Go to shadowsbook.xyz/mint & choose your NFT tier:

Silver - 0.05 ETH | NFT + Physical Book + Digital Access

Bronze - 0.02 ETH | Digital Only - NFT + eBook + Audiobook*

Gold - Auctions | 1/1 Art + 1/1 Books

All 1/1 artworks in the Shadows of the Gods collection are minted within my custom smart contract (including royalties). OpenSea is simply the interface we are using to manage the auction mechanics for the collection:

https://opensea.io/de-DE/collection/death-bringer-book

All Shadows of the Gods auctions are set to begin at 15h CET | 2pm GMT on Thursday, December 15; they will end at 15h CET | 2pm GMT on Tuesday, December 20.

Step 2 - Mint Your NFT

Connect your Ethereum wallet via the Connect button in the top right corner of the site.

Click the MINT button & then approve the mint fee + gas in your wallet when prompted. You can mint 1 Silver NFT per transaction & up to 10 Bronze NFTs per transaction.

Stay on the Mint page until the transaction is complete—you’ll see a green link to Etherscan appear after you’ve minted successfully.

If you minted a Silver NFT, the code to claim your physical copy of Death-Bringer will also be assigned at this step!

Step 3 - Download Your eBook | All NFT Tiers

Now, go to the Library page: shadowsbook.xyz/library.

This section is token-gated; it is where you can securely download your eBook & audiobook episodes. The full audiobook will be available in January; you can download Chapter 1 now.

Detailed instructions for adding the eBook to your Kindle & other devices are included at the bottom of the Library page. In the meantime, here are a few helpful hints :)

• The AZW3 file format is specifically for Kindle devices.

• The EPUB file is formatted for all Apple & Android devices

• If you read on the Kindle App via your phone or iPad, download the EPUB :)

• You can also read the EPUB on your computer - I recommend Adobe Digital Editions, which is free for both PC & Mac.

• If you need a MOBI file, use the Contact form on the site to let me know!

Additional Details | Gold + Silver + PreSale Collectors

If your NFT tier includes a physical book, the Library will also show you:

1. Your personal claim code

2. A free shipping code

3. A link to order your copy of Death-Bringer for free on my Shopify site. Step-by-step ordering instructions are below!

Step 4 - Order Your Physical Book | Gold + Silver + PreSale

1. Go to shadowsbook.xyz & connect your Metamask wallet.

2. Go to the Library page - you'll see the Death-Bringer book at the top of the page.

3. Click the "Get Your Code" button.

4. Copy your code and then click the "Claim Now" button - you'll be directed to my Shopify site to order. Note: We've learned that Shopify & Brave are not friends, so if you're using Brave, you need to copy the Shopify link to a different browser.

5. In Shopify, click the "Buy Now" button to add the book to your cart.

6. On the ordering page, fill in the address you'd like the book shipped to.

7. Enter your personal discount code (from the Library) & click Apply. Then enter your shipping code for free worldwide shipping in the same box & click Apply again.

8. Click the "Continue to shipping" button & select your shipping method, then click "Continue to payment."

9. Review and complete your order - you’ll receive a confirmation email if you include an email address with your order.

10. Congratulations - your copy of Death-Bringer is on its way to your door!

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"Into the Gorge" is the 1st piece of my limited-edition NFT series "Shadows of the Gods." This standalone short story + original art free mint is the proof-of-concept for my full book launch this fall, so you're doing me a huge favor by taking part!

Minting will take place on my shiny new project site: shadowsbook.xyz.

https://www.shadowsbook.xyz/

The Shadows Book site is a fully custom build by @AriaWorkshop: a custom token-gated dApp platform on Ethereum, powered by my own gas-optimized smart contract.

Minting goes live on Wednesday, July 27 at 12pm UTC / 14.00h CET / 8:00am EST.

We've set a limit of 2 tokens per wallet & there is a max supply set, so be sure to mint early so you don't miss out! As a bonus: everyone who mints will automatically be included on the allowlist for the drop of Book One: The Death Bringer this fall (wallet snapshot TBA).

Here's how it will work:

• Connect your Ethereum wallet to my project site

• Mint up to 2 tokens for 0 ETH + gas fees

• Upon minting, your NFT unlocks the site’s token-gated Library

• The Library includes eBook AND audio downloads in Kindle/Apple Books/Spotify-friendly formats

• And of course you’ll be able to view the NFT in your wallet on OpenSea!

My goal here is to deliver a simple, functional, no BS launch. The art + story are the utility. There’s no DAO, no token, no investors. It’s just me, a solo creator & the artists, developer & designers who decided to collaborate with me to make all this happen.

No one ever accomplishes anything worthwhile alone, & there's an amazing team behind this project. Each one is an incredible creator in their own right & I can't believe how lucky I am to work with these people!

• The original art for “Into the Gorge” was created by the amazingly talented & unbelievably kind @CR24TI7E.

• @AriaWorkshop is our developer extraordinaire & none of this would exist without his dedication & hard work!

• The “Into the Gorge” audio episode features the professional voice-acting talents of my college roommate/best friend @OccupyClaire!

• Of course, it's not really an audio-book without music! @JETS0N aka Mr. Bourland is creating the music that will bring Shadows of the Gods to life.

• You probably know @NFTerryBain as an artist; he's also a professional book designer & publishing industry veteran who's designing the physical books available to collect this fall.

• Last but not least, @LINK_artwork is the incredible web designer helping make sure our mint site shines!

