She held it up in front of the digital billboard and snapped a photo. Silver pulled out a scrap of paper, scribbled the name “Claire” on it, and drew a tiny flower next to her name. She felt like she was staring at her reflection. She pulled a black hat over her hair and walked fast to 1629. Under a blanket of clouds that threatened rain, she piloted her minivan down Manhattan’s packed avenues and parked a few blocks away from MoMA. In the morning she headed to the store’s restroom, then hit the road again. Each night as it got dark, she navigated to a Walmart parking lot and bunked down in the back of her car. Silver wanted to see 1629’s pixels in the flesh, so she shoved a futon into the back of her Dodge Grand Caravan and set off from her sleepy town on a three-day drive to New York. “Surreal doesn’t begin to cover it,” she tweeted after seeing a photo of the installation. It was almost as if Mr703’s prediction had come true. In May, on 55th Street in Manhattan, just three blocks from MoMA, the pink-haired Punk appeared on a screen atop a public Wi-Fi kiosk. One day a photographer named Justin Aversano, who cofounded a nonprofit that uses empty billboards and other advertising space to promote art, sent her a message asking her if he could use Punk No. Silver realized that Twitter and Discord were her conduits to a better life. Now, with a few thousand dollars’ worth of ether in her crypto wallet, she felt light-headed when she drifted down the aisles.
The store had always been a place that pummeled her with reminders of things she couldn’t afford. When she was a child, she says, her family relied on food donated by a local church, and as an adult she steered herself to the middle aisles of Walmart’s food section, where the cheapest groceries are kept.
Silver’s life, in a rural town surrounded by cornfields, was changed. The roughly $6,000 worth of ether that landed in her crypto wallet from these sales was enough to cover half a year of rent and groceries. Then Mr703 bought 12 moody portraits of figures in the palette of the old masters-all made with AI. An artist embodying a CryptoPunk and making her own NFTs was a delicious clash of memes, just the sort of thing the internet rewards.Ī birder and NFT enthusiast named Tom Marsan-Ryan became the first person to buy one of Silver’s pieces-an image of a crow seeming to perch on a branch made of flowers. “I started getting a thousand followers a month, and a ton of engagement, and a ton of DMs for opportunities,” Silver says. 1629, a pink-haired girl with a black hat. In late February, Silver changed her Twitter profile picture from one of her own works to Punk No. She’d noticed that people who used one as an avatar seemed to get clout in online discussions, as if owning a Punk was evidence of wisdom or investment prowess. She minted her first work on January 9, paid the $50 Ethereum transaction fee, and listed it for 0.5 ether (about $630).ĭiscouraged, she thought about her Punks. She found a pair of platforms, Rarible and OpenSea, where she could create NFTs of her own work and put them up them for sale. In January 2021, Silver noticed on Twitter that people kept mentioning the CryptoPunks and that people were buying NFTs for heaps of money. She selected some of these generated images and incorporated them into larger works. She found a tool called Ganbreeder that allowed her to train a machine-learning algorithm on images of her choice and to produce new ones. If AI could augment a person’s abilities, would it alleviate their suffering? On the other hand, would the loss of pain diminish their depth of spirit? Her curiosity sent her in search of ways to experiment with AI in her art. She starting thinking about artificial intelligence and whether it might help people like her, people with disabilities, in the future. She used it to make collages with photographs of her earlier work, public-domain images, and her doodles. She bought a secondhand iPad on Craigslist and spent $10 for an app called ProCreate. He gave away several more Punks and started going by the name Mr703.Ĭrypto winter had been difficult for Silver seeing her savings tank demoralized her, and she withdrew from her chat rooms. He was convinced that they belonged in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and he and Silver vowed that, no matter how high prices might climb, they wouldn’t sell until mainstream arbiters of culture caught up to them.