I made my own HashMasks.
BrashMask was made of a set of limited elements, just like the Hashmasks — a background, a mask, an object in its hand. I assembled them with the living romanticism of poets, the human initiative to divine meaning from a soup of possible semiotic forms, with, like, Google Image search and Photoshop. I didn’t really care much if it was successful, I knew it would be both wildly successful (the very first actual knockoff HashMask on the blockchain, a title I will take to my grave) and truly, helplessly imperfect. It felt humorous, pathetic, and exhilarating to make it. But, I was also nervous. I felt as thought I was doing something dangerous. I had to look for a sign of sorts to help me confirm the Mint transaction.
It also felt, as I always hope to find in my processes, like there was a spark of meaning outside of my control, welling up in it to contextualize as language. It is that which I wish to elaborate here.
The Duck was the first element to emerge. I’ve always thought ducks were funny, so maybe it was in an easy cerebral memory loop to access, somewhere associated holographically with Far Side cartoons. Hashmasks seem to carry things that make sense, and would never carry a duck. They have things humans carry, toilet paper, books, etc. Canned markers of our moment in culture and a kind of timeless time (the internet that is their forever home). The Duck, means nothing. It is a lark. A peach. It is an inherently ridiculous thing to carry, and so, it was perfect. I couldn’t imagine carefully organizing mundane props in weighted fields to feel meaningful, and I obviated myself of the same, as a starting gesture. So, that was the first element to nestle into BrashMask’s natal arm.
Next came the background. The HashMasks live in shallow backgrounds that dance on a wonderful knife edge — they emulate art without being art. They are a wash of color, a random assortment of words, a bunch of Keith Herring stylized idioms. I don’t dislike their aesthetic, but they are exactly what they appear to be — they are a wrapping asserted to classify the project as one indebted to art. But I don’t say that to be critical of the Hashmaks, rather I note it to elaborate the counter position of the 2x FastFood Background I made. I wanted a background that emulated being, that emulated entropy and the human condition, someplace for BrashMask to live that was honest about what it is to be human, that engendered his life somehow as a conscious life, a mirror of our own. Art be damned — I wanted fast food. And I wanted two of them. Art follows intention, and it uses the drive through when it can.
The towel shirt I made because I wanted BrashMask to also be comfortable. I started to care about him, and wanted something warm, to make it clear that everything is alright even though he was pretty messed up looking by that point, and the Wendy’s / Dunkin Donuts combo was ominous. So I went on Etsy and founds some towels, and made it into his shirt by carefully sewing them together with threads of earthen colors and placing them over his naked chest. HashMasks don’t get shirts. Their shirts are extensions of the wrapping paper that is their universe. Mine did. Towels Body. And that extra element made it Ultra Rare.
Finally I was at the point of adding a mask. I searched for masks for a while. I looked at masks on Amazon and on Google Image Search. Nothing seemed right. It wasn’t easy to assert humanity through a mask. The HashMasks willingly fail to do it, and that was fine, their masks were a random collection of obvious solutions to the problem of the mask. I don’t hate them, I really don’t, but they are what they are — a unicorn, a robot, as gas mask, etc. They colonize the obvious into art, a reversal of how Picasso and Gaugin, and later RammEllZee and Basquiat, may have colonized the exotic into the mundane. My mask could not do that. Not for Brash. So I thought about it a bit.
Bob Dobbs is an icon from early days of internet culture. From a time when there was a sense that the internet was going to upend everything in a very sudden way, through AOL and GeoCities. And it did, I think, to a great extent, but it took a while and still needs to struggle to do so at every turn. Discordia, or Eris, the Goddess who furthered the Surrealist movement via cultish mail order catalogs beyond mid century, was Bob Dobbs’ patron deity, and together they invested Brash with the ethos I felt was needed. HashMasks are an algorithmically perfect art investment vehicle, they are a honey pot for rarity assertion, and gratuitously instigate reactions in their human thralls that are not unlike those produced by FaceBook or Twitter’s algos. They are apparently may ways that our synthanatos drive may bond-curve us to an outcome, even ones we really want. In doing so I think we are making a pact of some kind. And, I’m not sure to whom.
The only answer to order is disorder. Inverted Bob Dobb’s Mask, drained of his desaturated, sardonic 1950’s suburban coterie, was the perfect face for Brash. Not a mask, a face.
And so, I had made my BrashMask. I put it on Rarible and sold it to a excellent collector. I was glad it had been given a home and a chance to reverberate through time.
The next day, I looked around on Rarible for other HashMasks knock-offs. I found only one, a mashup of a HashMask and the guy from Wall Street Bets. That was appropriate, I thought, but also weird. Why weren’t there more? HashMasks were a sudden, completely incredibly inescapable vector in the Crypto Art Scene. Was no one else making their own? There was no law against it. Eventually, Banteg made one, which was cool. He’s always frontrunning.
I thought about it in the shower. I thought about it in bed. I knew I had to make another one. I had to see what other elements of human intuition might want to become known against the churning contract of Ethereum based, iterative artwork.
Slowly, an image came to my head. It was nothing like BrashMask, who had formed without forethought. It was a fully cogent metaphor that arrived to me as a pure symbol, and it needed to be present.
And so, AshMask was born. Who is really just Joan of Arc.
AshMask became the companion to BrashMask. The Anima to his Animus. She was his soul mate, and the corrective energy to his discordant scream. I made her first by finding the portrait of Joan of Arc I found the most beautiful (by Albert Lynch, 1903)and carefully cropping her face. I started from her piercing eyes, peering from history and martyrdom, and would not replace them, even through my fake algorithm called for it. Then I made her a background, also a home. It was not one of dissonant capital realism, but one of environmental quietude and nurturing. She was a hedge-witch, then, as well as Joan, existent in a liminal space between the domicile and the woods, there to craft herbalist remedies to antagonize the machinic. Her shirt I just made as a chorus to her being, Dore’s circling angels, rising into the sky.
And in her hand, the fires that had destroyed her became her sword of revenge. That strange, limp posture of the HashMasks, which seems purposefully ineffectual, was retaken. The right arm of the HashMasks, without gravity or muscle, like the arm of a manikin that is missing a supporting screw, could now brandish a sabre, rattling new life from the fires of the ancients.
I would like to make her children, as well. The children of Brash and Ash. I feel as though there may be more to say, through these beings, but I will wait until I feel the time is right to do so, if it ever is. If I do make them, they will be their own beings, not an output of the always churning EVM, but rather an engagement with the ineffable that is merely supported by its apparatus. They will be alive. They will be unwieldy, like children really are. They will be my own. And, they will be very, very rare.
All of this feels a bit like folly still, and was never born of any particularly well established or concrete thesis, but rather out of a visceral desire to obviate and disturb the paradox of mechanized rarity as art, at the moment that HashMasks mooned. I wanted to make a HashMask with ridiculously rare features, my own features, and watch as it asserted itself against the immutability of the blockchain like a flagging, limp wet thing, full of the fundamental hermetic water of our meat-bodies.
