When NFTs first took off, it was Beeple’s digital art, CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club PFPs that dominated the headlines and top sales — but one individual bucked the trend in a unique way, garnering attention with generative audiovisual art using just a C compiler.
That individual was 0xDEAFBEEF, an artist and engineer based in Toronto, Canada who’s spent over 20 years experimenting with art, technology, music, generative art, computer animation, blacksmithing and sound recording.
Using low-level computer code and a minimal toolset to craft raw information into audiovisual artworks has proven more popular than you might expect. A collection of six of 0xDEAFBEEF’s sold for $6.8 million in August 2021, and two weeks ago, “Series 1: Angular – Token 134” fetched $241,300 at Sotheby’s. It was auctioned during part 1 of “Grails,” a collection of highly desirable NFTs originally owned by the now-insolvent 3AC (Three Arrows Capital).
Trained on classic piano as a kid and somewhat of a mad scientist when it came to audio equipment, discovering a programmable blockchain in Ethereum was a revelation.
“I’d describe myself as a tinkerer, jumping around between many fields, overlapping art and technology. It just happened that the project that I commenced before I knew anything about NFTs, doing audiovisual work with code, happened to align with things that were happening within Ethereum,” 0xDEAFBEEF says.
“It was great timing. When I look back, had I missed that window in 2021 by three to six months, things might have looked much different.”
But like so many successful NFT artists that have emerged in the explosion of the new digital art era, “not planned” is a common theme.
In March 2021, his “Synth Poems” were born, inspired by the sound of analog synthesizers. These short generative music pieces are stored fully on-chain.
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