Deep in the basement of Richard Nadler’s family home awaits an unusual room. Through its murky silence, after some seconds of adjustment, your eyes begin to discern the crisp outlines of cheekbones, and the sheen of teeth from out of the dimness. You switch on the light. Flash. Before you, and nailed into the colourful cloth that bedecks the wall, hang tens of century-old monkey skulls, freighted from Africa, and stowed in this antechamber out of a mother’s fear of bad omens. Despite the sealed and airless climate, the cloth is flexing, shifting. And somehow, some way, the two skulls from the very centre of this grim tableau have tumbled to rest against your toes.
…works become institutions as they weave a community together by providing it with shared experience and a certain kind of language; the language of stories that can be experienced over and over again through time.Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory
Threads
Just as the Latin word textus comes from the verb meaning, ‘to weave’, the creation of art may be conceived as the weaving of memory into material form; from the earliest scratches onto parchment, to these inscriptions of arbitrary data onto satoshis on the blockchain. Once these memories are fixed, collected, discussed and shared, they become the stories that help tell us who we are. Here, then, are stories for all of you who have ever been seduced by Bitcoin’s glimmer- from the utopian visionary, to the degen dreamer- midst the fifteen-year wake of that algorithmic summoning of decentralised finance. Each of these 206 ordinals- one for each bone of the human body- serve to honour and ossify this revolutionary event. Its outputs depict skeletons, seem to invite us to consider their symbolic paradox; a permanent reminder that life is fleeting. Each encounter with a skeleton offers the visceral story of the transition of life itself, from suggested past, present fact to inevitable future. So Bitcoin provides the fixed and immutable ledger that bridges our striving for liberation from venal states and corrupt financial institutions. It will outlast us all, in danse macabre, gleaming its gold out of the bony clutch of King and peasant alike. Charon’s latest obol.
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Although this may sound morbid, Memento Mori in fact hopes to inspire the inverse: to celebrate our every second of conscious living. Perhaps it takes the contemplation of death to feel truly alive. Our concentration is often shattered by the digital world; subsumed by the pings and notifications of manufactured desire. In weaving these stories, Nadler calls to our attention the multitudinous miracle of the natural world. His backdrops allow the viewer to be truly present, to gaze into his signature curtains of giddying baroque palettes and lush, verdant fecundity. To continue the weaving metaphor, here is the vibrant warp on which the viewer’s weft of consciousness is threaded, supported, primed for the tactile moment. For who hasn’t longed to reach out their hand and trace the brush strokes in oil of an old masterpiece with their fingertip as they stand behind the velvet rope?
Nadler draws his threads from fantastic organic material: lichen, vine, petal, coral, neon fungal rhizomes. These threads appear to nurture, cradle, and sustain the skeletons, infusing the motion of life in moments of vibrant juxtaposition. Cranial bone falls away to reveal strata of flora where the brain once was; relentless life and unthinking death fused as one. Although we walk the dark path, there is no monochrome, for as Nadler insists, there is enough darkness in the world. Instead, hot pinks and damask petals rub softly against the bleached white tropes of bones, and newly minted bitcoins irradiate their gold in brilliant haloes. Here are mediaeval frescoes for the blockchain age.
Flesh and Blood
Although these stories resonate on the collective and institutional level, they first began to emerge as tokens of Nadler’s own lived experience before he began work on his previous collections, Izanami Islands, and Yamabushi’s Horizons. He spent six months training an AI model on skulls, before turning to the Japanese structural work of his debut collections. The loss of his father when Richard was just 18 was the period in which this collection began to germinate: ‘Suddenly everything stopped. He was such a strong guy, and guide. I was left hanging in the air… I visited my father at every opportunity: he was my teacher, my best friend. So many good times.’ Richard’s father was ‘a dreamer and a self-made man’ who rose from poverty in Austria to ‘achieve everything he ever wanted to’, including charitable initiatives to build houses in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, whilst collecting art from around the world. Returning to the family home after the sudden loss of his father, Nadler discovered the fallen monkey skulls, and recognised their significance: ‘I never believed in ghosts or souls or anything like that before then, but I immediately called my mother to tell her it was a sign.’ After a childhood in which he rubbed shoulders with artists and was surrounded by artworks, Nadler began to finally make his own art with a newborn sensitivity.
