SuperRare Since 2018 – an Artist Story
A lot can happen in three years in crypto. And in your own life.
Origins
Three years ago, I became the 18th artist on a new crypto art platform called SuperRare. In 2017 I started to read about Bitcoin and I went down the rabbit hole as many people do. As someone who studied Mathematics in school, I was fascinated by how math itself was effectively creating something previously unimaginable – digital scarcity.
I won’t dive into it now, but I will say that once you understand that digital scarcity can be provably created and immutably secured, you instantly understand that the implications are profound. So, when you hear someone mention the concept of “crypto art” or “art on the blockchain”, you immediately become interested. That’s exactly what happened to me when I came across Jason Bailey’s aptly titled: What is Cryptoart? All the magic of Bitcoin had found its way into digital art (and music, and writing, etc) – it’s hard to overstate how transformative the creation of digital scarcity might become in a time when software is eating the world, as Marc Andreesen famously stated.
I devoured as much as I could from Jason (thank you, @artnome) including his podcast called Dank Rares. One episode featured the founders of SuperRare – a new crypto art website that “makes it easy to create, sell, and collect rare digital art.” A few other crypto art sites were around at the time, but as an artist, one thing was immediately obvious from the moment you saw SuperRare – it was beautiful. OpenSea felt like a marketplace, but SuperRare was a gallery. From the use of whitespace to the type hierarchy, SuperRare made you feel like you were walking into a Chelsea gallery – the aesthetic elevated the art. This may seem minor, but I think the design of SuperRare is a big reason why SuperRare is a success – digital art needed to be elevated from Tumblr and DeviantArt to be taken seriously by “The Art World”. SuperRare made crypto art feel important.
The other reason that SuperRare looked so beautiful was that they curated each artist on the site. When I first looked at SuperRare, I saw incredible works from Robbie Barrat, XCopy, and Hackatao. I knew that I wanted to be on SuperRare, but now I had to see if SuperRare wanted me.
Luxmoji
In late 2016, virtual goods were beginning to explode. People were spending billions of dollars on items like digital outfits and virtual swords, and Fortnite wasn’t even a thing yet. If digital goods appeared here to stay, wouldn’t digital luxury goods be next? In the metaverse, digital pants might need a digital Gucci belt. Rarity has long been an essential foundation of traditional luxury goods, but digital spaces upended notions of objects being original or authentic. Could you have digitally rare luxury objects?
The idea of a one-of-a-kind digital object is practically antithetical by definition. The power of digital technology is primarily based on the ability to send a copy of a “packet” of data (like a website, song, or image) from one place to another instantly and infinitely. The internet is perhaps the greatest symbol of abundance in the history of humanity. Using cryptography to secure a distributed time-stamped ledger fundamentally changes digital technology – it formally introduces rarity and authenticity into the digital world, perhaps more so than even a fingerprint scanner. A computer can fake a fingerprint scan, but it can’t fake Proof of Work. I found the whole concept endlessly fascinating, and I was hoping the team at SuperRare would too. The act of creating “digital luxury” challenged conventions not only of art & artifact, but also of reality itself. I also thought it looked pretty sick 😁.
Luxmoji No.5 (2018)
I submitted my Luxmoji series to SuperRare, and received an email from Jonathan Perkins (co-founder of SuperRare) to set up a video call. He was in a small office in New York with typical startup activity in the background – it felt like early days, but also immediately clear that he and John Crain (his co-founder) were the real deal. I explained to Jonathan that I had originally created Luxmoji as an iPhone sticker pack that sold for $99 (Apple rejected my initial $499 price point). I shared my vision of creating exorbitantly priced NFTs – up to 50 ETH (unheard of in 2018) – as an integral part of the work. He totally got it and really liked the concept and the design. He also gave me some feedback about cropping the images and even some edits on my description text. We agreed that for the purposes of scarcity, I would remove the sticker pack from the App Store as well – fortunately only one user in Russia had paid for the sticker pack. Luxmoji was about to truly become SuperRare.
The Void
It was a huge milestone to launch my work on SuperRare on June 4th, 2018. No one knew what NFTs were, but it didn’t matter. I felt like I was exhibiting in my first gallery show! I excitedly shared the links with my Mom and my brother – the only measure of success that mattered to me. My Mom never replied to that email, a sign that something might be wrong. She passed away two months later. My three-year relationship with my girlfriend ended that December.
The Void (2019)
Kanye West once said that he pursued music over visual art because visual art “wasn’t loud enough”. I can’t find the exact quote, but I remember fully understanding what he meant as I found myself turning from visual art to music during this new chapter of my life. I released an EP called The Void – effectively a soundtrack for what I experienced during the second half of 2018. I find it hauntingly beautiful, but it is “a LOT” according to a close friend.
Uncertainty (2020)
2019 was the hardest year of my life. I felt that 2020 would be a fresh start, and then Coronavirus upended the world. I struggled to write music during this time, but I continued to experiment with a new method of creating music that was more akin to painting. The process is hard to explain, but it was ultimately an exercise in uncertainty: a process that aptly reflected both the state of the world, and my own life as well.
Chrome Cat (2020)
The last thing in the world that my Mom and Dad would want is for me to be sad because they were both gone. Life is unpredictable, but it’s important to note that I wasn’t entirely alone. I still had my brother, and I made Chrome Cat to keep me company. Life goes on. Some things will make you cry, and some things will make you laugh. Hopefully this trailer will make you cry laughing.
igivefor (2020)
As I stepped back to think about what really mattered in life, I shifted my energy to a project focused on giving. For years I had wondered if you could make giving online simple and social. Could you create a digital version of an “I voted” sticker, but for giving? Could you create a movement for good by empowering anyone to give to the most effective nonprofits in the world and share their donation?
