Original article by Mia Bao, co-founder of thepass.to, chief partner of WHALE members
Data: Jin, data analyst of thepass.to
Thanks Hakan for proofreading.
In August 2022, American game designer Jason Allen won the first prize in the Colorado State Fair Art Competition with an AI painting, "Space Opera". Since then, the public's perception of AI painting has gradually changed. Recently, ChatGPT has become popular and several AI-generated content companies have announced new financing of over 100 million US dollars. Stability AI, the company behind the Stable Diffusion model, announced that it has received US$101 million in financing, with a post-investment valuation of US$1 billion; the star AI content platform startup Jasper also announced that it has received US$125 million in new financing, with a valuation of US$1.7 billion. The enthusiasm of capital has made us feel the gradual rise of the AIGC track.
Refik Anadol - Archive Dreaming
From AI-generated content to the broader human "use of computers to create art" can be traced back to the 1960s, more than half a century ago. In 1969, Georg Nees presented generative art works created by computers in his paper "Generative Computergraphik", and his work Shotter (Gravel), released in 1968, is considered one of the earliest and most famous generative art works. With the foundation laid by pioneers such as Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, and Michael Noll, generative art has never been as popular and recognized by the general public as it is now.
From the beginning of its birth to the present, there has been endless debate about whether generative art is art. The fear of new things is often the biggest stumbling block to freedom and creativity. As Jason Bailey said in his 2018 article "Why Love Generative Art?": "Generative art is art that uses computer programming to intentionally introduce "randomness" as part of the creative process. "Controlled randomness" sounds contradictory, but if you are an artist or art historian, you will know that artists have been seeking to introduce randomness into their works to stimulate creativity."
Whether it is AI creation or generative art, in addition to lowering the threshold for ordinary users to participate, it is also a source of creative inspiration for professional artists. If you imagine it as a complete work of art, computer-driven works are more like a "sketch", just as the award-winning "Space Opera" took the artist more than 80 hours of modification and detailed carving in addition to the computer addition. Artists construct through controlled aesthetics, and computer programs are responsible for variables. This is the charm of generative art. In 2021, global searches for "generative art" reached an all-time high, and Art Blocks is inevitably mentioned behind this outbreak. In this article, the author will briefly talk about the development history of Art Blocks from a data perspective.
What are Art Blocks?
Art Blocks is a randomly generated art platform based on Ethereum. It was officially founded and launched by Erick Calderon (Snowfro) in November 2020. If artists want to turn their designs into Art Blocks NFTs, they first need to upload their unique algorithm to the platform and set a specific number of NFTs to be issued.
ArtBlocks Partial Code
Calderon's initial plan for Art Blocks was not too radical. Initially, he just wanted to build a website to sell generative art using blockchain technology. However, the final eye-popping prices of artworks, investors' interest in the platform, and emerging concepts that subverted the traditional art world quickly detonated Art Blocks and grew into a fast-growing business. As of December 1, 2022, Art Blocks has a total of 229 artists, including 68 Curated, 33 Playground (Curated artists include Playground), 167 Factory (10 of which overlap with Curated), 4 ArtBlock X Pace artists, and 2 Exploration artists. A total of 371 series have been issued, totaling 235,296 works, 36,523 independent address collectors, and a total transaction volume of more than 1.3 billion US dollars.
ArtBlocks Trading Volume
5 types of Art Blocks releases
Art Blocks was previously categorized into three different types: Curated, Playground and Factory. As the business grew, Exploration and Art Block X Pace collaboration series were added.
Curated is the work of artists officially incubated by Art Blocks. All works will undergo the most rigorous review, so only top NFT collections will be incubated.
Playground projects can be considered derivatives of Curated, created by artists who have been included in the curated series and wish to experiment with more relaxed review conditions without waiting for further approval from the curated series.
Factory projects are created by artists who have not yet been accepted by curators, but still need to meet a set of requirements, and artists who launch work in the factory must wait until all of their works have sold before they can launch more series.
Exploration is a series of contemporary generative art launched by Art Blocks on October 26, 2022, while Art Block X Pace is a work launched in collaboration with Pace Gallery.
