Collecting the artist: 0xDEAFBEEF
In the open waters of crypto art, 0xDEAFBEEF (”Deafbeef”) is an island.
The Canadian-born generative artist has become a pioneering figure amongst contemporary artists in embodying the spirit of crypto-native culture through his generative audiovisual art. This distinction comes not just from his artistic output, but also from his persona, creative approach, and comprehensive use of the blockchain medium.
Since releasing his first series in 2021, Deafbeef has become one of the most respected crypto-native artists. To date, he’s released eight series of core works across two volumes. His eponymous debut series “DEAFBEEF” (also referred to as “Volume 1”) includes six series and is considered his premier collection. His core works are held tightly by a small group of high conviction collectors that includes hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard, Figma founder Dylan Field, AOTM founder VincentVanDough, the NFT DAO Fingerprints, and our Curated collection. His new work is being released on “DEAFBEEF2”, which is Volume 2 of his primary collection, and currently features two series.
Due to very low supply and a terminal collector base, acquiring a Deafbeef full set — one of each series from Volume 1 — is one of the most difficult things to do as a digital art collector. His works have been auctioned at Sotheby’s and Phillips, and his most recent series “Noumenon” has entered into the permanent collection of LACMA.
In our first editorial of “Collecting the Artist”, we dive into what makes Deafbeef stand alone in the world of digital art and explore each series within his Volume 1 collection.
To fully appreciate Deafbeef is to understand the multifaceted nature of his artistry and explore his connection to crypto-native culture through various lenses: his personal background, art creation process, “full stack” use of the blockchain, thematic exploration of crypto-native topics, and a distinct retro digital aesthetic.
Deafbeef is a multidisciplinary artist and engineer. A classically trained musician with an education in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto, he has spent his life working within the overlap of music, visual art, and technology. His wide ranging career includes doing computer graphics academic research, operating a recording studio, and working as an artisan blacksmith to create sculptures and jewelry.
His early exposure to art and computers came through ASCII terminal games in the 1980s, including Rogue and Nethack. These games featured procedurally generated maps and dungeons, which he cites as his first experience with generative art. Playing computer games motivated him to learn programming, and early computers would later have a strong influence on his art.
Even his artist name is a nod to early computer programming. 0xDEAFBEEF is hex speak, words that are formed with letters available in hexadecimal digits used in programming. It makes an audio pun, while playing on an old computer memory term 0xDEADBEEF.
Throughout his professional and artistic careers, there’s a common theme: a maniacal focus on mastering the fundamental principles of his craft. As a recording studio operator, he studied electrical engineering to better maintain the equipment. As a blacksmith, he forges by hand rather than with casting or CNC machinery. And as a digital artist, he avoids open source libraries and relies on what he can create from scratch.
In all aspects of his work, Deafbeef is unwavering in his dedication to perfecting the fundamental elements of his craft and, in doing so, making something that is uniquely his.
As an artist, Deafbeef shows a deep commitment to craftsmanship through focusing on low-level coding, reducing dependencies, and creating art from the ground up. This approach not only highlights his technical prowess, but also resonates with the crypto-native ethos of independence and a deliberate move away from centralization.
Inspired by the resurgent culture of modular synthesizers, a field where creators commonly rely on expensive “blackbox” audio gear, Deafbeef chose to take a different approach. He crafted everything digitally from scratch using low level code — not just as a test of his skill, but also in service of forging distinctive synth sounds that set his work apart.
Understanding that Deafbeef crafted every sound, visual, and detail from raw code adds a deep layer of appreciation to the beauty and range found in his collections, which makes it all the more remarkable. From the monophonic sounds of Synth Poems and the chaotic rhythms of Transmission, to the melancholic strings of Entropy and the ethereal undulation of Advection, all were created by applying synth theory and coding mathematical sequences to generate audio art.
Furthermore, Deafbeef constructed his core collection as an exploration of permanence, an often touted first class feature of NFTs. When he was getting started, most NFTs stored media either directly on centralized servers or in decentralized storage solutions such as IPFS or Arweave. Even platforms that stored model code and parameters on-chain, such as Art Blocks, had to rely on modern browser code for rendering files and open source libraries.
As the Ethereum blockchain is already dependent on C compilers, it was a way to minimize dependencies even further. Below, we share an overview of how to directly render Deafbeef’s work from on-chain data.
Deafbeef’s dedication to his craft extends beyond his own art. In April 2021, CryptoPunks were brought on-chain, in no small part due to Deafbeef, who had created a proof-of-concept contract that proved it was possible. Today, the SVGs and attributes of all 10,000 CryptoPunks are on-chain, forever part of the permanent record on the Ethereum blockchain.
In his own words, Deafbeef was late to Ethereum. While he had a complete mining rig setup to mint Litecoin in 2013, he “shelved it, had kids, and slept on crypto” for the following eight years. By the time he was introduced to Ethereum in 2021, he was blown away by the concept of a programmable blockchain.