The answers to these questions were realized with igivefor.com. I was incredibly fortunate to secure partnerships with some of the greatest nonprofits in the world including Malala Fund, GiveDirectly, and the International Rescue Committee.
Network Activity
Towards the end of 2020, I was ready to make art again. I also realized that getting into SuperRare had become a coveted opportunity in cryptoart, and that by focusing on curation, SuperRare had become an appealing place for collectors to find great artists. XCopy and Hackatao were now considered legendary “O.G.s” of cryptoart. Fewocious stormed onto the scene with contagious enthusiasm. Pablo Fraile upped the stakes from the collector side. The price of Ethereum was up to $500 again. Things were looking up for cryptoart. I was ready to return.
Network Activity – Satoshi & Hal (2021)
I returned to SuperRare on January 8th, 2021, with a piece called Network Activity – Satoshi & Hal. On January 8th, 2009, Satoshi announced the release of Bitcoin v0.1 to The Cryptography Mailing List – a group of enthusiasts that included Hal Finney, one of its earliest contributors and the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction. Hal would later write that the reaction to Bitcoin was skeptical at best, while he was more positive. In that same post, Hal shared that in 2009 – the same year the Bitcoin network came online – he was diagnosed with ALS.
I wanted to visually convey the tragic paradox of a digital network of nodes coming alive just as a human network of nodes was beginning to fade away. I tried to create a short film with this piece that would tell a whole story. The style of music that I had created over the past two years gave me the ideal soundtrack.
I still get emotional when I reach the end of this piece as I’m reminded of the fragility of life.
One Day – 24 hours (2021)
Time is a theme that I have been exploring with my recent work because much of cryptoart feels as though it has emerged from the short-attention span, gif-dominated digital world. This makes a lot of cryptoart cool, but not something you necessarily would want on the wall of your living room for 24 hours a day.
Could you make an NFT that was 24 hours long, but also looked unique at any given second? This was the question I set out to tackle with One Day – 24 hours. It’s not hard to make a long video that has minimal aesthetic appeal. And it’s not hard to make a visually-engaging piece that is a few seconds long. But to make a continuously changing 24-hour long video is a fascinating challenge.
The only way to make a 24-hour video file that fits SuperRare’s upload limit of 50MB is to make the video dimensions very, very small. In the end, the poetic size became 24 x 24 pixels – that’s right, the video is about the size of a favicon (the icon in a browser tab). The beauty is that the abstract sky shown in the video is designed to blur and distort as it scales up to the size you might view it at. Meaning, the blurring of a small video into a larger viewport is definitively part of the art itself. The horizontal “bands” of the piece also mean that it can be stretched to fill a vertical or horizontal monitor at any size.
Fun fact: this piece was made entirely in Keynote (1,440 individual slides).
Sentience (2021)
Sentience was the piece that changed everything for me. I wanted to see if I could make a piece that recognized me the way that I recognized it. What could a piece of cryptoart “know”? The answer I arrived at was that it could know really only one thing with certainty without being interactive: it could know that it was opened (or restarted). A piece of cryptoart could know that it was reborn.
Once I realized that a work could know that it was reborn, it became clear that the work could “breathe” or somehow have a “beating heart” that measured its liveness. The simplest way to communicate this “life” to the user is with a timer that counts up every second. But what really made this piece resonate with others was that it was an animated GIF – this meant there was no play button, and that meant that in the SuperRare Activity feed, it was immediately alive. You didn’t bring it to life (with a play button), it was alive, and it was aware that it was alive. It was sentient.
I posted the piece late one night and excitedly sent the link to my brother. I had yet to sell any work. He replied with typical support saying “keep putting your stuff up!” I’m not exactly sure how the next morning played out, but I came out of a routine doctor appointment and saw a tweet notification that “One Day – 24 Hours” had been sold for 8 ETH. The list price was 2.4 ETH – it had just sold for the second time in a matter of hours.
There were more notifications. I had sold three works in one hour (thank you, @rudy) and Sentience was the catalyst that sparked it all. Bids were rolling in, and it was as if people heard the name Mills for the first time on SuperRare in two and a half years. I even sold a Luxmoji. I was overcome with emotion and called my brother to share the news. Then I bought a bottle of champagne and drove home to mash the accept button on Jonathan’s offer for Sentience.
My Mom and Dad would have really gotten a kick out of that morning. It was the culmination of basically everything. I will never forget that day.
Emergence
I continue to make work that I hope will push the limits of cryptoart, or at least our understanding of what cryptoart can be. My current obsession is with animated SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) that look flawless at any size, on any screen. If someone invests in your work today, will it still look good in 2031?
Emergence (Pearl) (2021)
Hip Hop Forever (2021)
I also came back to my other true love in 2021: Hip Hop. My music, like my art, is somewhat unpredictable. I don’t have a signature style or aesthetic – frankly I can’t imagine something more restrictive as an artist. If there’s one thread that runs through all of my work, I hope it is simply that it makes you feel something.
Digital Luxury (TBD)
I always knew that conceptually Luxmoji might be ahead of its time. Digital luxury goods are a bit of an absurd concept. But the future has nearly arrived – a virtual Gucci bag sold for $4,100 a few days ago (the “real version” costs $3,400). Whenever the future of digital luxury arrives, Luxmoji will be here – provably scarce, minted on SuperRare.
Thank You
Thank you to Jonathan Perkins and John Crain – the co-founders of SuperRare – for believing in my work and my vision. Thank you to nftart, Jonathan Habicht, and especially Rudy Adler for collecting and investing in my art. Thanks to anyone that has ever made a bid on my work, or simply favorited a piece.
Thank you to my brother David for everything.
And thank you (for reading!)
– Mills