Last week I collected a ton of art as @0xMQQ's intern.

𝙎𝙖𝙗𝙖𝙩𝙤 (@sabatobox)

Originally posted Sunday, October 12, 2025 · Archived Feb 12, 2026, 3:02 PM

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Last week I collected a ton of art as @0xMQQ's intern. (Long🧵coming)

My curation was titled: "WTF is Avant Garde? (aka the Gay Agenda)"

I wanted to pay respect to some of the vanguard communities/movements here in web3.

glitch art hivemind/SEED avant gay NFTs

Basic Premise: The historical avant gardes of the 20th century have largely been absorbed either by the state, by gatekept cultural industries (like contemporary art), and/or by private media vectors (OpenAI, Meta, Tiktok, etc). However, this does not negate the vague historical impulse towards new forms and towards opposing entrenched institutional hierarchies. Art communities can still flourish in the margins, but as social practices become increasingly delocalized, network communities become the centers for emerging scenes.

Tendencies of avant-gardes:

networks of people with a shared modus operandi or aesthetic opposition towards institutions, dominant trends, and ways of doing things creation and conservation of not only art, but discourse, lores, histories operation on the margins of the mainstream.

Of course social groups are fuzzy and indeterminate, not everything fits neatly into boxes and you have medium like AI Art, that has avant garde tendencies but at this point is the official aesthetic of the state department.

Anyways, let's go through my picks from last week.

in collecting glitch art, I had to start with Rosa Menkman's foundational text from 2010, minted on hic et nunc in 2021. Can't state enough how much of an inspiration this has been to me and so many glitch artists

Vernacular of File Formats (PDF, 2010), by @_menkman

Out on The Prairies (2022) by @joncates

jonCates is one of the most OG glitch artists. He used to run the dirty new media Tumblr back in 2010s which was a gateway for me. This still is taken from his Glitch Western film "鬼鎮 (Ghosttown)" which also has an immersive open world game

BROKEN DOLL FOR SALE (GLB, 2024) by Ras Alhague

Thing about glitch art --it's gay af. It's development over the years has been guided by queer artists and non-male artists. Ras is one of those artists, not only for their incredible practice, but for being one of the og mods of the Glitch Artists Collective group on Facebook during the 2010s.

How To Make Glitch Art (mp4, 2021) by @letsglitchit

Dawnia deserves not only credit for being an amazing glitch artist but also for her work with early AI processes. Little known fact but the Glitch Artists Collective on Facebook was one of the first communities to actively encourage experimentation with AI since the DeepDream algo dropped in 2015.

Self Portrait of a Daydreamer (2022) by @SkyGoodman24898

Sky's practices encompasses a wide range of processes, from glitchy analog video synth to generative AI to 3D modeling. Tried to get a little bit of everything, including one of their classic Impossible Sneakers.

💯💯

The Rendering Tree (mp4, 2024) by @matau_eth and @aitsolabs

Matau's video collage of video game cut scenes mixing sublimely with Aitso's analog synths. Glitch as the bridge between analog and digital media histories <3

B̷i̴n̵g̶h̸a̶m̸ (mp4, 2022) by @chepertom

Thomas Collet is a wizard of datamoshing, a glitch process that generates blooming visuals by removing i-frames from compressed digital video files.

RAMP RATS (gif, 2023) by @haydiroket Meadow [Secret Valley] (gif, 2025) by @WildMissingNos

Videogames were one of the first mediums to be glitched (Digital TV Dinner by Jamie Fenton and Raul Zaritsky, 1978) and are sites of some of the most famous works of glitch art (ie by JODI and Cory Arcangel). They remain relevant today, especially as video game companies slowly go after ROMs and video game emulation. Works by artists like Haydi and Kyle not only have an element of media conservation through remix, but form an act of resistance against hegemonic IP laws.

P_StRucT (gif, 2021) by @YMMSH2 (aka Nicolas Sassoon)

Vanguards not only look to the future but they reincorporate the past. Nic was notably part of Computers Club, a digital art collective from the 2000s that remains influential to this day. P_StRucT is one of my favorite pieces from his YMMSH alt. As a piece of speculative architecture, it's just perfect.

Quin Quag: district 1 by @kris10roos

Color cycling was such an integral part of 80s-90s game and graphics, mostly because it creates movement/variation with minimal resource usage. Seeing artists like Kristen reclaim this process to create magnificent cityscapes like the Quin Quag district has been one of my biggest inspirations in this space.

Nico_P1S7 (2022) by Ariel Institute (@EllieHedden)

I miss seeing Ellie's work on the blockchain, their post-photography practice was one of the most unique I've encountered. Ariel Institute created uncanny portraits using generative AI and archival photographs.

alvin has a living room (2022) by @l444u_

There was an insane explosion of digital art coming from Brazil and Latin America in 2021 thanks to hic et nunc and also to DAOs like Magma, Hivemind, and SEED that help platform young artists. L444u's art was avant and gay before those things were even considered cool.

Xhffxghul - Mech Emanator (2022) by flpgfx

Though harder to categorize, this movement of global south artists spurred by hic et nunc deserve their own name. Felipe was one of those artists creating insane collages and 3D works.

Cornelia Goth (gif, 2025) by @estelle_flores_

Estelle's work was one of the first NFTs I ever collected. I instantly loved her deconstructive photographs and videos created in The Sims. Her NPC series is a wonderful culmination of her practice, mixing the Sims with low-res generative graphics.

