fukrLORE

Conception

This project started with an idea to create something under a pseudonym. I produce a lot of work and figured having multiple outlets would enable me to try more experimental things without the risk of confusing the brand I was establishing in the generative art world. Once committed, my mind soon went back to a series of paintings I made when I was a teenager of these wild disembodied screaming heads. I always loved these paintings for their raw energy, but felt as a ‘grown-up’ artist there was no way for me to revisit a theme that was literally the product of a teenage imagination. The sense of anonymity however, gave me the freedom to explore this idea just for the joy of it without worrying if it would be viewed as juvenile. So I set about trying to create something with the same energy but with a fully generative approach. I had a vision of myself hitting the refresh button and seeing an endless stream of monsters generating before me. This was very exciting. I quickly fell in love with the method of layering multiple algorithmic elements needed to make something figurative. The figuration held all the disparate visual languages together and pushed me to explore dynamics I maybe wouldn’t have if just making a more homogeneous abstract work. The desire and ambition to marry a complex array of elements together in a single work is something that’s been in my artistic DNA all along. This approach has typically meant working in a certain direction for a number of years and then gathering everything I have learnt into a single culmination piece. chatFUKR feels like one of those culminating projects. In the end of course I built something in chatFUKR I am very proud of and I decided to put my name on the project. I also heard from friends that it has my artistic DNA all over it so collectors would know it was me anyway. I was a little apprehensive prior to the announcement that some of my ETH collectors would not like to see me making a PFP collection, especially on BTC. However I feel the work reveals my passion and love for the process and concept and in the end I got zero push back.

The idea of creating a PFP was not obvious from the beginning. Most of the core ideas actually unfolded in a more organic way as generally happens with my best work. Once I started to see the variety of outputs together with the emerging idea of making some kind of commentary on degen culture, the leap to going full-on PFP was the next natural step. Degeneracy is a slippery slope. Having said this, I’d already got a little taste of degeneracy with my project Quasi Dragon Studies which I dropped with Verse last year. In part the project embraces market behavior as a mechanism to create art.

QDS White Paper
QDS Composite Builder The art value prop side of PFPs still left me somewhat uninspired so the leap from: ‘PFPs are some other thing roughly adjacent to Art’ to ‘let’s make a full-on Art PFP’ still took a few weeks to become a clear goal!

The name chatFUKR came to me pretty quickly. To me the character I was developing looked like a troll, that had evolved in the wild of the interconnected digital ecosystem. I could imagine this virtual critter feeding off the torrent of human chat that flowed through its domain. Of course there is a reference to chatGPT in the name. LLMs are now an evolutionary step in the domain in which a wild AI troll could potentially evolve. Moreover, ‘chat’ is such a friendly innocuous word, I loved how it sounded next to such an aggressive, hostile word. It’s like the name captures the paradoxical absurdity I am aiming for with the project.