If you like what we're building & want to see NFT books/publishing succeed, it would be really cool if you'd share the mint details with your friends here. I've also created a Twitter group for friends of the project where I share news/reveals/insider updates - send me a DM if you want in!

-- M.S. Bourland / @msbourland

It does not reflect well on me that one of the first questions in my mind after I quit drinking was: “What will people think?” I became so obsessed with mitigating this public opinion problem that the answer, when it arrived, seemed self-evident: “Just don’t tell anyone.” So I didn’t. It wasn’t until I had been pretending to drink alcohol—at business dinners, industry conferences and corporate cocktail hours—for nearly two years that I realized things had probably gotten a little out of hand. 

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Let’s begin with some brief credentialing. For more than a decade, alcohol was the primary coping mechanism I used to manage memories of childhood abuse, discomfort over failed relationships, and the crushing stress of adulthood. I understand the numbing, sanitizing, anesthetizing function of alcohol as well as anyone. I needed it, that satisfying mix of chemical consolation and temporary amnesia that always, always took my pain away—even if it had to knock me senseless to do it. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton once said in an interview: “One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.” No, of course not, Anne—that’s why one drinks vodka on the rocks. 

I understand the numbing, sanitizing, anesthetizing function of alcohol as well as anyone. I needed it, that satisfying mix of chemical consolation and temporary amnesia that always, always took my pain away.

I started drinking for real in college, as one does. As the years passed, I progressed from college student/restaurant server to graduate student/bartender, then to my first “salary and benefits” job in corporate pharma. While the bartending years surely honed my drinking skills, it was the corporate job, in an industry notorious for its sales-driven “work hard-play harder” culture, that ushered me into the professional leagues of high-functioning alcoholism.

The higher up the ladder I climbed, the more stress I absorbed and the more I drank. Within that world, it is impossible to over-exaggerate just how much corporate politicking, information sharing and even decision making happened at the bar. That was where we met: after the meeting, before dinner, after dinner, at the end of the night, while waiting for the plane. We drank to entertain the customer, close the deal, prepare for the meeting, debrief the meeting, curb the jet lag, take the edge off, pass the time. After I quit drinking, I knew it would be a challenge to keep my sobriety a secret in such a booze-soaked setting, but—bizarrely—I couldn’t see a better option.

I had no evidence to suggest that my decision to avoid alcohol would be met with sympathy, let alone identification. I have always been very secretive about my moments of sadness; it’s a practice I learned early in life and never quite abandoned. As I grew older, I discovered that alcohol is what successful people use to deal with complicated emotions: a technique consistently modeled by every one of my corporate mentors. One of the executives I worked with closely at the time had been known to down four top-shelf gin and tonics during the course of dinner and then chase them with an ouzo shot as he paid the check. No judgment—I had been on exactly the same trajectory, so much so that he often joked that I would take his job one day.  

As I grew older, I discovered that alcohol is what successful people use to deal with complicated emotions: a technique consistently modeled by every one of my corporate mentors.

By the time I quit drinking, I had spent half a decade building a career from the delightful, character-building experience of being the youngest and often, only, woman in the room. An abrupt swerve into sobriety would tarnish my image, raise questions about my “cultural fit,” undermine my already tenuous ability to belong. Loss aversion is a powerful force; at the time, telling a few dry little lies seemed like an entirely noble and reasonable sacrifice to make for my career.

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Since corporate drinking culture is relatively predictable, there were really only a few scenarios to navigate. In situations where I was lucky enough to be able to order my own drink, without an audience, my go-to was either tonic water with lime, which still kind of smells like a G&T, or alcohol-free beer, which is disgusting, but looks exactly like real beer once served. Ordering a drink as part of a group, at dinner or at the bar, required far more complex machinations. In general terms, the goal was to order something that 1) didn’t scream “mocktail” when I said it out loud and 2) looked plausibly like something a grownup would drink.

Loss aversion is a powerful force; at the time, telling a few dry little lies seemed like an entirely noble and reasonable sacrifice to make for my career.

Before I quit drinking, I had no idea that other people could care so much about the liquid in someone else’s glass, but my God, did they ever—even when they thought it was alcohol. I learned to cheerfully deflect the inevitable comments from coworkers whenever I chose poorly and a mocktail rendition of Chiquita Banana’s headdress showed up on the bar in front of me. It was preferable to be thought of as someone who had shitty taste in alcohol than to be known as someone who didn’t drink at all.  Taste—in any sense of the word—was no longer a factor in my dry new world.

As Jia Tolentino points out, “it’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible.” It was out of precisely such a sense of obligation that I began to analyze alcohol-free cocktail lists like they were the lost pages of a sacred text. I worked out my sobriety in fear and trembling, ordering drinks with embarrassing, botanically suggestive names like Mosquito, Pink Chia, or Secret Garden.

I began to analyze alcohol-free cocktail lists like they were the lost pages of a sacred text. I worked out my sobriety in fear and trembling, ordering drinks with embarrassing, botanically suggestive names like Mosquito, Pink Chia, or Secret Garden.

In fact, I once suffered through four consecutive Secret Gardens in quick succession when a male marketing executive made it his personal mission to get me drunk at a company holiday party. (He never realized his failure, as he succeeded in getting himself drunk in the process.) I endured an entire purgatory of “pink drinks” in those years—mocktails that looked like menstruation in a glass, made with jejune ingredients like grenadine, raspberries, Sprite. For a girl who once drank Grey Goose on the rocks on the regular, who had firmly believed in the sanitizing function of alcohol, it was hard to stomach.

