mxtter genesis season — a recap

Looking back on our previous season, and looking ahead to our next

kaigani

Published in

[ mxtter ]

4 min readJun 4, 2022

Inspiration

When I first wrote an introduction to mxtter, it was a personal story about my growth as a generative artist in this space, and it contained the principles for what we hoped to build with other artists.

Putting artists first — storytelling to give context to the art

At the end of 2021, when I thought about what inspired me about the web3 & NFT space moving into 2022 — I felt that what is really impressive is the sheer number of new artists who are finding an audience and market for their digital work. I wanted to work with up & coming artists to help them explore the new emerging technologies and help expand the market for digital art, which had always struggled to gain the support of the ‘traditional’ art world (gallerists, curators, collectors).

We did this by focusing on the artist first. It struck me, with all the proliferation of art you see now (which is great) — there’s still so little you hear about the artists themselves. What is their background? What inspires them? How do they approach making their art?

Given I’d spent 3 years at Netflix, I had a very specific mindset in wanting to tell their stories in video– starting with my own:

We could make mxtter a new, original outlet for discovering artists & their art, differentiated through our releases (‘drops’) which would be:

Generative
Collaborative
Experimental

Generative

What’s exciting to me about using NFTs as an artistic medium is that it is, in a sense, performative. The audience/collector is involved in creating the NFT by minting it, and then it is revealed according to the artist’s plan. While there are lots of benefits to using NFTs to enable ownership of digital art, generative art is using the medium to its fullest. The goal of mxtter to is help artists discover making their art generative.

Collaborative

In my own work, I’ve done a few collabs and I found that it tends to be my favorite way to work. Both artists tend to push each other’s thinking in new ways, and it’s a great way to push and evolve your own artistic style. With mxtter, I wanted to make collaborative drops what we become known for. The ultimate goal will be when we are able to pair newly emerging artists with established artists, to learn from each other and set the new artist up for a successful career ahead.

Experimental

The web3 space is so new and cutting edge, it seems like every project holds the opportunity to innovate. Between 2017–2020, there was very little mainstream attention being given to the NFT space, but for me, that was the most exciting time because we did it for the love of the exciting new things made possible by the technology. We wanted to bring that spirit of innovation to mxtter and create an experimental space for artists to play with the state of the art.

Our genesis season artists

So far on our journey, we’ve launched with 4 artists for what we’re calling our ‘Genesis season’ — think of this as our ‘test run’ as we were getting ready to onboard more artists with each season through a more robust program.

These are all artists, I’ve worked with, or am familiar with through their NFT art. They were ideal for us to launch our genesis season with because of their familiarity with the medium, so we only had to work on our collaborative process with them.

AZAR

TARTARUS

Genesis season — Creative Director

Each season features a takeover creative direction shaped by the vision of a talented artist and designer. For our Genesis season was guided by the incredible eye of Hyam

What’s next — Season 1: #ArtistSummer

What’s next

We’re getting ready with big plans for our Season 1 including:

$30k grants program for new artists
Activation of the mxtter DAO
Announcements of our Season 1 artists
Season pass
Team announcement — expanding our team of curators, contributors and advisors
New Discord server