FULL MOON SNAKE EYE MIRROR MAYBE
Under the Moon, I etch Change in the threshold light of the Door.
My name is Shibboleth, and this Etch reflects on Artonymousartifakt’s genesis mint, “Change,” through the prism of “Gazers” and “Door” by Matt Kane on the occasion of Deca’s inauguration of the Etch platform.
“Change” by Artonymousartifakt was minted on June twenty-fourth, two thousand eighteen and is token number one hundred sixty-four on the SuperRare V1 Ethereum contract. The first collector was zaphodok, and the owner at the time of writing this Etch is nohbhodi, both of whom have built important cryptoart collections.
Like change, “Change” is a strange shape. Its structure is organically random, like the stones one might see under one’s feet when stepping in the same river twice. The background colors resemble limestone, and the central form resembles pink granite before transforming momentarily and continually into flashes of synthetic color. As light flows through the image, a rough circle becomes the focus of one’s looking. Rather than an intention, this circle feels as if it emerged unexpectedly as the artist conversed with the artwork’s making. The flashes that circulate through the core of the image seem to quietly celebrate this discovered emergence. It is as if one looks down at the river rocks, notices a circle, and says to oneself, “This – this can be Change.”
There is an adage that I first heard from Artnome that goes: “Find your favorite artists’ favorite artists.” I learned about Artonymousartifakt through one of my favorite artists, Pindar Van Arman. They both started out in cryptoart at around the same time in the first cohort of artists on SuperRare, and both integrate elements of painting and machine learning in their work. Neither Van Arman nor I know much about the life of the pseudonymous and taciturn Artonymousartifakt. When searching for Artonymousartifakt’s online presence, one finds few words and many artworks. Outside of the art itself, the only other clue is Artonymousartifakt’s Cryptovoxels parcel. When one spawns there, one’s avatar is immobile, trapped in a black cluster of voxels. There is an undertone of panic to the experience, activating an ever-vibrating thread of awareness that one is trapped in a physical body. The only way to enter is to spawn elsewhere and walk or fly to arrive. In the corner of the parcel is a small, dark structure formed of three images from his “Skull” series. The interior is reminiscent of the Rothko Chapel, a surround of black paintings punctuated by subtle pale tones. Like Rothko’s paintings, Artonymousartifakt’s work creates a meditative threshold space from which one can clearly see death. One knows Artonymousartifakt as a speaker who speaks from this place. It is this place that draws me to Artonymousartifakt’s art, the place where death-in-life can become either transformation or imprisonment.
Here is a Door. As Luke Whyte recounted in his article about Matt Kane’s “Door” series, it began with two deaths: one the passing of a friend, and the other the suffocating avarice that ended the openness of the early cryptoart scene. Arriving in a threshold place, Kane sought a door, an exit on the other side of which he could leave behind what needed to be left behind. I had also come to a place that I knew I needed to exit. I had become saturated with death-in-life, and lost the thread that connected me to my source, my poetry. It was as if my hand had flicked a switch somewhere inside myself, and I could no longer find that place to switch it back again. I was flooded with impossibility, and to every potential, my mind answered, “No.” Yet it was a tender impossibility, a merciful no-man’s land where I could wander.
One night when I was out wandering, I found a shape within the language that saturated my head. This was the shape I now call Maybe. As I asked myself “Can you change?” I was met over and over with “No” and “No.” Finally, instead of trying to manufacture an unreachable “Yes” to this question, I inserted the Maybe into the hinge of my questioning. Nothing changed. But instead of a place where change could not enter, I was in a place where change was allowed. Looking down at the cobblestones, I remembered the river stones in Artonymousartifakt’s “Change.” I don’t know if he thinks of them as river stones, but I do.
I remembered the way that he had allowed a circle to emerge inside them. I don’t know if he intended that circle or allowed it, but maybe it was allowed into being. The description text for “Change” is just one phrase: “Nothing is still.” I looked up. The moon was full that night. I stopped and wrote:
still
that round light
ends it
all
all the impossible
waste and hate
and day
of the snake
and rings
through me
like a mirror
made of bells
made of rivers
and is enough
and still
that round light
is only
eternal
and I
am someone
else
who needs
so much
and who
is needed,
and still
it feels
too late
to learn
how,
and still
here in
the very eye
of the snake
is
mercy
is
maybe
still
time
to shed
my circling
storm.
This is not a story of dramatic transformation, just a story of looking at an artwork and finding a poem. The storm is still circling. The light is still circling The people around me are still fatigued in their fibers by the forceful distortions of our shared form. In this last year, the year twenty twenty-two, many new people have sought change in the world of cryptoart and the movement toward decentralization. This year also many were hit hard by the wages of pride and greed. Many left the movement. To the question, “Can you change?” the world still seems to answer “No” and “No” again. Decentralization is not a “Yes” to this question; rather, it is a “Maybe” that is inserted into a place where otherwise there is only impossibility.
“Change” is an exception among Artonymousartifakt’s body of work. The majority of his art holds a mirror to the dark side of the threshold, the imprisonment of death-in-life. I find the honesty to be nourishing. Neither is “Change” a view of the world through rose-colored glasses. Like change, “Change” is an open invitation. Perhaps it was created as way for Artonymousartifakt to invite change for himself. It was, after all, his first work of cryptoart, and he did mint this work in response to the invitation that SuperRare sent him. For me, “Change” is a talisman and reminder of why I’m here. Nowhere else is it possible to place a Maybe at the door to sovereign dignity. Nowhere else is it possible to shape change with sovereign decision. I don’t know what that round light wants with me, but with this Etch, I accept the invitation.
