Matt City Pseudo-Proposal: "Blank Canvas" Digital NFT Self-Portrait

When you collect this canvas, it is white and nothing;
But as soon as you connect to the LikeCoin wallet address, it appears as yourself in the digital world….

This article wants to subvert everyone's traditional perception of PFP, reconstruct PFP, and discuss the possibility of Matt City text interaction and derived NFT portraits.

Profile Picture NFT, hereinafter referred to as PFP, you may have seen BAYC, Phantaci Bear, CryptoPunk, this is PFP. In the cryptocurrency community, they are used as symbols of the common community of the community. My current avatar, Travelloggers, is the PFP officially launched by Matt City.

Since I learned last September that Matters is about to release NFT (later named Travelloggers), and Matters has been dealing with issues such as decentralized content creation and content economy, I am looking forward to it, and various possibilities keep popping up in my mind. sex.

Here is one of the (pseudo) proposals , summarizing the imagination of the content ecology, which can be regarded as recording the insights of the past few months. This article was completed in September 2021, revised and published for public release.

Pseudo-proposal, as the name suggests, this project will not actually be implemented, it only provides an introduction, or can be used as a speculative design (Speculative Design: using imagination, combining existing technology and research facts, subverting the stereotype of the existing century), but web3 The essence of the world is that a group of people with lofty ideals act together to create infinite possibilities (and the economic cycle behind it), who knows?

When everyone is talking about the transaction price of NFT, they exclaimed that a picture file can be sold for money. Have you ever thought back, why is a picture free at the beginning of the Internet era? Why do we store a picture on the screen for free? The emergence of NFTs has brought back ownership of "electronic items" (even though Taiwanese laws now tend to call them digital naming rights). When you own an item, it does not necessarily mean that you have to sell it for money. The concept of "owning" will create infinite waves in your heart, like a portrait of future generations.

Since the Renaissance, it has become popular among court aristocrats and social sages to put up their own portraits at home. It is not necessarily a self-portrait, but can also be painted by hired artists. When the master puts the painting out, it symbolizes the master's love for the portrait itself. Recognition, which can be spiritual, identity, epochal or emotional.

When you take the Travelloggers little alien as your avatar, you somewhat agree that it represents a certain piece of your heart.

But how is this little alien really you? It will shape the experience together with you. What PFP creates is a shared journey in the future. Maybe the details above will make the owner feel it. To a certain extent, it seems that the ancient KOLs hired the same first-class painter and painted in the same style. their portraits. Hang it on the wall at home and show it off to visiting friends.

I try to make an analogy between PFP and portrait painting. Is there a type of NFT that looks like a self-portrait?

"Blank Canvas" (Portrait)

You are what you write.
You are what you read.
You matter.

This is a retrospective NFT that visualizes digital memory; if Matt City is a city, then "Blank Canvas" is the urban memory of citizens. That city doesn't really exist, it can only be passed on by word of mouth, the text is deferred, as if Calvino couldn't see the city.

When you collect this canvas, it is nothing but nothing, but when you connect to the LikeCoin wallet address, it appears as yourself in the digital world. On the white canvas are floating objects you are familiar with, all of which you have written before. and admired objects that constitute a digital yourself.

The following is my fantasy, the Metadata of the Matters platform is complete, I call it Dark Matters, including the basic information of the tag system, reading time, clapping interaction and other post-scenarios. Although these materials are not the content of Matt's universe itself, they allow us to better understand the interactions and phenomena of the entire content universe.

With these metadata, we can easily standardize and differentiate users, mass-produce them without alienation, and use metadata to create personalized NFTs. Let everyone on Matters be a collector, collect yourself, and rediscover yourself.

Please refer to Tag Universe : @Xa Matters Tag Universe | Matters Tag Universe

With Dark Matters we can draw a "blank canvas" by combining the tags of the articles written, the tags of articles that we clapped for, and the reading time of the articles we liked. Every article written or appreciated by every citizen has been tagged, and these tags are combined to form a "blank canvas", which is your digital personality. And someone has already drawn the topological structure of Matt City's tag universe, and users with similar tag groups will naturally gather together for the same hobby. Matters' paywall "Room" is the same concept, but "Blank Canvas" produces a bottom-up collective writing/collective reading behavior.

What will my canvas look like? Definitely full of keywords like blockchain, NFTs, social movements, etc. But this is very different from who I really am, but I believe in the footprints on Matt City more, which makes me more willing to hold my chest up and say this is who I am. (instead of a medical license in hand)

"Blank Canvas" is a personalized tag cloud that generates a unique NFT.

Your reading and writing shape your digital portrait.

floating thing

The user's meta data is divided into two categories, writing and reading. The articles written by oneself are tagged by themselves, and the tags of reading articles are accumulated by the praise behavior. The two labelling systems produce different visual styles. For each canvas, generate 10-20 objects ranging from 10 to 20 generated by the labeling system.

"Blank Canvas" changes synchronously with the user's growth experience, and "Canvas" in 2022 will be different from 2023.

"Blank Canvas" may be an airdrop NFT, may be issued regularly, or even a LikeCoin dAPP, which is maintained by users paying to unlock the "Blank Canvas" permission. If it is an NFT, it is best to use the Cosmos ecosystem on which the LikeCoin Chain is located, and its NFT can preferably be purchased with LikeCoin. (Sampling details and administrative details are not repeated here)

As for the visual appearance of "Canvas", I wrote a long paragraph, but I think that only blank space can create space for imagination. Three directions: illustration PFP such as Les Elefants Terribles , dynamic labeling NFT such as Randomly Common Skeleton , or AI text-generating graphics (vqGAN+CLIP) (for details, please refer to my article: Machines and Artists Created with Collective Minds).

"Canvas" can be regarded as a kind of generative art. It can mix the time system (the time when the article is read, the time when the article is read) to generate scarcity, identity systems such as architects, admiring citizens, groups around the fireplace, and labeling systems such as Writing tags and reader tags.

Please refer to: @刘国 " The Architecture and Technology Stack of Matters "

For articles, appreciate, support, comment, associate, read, favorite and select;
For tags, editorial, featured and tracked;
For authors, it's tracking, and all actions on author posts or tags.
Each behavior is a time series, containing an infinite number of time-segmented windows;
At the same time, each user has different weighting methods, such as the number of followers, the number of supports received, and the number of supports given, which can give different weights to behaviors.

"Blank Canvas" may be a traditional portrait, or it may not be a half-length portrait. After all, what a digital portrait looks like, no one has ever said death. Perhaps the complex of abstract symbols and object memories is the embodiment of our online mind.

As discussed in the above article, if the metadata of digital texts is connected with generative art and NFT technology, it will be able to re-discuss the way of life of human beings in the digital world, and this way of life, I think, is digital self-portrait.