1080 Zero Grav is a pioneering conceptual artwork collection that stands at the intersection of ON-CHAIN storage, DYNAMIC media, INTERACTIVE content, GENERATIVE art, and MULTIDIMENSIONAL experience. It melds skateboard components and inscriptions into an NFT collection that skillfully bridges the worlds of boarding culture and finance. This convergence highlights striking similarities between the two realms – notably in terms of their respective speculative, volatile and risky movements – redefining their value through a unique lens.
It is also a tribute to the late Randy Martin, whose reading of the derivative outside of finance and especially in artistic and cultural practices coincides deeply with the project founder’s practice and thinking.
UNDERSTANDING OUR ART
Zero gravity conceptually allows objects to levitate, unbound by any connection to larger systems, entities, or objects—representing a form of material liberation. However, our artworks dig deeper, embodying the essence of speculative logic rather than escaping it. They mimic how gravity itself is indifferent to its own force. Incorporating skateboards into this realm of 'non-gravity' presents a material challenge: although skateboarding inherently defies gravity through its risky tricks and movements, it is ultimately tied to the physical world's gravitational pull. Therefore, performing zero-gravity 1080 spins on the blockchain becomes a symbolic act. The fluidity of tokenized markets, whether liquid or otherwise, serves as our playground, akin to ramps in skateboarding or emptied pools to be occupied.
1080 zero grav explores some of the striking parallels between boarding culture and crypto/finance. The art project transforms the NFT space into a participative ecosystem that feels like a digital skatepark in which volatility, arbitrage, and leverage turn into aesthetic and dynamic forms of visual movement.
1080 zero grav takes skateboarding from the physical space to the blockchain. The NFT collection celebrates boarding as the art of volatile balancing, from asphalt surfing to street skateboarding, and on to crypto boarding!
1080 zero grav plays with the contingency of the next move in what we believe is boarding’s common trait with derivative finance: a performative, even visceral, exposure to risk, a radical and novel affirmation of volatility and leverage distinctive of a derivative condition. While boarding and (crypto)finance share a passion for speculative flows, boarding culture excels as a movement that has shaped itself into a kinesthetic artform.
1080 zero grav explores the logic of the NFT ecosystem. Is there a speculative brilliance in “shredding” the market? Are there sick “aerials” and swings that exceed the truism of buying low and selling high? The crypto space alone might lack genuine artistic logic, but what about qualities akin to stoked boarding moves, something like dynamically hedging tokens artfully in volatile market conditions? What about a speculative logic deriving from the aesthetic and ever-changing value of NFT art that exceeds mere “token effort"?
1080 zero grav turns NFT liquidity into a playful, artistic experience. You participate in the 1080 zero grav ecosystem creation by assembling your board and trading its parts in the initial mint. Based on staking and arbitrage rewards, the next level aims to assemble a Web3D boarding contest. Racing, jumping, verting, flipping, grinding, and carving through NFT space, can your speculative flow skill defy gravity?
Later, we might take the fun even further, let’s say to an “XYZ-games DAO”? As a rad play on the level of resonating volatilities, boarding virtual flows in a 3D environment could become a joint challenge to carve out and leverage new ways of sensing, indexing, and navigating 3D-space. In other words: Free Web3 from Gravity!
HOW OUR NFTs WORK
All trades and transfers (excluding safeTransfer) influence the appearance and animation of our NFTs dynamically and update their traits. Metadata has to be manually updated on platforms like Opensea. Our NFTs consist of three components. Invocations, gravity and volatility.
You can try it out for yourself on Opensea:
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Invocations:
Hover with your mouse over the invocation on the skateboard.
Dynamic change: transfers/trades = higher speed of the animation.
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Gravity:
Click and hold your mouse on a sphere and move it anywhere within the NFT in order to change the gravitational direction of the skateboard.
Dynamic change: transfers/trades = more spheres in space
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Volatility:
Click with your mouse anywhere inside the board to generate visuals from the click-point.
Dynamic change: more transfers/trades = more click-points to create your generative artwork
DYNAMIC COLLECTION PREVIEW IMAGES
All of our collection preview images on Opensea are dynamic too and track a variety of different technical indicators:
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Inverse Mint Fear & Greed Index:
Shorter time frames between each mint, result in a lower Inverse Mint Fear & Greed Index and vice versa.
0 = greed
infinity = fear
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Implied Volatility:
Implied volatility decreases the faster a trading cycle of a particular NFT is in comparison to its previous trades and the time in-between the cycles.
0 = highest implied volatility
infinity = lowest implied volatility
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Leverage:
Leverage tracks the comparison of the volatility metric compared to previous states of volatility.
0 = lowest leverage
infinity = highest leverage
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Liquidity:
The liquidity metric changes proportional with the number of transfers.
0 = never transferred
1080 = 1080 transfers
METADATA, TRANSFERS AND MORE
Transfers:
In order for you to activate your NFT’s metadata, you need to transfer the NFT for the first time. You can transfer it to your own wallet using Etherscan. For this you can utilize the “transferFrom” function. Input your own wallet address in both address fields and find your tokenId (number between 1 and 1080). If you DO NOT wish to alter your metadata using transfers, you can use the 7th function named “safeTransferFrom”.
Example using Etherscan:
Token ID:
Below is an example for finding your TokenId using Opensea.
Access your NFT, scroll down to “Details”.
