Usually I write a long piece about an artist. But I am trying something new today. I am pointing you to a thread I wrote recently on Twitter about Piv’s homage to Joseph Albers. You can visit that and get a good run down of an amazing project. If you want context, read below:

The work is called “Clickbait,” and it is an assembly of PNG files that arrange the color pixels of a CryptoPunk into nesting squares. The work references the work of Joseph Albers, a painter who spent decades of his life doing the same thing with commercial paint he bought from stores and manufacturers. His exploration of simultaneous contrast, or the way that colors next to each other alter how their hues are perceived, led him to discover that paints from different suppliers may have shared the same name, but they also looked completely different on their own.

Piv is playing with this unsettling interplay between artistic heuristics and our expectations that colors are stable and their stability is an anchor for meaning we assign them.

In Clickbait, the NFT viewer is invited to click on each nesting square color and see where the color originates from in an NFT profile picture, or PFP, called a CryptoPunk.

Some CryptoPunks (there’s a whole story here, which I will get into one day)

In doing so, the viewer notices that the color in the nesting box is altered by its proximity to the hue next to it. When the “reveal” happens, the clickbait is shown — often the natural color in the CryptoPunk looks orders of magnitude different.

Below is an example of the Bait and the Click. But visit the twitter thread and give me feedback. I’d love to know if the explanation and video I show there makes this easy to understand. It’s an original NFT project that deeply explores the aesthetic, technical and philosophical implications of putting art on the blockchain.