mint now open: even the devil once had wings
the moment has arrived! even the devil once had wings is open for bids.
⚔ 11 objects, minted as 1/1 .glb files
⚔ bids start at 0.11 base eth
⚔ the bidding window is open until 4pm CET on february 25 (that's 72h, or 3 days)
visit the minting page: https://www.tinyrainboot.com/even-the-devil-once-had-wings/
to get ethereum on base, you can use one of the superchain bridges or purchase base eth directly via a centralized or decentralized exchange.
if you bid on an artwork, it is advisable to connect an email to your account on manifold in order to receive notifications in case you are outbid.
thank you for your support 🩶
tiny
my digital sculpting journey
taking some time to talk about my digital sculpting journey today, and how it has led me to releasing my first collection of 3d objects (this weekend)! this is an adaptation of an x thread that has videos, which i can't post via paragraph.
i began learning 3d in 2023, starting with nomad sculpt, which is a sculpting app for the ipad.
at that time, i had a thesis that after the hype around AI art faded away in the digital art world, 3d might be the next big thing, especially as more people got used to using AR/VR. i became interested in exploring this medium while its intersection with the onchain art world was still somewhat nascent.
i really thought at the time that the apple headset would lead to widespread adoption of AR tools! lol. seems we still aren't there yet.
i started sculpting on my ipad, and was totally hooked. there is an element of tactility there that i really enjoy. it's almost like using clay, except you can undo, and my hands don't get itchy 😂
actually, at first i wanted to explore using text-to-3d and modifying those ai-generated meshes, but i found two things:
the ai-generated 3d models at that time still needed a tremendous amount of work, which meant that i really needed to go back and learn 3d from a foundational standpoint
sculpting on its own was so fun, and somehow even easy... AI seemed superfluous when i could just make my own models
i was really into AI at the time, incorporating it into most of my work, so that's why i initially approached it from that angle.
i actually even won optimism's we ❤ the art contest in the 1/1 category pretty early on in my journey! so that definitely encouraged me to keep going. see the full piece here.
anyway, i started making all these objects, but that left me wondering where to put them.
most of my digital art over the years has comprised scenes -- landscapes, scifi worlds, fantasy forests -- containing elements of text. i wanted to learn how to create these scenes, which i had often been using AI for, using 3d.
so i started an online course in 3d environment design.
that was when i delved into blender for the first time. wow, the learning curve is STEEP. but i was really dedicated to doing a little bit every day (slow and steady, that's how we win) and by the end of the course i had produced the below -- still one of my favorite pieces i've ever made!
after garnering an adequate understanding of both nomad and blender, i developed a workflow that integrates both tools. usually i will sculpt the initial object in nomad using my ipad, and then i pull the file into blender where i can perform more mathematical/precise work (like creating sword blades :)) or build scenes.
now to my upcoming collection: it's been in progress for around a year as i started making the pieces and gradually came to the idea of releasing them as a set.
in the beginning, i began making these sharp objects as some kind of personification of internal anger i was dealing with at the time -- since then, it's evolved into something much more playful. it's interesting to me how art helps us to deal with complicated feelings, in many ways to release them and move on.
the pieces comprising "even the devil once had wings" are actually minted as .glb files on base -- they are 3d objects you can interact with, or even experiment with pulling them into other programs or VR environments. i'm really curious as to whether they'll take on new lives of their own once they're out in the world. <3
check it out: https://tinyrainboot.com/even-the-devil-once-had-wings/
so what's next? i'm continuing to work on pieces that are created using 3d software. i especially want to keep creating scenes, but i do find that my technical knowledge does not always live up to my visions! so i'm planning to start another blender course soon.
aaaand i have some ideas for ways to translate these motifs into IRL objects, but that will take me a bit more time! hope you stay tuned to follow this ongoing evolution.
lots of love to all of you who have stuck with me long enough to see this through. (*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)ᯓᡣ𐭩
xoxo
tiny
the gallery is live: even the devil once had wings
gm! very excited to share with you all that the gallery for my new collection, even the devil once had wings, is now live. here is the link: https://www.tinyrainboot.com/even-the-devil-once-had-wings/
please note that you will have the best experience on desktop, where you can interact with the 3d objects.
