NFT moment
I have loved cars ever since I was a kid. I loved how they looked. I loved how they worked. I loved the fast ones especially. I’d be drawn to all the cool cars in TV shows and movies like “Knight Rider”, “Miami Vice”, or “Back to the Future”, even obscure movies like “Black Moon Rising”.
Because I like cars so much, I periodically have these “car moments”, where all the elements of a scene come together and it all just blows me away. One of these moments happened in front of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A woman walked out with some boxes in her arms and approached her car that was parked out front. She was dressed very elegantly in a light colored pant suit. She looked like she was a director at the museum, very sophisticated in her look and how she moved. She opened the hatch back of her car, then got in and drove away. The car was a silver Audi TT, probably the year it first came out. The combination of being in front of the SF MOMA, the woman, and the bauhaus style of the Audi TT, all combined to create this “car moment”. I fell in love with that car and dreamed of getting one someday.
I was reminded of these “car moments” when voxel artist Christophe Tritz tweeted that Mari was the “the Kalessi of the 2K voxel grid”.
Mari is an extraordinary voxel artist. There is so much detail in her voxel art that you almost don’t realize it was created out of voxels until after you’ve lost track of time having been pulled into one of her worlds.
When Christophe called Mari our “Voxel Khaleesi”, it reminded me that it was Mari’s work that inspired me to start collecting NFTs. I had a mental flashback of another tweet from Neill Blomkamp, creator of the epic sci-fi film “District 9”.
I obviously knew who Neill was, but I had no idea who Mari was. As I looked at the voxel art in the tweet that he referenced, I had to do a double take. What made this voxel art? As I looked closer, I realized what had appeared at first glance to be a normal 3D model was actually composed of very tiny voxels. If I had seen this in the physical world, I think I would kept looking at it and then embarrassingly walked into a wall for not paying attention to where I was going or walked so close to a glass window that I’d smash my nose. In that moment, I said to myself, “I want to own that NFT!”.
And that is how I remember it all starting, that one single “NFT moment” as I’ll call it. One moment of connecting to a piece of art in a truly deep and meaningful way. One moment of discovering a whole new world that spoke to my aesthetics, my love for technology, and a whole new appreciation for art in the digital form.
I’m now fully immersed in the NFT world and feel lucky that I’ve found the NFT community. I’ve met lots of new artists and collectors from all over the world and it still feels like it’s just getting started even though I feel like I’m totally late to the game. Everybody I’ve met in the NFT community has been so friendly and nice. People are kind, encourage one another, and show appreciation for all the NFT art being created. I’ve even gotten compliments on my collection! How nice is that?
I hope that NFTs are here to stay. I do think it has sparked a whole new wave of thinking and innovation in the art world, especially for digital art. There are so many experiments that are happening and new projects being launched, it’s a wild ride to be on and you have to hold on tight, otherwise you might get thrown off the rollercoaster. I do wonder where it will all end up, but I think no matter what happens, the community that surrounds NFTs is here to stay and that is why I’m more bullish on its future than most. If you are lucky enough to participate and feel the energy coming from the NFT community, you’ll see that there is something special going on. It could all still fall apart, but if we can find a way to harness all that energy and continue to build more tools and infrastructure to support the needs of the NFT community, I think we will look back at this moment and be amazed at how far we have come.
