Took a Big Writing Break While I Made a Bunch of Art (Plus NFTs)!

Clyde F. Smith
2 min readJan 13, 2023
Dumpster Fire 36.50 from 44 Dumpster Fires, An NFT Collection by Flux Research

If you check out my Medium profile, you’ll see that I haven’t written a lot this year. I actually did more than this profile suggests, but it’s true, I ultimately took a big break and now I’m back. This time, with art!

In 2021, I only minted one collection, The Early Days, on OpenSea. I gained some solid collectors but the response was generally underwhelming. I expected to follow with a dozen Dumpster Fires and talked to biz dev guys from two different NFT platforms that were planning launches on the Flow blockchain. They loved my work!

ProTip: Artists should not talk to biz dev guys. Both ghosted me and so 44 Dumpster Fires did not launch till 2022. It was my first drop on the Tezos blockchain and I’m very happy about how things are going there.

TrashArt Stamp from TrashArt Tattoos, An NFT Collection by Flux Research

I followed 44 Dumpster Fires with TrashArt Tattoos, my second collection on objkt, which could be considered a much smaller OpenSea for Tezos. Oddly enough, 44 Dumpster Fires was inspired by the TrashArt movement but ended up being a beautiful collection that did not fit the TrashArt aesthetic.

TrashArt Tattoos is a better fit with TrashArt, though you could debate this one as well. It was a delayed response to TrashArt Day on Tezos which was a heck of a lot of fun and went on for about a week.

Headless from Stairway to Psychedelia, An NFT Collection by Flux Research

My final collection for the year, Stairway to Psychedelia, drew on a series of video stills of a performance project by myself and musician Jeb Bishop from video documentation by Neal Hutcheson. I’ve previously written about this Stairway Session and am now revisiting the documentation to create new visuals.

Both 44 Dumpster Fires and Stairway to Psychedelia included the use of generative adversarial networks created by Playform. I write more about some of the ideas and processes behind my art at Flux Art NFTs. But, as you’ll see, I’m a bit behind on my writing there as well!

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