Volume: IV | Featuring Ash Chapter Two NFT Artist, David Ariew and Pak's Merge Season 1
7 April 2022 - Community is the Utility
Reading Key:
“Treasure HUNT.”
If, “Merge is a \game of extinction” then Matter* is a game of search and plausible destruction. Allow me to explain. Of the 28,990 Mass NFTs minted less than 24,800 remain. Collectors reduce the supply of Mass NFTs through the merge mechanic. And are incentivized to do so because it is the gateway to rare Pak NFTs.
Matter* is the first game that mass.black has to offer. Ending on 30 April 2022 mass tokens that meet the criteria will win Matter* NFTs. There are 10 tiers detailed on the website in addition to one hidden tier and a challenge tier- unlocked if the supply of Mass NFTs fall below 20k during the event. As such, mass tokens can qualify for multiple tiers and therefor win multiple Matter* NFTs.
The total supply of Matter* is 1409+? (whatever the hidden tier is and possible challenge tier). There are many ways to play the game of Matter* appealing to all collector categories:
“Hunters and Traps”
750/750 token supply
for mass tokens with 4 and above merges
sorted in descending order of identification number
“Scavenger’s Weak Hands”
450/450 token supply
for mass tokens with 10 and above mass
sorted in descending order of identification number
“Thief’s Wise Hands”
?/450 token supply
for mass tokens with 100 and above score (mass x merges)
sorted in descending order of score (mass x merges)
steals from “Scavenger’s Weak Hands” supply
“Cannibalism”
150/150 token supply
for mass tokens with most merges
sorted in descending order of merges
“Lazy Gold”
36/36 token supply
for yellow (t2) mass tokens with most merges
sorted in descending order of merges
“Lone Survivors”
12/12 token supply
for blue (t3) mass tokens with most merges
sorted in descending order of merges
“Kings of the Hill”
6/6 token supply
for mass tokens with most mass
sorted in descending order of mass
“Three Lucky Giants”
3/3 token supply
every mass token has equal chance
for random winners
“Atlas Apprentice”
1/1 token supply
for the mass token with most merges
“Titan”
1/1 token supply
for the alpha mass
I understand that this is a lot to take in. Which is why I am happy to direct you towards an amazing community made resource: Merge.Tine.Cafe This dashboard provides you with a great overview of the project- including filtration for the first mass.black event.
Happy hunting! “May the odds ever be in your favour”
iseult
Creator Interview with David Ariew
As someone that works in the border between the music and film industries- what immediate use case do NFTs have in an interactive art space like Meow Wolf, concerts & festivals?
That’s an interesting question. I think that NFTs could easily become tickets to concerts, or given exclusively to attendees of a concert. For example, maybe you could go and see my Zedd visuals and then be put into a raffle to win an edition of one of my Zedd pieces in the future! Or maybe I design an immersive experience with Artechouse where collectors can purchase pieces from the show as NFTs, or perhaps they can only get into the experience with an NFT as a pass. The possibilities are totally endless, and I’m so excited for the future. I’m sure that we’ll see some things coming, but other use cases will be a total surprise. I love Meow Wolf too by the way, and they have rooms there where you can purchase physical pieces from artists, but how great would it be to have parts of Meow Wolf purchasable as NFTs? Just scan the QR code and find the piece there!
How much of a benefit is it for your partner Chelsea to also be a NFT creator?
Tackling the NFT space alongside Chelsea makes it a million times more fun! At night we smoke some weed and babble our faces off about NFTs, who we connected with during the day, new projects launching, dope artists, and just art in general! This is the first time we’ve been on the same career track, and it’s massive being able to support each other, collab on projects together, and go to the IRL events as a couple! We’re very close to each other as a couple, and even though Chelsea’s previous career was photography, she would always come to the big motion design events with me and befriend everyone, but now we’re completely on the same track, sharing the same office, and it’s the best time of our lives!
You are a great teacher and lifelong learner whose Disciples have named Octane Jesus. Not to let such an extravagant title get to your head you remain humble and are a role model for many. What does it mean to be a David Ariew collector?
Thanks so much for the kind words! I pretty much fell into teaching thanks to my buddy EJ Hassenfratz who is Cinema 4D’s golden boy. He’s one of the best educators ever because of how he breaks down complex concepts until they’re easy to understand, and he’s friendly and approachable.
Anyway, about 5 years ago he asked me to do some Octane tutorials for his channel which was amazing because he already had a massive following, and because I’m a tryhard, people responded well to the tuts and they started to blow up! I kept going with it for several years alongside client work and it was always a way for me to go off and experiment with new techniques and then teach them, and my philosophy was always that I wanted to show my entire process start to finish without skipping any steps because that way I’m not leaving anyone behind, but at the same time I would tightly edit the tutorials so I’m not wasting anyone’s time either.
