffic on the Internet Superhighway, and other times hopping over the guardrail to do hoodrat shit with friends under the bridge.
…
Radical Friends by Ruth Catlow & Penny Rafferty
‘Friends are the original DAO. To be friends is a relation autonomous from corporations or states, a fugitive association. There is no Bureau of Friendship that could possibly centralize such organizations as these.’
This recently published book by Ruth Catlow & Penny Rafferty is a collection of essays and critical musing on what DAOs are, and can be. The authors wonderfully also touch on the historical importance of social groups, and the rebellious nature of friendship. We forget in Web3 that everything new was something first.
What DAOs become, who knows. But, I do know that I am here for decentralized groups of friends operating with ‘a punk spirit of networked collaboration.’ A lot of my personal connections within Web3 came through FWB (Friends with Benefits), an Artist DAO mentioned in Radical Friends.
Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technologies. In recent years DAOs have been heralded as a powerful stimulus for reshaping how value systems for interdependence and cooperation manifest themselves in arts organising. Radical Friends.
Cultural Tutor’s thread on Art Nouveau
In the glorious oozing mess that is Twitter today, one account that I love is The Cultural Tutor. While heavily leaning on a Greco-Roman influence, the account does a great job of tying the design (or lack thereof) of modern society all the way back to ancient times.
A recent thread focused on Art Nouveau, the turn of the century art and architectural movement formed in reaction to the rigidity of the times. The author writes, ‘Art Nouveau's distinctive flowing curves and shapes were an attempt to introduce something *new* into the stale world of design, in this case inspired by natural forms.’
They continue, ‘The second - and perhaps more interesting - influence on Art Nouveau was an anxiety about the impact of industrialization and mass-production on the arts. What had once been the sole remit of skilled individuals was now being democratized; art was being removed from the artist.’
As someone else alive at that time once said, ‘History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.’
Art Nouveau as an inspiration feels timely; it feels fresh, pertinent, even rebellious in our warm sea of sameness, (or ugliness).
Blackbird Spylane’s ‘Un-Grammable Hang Zones (U.G.H.Z.)’
In some ways, those that critique cultures are the most deeply in it. Blackbird Spyplane gives master classes on critiquing gorpcore-obsessed creative director jawns, while also curating the sub-tropes of the sub-culture.
Their recent article titled ‘In praise of Un-Grammable Hang Zones (U.G.H.Z.)’ highlights the sameness on so much of the internet superhighway today. And that anything that makes it onto the digital freeway, has essentially lost its uniqueness; it’s funk.
So what is cool and funky then?
The author writes,
‘Big saran-wrapped cookies studded with M&Ms for sale alongside enormous muffins with jumbo chocolate chips, board games and a little library of FUNKY and/or classic books, Second-run movie nights, or even, like, “Live Zydeco Thursdays”?? Slow internet / no internet, A hodgepodge of mismatched china / mismatched furniture possibly including a beanbag and an old couch, Maybe, like, a burlap coffee sack pinned to the wall next to a Japanese parasol as décor.’
However, if the aforementioned tastes are taken up by small cliques of UGHZ-ists, they had better stay off the superhighways themselves, less the next Tiktok trend starts with a Zydeco audio sample.
In praise of Un-Grammable Hang Zones (U.G.H.Z.)
The Big Flat Now by Jack Self
The BBSP article reminds me of one of my favorite essays entitled The Big Flat Now.
As a contemporary metaphor, flatness describes how the invention of the Internet has restructured global society. At its origin, its promise was a social revolution founded on intersectional equality and universal democracy. It is our contention that that promise may yet be fully realized.
Written at the end of 2018, it was one of the first (non-non mainstream?) articles that posited anything that is on the internet is not subculture anymore. It cannot be. That’s the counter to BBSP’s article - to be un-grammable you can’t even be online. You have to be under the overpass, in the shadows. Forever.
Once you put anything online, it morphs into the gray goo of the ‘big flat now’ that is Everything Everywhere All at Once (a very Blackbird Spyplane un-grammably grammable film).
From Radical Friends to The Big Flat Now, there is a dancing throughline of what is punk, what is not punk.