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According to the Mayo Clinic, “Heavy or high-risk drinking [for women] is defined as more than 3 drinks on any day or more than 7 drinks a week.” I laughed out loud the first time I read that. Once upon a time, a normal Saturday required 6 to 8 drinks to get me from brunch to bedtime. Even now, I take a sort of perverse pride in remembering that at my alcoholic peak, I could manage a week’s worth of drinking in a single day—that is, by Mayo Clinic standards. 

In those days, outside my working hours, I was constantly thinking about where my next drink was coming from—brain waves continually quivering on a secret frequency, like the kind of low-level electricity that an appliance pulls when it’s turned off but still plugged in. I can remember, with distressing vividness, the flutter of sheer panic I used to feel when I wasn’t sure there was enough alcohol in the house to get me through the night, or when a server disappeared just as my drink was starting to get low. To me, that constant experience of fear—uncontrollable, senseless, looping—was the worst part of being a full-blown alcoholic, worse even than the blackouts and the hangovers and the vomit. 

To me, that constant experience of fear—uncontrollable, senseless, looping—was the worst part of being a full-blown alcoholic, worse even than the blackouts and the hangovers and the vomit.

By the time I was nearing my thirtieth birthday, I had begun attempting to gently de-risk my alcohol dependence without actually acknowledging its existence. I had more or less stopped drinking liquor; I stopped keeping wine at home; I started drinking from the hotel minibar on business trips instead of meeting colleagues at the bar. I had come to accept my drinking habits in the same way that you think about a mildly sexist great-uncle at your wedding: a necessary but terribly embarrassing presence, which you hope everyone else will be too drunk to notice.   

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Sobriety is a hard thing to talk about publicly without coming across as sanctimonious. Women in particular, especially when they write about themselves, are supposed to be self-deprecating, snarky, homely. To take oneself too seriously is a cardinal sin. We are supposed to leave the moral meanings to David Brooks, the tidy endings to Disney+. We are also not supposed to make people uncomfortable, and recovering alcoholics make other people deeply uncomfortable, in a variety of ways that are both psychologically revealing and very funny.

I can only assume that Americans have been so frequently accosted by the “lifestyle” abstinence of vegans and the “non-celiac but still gluten-free” that any phrase beginning with “I don’t eat...” or “I don’t drink…” produces an immediate traumatic response. In the US, if I happen to let it slip that I don’t drink alcohol, my hosts typically begin twitching involuntarily. They seem to be bracing themselves for a Goop-sponsored upper-middle-white-class PSA, when all I really want is a glass of water and to not be asked if I’m pregnant.

Sobriety is a hard thing to talk about publicly without coming across as sanctimonious. To take oneself too seriously is a cardinal sin.

I think people worry primarily that recovering alcoholics are going to tell them they should drink less. The truth is, drunks in glass houses generally know better than to throw stones. When it comes to my sobriety, I don’t have an evangelical bone in my body. I’ve never attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting; I couldn’t tell you a thing about the famous Steps except for the fact that there are Twelve of them, which seems like too many to remember for people who have destroyed essential brain cells through years of binge-drinking.  One of the AA Traditions states, “Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.” It’s a noble goal, for sure, but it isn’t exactly my vibe. 

People don’t usually quit drinking because they want to, or because sobriety is a super fun, trendy thing that lots of people are trying, like paleo or Peloton.

What I do feel compelled to say is this: if someone you know mentions that they don’t drink, or they’re not drinking right now—especially if that person happens to be a woman under the age of 45—that’s a perfect opportunity to practice empathy and keep your curiosity to yourself. People don’t usually quit drinking because they want to, or because sobriety is a super fun, trendy thing that lots of people are trying, like paleo or Peloton. Whenever someone asks me why I don’t drink, I’m always tempted to reply, in my most Southern-saccharine tone, “Oh honey, I’m a raging alcoholic.” The truth, like karma, can be a bitch.

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If I seemed the same on the outside, I thought, no one need ever know what was happening inside.

All these stereotypes and imagined scenarios coalesced into my decision not to tell anyone in my work universe that I had quit drinking. I had no illusions about how cruel my peers could be if they found out I was battling a substance abuse disorder; I was desperate to hold onto even the scraps of the professional status I had worked so hard for. If I seemed the same on the outside, I thought, no one need ever know what was happening inside. It was an impossible mission, because remaking my relationship to alcohol had very little to do with managing the “what” and “when” and “how much” of my drinking habits, and everything to do with facing up to why I was drinking—and then learning how to live with those hard truths.

Remaking my relationship to alcohol had very little to do with managing the “what” and “when” and “how much” of my drinking habits, and everything to do with facing up to why I was drinking.

The story of the incident that finally convinced me to quit drinking once and for all is one that I can’t share, because it doesn’t belong only to me. It must suffice to say that there are moments in our lives that pull back the veil to show us the hidden mechanisms inside ourselves. In one such moment, I saw a foreshadowing—the tiniest beginning—of the damage and loss of everything that I love most in this world, all of it rooted in the influence of something I had already begun to hate. Days later, in early January 2018, I poured my last drink. 

In “Four Quartets” T.S. Eliot writes: “Say that the end precedes the beginning, / And the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end. / And all is always now.” My last drink was a Gordon’s Gin & Tonic in the can, bought at the supermarket on my way home from work. My decade-long love affair with alcohol culminated in as stylish and radiant a manner as it had begun, back in my college days—with a cheap drink in a tin can. Goodnight, gin, I thought—goodnight and goodbye.

