BTC Golem & Others - grounding essay

unawunwa (31)in #nft • 3 years ago (edited)

The idea for an NFT __ representing a single instance of digital art crafted by me Kelechi Isiodu (a meme or moniker of mine– Kellykrypto, basically a nickname).

A basic photo of me - a selfie taken with me holding a commemorative bitcoin (centre) in my mouth is supposed to be only one of its kind in existence and if transferred will continue to be the only one of its kind (until copied obviously). It is supposed to serve as 'digital art' and this essay is one description of how it was created.

The photo was taken on an iPhone 8 and then retouched using GIMP software. 'Blemishes' were removed and the heal and clone stamp tools were applied to aspects of the photo to bring the background to its kind of near-unified grey hue. From the onset, the aim was to create a kind of caricature employing a certain cartoon character quality. The feature of the selfie taken was designed to bring the subject (me) foreground, with facial features protruding and projecting 'unnaturally'. Filters in the GIMP - Oilify, Cartoon were applied and then exports were made in three formats: .jpg, .xcf, & .png ...

The resulting photo (in .jpg format) was then cropped to remove extraneous detail and other filters applied; the final one being 'Burlesque'... which offered the best blend of colours that appears in this final instance, to my mind.

BTC Golem was created first during the pandemic lockdown period, which also marked the time of taking up crypto trading and Defi investing. Later still, the idea occurred to me to create a further two characters featuring me as the 'model': Ethamental and Rippleyed showing the coins and projects I am a fan of. These were meant to follow the creative styles of an imaginary cast of comic superheroes or the otherwise otherworldly look of the characters portrayed in film projects like Watchmen (2009) or 300 (2006). I always liked the photorealism of the stars' portrayals in those films.

For titling, I thought to bring the 3 photos together in a digital triptych and call them 'Adoption'. But Adoption is reserved for a project featuring the same characters 'minted' on the Ethereum blockchain, using OpenSea.io.
I have called this 'installation' 'Because Adoption is a work-in-progress' since I mean to highlight the increasing adoption of cryptocurrencies by common persons for all sorts of use cases (I am bullish); but, I also mean to use the pieces to hint at the aura of controversy surrounding cyrptos. I first shared peeks of this work with friends, whom I persuaded to start looking seriously at the budding crypto market (in 2020).

Whether it is with Chinese crackdowns on miners, governmental FUD - (read Nigerian governmental edicts banning institutions for instance), governmental CRED - (government of El Salvador adopting crypto as legal tender) or rug-pulls within Defi, the fact of scammers & cryptos lost down unreadable storage devices ... not excluding forgotten passwords or assets getting sent to bad addresses)– crypto activity is showing a crescendo of adoption. And this is just the beginning– the pieces serve to mark this unique time in history. We may also be living through another speculative bubble. This also shows the only time to my knowledge when a common person appears with commemorative coins in these specific poses. So, no laser eyes, but you got my message. I hope you love the suggestion of Art. I hope you like the result.

#essay #digitalart #stub