The Home Run Series is the culmination of almost a year of work with the City of Seattle to put my art on a signal box in the city.

The signal box art program (here) is meant to engage the community by showing local artists on every day infrastructure, making the streets more vibrant.

I applied for a permit to the box in August of 2023 and finally got approved in January of 2024.

With permit in hand, I had my plan for the box. I would install my art from my project Melt Into You along with a game powered by IYK. Embedded underneath the vinyl art on the box is a small NFC chip that links to this token on Base chain.

The trick is that the token is owned by the box itself. Anyone can come by and temporarily steal the NFT, but the next person who goes to the box can take it again. It's basically a game of King of the Hill, but with my art.

The inspiration for the art is my hometown baseball team, the Mariners. Their colors are blue, teal, white, and a hint of red. Additionally, the signal box is right outside of a soon-to-be-opened transit station. I am hoping that people will get the chance to enjoy it on their commutes home from the games this summer.

I think this box will hopefully be a way for the community here in Seattle to engage with physical art, digital art, and learn about NFTs in a new and approachable way.

"Melt Into You" is the story of a partner's loving embrace. When the warmth of a hug melts all your troubles away.

The tight knit compositions bounded by the boxes show what it's like under tension and stress, while the more flow-y pieces illustrate a sense of calmness and healing.

When viewing "Melt Into You", take care to curate pairs of the same color but differing levels of tension.

breathe is an exercise in calmness.

the project was built during a period when I needed time away from the space, just to breathe.

the art invites the viewer to stare at the circles as they form, slowly shutting your eyes as the grain sets in.

as each circle forms, take a deep breath in, then out. in the middle of the animation, pause for a few seconds as the animation gets more faded. then continue the breathing as the animation reverses and the tension releases from your body.

Chicken was another one of my classic combinations of flow-field based art and smart contract wizardry!

Art

You may recognize that the art here is very similar to my pieces I made during wkndfest wknd 1. However, in this case it appears that there are two armies of particles flying at each other and fighting. Just like the game of chicken. Every time you re-load the art, there is a new pattern of particles racing towards each other. I also experimented here with a new palette of oranges and yellows, which remind me a lot of chickens.

Contract

The contract was another fun play on the game of chicken. It was essentially a limited-open-edition. For 24 hours, the edition was “open” but every 10 minted would reset the count to 0. What this meant is that it was capped at an edition of 10, but as many people could fight over ownership of those 10 until the timer went out. This resulted in 107 mints, but only 7 copies owned by 5 people in the end. An open-limited-edition 🐓 You can find the contract here

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The sales from this piece totaled to 0.7383 ETH. You can view the art here

This piece was made as part of the month of wknd fest activities.

Similar to wknd fest wknd 1, this is a showcasing of my artistic skills using flow fields. However, this also showcases my smart contract writing skills!

Art

The art was dual-faceted and configurable by the the bidders on the piece. The main configurations were palette, style (lines or dots), spread, and inverse-ness. Each of this had a play in the final output of the piece.

The background is from a photograph I took with my girlfriend while on vacation in Lisbon. The colors for each of the palettes for the generative-art aspect of this piece come from that sunset photo.

Contract

The contract here is where the magic really happened. Upon each bid, the bidder was given 5 minutes to customize one of the given traits on the piece. Bidding was locked during this 5 minutes, and once customized, bidders would be bidding on essentially a “new” piece of art. This allowed for an interactive bidding experience like none before.

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The piece sold at auction for 2 ETH. You can see the token here.

City Planner was the second iteration of my City Parks project! I wanted to provide extra fun to the holders of City Parks by using the same constructs to create new, unminted parks.

I first built a drag and drop tool for a user to create their own City Parks. Then I did an auction of a completely blank City Parks, with the winner having the ability to save their custom City Parks on-chain!

The contract for doing this was here. The auction settled at 0.769 ETH.

wkndfest was my exploration of releasing art every weekend for an entire month. It was a challenge for myself to continually create and see what I could come up with.

These three pieces are from the first weekend of wkndfest, releasing on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in early November, 2022.

Each of them is animated and showcases my signature flow-fields work, overlaid upon itself twice. I was quite happy with how the overlaps turned out, especially in space window, where the lines seemingly melted from the inside box into the outside box.

Each set of these sold for about 6.9 ETH each.

midnight mirror - open edition, 0.0069 ETH each, 875 minted.

lightning strikes again - edition of 100, 0.069 ETH each

space window - edition of 11, 0.69 ETH each.

This was one of the highlights of my career as an artist! There was a lot of excitement and buildup around the release for this weekend and it kicked off a bunch of sales.

This was a piece that combined both my ability to write code-based art and artistic code!

