piñata3

This experimental project spans a physical installations (Marfa 2024) and a generative series on Art Blocks Studio. The entire piñata3 experience is highly interactive: the discounted allowlist was distributed through a game of piñata at the Marfa Art Blocks gallery and the generative collection supported collector curation of outputs (more details below).

Explore or purchase artworks from the digital collection on Art Blocks or OpenSea.

Marfa 2024: From Backyard to Blockchain

What's in the piñata?

I decided to bring a piñata to Art Blocks weekend this year (2024). I wanted to put together a special and memorable experience for all the people making the long pilgrimage to the quirky and artsy town of Marfa.

While piñatas are normally filled with candy or fruits, this was a web3 piñata… filled with strange poems that unlocked access to digital wallets on Ethereum. Using these wallets got you on the discounted allowlist for my generative art project, piñata3. The whole experience was a mariachi-fueled dance between the digital and the physical: physical piñata → human-sourced randomness → secret paper poems → secret digital wallets → PRNG-sourced randomness → digital piñata.

Shown below: photos of the crowd playing the game (photos by Vincent Roazzi Jr.), a sample poem from inside the piñata, and a post-destruction photo of people trying to figure out what they just got looped into.

Generative Collection

This project is very much about the materiality of digital art, bridging between physical and digital across multiple dimensions. The artwork for the generative collection, piñata3, is a new experiment in blending together my algorithmically constructed forms and patterns with a new set of ink drawings I made by hand for this project. The drawings are stored on Arweave and loaded dynamically by my script during runtime. Scan through the gallery below to see the drawings included in this project!

The color palettes in this project are all named after celebratory occasions (birthdays, graduations, retirement, etc.). I really wanted to capture the joy, the spontaneity, and the festivity of people gathering together for a good time, much like we did in Marfa. A few sample (out-of-bound) artworks from the system are shown below. The final collection will be capped at a maximum of 300 artworks.

Collector Curation

For this generative series, I gave collectors the option to curate their own mints, i.e., hunt for an output from the generative system that they want to use for their mint. This was totally optional - many people prefer the traditional long-form generative art experience, getting a completely random output at the time of mint.

I did a one time update of the on-chain project script a few weeks after public launch, encoding any override token hashes provided by collectors (deadline was Dec 23, 2024). With this update, 32% of the project’s mints were updated with overrides supplied by collectors.

Note: piñata3 is still open for minting, the option to curate your own mint is just no longer available.

Future Print Series

In early 2025 I’ll be making prints available for purchase to collectors of the generative collection. Subscribe to my newsletter if you want to keep up to date on those developments!