A project by ogFUKR Harvey Rayner
chatFUKR Secondary
chatFUKR is a playfully transgressive Ordinals collection at the intersection of PFP degen culture, contemporary fine art, and generative artistry. The collection both mocks and embraces degeneracy, taking an innovative fully generative approach to representing the memes and symbols of the contemporary crypto art movement and PFP collecting culture.
Generative Art PFP with Epic Variety
- A multi-year, 6942 piece PFP collection launched in batches
- Each new batch brings new traits, characters & evolving narratives
- Algorithmic traits and elements are rendered uniquely for every mint
Contemporary Art with Cultural Relevance
- Self-deprecating Art that celebrates human absurdity & diversity
- A visceral commentary on the evolving virtual society & its communities
- Both a mockery & love letter to Degen culture
Fully On-Chain Designed for Ordinals
- Unique Great Grandparent, Grandparent, Parent, Child provenance structure
- Algorithmic traits made available to others through the use of recursion
- JS+SVG, brings rich highres art and integrated functionality to Ordinals
Inscription Provenance Structure
The Parent Child protocol is unique to Ordinals and provides an elegant way to create an onchain hierarchical relationship between artworks. For chatFUKR the use of multiple parents provides indelible provenance and a convenient way to navigate between batches, especially as different batches may be dropped using varying drop dynamics.
All parents are created generatively and make use of recursion to reuse the algorithms used to create chatFUKR traits. Every time they are refreshed they will be slightly different. Both the batch and collection parents also include a perpetual Degen insult generator displayed in a auto scrolling marquee.
Great Grand Parent: Artist Seal
This generative work is based on a motif the artist has used to sign his work for over a decade. The art auto ages, starting as pristine white at the artists birth 49 years ago and continues to become increasingly worn and discolored with time. It will serve as an onchain signature for all Harvey Rayner's future Ordinals collections.
Recursion
Recursion is a simple Ordinals protocol that allows one inscription to use content from another inscription. Because chatFUKR is created from multiple algorithms, recursion provides a way for all future mint inscriptions to access the evolving chatFUKR codebase. This means the following:
- chatFUKR mint inscriptions are small and cheap to mint
- Future batches will be able to use traits from earlier batches without having to reinscribe the code
- Other future generative PFP projects will be able to use chatFUKR traits
This last point is particularly interesting. In years from now the inscriptions that have been referenced the most may be seen as culturally more important. This would be similar to how authority and status is given to white papers that are cited the most in the scientific community. Writing and documenting the chatFUKR traits in such a way to encourage recursive use is another way to potentially secure future provenance for the project.
The Troll
The chatFUKR character represents a troll that has evolved independently of man’s direct involvement in the interconnected web servers and blockchain nodes. Inspired by George Dyson's idea of AI evolving in the wilderness of the global digital ecosystem, hiding from human attention for the sake of its own preservation. The second fun idea is that this troll feeds off the constant torrent of human degenerate discourse and spews it back into the Web3 message channels for its own entertainment. The trolling of course also satisfies its thirst for power over its domain and paradoxically feeds its need for connection, not unlike human trolls.
The Scream
The scream of the chatFUKR is a birth roar, a representation of its first breath as this AI comes online. This scream is also representative of the particular flavor of existential angst we are all familiar with from spending too much time immersed in our cyber worlds. Edvard Munch’s The Scream was created at the dawn of the industrial revolution in 1893 - chatFUKR’s scream heralds the dawn of the crypto revolution.
Why dropping in batches?
The full chatFUKR collection (6942.0 supply) will be dropped in batches of varying sizes over the course of one year+ for the following reasons:
- Every trait in chatFUKR is a new algorithm and so there is a ton of work to create the epic variety desired for the final collection.
- Community and project can grow simultaneously.
- Community can help determine what new traits are added and what stories are told that reflect the rapidly changing Web3 ecosystem.
- Each batch will have a different theme that may be related to a part of the world or community.
- IRL events and shows in different locations around the world can be used to celebrate and promote new batches helping to create an international community
fukrTYPEs and persistent traits
furkrTYPEs are batch specific and will help define the theme for each batch. Indicated by the ‘Type’ trait they are collections of traits and unique features that create distinctive characters. In batch 1 there are 8 rare and 2 common fukrTYPEs.
All other traits are called persistent traits and these will reappear in future batches. However each new batch will introduce new persistent traits to the trait pool so the probability of each persistent trait appearing again will decrease with each new batch.
