A group of artists and developers from the United States have grouped their skills to create digital assets as an art form. The designer Mark Willis and the developers Sam Weinrott and Eric Manganaro have created Texel, a world of digital tulips developed from the Blockchain.
Texel (named for a real island in the Netherlands) builds a virtual world alive around the world of digital tulips. These are generated through programming, genetically expressive, demonstrably unique and stored in chain blocks.
Each tulip is a beautiful piece of digital art. Texel promises to plant, grow, reproduce, and exchange through an online gaming experience, installation of digital art and a social experience.
Its creators met by chance in Rare Digital Art Festival, New York, during the month of January, where creators and supporters of rare digital art met to exchange ideas about the future medium.
The rare digital art is a movement to take Internet assets that previously have been able to copy infinitely an example of it: songs, memes, among others, which are subsequently converted into interchangeable Blockchain assets.
Willis remembers how people paid five figures for a digital CryptoKitty. And from there they asked themselves how they could play with that space. Inspired by unique encryption collections around the world such as CryptoKitties (which, in fact, was covered by Technical.ly Brooklyn) and CryptoPunks, and the community-based social experiment Place on Reddit, the team conceptualized its own project, amplifying the elements of art and interactive game.
Textel is configured as a grid. Users can select where they want to buy a plot and plant their bulbs. Because each bulb has unique DNA, users will not know what their tulips will be until they bloom.
When the time comes to pollinate, users can choose to grow back their plants with the same genetics, or raise them to create something completely new, and potentially desirable.
"The main wrinkle that we are adding to the space of the cryptography collection is the geographic element," says Weinrott.
For Willis, an artist, it's about understanding the value of art in the modern era and developing the definition of digital art and decentralized ownership.
Recognizing that the ownership of digital assets continues to be a novel concept for the masses, the team understands that there are barriers to investing in the intangible.
Although people need ETH to participate in Texel, the creators are not motivated by money. For Weinrott, the project is a study of social sciences, while for Willis, it is about understanding the value of art in the modern era and developing the definition of digital art and decentralized ownership.
Texel is expected to be launched in less than a year. While it arrives, the day interested people can register to receive updates and consult the demonstrations that have been prepared.