Art

On the art side - this uses flow fields to create a sort of vine-y, leaf-y pattern overlaid over a gradient that was taken from a sunset photo with my girlfriend. An additional twist on this art is that it changes over the course of the day, with the piece getting darker and darker as the day goes on. Additionally - the amount of curling in the vines is based on the amount that the bidder had bid. This leads us to the contract.

Contract

The contract was one of the early examples of an on-chain bidder’s edition. I created this out of the frustration of artists creating bidder’s editions but then needing to manually airdrop pieces, or forgetting to do so. In this case, as each bid comes in, a new piece is automatically minted to the previous bidder’s wallet. This results in a new piece for every bidder except the winner, who gets the main piece. I passed in the bid data to the p5js script which then generated the art with the specific bidder’s amount.

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The piece sold at auction for 10 ETH.

You can see the full collection on OpenSea here - https://opensea.io/collection/california-sunset-yungwknd

I created this output live at the Seattle NFT Museum during a class I taught on how to go from an algorithm to an output in only 1 hour!

I took a common flow-fields algorithm and some basic particles and went through the practice of showing the listeners how to modify the math to make art using p5js. This is the final output that I made, along with live feedback from the class to change the style as we went.

This art was given away for free to those who attended the talk!

This started as a collaborative art piece giveaway by yungwknd and ACK. It was a one-of-a-kind digital art piece that showcased the creative talents of these two artists.

The art piece was created using a combination of yungwknd's signature style of generative, abstract lines and ACK's intricate 3D modeling work. The final artwork is a stunning display of their combined creative energies and was given away to the winner in an on-chain manner.

The giveaway was set up in an on-chain contract here. No info was given about who the collab was with or that it was a collab at all.

It had been running smoothly at about 200 entries when suddenly the contract had appeared to be botted in the final hour. In the end, over 700 entries were put in, many from new (and fake) accounts.

In a snap decision, yungwknd deployed a new contract to generate a random number here and used that to pick a number between 1 and 220. The random winner was submission #57.

The art piece was later resold for around 4 ETH.

Touching Grass is a series where I’ll be examining the relationship a digital artist has with their medium and subject of choice.

The first piece - "The Mountain" - is a nod to Alexander von Humboldt, a naturalist who explored much of South America. I include a quote from him:

"Nature must be experienced through feeling".

I want this art to convey a physical feeling. The feeling of touching physical paper, or physical grass, or anything in nature. You can see the difference in texture zoomed in here

I want the viewer to feel the fibrous strands in the paper, even though the medium is digital code.

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The first piece, “The Mountain” sold for 2.33 ETH to @5280ross. He took the buyer’s choice to grab the second piece, “Evening Ascent” for half the settling price of the first, 1.17 ETH.

Both pieces were coded with p5js and the texture I examined in the pair is cardboard paper.

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The next two pieces in the series, titled “a cartoon chair” and “shadows of a lamp” are a study of the texture of wood.

The story of the mountain continues, with a more zoomed-out perspective. This time, the viewer is inside a cabin in the foothills of the mountain.

Now, for the textural study. As you can see with the zoomed in look at the floorboards, each individual piece has its own wood grain. It took a lot of experimenting and completely re-doing the floor until it looked in a way that I’d describe as natural wood.

While I made the wood grain with an algorithm, each and every nail in the floor was hand-coded to be placed there. I find that this mimics real life in a very interesting manner. While wood grain is almost “magical” in the way its pattern forms, nails in the floor are an act of human labor. Much like a real carpenter, I hammered each and every one in to place.

The first piece, “a cartoon chair” was auctioned on April 18th-April 19th and sold for 1.3 ETH to @wetpotatobrain. He took the option of securing the second piece, “shadows of a lamp” for 0.65 ETH in a private sale.

FAKESHRINE is my first issuance on Counterparty. Full video can be seen here.

It’s an issuance of 69 for 0.0069 BTC each. With this piece, I wanted to play on the way that our culture seems to idolize influencers, whales, and artists.

This piece is based on the Zealot Pepe piece which can be found here on Matt Furie’s twitter or here on OpenSea.

I used code to automatically convert dark and light tones to different ASCII characters. I then overlaid a gradient background pattern and timed it to change colors when the Zealot touched the Idol.

Enjoy 🐸

flashing lights is yungwknd’s first generative piece that is a 1/1.

A consistent theme in yungwknd’s work is the relationship between the artist and the collector. This piece breaks down the traditional method of selling outputs of generative art, and instead sells the whole algorithm.

This piece is truly a living embodiment of the algorithm behind it. Each time you view it, and each different viewer, gets something completely new. Where the art flows is random and doesn’t repeat.

For this reason, I’ve also given the collector the ability in the contract to update the preview that shows on OS to any recording they take of the piece.

You can view the living piece here.

This sold for 1.25 ETH to @VGFreakXBL

The Collector was the piece that started me on my ASH journey. This piece was another experiment in breaking down the traditional relationship between artist and collector.

