A manifest in chapters, unique in each edition.
Every Manifest will change, but there are already some things to consider:
Is the Manifestation with the one who minted?
Is the Manifestation alone?
Every Manifestation has its day.
A Manifest will look different in other hands.
Only the first revolution has unlocked..
Some future revolututions will be dependant on interaction with the chain or the artwork during presentations.
The minting of new manifests will be limited during active presentations of the artwork the initial year, in the period of this first year a total of 256 Manifestations will be available for minting during exhibition periods.
The first minting period will end February 18 midnight PST.
At the end of the initial year a 11.similar amount of Manifests will be released for latecomers, in batches of 32, locked into a single revolutionary state, double going marketrate.
Only those initial minters, who can make all the revolutions will share the final Manifest, the true artwork.
To buy (mint) the work you will need to have the Metamask plugin installed in your browser, and have Ethereum in your wallet.
Please refer to Metamask's FAQ for instructions.
When you click the mint button, and confirm in Metamask, you will start the process of minting your NFT. When this is complete your manifestation will be generated and rendered as an SVG and will be visible in your wallet address in https://opensea.io/.
The price of a manifestation is at the initial drop is 0.29 ETH (exchange fees a.k.a gas not included), and 256 will be minted (of which 10 will be artist proofs). After a year, and when the manifestations have had a chance to reach a new revolutionary state another total of 256 new tokens CAN be made available for 150% of the going OpenSea price, related to new exhibitions. These new Manifests will be locked in groups of 32 to a single revolutionary state.
The word "aura" is a reference to the concept referring to the unique aesthetic authority of a work of art, as defined by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Where the idea of registering a mechanically reproducible work using decentralised ledger technology would be replacing the sense of 'aura' and making it a commodity.
While artworks have been seen as assets for a long time, Non Fungeable Tokens (NFT) make it possible for the artist working with digital more ephemeral media to make works more market ready.
I strongly believe all information should be free, and a thorough and equally accessible distribution is key to cultural reflection, critique and change. I see the commoditisation of artworks as a potential support structure, and as a method of distribution. It not only allows the possibility of supporting a practice, it also increases the interest in safekeeping the work. The aura.lol works can be seen by anyone as soon as they are minted, and the collective experience of the collectors is an unprecedented involvement with an artistic art practice.
About 8 years ago I had first experience with registering artworks (Jennifer in Paradise series and other works), with an MD5 hash.
This is a system i would like platforms to use in combination with IPFS (interplanetary file system, try it on the awesome dreamlink.cloud) for external files registered on-chain for NFTs..
These early works were registered in the bitcoin blockchain with ascribe.io (hi Trent & Masha!) in 2014 and inspired me to keep thinking about the possibilities of mixing artistic expression and critique in code with transactions in custom protocols.
Basically program the artwork to respond and interact in relationship to automated or triggered transactions.
The same year i worked on a treasure hunt exhibition, making the actual cryptographic puzzle for the Treasure of Lima.
Mixed with my early fascination for media critique, I have now made https://aura.lol/
Launched during a steep decline in cryptocurrency prices the work is dynamic, and could change at any time.
Essentially a trust exercise, in which the collected artwork will improve over time.
This is a process in continuous development, coinciding with exhibitions, world events and other external factors.
Sometimes the influence of certain collectors will influence the works of other works, in other wallets.
Most importantly, a physical interaction (an authentication on site) with the work, in future exhibited form will be required to reach the final stages of the work. To keep track of these changes please join the project on discord or twitter.
Technically: there are several triggers in and outside of the contract that will cause it to be rendered differently during the year. Certain triggers can be influenced, and others like timestamps, can not.
My name is Constant Dullaart (really), and I have created a Facebook army before the 2016 US presidential elections, found and redistributed the first ever photoshopped photograph, was called 'the Lenin of social media', wrote a manifest about art in time of surveillance, made a custom dataset for European culture, and a neural network photo filter to make images boring, a self typing keyboard, have bots write poetry in instagram comments, started a new social medium based around online exhibitions. And I am DVD guy
Coding by cxkoda, with thanks to Ties van Asseldonk, Tereza Havlíková at StudioDull, and most of all Mirthe Berentsen.