Some of the largest token sales on SuperRare have been Robbie Barrat’s AI nudes and landscapes. There are only 36 tokens minted by videodrome that are visible on SuperRare and most of them are unavailable, but of the ones that do have a list price, they are all listed over $1,000,000. One of them is listed over $11,000,000.
What are “Lost Robbie Barrats?”
Basically Christie’s gave away 300 Robbie Barrat NFTs in 2018 and no one cared. Only 12 out of the 300 were claimed, and all the rest of them were thought to be lost to the annals of digital art history, and most are.
SuperRare was invited to add to the gift bags of the 300+ attendees, and wanting to do something cool and unique decided to partner with Jason Bailey and enlist Robbie Barrat, the first artist to ever tokenize on SuperRare, to create an artwork with 300 individual frames that could each be tokenized and given away to the attendees.
There was a SuperRare article that covered this, but the link to it is broken. You can see the SuperRare article covering this on archive.org for now, and I will update this article with the link to it on SuperRare when it’s recovered on their website.
(UPDATE: here is the direct link to SuperRare’s story on the Lost Robbies)
Are they just valuable because they were lost?
No, collectors have consistently paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Robbie Barrat tokens because they are the first tokenized representations of what AI thinks we look like. Blockchain technology has changed the way technical people view accountability, and with a “Don’t trust, verify” mindset, these are truly the first AI nudes and landscape images that humanity can provably say were minted on a certain date in a decentralized manner.
You can actually see all the code that was used to generate these images right on Robbie Barrat’s Github page under a modified BSD License. These images were all created with code that has been available to audit publicly for many years. The data used to create these masterpieces was trained on royalty free and publicly available images as well.
Not only do we know for sure when these were minted due to blockchain tech, we know for sure how they were created through Robbie’s code. In terms of verifiability in generated art, this sets the tone for all trustless creation that came after it. These Robbie Barrat tokens are truly historic.
AI Generated Nude Portrait #7 Frame #101
If some no name collector listed just anything at $11 million dollars it should be ignored, but when TokenAngels, one of the most noted collectors in the space who consistently makes smart moves and big money lists a Robbie Barrat at $11 million dollars, it makes sense to pay attention.
AI Generated Nude Portrait #5
Add big mover westcoastbill to the list of collectors who value their Robbie Barrat tokens well over a million dollars. This token which is the 65th SuperRare token to exist, is for sale currently at 1888 Ether (around $4,000,000) and changed hands at over $100,000 before the latest NFT hype cycle began. At the time of this sale it was the highest priced token to ever sell on SuperRare, and when it changes hands again it will likely take that title back.
Does this mean that collectors will value the “Lost Robbies” more than other Robbie Barrat tokens?
These are the most scarce, valuable, and fairly distributed digital assets that the world has ever seen. CryptoPunks were also distributed in a free manner, but all 10,000 of them were all gobbled up within hours. These Lost Robbies which are worth millions today, were offered freely and discarded hastily.
In our corner of the crypto world, this is similar to the guy who threw out a hard drive with Bitcoin worth a fortune, but hits even harder because this is priceless and historic art which was carelessly disregarded by hundreds of people, and now worth millions.
Is this irony, the universe’s way of scorning digital art non-believers, or a collector opportunity of a lifetime? Maybe it’s all three.