gokhan.eth

Posted on Jul 26, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

the making of artInProd()

Hello, I am Gökhan.

Aye, that is my real name which literally means the Sky Ruler. For those of you who are not familiar with me, I’d like to inform you that they used to know me as Giga Bvgatti during DeFi Summer 2020, and I have been using my real name as my alias since 2021.

I have recently been interviewed by Juried Protocol Galleries team. You can read the interview here to comprehend my mindset regarding the art and financial worlds in tandem with per block time of existence. Through the below blocks, I am talking with you about my recent launch of a non-community called anticommune; its relation to the onchain alliance of experimental arts—which is but a draft right now; the artInProd() approach that I employ in these latest community-making ERC721 freedrops by means of an exemplary symbiosis play with Gabagool dot eth’s Writing Token—of which, I am the voluntary Discord server moderator—;how I approach the idea of a community as a node from which individuals and clusters thereof segment in or segment out of the umbrella constellation, in this case which is, onchain alliance of experimental arts (which is just a draft for the time being); and, most importantly, how I processed artInProd_1_sittingInASmartContract into a piece of experimental sound art that could well have been issued as a music NFT. It is the ERC721 token that I minted through Manifold Studio’s Claim app, and dropped exclusively for the holders of either anticommune $COMMUNE, or Writing Token $ESSAI in an edition of 69/69 for free.

I assume that I’ll be “airdropped” too many questions regarding this writing NFT by tomorrow (03:33 a.m. rn here). As I repeat countless times below, I approach that which are community and art as live processes. Sample live, and loop. Those of you who use Cycling ‘74’s standalone, or for Ableton Live, Max can in fact easily understand what I try to posit: I am trying to build synths that process communities and art works by amplifying the current blockspace. Thus, I shall need to state that any collectible piece free, or not, including POAPs around anticommune will be used as joineries for upcoming directions in the community-making around experimental arts.

If you hold any NFT about/ for/ by the project, you will most probably allowlisted for many an update in the future even though it takes longer for such projects than anticipated. It is neither a financial implication nor an advice thereof whatsoever. I am speaking of bonding as in SBTs.

anticommune is foremost a community making experiment around experimental arts, and this post is in fact about the yesterday’s drop since few people asked if I could share how I created the work. However, being an ex-academic with a degree in Comparative Literature, I just kept writing, and here we are now.

GM.

a draft by myself that I thought nobody at SuperRare would notice as a work of art if I included it in the application file.

one.

Recently, as I was chatting in one of the token-gated channels of Writing Token Discord server, of which I am the voluntary moderator, a fellow homo sapiens indicated to me in public that segmenting a community before it even formed is not well-suited for the betterment of that very community. They are right for some use-cases of communities as are they the communities used to bootstrap much needed deep liquidity of media financially, culturally, and socially.

However, I do not think that their view is healthy for the long clock of that which we have to come to community whereas it is already a macro-constellation of clusters of micro-communities. Anyone who has spent at least a quarter of a year across the daoville can confirm it.

We keep telling each other that our understanding of societal organization should be re-generated through an architecture of solution that is based on values that help species-wide informed decentralization possible, at least in the long term; yet, we still see an ecosystem of communities as comprised by individual units that centralize everything in the name of governance, liquidity mining, and a caricature of Kubrick’s *Eyes Wide Shut—*I am not necessarily talking about bodily liquid DEXes in the movie but the praxis of being an anon.

two.

I have the dream, and the need to form and launch an alliance around niché experimental arts regardless of the media and geographical location around the globe. I feel the same joy whilst listening to a piece of musique concrète as farmed and harvested through a listening to the mempool with given parameters, or observing a musical architecture by a Xenakis fan who bitmaps it into an self-assembling smart contract, or flying over (in Google Maps) a piece of either ancient or contemporaneous petroglyphs.

That is why I have jotted down into one of my light brown physical Moleskin notebooks with a Rotring pen that “I will call it oaoea.”

three.

the onchain alliance of experimental arts.

There is currently not a well-formed map to re-territorialize oaoea into a web of communicative plane over which human clusters come to agree on the next swarm movement. Hence, artInProd.

Yes, it is a nod to the Andre Cronje, esq.

The only aspect of which I am able to speak as of now is that the onchain alliance of experimental arts will bloom in fractals emanating from the originary anticommune which qualitatively seeds the alliance by forming incentive-aligned troupes with other communities, guilds, sub-DAOs, DAOs, protocols, platforms. I, for one, prefer to work with bodies without organs that Jacob of Zora calls Hyperstructures.

Were I obliged to namedrop those projects/ platforms/ protocols with which I’d love to segment out of the anticommune together, I’d utter joyously: channel, JPG, Feral File, Flashbots, Foundry… and, the like. Yes, those projects who prepare much needed code, and market automation tools for the masses (Dave Gahan accent here) are pure culturally evolutionary data and tooling curation protocols for me.

…segment out of the anticommune together?

Think of anticommune as a community-making incubator where distinct communities incentive-align with the very anticommune originary server.

anticommune will neither become of a DAO nor issue a governance token, let alone an ERC20. However, and for example, if the Prod role group in the anticommune Discord server that is home to the holders of ERC20 titled *artInProd_1_sittingInASmartContract *that segments a community out of Writing Token and/ or anticommune members wants to bootstrap their own exit>voice move unto self-sovereignity, let them be.