Lady at garden (2022) by @eduardopolitzer

The great Ed Marola, another artist I instantly collected on hic et nunc and whose practice has only grown throughout the years encompassing film and sound. He even made a music video for Metallica which they didn't like it. Legend shit.

rolling a joint <inside the national museum> (mp4, 2025) by @lidicesilveira

Lidice's practice is so special, bridging performance with emerging technology and fashion. Love this work in particular for it's cheeky homage to Warhol but also bc I want a joint right now too.

Card NFT #7775 by @bis__cut

An academic definition of avant garde is a practice that unites art with everyday life in a new way. I see this in avant gay NFTs in how they directly address gamification, a common feature of our contemporary life. You see it in Biscuit's use of pokemon cards as canvas, as well as the extensive use of traitmaxxed attributes to guide and defy how algorithms interpret a series of artworks.

Burger Funds NFT Avatar #253 by @Gremlins2Movie

It's funny that so much discourse in 2021 was spent differentiating "real digital art" from "NFT collectibles" only now for us to blow it all up. That's the beauty of an avant-garde, it lifts the curtains to new possibilities.

(just realized this image was partially transparent, amazing lol)

PRAY4LOWBIE #327 by @archivepilled

Datafication is another aspect of daily life that is united by art in avant gay NFTs, though maybe not in an obvious way. This age of AI means every action we make becomes a data point. Traitmaxxing uses that logic in artistic production, where every visible gesture and even some invisible ones can become data points in the form of a pfp trait. What may seem like a gamified gimmick is suddenly personal and affective. Lowbie's mock-up of his own funeral play into this psychogeography perfectly, not only because of the anxiety of being sick, but in the warmth given to the artefacts on display.

Thanks so much fam. Twitter hates links but here are links to the wallets I collected through:

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Added Oct 12, 2025, 9:28 PM

Holes #635 by @ShelfLifeGroup

A hole is one of those mathematical/semantic concepts that can be anything. I'm particularly struck by this hole which i think fulfills only the bare minimum requirements of holiness. If anything it's more of a gateway, an escape.

MiFella 2 #5646 by @MMifella

MiFella 2 has a way of asking "What is in a face?" Maybe it's because this series is a kind of collective schizopunk epiphany that is sometimes confounding, sometimes aggravating with the intense overlays, but sometimes simply sublime. There are no signs or embedded critique for a work like this, the viewer is left to their own devices.

Toji A #4337 by @m_m_____m____mm

I love how Tojiba Brand Manager resurrects the aura of buying computers in the 90s and y2k eras. Computers had an air of home furnishings and software had magical qualities --the symbol of lost futures and obsolete utopias. Toji A Computers are enthralling exercises in hauntology.

The Tree is the Key #1 by @ko1_ ċһȗ-Ԁѧı #47 by @guruguruhyena

Thing about these networked avant gardes is that they aren't bound by physical location or institutional access. Artists traverse from one scene to another. Seeing artists I've known for years from GAC or HEN minting on VVV brings me joy, not only because there is so much conversation to be had between these aesthetics.

The Jazz Players ⌮⌮⌮⌮⌮⌮⌮⌮⌮⌮⌮⌮ by @canekzapata

As time goes on, these virtual journeys through different scenes and blockchain ecosystems feels like a real odyssey. I've never met Canek IRL but he's been there on the same boat across the Glitch Artists Collective, HEN, now seeing him drop on VVV is like running into an old friend at the gallery. Seeing him mint out on VVV and sell on Fellowship makes me feel bullish that the immense talent in this space won't go unnoticed.

ICSA2 #986 by @enzoriofonseca

Probably one of the more straightforward works of schizocollage within the avant gay NFT scene, but nonetheless one of the more compelling. For a pfp-style series, the variation and compositions are impeccable. The little nods to Brazilian culture like Lula and Pixo bring me great joy.

Scarecrow #2325 by @jimspindle

One of my favorite aspect of the avant gay scene is the open remixing and referentiality (what Charlotte Fang calls hypercitationalism). The ability for an image to have embedded metatext provides an entire new dimension of layering meanings. But there is also a collective effect, as images and jokes and histories carry on from one series to the next, sometimes in obvious ways, like the Tojiba Horse in the background, but sometimes in quiet personal ways as well.

PiFella 2 Parasite Chamber #497 by @SAlgotrader

There are inherent limitations to PFPs, for one they tend to flatten everything on a 2D plane. This is one reason I keep coming back to Patrician's PiFellas, they are beautiful studies in dimensionality and composition, pushing pfp software like hashlips to create a wide variety of scenes with different perspective points. Of course, I especially love it when the planes don't line up perfectly, like in this angelic tableau.

Drilady #723 by @CreamyDreamy

Parker's work was my entry point to the avant gay scene. I was drawn to the promiscuous bunnies at first but was sold with the "A Thousand Plateaus" trait that came with a great quote in the metadata. (srry im pretentious)

I would even venture to say that avant gay NFTs (and their forebears in Remilia) are some of the first digital art to be completely "deterritorialized," in the sense that anything: any culture or element or text or politics can become an aggregated trait, funneled into an algorithm for gamification, and dissemination. The network plays an integral part these mechanics. There's no real point in looking at just one Drilady, she is a multitude, a macrocosm, a community. It really opened my eyes in how to analyze works ranging from Milady Maker to Drifella III, and how to proceed as an artist going forward.

Yessssss, just posted about them ❤️

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Added Oct 13, 2025, 4:01 AM

Thanks for reading fam 🫶

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Thread by @sabatobox · 34 tweets · Sunday, October 12, 2025 · Archived via ThreadPilled · Original