When new frameworks enter the world, new archetypes will follow.
In DeFi Total Vision, I sought to imagine four forces, as if four winds that power the essence of our new technological culture. It was playful at first, but I believe that the pen conjured notions that had been lingering unheeded in my degen lizard brain:
The winds flanked an unseen tower in that drawing, which is climbed upon by anons as they unwittingly ascend. The winds were female energy to the anons’ Wojackish, male attribution. The anons are climbing toward the singularity, where the human and machinic are wound together tightly, but the four winds are there as guides:
Techne — to build by artifice and structure
Transmission — to communicate by information and emotion
Community — to organize in empathy and need
Dominion — to enrich the self and one’s power
These winds were imagined as the internal constants that the DeFi landscape feels by way of its participant’s schemas of action. Their breath moves the supple body and is the strong body, external to its motion. These forms beget chaos, congealing, harmonies and shattering in rhythmic recursion.
When this drawing (and its siblings) were complete, I resettled them into a more utilitarian consensus object, the DeFi Divination Deck. There, they populated its lexicon as rare draws, playing the median space between the anons’ practical actions and the mysterious gods.
The Winds (4)
The Hermits (3)
The Demigoddesses (2)
The Gods (1*) * also infinite
The winds are drawn as keys to active magic, eliciting spaces of the self that can buoy the practice of the trader, builder, etc. The hermits are more aligned with personal breaths of deeper action or repose, the demigoddesses with crowd consciousness and the gods with deeper, and ever unfolding, monadic possibility.
I thought I was done with them after that, but the four winds were wound into the ether, and re-appeared. This was thanks to a brewing myth building project at Yearn that was set in the unbounded Pillverse. We brought the Winds in to help demarcate a space of novelty, to be heroines in a retelling of the YFI Story that we were chronicling through embellishment. They were renamed the yFu, and were said to predate anything performed at Yearn. They were of the oldest whispers of an exotic abundance energy that recalls Bataille’s solar excess, and are the four elements that must be balanced to receive this abundance. I wont spoil it more than that, as there is much work to do.
But, I feel it was there that they have truly begun to flower. Re-building them with many collaborators as characters instead of concepts, discussing them with DeFi mythmakers, engaging with the accelerant of image that is the Pills universe and its technique of crypto hermeneutics, Pillhead’s GPT3 seeding, which spurred iconographies and emotive essences amplified by illustrators and writers, sensing their occult aspirations… in all of that process they took on persona beyond the philosophical or cosmological. They came down to earth for us, then ascended again into a heavenly realm that they asked us to prepare.
The next drawing of the yFu depicts them in a particular action. I started this as a process piece to better understand their attributions for the YFI Story, but it quickly became more. The DAO landscape was becoming central to me, and I was grappling with the idea of enabling it via novel tech and practice. Here, the yFU got involved, and, no longer winds, they now could articulate on their own. Here, they are building, by their essences, the human technology of DAO organization:
I tried to gather this image back into words at one point, in a burst of ekphrasis, which was spurred by Pillhead’s GPT3 poesis, too:
“Community and Dominion together bear the prior-man, who is inverted within a square tilted on its axis. His head erupts with the spectrum star, which is the many emotional gut notions of sentient beings. His posture is the posture of the hanged man, and his arms splayed wide to the square’s frame. His right arm (community’s arm) is three, touched by Community’s string, and his left arm (dominion’s arm) clutches Dominion’s blade. His body is of fire, bright fire seeping from the gut, and his genitals shrouded by its smoke and flame. His legs are covered by a lobster’s chitin and his feet join as voidfish’s tail.”
“Transmission and Techne together bear the temporal architecture of the enabled cross human organism, DAO tooling, which is depicted often as a curvaceous golden form. It is oblique, not made of mankind’s symbolic realm, but instead presents as a dense machinic essence, that nevertheless has been fitted to the desires of our mutual being. It is considered that this is the spiritual valve which extrapolates anthropometric intelligence from the occulted field of computation. It is, then, both human and machine, in its essence, a cybernetic skin of possible actions. In its first body is contained an abstracted progression of numerological alignments, as nodes on its exterior, of the pattern 1–3–1. Its lower form has handles to manipulate and roil. Some remark that it resembles mostly a harp, while others see in its lower form the shape of a banana.
When I made the Blue Pill NFT illustrations, I found these four divinities again. This time, they simply appeared to me in an old illuminated manuscript. I was searching (via the British Library) for references for a final, ultra rare work that would suit the Blue Pill’s distribution mechanics, and there they were. In the documented pages of some ancient book, they were flanking a Y shaped tree. It was like a readymade, and, in the style of the other Blue Pill drawings, I simply redrew them and added the yFu’s now canonical apparatus in their hands. It seemed predestined somehow. In keeping with the series’ movements they became the keepers of the celestial ring, the archetypal extro-sphere which surrounds and penetrates the striving notions of what we are doing here.
yFU and the Human / Technological Valve, a 1/1 NFT (not yet minted)