Bright Moments: Abridged
Bright Moments bridges the gap between physical and digital experiences. We believe that being physically present during the creation of art is the most powerful way to connect creators and their communities.
Since starting as a group of volunteers in California, Bright Moments has grown into an international organization with thriving communities in the Metaverse, Venice Beach, New York, and Berlin. As a traveling NFT art gallery, we host art exhibitions that explore the intersection of digital art and in-person experiences. Our next city, London, will be the fifth city and halfway point of our ten-city roadmap.
This project will take our community on a multi-year journey around the world, with new cities determined through a voting process enabled by blockchain technology. Along the way, we will collaborate with artists to bring their concepts to life through unforgettable events and unique minting experiences. Our members, the CryptoCitizens, support the emergent class of generative and NFT artists by innovating how art is financed and how passionate collectors connect with artists.
NFT IRL
Bright Moments was founded on-chain as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) when 10,000,000 membership tokens were minted in March 2021. DAOs are communities that come together around a common purpose, coordinated by voting through smart contracts on a public blockchain. In the spirit of our online connections, forming as a DAO gave us a way to distribute ownership of the project equally, not just to those who happened to be in the room when the papers were signed. We named ourselves Bright Moments, after the work of jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
After an auspicious start, we found ourselves in the middle of a movement.
We curated events for artists. We built software to read data from public blockchains and display images from distributed file storage systems. We started hosting small events with outdoor seating, just to help people feel normal. Press showed up at our door and wrote about us.
Our first public event happened in May. We launched a tribute event poster as an NFT and auctioned it on OpenSea to serve as a tip jar for the performers. The event was a smashing success, with the crowd spilling into the street. We shut down the block as people laughed, listened to live music, and enjoyed food and drinks from local street vendors.
Although our Thursday night art shows were drawing a crowd, the gallery remained empty throughout the rest of the week. To solve this, we launched our own NFT collection: the CryptoVenetians. The original purpose of the CryptoVenetian project was to onboard crypto-curious passerby and increase foot traffic to the Bright Moments gallery between shows.
CryptoVenetians are algorithmically generated characters that represent the diversity of the local scene in Venice Beach. Unlike other projects, we restricted the creation, or minting, exclusively to visitors of the gallery. This gave us a chance to meet our online community in-person. During the first week, we minted CryptoVenetians for the original members of the DAO, as well as a few dozen visitors who had heard about the project and stopped by to learn about the strange on-chain experiment happening in Venice Beach.
In the same week, we hosted our first public auction. Jeff Davis, Chief Creative Officer of the generative art platform Art Blocks, created a series specifically designed to display on our hardware. The auction for Portals was hosted at our gallery in Venice with bidders joining from all over the world. The final Portal sold in just under an hour, bringing the total amount sold to over 30 ETH (~$63,000 USD at the time of sale).
As word of the gallery began to spread, we experienced a growing interest in the CryptoVenetians collection. The combination of Art Blocks’ on-chain generative technology, unique pixel art, and exclusive minting restriction created a surge in demand for the collection. Executives from major entertainment studios, celebrities, athletes, and locals stopped by the gallery to see first-hand what the excitement around NFTs was all about.
Our small experiment had struck a nerve. We launched a waiting list for CryptoVenetian minting appointments and watched it swell to thousands of people in the first twenty four hours. CryptoVenetians started selling on the secondary market for increasingly large sums. At the peak, a single CryptoVenetian NFT was exchanged for 20 ETH, or about $36,000.
What started as a side project was quickly growing into something much larger. Our team of volunteers stayed late into the night, devising ways to improve the live minting process and carefully select the right candidates to receive minting appointments, unaware that we were hurtling towards the unexpected and sudden end of the CryptoVenetian minting.
The Heist
On the night of August 10th, 309 CryptoVenetians were minted into an anonymous wallet, prematurely ending the collection and preventing those on the waiting list from their chance at joining the community. The wallets involved in the heist quickly sold dozens of stolen CryptoVenetians, netting over $100,000 and spreading confusion among those who had unknowingly purchased stolen goods.
Our team woke up to thousands of messages. The incident became known as “The Heist” and threatened to end Bright Moments before it truly had a chance to get started. For the next 48 hours we worked around the clock, struggling to see through the fog of war and devise a way to move forward. We explained to community members who had flown in for the experience that we had nothing to give them. It was heartbreaking.