It was ultimately the Art Blocks ecosystem that brought him fully into the world of NFTs. Learning that there was a platform and an active digital community around generative art was a major turning point. While Deafbeef became an active collector and community member in Art Blocks, the waitlist to be an artist on the platform along with incompatibility with C code generative art prevented him from releasing work on the platform. He would go on to release his works independently, a decision that ultimately added to the uniqueness of his artist persona.
As he does in all aspects of his work, he took on mastering the fundamentals of the blockchain. He learned Solidity and wrote his own smart contract for his “DEAFBEEF” collection. He even created his own website from scratch for viewing, minting, and interacting with his artwork. Every aspect of Deafbeef’s artwork is through code that Deafbeef himself wrote. There are very few generative artists with this level of mastery, control, and thoughtfulness over their work.
Beyond his work being tokenized on his own smart contract, Deafbeef’s art often engages core primitives of the blockchain. He routinely makes important aspects of crypto-native culture part of his thematic exploration: decentralization, permanence, and time.
Decentralization: Many of his core series in “DEAFBEEF” involve collaborative interactions from collectors that change the on-chain art. The decentralized collaboration allows multiple participants, usually collectors and occasionally spectators, to engage with and contribute to the art.
For example, Glitchbox (Vol. 1, Series 4) and Advection (Vol. 1, Series 5) are both coded as programmable media that invites collectors to tweak parameters, curate outputs, and store those settings immutably on chain.
Permanence: Beyond the challenge to maximize permanence in the technical construction of “DEAFBEEF”, Deafbeef also explores the topic of permanence directly in his art. In “Entropy” (Vol. 1, Series 3), the digital media artificially degrades in quality upon transfer from one owner to another.
Time: Deafbeef’s most recent series, Noumenon (Vol. 2, Series 1), takes advantage of the blockchain’s consensus layer and its timing mechanism to embed a dimension of time directly into the art.
Noumenon is an interactive series that allows participants to take on-chain observations, which results in the minting of those observations in the Chronophotographs collection. For each new observation, the collector is required to wait double the previous waiting period, with the time mechanism governed by the blockchain’s timestamp.
It’s rare to find an artist who uses the blockchain to its full potential, who not only incorporates its properties and themes into his art, but also has technical mastery of the blockchain canvas to write his own smart contract.
In Deafbeef’s work, the visual art is there to complement the audio. While the core of his artwork is audio, Deafbeef was keenly aware of the importance of visuals in growing an audience and social sharing. As he mentioned in a 2021 interview on the Modern Finance podcast, “in social media and in NFTs, it’s pretty difficult [to do something] that’s sound only.”
Deafbeef’s aesthetic is true to his artistry — a minimalistic grayscale that brings in elements of early digital artifacts:
Each Deafbeef artwork is imbued with his signature visual style, making it instantly recognizable across all collections and uniquely Deafbeef in all aspects of the work.
“DEAFBEEF” (Volume 1) is viewed as Deafbeef’s premier collection and original smart contract. It’s compromised of 223 pieces across six series. Acquiring any pieces from the collection is often difficult given that so few are ever listed. Series 1, 2, 3, and 5 are especially difficult to collect since they’re each limited to only eight pieces.
To be a full set collector — i.e to collect a piece from every series — is one of the most difficult challenges in all of digital art collecting. Only eight sets are possible and four currently exist today. It took our Curated collection nearly two years to get there, through Sotheby’s and Phillips auctions as well as numerous private collector negotiations.
In Collecting The Algorithm: Autoglyphs, we shared just how difficult it is to do curation when collecting Autoglyphs due to the limited supply and price considerations. Deafbeef’s work is perhaps the only generative collection to surpass Autoglyphs in curation difficulty. In this section, we’ll dive into each series and what makes it so unique.
Synth Poems was the first project released in the “DEAFBEEF” collection. The series is comprised of 128 unique generative audiovisual pieces that are each about one minute in length.
The project served as the artist's “Hello World” to NFTs, introducing the digital art world to the concept of self-contained C code stored on the blockchain to deterministically produce art — in this case, a monophonic synth composition.
It uses a concept called Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesis, which is an encoding method originally used for analog signals in radio broadcasting. It was later used in audio synthesis for creating rich harmonic timbres.
The visuals mimic an oscilloscope setup in XY mode, a reference to early computer graphics and the pioneering electronic visualizations of Ben Lapovsky, Herbert Franke, and Mary Ellen Bute. The left and right audio channels provide the X and Y inputs to produce a unique visualization of the audio.
Angular is a collection of art pieces that blend sound and visuals together. The audio features music that eschews typical, predictable patterns, instead flowing more naturally and changing smoothly over time. The music evolves and isn’t rigid or repetitive. The duration of each note and its pitch are determined by continuous functions of time.
Angular is the second release in “DEAFBEEF”, and features a small edition size of eight that has come to define the challenge of collecting a full set. Perhaps influential to the decision on edition size is that the artist allowed only a very tightly constrained parameter space — the generative artist Tyler Hobbs later did the same for his sophomore collection “Incomplete Control”, which valued coherence over versatility.
The visuals here are particularly noteworthy, as it’s the first appearance of ASCII art, reminiscent of the dungeon crawlers of Deafbeef’s youth. Those visuals would later make their way back in with Caves (Vol. 2, Series 0), Deafbeef’s 2023 tribute to the late great Herbert Franke.
