Hello, I’m Zemm and I’m starting a blog.
I’ve just spent most of the evening enjoying gas prices being high enough to stop me from actually doing anything with the Eth blockchain, and instead spent some time playing with my kid, did the dishes, and now its late, (when I do all my artwork), and I’m writing.
I guess traditionally this post would be a manifesto about what this blog will be for. However, I don’t feel much like doing that tonight, though I will toss out a bullet list:
- writing about my NFT projects and art.
- writing AS my NFTs (I’ve got plans to make many of them into reverse-illustrations, generating writing from the drawings that will make up the context of the NFTs).
- maybe some art criticism or speculative thoughts on DeFi and things like that.
What I’m more interested in doing tonight is an example of #1, here’s a note on something I’m working on:
So for the last six months I’ve made a rather large stack of drawings that are going to become I think my first really free NFT project. I exited from my metropolitan lodgings in March, chased out by the virus. My inability to imagine living in an apartment with my 5 year old on lockdown without going insane made me flee, and my family and I have been living in various rural locations since that time. I packed up my studio into storage, and bought a set of colored pencils and a pad of paper, and pretty much hit reset on my art practice, for better or worse.
At first those drawings seemed pretty half baked. Well, the first one wasn’t. The first one was amazing, it intuited the entire next year in one image… but all the others were (for a while)sorta lame. I didn’t barely know how to use colored pencils, and it showed. However, when I hit my stride, I started to more frequently make things I thought were solid, sometimes really good. They were all very weird and clearly channeling the strange, fictive seeming space I was living in now, stocking up on canned fruits via Amazon, living much closer to nature than usual, but also fully intermediated by the digital epoch. They felt like drawings I had made as a teenager. More refined, but they had the same emotional core that drove me to fill up like 25 sketchbooks with crazy shit from age 17 to 26.
When I started getting back into crypto and discovering DeFi in August, the concepts I found were already in the colored pencil drawings of the pandemic. Investing myself in tech centered teleological theory, making some tech-centered artworks over the last year, and being on several zoom meetings each day I suppose primed the pump. It was easy to start to see blockchain related themes developing again, much like my drawings from 2017, when I first started investing in Crypto. However, now they were more omnipresent, an element of an overall change in myself and the world that was spectrally palpable all around us.
Anyway, I don’t want to frame the project too directly yet, so will make some more bullet points instead.
- 40+ works
- each accompanied by a short, science fictive or fantasy narrative (generally both), to be published here.
- Digitized using motion graphics and video layers
- Released over time both multiples and specialized 1/1s.
I’m excited to start making these real.
