Nouns x Artmatr - 1,001 Matr'd Nouns

Summary

Our last prop allowed Artmatr the opportunity to develop and create seven unique paintings of Nouns over the course of one week in March. Each day’s minted Noun was interpreted by our team of artists and engineers and “MATRed” on the same day as a 48” x 48” oil painting with our custom robotic hardware and code. The winner of each auction was given the rights to the corresponding painting. We celebrated the week of Nouns art with a successful public exhibition and VIP opening in our Brooklyn gallery, attended by major artists, gallerists, and auctioneers from the New York art scene.

We’re excited to follow up on the success of Prop 224 with a massive endeavor to bring every Noun into the physical world. With the help of the Nouns community’s creative input, we hope to MATR the first 1,001 Nouns and distribute them globally to their respective holders, as well as create and airdrop a new collection of NFTs that provide a digital Certificate of Authenticity for each physical Noun. Supporting this huge development and production effort, we will deploy curated content across a variety of social channels, raising visibility of Nouns DAO and the ways Nouns create value and delight for the broader web3 community.

We will publicly celebrate this endeavor with a huge launch party and exhibition in collaboration with Dustin Yellin near the August 8th Nouniversary and we will continue to promote this effort through dedicated social channels throughout the whole process. We also propose that one of our cutting-edge MATR Labs machine racks gets built with custom Nouns sponsorship visibility, so that Noggles and Nouns branding can be seen in the content generated by every piece of art created on the machine.

Recap

Prop 224 passed on February 13, 2023, to a resounding yes vote of 151 to 17. We immediately began developing ways we could use our custom robots and software to create a unique oil painting for each Noun over the prescribed week. We developed a number of stylistic directions that required new tools and hours of code development. Ultimately, we created paintings with unique robotically-created textures in the oil paint that brought dimensionality and life to Nouns, and embedded the mint hash into the paintings as well.

We wrote thousands of lines of code to reinterpret the digital images as paintings, honed the tooling, mixed the paint, and arranged the cameras. As proposed, we completed a unique painting of that day’s Noun, on time, and live streamed the entire process, as well as a 3D scan of each finished work for our virtual gallery. The project pushed our technical limits to the edge and allowed us to try new creative techniques that have greatly improved our art-making processes as a whole.

If you want to know more about the previous collab click here

During production time our Twitter and Instagram feeds were full of Nouns as our content and marketing team came up with new and creative ways to showcase the community through the paintings. The project generated great buzz from the community, and generated auction prices above the previous 30-day average, including a 36.69 ETH sale on the genesis painting. The week was capped off with a successful first-ever exhibition in the Artmatr space in Brooklyn. The works have been seen and talked about by major collectors, artists, galleries and auction houses, including Christie’s, Pace, Pioneer Works, and many other VIP’s in the crypto and traditional art communities.

New Prop

TL;DR:

  • We are proposing to use our Matr Labs robotics to fabricate every Noun from #0 to #1,000. Artmatr will develop custom software and hardware to pull off this feat, including a community-exclusive MATRing portal with algorithmic and AI creative control, cutting edge tool development, and the extensive code development required to tie it all together. All Noun holders will have the right to customize and claim their respective physical copy(s).
  • All shipping and handling costs will be covered by Artmatr.
  • Complementary digital content, including timelapse videos and high-resolution photography, will be available to Nouns holders and the community, and the MATRed Nouns will be minted into a new collection and airdropped to their respective Nouns holders.
  • We will produce a massive Nouniversary event at artist Dustin Yellin’s studio in NYC, showcasing some of the first MATRed Nouns alongside Yellin’s recently completed glass Nouns sculpture (Prop 48) with live MATRING throughout the day
  • This project will add a significant amount of new value to existing Nouns mints, as well as upcoming auctions. The content created by each Noun’s MATRing process will be widely distributed and shared, elevating visibility of the innovative ways Nouns can be works of art IRL, and the Nouniversary

[User flow: User starts by connecting their wallet & choosing their Noun on the server > Personalizes the Noun > server generated a preview with the translation layer > users has three choices: Modify the artwork, Save the preview for consideration or send to MATR > during the MATRing process, the work is captured in high res and when the MATR process is finished, the work is minted and shipped].

