How Rhea Myers Made Blockchain Art Before NFTs Were a Thing
You might think you know what a non-fungible token, or NFT, is or looks like — a cartoonish profile pic of a CryptoPunk or of a Bored Ape that may be dressed in nautical clothing.
But before NFTs became the phenomenon whose top 10 projects have done a minimum of $9 billion in trading volume over all time, Rhea Myers was a blockchain coder and artist who had dabbled in things like generative art bots on Tumblr and artificial intelligence art. (Generative art is art in which the artist sets up rules for the art works, and the system itself follows those rules, administered, for instance, by an algorithm, to then generate its own new artworks, without needing further input from the artist.) Then she began making blockchain-based art on early chains like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Counterpary and others. That makes her a true OG crypto artist, one who was making blockchain-based art before NFTs were even a thing. Finally, this summer, she sold one of those early works in a Sotheby’s NFT auction.
In her interview on my show, Unchained, Rhea said that though she had gone to art school in the 1990s, “I decided that rather than have a struggling career as an artist with most of my time spent making the money to support my art, I would have a struggling career in software development and take the money from that, then use it to make art.”
Rhea is now a senior smart contract developer at Dapper Labs, the company behind some of the most popular NFT projects — CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot. But her work as a crypto artist started when she was exploring Vancouver’s crypto art scene several years ago after having moved there.
“I crafted some Bitcoin transactions as art. That’s something you can do if you’re an artist, to just get to do something and declare it art,” she says. She tried doing similar things with other chains, some of them long-forgotten, such as Dogeparty, a fork (or branch) of Dogecoin, the popular meme-coin with a Shiba Inu mascot whose thoughts are printed in uses Comic Sans font. (Elon Musk is a fan.) For the Sotheby’s NFT auction, the work chosen was one of the few that could actually be sold, given that some of the others were made on blockchains that are not currently functioning.
One of the most amusing pieces is titled, MYSOUL, in which, as she puts it, “I have placed my soul on the blockchain, representing it as a cryptographic asset token.” Hilariously, she put her soul on Dogeparty. (A note on the artwork now warns viewers, “Note: as of 2017 dogepartychain is offline, don’t follow the link!”) On my show, Rhea said, speaking about her wife, “she was not unreasonably terribly offended by the idea of anyone other than herself owing my soul. So I’m actually not allowed to sell these tokens.”
One work to which Rhea contributed may be one of the most famous crypto artworks of all time. She collaborated with another OG crypto artist, Marguerite de Courcelle, on an iconic early Bitcoin artwork, which was actually a puzzle with two bitcoins hidden inside. TORCHED H34R7S, for which Rhea helped out on the cryptographic elements, contained what Rhea says was “a codes-generated list — ‘tall flame orange, red outline, curved left’ — and that kind of thing, and she painted 160 of those with perfect accuracy.” It took someone two years to unlock the codes hidden in the flames, during which time the bitcoin price had multiplied, so the initial $2,000 prize was then worth $40,000.
The NFT that Rhea sold at Sotheby’s earlier this summer is called “Secret Artwork (Content)” and even Rhea herself forgets what artwork it is based on.
“I came up with something that would be interesting to go into the artwork, created the cryptographic hash of the text of that, saved the original text somewhere in a bank vault or, or a cave and the top of a mountain or somewhere that people will not be able to access,” she says. “I personally genuinely cannot remember what it was now, but I can access it if I’m ever taken to court to prove that I did have an idea.”
My personal favorite of the cryptographic descriptions of the artwork is the emoji representation.
Check out the full episode to hear Rhea talk about the ways in which she was wrong about how the NFT industry would evolve, why she isn’t concerned about how much energy NFTs consume, and why she’s interested in NFT curation DAOs.
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