as a reminder, here are the full details of the upcoming mint (it starts this saturday!):
⚔ 11 objects, minted as 1/1 .glb files
⚔ bidding mechanism, starting at 0.11 eth on base
⚔ sale starts on 22.02 at 16 CET / 10 EST, closes after 72 hours
⚔ browse the pieces
⚔ set a reminder using this link
i could not have done this without the incredible benna, who not only built my fantastic website but also set up this beautiful, custom minting page. follow her on farcaster, twitter, or check out her website. (she's open to new projects, too! hint, hint.)
i'll be in touch again when the mint has opened. until then, stay sharp!
tiny
⚔
february 22: even the devil once had wings
mint details:
⚔ 11 objects, minted as 1/1 .glb files
⚔ bidding mechanism, starting at 0.11 eth on base
⚔ sale starts on 22.02 at 16 CET / 10 EST, closes after 72 hours
⚔ gallery preview link coming very soon
⚔ set a reminder using this link
it is with armor that we go out into the world, placed upon us by our mother’s mothers, and theirs before. and though the world is changing, we still look to these distillations of collective knowledge to guide us through the dark.
even the devil once had wings is an 11-piece collection of fantasy and folklore-inspired objects. each piece is minted as a 3d file, meaning it can continue to find new life and expression as we move into an increasingly digitally-augmented world.
it was a year ago that i first began sculpting 3d daggers. my aim was always for this to turn into a series: because you can look, but don't touch. we might be pretty, but we're filled with rage.
a delicate balance of beauty and anger, of smooth hilts and sharp edges, is a concept that intrigues me deeply. many of us move through the world like this: softening our corners while a fire smolders just underneath.
there's this dread so ancient in me — do you feel it, too? sometimes it feels like i'm carrying all that has come before, and all that will ever be.
each of the 11 pieces in the collection is titled with a proverb. these adages offer wisdom from the collective human experience. from our mother's mothers, and theirs before.
and despite these hints at darker undertones, which you are used to seeing in my work, i attempted to keep the collection playful and fun. many of the pieces are inspired by a combination of real-world objects and fantasy weapons, decorated with motifs of animals and hearts. you are free to choose whichever facet appeals most to you.
i'll be sending out the link to the gallery for previews soon. until then,
tinyrainboot
⚔
ego death through network spirituality
sometimes i worry about my essence. i have concerns about handing over everything i perceive to be human about me to the network and there being nothing genuine left of me at the end.
we willingly feed the internet the bits that make up our Selves: our habits, our gps locations, our photographs, our videos, our voice notes, and even our DNA. our physical forms can already be reproduced, mimicked, and forged. today's well-executed deepfake is indistinguishable from "reality."
what will this technology be like five years from now? ten? is this a plateauing or an exponential situation?
with the advent of the clever AI assistant, we are already feeling significant shifts in our approaches to problem-solving and creative thought. we might not readily admit it, but our brains are changing. i can't be the only one finding myself more frequently blanking on words, concepts, and simple mathematics. what once could be recalled with relative ease now swims tantalizingly just out of reach. let me google/chatgpt/perplexity that real quick.
i'm as guilty as most — tasks i don't care for too much are outsourced to the network brain, and thereby i contribute to this changing world order. still, i draw somewhat-arbitrary rules for myself when it comes to my art, to my writing, to my "genuine" expressions of self — at least for now, for as long as i can hold out. for as long as i can still remember all the words i'm looking for.
"i've made up so many rules for myself, but why should i bother with them at all?"
people will say things to me like, "why don't you digitize and upload all your journals! feed them to an LLM, and see what happens!" as if it's a game to hand over your soul like that. i'm not ready. i'm not ready to let go of what is holy to me, what feels like my core. i'm not ready to bare myself, defiantly lay it all on the table and declare, "now tell me exactly who you think i am!"
then i wonder what gave me the right to feel like i matter that much.
my efforts to hold on to some outdated version of the way the world could have worked makes me slowly weary. i never saw myself as a luddite. all of this feels like a wave, a wave i can pretend to fight for a while, until the energy saps out of my body and i'm tired, so tired, and i give up, i let it take me. sweet release.
i remember that convenience always wins for the masses, because since the dawn of time man has sought ways to expend less effort, to make lighter his burden. then i also remember that artisans always remain, though usually as a curiosity of a bygone time.
