THREE SHADOWS (a poem)

Three shadows find the wrong door Three shadows study the lost world Three shadows hunt for a gateway Three shadows find the next way Three shadows pass through a new portal Three shadows discover a strange tower Three shadows commandeer the spire Three shadows look down from on high Three shadows pass by new towers Three shadows pass by empty lands Three shadows debate the way to go Three shadows unlock an olden door Three shadows transform in golden light Three shadows open the red gate Three shadows return home

THREE SHADOWS (a prose vignette)

The rain stopped and they went through: three shadows away from the sun into that shadow-sun world. Silence drawing, the hunt nearing, they drifted low through doorways like they were pulling something invisible together. They moved away from the distant thunder through the cold air of that starless land, their feelings rituals, their silence vigils. There were other shadows here, but they instead were actual nothingness, and these other ones had no mind of portals or golden light and could’nt tremble at any red gate. The three real shadows searched on, they never slept, they went through and around magical towers and advanced across the strange lands. In that lost world they were judges without anything to judge, and that feeling of passing through a place that was dust made them wonder of their destinies. Before despair they found and unlocked the proper door, and in the hot light that burned out they were wrung into new forms. At last the red gate reopened then, and old friends danced on the other side, welcoming the three new monsters home with victors’ threads. The heroes crossed over, enrobed and unshadowed into the bleeding midnight of the Great Capital. They’d passed through.

THREE SHADOWS (a cryptoart series)

ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/20633

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ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/20641

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ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/20648

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ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/20650

What is Three Shadows?

Three Shadows is a surrealistic art project I created that has three main layers:

• It’s a poem about three shadowy figures who go on a strange journey together
• It’s a prose vignette adaptation of that strange journey
• It’s a 15 part cryptoart series that illustrates the story, as minted on Zora

What was the creative process?

Three Shadows was created in aleatory fashion:

• I downloaded an AI app and started feeding it random prompts off the top of my head
• After a while I created the piece that I’d later deem Part 8, “Three shadows look down from on high,” in the Three Shadows cryptoart series; the piece inspired me to create the larger 15 part series based on the motif of three shadowy figures
• I started feeding variations of the “three shadowy figures” prompt to the AI and configuring presets to curate 15 pieces that I could craft a story around
• I titled the 15 final pieces according to their visuals and then ordered them Part 1 through Part 15 as part of a narrative about three shadows crossing into and out of some sort of mysterious threshold zone
• I then used “Three shadows” as a tag, which is a poetry device in which a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning or end of multiple lines, to a create a simple poem based on the 15 pieces’ titles
• I edited the 15 pieces in GIMP for finishing touches and then minted them as NFTs on Zora
• I went to Mirror and started this post, uploading the poem and the 15 NFT previews
• I then used the cut-up technique on the text of the poem combined with some snippets of random texts I have nearby to create a textual base that I did further automatic writing/automatic editing around to develop the finished vignette for this post’s 3rd layer

When it comes to creative writing or art in general, I like to turn things over to chance and randomness to guide my way. In Three Shadows I used AI, the cut-up method, and other spontaneity-driven techniques to create works that I wouldn’t have been able to arrive at otherwise.

If you’re interested in collecting a tokenized version of this art project as a writing NFT, I’ve created 100 NFT editions of this post priced at 0.01 ETH each. Also, the 15 pieces in the Zora cryptoart series are individually collectable as 1/1 NFTs for 0.069 ETH each, so I’ve set up a storefront on JPG for them.

This is first effort in a new wave of writing NFT experiments from me, so be on the lookout for future releases. Namely, I’m currently working on a novel tentatively titled Mallet’s Jar, which is about a powerful rogue regen DAO and an international mystic cult battling over a future-centric science supercenter in Iceland. I’m thinking of doing some sort of tokenized book release for it, so I’ll share more on that when the time comes … ✍️

Have any comments or questions? Hit me up on Twitter! And as always thanks kindly for reading.