After nearly two years of research, design, and experimentation, I’ve released the first generation of Primitives (PRIM), a bespoke visual language on the Ethereum blockchain. This marks a significant milestone in my artistic journey, establishing a framework that serves as both the foundation of my practice and a living language for a lifetime of creative exploration.

This project led me to develop an emotional vocabulary of 18 distinct color palettes representing 100 emotions, each defined by 11 unique attribute including chaos, harmony, intensity, and directionality.

The true depth of Primitives will emerge over time, not through a grand gestural announcement but through the natural evolution of my work. So let this post serve simply as an introduction to the next phase of my life as an artist. As my art catalog grows, the connections between Primitives and my creations will become more apparent and reinforce their role as the essential building blocks of my practice.

This release is deeply personal. It represents years of research and design, and combines everything I’ve learned over the last five years in the Web3/NFT space. At the same time, it is just the beginning and the first step in a lifelong pursuit to understand and express my internal emotional landscape as an artist.

Moving forward, I plan to use this emotional vocabulary as a palette for exploring ephemera and the tensions between permanence and transience, further expanding my practice through the lens of memory, impermanence, and the emotional weight of life's fleeting moments.

For those interested, you can explore each Primitive and their metadata on OpenSea for now.

Recently, I found myself revisiting familiar territory: interacting directly with a platform’s smart contract to subvert its limitations and create something uniquely my own.

My latest artwork on Rodeo, transforming older works into 50/50 tickets, echoes themes I first explored in 2021 with SuperRare’s V1 contract. Back then, locked out of their ecosystem, I minted “ghost tokens” as a statement on censorship and control. In that case, the platform removed my access entirely, but I found a loophole in the contract to assert my creative agency.

While Rodeo hasn’t banned me, it presents a subtler form of control: allowing artists to change metadata via its mutable contracts but now seemingly refusing to refresh the metadata within the platform’s interface. This decision undermines the artist’s ability to shape their work and creates a tension between what’s technically possible and what’s publicly visible.

Both works share a common thread: using the tools and constraints of the platform itself as a medium to critique and expand its boundaries. If the Ghost Tokens were an act of rebellion, the 50/50 tickets are a playful commentary on ephemerality, participation, and the fragile promise of immutability.

Rodeo isn’t about permanence. It’s a platform for fleeting moments—a rotating display with ephemeral outputs. It's Instagram meets collectibles, where art feels less like timeless gallery work and more like postcards, stickers, key chains, matchbooks, or tickets: things we collect in passing that often end up in a junk drawer.

This inspired my latest work, where I recontextualized my older works on Rodeo by updating their metadata.

By using the tokenURI function and manipulating the setMintEndtime function I was able to mint older pieces that hadn’t yet been stored on-chain. This process introduced two kinds of tokens: those rare tokens collected within the platform’s original 24-hour window, now stamped with a "Keep This Coupon" stub, and those minted later, outside the platform’s flow, marked simply as "Ticket."

This experiment not only reshaped the works but also called attention to the fragility of the blockchain’s “promise of immutability.” Rodeo’s mutable contracts allowed me to highlight how art—thought to be locked and permanent—remains pliable when viewed through a technical lens.

These pieces critique and celebrate the ephemeral nature of platform-based art. Their 50/50 ticket designs mirror the randomness of secondary markets while exploring deeper questions about Web3: value—how does the 50/50 fee split between artist and platform reflect the tension in shared control over artistic value? control—who defines an artwork’s final form; ownership—how do collectors reconcile mutable works with the idea of possession; and permanence—how do mutable systems challenge blockchain’s core narratives?

This wasn’t just experimentation; it was play. Rodeo became a collaborator in a performance that questioned how art, technology, and trust interact. While my part of the performance is complete, the work remains ongoing—Rodeo holds the next move, deciding whether to refresh the metadata and acknowledge the transformation and my will as the artist.

Recently, I learned it was possible to interact directly with a Rodeo’s smart contract. Being the tinkerer I am, I couldn’t resist diving in. From past experience, I knew that the tokenURI function could allow me to modify the metadata tied to my uploaded content.

Naturally, I wanted to push boundaries and make the experience my own. In that effort, I succeeded. Before diving into the specifics—which I’ll share in another post—it’s worth noting: this isn’t my first rodeo (pun intended) with a platform’s contract.

Back in 2021, I minted two forbidden tokens directly through SuperRare’s V1 contract while banned from their app.

SuperRare banned me from their ecosystem in late 2020. This meant no more minting, no Discord support, no participation. By 2021, and still operating under the pseudonym Second Realm, I couldn’t capitalize on my earlier presence on the most prestigious NFT platform. Locked out and at a disadvantage during the bull run, I started to wonder: had their contract migration left a door open?

To my surprise, I was still whitelisted on the original V1 contract. SuperRare’s first contract supported whitelisting but lacked the ability to blacklist or remove addresses. That loophole was the exploit I was looking for.

Some might question the ethics of my next move. But as McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.”

Minting directly through the V1 contract—rather than the app tied to the V2 contract—wasn’t just a workaround; it was an act of rebellion. At a time when "trash artists" were being censored for not conforming to the tastes of influential whales, the mint itself became the art. Tokens #4435 and #4436 exist on-chain as evidence of that performance.

What does it all mean? These tokens occupy a strange liminal space, their IDs tied across two active SuperRare contracts. Yet, the ones I minted remain invisible in SuperRare’s app appearing only as tradable assets on third-party platforms. Ghost artifacts with a quiet nod to Second Realm in the footer. Subtle reminders of the tension and disruption of that era.