Foodmasku Dishes Out Edible Masks on the Blockchain
NFT
Some detractors of NFTs fixate on their ethereal, intangible nature. How can they be artwork, critics cry, in the event that they’re solely digital, digital, disconnected from actuality?
It will be tough to levy these claims in opposition to the works of Foodmasku.
That’s the moniker of Antonius Wiriadjaja, the multimedia efficiency artist who—for 3 years now—has created NFTs depicting himself sporting masks made solely of meals, after which consuming the masks. The final word consumption of the work is a rule, a key part.
Courtesy: Foodmasku
The affiliation between masks and meals—and between meals masks and the blockchain for that matter—isn’t essentially intuitive. Which may be as a result of, for Wiriadjaja, these connections have been the product of natural necessity.
Within the earliest months of the pandemic, the artist recollects, he and a gaggle of distant colleagues have been navigating the still-bizarre realm of Zoom encounters. One fateful day, considered one of his pals grew to become inadvertently trapped in a video filter that apparently turned their face right into a pickle. The caller was embarrassed. Wiriadjaja’s first impulse was to make them really feel higher.
“So I took [a part of] my dinner, which was a chunk of kale, put it on my face and stated ‘Hey, I’ve a filter on as properly,’” Wiriadjaja advised Decrypt at NFC Lisbon earlier this week.
The pickled participant was delighted, their disgrace washed away, they usually requested Wiriadjaja what he was going to put on tomorrow. Foodmasku was born.
Courtesy: Foodmasku
Within the following weeks and months, Wiriadjaja devoted himself to the mission of making, documenting, and consuming meals masks. Banana eyes, broccoli nostrils, noodle noses, shrimp eyebrows… every single day, a brand new luxurious self-portrait.
The undertaking steadily gained steam, however that success was a double-edged sword: individuals have been so enamored with Wiriadjaja’s meals masks that phony Foodmasku accounts started popping up throughout quite a few social media platforms.
Courtesy: Foodmasku
This was March 2021, and Wiriadjaja was pissed off. There needed to be a solution to personal digital recordsdata, to guard his edible oeuvre. He did some looking out on-line and got here throughout NFTs. The artist Beeple had simply bought an NFT art work for $69 million, catapulting the rising expertise into the mainstream.
So Foodmasku grew to become a Web3 artist. Not out of an ideological or creative dedication to the ethos of decentralization, however as a substitute—as with the inciting kale flap—as a result of it simply made sense.
Thus far, Wiriadjaja has created nearly 2,000 Foodmasku NFTs, producing about 50 ETH, or $92,000, in gross sales.
Courtesy: Foodmasku
The artist, who was born in Indonesia and raised in Boston, has confronted totally different reactions to his works throughout varied cultures and contexts. A through-line, he’s discovered, is that individuals internationally are typically afraid of expertise.
“Expertise is horrifying to everybody, in every single place,” he stated. “Indonesians are nervous that expertise’s going to kill off their conventional arts, Individuals are nervous expertise’s going to take all of their jobs. However one factor everyone pertains to is meals.”
If meals and masks and emergent digital applied sciences will be introduced collectively to provide Wiriadjaja’s colorfully ingenious and optimistic portraits a cohesive thesis, it could be that any medium possesses the capability to faucet into the common vibrancy of humanity.
In that vein, Wiriadjaja has just lately develop into fascinated with synthetic intelligence. He’s growing a undertaking referred to as “Proof of Eat,” which is meant to clear the air on the rising disquiet prompted by blurring of the road between people and machines.
“One huge check of whether or not a creator is human or not, is that if they will eat meals,” he stated.
