ADD, my first generative art NFT collection, a journey through 2021
On January 4th 2021, Juanjo, a friend of mine from Madrid, told us about NFTs in a group chat. I had never heard about them before. My first reaction was “this is perfect for generative art”.
I started experimenting with generative art in 2010. After years of abstract mural painting I wanted to make it more exciting by adding some chance to it and losing control of part of the creative process. The first generative mural paintings were called Script, I executed Script 1.0 in Buenos Aires (2010), Script 1.1 in Seville (2010), Script 1.2 in Madrid (2010), Script 1.3 in Beijing (2013) and Script 1.4 in Besançon, France (2014).
Even though the project was called Script, I never used any computer or programmed language to make the murals. I did a couple more experiments called x Lines Passing Through x Points, 8/4 in Bari, Italy (2013) and 53/5 in Zestafoni, Georgia (2013) and in 2016 I started the Modo Project.
The majority of the generative murals I painted before the creation of Modo were indoors and not very big. Modo was the blend of my Composition on Building mural project (monumental compositions playing with the architecture) and the generative indoor experiments.
Modo n.º1, was executed in 2016 in Dijon, France and I painted Modo n.º48, in July 2021. Almost 50 mural paintings in less than 5 years. Each project needed a lot of preparation and protocol testing so at the end of 2016, for the preparation of Modo n.º6, I got my dad involved in the project.
My dad is a 75 years old chemical engineer. However he never worked as a chemist. As soon as he finished school, he was hired as a computer engineer. He started computing information (he worked with punch-cards on IBM P80 in the 70’s) and slowly became a COBOL specialist. As his former colleagues always say, he was one of the best COBOL developer in France. So, in 2016, after some well deserved years of retirement, I got him hooked on Processing. He learned the language quickly and in a few weeks we had the first processing sketch ready to test my Modo wall painting protocols.
When painting generative murals in the public space, I only use Processing to do tests and get a consequent range of outputs to be sure of the protocol consistency. Once on the wall, I execute the protocol by hand, rolling dice and filling one cell after the other. What I like most about this process is not knowing the final output before the end of the job and observing the constant evolution of the piece.
Back to January 2021, as soon as my friend told me about this new (for me at least) NFT thing, I realized it was a perfect environment for generative art and I dove straight in. Now, I needed an idea for my first NFT... Since 2019 I’ve been tracing generative drawings with a CNC on paper and selling them on my website, they are called DMA (Mechanical Aleatory Drawings in French).
To make the DMA drawings, I generate tons of digital images. When I discovered the blockchain technology, I realized these files could be collected. I decided that my first NFT collection would be a digital version of these CNC drawings. I called it ADD, Aleatory Digital Drawings. Since I signed every DMA with the date on the lower left part of the paper, I did the same with the digital collection. With the date now visible on the artwork, I decided to generate one a day.
Using Processing, I generated ADD 04.01.2021 on January 4th. My friend sent me 0.070 ETH (the equivalent of 60 Euros at that time) and after an all nighter on Twitter trying to understand what was happening and getting everything ready, on January 5th 2021, I was able to mint my very first NFT, ADD 04.01.2021 at 0.02 ETH on Rarible. That same day, I saw a tweet from OpenSea talking about their ”lazy minting” and since I had only 0.036 ETH left to keep the adventure going I decided to give it a try. That’s why ADD 04.01.2021 and ADD 06.01.2021 were minted on Rarible and the rest on OpenSea. Beginner’s mistakes.
On January 6th, I sold ADD 04.01.2021 to my friend Juanjo, my first sale!
In the mean time I opened a Cent account and started posting about the new ADD collection. I got a Cent seed sent to me by someone called Jeff Davis, I looked at his work and was obviously attracted by his minimalist and systematic aesthetic. Following his thread I came upon Artblocks.io, a tiny minimal website at that time. I actually thought it was Jeff’s website, only a few projects were active. Discovering Artblocks literally blew my mind. After more than a decade making generative art, I always wanted to involve collectors in the creative process and for me the best way for them to play this generative game was to have them buy an artwork first and generate it after. Boom! This is exactly what Artblocks does!
On January 8th , I was tagged on a tweet by @cloudwhiteNFT saying that my collection had been verified on OpenSea. This meant a lot at that time!
On January 10th I sold ADD 09.01.2021, to MLOdotArt, my first sale to a collector that was not a friend.