Worse, we learned that the individuals behind the heist were not sophisticated hackers, but instead early members of the DAO who had used their privileged access for financial gain. It was an incredibly painful time as we grappled with the violation of trust and murkiness of enforcing theft in a brand new industry. By working with law enforcement, we were able to recover 240 of the 309 CryptoVenetians. To this day, we have not yet recovered all of the stolen Venetians.
The Heist changed our DNA; the carefree early attitude of the DAO was gone, replaced by a pragmatism forged by a first-hand experience of how quickly things can change on-chain.
The final CryptoVenetian mint signaled the end of the halcyon days of Venice Beach. The loss of the daily minting routine of minting had left a gap in our lives, and we were eager to take our show on the road. However, before we could leave California we needed to prepare for one final show.
Rituals
Our sendoff in Venice was Rituals, a collaboration with Aaron Penne and Boreta to create an immersive and meditative experience over a 50-hour minting marathon.
Rituals convinced us of the power in immersive live experiences. We set out to achieve a new record: 200 NFTs minted in-person over the course of a single weekend. Minters signed up for a fifteen-minute appointment randomly assigned throughout the weekend. Collectors flew in from around the country to mint during their window, including those with time slots in the middle of the night. For three straight days our team, the artists, and collectors worked together to create a series of infinite artworks with generative music and visuals. At the end of the weekend, collectors came back together to experience the final mint in-person and reflect on the ability for NFTs to inspire a group of people to accomplish something together.
The success of Rituals gave us the strength to believe that we were building something worth preserving and rebuild the trust that had been damaged during The Heist. It was time to expand. We sold 200 “Golden Token” NFTs to fund our expansion to New York City, raising 400 ETH to establish a physical gallery in Soho and, for the first time, allow members of our team to quit their jobs and pursue Bright Moments full-time. We were ready for primetime.
CryptoNewYorkers
We established our new headquarters in the heart of Soho, New York City. In the span of a few months, NFTs had transformed from an esoteric technical topic into a global phenomenon. We arrived in New York with renewed energy and a determination to prove that generative art was here to stay.
For our first event on Halloween, the line stretched around the block as thousands funneled through our doors. Regardless of crypto experience, we welcomed new members to the community and taught them about the world of NFTs, Ethereum, and the magic and responsibility of becoming your own bank.
To recapture the serendipity from those early Venice days, we sent members of our team to bring strangers from Washington Square Park to the gallery. These were people that had no experience with cryptocurrency. Some said “no”, but the ones who said yes were rewarded with an unforgettable experience and a CryptoNewYorker NFT of their own.
In a few short months, we minted 1,000 CryptoNewYorkers and created a community made up of artists, entrepreneurs, collectors, and the unsung locals who keep New York City alive.
In addition to our CryptoNewYorker NFTs, we brought generative art to Soho with shows by Tyler Hobbs and Jeff Davis.
Reflections
Jeff’s Portals show had been our first auction in Venice Beach, so it was fitting that we hosted his next collection as our first exhibition in New York. We bucked convention and turned the opening for Reflections into a public celebration. The day of the event, a full page in the Arts & Culture section of the New York Times brashly announced the presence of a new gallery focused on the renaissance happening in the world of digital art. Inside the gallery, guests danced and laughed as Reflections framed the clinking of glasses with a kaleidoscope of colors.
Incomplete Control
Throughout our journey, we’ve been most successful when we create opportunities for artists to collaborate and share their creative inspiration with one another. In this case, the formative conversations around the concept of a physical show happened during Rituals when Tyler visited Venice Beach to experience the live minting of a fellow Art Blocks artist.
Incomplete Control is the highly anticipated successor to Fidenza, the generative collection that propelled Tyler to popularity and which remains the most financially successful project hosted on Art Blocks. The diversity of the Fidenza algorithm captured the attention of collectors and drove incredible demand for Incomplete Control. Although visually distinctive from Fidenza, Incomplete Control explored the concepts of imperfection and a continuous spectrum of work across the outputs in the collection.
As part of our commitment to provide ongoing utility to members of our community, we airdropped over $3.5M worth of Tyler Hobbs’ mint passes randomly to CryptoCitizens. In many cases, the funds from these airdrops provided financial stability and helped pay off debts, grow local businesses, and fund emerging artists in the Bright Moments communities.
The reveal of Incomplete Control took place over four nights. A jazz band scored the reveal of each mint as Tyler guided the audience through the noteworthy characteristics of each piece. During the reveal, both Tyler and the collectors were seeing the works for the very first time.
