Bright Moments in Patagonia: How an NFT Artist Lures Collectors to Remote Boulders

A few months ago Bright moments The team is somewhat concerned that it sits at the foot of Mount Fitzroy in rural Argentina.

They were there near the southern tip of the US to check out sites for an upcoming act headlined by renowned artist Denkoro. cryptocurrencies gathering. And after 17 hours of travel in Buenos Aires, he stopped on a glacier, at a local ranch (or Estancia), and now, visiting the mountain featured in the Patagonia clothing brand logo was coming up empty.

The team knew enough from hosting the past six CryptoCitizens events—that generative Ethereum NFT artworks to Immersive experiences Held in cities on four continents—to realize that if you don't know all this by now, you're “basically screwed,” in the words of one Bright Moment crew member.

Then, when the bus returned to the mountain, it passed through the abandoned place Guanaco-Pepper Patagonia Wilderness, Bright Moments founder Seth Goldstein suddenly shot up from her seat: “Stop! Stop the car!”

“I've never seen him do that,” recalled Bright Moments crew member Phil Mohun, who was present that day. Scene. “They stop the car, he gets out of the car, jumps over the fence, doesn't say anything. And then he starts running.

So the group got out and started running after Goldstein. After a short track and field course, they all stood in front of a giant 30-foot-tall boulder. No other stone surrounds the stone, and there is no sign of how it could have gotten there. The team knew without saying anything: they found their place.

“He felt like he wasn't supposed to be there, he just happened to be there,” Mohun said. “And I think we felt that way.”

The group soon put Deafbeef on the rocks. Without hesitation, the artist entered.

“I thought: this is perfect,” said Deafbeef Scene. “It's a bit silly. Do people go all that way, off the beaten path, for this rock? What are we going to do?

So the Bright Moments team rushed to secure the stone. The fence Goldstein had jumped turned out to mark the property line of a nearby gaucho—one they didn't know but within reach of their guide.

Mohun said that it was an hours-long collaborative process with the director, describing the live broadcast of the NFT shoot as “filmmaking… is an art project.” And after a healthy negotiation between the guide and the gaucho, Bright Moments had permission to use the rock.

The rock, the thing was fused with ice: a large rock that had been buried thousands of years ago in a prehistoric, long-lost body of ice. For centuries, such mechanisms have puzzled scientists; They wondered how these unique and immobile things could have gotten to where they are now.

This kind of phenomenon is very appealing to the deaf meat. The artist saw the basic truth about life and reality.

“It's a one-way process,” Deafbeef said. “You can go forward, but you can't go back.”

To bring the concept to life, mainly working Deafbeef Digital media-He made a deceptively heavy 18-inch by 18-inch metal grid, and 100 tiny metal sculptures to fit onto it. Sculptures, named “Hashmarks” In the artist, he talked about the one-way process in blockchain networks: permanent, public ledgers where information can be written, but never removed.

Each Hashmark sculpture is associated with a corresponding digital token on the Ethereum network. Each of those tokens contains a unique image of a holder's sculptural footprint that can be distributed or kept private at the owner's option.

The rights to claim 50 of the sculptures were sold to the highest bidder through Bright Moments. The remaining 50 were distributed by lottery to Bright Moments community members around the world.

Crucially, Deafbeef designed the sculptures in front of their future owners in glacial erratic, Patagonia. The process by which the collection owners receive the works should also be a distinctly one-way, irreplaceable experience.

“People come from all over the world and stuff into this very remote area,” Deafbeef said. “And for that he lives only for a moment. They break up, and go to all corners of the earth, and can never be put together again.

So earlier in November, after months of daily weightlifting, Denkoro strapped a 40-plus-pound metal sculpture to his body with custom straps and made a multi-flight journey from his native Toronto to that crag at the southern tip of Argentina.

over there, 70 art collectors and Bright Moments community members (who can walk) meet to share in a project designed to reflect the ephemeral—but uniquely precious—value of an experience and a life cycle.

“I'm not getting any younger,” said Deafbeef. “My children are growing up. I'm getting old too. And that's the thing—no dress rehearsal. Each time is its own time. ”

“And as long as you're holding on to these illusions—like, one day I'll be reunited with all my friends from high school, and we'll all meet—that's done,” he continued. “It won't happen anymore. I see some of them occasionally. But there was one day [in the past] That was the last time it happened,” he said.

Hashmarks' active participants, however, did not find the event overshadowed by a sense of tragic uncertainty. On the contrary, some find it a more liberating and enveloping experience than many other art fairs.

“The people who went were willing to travel so far to be part of art history,” said Emily Edelman, an artist who attended the event. Scene. “The distance traveled, the people, the climate, the landscape, the food and the adventure all make the collector experience the artist.”

Most of those moments, like the chained hashmark sculptures themselves, Deafbeef and his audience choose to keep secret. Their value, the artist values ​​deeply—especially when considered in the context of life's ultimate one-way process.

“I like to think a lot about mortality and the brevity and fragility of things,” Deafbeef said.

As for the Diffiff steel plate made to hold the sculptures, it will remain on the glacier indefinitely as long as nature keeps it there. Or until the gaucho finds him.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.