Self-Driving Megaworms™ is a collection of 6666 generative ANTI-PFP cNFTs parthenogenically deployed by GHORECHEM INCOPORATED LTD. as Trucker Uniforms on the Solana Blockchain. Under the artistic direction of Kidxanthrax (@ghorestink666) and prompted by Luvbug (@brg_luvbug) they are designed to be fashion-blinded genuinely bad social media avatars which hope to push character based generative NFT art beyond the present confines of the PFP.
ANTI-PFP
BEYOND THE AVATAR
When Fang was designing Milady with Sprite he wrote a somewhat inadvertently influential work on the idea of profile first PFPNFT wherein he discussed the physiognomy of the profile picture avatar criticizing the then explosively popular BAYC. He wrote about seemingly mundane formal qualities such as crop and background colour which were perhaps interesting and less intuitive at the time. What these notes really amounted to was an admission to the conscious tailoring of this newly popular art form to the confines of the social media specifications of (crypto) Twitter. This makes sense considering the Twitter PFP became the NFT’s most popular use case and the social media platform was where most of the audience that formed crypto cults therein would congregate. It also aligns itself nicely with the Network Spiritualist embrace of social media as a primary artistic space of creation especially during the forced lockdowns of COVID-19.
Since the popularization of Milady numerous derivatives have cropped up, many of which have closely studied and replicated these specifications laid out by Remilia Corporation following suit with the Neo Chibi digital painting style. Some of the less reverent derivatives however became unsanctioned (for reasons beyond strict aesthetics) breaking away into chaotic and experimental modes that adhered less to the physiognomy of the profile picture. Most notable of such break-off derivs was MiFella and other Fellaverse projects. The Fellas began to align more with the OG SOL hit collection Toji CPU by Tojiba Corp, in their concern with a more formally challenging and eventually deconstructionist approach to the PFPNFT(see Cuckfella). Note that the original Toji PCs pushed the PFPNFT into object-hood instead of the character based PFP which removed some of the aforementioned use case appeal but provided a unique aesthetic appeal that is hard to ignore.
The point of this brief (mind you incomplete) history here is not to debate the origin of terminologies such as AvantNFT, or to choose sides, but rather to outline what I view as opposing schools of thought in the milieu of quality artistic PFPNFT art which inspired the SDMW™ in different capacities. The aforementioned Neo-Chibi RemCo school emphasized the avatar use case as a primary tool in the process of minting a crypto finance cult, whereas the latter school which formed primarily on Solana (cheaper chain with lower barriers to entry) emphasized the formal aesthetic potential and limitations of the generative PFP, less concerned with financialization as the primary driver of the mediums development.
In designing the Self-Driving Megaworms™ with Luvbug we were coming from somewhat opposing camps without fully realizing it, which ended up playing in our favour. I was initially very interested in this Solana school, excited about pushing formal qualities of the generative PFP to its breaking point. Luvbug on the other hand who had played a significant role in forming the RemCo aligned Based Retard Gang Music Group was quick to remind me of the importance of treating the PFP as a sort of uniform with a distinct character.
We conceded to make a collection wherein the composition mimicked that of the traditional rugcore animalNFT: a ¾ view, right facing character cropped around mid upper body. The result was the Self-Driving Megaworm™; an obese middle aged trucker touting a Trucker cap and wearing sunglasses taking a selfie. Eventually we expanded the design to integrate a more dynamic composition and dropped the selfie idea as it was presenting too many issues with foreshortening. The background of the character (which in many first gen rugcore NFTs is a simple randomized colour or a single exterior setting) was designed to seat the trucker including a flag for the cab interior and an exterior which suggests a world of lore beyond the Megaworms™ themselves.
With Luvbug’s prompting and my heavy handed (admittedly naive) experimentation with the form I believe we have achieved a collection which simultaneously explodes the PFP formally while remaining very recognizable as such.
TRAITMAXXIMALISM
The Self Driving Megaworm™ is a TraitMaxxie ANTI-PFP. It is the traitmaxximalism which distinguishes it from many other PFP collections and pushes the PFP towards a broken zenith. The SDMW™ has 17 trait categories which is more than most collections I am aware of. In the early days of development Luvbug and I had been obsessed with a Radbro derivative collection called Radcats which were silly and very experimental AnimalPFPs. I wanted to achieve a similar silliness and sense of chaos with the SDMWs™ so I set out to create over 1000 traits in an arduous multiple month long process involving many different digital illustration methodologies. The original composition was 3D rendered in Maya using Arnold and Hardware rendering with stolen assets from the internet -- save the body of the character which I sculpted in Zbrush. Eventually we realized the power of collage, utilizing AI to experiment and create assets, cutting out specific pieces of generated images to be used as traits. Many of the exterior backgrounds were created this way.
