The Story

I started making Clipleft exactly on the day of the FTX collapse. I always held skepticism towards “effective altruism” ideology (or even philanthropy in general) but I was especially suspicious of SBF. So when FTX was collapsing and SBF’s frauds were coming out, I was filled with a lot of emotions: Anger, affirmation, sadness for people who lost their money, fear, and ultimately cynicism.

Clipleft is open to interpretation, on purpose. I see it as the people who are scarred by the various frauds in web3 space. But one can interpret it as sth entirely different, as a glitchy pfp, as a painting (I worked hard to make it look like a painting), as a doom warning, or something completely different.

The Concept

My goal while doing Clipleft was to do a painting with the smallest possible file. Obviously a simple square would result in a small file, but I also wanted to aim for an aesthetic piece. I talked about this concept extensively for Pushersleft, and Pushersleft itself was a massively optimized piece. But of course Pushersleft was a very complex piece, it was a literal mini-movie, so it had to be more than 5,000 bytes.

I think the result aesthetically speaks for itself, and finally we have this beautiful glitch painting that’s stored only in 1,653 bytes.

This was made possible because I used an SVG technique for the first time within ART PONZI called clipping, which brings us to:

Technicals

By now I feel like I’ve iterated on the distortion effects enough times so I won’t go into the details on them much, apart from mentioning that the double-distortion here is what allowed me to create splash-like brushes on the canvas. Still, if you’re interested, here’s the non-distorted hand drawing:

The real difference in this piece was using the technique called “clipping”. Clipping allows you to crop a specific shape over a pre-existing layout. So I can create beautiful abstract color animations as a baselayer, and add a skull shape on top of it using clipping. This is basically what I’ve done in this piece, and this is what helped create this painting at such a small size.

You can get very creative with this technique. You can use shapes and pathways of course, but even texts or dashed strokes. In fact I tried showcasing the flexibility that can come with clipping in one of my experiments for Keepersleft, but decided to not mint his version in the end.

I suggest other SVG aficionados to try clipping.

Final Thoughts

I hope everyone likes Clipleft as much as I do. The painting itself didn’t take too long to complete, but the larger part of the work was optimization of the SVG elements to minimize the code as much as possible, since this was my goal for this piece.

This was ART PONZI’s 8th drop. We’re close to the end of the Series 1, where all the released were stored 100% on-chain. I plan to do some interesting things with the last 2 drops, and meanwhile, some surprises will be waiting for ART PONZI holders.

Don’t forget; every piece you own in ART PONZI qualify you an airdrop of the next piece. The final piece in the Series 1 will qualify its holders for a piece from a secret collection. This means; if you keep holding all drops, the next ART PONZI piece (piece #9) will qualify you for a total of 2 additional pieces.