GM

It’s time to cancel thy Friday plans, we have many drops to cover.

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

This is how I’m spending my weekend

The MoMA and Feral File just dropped an exhibition of Sound Machines, a group show of upcoming NFTs that includes 0xDEAFBEEF and Yoko Ono (who turned 91 years old last week).  

This is a “you have to experience it for yourself” kinda thing, but here’s an attempt at a description. 

Sound Machines feels like an internet funhouse where each room opens up a completely unexpected experience, all totally different from each other except for the fact that they all use sound or music. 

Let’s go room by room. 

Cancel Yourself by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

A choose-your-own-adventure where the adventure is getting yourself canceled.  

Select your sin (e.g. “I liked Dave Chapelle’s special”), get fake hate replies on fake social media, apologize for what you did, and then get canceled anyway (and mint the proof). Weeee! 

PAYPHONE by 0xDEAFBEEF

The artist is going to host a livestream where he sits in a room with an old rotary phone that rings and speaks any prompts from viewers.

That audio will then be loaded into NFTs of phone cards, which can also be used to obtain physicals made from hand-forged and laser cut iron. He didn’t have to go that hard but he did. 

SOUND PIECE V by Yoko Ono

Yoko revisits her multi-decade exploration of “instruction” art that brings the spectator into the act of creation, this time asking them to follow a text prompt (“Tape the sound of friends laughing together. / Save it for a rainy day”) by adding their own sound bites to the work’s metadata. 

This art takes on a new meaning for me in the age of AI, where every form of media can be flattened down into simple natural language prompts. 

Integrity Protocol / Lower Limb Lecture by American Artist and Tommy Martinez

Jump into a DJ booth of sorts and mix your own “sonic textures” based on an earlier audio recording from the artists. 

The visuals are meant to represent the “blue screen of death” you might get when your PC crashes, although I can’t help but also get some dystopian jeopardy vibes. 

Play from Memory by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

AI models informed by music education games from the 1920s that were designed to help children improvise from memory. 

Like those children, the AI here is also “playing by memory” and creating mesmerizing (sometimes creepy) works of orchestral music and youth choruses. 

My personal favorite. 

How to buy

Feral File is splitting this into 30 sets of 5 works (one from each artist) sold via a highest-bid auction starting at 3 ETH on March 15th.

They’re also releasing three 100-piece editions at a fixed price of 0.1 ETH.

Any sets not sold after 24 hours are removed from sale. 

Bottom line

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

33 Curated Drop

Numerologists, assemble. On 3/3 guided by the hand of pseudonymous curator 33NFT, this upcoming drop might hold the answers you seek.

Five artists indulging in different genres and themes feature here, including names you might already know from other platforms, like Lucho Poletti, Zhuk, Brilly and Michael Sidofsky.

The main dish, however, is a series by veteran crypto artist Trevor Jones titled Ensō, inviting us to take a breather from this hectic, emotion-fueled blockchain rabbit hole.

Have a break, have a Kit-Kat cryptographically-secured Ethereum-based digital artifact.

Today Ancient Seeds

Another day, another free gaming mint for your headtop.

In development by by a doxxed team of former AAA game company employees, Today makes heavy use of AI in its cozy social simulation game.

In it, you’ll construct a world using generative tools, including your own island where you’ll vie for the attention of NPCs and other players, kind of like a first-person Animal Crossing type of vibe.

You can find gameplay footage here and here showing aesthetic sandboxes as well as chatbox interactions with NPCs using what seems like the latest AI tech.

Ancient Seeds will be the game’s genesis mint. Although details are still unclear and this type of game is pretty hard to pull off, the accessible price of free makes it a no-brainer.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

Mutant Hounds: Inscriptions

Another Ethereum-based project ventures into Bitcoin. In this case, we have Novel Labs releasing Mutant Hounds: Inscriptions, a follow-up to their 2023 PFP collection Mutant Hounds.

So far they’ve only revealed the art, a series of colorful, front-facing, low pixel renditions of the aforementioned canines, so there’s not much to speak of yet.

However, we can probably expect some sort of tie-in with the Yuga Labs and Apecoin ecosystem like the rest of Novel Labs’s projects, including the recently released Serum City game.