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The withdrawal process was short but excruciating; the grieving process was longer and angry. No one tells you that you work through the stages of grief when you walk away from a decade-long relationship with alcohol, but I can assure you that I did. Once, walking home from work on a warm spring night, I started crying on the street as I passed a cafe filled with people drinking wine at their sidewalk tables. “That will never be me again,” I thought. The word “never” is one of the most powerful in the English language, because it implies a kind of death. To “never” drink again—it felt like the death of the person I had been for my entire adult, professional life. 

No one tells you that you work through the stages of grief when you walk away from a decade-long relationship with alcohol, but I can assure you that I did.

The charming, competent corporate communications professional who always had a drink in her hand, who had closed down the bar more times than she could—literally—remember: she was suddenly no more.  More accurately, it was like she had been woken from a long coma. I had to relearn how to manage my stress, deal with family, plan a holiday, even navigate a menu. Because everything had once been an occasion to drink, life now seemed to consist of an endless series of sobriety tests. The milestones began to accumulate, slowly, painfully, absurdly—first sober wedding, first sober trans-Atlantic flight, first business trip, first summer vacation, first sober Christmas.  

“Our days are links in a chain, connecting past and present and future,” I wrote in the first days of my sobriety. “Our choices make us, not only who we are, but who we become.”

Eventually, I did acknowledge the fact that “convincing my coworkers that I’m the same high-functioning alcoholic I always was” is not the kind of goal that a healthy life is organized around. In time, I came to understand that rewiring my relationship to alcohol meant rethinking every aspect of my life. “Our days are links in a chain, connecting past and present and future,” I wrote in the first days of my sobriety. “Our choices make us, not only who we are, but who we become.” Two years after I got sober, I left my corporate job and started writing full-time. I also stopped telling dry little lies—but then, you knew that part already.

FIN

Virtual reality art is on the rise, perhaps accelerated by the pandemic—that collective global experience in which entire years of our lives have been molded and contorted by fear, disease and loneliness. Yet VR is still only a sliver of the overall NFT art market; for example, KnownOrigin.io currently lists only 107 items for sale in the category. We’re used to seeing art that shows us the world outside ourselves. It’s far more rare to discover art that seeks to show us the worlds inside ourselves.

Enter “Astro Dreams” — a collection of fourteen virtual reality experiences paired with three-dimensional music. The series is the result of the combined creative powers of UK-based visual artist Nygilia McClain and Haitian-American composer and producer Phinestro. Each piece is a multi-faceted symphony of light and sound—a dynamic sensory exploration in which every element is perfectly, literally in sync. It can be difficult to capture the essence of art in motion, because every piece is a journey taken in real time. Still, it seems worthwhile to try, because “Astro Dreams” feels utterly unlike any other NFT collection I’ve discovered so far.

Each piece is a multi-faceted symphony of light and sound—a dynamic sensory exploration in which every element is perfectly, literally in sync.

The visual composition of “Astro Dreams” is painterly, characterized by organic shapes, curves and angles; there are no glitches or harshness, and the sense of motion within each dream is sweeping, weightless—often swift but never chaotic. The color work is bold, jewel, neon without being hallucinogenic; the palette is bright yet soothing, toned to perfection. Specific elements appear across the dreams; each piece has a distinguishable entry point, often a circular or spiraling portal followed by dense walls or clouds of pigment, gem-like stepping stones, geometric shapes resembling architectural blueprints. Deconstructed images of nature also recur: prismatic rainbows, flickering lightning, whirling snowflakes, rivers made of liquid light. In particular, “Falling in Heaven” is so coated with stars that it feels like floating inside an incandescent constellation.

How do you build a dream? I don’t typically discuss a collection with the artist(s) before or during my writing process, but in this case I asked Ny to share the technique used to create the visuals of Astro Dreams. She told me that the dreams were brought to life with the Tiltbrush program, which allowed her to paint and animate in three dimensions while wearing an Oculus Quest 2 headset. In parallel, Phinestro composed original three-dimensional audio tracks to match the kinetic journey that a viewer takes within each dream. Pop on a pair of stereo headphones to listen to “Soaring Magician” and you’ll immediately realize the masterful precision of the auditory echoes, fades and transitions as you drift through walls or down spiraling tunnels. To be inside one of the “Astro Dreams” is to find yourself immersed in a melodic, kaleidoscopic landscape of sound and light, to fly, to float, to be freed from the constraints of gravity and the laws of physics.

Pop on a pair of stereo headphones and you’ll immediately realize the masterful precision of the auditory echoes, fades and transitions as you drift through walls or down spiraling tunnels.

A silent, glowing figure waits at the heart of each of the dreams—beings of light, wisdom, mystery, their faces obscured. They are regal, powerful; they wear their hair like crowns and diadems; they are adorned with glowing braids, horns, haloes, wings, feathered capes, masks. These dreamers are one with their world, not inhabitants or colonists “placed” there by the hand of the artist—they are the core, the soul of each dream. These figurative elements of “Astro Dreams” are intentionally surreal, Neo-expressionist in both technique and reference.

There are touches of Basquiat to be found here; the distinctive three-peaked crown the dreamer wears in “I am Forever” is a clear homage. But I also found myself thinking of Ralph Ellison’s 1953 novel The Invisible Man, where the protagonist says: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination.” In this context, the “Astro Dreams” collection is a kind of reimagining and taking back control of the house of mirrors, removing the distortions to show a kind of beauty that is so often, still, made invisible by a refusal to see.