Block 9 450x Sats
Memento Mori is a special vision, created as Richard Nadler’s homage to bitcoin, specifically for this chain. It will be the only collection that Nadler ever releases as ordinals, and his attempt to create the finest artwork to thus far grace the chain. In order to honour this commitment, gm.scribe has chosen to inscribe the work on the rarest and most sought-after satoshis- Block 9 450x Sats. The ninth block after the genesis block, it was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto on January 11th 2009 and featured several landmark transactions, such as the first ever transfer of bitcoin. 450x sats are especially rare as they are taken exclusively from the first bitcoin of the 9th block. They are the oldest satoshis available for inscription. The UTX sats have been isolated, and each output manually inscribed by broadcasting until they were picked up over the course of several days.
Scribed by Hand
In generative art on ethereum, such as in gm.studios’s releases to date, the parent inscription is minted with meta-data, traits and scripts. Recursive subsequent mints reference that script without having to mint the script every time: it’s hosted in the initial inscription, and the initial outputs are seeds. The NFT marketplace puts those elements together and renders them on peoples’ browsers without dependencies, or hosting them in any way. As a consequence, data inscriptions that have seeds are tiny, strings of numbers and letters.
To meet the challenge of releasing a pre-curated collection on Bitcoin, each Memento Mori has undergone a remarkable series of processes:
Each artwork has been personally curated from over 17000 outputs from an AI model trained, refined and iterated on, over six months.
gm.generator is utilised to render ultra-high outputs on the backend, as Magic Eden supports offchain images where content on bitcoin is rendered on the browser.
Memento Mori is AI generated and pre-rendered. This is very computationally demanding in terms of what is required to generate those images, as pre-rendered images in high resolution represent a big challenge to inscribe on bitcoin. The cost to inscribe an image of 1 megabyte at current prices at the time of writing with average tx fees would cost c.$3000. The average block size on bitcoin is close to a megabyte, so trying to push for the entire blockspace on any given block would be exorbitantly difficult and expensive.
To mitigate these challenges, gm.scribe has implemented a process of optimising the images stored onchain to reduce them to 25kb. Every single image has been manually optimised, using compression techniques, aiming for the optimal size that would still be rewarding to view- settled at 400 x 400 pixels. They are supplied with a json file, with high resolution outputs also supplied: when browsing on Magic Eden you will see the high resolution outputs. Ordinals.com will reveal the default content. gm. Scribe has footed the cost of an estimated $10-15k to inscribe the images on collectors’ behalf.
It is much easier to render artwork on ordinals itself as colour is hard to inscribe (hence the proliferation of pixelated and sprite-based art on bitcoin). Richard Nadler famously uses a prodigious array of colour in his artwork. In order to capture this, each output has been individually optimised; divided into chromatic layers, removed and desaturated. Some outputs are complex and busy, in which case the studio had to push the filter further to optimise them. Other outputs are less complicated with fewer flowers and details, and here we could increase saturation and crispness. Each of the 206 outputs has thus been tailor-made to enable its optimal onchain image.
Each Memento Mori will be pre-inscribed and sent to the winning bidder.
Technical / Traits:
There are 206 Memento Moris, one for each bone in the human body.
Rarities: TBA
Sat Origin: Block 9 450x
Exclusive
This is Richard Nadler's homage to the king chain. With Memento Mori, we believe that Bitcoin will finally get the fine art it deserves, befitting its epochal moment. Here for you, are inscribed the universal symbols of fleeting natural beauty and mortality, threaded to stand the test of time upon the blockchain, long after we are all gone. Carpe diem.