Our new Matr Labs platform consisting of our newly developed Art-making software and scaled down versions of our large machines will incorporate technology distilled from our experiences with the likes of Tyler Hobbs, Zancan and every other major artist that has come through our door. The technology is entering a production-ready state from an initial prototype, and we want the Nouns community to work with us as we continue to develop and scale. We continue to push the envelope of technological creativity, and with the assistance of Nouns DAO, we will define it for every artist in the future. We would like to propose that every Noun holder from now until the August 8th Nouniversary will have the opportunity to use our new platform and generate a unique 18” x 18” physical rendition of their Noun(s). Each MATRed Noun will be shipped to the holder at no additional cost, worldwide.

The physical pieces created by the community will generate increased visibility and value to the DAO, as existing holders and new auction winners alike will be given the opportunity to create a physical representation of their Noun with their own creative input. We will also brand our newly-produced robot with Nouns branding, elevating Nouns visibility alongside the growth of this initiative.

Nouns Sponsored Matr Labs Rack

Having the Nouns community with us will give us the freedom to come up with exciting new ways to implement our technology that we may not otherwise have been able to do when operating within the constraints of an individual artist. We want to continue pushing the boundaries of our technology in order to make art that excites both the Nouns community and our community at-large.

  • Immediately following the acceptance of the proposal, Artmatr will begin development of a custom Nouns DAO creative interface and the construction of a Nouns-sponsored Matr Labs rack. We will open up private social channels on Discord and provide regular updates on the progress made on both the hardware and software development. We will stay active in those channels for enthusiasts of the technology to engage with our team of artists and engineers and also promote the project development publicly via our Twitter & Instagram.
  • Artmatr will use the community Nouns as our test materials during the summer development process, and will publish the results as the works are formed.
  • We will officially launch the token-gated Nouns website for the community to start generating works using their Noun on August 1. Around the same time, we will host a live gallery event at Artmatr in NYC near the August 8th Nouniversary. We will exhibit the community Nouns created by Artmatr at the event, and allow Nouns holders the ability to create their work live that day.
  • The community-exclusive MATRing will remain active until January 31, allowing the community to create unique works of art from the Nouns that they hold in their wallets, utilizing a specialized UI which includes a number of AI and algorithmic features. Noun holders will be able to customize their Noun to create a unique work of art using pens, brushes, and our proprietary painting tools, MATRed on acid-free, archival grade 100 lb Bristol cardstock. The works will be shipped to each community member as they are made free of charge.
  • Timelapse video and hi-rez photos of each work will be collected and collated by our automated systems, and will be used to generate additional visibility of the project via dedicated Twitter and Discord channels. The content will also be available on our website, and used to mint works into a new collection of MATRed Nouns, each work being airdropped to its creator.

Watch a video demo: https://vimeo.com/829428238?share=copy [password: 4rtm4tr]

Timeline

Nouns DAO Submission May 26
Funds Received/Submission Accepted ~June 5
Machine Parts Order - Software R&D Begins June 6
Private Discord Channel Opens June 7
First Community Update (Weekly) June 14
Machine Rack Expansion Build Starts July 1
Nouns-sponsored “Matr Robot" Completed July 31
Nouns Matr Portal Opens to Community August 1
Nouniversary Event August 8
Noun #1,000 Minted ~January 31, 2024
Nouns MATR Portal Closes February 15, 2024

About

Artmatr’s team of experts from the art, robotics, Web3, and marketing worlds are focused on broadly expanding every artists’ creative toolkit. We want to make our highly sophisticated hardware and software technologies available to everyone, from the biggest names in art to an emerging creative at home. We have so far demonstrated our ability to execute bespoke projects at a small scale, and now we are ready to start opening the doors to the world at-large.

Led by CEO Rafael Feitelberg and CCO Ben Tritt, Artmatr’s creative studio in Brooklyn and R&D lab in Israel are developing revolutionary art-making tools and techniques. Our Brooklyn studio has a steady stream of artists coming in with brand new creative ideas unlocked thanks to our technology. Our new Matr Labs project will bring that creativity home to anyone with a computer, starting with the Nouns community.