With the art, I sold the right to release 100 pieces under my name (now known as the Ash Forest). I wanted to flip the idea of being a “collector” and being “collected” on its head. Now - the collector became the collected one.

This piece sold at auction for 759 $ASH (about 5.5 ETH at the time).

The Ash Forest is a collection of 100 randomly generated seedling trees based on the initial piece, “The Collector”.

The algorithm defining the Ash Forest is similar to The Collector, though two trees are present, and have either gold or silver leaves.

What made this collection truly special was that it was the first $ASH-only mint. Each piece could be minted for 11 $ASH and pioneered a wave of $ASH-only mints. The edition of 100 sold out in only 8 minutes.

An additional mechanic with this collection was the burn/redeem/reward mechanic. In this case, current holders of the ASH Collector Card had the option to burn one Ash Forest to get back a golden tree. ASH Collector Card holders were also rewarded with 11 $ASH for doing so, effectively canceling out their initial investment.

For those who do not hold the ASH Collector Card, a golden tree could be obtained by burning 2 Ash Forest pieces.

my beautiful dark twisted cryptodickbutt was my first collab, and I chose @ProbCause for this, as he’s one of the premier cryptodickbutt derivative artists.

This piece is a mix of generative art and hand-drawn art. I wanted to play off the Kanye album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”. So, I made a blurred version of it, similar to how to album cover is blurred. I then reached out to Prob to create a cryptodickbutt for the inner art.

In the final piece, the art slowly clarifies until it shows Prob’s drawing. However, there is a secret functionality that can be unlocked by clicking on the right-click advisory button. By clicking on it, you can blur and unblur the inner art.

You can view the piece here.

This piece sold for 1 ETH to @lphacentaurikid

little red umbrella was my first commissioned / curated piece. This was curated for the Intern Studios exhibit in the first week of March.

This 1/1 piece was created with p5.js and javascript. It depicts an umbrella that lights up either red or blue depending on the color of the raindrop that hits it.

A secret feature of this piece is that you can interact with it by hitting the space bar on your computer. This will change the umbrella from blue/red (3D) to black & white.

You can view and interact with the piece here

This piece sold for 1.65 ETH to @GAMT242

Generative Morning is one of my earlier art pieces, from September 2021.

The art is fully on-chain and I consider it to be a “living” piece. Every block, the sun moves slightly across the sky, over a 12 hour period. Once the sun sets, there is 12 hours of night time, showing the moon and a darker color set.

The owner of this piece is able to set a number of options for it. They can change the “gm” message that is on-chain, they can change the length of the day, the time of the sunrise, and whether or not the piece is actually revealed on OpenSea.

You can see the piece live at https://generativemorning.eth.limo/

This piece was bought by @nvlcllctr for 1.75 ETH

More Or Less was one of my most technically challenging pieces. For this, I wrote an on-chain SVG art generation library.

In the “experiment”, so to say, the buyers had the option to choose to pay either 0.1 ETH or 0.01 ETH. Whichever bucket had the most mints would be donated to Black Girls Code. In the end, 6.13 ETH was donated.

You can read a full blog post on the project here

You can view the art here

Carbon Raindrops was my very first project and contract I ever deployed. I first got into NFTs in early 2021 through ArtBlocks. I realized that my ability to code could create beautiful outputs. However, I saw the applications were closed for ArtBlocks, so I decided to make my own contract in the same vein as them and deploy my own art.

Carbon Raindrops is generated with p5js and the code is stored on-chain and rendered in the browser.

I sold 100 of these for 0.1 ETH each, donating 50% (5 ETH) to Offsetra, a carbon offsets company.

You can view the Carbon Raindrops project here

City Parks is another on-chain generative SVG project that I made, this time inspired by the parks in NYC. The custom solidity library I wrote to handle this art took 3 contracts to fully deploy.

So far, 93/1700 have been minted. Each is priced at 0.03 ETH.

50% of the proceeds will be donated to TWLOHA. TWLOHA is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling w/ depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide.

You can see the project and mint one yourself here

The ASH Collector card is my vision for how membership cards will work in the NFT space. Rather than a card that gives specific benefits to a specific project (like pre-sale, allowlist, etc), this card is for the wider $ASH ecosystem.

It’s a card that rewards you for spending $ASH on all creators that onboard with it. You can accrue points, spend points, get discounts, and pretty much do anything.

This is less of an “art” project and more of a technical feat.

I sold 20 cards initially for 50 $ASH each. At the time this was about 6 ETH total.

You can read more about the project in this twitter thread here

This was another $ASH-drop that I did, priced at 3.14 $ASH each. The art is all generated with p5js and randomly performs Buffon’s Needle Experiment - a method with which you can estimate pi.

Each piece is unique for all the needles that it drops. Overall, 113 pieces sold for 3.14 $ASH each, totally about 2 ETH in sales.

You can find the mint-site here