Regular Looking Horses
Notes on the Horses generation process and the current state of NFT.
The Horses took just 3 days to complete. New Art Program and I once talked about hosting an NFT Jam. Similar to a Game Jam participants would have 24 hours (or whatever set amount of time) to complete an entire NFT collection. This idea, in part, inspired this collection. Speed and compositional unpredictability are, in my opinion, the 2 main things that make NFT generation an interesting process. This possibly even elevates 'NFT' generation (hashlips or whatever you may use) to the nicest current form of digital art production, as it leans into its immateriality, its rapidity and its mass production potential to create more images than one person would ever care to look at. Though problems of sameness arise when weighting isn't tweaked properly or things compositionally become too messy. It's absolutely a problem you face when generating 1000 images versus 20. This falls back on the classic Tojiba tweet "Looks rare vs. Looks clean" dichotomy within one collection. An important consideration to all serious collection generation and the backbone of the Old NFT. The most visually interesting projects throughout NFT have shared this, from Apes to Milady to Spiky DJ. Horses background weighting was for the most part left untweaked. Compositionally they were always going to look that way no matter the weighting. The only noticeable weighting is in the horses attire. Whether or not that makes it good or bad I'm not sure. It really just makes it what it is and perhaps opens something up. If each new compositional generation is an exploration towards the mediums potential it's important to not get too hung up on content. Or the content of your content.
Very few thoughtful choices were made in the selection of Horses asset images. The background consists of 1 base solid color layer, 4 texture image backgrounds, 2 repeating dissolved black paint layer overlays and 1 layer of more obviously found imagery. The texture images were selected randomly by hand from large free downloadable texture packs found on the Internet Archive. The horses themselves and their attire were ripped from a Russian horse builder website. The prehat, rear and handler layers were hand built compositions made entirely out of the ripped horse assets. The only non found imagery here are the dissolved paint overlay layers and the solid color layer. It was important for this generation to not focus on the content of the images so much as the composition. The project is intentionally void of any aimed signifiers and is limited mostly to 2 pools of content. Restrictions, rules and boundaries offer more interesting generations and often more interesting art in general. Sometimes self-made sometimes not. There is important growth in recognizing the banality(bad) of chaos for chaos sake or the beauty of limitation. Once again whether or not Horses achieve this isn't really apparent to me. It is about a progressive approach to thinking about NFT generation. If the goal of NFT creators is for their creations to be viewed as and treated as art, critical stances must be taken by the most active creators to both help the moment avoid 'scene' statuses and to inevitably save it from itself. Money might consistently bend all our output towards new uniformity should we not take a step back every now and then and open ourselves up to critique.
The Real uncharted NFT territory is somewhere beyond the animal collection. Beyond what became known as 'rugcore'. While the subject of Horses is a horse it's less about Animal PFPs and far more about the feeling that NFTs needed a horse moment in the same way painting has had and will continue to have horse moments. (Thinking like painting is probably a consistent pitfall.) The collection took just 3 days but the original 4 horses were made almost a year prior to the creation of the collection, and they were originally meant for print. It was months later that I had the feeling about a horse moment for NFTs. I think I thought also that it may inspire another Horse collection which would not act as a derivative or a spiritual successor but possibly as a competitor. Because a horse is such a classic subject why wouldn't other NFT creators want to make their own horse project. Generating an NFT collection is very low stakes when you do it correctly. But back to the Real uncharted NFT territory of Animal PFPs. If Avant NFT continues to refuse Animal PFPs they continue along a line of creating traditional art hierarchies of taste and in doing so beg to become another boring problem, and eventually just die. Maybe not financially but spiritually they die. Accept the Animal PFP as it is and give your genuine belief in the further exploration of it's form or watch yourself become the dull one. I don't mean parody the Animal PFP with things like 'rugcore'. I mean disect its form truly and turn it into something good. Not an appropriation of it's attitude. This is a classic misstep for people who believe they are artistically beyond an Animal PFP. If I can mimic it's attitude I don't have to understand why I find it's appearance so abhorrent. I don't have to accept that it is the NFT in it's most challenging form to date.