Creative work within the genres of Afro-fantasy and Afro-futurism manifests a belief in the power of the future, a belief that is simultaneously rooted in the trauma of the past. Consider, for a moment, the pain woven into the deepest levels of the Afro-diasporic experience: the history of being made “other” by force, of having every scrap of  physical and emotional personhood stripped away. When a people has been so brutally cut off from their past, is it not inevitable that they would seek refuge in dreams of the future? Ytasha L. Womack describes Afro-futurism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation,” while Ingrid LaFleur calls it “a way of imagining possible futures through a Black cultural lens.”

Afro-fantasy is a distinctive form of world-building, continuously directed by the Black speculative imagination and its tradition of magical realism. This kind of creative work—the imagining of a future possible world—requires both optimism and fierce courage. For artists working in the Afro-fantasy genre, it seems necessarily linked to the choice to reclaim stolen, long-withheld power: the power to imagine a different kind of future and to create their own stories about that future.

Over the last weeks, the figures within the “Astro Dreams” have become my nightly companions. That is how I know that they are travelers of light indeed, something like spirit guides, leading me on my own path toward the land of sleep. Again and again, I returned to their light-particle, sound-wave cosmos as I waited for my own dreams, never certain what I’d find on the other side of that veil. Insomniacs learn to make peace with the night, to type out aphorisms and essays (perhaps even ones like these) in the dark, using the Notes app of a phone set to Bedtime Mode hours ago.  But we all do eventually have to sleep, to confront the state of our psyches within the dream state, on the other side of the veil of consciousness. And in those long hours spent both seeking and avoiding sleep, it comforted me to be able to seek refuge in the dreams of others.

Ultimately, the “Astro Dreams” collection is fierce, optimistic, pure-hearted art that is reaching for something big and beautiful beyond itself.  Each of the fourteen pieces feels like its own dynamic, multi-dimensional expression of the Afro-fantasy vision: unique, personal, expectant. The depth and complexity of the worldbuilding is also an incredible collaborative accomplishment, unlike anything I have seen in the NFT space so far. With the creation of “Astro Dreams,” these artists have given us a fully-realized experience of an alternate universe, a complete and deeply intentional cosmos.

The “Astro Dreams” collection is fierce, optimistic, pure-hearted art that is reaching for something big and beautiful beyond itself.

Dreams are always fraught with notions of past and future, time and travel, motion and transgression—the not-yet and never-will and forever-gone. And yet, in the waking world, dreaming is the ultimate act of hope; it rips away the label of “not yet” and replaces it with “someday soon, and very soon.” After all, how do you build the future? Usually, it starts with a dream.

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Sources:

All images from the “Astro Dreams” collection used with permission from the artists.

Creative work requires immense courage because artists can’t help but leave their fingerprints on the things they make; they always risk being seen by those who choose to look.

I’ve spent hours interrogating Max Taquet’s “Sceneries and artworks” collection, and I can’t shake the feeling that nearly every hazy, lonely landscape in this collection is a representation of the creative process—what it feels like to push past the boundary lines and border-guards of our own consciousness, and the new and seemingly infinite worlds waiting for us once we summon that courage.

In terms of references, Taquet’s art is gorgeously reminiscent of the aesthetic of the golden age of science-fiction: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke (1951), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1950s through 1980s), as well as mid-century editions of H.G. Wells classics like The First Men in the Moon (1900). Taquet’s work is never less than modern, yet each piece feels infused with all the space-age optimism and anxiety of the mid-twentieth century.

Each of the “Sceneries and artworks” displays a hazy, timeless quality, as if these worlds are suspended in time as well as space; their sensibility is simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic. The color palette varies widely across the collection, but the composition is always calm, confident, uncluttered. Though Taquet’s land-and-sky scapes are cosmic, otherworldly, they retain the documentary quality of photographic work, giving us images that appear hyperreal rather than surreal. Specific elements frequently recur: haze, cloud and fog, photorealistic light flares, diverse spherical bodies, eclipses, orbits, horizontal and vertical lines that subtly split the frame into quadrants.

Though Taquet’s land-and-sky scapes are cosmic, otherworldly, they retain the documentary quality of photographic work, giving us images that appear hyperreal rather than surreal.

Each piece offers its viewer an escape; whether that window shows a past or future world depends entirely on the eye of the beholder. And each work in the collection rewards its audience for pausing to look closer.

The inky outline of a solitary traveler in the lower left foreground of “Space Inn” recontextualizes the entire scene; loneliness washes over you, and suddenly you can’t help but wonder if the eponymous inn is a space-mirage, if the wanderer will ever find the place she seeks. In “Forest Exploration” the lone sign of life is the coal-black contour of a bird against an uneasy sky, a gradient of washed-out taupe and turquoise behind the twin cooling towers of a nuclear power station. Study “Canyon” carefully and you’ll find a dark figure standing at the halfway point of the bridge; look closer and the tiny orb of light against the right cliff face becomes a lonely spacecraft hovering between the canyon walls.

“Quiet Evening” is the collection’s single cityscape, dense with urban detail; two mega-cities mirror each other, two suns are suspended at either edge of the skyline. But the true brilliance of this image is the way in which it offers a full quadrant of possible perspectives; each ninety-degree rotation reveals yet another distinct and fully-realized metropolis.

“Eclipse” gives us the most coherent narrative, with tension, stakes and inciting incident all visible inside the frame.  The scene—a pair of corroded, densely inhabited industrial towers overshadowed by a massive blacked-out sun—is an immediate jolt to the imagination; the story of this planet began to construct itself in my mind the moment I saw it. Artistically, “Eclipse” is a masterwork of texture: from the fog of cloud that hangs in the atmosphere and the weathered, crumbling stonework at the towers’ base, to the tawny, grainy, perfectly-shaded sand dunes and the dusty wind blowing over the planet’s barren surface.

