WELCOME TO BUENOS AIRES: SETH GOLDSTEIN
The world’s first radio transmission was in Buenos Aires in 1920, from the rooftop of the Palacio Guerrico, the same building where we are minting our collection of NFTs in this, the eighth of our ten city journey around the world. It was here that Enrique Susini broadcast Wagner’s Parsifal, an opera about a young knight’s quest for the Holy Grail.
The 1920s were the golden age of Buenos Aires, a period of remarkable economic prosperity and cultural development. Argentina was a global exporter of beef and grains, and Buenos Aires was the epicenter of this trade. The city was a bustling metropolis, often compared to major European cities like Paris due to its grand architecture, vibrant arts scene, and cosmopolitan atmosphere. You can still feel the echoes of this prosperity in the city, but they have been muted by years of hyper inflation and currency controls.
The role of crypto in Argentina is more than just speculative. For many here, self custody has become a way of life. I always hoped that Buenos Aires would be one of the stops on the Bright Moments roadmap, because I felt that we had much to learn from its struggle to protect cultural value from inflation. And so here we are, in the depths of a bear market that is characterized by fear, uncertainty and doubt, far from the bright shiny capitals of art, about to explore a new range of tokenized experiences.
We visited Buenos Aires in June, after having just finished Tokyo. Jeff Davis introduced us to Juan Pedro Vallejo, who helped organize a dinner where we met Guido, Lolo, Leonardo, Tama, Pedro, Julian, and Kali: all key contributors to the Argentinian generative art community, and now– through our live minting in Buenos Aires– part of the Bright Moments story. We are proud to feature so many local artists and performers in Buenos Aires, and share their work across our network of citizens. This is the kind of progressive decentralization that we have always aspired to.
In addition to meeting artists and scouting venues during our trip to Buenos Aires in June, we also had to come up with a name for this collection of CryptoCitizens. As we opened up the debate on Telegram and during our meetup in Palermo, there was no clear consensus. Some suggested “Porteños,” while others wanted “Argentinos.” We felt that the former was too local, and might not be recognized globally; the latter was too broad and didn’t convey the city of Buenos Aires. It was only when we were in the Calafate airport, returning from a trip to the glacier, that Qian turned to us and said “why don’t we call them CryptoPatagonians!” This was the way, since the one thing that all Porteños had in common was a deep pride for the natural history and culture of rural Patagonia.
After we finished minting CryptoTokyoite #999 in the Shibuya Parco skyscraper in May, Phil and I were walking through the impossibly crowded Shibuya crossing, talking about what comes next with City #8. He turned to me with a smile and said “from the center of the world, to the end of the world!” And so began our journey south to Buenos Aires and then even further south to Patagonia.
Each of our live minting city experiences has an organizing principle: for Berlin it was “monumental,” for London it was “craft,” Mexico was “smoke & mirrors,” and Tokyo was “omakase.” The prompt for Buenos Aires is “on chain / off line.” How can we engage with the blockchain in a deeper way, one that transcends the need for digital screens and the Internet? This is what led us to a decaying theater in the back of a Belle Epoque palace, where we will be revealing freshly minted CryptoPatagonians on an elaborate analog stage system designed specifically for this collection.
Perhaps the purest interpretation of “on chain / off line” is 0xDEAFBEEF’s Hashmarks. There is no other artist today that espouses the duality of this theme. He is the most crypto-native of digital artists, using the C programming language to create dynamic systems that live entirely on the blockchain. He is also a long-time blacksmith who creates his own tools in his forge at home. Hashmarks is a grid of 100 unique hand forged iron sculptures, a cryptographically linked set of digital tokens, and a site specific happening in Patagonia.
...all these objects, all of us, are only together in this one place, one time. After, they disperse. What remains doesn’t have to be permanent. It could be the steel plate left in a field to rust. The key is the narrative—people take their pieces, something gets left behind. 0xDEAFBEEF, 2023.
It is easy now to dismiss NFTs as empty gestures— speculative transactions— that represent a brief bubble between the woes of Covid and the wonders of AI. And yet, these tokens that we are minting in Argentina have brought us together physically to experience art in ways that will always be remembered. On chain. Off line. Welcome to Bright Moments Buenos Aires. Thank you for making the journey with us.
