The byline for this 100 edition work XCOPY minted on the then 6 month old NFT marketplace KnownOrigin on October 21, 2018 is ‘Tech wont save us’.

A memento mori. But more on that later.

‘The Doomed’ has become an iconic work. If great art is partly great by being layered and reflective of a fertile epoch, it is worthwhile examining these layers and that epoch in turn.

I bought edition 11 of ‘The Doomed’ from prolific XCOPY collector Jediwolf on Jan 30 2023 for 27ETH ($USD 40,223.79).

It is well known that the artist struggled to sell the original work. 100 editions took 433 days to sell out, offered initially at 0.075 ETH ($15.53). 13 were given away.

Xcopy posted 1167 GIFs (Tumblr uses webp format) on tumblr between August 2010 and June 2022. The ouevre and development of style is easily parsed by scrolling through the archive at speed, or by examining each of the 18755 frames that make up all of the images. I did both.

The Doomed motif first appears in January 2013. This version, by Xcopy’s later standards, is simpler in construction. Pre-Ethereum, pre-widespread blockchain adoption, pre-NFT, we see Xcopy refining the use of colour and movement, and, for want of a better word, glitch.

There is a progenitor piece, posted as a collaboration between Xcopy and Yura Miron on August 22, 2012 on Xcopy’s tumblr, and subsequently minted on Superrare as an edition of 30 in 2021.

Here we see the dominance of the Xcopy style as there is nothing before or subsequent in Yura Mirons work that alludes to the motifs that are so defining in Xcopy.

The next version appears on the tumblr on February 8, 2013. This version is neon, loud, seizure inducing. The more I look at it, the more I wish it were minted.

A month later there is a more abstract work. The skull is more abstract, with a parade of smaller skulls behind it.

In May 2013 the Doomed motif again appears and this time as a still image. What is obvious here is how much power is lost or gained, by movement and animation in the previous and subsequent work.

Just five days later, another version is posted, and this one takes movement to the opposite extreme.

A plain white version was posted in October 2013.

The next iteration appears a year later, and is back to a clearer skull motif, but with aggressive neon overlay.

A red version, going back to the earlier small skull background motif, was posted in August 2014.

A blue version was post on Tumblr in June 2015 in a plainer style.

A month later the image was posted again, and here we see a mature form developing, but without the fine grain sophistication of the final work.

The work appears again on Nov 30, 2015 as ‘same skull, different day’ and again on Aug 14, 2017, Jun 26, 2018, and in it’s final form on October 21, 2018, now renamed as ‘The Doomed’ and minted on KnownOrigin as an edition of 100. Xcopy posted the work again on his Tumblr on Nov 3 and Nov 4, 2018, Dec 19, Jan 19, 2019 and Feb 11, 2019. Significant?

As is often the case with long reworked Xcopy images, a 1/1 of the work called ‘The Doomed (mono)’ was minted on Superrare on May 4, 2019. This work is currently owned by artist and writer MLOdotArt who bought it in 2019 for 0.3 eth and who subsequently rejected an offer of 300 eth in August 2022.

The Doomed VariantsTwo years after the initial mint of the Doomed on KnownOrigin Xcopy minted three variants. These were given away to existing Xcopy holders using the Wheel of Doom.

- Red (10 editions, nine of which were given away to existing Doomed holders and one sold for 1.2 ETH).

- Black and Green (6 editions, 4 gifted, 2 sold for 2 ETH each)

- Black and Red (15 editions, 2 gifted, 13 sold for average 0.67 ETH)

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The er, origin of KnownOrigin **KnownOrigin, now acquired by eBay, emerged from Manchester in January 2018. Xcopy was not the first artist to mint there, but was probably within the first 50 artists on the platform. The initial reception is muted, with KnownOrigin not even tweeting themselves, though Xcopy himself did.

Xcopy would go on to mint 28 editions comprising 575 works on KnownOrigin between 2018 and 2021, with many considering these among Xcopy’s best works. He would rapidly become the platforms biggest seller by a factor of 3.

Construction, motif and styleThe final minted image is a 750x750 pixel 445KB square gif stored as an ERC-721 (a standard that had only been released in Jan 2018) on IPFS using the KnownOrigin minting contract. There are 14 frames in the gif. This metric can in some ways be used as a rough proxy for the artists attention to the work. Scanning the tumblr archive, we see Xcopy varying the frame number, four in early work, and over 20 in some later works, and 14 seems notable for a (at first glance) relatively simple image of this type.

When the animation is slowed and zoomed in, in this case to the top left of the image the attention to detail can be more easily viewed. Developing both the detail and restraint in this effect are not easy, and one of the key aesthetic developments that make this work significant.

There are three motifs that are recalled in ‘The Doomed’. From a colour perspective green is clearly a nod to early cathode ray era computing, later seen as shorthand for all things digital in films like ‘The Matrix’. Herein lies a step forward for ways of seeing, and maybe the artistic dilemma of out time: what is the difference between the aesthetics of digitally rendered images and physical work? Or maybe put more simply, could ‘The Doomed’ be painted?

Movement aside, the digital colour palette alone is not one yet covered in the ‘Artist’s Handbook’.

Secondly, the skull motif is a obvious Memento Mori, and one that is a recurring theme of many of Xcopy’s work. In ‘The Doomed’ we see the skull as almost a starting point for Xcopy, one of the first messages he places on KnownOrigin. What seems key here is that for Xcopy the interpretation is not a liberating one in the Stoic sense, or an explanatory one in the Ernest Becker sense, but a negative and hopeless one.

The third motif is tech. In contrast to the Techno-optimism of David Deutsch we see Xcopy, always an early tech innovator in the experiments and platforms he seems to constantly tinker with, nonetheless landing on a skeptical view of the future, though the nature of the danger is not made clear. Is it mass human destruction by tech as Bostrom warns, or merely that despite all effort, the artists too will be forgotten?

With Xcopy this is not clear, but in ‘The Doomed’ we see one of the most modern and aesthetically concise renders. If Goya has artistic staying power because he seems modern to every generation of viewer over 200 years, how long will ‘The Doomed’ continue to warn us with relevance?