Art Blocks Artist Data and Portraits
So far (December 4), ArtBlocks has a total of 229 artists, 371 projects, 230,000 works, and more than 36,000 independent collectors. Among them, there are 68 artists who meet the Curated series, 70 series released, and a total of 62,348 works. Playground has a total of 33 artists, 65 series, and a total of 31,671 works. Factory has a total of 167 artists, 230 series, and a total of 114,439 works. The rest are shown in the figure below.
ArtBlocks Artwork Distribution
Among them, the monthly growth curves of different types of artists and projects are as follows, among which the artists and projects grew the fastest in October 2021.
Number of Art Blocks Artists by Type
Number of Art Blocks Projects by Type
Among these 371 projects, a total of 235,296 pieces of art were created. Curated projects generally issued around 1,000 NFTs, while Playground and Factory issued an average of nearly 500 NFTs. Chromie Squiggle had the largest issuance of 9,700 NFTs, with the fastest growth in August 2021.
Number of Art Blocks Tokens by Type
Among the many artists, the top ten most popular Art Block Curated artists are Snowfro, Tyler Hobbs, Dmitri Cherniak, Monica Rizzolli, Kjetil Golid, Rich Lord, Loren Bednar, Darien Brito, Piter Pasma and Matt DesLauriers. Artist Jeff Davis (who is also the CCO of Art Blocks) has created 8 projects so far - the most among single artists, followed by artists with a large number of releases including Rafaël Rozendaal, Alexis André, and Shvembldr, who have released 6 projects each.
Top Art Block Favorite Artists by Volume
From the perspective of asset price evaluation, the top ten Curated series artists are ranked according to the series floor price (2022/12/4): Tyler Hobbs (95 eth), luxpris (69 eth), Dmitri Cherniak (60 eth), Matt Kane (35 eth), Kjetil Golid (27 eth), Zeblocks (15 eth), Snowfro (13.12 eth), Harvey Rayner | patterndotco (10.95 eth), Matt DesLauriers (10.69 eth) and Daniel Calderon Arenas (9.5 eth).
Art Block Curated Artists by Floor Price
Floor price is one of the important dimensions for evaluating an artist's work. However, it is fair to evaluate an artist's past works based on past historical prices. Taking Curated artists as an example, the prices of their works are evaluated based on past historical transaction records. The ranking of artists is as follows.
Artist Rank by Historical Price
The above figure shows that the same series by a single artist still has price gradient differences due to different attributes. According to thepass.to data, the price valuation range of the Chromie Squiggle series is 8.9 eth to 352.5 eth. According to different characteristics, we can divide it into the following price gradients (by historical price).
Chromie Squiggle Evaluation by Traits/Types
Art Blocks Key Projects Introduction and Highest Price
Chromie Squiggles, Snowfro
Chromie Squiggles are the first series to be released and minted on Art Blocks, designed by platform founder Snowfro himself. He believes they "embody the soul of the Art Blocks platform" and says they are his "personal signature as an artist, developer, and tinkerer." The minting of the iconic rainbow-colored trails has been permanently suspended and will no longer be produced. The highest price Squiggles sold was 945 ETH (2.89 million US dollars) (https://etherscan.io/tx/0 x 2 e 0945 a 447 f 7 e 17 e 7 a 38 c 7 e 321 b 22 aed 9 b 995 dccfe 05425 a 0 e 91 ada 750 ad 8 a 79 )
Chromie Squiggles Artwork
Fidenza，Tyler Hobbs
Tyler Hobbs is a visual artist from Austin, Texas. The Fidenza series is Tyler Hobbs' most well-known generative art to date. In Tyler Hobbs' own words, the technology used in Fidenza is "my most versatile algorithm so far." The program behind the series is not complicated, but the core structure of the algorithm is very flexible, allowing the generation of multi-dimensional diversity results in scale, organization, texture and color. The highest price of the series was 1,000 ETH (3.32 million US dollars), which was purchased by the well-known collector punk 6529.
Ringers，Dmitri Cherniak
There are nearly infinite ways to wrap a piece of string around a set of pegs. On the surface, it seems like a simple concept, but you’ll be surprised and delighted by the results when faced with the various combinations the algorithm can produce. Each output of Ringers comes from a unique transaction hash, with variations in features including the number of pegs, size, layout, packing direction, and some colorful decorations. Canadian artist Dmitri Cherniak has delivered a perfect answer to generative art creation. The highest price of the series was 2,100 ETH (7.11 million US dollars) in October 2021.
