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.