Textured, hazy, tinted in shades of aubergine and ochre, “Opaque” allows us to glimpse, ever so briefly, the hand of the creator at work. The piece centers on Taquet’s simple yet eerie artistic choice to pluck all the stars from the night sky, to erase every pinprick of light, as if they never existed in this world at all.

Taquet’s “Sceneries and artworks” collection uses images of solitude, exploration and the vastness of space to reflect the inward journey of the artist—to show us the frontiers of the imagination, the soul.

Creative work is always a kind of exploration, pushing against the limits of time and space and possibility, yet there is also a fundamental loneliness to the work of making art—a loneliness that Taquet’s work captures so beautifully. Once, we called space “the final frontier.” The “Sceneries and artworks” collection uses images of solitude, exploration and the vastness of space to reflect the inward journey of the artist—to show us the frontiers of the imagination, the soul. Because, as Mozambican writer Mia Couto explains: “The journey does not begin when distances are traveled, it begins when our internal borders are crossed.”

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Sources:

All images from the “Sceneries and artworks” OpenSea collection used with permission from the artist.

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Her aesthetic is unmistakably feminist—in the sense that arguing that a woman can be the protagonist, author and narrator of her own story is apparently still a feminist idea.

Fairy tales as we know them today were invented by a group of aristocratic Parisian women in the late 17th century.* Perhaps the most influential of these was the Baroness d’Aulnoy (born Marie-Catherine de Barneville in Normandy in 1650) who became famous throughout Paris for the colorful, magical tales she told in her Rue Saint-Benoit salon as early as 1685. At that time, storytelling for a salon audience was an extremely dangerous business. The ornate language and fantastic settings were typically used to disguise political arguments and caricatures that, if recognized, could lead to exile or imprisonment. More importantly, fairy tales provided a coded framework for women to comment on the social problems of their day: arranged marriages, financial dependence, limited access to education, lack of legal rights and social mobility.

The original versions of classic tales such as “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” feature real-world conflicts: forced marriage, sexual violence, death in childbirth. And the most memorable fairytale heroines mirror the real women who created them: beauty often gets them into trouble, while their brains are what gets them out of it. The fairy tales that have come down to us from the French salon tradition anticipate a version of the world where marriage, education and vocation are a matter of free choice; they are sketches drawn by women fighting to be seen as they see themselves, as they wish to be portrayed. In this sense, Browntopink’s aesthetic both absorbs and reflects the feminist realities of the literary fairy tale tradition.

The most memorable fairytale heroines mirror the real women who created them: beauty often gets them into trouble, while their brains are what gets them out of it.

Though every listing in Browntopink’s current Makersplace collection is worthy of attention, I focus here on just three: “She didn’t bite the apple.” “After Party” and “Onírico.” Each image is a story in miniature, complete with character, plot and setting. Together, these three pieces offer a clear view of the artist’s references, perspective and technique.

“She didn’t bite the apple.” presents Eve as the queen of an alternate Eden, naked without shame, her body draped with a translucent bubble-gum pink python; in this rendition, the conniving serpent is reduced to a child’s plaything, something rather like an inflatable pool toy. Eve’s crown, studded with berry-red jewels, has slipped down over her eyes to rest on her perfectly-chiseled cheekbones; she is blissfully blind, still innocent of any knowledge of good and evil.

The garden grass beneath her feet transitions almost imperceptibly from blood red to emerald green; the aqua-paneled walls behind her are traced with thorny golden briars; the Lucite chair in which she sits seems to conduct light and color rather than simply reflect it. When you zoom out to take in the details of the room, the archetypal nature of the woman at its center comes into focus: unfallen Eve, emancipated Sleeping Beauty, the princess unafraid of the forbidden room.

In “After Party,” Browntopink gives us a barefoot, nude, metamodern Cinderella—a figure shimmering with melancholy, emerald mascara streaks staining her cheeks. Helium-filled balloons in shades of green and gilt surround her kneeling form; clouds of golden fog hover against the garnet damask curtains in the background. But the detail in this piece that still stuns me is the sequins on the balloons. It’s a sticky, imaginative choice that’s executed brilliantly. I can only imagine the technical skill needed to direct the gradients of light on each individual sequin, or to create the coral-colored reflections of the carpet below. Look closely and you’ll see: “After Party” isn’t a portrait at all; it’s a retelling, a seeing-new. Browntopink chooses one of the most familiar of all female characters, then offers us the chance to peer into her story through a wholly different lens.

I’ve spent hours now with “Onírico”—Spanish for “dreamlike”—and I still find the color work simply breathtaking. The dreamer, a lingerie-clad young woman with electric violet hair, sits on an L-shaped sofa in the center of a flooded room, surrounded by choppy sapphire waves. Her left hand is stretched toward a school of incandescent yellow fish, swimming through a haze of canary-colored smoke in the air above her head; the walls behind her are a saturated tomato red. Never have blue, red and yellow seemed both so primary and so sophisticated. In contrast, the white sofa and iridescent silver pillows are simply a blank canvas, pulling and reflecting the wash of colors in the room into a spectrum of pastels. “Onírico” is so richly drawn and shaded that you feel like you could slip straight through the screen and into the suspended reality on the other side.

Every scene is soaked with color, crackling with life, and yet the stories they share with us are subtle, complex, more than modern.

