GM

I dedicate this salute emoji to those who share this newsletter with their friends: 🫡

Blessed art thou.

In today’s edition:

• Only 400 people can ever experience this NFT

• New Top 25

• 4 fresh drops

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Did you know?

We have a premium pass that gives you access to a directory of every drop we cover, complete with detailed information on how to get on every whitelist (including those underrated ones that aren’t already full).

And for those curatooors out there, you can get free NFTs just by finding drops that end up on the Mint or Watch list.

Lastly, hang with me and the MoS team in a private discord with weekly voice chats. The vibes are great.

Would you like to be featured in Mint or Skip like the above ☝️ ?

Only 400 people can ever experience this NFT

Context

Verse announced a new collection called Echo, No Resonance by Andreas Rau in collab with the artist collective HERE & NOW.

Here’s how it works: 

1. 400 mint passes

2. Sold on November 20

3. Via auction (format TBD)

4. Passes will grant access to a token-gated livestream

5. A film will be shot, edited and presented during that livestream

6. The film will never be shown again

7. Film screenshots will be used to create generative art

8. Passes will then be used to mint those artworks as NFTs

Andreas has been releasing NFTs on Tezos since 2021 and has one of the top 20 highest-grossing collections of all time on fxhash (Toccata). 

Our take

Felt cute this morning so I took a selfie as I watched the sunrise. Then I ran it through the Echo, No Resonance algorithm, which produced this glitchy portrait based on the pixels from my image.

You too can create cyber echoes of yourself using your camera here. 

It’s using the same algo that will ingest screenshots from the upcoming film and remix them into similar visuals to what you see above. 

Bonus: They’re going to choose one person who shares an output and give them a free mint pass. 

This drop is interesting on a few layers

There’s the performance. An entire film being shot, edited and presented during a single livestream sounds intriguing - I haven’t heard of this being done before. 

There’s the tech. Token-gated livestreams, randomized generative deconstructions of screenshots, onchain distribution. All very //cutting edge//. 

And then there’s the storytelling.

In their words, these NFTs serve as:

The NFTs are linked directly to images from the film, but they don’t transfer exactly what you saw.

As my more Awakened Readers will know, Andreas is simply reminding us of how things already are.

We know, but often forget, that our memories are closer to these echoes than they are to the screenshots, and any single moment is just a fleeting blip that’s here and then gone forever. 

As I sit here, in an undisclosed private vineyard, being fed grapes like some sort of Baroque Saint while dictating this newsletter to my scribe – this moment too is fleeting! 

I forgot how fun having an existential crisis can be, and it’s not even lunchtime. 

Bottom line 

This one’s for those who want to take You Just Had To Be There to the extreme by memorializing the Present Moment feeling onchain. 

✨ Added to Top 25 & Favorites 🔥

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

Triumphs of the Nation State by Slimesunday

The Nation State series by Boston-based collage artist Slimesunday sure is a funny one.

The first edition dropped in November 2020, right before worldwide crypto mania in 2021. The second came in November 2022, in the midst of the market “bottom” and just one week after the collapse of a certain 3-letter exchange that shan’t be named.

Today (following a holder-only presale yesterday), we’re getting a third release, which marks _____*. This one’s for the early celebrators.

* fill in the blank with your most bullish take

Panopticons by Teto

FingerprintsDAO follows up on their Bit Rot sellout last week by introducing Community Drops, a new exploratory space for emerging artists in the studio (the “Presents” or “Factory” to their existing “Curated”, some might say). The first drop will be Panopticons by pseudonymous artist Teto.

While we don’t have a lot of details, the collection looks like a colorful, anime-inspired commentary on technology’s role in societal control, which I could definitely envision an audience for.

One for cyberpunk maxis.

Forecast by Manuel Larino

Spanish artist Manuel Lariño makes his Art Blocks debut with this upcoming 365-supply collection.

Releasing next week, Forecast is a colorful interpretation of the connection between weather and human emotions, depicting raindrops in as many varieties as there are ways of feeling (I write in a blue shade of anguish as the rainy night sky sets at 4:30 PM in Ciceroland).

One for the rainy season lovers out there.

Axo by jiwa

The last new drop on today’s list is another Art Blocks debut, Axo by jiwa (a.k.a. S. Ryan O'Connor), a Berlin-based artist who’s also the founder of the ntent.art collective.

It explores the activity in the human brain by portraying neurons as colorful pixels that continually expand and contract on a void-like canvas, rupturing old connections and forming new ones depending on the state of the mind (a state that you can guide, given that all of these pieces are interactive).

Check out the artist’s site and feel free to experiment with the controls afterward. Since I’m a dynamic art enjoyooor, I’ve…

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