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.
It is a paradigm shift in the artistic aspect since it is not something that can be hung on the wall, but only has a presence in the digital universe, as has been reported through technical.ly .
The digital tulips are a mixture of art, a game and a social experiment that was born after those involved met in New York during the development of the Rare Digital Art Festival .
"People paid five figures for a digital CryptoKitty . We thought, 'How can we play in this space?', Willis recalled about his beginnings. The entrepreneurs were inspired by unique encryption collections in the world such as CryptoKitties, the CryptoPunks, and the social experiment based on the community Place de Reddit.
Little by little, they gave shape to their own project that later became Texel , which definitively involved art and interactive games. The name comes from the island Texel belonging to Holland. The nation becomes a sea of flowers between March and May , which also translates into a tourist attraction.
The Texel project has been configured as a grid where users can select where to buy a plot and start planting their bulbs. Each one has a different DNA, so users can not know what their tulips will be until they bloom.
At the time of pollinating the tulip owners have two options: let the plants grow again with the same genetics or raise them to create something completely new.
VISUAL COMPOSITION
The developers have reported that users can manipulate the visual composition of their tulips according to the place where they have chosen to plant them in the ecosystem. If you plant one you will keep it that way, however, if you choose a plot with other tulips the flowers will pollinate and a new type of tulip will be born, as it happens in real life.
Through its website texel.space , the entrepreneurs point out that "a virtual world is being built around digital tulips."
In general, tulips are generated by programming to make them genetically expressive, unique and stored in the blockchain . Each of the copies is an unpredictable piece of digital art .
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 1 year. While it arrives, the day interested people can register to receive updates and consult the demonstrations that have been prepared.