Shvembldr’s Drop Day Double-up
Last Friday, we had the pleasure of welcoming Shvembldr’s 5th project to Art Blocks’ Playground collection, Alien DNA. If you’re not familiar with Shvembldr, his work ethic is second to none, and an example of a hardworking artist focused on building an aesthetically compelling and conceptually interesting body of work.
Alien DNA is an outstanding project that stands out against an impressive resume of projects. Roughly 10% of the mints were reserved for TBOA members, which were available to claim 24 hours before the project’s release. And once the public mint was sold out, Shvembldr dropped this message in his Curated channel:
This meant that every mint had an accompanying banner, so we were surprised with twice as much art on drop day! Discord member homy was the first to take him up on the offer for #41, and I wasn’t prepared for the stunning result.
Shvembldr dropped the banner in the chat which set off a flood of requests, and over the next few hours, I found myself stuck in the chat obsessing over the pairings.
Throughout the day, I continued to go back and scroll through the whole collection — I must’ve gone back three times to look through all outputs in the hours after the project sold out.
It was immediately obvious how different the banners were from the originals. Shvembldr said,
“[the original output and the banner] have a common basis, but the elements are distributed differently because of the ratio of sides to maintain balance.”
What I found most interesting was some ‘floor’ outputs had incredible banners. Sometimes, they looked wholly different and hardly recognizable from the original.
And to top off an incredible project, Shvembldr had a heart-felt pre-drop talk (which I highly encourage you to check out) where he announced he would be donating revenue from the project to help Ukraine. Incredibly, that donation totaled $201,495.56. Bravo Shvembldr, bravo.
Check out these mint + banner pairs