Collection Supply Allocation
Held supply will never be dumped in one sale, but sold gradually over the duration of the project and most likely after all the batches have been minted. If we don’t believe in the long term value prop of the project then we can’t expect anyone else to.
The ponzi scheme, get-rich-quick, money grab image of NFTs outside Web 3, let’s be honest, is based in some reality. Art Blocks did set a precedent that helped to counter this view in the gen art world by creating a culture of charitable giving by artists, at a time when artists were making, let’s be honest again, too much money. With all the new approaches we are taking with chatFUKR there seems to be an opportunity to make charitable giving one of the pillars of the chatFUKR culture. It seems if this was common practice then the optics of NFT projects outside of Web3 could be greatly improved bringing more outside interest and respect for the space.
The artist is holding supply as a way to keep mint prices accessible. Batch 1 is set to be 0.0016969 BTC (for the culture), around $100. Making obscene profits from primary sales is not a sustainable way to build the type of community we want for chatFUKRs. By holding supply the artist gets rewarded if the community gets rewarded and if there is movement in the floor price the artist rides the wave with the community.
Throwing IRL events for the community can be costly but it's an important part of our vision for the project. Holding supply for community events and or projects is a way to facilitate fun and experimentation that will only strengthen the community and add value to the project.
It's always good to keep some mints for giveaways and to reward people whose help has been invaluable to the project.
Harvey Rayner (born 1st January 1975) is an English artist and creative coder with over 25 years of digital and generative art practice.
He attended The City and Guilds of London Art School and has had a diverse creative career working as a designer, inventor, programmer, and business owner while maintaining a dedicated daily art practice. His large and varied body of work reveals an evolution in formalized geometric approaches to art making.
In early 2022 Rayner discovered Art Blocks and immediately recognized a home for his own work in this new digitally native art genre. Rayner has used his creative momentum and experience to drop eight major series in the last two years. His second NFT collection Fontana gained curated status on ArtBlocks and a rapturous reception amongst collectors with the floor price climbing over 20x in the first two months. Since then Rayner has sold works at both Sotheby's and Christies, and released Velum with Bright Moments.
Rayner is dedicated to creating ambitious innovative projects that have generative artistry and community building at the heart. In 2023 Rayner released Quasi Dragon Studies with Verse which was a novel demonstration of 'composite generative art' where collectors took part in compositing art tiles to create new works. The dynamic also introduced the idea of Proof-of-work rarity where collectors invested time, energy and ETH to create hard-to-make composites. In the same year Rayner also created marfaMESH which was a demonstration of 'Event Driven' generative art, where live interaction data was collected from attendees at Art Blocks Marfa weekend 2023 and used to create personalized artworks that unfolded in real time chronicling their individual experience of the event. The project was put fully onchain and minted for free to all attendees as a thank you to the community that help launch Rayner's career.
Rayner lives in upstate New York with his wife and has two adult children. He is a keen rock climber and has maintained a daily meditation practice for over 25 years.
Harvey Rayner | Quasi Dragon Studies | London 2023
We have the conviction that Web3 art will not reach full maturity until we have equal numbers of brother and sister collectors, curators, commentators and artists in the space.
We have set up a sheFUKRs channel in the discord where we invite anyone, but especially women to help make chatFUKR a richer balance of both Yin and Yang nonsense. By actively seeking input from underrepresented perspectives, chatFUKR aims to create a richer, more balanced narrative that reflects the diverse realities of contemporary society.
Crypto Queenie is a ridiculous and unapologetic feminine stereotype which was created with help from the sheFUKR channel. Roughly 80% of the collection however is gender agnostic but some extreme edge cases are included with the magic of randomness and generative art blending the space in between.
We also plan to have a lgbtqFUKR and prideFUKR in future batches. Anyone with insight into that culture, perspective and reality please come to the discord and share your creativity and humor.
chatFUKR started out as a project about Degen culture. As the project evolves however its starting to feel more like a form of digital portraiture that reveals something more general about what it means to be a humanFUKR in an ever-evolving virtual world.
Somewhat ironically, I feel that by fully embracing PFP culture and making Art about this social phenomena I will make Art that’s potentially more interesting and credible in the eyes of the wider art world. I want to make art that cannot have been made in any other time, by any other artist and expresses something essential about its moment in history. There is already a precedent for contemporary artists like George Condo and Kaws making work from absurd cartoonesque motifs so this type of stylization is not the obstacle to non Web3 curatorial attention. The degen in jokes and symbolism might be, but its also a genuine commentary about a very real movement in society which has always been a universally appreciated function of the power of art.