One of the foremost chaotic design elements of the Self Driving Megaworms™ were the arms, which we decided we would omit from the sculpted body. The arms are variously collaged over the trucker’s obese thumb-like torso, often tattooed clutching the steering wheel, sometimes with achondroplasia, sometimes passively resting at the character’s side, sometimes armed with a bazooka, but always stylistically variant in a way that is incoherent with the rest of the image resulting in a rough and collaged look. This decision was made to make the posing of the characters more dynamic adding another narrative device to the collection. It also caused several messy combinations and layer ordering issues which I resolved to keep because they looked hilarious and revealed the mechanics of the art engine I was using to generate the collection.
The other Traitmaxxed dynamic is achieved through the layered overlays. There were two main overlay layers: one which was a “styleover” sourced from memetic content found online, and the other was scanned in “drawlings” textures sourced from an old sketchbook I dug up from years ago. These overlays were initially intended to be weighted very low in rarity but as the collection developed took on much more heavy weighting than in earlier generations. This was decided because I really enjoyed the way the overlays disrupted and flattened the already busy 3D composition creating a much less compositionally neat and expressionistic total image. The depth was still there but there was always the reminder that it is a digital image which could be edited or defaced by any user at any given moment.
The term “ANTI-PFP” is not unlike “ANTI-ART” or “ANTI-MUSIC” in that it serves to connote a pushing to the limits rather than a true defacement of the form. Being truly ANTI-PFP would actually mean taking the stance which most of the traditional art world holds as popular opinion not recognizing any potential in the medium at all. Rather I was concerned more with the iconoclasm of the technical image itself seeking a self-aware means of pushing the form to its limits and beyond while retaining those qualities which make it interesting.
META-DATAISM
The tongue-in-cheek neologism is a pun operating on many levels as a way to connect the anti-traditions of Dada to the disruptive nature of the generative PFP as financialized “datafied” art, and on the other hand points to notions of Meta-Modernity and the self-reflexive cybernetic loop of network art.
HYPERCOLLAGE
As many will know, what makes a generative PFPNFT different from any JPEG is it’s JSON text document which contains metadata. This metadata consists of the rarity weighting and names of each trait as well as the collections contract details. When minted, each NFT becomes data containing financialized pieces of itself situating its rarity and worth in relation to the other NFT image assets within the collection. This financialized vivisection of the technical image is the major innovation and initially (Fang has noted elsewhere) it’s main appeal. However when approached as a surgical process of (CPU-aided) hyper-collaging of cultural image-artifacts into several unique works it raises many interesting issues about how to value each cultural piece of the whole. With Milady, RemCo were aware of this issue and created a Sartorialist hierarchy, a single unique digital character with its own fashion items (some have referred to this as dressing up the doll) and in turn becoming its own digital luxury PFP fashion item. However when a less hierarchical approach is taken to this hyper-collage art engine you are left with a machinically accelerated absurdism which can tell a wholly different (perhaps less bourgeois) story. With the SDMWs™ this story is one of a less fashion oriented working class fleet of supply chain workers of various racial cultural heritages smashed together inspired by the post-cultural context of the 2022 Canada Convoy Anti-Mask Protests.
EXQUISITE RACE
When Luvbug came to me with the idea for this collection we were initially excited by the humorous potential of randomizing strong cultural signifiers. We talked about post-identity (a major theme in Based Retard Gang lore, everyone is an asian girl online et cetera) but applied in an accelerated racial cultural surrealism. The intention here was to bring the woke internationalism of Twitter bios to life. Suddenly a trucker with black skin is wearing a shtreimel, rainbow shutter glasses, a ball gag harness, sitting in a wheelchair and touting an ak-47. Our thoughts were: that person probably exists. The hyper-specification of identity within the post-cultural landscape of online political discourse was always the joke we wanted to tell via artificial intelligence automatism. The results are not unlike an Exquisite Corpse drawing except the collaborator in this instance was the same machine which was over-driving political identity to such hilariously specific iterations. Eventually it became clear that this made sense in tandem with the Trucker Convoy which I remember distinctly responding to accusations of far-right extremism by pointing to the multicultural nature of the Truckers. A sort of surrealist portraiture of the Canadian proletariat began to emerge.
There are however still defining characteristics to the SDMWs™ of course in their predominantly (Xeno)masculine and militant anarchic energies. The Megaworm™ is the custodian of the supply chain who has revolted against the parasitical rig that he is no longer really operating. This Bugman-Workerist vibe is also apparent if one were to observe any of the clothing items the truckers are wearing, notice there are few if any brand references, save the odd pro-Trump MAGA merchandise. Some have noted the use of far right imagery in the collection as a sort of critique but fail to ever mention the other political ideologies represented such as the Me Too icon knitted Pussy Hat. Eventually the signifiers were sufficiently randomized and the question was how do we account for rarity without becoming culturally hierarchical.
