Welcome to Pixelated Perspectives where we get to know some of the most renowned collectors and curators on Gallery. This week we spoke with Leonidas (Twitter).
Leonidas is a collector of historically significant digital art. They have accumulated a sprawling array of NFTs from the early emergence period of 2011 to 2020, on a mission to highlight the innovation and culture of early on-chain pioneers. They curate with an emphasis on historical significance and focus on acquiring NFTs that will be considered priceless cultural artifacts in the future.
We asked Leonidas about art, curation, and code. Here's what they had to say:
1) How did you become the NFT collector you are today? Walk us through your journey and what sparked your interest in the space.
The magical experience that Roham and the team at Dapper Labs created with CryptoKitties back in 2017 onboarded me to the space and I will forever be grateful to them for that. I played around with OpenSea when it came out but mostly checked out from NFTs until late 2020 when several people told me they were interesting things happening again. I spent an hour visiting all of the new platforms that had been created but was overwhelmed and had no clue how to determine what was worthy of collecting or not. So rather than trying to navigate this new market of NFTs my gut instinct was to go buy the two oldest collections that I knew about with the thinking that the oldest NFT projects would probably have some sort of long-term collectible value. So I picked up a founder CryptoKitty and a CryptoPunk and then mostly sat back and watched the market until one day in March 2021 when I stumbled into a Clubhouse room where the speakers were talking about the rediscovery of an old project called MoonCats. I listened on as this early project that they had found went from a $0 market cap to a $100M market in just a few hours and it occurred to me that there were probably other forgotten NFT projects on Ethereum from 2017. I hopped onto my laptop and after about three hours of doing research, on the seventh page of a Google search for "crypto art" filtered to the year 2017, I came across an old project called Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility by Mitchell F Chan that I absolutely fell in love with and hold to this day. This is when I really started taking historical NFT collecting seriously.
2) What's your strategy when it comes to curating your collection?
Our civilization is in the middle of a century-long transition to becoming fully digital. When Satoshi introduced the concept of true ownership of digital assets, it changed the trajectory of our society forever. A century from now, our descendants will consider the earliest of these digital assets to be priceless cultural artifacts. When I collect, I try to look through their eyes and determine what I think they will view as being the most historically significant. A few of the things that I think about other than on-chain timestamp are: How suitable is an asset as a store of value from a technical perspective? Was it early in a specific category, such as gaming, PFPs, generative art, etc.? Did it influence collections created after it? Was anything about it innovative technically? I tend to try to avoid pieces where the "intrinsic" historical value is inflated by a strong community or the assumption that a founder will execute well, etc. It's a very difficult challenge for an artist or founder's creation to remain relevant in a decade. Even the most exciting thing at any given point in time can turn into a fad a few years later. I want to collect pieces that don't have as much of this risk which has mostly kept me to collecting art and early NFTs experiments.
3) Can you share with us your most prized NFT possession, and what makes it so special to you?
My Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility by Mitchell F Chan are very special to me. Because of the role Digital Zones played in my life I will always have an emotional connection with them. Then on top of that they are also incredibly compelling conceptual art pieces that were way ahead of their time in many ways. For example, there is no visual component to them. Everyone else created at that time was focused on taking the concept of a token and adding metadata to it which linked to a JPEG. Mitchell took things a step further and actually leveraged the smart contract to create the art. You couldn't have the same experience with the art if it weren't on the blockchain. With generative art NFTs being so common today nobody bats an eye at an artist coding rules about the art into a smart contract but in 2017 this was super innovative. Naturally, my Digital Zones sit at the top of my Gallery!
4) How does Gallery play a role in your NFT collecting experience?
Gallery is the best tool I have come across for displaying my collection. Not in terms of the UI that I use (although it's great), but how it presents itself to others. I can quickly share my custom URL with people and no matter what device they are on they can quickly scan my collection and see what I'm into. The simplicity of it is my favorite part. Anything more takes away from the art on the screen so I like that minimalism and cleanness.
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