These shows attracted collectors from all over the world and put a spotlight on the power of IRL NFT minting experiences to reward artists, distribute wealth, and build prosperous communities with real face-to-face connections.
NFT Art Berlin
We began planning for Berlin the day after the last CryptoNewYorker was minted. During that conversation, it became clear that Berlin was to be a monument to the scale that on-chain generative art had achieved over the last twelve months.
To accomplish this, we needed a venue that matched our ambition. We found Kraftwerk: an iconic abandoned power plant located in the eastern district of Kreuzberg. Kraftwerk boasted three stories of exposed concrete in an industrial setting that served as the perfect contrast for the futuristic display of digital art that would fill over 80,000 square feet for guests to explore and wander.
During the months that followed, the team worked around the clock to plan, design, and execute a ten day art and music exhibition. We established temporary offices in Venice Beach, New York, and Berlin to scale our screen display and live minting technology for ten artists who shared our vision. Collectively, the works from these artists became known as the Berlin Collection, a designation that we would carry with us for our future cities.
NFT Art Berlin was beginning to take shape.
On each of the ten evenings, a different artist from the Berlin Collection transformed the space into their personal artistic playground. Each artist created a collection of 100 works to be minted in situ by guests of the event, before being displayed in a gallery experience that blended elements of performance and exhibition.
The Berlin Collection included Boreta’s exploration of beauty through machine-dreaming, Holger Lippmann’s code-generated arc-circulation rosettes, a generative art series inspired from years of audiovisual practice by Alida Sun, Gabriel Massan’s animated archive of sculpted creatures, a generative adaptation of Paul Klee’s aesthetics by mpkoz, custom-coded points of change and new opportunities by Jeff Davis, Loren Bednar’s take on interfacing lines, constantly folding patterns, and outward reflections, a light field meditation on peaceful coexistence by Jason Ting, a gallery of impossible creatures crafted from code and bent circuit hardware by Ellie Pritts, and Casey Reas’s vivid contemporary reinterpretation of a Mondrian piece.
Each night, we displayed an adaptation of an iconic scene from Einstein on the Beach, the opera by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. Over fifteen minutes a single bar of light, framed by an orchestra, rose up and off of a single screen positioned in the center of the cavernous top floor of Kraftwerk.
The night concluded with a CryptoBerliner symphony featuring the generative pixel art characters minted throughout the course of the evening. We left Berlin with 1,000 new members and an international presence that taught us about the importance of empowering the local community. Learning from our experience in prior cities, we established a local governance structure in Berlin, appointed by the core team and ratified by the local community to represent the CryptoBerliners within the DAO. These elected roles are responsible for the organization of local events and management of a treasury seeded with proceeds from NFT Art Berlin.
100 PRINT
After Berlin, our team returned to New York City for a collaboration with Ben Kovach, a Vermont based digital artist. Ben originally approached us with an idea for a collection that would serve as a follow-up to his successful Edifice project which had premiered on Art Blocks in November. The collection, 100 PRINT, is a deep exploration of perspective created through 3D drawing principles and expressed in a physical gallery setting. The work draws inspiration from many sources, including Escher sketches, cubism, and abstract expressionist artworks.
Each piece from the 100 PRINT collection was pre-minted, printed, framed and installed at Bright Moments Soho gallery, where collectors selected their NFT and associated print in-person. This process was made possible through a unique financing model that gave preferential selection to buyers who purchased a ticket early in the dutch auction.
Over the course of two nights, all 100 pieces in the collection were selected through a draft process. This created an emergent way of evaluating the items in the collection based on collector preference. Rather than being a passive viewing event, the show required active engagement, with guests eagerly comparing notes and modifying their selection strategy based on in-person conversations at the gallery.
Engagement online soared as people around the world eagerly awaited the results of the selection process from the gallery. In several cases, collectors who could not attend in-person sent guests to attend and report on the aesthetics of the physical prints compared to their digital counterparts. It was the most successful blend of online and in-person art appreciation that we have experienced yet.
London
London was selected as the location for our fifth city by the members of our community. This marked an important milestone as the first location that was determined through an on-chain vote.
We’ve curated an amazing collection of six artists who will form our London Collection: Nicolas Sassoon, Jeff Davis, Sputniko, Thomas Lin Pedersen, Matt DesLauriers, and Emily Xie. Throughout the month of July, these artists will transform 13 Soho square into a hub for generative art in the heart of London.
We’re excited to see what you create.
