코인톡

Creep Kids is a collection that shows a group of adorable and strange children, in many cases being mistreated. The pieces that show them being trampled by Kiss boots, peed on, pointed at with a gun, having their brains eaten as if it were ice cream, being breathed on with morning breath, or a bully flicking a red booger at them as a result of taking adulterated cocaine, are all hilarious situations inspired by completely difficult situations experienced by people who have a different way of thinking, dress differently, and act differently, which leads them to be judged by other more integrated children or adults as creeps. The idea of a creep as the weirdo comes from the Radiohead song, but it is inspired by the difficult childhood had by many of the people who today have left a mark on culture, science, and technology. Like Axl Rose's, Kurt Cobain, Marshall Mathers, Eminem, Elon Musk, Nikola Tesla, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, and more. Because they had a shy or withdrawn personality, they were harassed: hence the definition of the collection “Creep. Noun. Slang. Number one. An obnoxious, disturbingly eccentric, deviant, or painfully introverted person. Misfit, weirdo. Rarely speaks. Barely explains.“ Although the first definition was much more violent, but upon realizing that I couldn't even read it to my fam, I discarded it, but it went like this: “Creep Definition: Slang. an obnoxious, disturbingly eccentric, deviant, or painfully introverted person. Misfit, weirdo. An orphaned, pissed-on, countercultural collection of the crypto non-culture, birthed through a botched illegal abortion on a piece of cardboard with a knitting needle. Instead of being skewered, the creeps used it to slide down like the Ghostbusters’ fire pole, emerging from the encoded vagina to crash into the stock market—where, just like you, they were also scammed.”

Going back to the mistreated geniuses, this made me imagine them as children, as creep kids being bullied by the world, tiny little people with a potential to change the planet being mistreated by an insensitive and materialistic environment, by bullies who defend normality.

In January two thousand twenty-four, a year after Ordinals came out, the digital art ecosystem on BTC was at its peak. Collections like Bitcoin Puppets were showing a new trend that seemed like it was going to last forever and surpass Ethereum. I had started on Ethereum in two thousand twenty-one, with no success at all, and later I migrated to the Tezos network, where the majority of the dedicated artists I admired were. I had started by creating a collection of Wall Street heads and especially digital experiments with heads, mixing cinematic techniques, expanded polyurethane sculpture, three D, and pixel art, which sold but weren't enough to even feed me, and I thought the opportunity to make my work known was very simple: I just had to drop something into the Ordinal ecosystem; the Bitcoiners were very excited, and they paid anything for anything. But inscribing a piece on BTC wasn't that easy. When I set out to make a collection, I realized that uploading images of twelve hundred by twelve hundred pixels was extremely expensive. I could only inscribe using Unisat at thirty-six pieces per batch, which cost me approximately four thousand eight hundred dollars. So a collection of ten thousand JPGs would cost me approximately forty-eight million dollars. Something I didn't have.

Later I discovered that I could have done it with WEBP files, but at that time I didn't know. And the option then was to create the smallest collection possible, in miniature, to reduce costs by ten thousand percent, and that is how I started studying how to make the pieces as small as possible. Well, the thing is that while other collections thought they were very clever for making pieces of one hundred twenty-eight by one hundred twenty-eight pixels, for me that size, even though it was small, was still an impossible cost to face. The first thing I thought of doing was single-pixel pieces, a single color, something similar to the concept Yves Klein used with his ultramarine blue paintings; it was a very abstract idea and occupied two bytes per piece, almost nothing, and cost me twenty cents per image. But I was a figurative artist, who had come from making heads with multiple processes, and making a collection out of a single pixel just didn't sit right within my far-from-homogeneous career, and besides, it seemed like a scam to me; I wasn't going to have the strength to defend that.

I then absolutely had to make figurative images with a narrative behind them, the way I like to do things, and I started drawing some pixel art sketches in a grid notebook since it was what took up the least space. I created some things, and I realized that generating an idea with just a few squares was a work of ingenuity, not easy at all, and it was going to take me a lot of time. But moving pixels, looking for colors, was a very manageable task and much less exhausting than sculpture and film. I was fascinated by that comfort. I then began to study everything that existed up to that moment in that miniature format, and I discovered that Steve Jobs had already faced this problem in nineteen eighty when he came up with the brilliant idea of creating a graphical interface for his brand-new Macintosh. Since the Macintosh had very little RAM memory, the design had to be as lightweight as possible so it wouldn't collapse. Thus, under his direction, Susan Kare, the Mac designer, began to illustrate on paper what would become the most memorable icons of the Mac, and by combining black and white squares she was able to build miniature images that were very, very expressive and clean.

These images blew my mind; not only were they very beautiful to look at, but they also referenced many elements of traditional comics and typography design as a whole. Something I had studied a lot when I started my career as a graphic designer, only to later understand everything an art director had to do in an advertising agency and switch over to copywriting. So my world came down to that, figuring it out, having the ingenuity to design small pieces, backgrounds, a figure, and traits that could be used with those base figures, and through generative code mix it all together and create a dwarf collection to be able to inscribe on BTC. I discovered that this whole set could be done in sixteen by sixteen pixels and take up less than four hundred bytes per piece, which ended up costing me the same as inscribing one pixel. The thing is that those twenty cents turned into two thousand dollars to inscribe ten thousand images; I noticed that after spending months drawing the collection, I think it took me six months, maybe I'm lying, it was a very long time, that's for sure. But I couldn't even afford the two thousand dollars to inscribe the final pieces that had cost me so much effort. And that is how I dedicated myself to doing other artistic projects and this was suspended in time for a long time.

After months, I looked at the collection again, expanded it to twelve hundred by twelve hundred, and tried to do a launch on the Base network, but I was very mentally ill at that time; I had chronic insomnia from another project and from huge losses I was suffering, just like everyone else, with cryptocurrencies, and I couldn't do it. And when I recovered financially and health-wise, I started running daily to improve this collection and I realized that the concept is infinite; returning to the collection was like the holy cure. I noticed that I could expand its universe if I used a larger format and added textures to it, and that I had a ton of other ideas I could add, but that the best way was, instead of putting everything out from the beginning, to launch the collection and have the collection mutate—without adding supply, but by changing the metadata so that some pieces point to another image. And this would allow me to keep adding content to the collection and make it weirder and weirder. The idea fascinated me, and after a billion hours of work I considered that I had managed to create the best pixel art collection I had ever seen, and the best part was that I could keep improving it. And I could also make some pieces have no textures and make them as clean as possible. That's where the idea for the CRTs came from, which exaggeratedly imitate the color of old monitors.

But how did the traits for all this come about? Speaking of old drawing technologies, although the idea came from seeing the first Mac designs and familiarizing myself with the MacPaint program—the very first one, in black and white, which I started using to test the system, and that's where the category with white backgrounds and illustrations made in MacPaint came from—this thing about old technologies for creating was introduced into my life by the artist Hasdrubal Waffle, whom I admire and miss a lot, and who is one of the only authentic elders of the whole ecosystem, just like me, I'd say. Waffle had seen the collection at the beginning and told me it was very good; this encouraged me a lot, since I used to listen a lot to what he told me and looked at his work with profound admiration. That's where experimenting with MacPaint came from, since his early works show a bit of MacPaint. And that later mutated into some of the one of one pieces that are made with MacPaint and other programs.

This conversation is just this, it's what I remember right now; maybe there are a ton of things left to tell, but I hope it is of some use to you, and thank you very much for your time, for your support, and for listening to me and studying this collection.