I found teaching so rewarding and it allowed me to help other artists out and connect with them because that’s how I learned too. That journey culminated in a course I worked on full time for a year called Lights, Camera, Render for School of Motion. It was definitely my magnum opus of teaching and a complete download of my brain into a single course.
Students went crazy for it and I got to practice being a leader and giving so many artists feedback along the way, which was a totally new and incredible experience for me. The motion design community has always been so great about sharing techniques because there’s always more than enough work to go around, so that inspired me to do the same, and really the only competition should be with yourself.
To answer your first question though, what it means to be a collector of mine is to invest in someone who has over a decade of 3D work under their belt, but specifically my biggest talents are in lighting, camera movement, and editing, and I believe I’m fairly versatile because I have both cinematic and abstract styles. I love to experiment and push the boundaries of what a solo CG artist can do!
Growing up, what did you collect?
I’d say the biggest thing I collected was Pokémon cards hahaha. I did do the baseball and basketball cards thing when I was in elementary school, but honestly that was just because everyone else at school was doing it and I was trying to fit in. I’ve never been into sportsball, but when the Pokémon fad hit, I was all in. I loved collecting the cards, building decks, and battling friends.
By that same token, I’ve always been a pretty big completionist with video games. Trying to 100% everything and collect every item to get the most out of the game and feel good about myself lololol. Oh and yes when Pokémon Go came out I was pretty obsessed with that too.
I think that’s a reason collecting NFTs has come so naturally to me, and it’s even crazier because I get to collect work from all my best friends and artists I look up to. Instead of just liking things on Instagram and obsessing over all the amazing art there, I get to build a collection that’s representative of my taste.
Honestly though, it’s a problem because any time I have ETH it just evaporates before my eyes into NFTs because they’re so fun! And when they’re gamified on top of it like Pak’s ecosystem or Raf’s “All That Remains” collection, I’m hooked to an unhealthy degree. It’s seriously a problem playing the NFT game sometimes because it’s more like high stakes gambling! At least I understand it to some degree though, unlike poker. Let’s just say it’s never a life I thought I’d be living.
Can you expand on the importance of community?
Well, it’s really the driving force behind everything with NFTs. I will say there’s a lot of fake communities out there that will rise up in hatred against the community leaders if they’re not constantly making everyone money. There are tons of people grinding whitelists through fake engagement.
When it’s working well like with the Pak or Raf communities- it’s a beautiful thing. It gives people the opportunity to share crazy experiences like the mystery of Pak and these social experiments he’s crafting. It allows them to connect with like-minded, renegade individuals. I’ve made so many incredible new friends since getting into NFTs, both collectors and fellow artists, and it’s so damn fun going to events and partying with them IRL. Profile Pictures (PFP’s) especially represent digital identity, and we humans love feeling special, like we are part of the cool club. So it’s only natural that we gravitate towards these new technologies and form communities surrounding them.
Who is Tim Kang and what do they mean to the wider crypto community?
I first discovered Tim Kang, aka Illestrater, when I was watching Beeple’s 2020 drop go down, and he bid $777,777 on the final piece. It was a giant bombshell and broke all records, and it was absolutely shocking to see at the time. Little did I know that four months later I’d become friends with him, that he’d become a collector of mine, and that we’d even do a curated project together!
In February 2020, just after I was finally able to get into the space and begin selling my art, I created a Facebook and Discord group called GET NFT! I invited all my favorite artists and we all began trying to figure out if we could make it in the space. One of my good friends in the group, Koke Nunez, eventually connected me with Tim, and he and I hit it off immediately. Tim suggested that we do a curated exhibition for grants.art, his philanthropic site designed to give NFT artists a jumping off point by paying for or “minting” their genesis pieces for free.
I was stoked, and we set out creating a contest of sorts, where all the artists in GET NFT! could submit a work of art under the theme “Distorted Reality” that we collectively voted on, and only the top 77 entries would make it. It was a crazy experience, and I got a ton of the top artists in the space like Beeple, Fvckrender, Gmunk, Nessgraphics, Billelis, Ryan Talbot, Toomuchlag, Gavin Shapiro, Zomax, Josh Pierce, and Filip Hodas to curate. You can find the link to the collection here: https://grants.art/get-nft.
Not too long after that, Bored Apes launched, and seeing that I completely missed the mint, I started complaining on Twitter that I always miss everything. Tim hit me up and said that he didn’t want me to miss out, and then said “here, take one of my apes. I’ve got like 100 of them!” I was insanely grateful to be included and I got to pick an ape with a halo to match my Jesus branding vibes. I asked Tim if he thought they’d go up more and he said “probably not.”
