Where Data & Art Meet
A Guest Post by Mitchell F. Chan
👋🏽 Hello everyone, GM, GM!
Today we’re bringing you a guest post by Mitchell F. Chan, a Toronto-based OG crypto artist who’s been contributing to the space for 7+ years.
Perhaps best known for creating one of the first major NFT art projects in 2017, ‘Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility,’ Mitchell’s work explores themes of ownership and the commodification of art.
Long before he began making crypto art, however, Mitchell worked for baseball historian Bill James, the man whose ‘sabermetrics’ approach partially inspired the hit book Moneyball. He leans into those roots with his latest project, The Boys of Summer, a PFP & game.
Give it a read below, and be sure to check out Carly’s recent interview with Mitchell, at the end of last week’s recap episode!
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There's really nothing about our lives we can't quantify. Our Apple watch tells us how many steps we’ve taken, Gmail alerts us to messages we’ve yet to read, our bank account tracks what we spend and save.
Statistics and numbers are the tools we use to tell very complicated stories – the blunt instruments that measure nearly every detail of our lives and tell us how we’re doing. We are reflected through an amalgam of data that, when combined and analyzed, say something about our quality of life, habits, and – if we chose to let it – our potential.
We put a lot of stock in that data: how much money have we made? How many steps have we taken? How productive have I been today measured in emails sent?
And this tendency is even more pronounced in web3.
I've been in crypto for 7 years, and making crypto art for all of them. I'm particularly attuned to the role of numbers in our community’s sense of self-worth or sense of self, period. Line go up? Number go down? What’s the floor price?
Of course, quantifying ourselves is nothing new. Humans have been categorizing people, data-fying them, for a long time now. What has emerged more recently is the sense that we should actually own some of these datasets: our followers, our health records, our information.
This, too, is a particularly crypto idea. As a community, we spend a lot more time than most thinking about control of our own data.
And so, as an artist, I wanted to grapple with these ideas in the way I know how: by making art.
My latest collection is called ‘The Boys of Summer.’ It’s a PFP (because the PFP movement – where we break things down by individual traits and binary qualities and trade them on highly liquid, financialized, and incentivized marketplaces – embodies so much of this obsession with numbers that I’m playing with) and it’s a game - one in which your PFP character is perpetually making choices and taking actions that make the various scores (numbers) on your dashboard (and in your metadata) go up and down.
The PFPs are baseball players (hence, Boys of Summer). I drew inspiration from the summer I spent collecting player stats in Minor League Baseball for Bill James' Baseball Info Solutions. Bill was a baseball analyst whose work inspired sabermetrics and transformed the sport – a feat famously documented in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball.
My experience working for Bill would later crystallize the idea that a person and all of their capabilities could be boiled down to a set of statistics. That data could be used to represent your potential.
My goal is that ‘The Boys of Summer’ makes the big questions of life – those magnified in crypto – a bit more manageable. I hope holders and players will think about how behaviors inform qualities, and how qualities become statistics that predict societal decisions about what - and who - is ‘successful.’ And I want us all to examine our value systems and the inherent biases that shape our potential. This is the performance. Everyone plays the game, makes themselves into metadata that then becomes measured as market data. It’s about the process of quantifying ourselves, and how good it can feel. Because it’s fun to turn yourself into a set of numbers, right? Well, that part is up to you. I hope you’ll play with me.
‘The Boys of Summer’ debuts August 16, exclusively on Wildxyz, the home for experiential art. If you’re interested in allowlist access to ‘The Boys of Summer’, be sure to enroll via this PREMINT link reserved for Overpriced JPEGs followers!
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