🔥🚨ART DECC0s🚨🔥: Why the Hell Would MOCA Release a PFP Project?
In Other Words, Some of the Conceptual Underpinnings We're Exploring
A very good question.
It’s something like what Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison once said: “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
We were compelled to create Art DeCC0s because we had things to say, and we needed to find a way to say them. Only this project’s wide scope and large scale are sufficient to ask the questions we’ve been formulating for years, to interrogate all of crypto art’s pain points, weaknesses we’ve seen develop over many years. Just as last year’s MOCAIC was a way of asking “Who still remains in crypto art in 2023?” Art DeCC0s are a way of self-reflection. “What is the purpose of MOCA in 2024? What are we capable of? What else can we contribute to crypto art?”
I want to use today’s newsletter as a kind of extended Art DeCC0s curatorial statement, to discuss in detail a number of the conceptual questions that we created Art DeCC0s to answer, and others that arose along the way.
So let’s get into them:
What Are The Limits of Digital Identity?
This whole Art DeCC0’s thing is kind of tongue-in-cheek, I hope you realize: Taking a concept as conceptually-sterile and uninteresting as the PFP and turning it into a vehicle for depth and insight. We are very deliberately releasing a 10,000-piece PFP in the year 2024. We are reanimating a corpse and forcing it to sing The Queen of the Night aria.”
Because the promise of the PFP remains as potent as it did at the category’s inception, even if that promise was never fulfilled.
The crux of my essay, “The End of Art (As We Know It) (Again), or How I Learned How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bored Apes,” (which is itself a misnomer because I certainly do not love the Bored Apes, but nevertheless), is this idea of representing oneself online with a digital avatar, and how close a single image can ever possibly hew to the multifacets of one’s self. Obviously, it’s an impossible achievement in totality, but does that make reaching towards it any less worth our efforts?
The idea of uniqueness is often touted within these 10,000-piece collections, the inimitability of any given PFP within the whole. But while these projects provided variety in clothing, in facial expression, in skin tone and texture, in added symbology, a truly representative quality has almost always been lacking.
We always knew that our collection was to have 10,000 completely unique characters, placed atop 10,000 completely unique backgrounds. That in itself is no achievement, but the task of finding some kind of aesthetic unity amongst a collection of 10,000 highly-varied assets was something of a head-scratcher.
Ultimately, we found our answer within paradox. We believe that the sheer glut of characteristic individuality is itself unifying, a kind of inherent contradiction that may or may not better exemplify the human condition.
Our trait system itself —a marriage of four DNA traits, a background trait, and a “form” trait (used to differentiate 9500-similarly-shaped character PFPs from a more experimental set of selections we’ve chosen for the final 500, which are all conceptually-driven themselves, but let’s preserve some secrets for now)— guarantees this, exemplified even further by the fact that individual traits are not always accurate predictors of the aesthetics therein.
A “Chromie Squiggle” trait in the “DNA: Memetics” category will almost always impart some kind of neon coloration onto characters, but we’ve seen that neon emerge as skin tone, as snaking boas of color, as items seemingly wielded in hands, as magnificent chromatic crowns.
Meanwhile, the “Deity” trait within the “DNA: Lineage” category is sometimes responsible for blue skin-tones, but at other times manifests in oddly-shaped characters, sometimes in dangling bangles of gold and green.
In both of these cases, and as represented by the two Art DeCC0s above, neither the traits nor the aesthetics themselves are obvious indicators of each other. On top of that, there’s a profound sense that the two pieces above are linked, even though their shape, color, form, and backgrounds are systematically differentiated from one another.
Of course, ours is nowhere near the limit to a PFPs ability to represent oneself, but we think Art DeCC0s makes a strong argument that the issue of digital identity is still worth expanding. We want only to push the conversation forward, to ask if the wider world is really interested in sorting through these pieces so as to find one which feels somehow special to each beholder. We envision much of that coming in somewhat surprising fashion during the mint phase, and we anticipate many of these PFPs being traded for this exact purpose on the secondary market.
We almost hope that many Art DeCC0s are put up for cheap secondary adoption by their holders, so that they can fall into the right hands, the ones they most accurately represent.
Can We Completely Destroy Identity Politics?
One thing you’ll notice as you peruse the Art DeCC0s collection, or mint any for yourself, is that it’s very difficult to quickly deduce the race or gender of a given PFP. That was an entirely intentional decision.
There are a great host of ambiguous characters within the Art DeCC0s collection, ones that could conceivably be seen as male, female, nonbinary, or elsewhere along the gender spectrum. Classically feminine and masculine traits often overlap or are absent entirely. Similarly, DeCC0s bear skin-tones of every conceivable color, and every combination therein, which defy quick or unanimous identification.
This is not to say that we are blind to such means of identification, but we want the job of characterizer to be our collectors’ instead of ours, for it will be you who will be forming a relationship with these faces. We believe that two collectors will have different opinions about a given Art DeCC0s’ identity, and that’s wonderful! That means two collectors from varied backgrounds can form the same deep and emblematic relationship with an Art DeCC0. This in contrast to, say, CryptoPunks, an early PFP example where gender and race were very obviously denoted. Our goal is for as many collectors as possible to potentially form connections with as many pieces in the collection as they can, and we will not diminish that ability by outwardly labeling these characters with a given gender or race.
