On the 5th of April 2024 I found myself in a sweet spot in Tuscany...

I had some high quality watercolor paper, water from the river, some coal i recovered from a door burned in Collodi (the town of Pinocchio) and my colors. So I decided to make a calligraphy. This project of mine is about finding a shape then repeat it as a gesture many times. In the process this sign it will acquire a sound. And maybe a meaning is waiting in the end, in some years to come. Is the same path as the zen exercise of calligraphy but in reverse.

Some of these signs have already found me since I started in 2020, during the COVID19 lock down. I take the paper, clean my mind, let my hand move. I prefer to make my own inks if i have the chance. I have used tannin ones so far and watercolors, coal, sulfur of iron and other chemicals to dust the page and produce unforeseeable patterns in the color. At a certain moment the process is finished and the form does not require any change anymore.

This time I was in love with the spot of water in the drying phase. I used some charcoal dust to add texture and the wind was blowing it gently away while the paper dried...

I had the intuition that it needed this spot and this moment to become that precise moment of the process, something more specific. I took a picture and made immediately a NFT of it on the OPEN NETWORK Blockchain. I have almost without thinking as well a series of these "traces" and put the first one on auction to a symbolic bid to give the chance to a random stranger to buy it for 6 days. Both pieces have been made in the same spot one after the other. I added the location coordinates and time to the NFT, maybe I will add more metadata in the future. I will not publish the image of the dry works, so the two will be part of a whole of which one is only digital and another one on paper, as a trace one of the other, that touched in a specific moment in space and time when I decided the gesture was concluded.

Will see what happens to this. The Blockchain operates with TON coins and the wallet inside Telegram messenger.

The photo shows both NFTs created yesterday now on my wallet after the minting

TON is a proof of stake blockchain that does not consume insane amount of electricity for the block validation so can be considered ecologically safe to a certain degree. I love telegram messenger for many reasons but this is the custodian wallet called Tonkeeper, as a reference. Does not suck.

The NFT and the final (dried) watercolors will be exhibited in the first available occasion, that should be the Etherea universo digitale exhibition in Genova in June. Will keep you posted. If i do more in this series I will post updates on this site. Happy Spotting

ADDENDA:

We live already in the hybrid word. We are no more somehow ourselves, our life, but many more. We have no more knowledge of a single here-now but many more, due to our connection via internet and other communication means in the interconnected media sphere. My thesis is that this interconnection in the techno sphere has many side effects. It has an effect on the perception of subtle self, the collective unconscious, the ES. Sympathical engagement works. As the quantum one possibly does.

Calligraphy as a gesture from the empty mind that sets in the timeline of a life, in the here now a trace of a gesture, the image of a sign, the meaning of a sound. In reverse, from the same empty mind, that i obtain from my practice, the trace of the gesture is pure and chaotic, not yet a sign, deprived of meaning and sound. I add color. Is a ongoing research on color, how to make it, how to use it and on grain and dirt that i can add to it. I use sometimes the tanninic acid i produce boiling oak gal dust with iron sulfur directly on paper, or add to self made inks a spot of watercolor, or coffee, or other colorants I have at hand. It is a specific moment of my life that I put on the paper. And I have to recognize, this being the hardest part, when it is "finished". Then I stop.

Stop has never been easy, as is somehow connected with stepping out of the mental emptiness. Moreover the paper has still to dry. Will the color be stable? Will it dry that beauty full color effect or it will fade? This is what I capture digitally, with the phone, as many of us do, as billions of humans are doing, feeding the data conglomerate of "digital blobs" that interpreted signify a picture, of a calligraphy for example. Or of a spaghetti dish, that is maybe even more meaningful.

The intuition of this series of work is that those two deepness touch, in the empty mind, in the fabric of universe. But the digital photo with its metadata is not enough, as the dried piece is not carrying the extra meaning, the lived moment of wonder that says "thou shall not add more". So i decided to mirror the experience of this finite consciousness into a blockchain. The digital image becomes a nonfungible token, with a position, a time, a signature and all her metadata. This digital twin is no twin, because the real object is now dry.

When I am going to put them back to back, the NFT, in one of its representation, and the paper sign, will it have a sound? Will this help me to unleash its power into a sound that has a meaning? Carries a spell, an emotion, a shiver?

Will this piece, that represents the surface between here and now and the cryptographic block time accessible only through the present complexity of the matrix acquire a meaning, and more important this meaning be recognized by another being?

We are all leaving a trace, complex and irregular on the matrix own data world. A trace that is as real, in my eye, to the trace of our conscience in a metro train car. Back to back these two traces touch, and maybe, there, a door can open. I will not ever make a picture of this dried piece of paper.