Since our launch mid-2022, we have had successful projects with Tyler Hobbs, Zancan, Matthew Stone and Matthew Day Jackson, and our 2023 pipeline is full of exciting projects with blue-chip and emerging artists alike.

Artmatr’s Investors:

  • Delphi Digital: Delphi Digital is the leading research organization for crypto assets. Their research is regarded as an industry standard by institutions and crypto-natives alike. Delphi’s Ventures arm invests in early-stage Web3 startups, protocols, and networks that strive to make crypto happen sooner. Additionally, Delphi Labs incubates and builds protocols and tooling for the DeFi ecosystem.
  • Metaversal Ventures: Metaversal is a holding company focused on the NFT vertical spanning all stages of the market from large corporate brands to individual NFT artists. We deploy a differentiated strategy by investing in the next blue chip NFT assets, supporting NFT infrastructure build out, and acting as an incubator and venture studio to NFT creators. Metaversal partners with brands, creators, content holders, and IP owners to identify, execute, and underwrite evocative NFT projects. Backed by CoinFund, DCG, Galaxy and other leading investors, the Metaversal team is uniquely positioned to identify the requirements for success in the web3 ecosystem and remains platform and blockchain agnostic.

Budget & TXNs

Budget
Hardware Development and Fabrication

$83,000

Software & UI Development

$92,000

Web3 Development

$28,000

Team and Overhead

$96,000

Art Production Materials & Shipping/Handling

$79,000

Event Production

$85,000

Marketing and Comms

$26,000

Total Prop Costs

$489,000

Proposed Transactions:

489,000 USDC due at Acceptance

3 Likes

Hi all, thank you to everyone who has provided constructive feedback so far. We’ve had some great conversations of the last few days and look forward to continuing to address any questions that the community has before we ask for the proposal to go on chain. We want to provide a few updates to the project that we intend to make:

  • This project is envisioned as an on-demand service for the community, we hope to make 1,001 art objects but do not want to generate excess waste.

  • Rather than make the site token-gated by Nouns, we are planning to airdrop 1,001 Matr Labs tokens to every wallet with a Noun near the opening date of the Nouns MATR Portal, and to the ensuing Noun auction winners minted up to Noun 1,000. This will allow community members to trade their passes if they are not interested in participating, extending the reach of the project to a broader Nounish community. The portal would permit token holders to create any Noun, minted or Playground generated, embracing the Nouns’ CC0 spirit. All secondary royalties generated by token sales will be directed to the Nouns treasury. Each redeemable token’s metadata will be updated when it is used with a hi-res image of the MATRed piece upon completion. We have gotten very enthusiastic feedback for this modification to our prop from the community, and think this version of the prop adds additional value and flexibility to the project.

  • We want to stress our commitment to generating and deploying great digital content and marketing from this project, through our own and dedicated social media channels, as well as PR outreach on behalf of the DAO. We see each MATRed piece as an opportunity to spread the word about the creativity of the community and promote the brand, and our automated cameras will capture and produce a timelapse video of the the MATRing process of each created work. We will also explore collaborative Nouns MATRing with our community of blue-chip artists.

Thanks again for all your feedback, please keep reaching out to us either here or on Twitter/Discord. More updates to follow, including visualizations of the user experience, soon!

1 Like

Hi, I like the first collaboration between Nouns and Artmatr.
I think it did raise interest and prices of the auction.

You are requesting $489,000 in exchange for 1001 paintings? It is $488 USD per painting including shipping cost? Does that mean shipping worldwide?

1 Like

Yes, cost includes worldwide shipping. It is certainly easy to itemize the proposal that way, but we want to emphasize the additional marketing and content effort, as well as an event, that will go into this prop. Also, the way we are projecting this tech for public use in the future will likely be at a much higher price point.

2 Likes

We prepared a little concept video of our UI/UX that we plan to build on behalf of this project. You can watch it here.

Disclaimer that aspects and design will surely change, but this illustrates the core concept of creatively customizing the Noun and ensuing social engagement.

1 Like