Cursed, Floored, & Rejected:
A Landscape Experiment
In this experiment, I wanted to tackle the topic of Rebirth. It’s a strange concept. How can one be born again, or, re-birthed?
The more I thought about it, I was absolutely convinced that the only way to be born again is for death to occur. Something can only be made new once that current cycle of life is over.
There was a time in my own life when I hit rock bottom: I had cancer. My wife left me. My “friends” betrayed and abandoned me. I was forced to give up everything I owned, including my dog.
This was my death.
The entire process changed me, so thoroughly in fact, that I consider this the death of the man that I once was.
Day by day. Week by week. Month by month. I was slowly rebirthed—but not before I went into the depths of who I was, turned over every stone, processed, grieved, and slowly put the pieces of myself back together again.
A special part of this process was venturing out into nature, often in desolate abandoned places, and capturing the pristine, silent scenery that resonated with my grieving soul.
This collection features those photographs.
But I wanted to integrate the concept of rebirth beyond just the art. I asked myself what rebirth would look like on the blockchain.
For me, it had to involve several steps.
I was insistent about inscribing satoshis on which cursed ordinals already lived. They had to be broken. They needed to be rejected from collectors and live on the absolute bottom of the “floor”.
Just as I became rebirthed, I wanted the photographs to go through the same splitting and refining process. So, I chose to put them through a generative adversarial network (GAN)—a type of machine learning model where two neural networks—one that generates data and one that evaluates it—are trained in opposition to produce altered states. I needed the photos to be pulled in two different directions—a splitting of what was and what could be.
The outputs were too refined—too beautiful. So, I took them back into photoshop to break them further down into a simplified existence and composition. I needed them to portray simplicity. A near empty canvass that comes from starting from square one.
This experiment is my attempt to take what already existed and give it rebirth. A digital artifact that the blockchain deemed worthless (cursed, floored and rejected ordinals), and through art, give them new value and a new life.
The collection can be viewed on-chain in a Parent-Child family tree: Cursed, Floored, & Rejected: A Landscape Experiment
