Cool Hunting: Cosmic Reef

Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have unlimited utility as essentially traceable serial numbers in the decentralized web3 world. For artists, they’re an invaluable tool to authenticate, protect and ensure royalties from their digital work. NFTs are often minted for static illustrations and many of these pieces are the subject of hype media given their massive trading values in crypto communities. The NFT art I’m most excited about is work that is generated by code that is minted into the NFT itself—it’s akin to the instructions for a Sol Lewit wall drawing because the owner of those instructions is the owner of the work, not the venue where the walls get painted. Joey Roth‘s Vector Field was the first example of this approach I became familiar with a few months back and Leo Villareal‘s forthcoming Cosmic Reef I find tremendously exciting. Where this gets even more interesting is that the act of minting a piece, which happens at time of purchase, generates a unique character string that is used by the artwork’s code to influence how the final work takes form.