I kept on minting one drawing a day. One night, on January 17th, Jeff Davis bought ADD 05.01.2021 and tweeted about it. In a few minutes all the available ADDs were purchased. All the minted drawings from the collection sold out.
The ADD collection jumped to #38 in the OpenSea ranking, the movements on the platform were not the ones we see now but still, #38!
From ADD 18.01.2021 on, I put my daily drawings on a 24 h auction. The OpenSea auction system was different at that time and there was no minimum price to make a sale, at the end of the timed auction, the token was automatically transferred to the highest bidder. This system continued until around January 24th when they decided to make some changes because it had become unsustainable — they were paying more gas to accept bids than the percentage they were getting from the sale. Following that micro-hype, I listed the next drawings at 0.045 ETH and they sold pretty fast, usually the same day. I was now able to collect, I minted Spectron #320 and Color Study #393 and #674 and bought my Chromie Squiggle, #3637.
And we entered the month of March 2021. Everyone who was making NFTs in March 2021 remembers it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I guess it’s what’s called a “bull run”. My daily drawings sold in seconds after minting. All my other collections sold out too, Modern Buildings Generator, Accumulation, Stylus… On March 10th, I secretly launched my new 12 Points collection. While I was minting the drawings, I started seeing the amount on my wallet go up after manually minting and listing each drawing. I didn’t even tweet about the new collection yet. I wanted to get all the drawings minted, double check the features and then launch the collection. At some point my friend Nano4814 called me laughing and saying “Dude, what did you do? you killed the internet!”, apparently a collector noticed the 12 Points being slowly minted and talked about it on a Discord channel, 333 drawings sold in 3 hours, for me that was really crazy.
Then came March 27th, and quite abruptly everything slowed down. ADD drawings were now taking days to sell. We were entering three months of what I think was a bear market (again, correct me if I’m wrong). I kept minting one drawing a day — my goal was to build a strong coherent collection, not a hyped one. Sales were slow except for faithful collectors and special dates (I got a few birthday requests).
In the meantime, on May 25th, I minted my first Factory Drop with Artblocks: Andradite. Almost half of the collection was minted on the first night and then, during a month, minting went quite peacefully. Curated projects were still doing really good on the platform but the other projects were minting slowly. Between the end of June and mid July, minting for Playground and Factory started increasing to the point where it went crazy. The minting channel was on fire, Paper Armada (3000 tokens) sold out, Gen3 a couple of weeks later. Ode to Roy and Andradite sold out on June 26th.
A month later, on July 17th, I was painting a generative mural for a summer festival in Chalon sur Saône in France. At the end of the day I received a DM on Twitter, a collector saying “The secret is out”. I instantly checked my wallet and saw a huge bunch of transactions. Apparently, someone talked about the ADD collection on the CryptoPunks Discord and all the unsold drawings sold out in minutes. After a couple of hours all my available NFTs on every platform were gone. I was NFT-less…
For the second time, the ADD drawings were selling in seconds after minting, drawings from earlier months’ sets were selling on the secondary market. Collectors were stressing about not being able to collect the drawings anymore (a few collectors were trying to collect one drawing of each month’s set) so on August 13th I started a dutch auction system. It went very well all the way until mid October. It’s very interesting how, minting one drawing a day, you can take the pulse of the market. I saw the ADD drawings selling in a few seconds, then in minutes, then hours, days and weeks.
The ADD collection ended 365 days after the first mint, on January 3rd 2022. As I write this text, 84% of the drawings have been sold. October’s set is 62 % sold, November’s is 26% and December’s 6%. The last three drawings of the collection (January 1st, 2nd and 3rd 2022) sold right away, the three of them collected by long-time ADD collectors.
I write this now sitting in the same exact place where I went down the NFT rabbit hole one year ago, on my couch with my cat. Things are definitely different today, 2021 was a wild ride.
To thank all the early ADD collectors, I decided to make the first four ADD sets plottable on paper. I’m working on it at the moment, I hope to make an announcement about it very soon.
A special thanks to my Dad, Michel. Working with and learning how to code from him was extremely gratifying. In 2022 we plan on getting him a new computer…
The technical details and the archives of the ADD collection can be looked up here: https://www.eltono.com/lab/projects/add/
The OpenSea page of the collection is here: https://opensea.io/collection/add-generative-drawings