Fucked Up & Photocopied’ by Bryan Ray Turcotte and Christopher T. Miller
It reminds me of one of my favorite books, one that is dog-eared and full of post-it notes in my house, ‘Fucked Up & Photocopied’ by Bryan Ray Turcotte and Christopher T. Miller.
In the early 2000s, I used to have a t-shirt / skateboarding company, LOLA, with my childhood friends. Sitting on a couch, shirtless, with a mixture of sweat and arm scratches after skateboarding or who knows what else, we’d move our sewing machine and bulky computer, share cold beers wrapped in paper bags and go through this book, over and over. We reminisced on a scene that preceded us, but that we gravitated towards.
The DIY nature of punk zines feel once again relevant when increasingly we are algorithmically being squished together.
Angelfire, Geocities, & the .Gif
Similarly, while gifs are as Boomer normcore (shout out to K-hole) nowadays as emojis in advertising, there is still some magical fairy dust sprinkle fun to this red-headed media format. Gifs harken back to the Myspace predecessor world of teenage expression of Angelfire and Geocities from the late 90s and early 2000s, such as this gem of the internet, Cameron’s World.
🌍 A web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of GeoCities.
While we’re inspired by the likes of GifCities, this It’s Nice That’s article, ‘The creative legacy of Gifs: Past, present and future’ by Jenny Brewer and design by Nichole Shinn is a contemporary take on the lasting legacy of the gif.
When BBSP shows what is ‘un-grammable,’ his chosen aesthetic mirrors what many post Internet Superhighway digital artists, like Petra Cortright, have been exploring, and expressing for years.
In Conclusion
In Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 1933 book, ‘In Praise of Shadows,’ he writes, ‘The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.’
Read 3,164 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. An essay on aesthetics by the Japanese novelist, this book explores architecture, jade, ...
Sometimes you need shadows. When your eyes adapt, what you see, away from the bright lights, is beautiful.
It can be fun to play in the light, but subversiveness can still thrive within the shadows of our day-to-day communication.
That’s what I love about the fucked-up and photocopied nature of Web3 that we are trying to envision and create.
With the bright lights momentarily gone from our space, we’re forced, for the time being, to live in a dark room again, and maybe that’s not so bad.
-Emmett
Thank you to Madeline Bouton, Paige Libadisos, Joe Kelly, & Chris Matthews
**********************************************************************************
Follow @emmettshine and @RMX_PARTY on Twitter and come join our community in Geneva.
Be part of our genesis mint! To learn more, visit RMX.PARTY.
RMX product design and identity led by Paige Libadisos and Madeline Bouton. Banner by Madeline Bouton.
Emmett Shine is a multi-hyphenate creative and serial co-founder who’s out-of-the-box thinking and keen eye for design has contributed to the success of countless projects, including Pattern Brands, Gin Lane, JaJa, Fallen Grape, LOLA, and of course RMX.PARTY. Emmett works closely with the RMX design team, led by Madeline Bouton and Paige Libadisos, and recently he shared the following thread detailing what’s currently inspiring him.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
The Internet Superhighway’s Accessibility Problem
What is on the internet is accessible to almost anyone, anywhere, at any moment.
A consequence of this reach is the ephemeral, niche, and sub-culture ennui from the perimeters of society is also accessible to almost anyone, anywhere, at any moment.
Expanding knowledge and community is great in many ways. But for those that seek safety from the spotlight, or prefer to trade in the fringe and the offbeat, this accessibility can turn a seemingly soft flame of a campfire into a global, four-alarm blaze overnight.
In addition to being accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any moment, it all feels the same. And maybe that’s because easily accessibility breeds homogeneity. The rise of apps and algorithms has provided (forced) much of what we see and interact with in the everyday.
As Priyanka Desi recently tweeted, Rene Girard's mimicry theory states, ‘If people imitate each other's desires, they may wind up desiring the very same things; and if they desire the same things, they may easily become rivals, as they reach for the same objects.’
Is it us or the ghosts in the machine imitating us imitating each other?
-
The internet wasn’t always colloquially called ‘the internet.’ In the ‘90s, there was a coalition pushing for the nomenclature for our new connection to the world to be ‘the information superhighway.’ Luckily, that terminology didn’t win. Yet, today, it does feel like we have internet superhighways - dominant social apps, monolithic search engines, and a handful of media platforms. In some ways the massive superhighways of today have given new life to the shadows and quiet corners of the internet, enabling fringe culture.