Meridian，Matt DesLauriers
Matt DesLauriers was born in Toronto, Canada, and currently lives in London. He is a creative programmer who later joined the NFT world and is still one of the top 10 most popular artists on ArtBlocks. Matt has released two projects on the Art Blocks platform, Meridian and Subscapes, with the former trading 19,000 ETH and the latter over 7k ETH, both of which are members of the highest ranking series. Although the Curated series usually performs better than the Playground, it is worth mentioning that Matt's Meridian series is a Playground series, but it performs better than Subscape in terms of volume and floor. Meridian works look like Feng Shui oil paintings, but they are actually layered landforms composed of many small strokes of color. The hash of each mark describes different coordinates in multidimensional space, forming interesting and unique combinations. The highest price of this series is 200 ETH (600,000 US dollars), which was purchased by Geneis Holdings.
Meridian Artwork
Art Blocks Collectors and DAO Organization Data
Since the launch of Art Blocks, the owner base of its works has grown significantly, with a total of over 36,000 unique addresses currently holding Art Blocks, which means that every 5,975 unique Ethereum addresses own at least one Art Blocks work.
Total Art Blocks Owners by Type
With the popularity of Art Blocks, some organizations that specialize in or collect Art Blocks on a large scale have also emerged. According to the NFT DAO aggregation platform thepass.to, the most popular Art Blocks artist among DAO organizations is snowfro, who has been collected by nearly 10 large DAO organizations, with more than 600 pieces, and the more well-known organizations include the following.
Curated.xyz
Curated is a $30 million NFT crypto fund founded by Todd Goldberg and Andrew Jiang. This crypto fund is only used to invest in NFTs. Its backers include Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz, Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit and Seven Six Ventures, and representatives of Electric Capital, Pantera and Lattice Capital. From thepass.to data (https://app.thepass.to/dao/Curatedxyz_pending/Dashboard), we can see that the largest collection of Curated is ArtBlocks, accounting for 41%, followed by CryptoPunks (30.68%), Autoglyphs (9.82%), SuperRare (3.00%), Deafbeef (2.87%) and Where My Vans Go (2.66%).
Curated NFT Asset Distribution
Squiggle DAO
Squiggle DAO is a community-led organization focused on Squiggles collection. SquiggleDAO's mission is to help generate art NFTs grow, and you can join the DAO by holding Chromie Squiggles. In the Squiggle DAO treasury, basically 100% are Chromie Squiggles assets, with a total value of over 10 million US dollars.
Bright Monents
Bright Moments was originally just a small pop-up gallery launched on the streets of Los Angeles, USA in late 2021. At first, it was just an NFT physical gallery that displayed and sold NFT works on the screen with IRL (real life) characteristics. But at that time, even in the Los Angeles area, NFT was a very avant-garde concept, so more and more people interested in NFT began to gather. Therefore, BM broke away from the limitations of the entity, built an NFT collection community, and established its own "Crypto Citizens" CryptoCitizens. Currently, BM has nearly $500,000 in ArtBlocks in its treasury, accounting for 15% of its total assets.
Conclusion
Like many things in the NFT space, Art Blocks may seem obscure to those who are unfamiliar with it and those who don’t understand technology very well. But as Jason Bailey said, only when you explore the algorithms and programming behind the work will your aesthetic appreciation of this genre improve. Only by being curious and exploring new things can we continuously broaden the boundaries of cognition. From 0.035 eth to 100 eth, surprises continue to appear.
References:
https://nftplazas.com/what-are-art-blocks-nfts/
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/art-blocks
https://cryptoslam.io/art-blocks/sales/summary
https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/art-blocks-generative-artists/
http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/exhibition/164
https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-art
https://opensea.io/collection/chromie-squiggle-by-snowfro/analytics
https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/art-blocks-and-the-data-of-generative-art
https://nonfungible.com/market-tracker/artblocks
https://app.thepass.to/dao/Curatedxyz_pending/Dashboard
https://app.thepass.to/dao/Squiggledao_pending/Dashboard
https://app.thepass.to/dao/BrightMoments_pending/Dashboard