maybe i can be an artisan of words.
i follow the threads of my thoughts. my thoughts, which chatter incessantly and hardly leave me alone. even though i am trying to practice mindfulness and meditation, i have not yet learned how to silence the noise. i tie one thread to another, wondering if maybe thoughts are the problem, after all. realizing that thought is the barrier between myself and my ability to live in the present moment. thought is hesitation; by its very nature it disconnects us from presence.
if we were to remove the chains of thought, to fully submit to the network mind, would we be free? would handing over everything we are to the internet be the ultimate dissolution of our egos, the loss of individuality and memory, the merging of our spirits as one?
“If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it ... What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself ... The act of thinking itself is thus put off for ever. Indeed, the question of thought can no more be raised than the question of the freedom of future generations, who will pass through life as we travel through the air, strapped into their seats. These Men of Artificial Intelligence will traverse their own mental space bound hand and foot to their computers. Immobile in front of his computer, Virtual Man makes love via the screen and gives lessons by means of the teleconference. He is a physical - and no doubt also a mental cripple. That is the price he pays for being operational. Just as eyeglasses and contact lenses will arguably one day evolve into implanted prostheses for a species that has lost its sight, it is similarly to be feared that artificial intelligence and the hardware that supports it will become a mental prosthesis for a species without the capacity for thought. Artificial intelligence is devoid of intelligence because it is devoid of artifice.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena, 1990
baudrillard called it evil, 35 years ago. yet i wonder if it's even a bad thing, at the end. after all, the differences we built around ourselves have caused so much suffering. is this the timeline where humanity, bit by bit, loses its capacity for individuation and merges with the network itself? when we are relieved of the burden of thought, can we finally ascend?
maybe we've found the way to save ourselves, after all.
mint the accompanying artwork (24h only):
on the free mint stockholm syndrome
it's been bothering me for a while that the current "meta" in the digital-art-on-the-blockchain world is to give your work away for, essentially, free. i was trying to make peace with it. because let's be real, there's a bit of a stockholm syndrome thing going on here. i have audiences on platforms like zora and rodeo, and i'm scared to bite the hand that's been feeding me (when you're starving, the smallest crumb tastes good). "if only i could grow my following on those platforms," i'd tell myself. "then, maybe, maybe, i can find 'bigger-deal' opportunities that lead to income."
two months ago i started a new job. trying to "make it" as an artist in this space was becoming too stressful. i needed a break so that art could become fun again, and so far, that's kind of been working. but it also made me realize that i don't really have to put up with this shit, if i don't want to.
"mint anything," "onchain instagram" (because instagram is totally something we want to replicate), "don't overthink it." bröther, i am overthinking it like hell.
free mints do not primarily benefit artists, aside from potentially exposing their work to a wider audience. free mints primarily benefit the platforms that the works are being posted to. they encourage an inflated number of transactions that those platforms can then use to show how well they're performing. (look mom, we're helping create shareholder value.)
i don't mind the "mint anything" idea, per se. but we started participating in this game before we knew how the rules were going to change. with zora, we used to have so much more control: we could decide how long the mint would be open, or close it manually if we wanted. we could limit the number of mints per address. and we'd get a few dollars per mint, which was...a slightly bigger crumb. there were some great projects that worked really well with the time-limited-mint feature.
then, rodeo (a platform launched by foundation) came up with even cheaper mints, zora followed suit, and the rest of us started crying. i've spoken with other artists, and the general sentiment can probably be described as "glum disillusionment."
while "overthinking it," i came up with the following list of options for myself moving forward:
1) keep going as i am and eventually mint "higher value" pieces as 1/1s on other platforms (that is, works that require more effort, like 3D pieces)
2) boycott free mint platforms entirely, potentially to the detriment of my onchain career
3) shift to minting a different kind of content on these platforms - only works in progress, behind the scenes, etc.