Refreshing metadata:
After your NFT has been transferred to your own wallet, you can refresh the metadata on Opensea on the top right side menu.
MINT DETAILS AND WHITELIST
Mint date: April 28th
Supply: 1080
Network: Base
Friendlist: Free (gas fee sent to your wallet before mint, no need to fund the wallet)
Whitelist: 0.0085 ETH per NFT (can be subject to change)
Every Mint is a batch mint of 3 NFTs, so that everyone can start by owning all three components, the invocations, gravity and volatility.
We are going to publish our two public whitelisting campaigns soon via intract.io and twitter.com. If you are part of an art community, reach out to them so they can contact us for whitelist spots.
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Our Intract campaign is going to consist of a follow, like and retweet task system with a raffle for the 120 allocated spots at the end (360 NFTs).
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Our Twitter campaign is going to revolve around submitting your best generated art visuals based on our “volatility” NFT, a jury of artists will hand-pick the winning entries.
In the meantime, reach out on twitter or email if you think you should be given the chance to mint our artworks. If you follow our channels or reach out via email (community@zerograv.xyz) you will be noticed in time about our mint start.
COLLECTION SUPPLY AND PHASES
There can be a maximum of 360 mints in total (batch mint of 3 NFTs per transaction).
36 NFTs are reserved for the team:
We are never going to sell on secondary markets, it’s our own art, we will get a fraction of our oneandahalf years of dedicated work back from mint and royalties. We like the art so much, we want some artworks for ourselves to keep, a token of what we accomplished.
360 NFTs are reserved for the friendlist:
VIP’s, contributors, heavy supporters, pioneers, groundbreaking artists, enablers and educators, who either contributed to our project, its creation and distribution or who contributed to this art genre generally with the work they have done throughout their lifetimes.
801 NFTs are reserved for the whitelist:
Community members, art appreciators, finance enthusiasts and those who completed tasks in order to earn their whitelist as well as those who won their list because their community was able to get a spot for them. The whitelist is slightly overallocated with 39 spots (117 NFTs).
XYZ NFTs remain for the public sale:
Any NFTs not sold can be minted by the public, with a wallet limit of 1 transaction or 3 NFTs per wallet address.
XYZ NFTs remain for the community vault:
For the small chance that the collection is not minted out, we are going to mint the remaining XYZ pieces to a community vault, never to be sold on secondary markets. Unless the community decides to do it in a decentralized vote. This form of collective ownership rewards those who minted our NFT by enabling them to collectively own the remaining supply, as a token of gratitude for contributing to our artwork by being a part of it. The holders could decide to airdrop the remaining supply to their own wallets, use them as a reward mechanism for contributors or priced out appreciators who would genuinely love to be a part of this collection, for heavy supporters or enablers or to rent it out to an art gallery exhibition, everything is possible. Even if there is no remaining supply after the whitelist or public phase, we are going to implement decentralized voting mechanisms for our community, which will come in handy in the next steps of the artwork collection.
BEHIND THE ARTWORKS AND PROJECT
Our artworks have been crafted by Gerald Nestler, Sylvia Eckermann and Porzel Aaron.
Our project has been funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport and the City of Vienna.
Gerald Nestler:
Gerald is an artist and researcher who combines theory and conversation with performance, installation, intervention, video, code, sound and speech. He also develops post-disciplinary formats and collaborative practices between art and other fields of knowledge and experience. His research focuses on the derivative condition of technocapitalism and its models, technologies and narratives. His research project aesthetics of resolution applies the semantic field of the term to the performative speech of data-driven bio-power to which renegade activism addresses resistance as insurrection beyond critique and dissent. Gerald graduated from the Academy of fine arts Vienna (1992) and researched finance as a broker and trader (1994-97). His work has been shown internationally and he has published and edited widely on art, finance, media, and technology. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmith, University of London (2017), where he was a researcher at Forensic Architecture. He is also a member of the Technopolitics research group, Vienna.
Sylvia Eckermann:
In Sylvia's work, a discursive engagement with form and media culminates in critical artistic reflections about our entanglement as individuals in current socio-economic situations. She works with various media including digital and physical environments, installations, videos, objects, and sculptures. She began to work in digital art in the late 1980s and was a pioneer of Game Art. She is the first recipient of the City of Vienna Award for Media Art (2014) and was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Media Art (2018). She lives and works in Vienna.
Porzel Aaron:
Porzel Aaron is a multi-faceted artist, who has been featured in several art festivals like Parallel Vienna. As a studied mathematician, with a knack for programming, he developed his own data compression method, and learned Solidity and smart-contract development from scratch in order to make our on-chain storage feasible and quickly became the one and only developer for our elaborate smart-contract, enabling Gerald and Sylvia to put conceptual visions into the reality of blockchain, adding his own unique touch of artistry.
Raphael Hulan:
Raphael is a former NFT trader, blockchain enthusiast and art lover. He currently works as a project and event manager for Vangardist Agency & Magazine, a 360° branding and marketing agency and publisher of an avantgarde magazine. He has worked with clients like the Austrian Economic Chamber, MIT, BYD Auto and others and he has conceptualized an art gallery in the 20th district of Vienna. In our NFT project he is responsible for tying the knots between the different aspects involved in conceptualizing, creating, marketing and publishing an innovative NFT art production.
Our website: https://zerograv.xyz
Our Twitter: https://twitter.com/zerograv_xyz