Wings, Open for Minting

I began my GenArt adventure on the Async.Art platform on Ethereum. In the heady summer of 2021, I had some exciting initial success, and I wanted to feel that I had found an NFT home. The nature of the Async.Art platform, focusing as it does on layered compositing, dovetailed nicely with my photographic origins, and I loved (still do) the play that the platform encouraged between artist and collector - that sense of visual conversation that took place. However, the cost of working on Ethereum quickly sobered me up. After pouring my heart and hundreds of dollars in gas fees into a large complex project that excited no one but me, I had to face the fact that Async.art was a constrained playground. I might be bursting with ideas, but implementing them all was impractical. I had to budget my efforts and my funds, particularly as NFT sales plunged overall.

Things rocked along and I began hearing about this new platform on Tezos called, fx(Hash). Some of the artists that I most admired on Async, @tz1XMYyXTn3FmnJKJGh55ivepRPqNpQqeE7x, for example, were releasing exciting new work there. But it required coding skills. I saw that as an obstacle on two fronts. One, I had spent my working career coding, and I did not want to find myself anchored to a computer once again. The second obstacle was that my coding skills were database related. When I read the list of skills needed to create on fx(Hash), my eyes glazed over. I settled for becoming an fx(Hash) collector, and the months slipped away.

Then a fellow photographer, @tz1Kzk3rA9sMuxYbDnEgTohhmjtBBpvuMeRb, minted her first fx(Hash) piece, Subjective Photography #1. She had worked with another fx(Hash) artist, @tz1VTStnDKBJNsADuQtH5MrSNhTd3k6oPJK4, to complete the project, a combination of her photography and Jose's code. I decided it was time to get off the fence and I contacted Lorena to ask if she thought Jose might be interested in a collaboration with me. She quickly confirmed that he was interested, and he and I soon began a collaboration that we are still working on.

In the course of that work, I was exposed to p5.js code for the first time, and I found myself wondering why I had been so resistant to diving in. I dived in. Wings is the result. I have so much still to learn it can't be measured, but the best news is that the coding is fun. I will have to fight that obsession that could leave me a pale, shrunken shadow of myself in an unhealthy relationship to a machine, but I am sure I can handle that. I feel once again that I may have found my NFT home.

::tezos-storage-pointer[]{contract="KT1BJC12dG17CVvPKJ1VYaNnaT5mzfnUTwXv" path="ledger::19360" data_spec="FX-GEN-DATA-002"}

My previous article provides an overview of the construction of the project. You can read it here.

Love and creativity always,

Wanda