Hello and welcome to The Culture Project. Today we are going to talk about a generative PFP project that is releasing on the Bitcoin blockchain. We haven’t really covered any Bitcoin releases here in the past. We will be talking about some technical aspects of the project, but I think it will be easy to understand and digest. This article will also be a little more vulgar and laced with random profanity. The project touches on a lot of the common traits and behaviors you find in degen culture. ChatFUKR by Harvey Rayner is a homage to fine art and the PFP degen culture that has emerged with NFT communities. Before I get into that I’m going to highlight some of his older projects that were released on Ethereum. A kind of introduction to some of the people that are just discovering his work. Then we dive into this new project and all the layers it took to create it.
Fontana may be his most well known release. It was his second release on Art Blocks after Photon’s Dream. An another amazing project you should check out.
Fontana is Latin for fountain.
This project is a playful attempt at abstractly capturing the flowing movement of a fountain using precisely drawn elements that evoke a static and considered rendering of a subject that is in constant flux.
Velum was released as one of the live minting experiences with Bright Moments in New York. A little video below covering it with Harvey himself.
"What do you get if you blend the visual DNA of two mid 20th Century artistic movements into a 21st Century generative art algorithm?" Harvey Rayner was influenced by abstract expressionism and pop art, incorporating elements from Rothko, Jackson Pollock, & Lichtenstein into the algorithm.
Quasi Dragon Studies was my introduction to Harvey’s work. I had seen his other releases, but had never had the chance to collect some of his art. When I saw it on Verse and started reading about it, I instantly joined his discord server. Harvey was always in there communicating with everyone. He has become a big proponent in the co-creation process of creating art. Giving the collectors a way to participate in shaping what they will own. Bringing a different kind of connection to the art, the artist, and the collector. With QDS you would buy tiles and connect them together or add blanks around a piece to let it grow. It was an amazing experience.
Quasi Dragon Studies #204
Here are two of the rarest kinds you can create. The White Dragons being the rarest with only two being created and the Black Dragons having forty two editions created.
If you would like to know more about QDS I wrote an article about it. The Culture Project - Quasi Dragon Studies
Soon after that I got to meet Harvey in Marfa and I participated in the MarfaMESH project he was a part of with Shane Richardson & IYK. This was just another example of the co-creation of art that he has become fond of. Every dot in the marfaMESH piece is someone I met and interacted with at the event. You would scan their card with your phone and you could watch the art evolve in real time through the app. It started a conversation with strangers most of the time and I ended up meeting a lot of people. It was another really cool experience.
marfaMESH #131
If you would like to know more about the yearly Marfa event, I’ve written articles about it as well. Art Blocks Marfa 2022 & Art Blocks Marfa 2023
Harvey’s discord is one of a handful of servers I’m constantly active and posting in. Because of that I was lucky enough to become one of the Council of Elders in his server. I’m one out of about thirty other people that get a little view behind the curtain. We give input and explore algorithms he’s working on. See some things early that he may need tested. Because of that I have been able to compile information over the last four months while he has created this project. So lets start talking about chatFUKR and how it came to be.
I'm currently building a new project I intend to release on Ordinals. A new chain for a very new branch of work. The project is supposed to be ridiculous and tongue-in-cheek, exploring the intersection between full-on degen PFP culture and Fine Contemporary Art. Its a 100% generative PFP project suited to the inscription size limitations of Ordinals. The character is a troll that feeds on toxic DM chats and social postings. It represents the first primordial scream of a consciousness that is coming online. In the darkness of interconnected internet servers independent of us. It represents an AI in the wild.
The quote above is from January of this year and is when he first started posting about the project. Harvey has put an insane amount of work into this. There are a lot of pieces that all fit together to create a crazy and wonderful PFP project. From the beginning he had a solid idea of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. Ordinals just happened to be the perfect chain to release it on. He creates his work in an SVG format which is a format for displaying two-dimensional graphics. It’s a vector file, it can be scaled up or down without losing any of its resolution. I asked him about his thoughts on SVG and how it works with Ordinals.
I do feel JS+SVG and Ordinals are a perfect marriage. SVG 'Scalable Vector Graphics' are size agnostic, so they can be rendered at any size without losing resolution. Modern browsers are also super optimized to render SVG so even 10,000 SVG elements will render quickly, chatFUKR being a good example. If you had to inscribe a chatFUKR SVG file without it being dynamically generated with JS it would be prohibitively expensive. With recursion we can have a single JS code base inscribed once and have each mint inscription access that code to dynamically build the SVG. So each mint inscription is just a couple of dollars to inscribe if that. Any generative way of working can work with Ordinals but I love the speed of SVG. This is more important with Ordinals as some marketplaces like Ordinals.com just show the Ordinals raw in an iframe. If there are 30 on a page and our code is slow to render it, it will probably lock the browser up or crash it completely. Because of the cost of inscriptions, artists working in this way have a distinct advantage in terms of delivering high resolution artworks. Compared to most Ordinals which are low res JPEGs or PNGs because of the cost to inscribe.
Another really interesting part of this is the ability for other projects in the future to call and use traits from chatFUKR in their own projects.
