The Incredible Story Of The Kleee02 NFT Project
kleee02 is an art piece by Kelian Maissen & Johannes Gees. It is a contemporary, blockchain-inspired take on conceptual art. The kleee02 smart contract was uploaded to the ethereum blockchain on April 10, 2019, making kleee02 one of the “oldest” NFT projects.
“A line is a point going for a walk”
kleee02 is also related to Swiss artist Paul Klee’s famous quote “A line is a dot that goes for a walk”. This “walk of the dot” is described in the kleee02 smart contract: each of the 360 nonfungible tokens (NFT) is unique in its shape and its colors.
kleee02 was “officially” launched on June 3, 2019, with a public laser (!) projection of the first minted NFT’s, at my studio in a park near Zurich, Switzerland. A few of the guests bought an NFT without actually knowing what it was. But then they were cheap, around 10–15 $: The price of the 360 tokens that the smart contract allows to be minted is defined in the same smart contract, in an exponentially growing curve.
The code of the contract and the website https://fungle.xyz was written by fellow artist and coder Kelian Maissen. We had both dipped our toes into the NFT pond: Kelian during his studies in interaction design at ECAL, I with another conceptual art piece, “Proof Of Destruction” , that was minted on verisart.com, in February 2019.
All three projects went mostly unnoticed, since they all were well ahead of their time. Being artists, we were happy with our “proof of concepts”, and soon enough we turned to new projects.
Kleee02 in stealth mode
From the time the kleee02 smart contract was deployed in April 2019 to August 26, 2021, 47 NFT’s were minted, mostly by friends. Sometimes several months would pass without a single NFT being minted.
When the NFT craze broke loose in early 2021, I briefly thought about shilling the project. I didnt. When some Brooklyn kids burnt a Banksy and sold the NFT of it, some people were reminded of my “Proof Of Desctruction” from 2019, but hey: this is crypto, not art class, right?
Boom! Part 1
This all changed on August 25, when we realised that youliveonlyonce.eth started buying kleee02 tokens. That evening, we had about 1.5 eth on our payroll accounts and no clue what was going to happen next.
Boom! Part 2
When a collector pointed out on Twitter that the kleee02 smart contract was verified the same week in April 2019 as Autoglyph, the second NFT project by Crypto Punks creators Larva Labs, all hell broke lose. We: still no clue. Kelian sleeping and I visiting the optometrist with my mother. Everybody wanted a kleee02 token, the website fell “out of sync” with the smart contract, wrong token prices were indicated, funds locked forever in the contract, which, we must admit, had flaws. We had developped the project in 2019, as an experiment, never dreamed of selling all the tokens (who would ever pay 2, 3 or even 8 eth for an NFT, we thought at the time).
Anyway, kleee02 sold out within a few hours, and over on Twitter a shitstorm was beginning to break loose.
Cleaning up the mess
We sat down to get an overview: about 310 of 360 NFT’s had been minted and were safely sitting in the wallets of the happy buyers; about 150 eth were locked in the smart contract, forever lost; about 500 eth had been paid out to our payroll accounts. For a brief moment, we were $ Millionaires.
- We set up a Twitter account and started explaining. It was well received. We tried to be as transparent as possible.
- Some code-savvy members of our community shared their insights and helped us sort out the mess.
- We set up a google form to collect the transaction hashes of those that did not get a token. We set aside 150 eth in a separate account and started refunding.
- we minted the remaining tokens to offer it later to those that did not get one in the first place, at exactly the price that is defined by the smart contract. We want to stay true to the original project idea.
kleee02 was never meant for center stage. We didn’t code it that way, we never shilled it, we never imagined what could happen. But it did, thanks to a super-enthusiastic community of fellow artists, collectors and the fact that kleee02 caught the interest of a couple of art collectors and investors who saw the potential of kleee02. Thank you.
We are proud of what we we came up with in 2019, and we are grateful we now have the funds to build new projects. Stay tuned.
