🍿 #051 Mini - 80s Pop Roxy Bonus Pack
A little detour into my upcoming ArtBlocks drop.
I’m in full winding-down mode for the holidays. Its taken a few days but I’ve gotten there, I hope you’re all doing well and calm days are on the horizon.
This is a quick 100% self-promoting mini digital (NFT) project newsletter, with no pen plotter stuff in at all, so if NFTs are very understandably not your thing nothing will be lost from skipping this one and I’ll see you next Thursday.
# ARTBLOCKS, 26TH DEC LAUNCH
At 8pm GMT (26th Dec ‘24) I’m launching “80s Pop Roxy Bonus Pack 🍿” over on ArtBlocks, the main page is here: https://www.artblocks.io/marketplace/collections/80s-pop-roxy-bonus-pack
But I think a more entertaining link is this one, where you get to preview the possible outputs: https://www.artblocks.io/marketplace/collections/80s-pop-roxy-bonus-pack/explore
Interestingly anyone who hits that link above 👆 will get a different design, (the wonders of generative art), I got this one…
…and if you hit the “Generate 80s Pop Roxy Bonus Pack 🍿” button (a UI element probably designed without the expectation of my tendency for long run-on titles), you’ll get a new design, then another, and another, and another, have fun.
Right Click Save and they’re all yours for free.
# 70s & 80s POP BACKGROUND PRIMER
I’m not going to go into the full details, because I’ve made enough posts and videos about them before, but a quick catch-up for people who may just be joining in.
ArtBlocks is one of the primary platforms for code based generative (NFT) art. I have a huge soft spot for them and have had nothing but a good time when it comes to everything ArtBlocks. One of the very early projects on ArtBlocks was 70s Pop Series One, in the experimental part of the site called “Factory”, written when you could only put a tiny bit of code on-chain, which explains the aesthetic of a lot of early ArtBlocks work 🗜️
After that there was 70s Pop Series Two, and two “bonus packs”; Summertime and Ghost.
Since then I’ve also explored the design with print, screen print, riso print, sculpture, fabric, clothing, pen plotting (of course) and even furniture design.
Later 80s Pop Variety Pack - for experts only 🕹 was released which included two (very basic) playable games.
The follow up 80s bonus pack “Roxy” was supposed to release over a year ago, but because of various ArtBlocks platform changes, which have ended up with ArtBlocks Studio, its taken until now to get it out. And I figured it’d be fun to launch it the day after Christmas, because if there’s one thing more fun than an art drop, it’s an art drop when all the support staff are on holiday 🎄
# 80s POP ROXY DESIGN NOTES
It’s very weird story telling with what’s essentially simple abstract generative art, but as the series developed a few strands started to appear. The first was the vibe in Summertime, with “No special features, just sun-bleached curves in white set on four fresh summer palettes; Miami, Florida, New Orleans, Los Angeles and gradients for days”
70s Pop Series Two gave us: “Here we're cruising down Lake Shore Drive in our shag carpet lined Chevy van, with sweet custom airbrushed art on the side. Barbarella meets Saturday Night Fever 🌈🕺 in tiny code form.”
The “airdrop” for Summertime was Afterglow, with “As the sun slowly sets on the 70s and we move towards the 80s, we're hanging out in the arcade at the end of the pier, pushing quarters into the slot machines as the heat of the day slowly turns into the cool warm breeze of the night”
We had an intermission around Halloween for The Series Two “bonus pack” Ghost: “Last of the 70s Pops, gone but not quite dead 👻 nothing but black & white groovy patterns, perfect for colouring in. Some people say the spirits of the 70s haunt these, but that would be ridiculous”. Its corresponding airdrop Haunted, wrapped that up with “The screen flickers as the VHS reaches the end and starts to automatically rewind. Perhaps we shouldn't have watched Nightmare on Elm Street and the Evil Dead back to back, because now we've got to switch off the lights and make our way through the dark house upstairs to bed”.
80s Pop Variety Pack kicked back off with: “As the sun sets on the 70s, things become bigger, bolder and brasher. 80s Pop enters a new decade of extravagance with cutting-edge vector graphics, stylish modern patterns, cable TV and mainframe access.
A celebration of 1988, a whole year of games, tech and art crammed into one variety pack. The only way we could fit more in would be to put it on laserdisc.” - with its references to Battlezone, Q*Bert, 80s films and TV built into the variety of outputs.
Which brings us to 80s Pop Roxy Bonus Pack and “As the sun sets over the arcade we head off to the mall and slip into the Roxy to catch the last showing of the first action film of the year.”
So even with these tiny (badly written) vignettes I now have this picture in my head of where we are, what we’re doing and, to overuse the word again, the vibe that’s going on.
And in this case, it was the retro-futurism of Art Deco smashed with neon lights and chrome that the Roxy cinemas were trying to invoke with their architecture and styling. Which was the main scaffolding I used when thinking about the design I wanted for the Roxy Bonus Pack 🍿.
The colour palettes, are ripped directly from 80s themed stationery & folders, multiplex carpets and the (ugly) neons of laser-tag.
Meanwhile the most important to me, and least obvious which is why I’m writing it out, is the format change from square to portrait.
A lot of early ArtBlocks project (and NFTs in general) were square, for some undoubtably boring technical reason. As the art and space has matured things have tended to move back towards more traditional print ratios.
To me, personally, 80s Pop Roxy marks a transition point from the old early days’ aesthetic and format of NFTs. In addition to the shape, under the hood, the code in 80s Pop Variety Pack & Roxy is a ground-up rewrite of the 70s Pop code; 70s Pop was an evolution of pen plotter code and had limits, 80s Pop is more print friendly and flexible going forwards.
To really drill the point home, the background colours of the designs are the four used from Summertime; Miami, Florida, New Orleans, Los Angeles, with a faint 70s Pop design. Which, in an act of artistic metaphor, are shown at dusk, “sun setting” the old code/colours/design/format ready for whatever comes next.
IF I HAD MORE TIME, THIS WOULD BE SHORTER
As ridiculous as this sounds there’s loads more I could say about working on a series like 70s/80s/90s/Y2K Pop, but I don’t have the time now to make a long-ass post and edit down to a short-ass post without fucking it up.
One point though it’s that I’ve always thought of ArtBlocks as the home of 70s+ Pop and the most important thing to me is seeing the completion of the project. “The project” here being several collections thematically linked.
Which is why I’ll continue to ignore the fact that the NFT market is terrible, everyone will be on holiday, the day after Christmas is possibly the worst day to launch a project, and it’s been over two years since 80s Pop. I’ll keep doing these things anyway because…
You lot always make it fun, and I always enjoying doing them 🍻
# THE END
That’s the end of the mini-newsletter, if you celebrate it I hope you have a lovely Christmas. Here in the Catt household we celebrate the 21st, because science & astronomy, so this is me done now for a while.
The next proper newsletter will be Thursday the 26th of December (same day as the Roxy launch, but I wanted to at least give a few days heads up for those interested). It’ll either be some end of year wrap up (unlikely), or me going on about how much I like the AxiDraw MiniKit 2 tiny cute adorable pen plotter I put together over the holidays.
Love you all
Dan
❤️
PS, incase you missed them, people seemed to enjoy the last two weeks of #weeknotes.
Nice one and every time I wonder how complex is it how to write code to generate art like this.
Maybe this winter holiday I'll look up YouTube how to do it and code something very basic myself.