Andre Oshea Unveils New Generative Ordinals Drop on Gamma x Rarible
This is a historic week for the Rarible community. For the first time ever, we are opening the doors for an Ordinals drop facilitated by Rarible, in partnership with the brilliant artist Andre Oshea and our friends at Gamma — what a time to be alive!
Gamma is the platform for Fine Art Ordinals, making them our go-to team for this collaboration, and Andre Oshea is nothing short of a genius, right?
‘Nexus Grids’ drops on August 8th on Gamma.io at 12 pm ET.
Rarible fam, meet Ordinals
In case you missed the whole Ordinals buzz (where have you been?!), let us fill you in on some of the details. In the most basic sense, an Ordinal is the bitcoin equivalent of your standard NFT. The key difference is that NFT’s are usually stored off the blockchain, with just the transaction information stored on-chain.
🧡 With Ordinals, the artwork itself is inscribed directly onto individual units of bitcoin, known as satoshis. Each bitcoin = 100 million satoshis, so with roughly 20 million bitcoin in circulation, we’re looking at hundreds of trillions of satoshis in circulation too.
They’re called Ordinals because the satoshis are organized using Ordinal theory, which numbers each satoshi according to when it was minted and entered circulation.
All about ‘Nexus Grid’, by Andre Oshea
‘Nexus Grid’ is Andre’s first Ordinals drop: a generative art project that takes us on a journey through the mind of the artist. In these works we see the highs and lows, the intense emotions, and even the mundane tasks of life.
These works hover somewhere between abstract art and poetry, with words emerging and disappearing from a hazy grid of color. Each piece explores the complexity of being an artist and a human, asking us to take a moment to reflect on where we’re at and how we’re doing.
This week we sat down for a chat with Andre to find out more about ‘Nexus Grids’. Read on to learn about his process, and his great advice for artists and creatives.
You created this artwork knowing that it would become Ordinals, inscribed directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Has that impacted how you approached this project?
Andre: Absolutely. I feel like context is everything when it comes to the significance of a piece of work. Knowing that these would become Ordinals motivated me to create my first fully generative project.
This is also my first Ordinals collection so I felt like it was only right to explore new depths of technology for my artwork.
Can you tell us some more about the process for creating this generative work? The technicalities, the inspirations etc.
Andre: Starting a new project usually starts with making mood boards. Once I understand what I am pulled to, it could be color, texture, composition, etc — I start with some p5.js sketches. I use ChatGPT to help me code all of my tools and programs, so when I get to something I like, I use Chat to help me implement more complex options, scripts and functions.
Once I have help building the infrastructure, it's all about iteration, and "play testing" my code. I run hundreds of generations, adding words and color palettes as I go.
Your work is pretty diverse - at times fun and playful, at times futuristic and otherworldly. What kinds of interests and passions inspire your art?
Andre: Sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint specific inspirations because I feel like so much of my artwork is informed by my accumulative experience however when I take a step back, consistent inspirations in my work are technology, preparing for the future mentally, the ways people communicate & metamodernism.
For this collection, I was inspired by Hiroshi Kawano & computer storage visualization. ‘Nexus Grids’ is a commentary on how artists compartmentalize and rationalize their thoughts
— each piece resembles the data visualization of a computer's hard drive, and the colors and words add texture and tonality to our thoughts showing how connected or disjointed they can be. Collections like this allow me to follow many of those inspirations.
Finally - any words of wisdom for artists who want to get involved in the web3 space?
Andre: First & foremost, stay consistent. That's not just for web3, that's general advice for any art career. Most people hear that & think I mean "Oh I need to post a new tiktok every other day" when what I'm really expressing is you need to stay true to yourself.
People respond to consistency more than they do quality — strange, I know.
The other thing I like to tell people is to make sure your character can speak for you in rooms that you're not in. So many decisions about our lives are made in rooms we’re not in, so make sure you make a good impression on people.