*This is a brief exploration of the DEAFBEEF audiovisual generative art series 0–5. I do not own any of these NFT’s nor do I have any intentions to in the future.*
One core principle of decentralization in the smart contract world is the minimization of reliance on centralized elements as a baseline, and by extension maximizing blockchain-living elements as the ideal.
The evolution of NFT media in keeping with this ethos should progress towards on-chain generative data. Generally, IPFS is used as the media storage network, with a path to the content in the contract. DEAFBEEF audiovisual NFT’s on the other hand successfully maintain all required generative code on-chain. This exploration focuses on the initial audiovisual art mints — Series 0 to 5 found here. In the last 7 days 3 mints have sold for over $600k USD total.
What are they?
An audiovisual NFT collection created by @_deafbeef which fully embraces the ethos of DeFi by implementing a wholly on-chain content generation strategy. There are currently 221 unique mints across 6 series.
Some examples here:
Synth Poems 0 — ‘What you see is a direct representation of the sound signal, as it would appear on an oscilloscope.’
Entropy 145 — Entropy mints are interesting in that they ‘degrade’ through transfers. Every transferFrom() event triggers a generative parameter counter change in storage.
How do they work?
The contract deployer address sent a transaction to the burn address with a special property — the input data contains the C code required to generate the content. You can see that tx here.
In the contract a function is included which provides some important information about a mint. A user can pass a token ID to the getTokenParams() function and receive amongst other things a seed and the codeLocation0` That codeLocation0 points to a tx hash which has the source code as input data. Using the seed and code the user can generate the raw output of the audio and video content, which can then be encoded to appropriate formats.
Here is the getTokenparams() function:
Can learn more here.
Currently — for UX purposes the content is cached on a DEAFBEEF project server — but the point is all required ingredients are on-chain.
Autoglyphs is another on-chain generative project (static image only) — with the content generated directly by the smart contract. If you know of any others, please let me know.
DEAFBEEF has additional pieces to this initial series of audiovisual mints you can find on his homepage here.
Want a run-through of another crypto project — tell me in the comments below 👇
