-my first month in cryptoart-
You Are Now Entering Unrealcity
What This Is
It’s probably best to start with what this article’s not going to do.
It’s not going to assume any specialist knowledge on your part, because you don’t need any. It’s not going to exclude you with in-group hipster slanguage. And it’s not going to tell you what kind of cryptoart sells or what kind of cryptoart you should make.
What it is going to do is describe why I’m interested in cryptoart and how I go about making and selling it. I’ll share my experience of progressing from cryptosceptic to cryptoartist, with a portfolio of 30 editions and bottom line topping £300, in a little over a month.
I did consider simply writing a guide to posting work on Known Origin and exporting the cryptocurrency earned from sales there to a current account, but without some discussion of my aesthetic interests and purposes that would assume a deficiency in the soul of my audience.
Which is exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
Maslow’s Hammer
I’m not a visual artist by sensibility or training. My background is literary: I teach English for a living, I work for a charity that facilitates professional development for teachers by linking them with writers and academics, I’ve published poems and short stories and I’m working on a novel. Words are my homeland, but pictures are a nice place to visit, and like all tourism the ultimate aim is “…to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
With words, failure matters. As a writer, I am a soufflé: if it doesn’t work, I failed. With pictures, I am a maker of soufflés: if it doesn’t work, it failed, and I can just have a go at something easier. So this all began from the idea that playing around with the visual arts might be a nice amuse bouche between literary courses.
The trouble is my ideas are verbal, not visual, and so are my skills. I had the motivation to make pictures, but had little idea of what pictures to make and less of how to make them. I have no formal training, I can’t draw, I don’t own any art materials and they’re expensive to buy. In terms of both technique and aesthetic intent, the cupboard was bare. If that’s how you’re feeling now, don’t worry because here’s how you fill it: let your method inspire your creativity and let your creativity inspire your method. Unlike the traditional art, all you need you already have: some motivation, a laptop or mobile, and some time to play.
The American psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” I suppose it’s equally tempting, if you have a nail to bang in, to treat everything as if it were a hammer. I started with a hammer: a friend introduced me to Google Deep Dream, a free online resource that uses artificial intelligence to apply a visual style to any image you upload. The hammer was easy to use, and for a while everything looked like a nail: I photographed interesting things, applied Deep Dream to the images and gradually got more skilful with that hammer until I hit the nail on the head more regularly and actually produced some pictures I was pleased with.
And as soon as you make a picture that interests you out of these initial caveman hammerings, your method has inspired your creativity. The pictures that engaged me were all views of London, made psychedelic by Deep Dream’s trippy AI augmentation, because they made my familiar home town strange. I found myself regarding the mundane and seeing the potential, not the actual. Far from an idle doodling to refresh my aesthetic palette, this digital art thing changed the centre of gravity of my perceptions. I got the confidence to post my work publically on Deep Dream (you can choose not to) and on Twitter and started to get some encouraging feedback. I took the name Unrealcity from T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and began to develop the idea I eventually expressed in my Known Origin bio like this: “Poetry can be defined as language made strange. My art seeks to make the language of perception unfamiliar so we attend consciously to the familiar built environment.”
So, I’d picked up a hammer and banged in a few nails, but I wanted to build something better. The tool had inspired my creativity and now creativity inspired my choice of the next tool: I rummaged around the internet for free apps and sites that would allow me to manipulate everyday urban images into the kind of trippy landscapes in which I was interested. I soon found Artbreeder, which allows you to “cross” two images from a curated stable and edit the “genes” of the resulting offspring, producing some striking results. You can also upload images of your own, although that’s limited and takes a while. Using the site’s portfolio of cityscapes and buildings, I began breeding some suitably uncanny hybrid images. However, I wanted to anchor these more firmly to an identifiable London, as it is the fantastic that interests me, not fantasy. That lead me to various other tools that allow images to be combined or “double-exposed”, including Funny Pho.To and some packages that came with my laptop, like Paint and Photoshop, that until then I’d never found much of a use for. Finally, I wanted to add movement, for which I use an app called Pixaloop. Pixaloop works on the “freemium” model and is free at its basic level, although I do now subscribe to Pixaloop Pro for a few quid a year. Pixaloop Pro also allows me to export my animated works as gifs, which means I can upload them to Known Origin.