That said, it was important for us to challenge an established hierarchy in crypto art of male-leaning and white-coded characters. We will not tokenize any given identity herein. We will bring every Art DeCC0 to life with the same garbled smatterings of identity that we all carry around with us every day.
To that end, we have tried herein to represent a vast breadth of cultures and art movements throughout the world, both with our DNA traits and with our backgrounds. In their intersection, you will find representative artistry from every continent, many different civilizations throughout history, and many different religious leanings.
The ideal outcome is that every single Art DeCC0, upon mint or purchase, could well become an indelible part of one’s online identity. The closer we can hew to that outcome, the higher standard we set for artistic PFPs of the future, and the more viable such an outcome appears.
What Does Organic Value Creation Look Like in a PFP Vacuum?
Perhaps our most important disruption to the PFP meta is in the “value” realm.
While not every PFP project follows as predictable a value pattern as I’m about to describe, the overwhelming majority have equated trait-rarity with aesthetic superiority, meaning the “common” pieces in a given collection are doomed —for matters of preconceived value construction— to intentionally banal aesthetics. Rarity is denoted by statistics and emphasized by visual exceptionalism.
CryptoPunks were perhaps the unintentional innovator of this form, with the objectively more interesting punks —those with clown makeup, with alien and monkey skins, with hoodies and 3D glasses, etc.— commanding higher value not just because of their comparative trait rarity but because they literally look cooler.
While it’s bad enough that this kind of rarity scaling dooms the majority of a collection to sameness, we are more concerned with the fact that the creators of these projects are communicating value —or lack thereof— in a given piece before any collector intervention. PFPs that are more valuable become more sought after, and are thus seen as more influence-adorning pieces, and because the whole point of a PFP project is oftentimes that influence adornment, the rarity needs to be immediately identifiable in a Twitter thumbnail. The collector’s own sense of taste is sacrifice to that end well before mint..
So much else is sacrificed too.
Using heavily-curatorial process to achieve complete aesthetic individuality means that assigning value to any givens Art DeCC0s is a difficult, personal, and ultimately organic exercise.
We truly do not know what collectors will find more valuable, or will be more excited to mint:
An Art DeCC0 with comparatively common DNA traits but a truly wild and unique aesthetic (which would be difficult to search for in your classic OpenSea dashboard, but would be a prominent 1/1)?
An Art DeCC0 with a more subdued aesthetic but much rarer traits percentage-wise?
An Art DeCC0 with traits (rarity aside) that reference more famous projects/artists: XCOPY, Fidenzas, Chromie Squiggles, etc?
An Art DeCC0 that is intensely-rare but lacks visual cohesion with the collection otherwise?
There exists in this collection many examples of each.
As per that final bullet point, we have made 5% of the collection much categorically rarer than the rest, but the aesthetics therein are wholly unlike standard Art DeCC0s; some can hardly even be called PFPs at all. Will their rarity alone inspire value? Will collectors be interested in such pieces for reasons more conceptual than aesthetic?
Our goal in essence was to put the onus of value-creation on the community of Art DeCC0s collectors, because that more accurately represent the art-valuing ideal: each piece on its own merits, based on the relationships formed with it. It was much harder for us to achieve this end than a more easily-digestible rarity system would have been, which is probably why such a thing hasn’t hitherto been attempted on a grand scale.
But it also makes the project stronger, especially early in the minting process, because one cannot know with any certainty whether the pieces they have minted will be deemed rare in the future. One may or may not be sitting on a highly-valuable asset, and the only way to know so is to follow community conversations and watch how the whims of an unpredictable market play-out. We hope that this principle will allow collectors an opportunity to form deep connections with their Art DeCC0s based on aesthetics alone, being that the value component is necessarily removed to a later date.
All of us are quite eager to know where value will come to rest in this project. I will say, from my vantage point, having gone through every single one of these 10,000 pieces personally, I myself am most interested in those pieces with aesthetic majesty that do not necessarily correlate with trait rarity. Because they demand participation in the project. They demand attention. They demand internalization of norms and enough taste to recognize what bucks convention.
Ideally, there is no single piece in this collection that can universally be considered a “floor Art DeCC0,” if you understand my phrasing. We want every piece to inherently contain the possibility of value, either because its aesthetics are strangely sterling, its traits are rare, its background is mesmerizing, it includes some singular detail, etc. etc.
The market’s taste will always dominate conversations of value, but we have deliberately tried to make the market’s job difficult. We have looked at the raw data to try and predict its tendencies, and we have encoded in the collection sufficient secrets to confound it. Our best guess is that “valuable” Art DeCC0s are impossible to predict in the short-term and will be more subject to capricious human psychology than any pre-coded factor.
And we find that deeply exciting.
Can We Reclaim a Cash-Grab?