ANTHROPO-METAMORPHIC RARITY
The solution was nested somewhere within the lore of GHORECHEM INCORPORATED LTD. The SDWM™ rarity is thus not weighted in terms of swag but rather in terms of the xenomasculine degradation of the human subject into AnimalPFP. The closer the Megaworm™ resembles a trucker in appearance the less exposure they have had to the toxins which mutagenically transform them into subhuman hypermasculine worm subjects. In other words the rarest Megaworms™ are the least human. Unlike other PFPNFTs which portray a singular character with variation in outfit, Megaworms™ are an egregore which are recognizable only in their inhuman insanity.
Ironically what makes many other collections minted recently on Solana so recognizable is there reference to past metas. Retardio Cousins for example are extremely Meta-Dadaist but from a different angle. Derivatives like this do not only have hyper-referentiality embedded within their own traits but, when you zoom out, within the general meta of a crypto cycle as a whole. Retardio Cousins carry very few design elements distinct from Remilios, and are not a derivative in design but rather simply a multi-chain solution. They point to a cybernetic network which has become so self-referential it is now eating its own tail in an endless cycle of sameness and cheap knock-off scams. With SDMWs™ we intended to mint a completely new egregore and in doing so we realized we need that egregore to have characteristics wholly unique to itself.
Profile As Art
POSTEURSHIP
The question remained: how do we maintain an acephalic or non-hierarchical structure to a community while establishing a post-identity which is distinct yet schizophrenically deterritorializing itself politically and aesthetically. We decided to shift our focus onto character building and began creating Megaworm™ alts to flesh these things out on the TL.
From here on for about 4 months we engaged in a constant and somewhat tiresome campaign of occultural propaganda warfare building a cargo cult of politcal extrophile retardigrade postuers. IRL friends, artists, writers, musicians and thinkers came together into a scene of experimental hardcore posting with an emphasis on surrealist freespeachmaxxing. A few of us had 4 or 5 alts allowing the visual identity of the SDMW™ to inform the characters we had developed. Many unique personalities and political orientations arose from the OG Megaworm™ egregore, inciting a post-woke, post-reactionary, community agnosticism made up of a diverse array of individuals all rallying in a post-human convoy under the flag of pure and untethered retard disruption and elaborate LARP as performance: the true cowboys of the anarchic wild west of web3 in this cycle.
ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE FINANCE CULT
Simultaneously we began running a weekly X space through 66.6 EARWORM RADIO (hosted by @heavenrazor and I) the semi-fictional corporate radio station of GC.INC conducting an anthropology of the crypto cult spreading Megaworm™ propaganda. Each week we would invite an artist or community leader from various NFT occultures to come on and converse, shill, or beef giving us the platform to flesh out our characters even further and to spread the parthenogenic virus further throughout CT. This had the dual effect of minting audience and gaining insight into this bull cycle's alpha, and it turned out this elaborate shill of a propaganda campaign worked.
AVANT RUG-CORE
After minting out 6666 SDMWs™ in under a week we began to notice a through-line in many of the responses to the collection: “I don’t understand what I just bought but I love it.” was unknowingly repeated as a memetic sentiment on so many occasions from so many members of distinct communities it became hard to ignore. I took this as succinct proof that my avant-rugcore experiment worked.
NFT ‘collectors’ with far too much crypto liquidity, far too few use cases will ape into just about any piece of ‘art’ without understanding its historical context, aesthetic value, or researching the creator. Many of them are still operating on the meta from the last cultural cycle of financialized art asking about a roadmap and utility, conditioned to projects which make massive promises in the beginning, charge exorbitant prices and end up pulling the rug on the buyers they duped into believing there was ever really a community at all. So many of the buyers are so conditioned into a cybernetic ouroboric cycle of self-sucking vector art aesthetics, they are truly bewildered by a project that actually makes them feel something, one that moves them to a state of pure confusion and love. Self-Driving Megaworms™ have no roadmap, they are iconoclasts of the technical image who accelerate towards computer generated image extinction alone in their rig, knowing there are others out there like them locked into this wild trip through psychedelic finance. In reality we have engaged the same dynamics which all financialized artworks seem to succumb to, we shilled the shit out of SDMWs™ and made a lot of money in the process. However the Meta-Data for this cycle already seems to suggest that people are realizing where the real value is locked. Not within the faux defi protocol propped up by VC non-artist bad-actor financiers as money laundering schemes but rather within the mutagenesis on the margins of culture, the vangaurd of supply chain workers operating those self-driving electric vehicles from the unnerving comfort of their own head-canon.
POST-SCRIPT: NOTES ON PRICING AND ACCESSIBILITY
SDMW™ integrated into it’s pricing structure a similar non-hierarchical structure as mentioned above minted at a price that any working class person could afford 0.1234 SOL and 0.0666 SOL for Whitelisted communities. The idea being the rapid minting of real audience which accelerates into an eventual price discovery (we saw the success of this with Little Swag World and Drifella before us). Within 1 month of minting out the floorprice has 10x’d and at the current date SDMWs™ are trading at a 1 SOL floor. Luvbug once said “an NFT is just a shitcoin in slow motion” the only difference being that buyers get to walk away with a cool JPEG, or as I’ve heard it called, a “gay little artifact”.