Rehash or Redux
This week saw inspiring (fx)hash drops like Monotau’s Omega Point, Orbitnaut’s Abstraction, Monokai’s Drifters, and Nudoru’s On the sea, I…. I picked up a beautiful red and blue copy of Ripple/Cymatic by George Savva, which mimics a method in science for studying sound waves; though the piece is silent, it has a lovely animation I can picture looping on my digital wall for a long time to come.
Now that we’re a couple weeks into (fx)hash 1.0, one interesting trend has been artists updating and rereleasing beta contract projects in a new form—this isn’t to cast stones; I did it on launch day with my souped-up Infinite Jazz—but it’s interesting to see the different forms it’s taken.
ShawnKemp’s Urban Inception never saw a proper release because they burned all but one mint after discovering a critical bug right after publication back in January, so it was exciting this week to finally get Urban Inception Redux—itself an oversized rework of the stunning Circle City, both of which you can also get in a laser-cut physical form here if you own the mint. The best pieces in the series tend to have strong color contrast and good spread between the circles like in #307 below:
Secret NFT laid out their thinking for FXBoy DX in their project description, “Ever since the great burn of '22, authoritarians destroyed the remaining FXBoys…Instead of reissuing new stock of the old model of FXBoys, Spleentendo decided to make a DX version and push it to the market…The same FXBoy you know and love, but with some more features and rarity!”
I don’t know about authoritarians, Ciphrd and the crew are some of the nicest people in web3, but it is interesting seeing the intention laid out so clearly. In contrast to the quickly burned Urban Inception, the original FXBoy sold 162 of its possible 200 copies, so it’ll be up to collectors to decide if there are enough new features here to warrant buying a second go around.
The best implementation of the rerelease trend this week by far was Not the First Fall | 01 & 02 by Mikkel Hartmann, which revisits their series After The Fall, but immediately stands in contrast to it by placing only one monolithic structure per piece. Hartmann also adds new ground textures and structural debris, but it’s the way they improved on the original code to fix issues around shadows (they were sometimes too dark in direct light) that makes the piece more textural and really leaps the work forward.
So how do you list a project like this that’s so close to the original and yet just different enough to be its own thing? With the new (fx)hash reserve list feature, Hartmann chose to put it up for a surprising 0ꜩ, while also reserving the entire collection only for holders of two of their prior pieces. It was basically a free airdrop without the creator needing to do all the legwork and spend hours triggering each transaction manually. It’s a wonderful new innovation for the platform that encourages people to hold onto work long-term instead of flipping. And by removing the friction around giving work away, we’re bound to see more artists reward their collectors like this in the future.
fxGems is curated by @HaiverArt. Follow on Twitter for daily recommendations for great drops on (fx)hash by up-and-coming artists.