Last year, after we released our MOCAIC 2023 NFT, we fielded a few —not very many, but some fairly high-profile— criticisms from the crypto art community for what they asserted was our cash-grabby behavior. It was apparently not becoming of a crypto art museum, if we really cared about crypto art, to siphon money out of the ecosystem for our own gain. To our detractors, our MOCAIC —despite the intention that went into it and the massive participation we achieved— was just a way of shoving consumer goods down crypto art’s throat, and all to make a buck.
Simply put, we disagree with that. MOCA is a registered foundation that publishes bi-weekly newsletters, produces weekly podcasts, offers tools for exhibition and curation and metaverse experimentation all for free. We have demonstrated our commitment to inclusivity and accessibility time and time again. But six months into an art project of Art DeCC0s magnitude, with the mass of computing power and man-hours that were required to bring it to life, we need some kind of financial reciprocation, which is why we’re treating Art DeCC0s as a true-blue art project, worthy of purchase and collection.
I can already hear the echo of last year’s criticisms.
Truthfully, we’ve known since last year that we would face criticism anytime we chose to sell anything. And that factored heavily into our decision to explore the PFP ecosystem, so emblematic of a cash-grab ethos.
Releasing a PFP is our tongue-in-cheek response to all once and future accusations of pilfering and profiteering. Because what stinks more of pilfering and profiteering than PFPs? These are traditionally locales for influencers, shady grifters, opportunistic celebrities, and anyone else trying to make a quick profit for a week’s worth of work and some cheap Fiverr graphics.
Art DeCC0s is grounded in a realm where profiteering, cut corners, and thoughtlessness are the norm, but we have subverted that expectation in all the ways laid out in these essays, by investing a massive amount of time and energy in the creation of this thing, six months and a full team’s worth of daily labor across conceptual and curatorial and creative verticals, many many meetings, guess-and-tests, back-and-forths, trials and errors, our process originally slated to culminate in July, then August, now September, probably actually arriving in October, but even at this point, who knows?
Art DeCC0s represent our best attempt at creating a roadmap for the legitimization of PFPs, but even still, we’re aware this is PFP project. And that’s the point. We’re either reclaiming the form or we’re falling prey to its succubus wiles. We can’t tell you which ourselves; we’re biased judges.
Unfortunately, you will have to decide for yourself.
Where is the Line Between Influence and Theft in AI Artistry?
(I put this one at the bottom because I’m honestly a little nervous about how the world will react when they find out that there were elements of AI generation in the Art DeCC0s process. But here we are together, at the very bottom of this lengthy essay, where such a discussion feels safe.)
Being that Art DeCC0s’ creative process is AI-based, we would be remiss if we did not use this project to ask pointedly controversial questions about AI usage. The most obtuse and egregious of these questions is one still largely unsettled, this question of influence in AI art:
At what point does creative influence end and plagiaristic theft begin?
Artists across the creative spectrum have taken issue with, for example, OpenAI training their models on visual art and videos which were used without explicit permission. There are class-action lawsuits currently in the courts aimed at wholesale safeguarding the copyrights of artists and their work going forward. It is among the most hot-button issues regarding AI training.
Now, we did not use any artwork to train any models because we didn’t train any models in the first place. But we did use a fair amount of artwork in the image-generation process. For example, one of our four DNA traits is “MOCA Collection Works”, meaning our workflow used pieces we own (but did not create) as inspiration for generating characters. Sometimes, that led to explicitly recognizable characteristics from these works appearing Art DeCC0 characters. Off the top of my head, I think of the red splotches of paint Missalsimpson uses in CASH GRAFFITI:
…or the mirror-frame head of Undeadlu’s subject in Self-portrait of a broken mind.
Elsewhere, we have used referential artworks which we do not own but which hail from collections that have taken on a memetic and oft-remixed status. Bored Apes, Tyler Hobbes’ Fidenzas, Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers, etc. Art DeCC0s do not point to a single piece from these multi-vectored collections, but the mass of them taken altogether.
And so the questions come pouring in: Do we have the right to create artworks that explicitly borrow from these source images? Being artists working with AI instead of with Blender or with oil on canvas, are we doing anything different than creating the homages and derivatives of which crypto art has traditionally been so fond? Is this any different than an artist subtly including nods to the influential works of their peers? Is it different if we own the piece in question vs. if we do not?
Are we artists, or are we thieves?
The tension here is palpable within crypto art, let alone outside of it, where laypeople still have a collective meltdown at any assertion of AI art’s legitimacy. Grappling with “Is AI art real art?” is too hard for most, and we’re intentionally asking provocative questions many steps removed from that simple starting point.
There is also a question here of identity.
MOCA is not OpenAI. We are not a massive multinational corporation. We are not bestowing unto the general public an ability to generate artworks ad nauseum using the works we’ve included as in the case of Dall-E. We are a small foundation focused for many years on the uplift and interrogation of crypto art. Does our history matter in these circumstances; does every case of AI influence need to be judged on a case-by-case basis? Does our character, and do our past actions, inoculate us from criticism?
The questions lead seamlessly one to another, and now we’re all together at the bottom of this conceptual rabbit hole we’ve dug for you.
Welcome, friends, to where we have spent the last few months or so. It is warm, and we can talk very quietly without fear of interference.
-Your friendly neighborhood art writer,