Alternative Approaches to the Minting Experience
A major part of the Art Blocks experience is minting your own piece. Yes, yes, I also scour OpenSea for pieces to build a set or find a deal on a piece to fill a hole in my collection. But generative art gives collectors the unique opportunity to become part of the creative process. Each piece in a collection is the result of a specific transaction that would’ve otherwise never existed if not for a particular collector initiating the transaction.
This alone is a significant departure from traditional art, where an artist will work in private and publicly reveal what they’ve been working on. With generative art, artist and collector experience that reveal together in real-time.
And so far, the vast majority of Art Blocks projects are experienced by the artists and community in Discord. But there are other ways artists are approaching the minting experience that are interesting and underexplored.
In-person minting — CryptoVenetians
For me, the CryptoVenetian project was the first to leave a brain hickey on how I thought about the minting experience. CryptoVenetians are a series of 1000 generative avatars that are only available for in-person minting (let’s leave out the Ocean’s Eleven storyline for the sake of brevity).
CryptoVenetians were only available at the Bright Moments gallery in Venice Beach, CA. At first, a few people trickled into the gallery to mint their own, but very quickly, the Bright Moments team had to create a waiting list for minting, which filled up in no time.
When you arrive at the gallery, you’re taken to a back room before your mint is revealed. When the time came, the collector was the star of the show. They’d walk out to music playing, and all eyes on them as the freshly minted pixelated character waited on a large screen in the main gallery.
If you go through the CryptoVenetian’s Instagram story, you’ll see what I’m talking about. The entire art creation process turned the experience of minting from an obsessive ping pong between Discord, checking gas prices, and monitoring the website for mint count and price, to a personal experience of meeting your digital avatar.
Bright Moments found an innovative way to bridge the gap between the digital world we constantly live in and the physical world we easily take for granted. They have another in-person minting event in New York, and words cannot accurately capture how excited I am to see this process. In my opinion, this is exactly the type of innovation the broader NFT ecosystem needs to localize the ethereal nature of on-chain digital artifacts.
Live Event, Digital Auction — Portal
Jeff Davis’ Portal project was another Bright Moments hosted event. Jeff Davis pre-minted the project and held an auction on OpenSea alongside a physical gallery showing at the Bright Moments Gallery in Venice.
The pieces were displayed digitally in the gallery and invited viewers into a meditative bubble contrasted by the craziness of the California beach outside. Being a collection of only 10 pieces, Portal fetched a premium at the time. And now, these are considered unicorns and only live in grail collections.
The whole experience of preminting, live viewing, and digital auction was another example of playing between the physical and digital world that helps bridge the gap between the new and old art world. Better still, Jeff Davis was at the event experiencing the art side-by-side with viewers.
While these weren’t minted at the time of sale, I still wanted to include this as an alternative experience to typical Art Blocks drops because it shows a new and exciting approach for artists to take in their projects. Yes, I know this isn’t always feasible, but hell, what a great idea and fantastic execution.
Mint-a-thon — Rituals
Ok, this one gets real crazy. Before I give my thoughts, check out the details for the event here.
Rituals is an upcoming collaboration between Boreta from The Glitch Mob and Aaron Penne, the fantastic artist behind Apparitions and Return. This event is also hosted by Bright Moments Gallery in Venice Beach and runs from September 24–26. Unfortunately, the first piece hasn’t been minted yet, but I’ll trust the creative brainpower behind the project to melt our collective minds.
However, this event is really taking the in-person minting experience and cranking it to 11. The festivities will start on Friday night and run until Sunday evening. Straight. Yes, that is over 50 hours of continuous minting experience. Personally, I’m excited to check in on the live-mints channel in Discord and talk about each one as they come through the channel. It’s something the community hasn’t been able to do for months now.
There will be food, music, yoga, meditation, and even an altar during the minting marathon to set your intentions. Yes, this event is focused on art, but it doesn’t stop there.
During each session, visitors will have an intimate, meditative opportunity to relax, set their intention, and generate an original audio / visual experience that is revealed in the gallery.
The first 200 mints from the project will be done live throughout the weekend and have an on-chain watermark indicating that the piece was created in person. At the end of the event, minting will open up for the remaining 800 works in the project, and the in-person minters will reconvene to watch the rest of the project unfold as a group.
To say the very least, I am incredibly excited to see how this plays out. This is a wild swing that should change how artists and collectors think about what’s possible.
What’s Next?
I have no clue. If someone would’ve told me about Rituals a few months ago, I wouldn’t believe them — it sounds like a mini-festival on Venice Beach. But I’ll keep an open mind and keep an eye out for artists pushing the boundaries.
Do you have an idea for a crazy minting experience? I’d really love to hear about it. So please drop a comment below or tag me in Discord. I think the possibilities are endless, and I’ll give extra brownie points for weird ideas that sound impossible.