I’ve just started to expand my palette a bit and create satirical cartoons as well as fantastical lysergic landscapes, so I’m looking for a resource that allows me to add and manipulate text better than I can with my current toolbox: let your method inspire your creativity and let your creativity inspire your method. If you happen to know of one, hit me up on Twitter at @UnrealcityArt.
Filthy Lucre
I graduated quickly from private to public on Deep Dream, and then to posting on Creary . Creary is a lovely site that attaches its own cryptocurrency, crea, in various ways to reward both creators and curators. I still use Creary but I lack the skills to exchange crea for sterling and, as I’m not interested in trading cryptocurrency per se, that was an issue for me.
For that reason most of my work now goes on Known Origin (abbreviated as KO), which uses a better known cryptocurrency called Ethereum or ETH. There are similar platforms, such as SuperRare, but for now I’m very happy with KO. There’s a gatekeeping procedure to these sites, so you’ll need a small portfolio of a few pictures you’re pleased with before you apply, but the process is easy enough.
Once your application is accepted, you’ll need a cryptocurrency wallet before you can post. This is kind of a virtual bank account. KO will walk you through the process of setting one up and establishing security, but it’s easy to do. I happened to choose Fortmatic . You’ll need to put a little money in this account as posting and transferring will be charged, but these are microtransactions that cost a few pence.
Once you’ve got your wallet, you can start posting. Each time you do, you’ll be asked to set a price for your work. Cryptocurrency fluctuates a lot, but at the time of writing, one ETH is £110. I’m not going to get into the tactics of cryptoart pricing here, except to say that the bigger your edition size, the less you can charge. Unique pieces (which KO automatically tags as #ultrarare) tend to go for the most. I price my work according to how much effort went in to making it: the pieces that were easier to do go for about 0.04ETH, the ones that took more effort I’ll sell for up to 0.2 ETH (around £20). Some artists sell for more, some for less. I just want to give the people generous enough to buy my stuff a price I genuinely think is fair, and this seems to be a good policy as I’ve already established a regular clientele. I’ve sold 30 works all told in the month I’ve been on KO, and I broke the 3.0ETH barrier for total sales a couple of days ago.
This might be enough for you: make some pictures, generate some ETH and buy some other pictures (or whatever else) with it. However, if you want to pay the rent with your art, you’ll need to do a little more. First, you’ll need a way to manipulate your wallet so you can withdraw ETH from it. I use Zerion , which I can thoroughly recommend as it is easy to set up and use and the customer service is excellent. When I needed advice, I dropped them an email and a real person replied immediately and was very generous with his time.
Finally, you’ll need to sign up to a trading platform. I tried Kraken, which I’m told has great functionality, but personally I found it hard to use, so now I’m on Coinbase. You’ll need to supply some security information, the usual photo ID and proof of address, but that can be done quickly online. Zerion will walk you through it, but in essence what you then do is link your wallet to Coinbase and Coinbase to your bank account. This is just a matter of pasting your wallet address (mine is 0x3311D6D155a6D30e01A628D4cD64F3212E87e12A, for example- it’ll start with 0x) and typing your bank account number into Coinbase. Then, go to Zerion, send ETH to Coinbase and put the ETH on the market for sterling. Once it sells, transfer it into your bank account. I tend to wait until I’ve amassed a whole ETH before I do this and I’m just beginning to use the graphs on Zerion, which track exchange rates, to turn ETH into sterling when the price is right.
You Are Now Leaving Unrealcity
If you found this article in any way useful, please visit my KO page or get in touch on Twitter. I wouldn’t be here without help and advice from many people, principally the mighty @BlackBoxDotArt, and I’d love to play that forward.
Maybe we’ll all find ourselves collaborating on a project one day.