When NFTs first took off, it was Beeple’s digital art, CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club PFPs that dominated the headlines and top sales — but one individual bucked the trend in a unique way, garnering attention with generative audiovisual art using just a C compiler.
That individual was 0xDEAFBEEF, an artist and engineer based in Toronto, Canada who’s spent over 20 years experimenting with art, technology, music, generative art, computer animation, blacksmithing and sound recording.
Using low-level computer code and a minimal toolset to craft raw information into audiovisual artworks has proven more popular than you might expect. A collection of six of 0xDEAFBEEF’s sold for $6.8 million in August 2021, and two weeks ago, “Series 1: Angular – Token 134” fetched $241,300 at Sotheby’s. It was auctioned during part 1 of “Grails,” a collection of highly desirable NFTs originally owned by the now-insolvent 3AC (Three Arrows Capital).
Trained on classic piano as a kid and somewhat of a mad scientist when it came to audio equipment, discovering a programmable blockchain in Ethereum was a revelation.
“I’d describe myself as a tinkerer, jumping around between many fields, overlapping art and technology. It just happened that the project that I commenced before I knew anything about NFTs,…