In the shadows under these digital eight-lane freeways are gray overpasses, dusty off-ramps, and where RMX likes to hang out.
Design Reveries of a Nonexistent Past
In thinking about design for RMX, the Greek term, Anemoia comes to mind. It means, ‘nostalgia for a time one has never known.’
I find myself often longing for what the internet promised to be. Even though I grew up online in chat rooms talking to friends and strangers, alone, staring at a screen in the dark — proud to have not gotten caught by the anxiety-inducing 56k dial-up modem’s scream …I still feel like in hindsight, I wasn’t there.
The early 90’s were an era driven by the pre-internet mantra of not being a ‘sell-out,’ all the while living in a world being sold-out. Grunge, an alternative rock genre and subculture unto itself, became the biggest selling form of music in the world. Chuck Klosterman in his 2022 book ‘The Nineties,’ called this ‘a period of communal cognitive dissonance.’
Read 3,751 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The Nineties: a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge iro...
The same happened for the internet. The homebrew computer club became the dot-com boom. Today, at the end of 2022, post-post-Covid, I find myself back on the computer at home, hours on end, sometimes not sure what day or time it is.
With RMX, I find myself reminiscing back on the ideals, aesthetics, and design of the pre-superhighway internet. I wanted to share some links that are helping me teleport between then, and now. All of the below, in one form or another, help inform how Paige, Madeline, and myself think of our visual language of expression at RMX:
Never taking ourselves too seriously, but being students of what came before. Having a perspective for everything we do, but also trying to have a good time.
Embracing that we are sometimes stuck in traffic on the Internet Superhighway, and other times hopping over the guardrail to do hoodrat shit with friends under the bridge.
…
Radical Friends by Ruth Catlow & Penny Rafferty
‘Friends are the original DAO. To be friends is a relation autonomous from corporations or states, a fugitive association. There is no Bureau of Friendship that could possibly centralize such organizations as these.’
This recently published book by Ruth Catlow & Penny Rafferty is a collection of essays and critical musing on what DAOs are, and can be. The authors wonderfully also touch on the historical importance of social groups, and the rebellious nature of friendship. We forget in Web3 that everything new was something first.
What DAOs become, who knows. But, I do know that I am here for decentralized groups of friends operating with ‘a punk spirit of networked collaboration.’ A lot of my personal connections within Web3 came through FWB (Friends with Benefits), an Artist DAO mentioned in Radical Friends.
Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technologies. In recent years DAOs have been heralded as a powerful stimulus for reshaping how value systems for interdependence and cooperation manifest themselves in arts organising. Radical Friends.
Cultural Tutor’s thread on Art Nouveau
In the glorious oozing mess that is Twitter today, one account that I love is The Cultural Tutor. While heavily leaning on a Greco-Roman influence, the account does a great job of tying the design (or lack thereof) of modern society all the way back to ancient times.
A recent thread focused on Art Nouveau, the turn of the century art and architectural movement formed in reaction to the rigidity of the times. The author writes, ‘Art Nouveau's distinctive flowing curves and shapes were an attempt to introduce something *new* into the stale world of design, in this case inspired by natural forms.’
They continue, ‘The second - and perhaps more interesting - influence on Art Nouveau was an anxiety about the impact of industrialization and mass-production on the arts. What had once been the sole remit of skilled individuals was now being democratized; art was being removed from the artist.’
As someone else alive at that time once said, ‘History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.’
Art Nouveau as an inspiration feels timely; it feels fresh, pertinent, even rebellious in our warm sea of sameness, (or ugliness).
Blackbird Spylane’s ‘Un-Grammable Hang Zones (U.G.H.Z.)’
In some ways, those that critique cultures are the most deeply in it. Blackbird Spyplane gives master classes on critiquing gorpcore-obsessed creative director jawns, while also curating the sub-tropes of the sub-culture.
Their recent article titled ‘In praise of Un-Grammable Hang Zones (U.G.H.Z.)’ highlights the sameness on so much of the internet superhighway today. And that anything that makes it onto the digital freeway, has essentially lost its uniqueness; it’s funk.
