Technology as a tool to create art is taken to the next level through Martin Lukas Ostachowski’s tokens. Martin’s masterpieces are stunning but few and technically complex. His earliest sets use simple abstract shapes and colors juxtaposed with ideas of budding blockchain technology. His newest sets involve artworks featuring clouds with long and tedious creation processes. Technology not only inspires Martin, but it spearheads his processes by actually generating the media for he uses for his rare tokens.
The Opportunity For Collectors
Martin’s technicals as a crypto artist make him stand out from the crowd. He’s been in the game since early 2018 when very few tokens were being created, and crypto art had around 1% of the sales volume that it does now. It’s hard to stress how few artists were doing this in early 2018, and this small handful makes up the original Ethereum crypto artists whose work will likely see mass appreciation in the future after the hype dies down.
There are more tokens created daily at the time of this article’s publication than the entirety of tokens created in all of 2018. Collectors have yet to start appreciating the rarity of 2018 tokens and the works of artists who started creating around that time. In a space dominated by the rarity narrative, it’s only a matter of time before collectors start focusing more on artists like Martin.
Martin’s minting cadence is better than any other early crypto artist. His first token was minted on July 9th, 2018 on SuperRare, and since then he’s only created 33 more tokens on SuperRare in the 1000 days between that time and now. His output in three years is less than many artist’s output in three months.
While it’s clear that Martin is conscious of the perceived rarity of his works, he credits his stellar minting cadence to his long and tedious processes involved in creating each tokens.
Here’s a short video on the process he used to create his woven series:
A diverse list of strong handed collectors is a great indicator for the future value of an artist’s works. The list of token holders who own Martin’s work is a veritable who’s who of the most noted collectors in the space including TokenAngels, Momuscollection, Moderats, MoCA (Museum of Crypto Art), Petstick, Pabloo, Hex6c, Artnome, Rudy, Mattia Cuttini and more.
Seed Phrase Visualization
Fascinated by the idea that electronic data can be used to generate shapes and colors, Martin decided to bring seed phrases to the public’s attention by visualizing the list of 2,048 seed phrase words. The highly complex and technical process to create these tokens is outlined on his blog, along with an explanation of how he came up with the idea and a primer on what a seed phrase actually is.
Did you know that Seed phrase words are between 3 and 8 characters long (average 5.4) and across the full list, their total phonetic distribution consists of 38% vowels, 3% semivowels and 59% consonants? Neither did I. Martin stands out as the most technical old school crypto artist in the game.
Cloud Hash
On his blog, Martin deconstructs the cloud hash algorithm used to make these visually breathtaking and technologically complex tokens. These pieces focus on the SHA-256 Bitcoin algorithm and use it to render this stunning imagery. SHA-256 was created by the NSA and it makes distinctive fingerprints of files and texts thru mathematical means.
Martin worked together with Colorado-based audio engineers Alex Scott and Callum Bair to make unique audio experiences for each piece in the series. As seen on the animation, the center image rotates in intervals of 70 degrees, therefore allowing the hash algorithm to produce diverse output hashes and reiterations.
#79 Plus (Imaginary Diagrams)
Manual art joins forces with technology in Martin’s #79 Plus (Imaginary Diagrams) token. The artist’s acrylic works on paper were combined with understated animated lines dashing here and there in neat routes to complete an environment of abstract and symmetrical figures, while still giving us that dose of technology that we’ve come to expect from Martin’s tokens.
#Bufficorn … to the Moon
This animated token pictures a running buffalo rendered in mesmerizing strokes of continuous and cross-hatched lines. The cherry on top (of the moon) is a unicorn horn that shifts colors from magenta to a neon green. This is work is owned by one of the most noted collectors in the space, Momuscollection, who appreciates it so much they’ve even made it their profile image on SuperRare.
Touching Clouds
Touching Clouds is a video collage study which touches on the formation of a captivating cloudscape when a blunt figure cuts through that layer of amorphous, gaseous fluff. It is also a personal piece that liberates Martin’s feelings of anticipation to work with a number of archived items pre COVID-19. The collage piece is a combination of passenger flight videos and separate animated video frames which were Python-processed, playing along to an ambient soundtrack.
Martin did an interview with Chiara Braidotti, of Museum of Contemporary Digital Art which focused on his tedious creation processes and how he comes up with the ideas for his technologically complex art. He practices art every day regardless of what’s going on in his life and it all starts with sketch and concept books that he uses to develop new ideas for artworks and algorithms in a structured process.
Keep an eye on Martin’s body of work by following his Twitter account and his SuperRare profile.