Letter from the Bright Moments DAO (Summer 2022)
Craft is not something we talk about when it comes to NFTs. The conversation usually starts in terms of technical analysis: drop size, attributes and provenance. Then comes aesthetics, inspiration and genre. Most of the NFT Art produced over this past 18-month cycle has abstracted out the physical world in favor of purely digital experiences.
Bright Moments began in the most unlikely of circumstances: a wild assortment of creators and technologists– barely liberated from quarantine– started meeting twice a week on the Venice Beach boardwalk to plan an NFT Art Gallery. In order to drive foot traffic, we gave away on-chain generative art NFTs called Crypto Venetians, but only to visitors that minted them IRL at the gallery. This became enormously popular, and helped us envision a DAO that would travel around the world to exhibit new art works and mint 10,000 governing Crypto Citizens.
Since its inception, Bright Moments has experimented with using physical environments to drive emotional attachment to NFTs: Rituals was a spiritual minting marathon where one received the NFT as if it were an audio visual commandment from Alpha Centauri. CryptoNewYorkers were minted by running out of a reveal chamber in front of a live studio audience. Incomplete Control featured Tyler Hobbs doing spoken word poetry about each new mint, set against a live jazz trio. In Berlin, collectors met their CryptoBerliners by walking out across a Blade Runner landscape in the middle of a former East German power plant. 100 Print turned a white wall Soho gallery into a fantasy draft war room, where sophisticated generative art collectors competed against eachother to choose the best mint.
When we started to think about London, we knew that we wanted to do something very different than Berlin. Where Berlin was monumental, London would be small. It would be about attention to detail and commitment to high-touch service. While scouting our Mayfair location in April, we visited Savile Row tailors to understand their bespoke processes and sat down at the Donovan bar to watch the bartender prepare a perfect cocktail. In London, good things take time. We laughed at our journey from Kraftwerk to Craft Work.
We have curated the London experience to demonstrate the value of craft. One of the key elements we are exploring is the print as a primary mode of NFT display. As Thomas Lin Pedersen states: “For me, the work is always meant for the real world: something to be looked at in a physical space. The image on a print does not tire your eyes.” Expressing NFTs on paper– rather than on screens– invites the viewer to think differently about the blockchain: as a set of instructions that can be fully represented using atoms, not bits.
In addition to our focus on printing, we are also fascinated by London’s culture of bespoke service. In the same way that a properly tailored custom suit belies the infinite shapes and sizes of a human body, each generative NFT mint hides an infinite field of algorithmic possibilities. Matt DesLauriers sums this up best: “if the exhibition is done well, it can really help to reveal the system itself, which is a set of parameters, and not a set of images.”
The Bright Moments Quarterly is our forum for going deep with artists, in every city we mint, to describe the thinking and methodology behind their work. Thank you for joining us in London, our fifth city, which represents the half-way mark of our journey around the world.