Recursion is a simple Ordinals protocol that allows one inscription to use content from another inscription. Because chatFUKR is created from multiple algorithms, recursion provides a way for all future mint inscriptions to access the evolving chatFUKR codebase. This means the following:
chatFUKR mint inscriptions are small and cheap to mint
Future batches will be able to use traits from earlier batches without having to reinscribe the code
Other future generative PFP projects will be able to use chatFUKR traits
This last point is particularly interesting. In years from now the inscriptions that have been referenced the most may be seen as culturally more important. This would be similar to how authority and status is given to white papers that are cited the most in the scientific community. Writing and documenting the chatFUKR traits in such a way to encourage recursive use is another way to potentially secure future provenance for the project.
The name chatFUKR has references to chatGPT and how LLMs are becoming a part of our lives now. As AI becomes more prevalent in the tech world around us.
LLMs are now an evolutionary step in the domain in which a wild AI troll could potentially evolve. Moreover, ‘chat’ is such a friendly innocuous word, I loved how it sounded next to such an aggressive, hostile word. It’s like the name captures the paradoxical absurdity I am aiming for with the project.
The origins of the art for this project date back to the early 90s when Harvey drew these wild disembodied screaming heads. These were the inspiration behind chatFUKR and helped shape what they would look like.
This is Fetus2 drawn in 1992 when Harvey was a teenager and the first WIP of a wild chatFUKR. There is a great fukrLORE page to check out that covers more of the origins and provides more details of the earlier stages of the project. It also shows some more of Harvey’s earlier drawings.
With bitcoin and inscriptions you can create a hierarchy within the NFT system where they reference a parent file that also references a grand parent file and so on. This project will be released in batches and you will be able to follow that family tree through the blockchain. They all tie together as shown in the chart below.
That brings us to the Artist Seal which is the Great Grand Parent in this system. It’s an ever evolving piece of art that ages with Harvey. It wears and fades over time, linking it’s life to the artists. Such an impressive and well executed idea. They are currently aged at 49 years old.
Check out the interactive page. Click on it to adjust the age of the logo and watch it change in real time.
Now we can get into the chatFUKR art. Every trait created requires it’s own algorithm to be written to work within the project. There have been over fifty trait algorithms created and that number will only grow from here. Some of those reference other NFT communities and artists. There are a few different groups of rare chatFUKRz. One example of those are called Aristocrats. They will be given to all the members of the Council of Elders. There is a group within the community that all drink whisky and share the drinks they like. All the Aristocrats will have a cigar and whisky in their hands.
Here is chatFUKR #1 an Aristocrat that has XCOPY glasses on. He’s one classy looking Fukr.
Here is a clusterFUK of them. You can see the variety across, but they keep some common traits and color scheme throughout.
There are a lot of traits in this project. And I’m not going to sugar coat this, there are dicks and vaginas in this art. If that bothers you, that’s okay. I think it’s supposed to in a way. It’s part of the degen culture and something Harvey has embraced long before this project came to fruition. When he was younger he used to draw dicks. This isn’t a hilarious movie reference, even though it is quite funny. It’s a great story he shared with us in the discord and one reason we have little dicks as backgrounds.
Here are two examples of hand drawn dicks and vaginas as backgrounds.
I’m going to list some of the other traits people may recognize and show a range of examples below. There are references to XCOPY, tjo, diamond hands, market candles, squiggles, viper glasses, rainbow throw up, noun glasses, laser eyes, hoodies, and a lot more. New traits will come out with each new batch.
Here is a nice chart showing some of the common and rare pieces in the series.
If you go to the newly developed chatFUKR.art website you will find a lot of information on the project. There is a “Fukr’s Manifesto” with some really funny charts that show who a chatFUKR is meant for. It also has a page that shows a clusterFUK of chatFUKRz. That’s what we have come to call them when a group of them are gathered together. Each one has a hidden menu with various commands and information. Click on the image to activate the menu. There are transparent backgrounds, simplified backgrounds, different downloaded sizes, a trait list, and the generated insults that come with each one.
Every chatFUKR has a string of insults generated that go around the border of the image. They are pretty random and funny. Harvey built an insult generator specifically for this project.
A few more random facts to know about the project.
chatFUKRs will fit any aspect ratio.
Holders will have IP rights to their chatFUKRs. Do whatever you want with them.
chatFUKR holders will always have a greatly increased chance to get on future batch AL. With each new batch, we would also love to onboard members from other communities.
He’s also created a 1/1 piece for a well known auction house. Though we don’t know which one yet. More information should be coming out about it some time this month. Here is a video showcasing the work.
This project is going to release in batches over the next year. It’s hard to say how long it will go on for exactly, but if you want to be a part of it you should join the discord server. He’s constantly talking with his community while building this project and he likes to get input from everyone. I’ll have links at the bottom to help guide you to everything I’ve talked about.
The supply allocation for the project has been released.
chatFUKR Batch 1 mint details:
Wen: Wednesday, 15 May 2024 GTD AL: 9am - 3pm EST
FCFS AL: 3pm EST onwards
Price: 0.001696969 BTC (for the culture) Roughly $100
On: Magic Eden Supply: 1000
There will be 6942 of them in the series.
Harvey Rayner - Twitter / Warpcast
Discord Server - Come join us.
The chatFUKR website - chatFUKR.art / fukrLORE / The Fukr's Manifesto
Harvey’s Website - pattern.co
Thanks for reading! Please like and share the article if you enjoyed it. We are just trying to spread some Generative Art love with The Culture Project. Our community is open to anyone that wants to learn about or share generative art. The communities Twitter & Discord. My twitter is @joshripple. If you like the content please give us a follow.