4) compromise. instead of minting the entire piece, what if i were to just mint part of it?
as regards 1), i don't really want to keep going as i have been. i hate that i can't close my mints manually anymore on zora. i could just use rodeo instead, as the time limit is set to 24h, but i can't add much of a description there and the creator tools are worse. plus, it feels like such a slippery slope. if i value my work at 50 cents now, how can i justify wanting to charge more for my other work later? when will i, as an artist, suddenly become "more valuable"? 2) i am not ready for a full-scale boycott right now. people see my work being minted, people check out what i'm doing, maybe they like it, maybe they follow me. 3) i don't really want to mint my wips and behind the scenes?? i don't think these things need to be onchain as nfts. (ymmv)
but is option number 4 a cop-out?
my thought process is that this way, my work still gets more eyes on it — while i maintain control over the actual piece it is derived from. if someone were to want to own it digitally, they could contact me and we could arrange it.
or am i just psyopping myself to appease my captor again?
will this have repercussions for context? is this a weird frankenstein way of going about it? probably. will i change my mind again in a month or two? very likely. but the fact of the matter is that there is no "right" or "best" way to do any of these things, and we're all just stumbling along more or less in the dark, feeling the wall for the damn light switch (it's got to be here somewhere).
i just feel a bit frustrated, and i know i'm not the only one. these models incentivize the consumption of art as a quick bite, something you scroll past once, double-tap, and never look at again. meanwhile, your wallet is getting bloated. these models incentivize the creation of art as something quick, low-effort, and easy, because why pour hours of your time into making something with such a low ROI?
please, tell me if you think i'm crazy and looking at this entirely the wrong way. i am open to that possibility.
regardless, i'm going to give it a shot.
i ran and i ran and i ran and i ran and i did not get anywhere at all
i really like making video works but they're so annoying to optimize and get "just right" that i rarely do. here's a still from a short ai-animated piece i made today:
as you can see, it gets murdered by compression on zora, and everywhere else on the internet:
that's alright, it's experimental. as is the entire digital/nft art scene these days, it seems. after foundation came out with their "free mint" platform, rodeo, zora quickly followed suit to reduce its mint price, too. a lot of artists are mad about it, because there is basically zero way for us to make any money off of this. it financializes our work without a clear good reason.
i'm trying to see these platforms as part of my "marketing budget" — they allow me to reach a new/wider audience. and maybe "we're so early" that it won't matter much someday, and maybe some of these pieces will have monetary value, in the end. time will tell.
in the meantime, if we actually want to sell something, it had better be good. this week i got a major sale, which was a really welcome, happy surprise at a time i had started to feel extremely discouraged.
now i approach my 3d weapons collection with renewed vigor: i've mapped out all of the pieces and it's just a matter of working through them and then making a lot of decisions about rendering. i'm learning a lot along the way, and getting better at this. it's very time consuming work, but i enjoy it.
alongside that, i keep working on the internet diary. that is, pieces that contain a little part of my soul. here are some of the most recent:
i'm pleased with the way my body of work is developing over time.
i'll keep going.
press escape?
i was born in the darkness, and there i was raised
—the world is only as small as your cage—
a sapling rooted under cover of brush
is doomed at birth to turn to dust
but bless those hands that peel away
what otherwise tangles and decays
the gentle slope of a sunlit beam
is enough to unfurl dormant dreams.
—
title: press escape?
format: 4k mp4
duration: 17sec
process: fully created and animated using blender
by tinyrainboot, 07.2024
—
available as a 1/1 on the new lens-based platform, mystic garden: https://www.mysticgarden.xyz/gallery/0x012a99-0x046c
minting now: the contours of a dream
so pleased to present to you the contours of a dream, which is live-minting on https://playground.ink/tinyrainboot/ for the next 2 days. that means that every piece is unique and generated when you go to mint it!
the contours of a dream is about the murky spaces that comprise the human psyche: what secrets lie in the unexplored corners of (sub)consciousness?
the collection follows the path of a faceless figure wandering through chaotic and confusing states of mind, ever in search of scarce moments of tranquility.
these dreamscapes, “imagined” with the help of AI, encourage the viewer to reflect upon their own disposition. awake or asleep, where does your mind take you? what is it trying to say, and are you listening?
read the full write-up: https://paragraph.xyz/@tinyrainboot/the-contours-of-a-dream-coming-to-playgroundink-on-july-16
and watch the trailer:
check out all the pieces minted so far: https://playground.ink/tinyrainboot/
and let me know if you pick one up <3