Segment in—Segment out.

Hence, an anticommune, a non-commune, a non-community with the originary free drop ERC721 that waves the ticker $COMMUNE.

These are just stream-of-consciousness speaking in tongues that are native to the blockspace but might be foreign enough to some of our friends.

Thus, we can safely assume that a thousand plateaus will spring forth off the anticommune base.

anticommune is community-making in prod through art in prod fair drops that tokenize alliances for smart contract instrumentalists, zora rappers, and seed phrase mesostic generators.

anticommune is a non-commune that purports the idea that markets are self-aware, and in need of idea market pools where people may start forming professional friendships a la Le Corbusier + Xenakis, Cage + Cunningham, Kardashian + Balenciaga, Bargeld + Cave, SHXCXCHCXSH + Boiler Room, Joyce + Beckett… and listen to Romance all together and adore Celine Dion.

four—the making of.

I have been minting raw .txt, .md, or .jpeg, .png files as forms of writing nonfungibles for more than a couple of years now. It is a lone ranger scene—as if in one of those Richard Prince Cowboy appropriations from Clasen’s outstanding photography. &, if you have no coding background, it is even lonelier. However, it is a good practice resembling a no day-off routine of HIIT workouts. I have also been using Mirror almost since the beginning, and minting posts here as pieces of conceptual artworks such as this one that was inspired by Steve Reich’s enchanting piece “Music for 18 Musicians,” that I titled An NFT for 18 Tweets—an edition of which, to my joy, dear W. M. Peaster has collected.

Most of the time, I prefer to mint .txt files on Zora, though. Being a Zora .txt minter feels like being a SoundCloud rapper from 2010s—with the difference that the former is a mycelian hyperstructure. For instance, the below one in which I play with the ETH vs BTC maximalism and a T.S. Eliot quote-quote has been collected by Trente of JPG thanks to the direct purchase function of on-chain JPG exhibits through a self-curation of my own titled .TXTUALITY I:

ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/4909

The work that inspirated artInProd_1_sittingInASmartContract was unironically one of my own works: I am sitting in a smart contract.:

ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/17419

As I was contemplating upon the idea that those who want, and then can, should segment in the anticommune Discord server as the Writing Token, and again anticommune originary holders by also minting, or holding a complimentary token. There, I thought to myself that I would just read the title and the first sentence of the above-previewed work: “I am sitting in a smart contract.”

I powered my Sony PCM D100 field recorder for first time after I quit smoking as refreshing as it gets in that I can totally focus on what I am working on, and recorded my own voice reciting the statement in some sort of a broken English in that I felt shy, and left that as it was, and is, since I like the art raw most of the times. As I was preparing to mint this as an audio file, I thought that I should also nod to Gabagool—to whom, I feel the need to thank here in public that only by being himself and communicating ideas clearly has he encouraged me to talk to you people calmly, and sound. Hence, I decided that I would process and convert the thumbnails of anticommune and the Writing Token from image files to audio.

Gabagool.eth | Writing Token thumbnail image

Although there are a googleplex ways to convert images into audio files, I wanted a tool that is easy to use, and in which I could treat audio files as distinct layers, and I found about a tool called Photosounder, for which I acquired a pro-license via a Coinbase Commerce through my Metamask since PayPal is still unoperational in my country—wish Gfycat could also accept USDC, USDT, or DAI. There, I superimposed anticommune’s image-to-audio version upon that of the Writing Token, and harvested a satisfactory white noise scale in the wave format ‘cuz noise matters since surfers need the best format.

anticommune, thumbnail image, the original of which is in 6900 x 4200 pixels.

It was still a nude, and I didn’t want to send nudes. I needed some video loops, or videos that are but pure signals in order for the audio part of the composition to accentuate itself. I recalled that I bought Lumen some time ago, that is, a modular video synth emulator. Having played with patches as if I am about to launch a Moog Modular System 55 into the outer space, I recorded an almost 70-second long video, a snapshot from which you might observe as the header of this very writing NFT.

…and, I could not stop there. I wanted to produce a sound art non-fungible that is both a conceptual art piece (“I am sitting in a smart contract.”), and a dance track. At that moment, I was thinking about the guitar breezes of Durrutti Column, face-licking distant voices of Burial, and that good Japanese house music composer whose name I cannot recall. Duly, I opened up Logic Pro, and created the loop. To give a sense of lo-fi air to the track, I recycled the sound into my Sony PCM D100 by way of direct recording rather than exporting the track into anywhere local. In Final Cut Pro, I patchworked all of these files into a single piece of objected-oriented speculative realism, and rendered it in the Compressor. As the final step, I had to re-encode it in Adobe Media Encoder in order not to exceed the 100Mb file size so as not to break the display on OpenSea even though Manifold Studio supports up to 200Mb.

0x.

https://twitter.com/anticommune1/status/1551388375730601985?s=20&t=qOLjSZA2qUUDyZxsuwMPcA

Wut next? I build.

It is important for me that I can remix anything that I have in smart contracts that are but the software, DAW, workstation, text editor, image manipulation tool at the same time. Before longevity of our species, and the long clock of per block time media preservation, we need to be able to teach the contracts to bootstrap themselves ad infinitum.

GMi.