Announcing the Rabbit Fellowship
Applications are now open for Encryptoland’s Rabbit Fellowship. Apps close at 11:59 PM PT on October 31, 2021. For more details on the Fellowship, read on.
An early experiment
One of our first tests of our four foundational organizing principles, Learning, was teaching a traditional artist how to create generative art. We took a few applications from students at the Royal College of Art in London to find someone who would be interested in getting involved, finally accepting @BowDrillArt.
We weren’t really sure what to expect, but even the first results were honestly astonishing. After about two weeks of intensive work, @BowDrillArt was able to create an algorithm that generated some extraordinary pieces. Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings series, the algorithm @BowDrillArt created exhibits not only beauty, but also an incredible amount of variety and nuance.
Our process
We focused on a curriculum that was very simple: a tour of Javascript through the P5.js. We spent 30 minutes a day with @BowDrillArt for two weeks, switching between teaching and pair-programming.
The first couple days revolved around the pure basics: what was a variable, how do you access these variables, and how do you start to plot squares and circles on a digital canvas. One great thing about P5.js is the web editor, meaning there was no need to learn how to setup a local development environment.
Once we had the basics down, we challenged @BowDrillArt to decide what art they wanted to create. After a couple days of research, they settled on Sol LeWitt as a source of inspiration, and set out to create pieces inspired by his early Wall Drawings.
From here, we progressed into functions: allowing for more complex and nuanced outputs, moving from simple squares to complex curves and shapes, and then getting into custom randomization, conditional functions, and basic looping. This is when the art started to become truly generative, as we put together all the pieces to have new pieces of art on the fly.
Over the course of the next week, we progressively tweaked the output. Playing around with the looping logic, the randomization, and the color palettes until we finally had an algorithm that was continuously producing beautiful generative pieces.
The next step is for us to launch this as a Project with @BowDrillArt as our first Rabbit Fellow. @BowDrillArt is working with the @encryptoland team to deploy a smart contract and a minting site, the cost of all of which is covered by the Treasury reserves built up from the launch of our first Project, Kellogg’s Scribbles. This next Project will launch in the next few weeks.
Apply for the Rabbit Fellowship
The mission of this Fellowship is to reduce the barriers to entry (programming skills, deployment/minting costs, launch platform) of getting started exploring this new medium of expression and living for artists. If you’re an artist looking to learn how to make and launch generative NFT projects, you should apply to the first cohort of the Rabbit Fellowship. Applications are open now until October 31, 2021 (boo!). We’ll be accepting between 5-10 artists from around the world into the program, subject to our team’s bandwidth and resource constraints. For all Fellows, we will:
Work with you to teach you enough programming skills to develop your own generative NFT project.
Help you develop the smart contract and a minting site.
Cover at least some of the costs of deploying the smart contract and a minting site.
Launch your Project through Encryptoland, with some proceeds going into a Treasury that will help pay it forward to future Fellows.
This first cohort starts on Dec. 10, 2021 and ends on Dec. 31, 2021. All Fellows will be able to get to know the others in their cohort and go down the rabbit hole together. You can apply here.