Singular Artists — Craig Smith and The Philosopher
Our modular NFTs have unique features that allow artists to explore creativity in different ways. We interviewed 2 Singular artists that use our modular NFTs with their art in creative and unique ways.
Craig Smith
“I’ve always loved drawing and painting and I was obsessed with comics as a child. I graduated from Belfast Art College in the late nineties with a 1:1 in Art & Design. I painted semi-abstract figures, tried my hand at printmaking, took photography modules and in my final year I specialised in multimedia. That multimodal approach still informs my art practice today and I’ll take inspiration from pop culture, traditional art and whatever inspires me. I typically sketch and paint using Krita, an open source painting program that lets me use expressive digital paint brushes, or more focused pencil and pen work. I use Blender for my 3D work as it allows me to experiment with certain tools that I regularly use. My first collection on Singular was ‘Goopz’, a collection of 3D lab experiments given life by a toxic ‘goop’.
‘Goopz’ was my first foray into modular NFTs, and it enabled me to provide extra features or ‘skins’ that my collectors could choose for the artwork that I produce. I also introduced additional characters into the 3D environment which added something new to the narrative for each piece. I’m still thinking of ways to create modular NFTs that provide something extra for the collectors, as well as giving me an opportunity to innovate and provide additional depth to my creations.
NFTs have allowed me to create work from a rural part of Ireland and exhibit and sell in a Worldwide marketplace. I’ve been so impressed by the team at RMRK and Singular and I’ve focused my recent work on the Singular.app platform as I believe in the people and the technology. I can see a future where modular NFTs become more and more central to what artists and collectors want out of the NFT space. I feel a responsibility as an artist to try to expand my use of modular NFTs and hope to share some new work soon in 2024!”
Available at Singular:
Drollies — While they’re all instantly recognisable as a collection, each Droolie exhibits subtle hand-animated features that have a claymation effect and I’ve spent time composing and animating each one to give them a unique look. They’re also my first collection minting on Moonbeam.
Check also Empire of Avian and Goopz.
The Philosopher (Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Cid)
“I am a philosophy professor at the Federal University of Amapa, inside the Amazon region, in Brazil. I began in the world of art in 2017, when I developed a kind of art I call Nanjing Breath, blowing nanjing on paper, with my first individual exhibition in that year in the city of Ouro Preto. After that, I dove into art and started to produce painting, collage, assemblage, wood and bronze sculpture, and by the end of 2020 also digital art. The reason why I decided to go to digital art was a terrible fact: 2 of my physical bronze sculptures were stolen from the gallery where it was being exhibited, and I became really frightened of exhibiting physical pieces again. With blockchain technology, there was no way for people to steal me again, so I was excited with this new possibility, brought to me by a digital gallerist who presented me to the world of NFTs. In this cryptoworld, I was council of many daos on Near Blockchain, Voxels Metaverse official storyteller on Ethereum, curator for many metaverse and physical events, and also Singular’s Ambassador. I am also curator and leader from Brazucas NFT, a collective and gallery for Brazilian crypto artists. And you can find my work in many cities in the world, like New York, Chicago, Vancouver, Seoul, Helsinki, Brasília, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, and many others. For my creations, I can start from a physical piece or from a completely digitally born artwork. When I make digital paintings, I use Procreate and sometimes also Photomosh Pro. When I add music, I produce music from my partner’s piano playing or from Beatoven Artificial Intelligence. Some of my collaboration works are with musicians, so there is some original human music in some of my works. I link the music and the video with CapCut. For my digital work with movement, I can start on Canva and then pass to Photomosh Pro. On Photomosh, I can work multiple times in a single work: mosh, and upload the moshed version to mosh it again — I can go up to 5 or 6 times until I get a satisfactory result, and sometimes I use overlay between 2 moshed works. Nowadays, I am exploring making art inside virtual reality, but I still did not present the results in the form of NFT. I am excited for the future.
Modular NFTs are really interesting because they allowed me to make a NFT in which I can hold all the medias of an entire series in a single NFT. This is good for me because I can build my portfolio and a kind of different NFT that represents an entire series of art, and not just one artwork. I could make a NFT with 100 medias, with all my Frames. This is allowed by a limitless multi-asset feature that Singular provides. In another multi-asset NFT, I could put all the image from my Dark Web3 Tarot and also a pdf with these media prepared to be printed as physical tarot cards. So this limitless multi-asset feature also allows us to mint many KINDS of media in the same NFT (pdf, glb, png, mp4 etc). This is pretty useful to me. And I cannot forget I also played with the Soulbound feature, which is pretty cool, and the only one that allows soulbound to a wallet or to another NFT. I experimented with both, and my intention now is to gift my collectors with a wallet-soulbound NFT in order to have these wallets organized on chain. The NFT-soulbound artwork, I am using as a NFT that is an unbreakable piece of another one. A play with this calling my soulbound NFTs as a Pact of Souls. As all these NFTs are modular, they allow something really interesting, which is nesting, thus making a NFT to be a parent of another. Nesting is cool because you can sell 2 NFTs at the same time for a collector, and the collector will be able to split them and resell them separately. This is a beautiful form of gifting the collector. And the interesting thing here, different from any other marketplace, is that you nest NFTs and add medias to an existing NFT that is not owned by you. In fact, you cannot add, but you can suggest the addition to the present owner. This is really revolutionary. And the emojis? With RMRK contracts on Singular, you can emote NFTs, and this remains on-chain. My Singular NFTs are emotable, and some of them are already with on-chain reactions. This could be interesting to show how much appreciation for the NFT there is, or even to stimulate dynamic changes in the NFT.
I would say that my art is embedded with meaning. As I am a philosopher and philosophy professor, my artwork always tries to make some kind of critique or to express a philosophical concept. You can also find some darkness in many of my works or some irony. This is due to a gothic spirit that lives inside of me and is expressed in many of my works. And some religious or occultist flavors can be experienced in my work. For one year I trained to be a Dakshna Tantra Monk, but some illness in this process made me come back to be operated on and I realized that life is nothing without loving our most loved ones. So occultism, spirituality, and god — and also socio-economic problems and politics — are part of the semantic cloud around my work.”
Available at Singular:
Unconscious Collection — the only one with unsold and unlisted works, only available by offer submission. This collection is composed of NFTs which are multi-asset and comprise, each one, an entire series of NFTs. So one NFT has all the media of the NFTs of that series. As they are my portfolio of each series, the collector will know that this NFT will be updated with my suggestion of medias from the NFTs of this series. My Singular NFTs from this collection are special because they are forever evolving 1/1 multi-asset NFTs. For now, I have 8 NFTs, from 8 different series, each one with multiple media.
Check also Kinetic Abstractionism.