So what is cool and funky then?
The author writes,
‘Big saran-wrapped cookies studded with M&Ms for sale alongside enormous muffins with jumbo chocolate chips, board games and a little library of FUNKY and/or classic books, Second-run movie nights, or even, like, “Live Zydeco Thursdays”?? Slow internet / no internet, A hodgepodge of mismatched china / mismatched furniture possibly including a beanbag and an old couch, Maybe, like, a burlap coffee sack pinned to the wall next to a Japanese parasol as décor.’
However, if the aforementioned tastes are taken up by small cliques of UGHZ-ists, they had better stay off the superhighways themselves, less the next Tiktok trend starts with a Zydeco audio sample.
In praise of Un-Grammable Hang Zones (U.G.H.Z.)
The Big Flat Now by Jack Self
The BBSP article reminds me of one of my favorite essays entitled The Big Flat Now.
As a contemporary metaphor, flatness describes how the invention of the Internet has restructured global society. At its origin, its promise was a social revolution founded on intersectional equality and universal democracy. It is our contention that that promise may yet be fully realized.
Written at the end of 2018, it was one of the first (non-non mainstream?) articles that posited anything that is on the internet is not subculture anymore. It cannot be. That’s the counter to BBSP’s article - to be un-grammable you can’t even be online. You have to be under the overpass, in the shadows. Forever.
Once you put anything online, it morphs into the gray goo of the ‘big flat now’ that is Everything Everywhere All at Once (a very Blackbird Spyplane un-grammably grammable film).
From Radical Friends to The Big Flat Now, there is a dancing throughline of what is punk, what is not punk.
Fucked Up & Photocopied’ by Bryan Ray Turcotte and Christopher T. Miller
It reminds me of one of my favorite books, one that is dog-eared and full of post-it notes in my house, ‘Fucked Up & Photocopied’ by Bryan Ray Turcotte and Christopher T. Miller.
In the early 2000s, I used to have a t-shirt / skateboarding company, LOLA, with my childhood friends. Sitting on a couch, shirtless, with a mixture of sweat and arm scratches after skateboarding or who knows what else, we’d move our sewing machine and bulky computer, share cold beers wrapped in paper bags and go through this book, over and over. We reminisced on a scene that preceded us, but that we gravitated towards.
The DIY nature of punk zines feel once again relevant when increasingly we are algorithmically being squished together.
Angelfire, Geocities, & the .Gif
Similarly, while gifs are as Boomer normcore (shout out to K-hole) nowadays as emojis in advertising, there is still some magical fairy dust sprinkle fun to this red-headed media format. Gifs harken back to the Myspace predecessor world of teenage expression of Angelfire and Geocities from the late 90s and early 2000s, such as this gem of the internet, Cameron’s World.
🌍 A web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of GeoCities.
While we’re inspired by the likes of GifCities, this It’s Nice That’s article, ‘The creative legacy of Gifs: Past, present and future’ by Jenny Brewer and design by Nichole Shinn is a contemporary take on the lasting legacy of the gif.
When BBSP shows what is ‘un-grammable,’ his chosen aesthetic mirrors what many post Internet Superhighway digital artists, like Petra Cortright, have been exploring, and expressing for years.
In Conclusion
In Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 1933 book, ‘In Praise of Shadows,’ he writes, ‘The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.’
Read 3,164 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. An essay on aesthetics by the Japanese novelist, this book explores architecture, jade, ...
Sometimes you need shadows. When your eyes adapt, what you see, away from the bright lights, is beautiful.
It can be fun to play in the light, but subversiveness can still thrive within the shadows of our day-to-day communication.
That’s what I love about the fucked-up and photocopied nature of Web3 that we are trying to envision and create.
With the bright lights momentarily gone from our space, we’re forced, for the time being, to live in a dark room again, and maybe that’s not so bad.
-Emmett
Thank you to Madeline Bouton, Paige Libadisos, Joe Kelly, & Chris Matthews
**********************************************************************************
Follow @emmettshine and @RMX_PARTY on Twitter and come join our community in Geneva.
Be part of our genesis mint! To learn more, visit RMX.PARTY.
RMX product design and identity led by Paige Libadisos and Madeline Bouton. Banner by Madeline Bouton.
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