It took the collapse of the notorious hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and a Sotheby’s auction to bring Angular, Token 134 into the Curated collection. The collecting of this piece marked the completion of our full “DEAFBEEF” set, a journey that spanned nearly two years of collecting.
The third series in Volume 1 may be one of the few in “DEAFBEEF” where the visual demands more attention than the audio. Conceptually, Transmission was the artist building a time capsule to capture the ”spirit of the age”, including the early NFT era and tumultuous world events. Deafbeef mentioned this when he commented on Transmission - Token 139:
For me, the sights and sounds of Transmission serve as a document, and will always evoke potent memories of the feeling of existing amidst the chaotic events of
2020/21.
Each Transmission is branded by its first frame, most notably the “fake news COVID-19 vaccine” of #136 and “glory HODL” of #139. The visuals were inspired by ANSI terminals, early machines that were limited to text display.
Transmission continued Deafbeef’s experimentation with a “finely tuned and tightly constrained” parameter space and his eight piece edition size.
Within the Curated collection, we’ve collected “glory HODL” #139 and “ET” #141. Transmission #139 is significant both as our first Deafbeef acquisition and as one of the pieces selected for the Deafbeef limited edition vinyl.
Permanence is a recurring theme in Deafbeef’s work, and it is nowhere more deeply explored than it is in Entropy (Vol. 1, Series 3). Inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, this series of eight editions delves into the idea of permanence by simulating the loss and damage that can happen during the transfer of art.
Entropy creates output media that progressively degrades with each transfer transaction. As the token changes wallets, the media represented by the token becomes increasingly filtered and distorted. It’s an artificially imposed deterioration, serving as much as a statement on the ephemerality of physical art as it is on the potential of on-chain digital art. It perhaps poses a deeper, existential inquiry: Does the fleeting nature of art enhance its significance and impact?
Each time the token is transferred, the media represented by the token is changed to one that is more filtered and distorted. Below, you can click to toggle through the states of Entropy #145 and see its degradation after each transfer that has occurred.
Entropy represents the raw possibility that comes with blockchain art. It’s a concept that could only be captured and collected through a digital token. As the media “degrades” with every transfer, Entropy #145 is the only piece in the Curated collection with its own multi-sig vault to enable future ownership transfers without further degradation from on-chain transfers.
Glitchbox (Vol. 1, Series 4) is the first of two series in “DEAFBEEF” that explores the concept of the blockchain enabling collaborative programmable media. It’s an interactive programmable media experience that allows users to actively engage in the discovery and selection of a dynamic audiovisual model. Unlike Series 0-3 that produces a deterministic output from the minting hash, this series explores an array space of potential outputs for the observer to explore and select.
Control panel for Glitchbox, accessible only to owners and editors based on on-chain permissions
Owners have the ability to adjust various parameters impacting the model's output, with the adjustments being permanently recorded on the blockchain. These parameters, similar to controls found on a modular synthesizer, enable owners to “play” the instrument with all the final changes recorded to the blockchain. Owners also have the ability to add other “editors” that gain the ability to adjust the parameters and record them on-chain.
Glitchbox, which is a 64 piece collection, showcases the curatorial tastes of its collectors, so much so that nearly half of the pieces on the limited edition Deafbeef Vinyl are Glitchbox pieces, with parameters fine tuned by their collectors.
Advection (Vol. 1, Series 5) continues the exploration around programmable media and extends it to a study of fluid motion. In the artist’s own words, “Advection is a commentary on the relationship between nature, mathematics and generative art”. The fluid motion models that the visuals of Advection are based on were originally introduced in academic research by Deafbeef himself in 2010.
Just as in Glitchbox, owners of Advection can play around with parameters and record them on-chain to influence the final output. However, since this series only has eight editions, compared to 64 for Glitchbox, Deafbeef kept one of them and enabled his broader collector community to all interact with it.
Within the Curated collection, we were fortunate to collect Advection #222 in the Phillips: Ex-Machina auction in 2022.
In an increasingly digital world where anyone can adopt any persona they like, Deafbeef remains authentically himself, a self-reliant digital craftsman whose work reflects a life spanning from the early computer era to the blockchain present.
As a musician, engineer, blacksmith, and generative artist, he walks a path of focus, centered on mastering the fundamentals of his crafts. This extends to his use of the blockchain, not just as a medium and central theme he delves into, but as a core component of his artistic practice. He writes his own smart contracts, manages sales of his unique vinyls entirely on-chain, and even inscribes hashes directly into his metal work.
We’ve been fortunate to curate a complete set of his core “DEAFBEEF” collection, which itself captures a seminal period of digital art on the blockchain. We believe that no other artist embodies the spirit of crypto-native culture as much as Deafbeef does. He is singular, creating audiovisual generative art using nothing but a cheap laptop and a C compiler, placing him in a category of his own.
Thanks to 0xDEAFBEEF, Nat Emodi, Luiz Ramalho, Mackenzie Davenport, and Amanda Schmitt for reading drafts and shaping our thinking on this piece.