Ultimately, what really moves me in these pieces is the utter fearlessness of their narrative and artistic choices; this is art that argues. Browntopink’s work is dimensional, unexpected, dense with full-realized detail; every scene is soaked with color, crackling with life, and yet the stories she shares with us are subtle, complex, more than modern. By placing the female form at the core of her art, she makes a clear argument for the equality and centrality of female perspectives. Like Baroness d’Aulnoy and the other godmothers of the literary fairy tale movement, Browntopink is telling her own story about women, and she is holding nothing back.

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Notes:

*In one of those infuriating turns of history, Charles Perrault has long been given credit for a literary movement created by women some twenty years before he published his edited, sanitized versions of their original stories.

Sources:

Images from the Browntopink Makersplace collection used with the artist’s permission.

She didn't bite the apple. | Rare Digital Artwork | MakersPlace

After Party | Rare Digital Artwork | MakersPlace

Onírico | Rare Digital Artwork | MakersPlace

Title page: Contes des Fées, Countess d'Aulnoy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Frontispiece: Contes des Fées, Countess d'Aulnoy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I was all of fifteen when I first read Dante’s Divine Comedy—feeling, with all an adolescent’s arrogance, that I had discovered something entirely new. Paradiso, I found too theological; Purgatorio was somehow forgettable, like so many sequels. No, the real fun was to be found in the Inferno, with its richly imaginative punishments and “poetic justice meets torture porn” social satire.

After his exile from Florence in the year 1302, Dante comforted himself by assigning artistic rivals, political enemies and Florentine socialites to their appropriate circles of Hell, each with its own flamboyant torment. Dante did not invent contrapasso—the punishment balancing the crime—or Schadenfreude—finding joy in the pain of others—but he deployed both concepts with a certain flair that’s still appreciated across the centuries. We humans love watching others suffer, especially when they’ve earned it.* But we also seem obsessed with extracting the slivers of beauty in that suffering, and few writers have depicted pain and punishment as gorgeously or imaginatively as Dante Alighieri.

Enter the Divine Comedy NFT collection by digital artist Batt. Seven of the collection’s nine pieces can be found on KnownOrigin.io, with the rest expected to drop in the coming weeks. Each piece is a disembodied portrait, like a funeral bust or museum fragment, corresponding to one of the circles of Hell from Dante’s Inferno. If this sounds vaguely horrifying, I can assure you that it is, in all the best ways.  As with all good NFT projects, the concept is brilliantly, deceptively simple; you don’t have to be able to quote cantos to get it at once.

Batt’s “Divine Comedy” artworks are composed primarily of black and white linework—direct digital descendants of the medieval tradition of woodcut carving pioneered by masters such as Albrecht Dürer at the end of the fifteenth century. Woodcuts such as the immensely popular and influential “Apocalypse with Pictures” (1498) were first drawn by Dürer in relief—a mirrored image of the print as it would be produced—before the excess wood was carved out, sliver by sliver, by his assistants. Three hundred and fifty years later, using a similar method, French artist Gustave Doré created a series of seventy-five woodcuts to illustrate Dante’s Inferno, titled “The Vision of Hell” (1857).

Despite the differences in technique, Batt’s artwork shares the same precise detail of lines and planes, the same intentional but uncanny use of negative space to indicate light and shadow. Each of the pieces in the Divine Comedy collection is equal parts horrifying and playful, “dark, weird and intimate” just as Batt herself promises—a modern interpretation that reflects all of Dante’s original sensibilities. The symbolism is simultaneously delicate and gory, familiar yet distinctive.

Each of the pieces in the Divine Comedy collection is equal parts horrifying and playful, “dark, weird and intimate” just as Batt herself promises.

Withered, spidery branches spread from the eye sockets of “Limbo”; their roots stretch deep into her torso, over—or perhaps inside—veined, transparent, papery skin, creeping toward the exposed bones of her ribcage, which are stripped clean of muscle and sinew.

“Lust” holds a bleeding apple, her chin and lips already stained with dark gore; the serpent of Eden is coiled around her floating wrists like a shackle, its head resting in her outstretched palm. She is a type of tranquil Tantalos, the fruit of her craving suspended just out of reach, her desire never to be satisfied.

Howling wolves claw through the flesh of “Gluttony’s” torso, which is already scored and quartered by surgical lines, just like a post-autopsy corpse. His eyes are bleached and sightless and dark entrails dangle delicately from his chest.

“Greed” is a sad-eyed Jazz Age flapper with chic bobbed hair, her fingers draped heavily in pendants, bangles, lockets, jewels. The portrait seems conventional enough, until your eye finally processes the extra set of hands clutching yet another assortment of baubles. This is perhaps my favorite artistic choice in the collection to date—so symbolic, so simple, and yet so instantly unnerving…

“Wrath” displays all the angry, dilated vascularity of a professional bodybuilder, matched with pin-prick pupils and vampiric pronged teeth. Her sharp-nailed fingers are wrapped around her own throat; the blade of her scythe has turned on its owner, slicing with expert precision at her face, torso, even her hair—a chilling reminder that the evil we wish upon others has a way of taking up residence inside our own souls.

There’s not much higher praise I can give to any piece of art than to say that it possesses that mysterious, intimate power of transportation.

You only get one “first time” with any story. But if you’re very lucky, sometimes a memory of that discovery lingers dormant inside you, waiting to be awakened and remind you of a past self out of reach but never quite gone. The moment I laid eyes on Batt’s “Divine Comedy” collection, I was carried away to that place once more—a fifteen-year-old girl wandering wide-eyed through the bowels of Hell with Virgil as my guide. And there’s not much higher praise I can give to any piece of art than to suggest that it possesses that mysterious, intimate power of transportation.