It was actually a huge blessing that the ape was a gift because I’ve continued to hold to this day. I doubt I’d have that level of diamond hands otherwise! Last but not least, Tim introduced me to Pak and his ecosystem, explaining the mechanics of burning cubes, and that’s what got me hooked on Pak! All in all, I have Tim to thank for so many incredible things along my journey so far, and it’s been so fun chilling with him at IRL events like ETH Denver and Art Basel!
When did you first discover Pak’s work?
Above I mentioned that Tim Kang helped give me the confidence to really dive into collecting Pak’s work, but I had been following Pak since I first began collecting NFTs in December 2020. I knew he helped Beeple get into the space and that he was a mysterious figure who’d created Archillect.
At the time though, I didn’t really understand his vision, but I enjoyed the fact that he was also a performance artist and raised interesting questions about value, like his drop “The Title". That’s when I started paying attention more, but I still didn’t have enough ETH or knowledge to participate. I thought he seemed like the Banksy of NFTs with his controversial pieces like “The Creation”. Even The Fungible didn’t really paint the whole picture for me, but when The Defiant Guide to Pak came out, an insanely well-produced three-part documentary on Pak, I watched the whole thing and I was floored.
It dove in so deeply to his entire career and painted a fascinating picture of someone who is a deep thinker, technologist, and humanitarian. I finally understood why his collectors had been going so crazy for his work and that he brings together so many disciplines under one umbrella, such as the design of smart contract mechanisms, the visual art itself, game theory, AI art, and genius marketing techniques. It’s clear that he’s the biggest innovator in the space, constantly on the bleeding edge and surprising collectors with new twists and turns. He’s mysterious, but also kind-hearted, and I couldn’t think of a better leader for this movement!
What is Ash Chapter Two and how did you come to take part in it?
If going out on your own as an NFT artist is like becoming a solo musician, then I’d describe Ash Chapter Two as being akin to the first huge music festival for NFTs. Pak roped in the most talented and best known NFT artists out there, and I was shocked and honored when he approached me. The extra layer of awesomeness is the burn and morph mechanism that Pak put into place, and the brief of creating two versions of the same piece was such an inspirational challenge that unified the whole collection. I don’t think this team is going anywhere and you’ll see more from us in the near future!
Manifold and Pak refunded a few hundred ETH in gas fees to the collector community. What does these actions say about what Pak is trying to build?
To me this says exactly what Pak is extremely vocal about – that he’s not in it for the money. He’s here to build on the cutting edge of this technology, and that’s fun and exciting. He got into BTC in 2010, so he doesn’t even need any of the money from the sales, but at the same time it will allow him to continue building bigger and better things.
That’s the goal, to connect with a community, to innovate and surprise, and to forge a path forward for artists. The refunds speak to his integrity, and that the health and reputation of the projects are far more important than the numbers. By that same token, he took 0% of the sales and gave everything to the other 29 creators. That’s also an incredible gesture, and he’s got my complete trust, confidence and support at this point!
Are there any hidden elements within your work?
I wouldn’t say there are hidden elements like Easter eggs, but some workflows that I use produce completely unexpected results, especially my mirror box process. Because I never know exactly what’s going to come out, it feels more like an exploration or a partnership with the software. Where I’m creating these fully reflective rooms that would be extremely difficult to build in reality, but still bounce the light back and forth with true physics, and where I can bend and twist them in ways that produce extremely trippy visuals, frequently shooting them with bizarre lens choices like fisheyes or panoramic lenses. Often when I’m watching them back later whilst high, I say to myself “WTF… I made that??” I think that’s why the abstract work is so important to me and where I’ve had the most fun creating over the past year. It also combines so nicely with my concert visuals skills and I can create long experiences for the audience to get sucked into- synced with the music.
What is it that you want to add to the plethora of human existence?
My goal is to push the boundaries of what a solo CG artist can create, constantly learning and growing into my craft. I want to affect the audience emotionally and create immersive experiences, and visuals that are completely unique, things that nobody has ever seen before. I also want to help the growth of NFTs by being a spokesperson for the space, and lift up fellow artists who are absurdly talented but unseen by many collectors. I also really want to collab with so many of my genius friends, and especially with my wife, and give birth to our magical and crazy ideas for everyone’s enjoyment. Those are the immediate goals, but it’s impossible to tell what the future holds, or what the metaverse will look like, but once it arrives, I can’t wait to begin designing for it!
Official Pak Project Links
Do you exist? mass.black
∴ AB AETERNO lostpoets.xyz
Creation Through Destruction ASH burn.art
To contribute contact iseult at:
@_seult on Twitter
iseult#8848 on Discord
iseultimpakt@gmail.com
Please consider donating ASH or ETH to: 0x56ec61c5ca992dbe5dba7e942cc4a055bf584f24
All donations will be used to acquire Pak and ASH Creator NFTs for a Virtual Museum.