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Sources:

Images from The Divine Comedy collection, Batt: The Divine Comedy by Batt (knownorigin.io). Images used with permission from the artist.

Inferno Canto XXVIII, The Severed Head of Bertrand de Born: Gustave Doré, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

La Carte de l'Enfer: Sandro Botticelli, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Inferno, Dante Alighieri, Public Domain: Inferno, Canto I by Dante Alighieri

Notes:

*To those inclined to disagree with the premise that we like to watch other humans suffer, I’d like to point out that as of 2021, “Saw” is a $1 billion horror franchise.

The museum itself is architecturally striking: a long, rectangular building with two levels and a multi-chromatic facade made of 36,000 individual ceramic pieces; it is home to the largest collection of Warhol pieces in Europe, as well as works by Basquiat, Baselitz and Miró. Ordinarily, I would have been delighted to spend several hours wandering through such rooms on a rainy Sunday.

But as we stepped through the glass and into the cavernous lobby, I was merely irritable, jonesing for a drink, glancing enviously toward the patrons seated in the museum’s cafe/bar at the other end of the hall. I remember that my husband and I began bickering before we even made it down the stairs to stow our bags in the wood-paneled cloakroom below the lobby—a nothing-fight neither of us could fully justify; it was that kind of day.

Eventually we made our way to the top floor of the museum and into an immense, oddly-shaped room, specially designed for the twelve large-format paintings that hung at eye-level, perfectly spaced, around its perimeter. Lepanto, 2001, read the rectangular white placard beside the door. I knew, ostensibly, who Cy Twombly was; I had certainly heard his name, possibly seen one or two of his minor works in some museum here or there. And I knew the story of the battle of Lepanto well, long before I ever set foot in the Museum Brandhorst.

One of the many hazards of being raised Catholic is the tendency to acquire an unwieldy collection of esoteric knowledge—the ability to cobble together rough translations of Latin inscriptions in churches and graveyards, to correctly identify saints in religious art based on cause of death, to casually rattle off major miracles and apparitions in Church history. And the tale of the Holy League's relatively improbable naval victory over the Ottoman Empire on October 7, anno Domini 1571 falls neatly into that last category. Four hundred and fifty years later, the date of the battle of Lepanto is still celebrated as a Roman Catholic feast day, dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, whose intercession is supposed to have protected the Christian fleet that day.

I believe that there are moments in time, distinct but rare, when we encounter exactly the right work of art at exactly the right instant in our lives; an intersection that becomes an inflection point.

The moment I stepped into the same room as Twombly’s “Lepanto” paintings, I was immediately and utterly transfixed. Even professional photographs do not adequately convey the intensity—the sheer scope—of the cycle. The smallest of the twelve paintings measures nearly seven feet tall and around nine and a half feet long. In person, the canvases appear to bleed color; you hardly dare to get too close, for fear that the paint has not yet fully dried.

The palette is violent, gory, bright—a shower of fiery arrows pouring out of a clear sky. Galleys and galleasses are marshalled across the landscapes, sometimes in vertical rows as if we are being given a birds-eye view of battle formations, sometimes as if we are watching the fleet from a distance, ships spread laterally across the horizon with outstretched oars.

The transition of color from one canvas to the next imitates the changing hours in a day—dawn, midday, sunset, twilight; Twombly uses shifts of light and hue to mingle perception and historical reality, to depict a battle fought over the course of a single day. The spatters of gold and violet and green against pale blue and grey backgrounds recall the splashing of waves and sunlight on water, but both the sea and the sky hold the promise of death, for the focal color of the Lepanto cycle is a hematic, dripping red.

The Lepanto paintings are among the last of Twombly’s major works; they were completed when he was already seventy-three, only ten years before his death. I suppose this is why “Lepanto” always reminds me of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73:  “In me thou seest the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by and by black night doth take away, / Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.”

The “Lepanto” paintings are a cycle in the truest sense, and if you are ever lucky enough to see them in person, you will find that the curving, sweeping arc of the room where they hang aids this impression. Part I and Part XII are the most similar among the twelve, nearly identical in color palette, use of space, organization of the major elements. Their position as bookends in the series gives the feeling that the story never quite ends; just when you think it has finished, it begins again where it seemed to leave off: a Nietzschean recurrence of the same.

“In me thou seest the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by and by black night doth take away, / Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.” - Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

I believe that there are moments in time, distinct but rare, when we encounter exactly the right work of art at exactly the right instant in our lives; an intersection that becomes an inflection point. In an essay on Twombly’s oeuvre, art historian Kirk Varnedoe suggests that “the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order.” I brought a certain chaos with me into that gallery on that dreary Sunday: my cramped, embittered adult yearning for sobriety; bittersweet childish memories of garnet-glass rosary beads slipping through my fingers; the ever-present desire to be carried outside the confines of my self.

I don’t precisely know where high art derives its power to make us feel whole again. I only know that it never feels like an exaggeration to say that seeing “Lepanto” in person was a life-altering experience. As I stood in the upstairs of the Museum Brandhorst that day, those paintings seemed to be a messy, complex, brilliantly-rendered large-format version of the tiny battle inside my own soul. To me, Twombly’s “Lepanto” cycle will always be about death and time and the inevitable fall of night, the question of what victory can be won in a single day, or even a single lifetime, a meditation on the occasional necessity of doing battle, even against the odds, even with ourselves.

Gallery interior photo: Heinz Theuerkauf. Used with permission, all rights reserved. Museum exterior photo: Guido Radig. CC BY-SA 3.0, without changes.