1. sosogutter (https://twitter.com/sosogutter)

I’ll be the first to admit that I spent a lot more time studying art history than contemporary artists before I got into NFTs. I found Sosogutter on the Glitch Artists Collective Facebook page (gross, facebook) was one of the few artists that I was both aware of and really looked forward to seeing new work from. He says he’s only using MSPaint - and for all I know it’s true. What caught my eye and kept it is that it’s pixellated work, usually in bright primary colors, but it doesn’t feel superficially bouncy.

A lot of his work has kind of a faux-graffiti look to it that really feels at home in the world of glitched cyberpunk imaginary graffiti. Like tags for fictional artists that soso makes up just long enough to make a tossed-off glitch minimalist design and then they disappear.

I’ve also always been jealous - sosogutter knows when to stop working. It’s a weakness of mine that when I feel like I can’t get something to feel quite right I just keep adding stuff. Sosogutter has the kind of effortless “I made it, it’s good, I’m done” attitude that characterizes someone with confidence and a pretty amazing ability to take a simple design and make thousands of versions of it that all feel fresh. That’s another thing that amazes me - I can still see a new sosogutter circle or wavy lasagna noodle-looking thing and know it’s one of his stock designs but the squares and pixels and waves of color contrasting with black will this time strike me slightly differently and I’m back - I’m off again imagining this piece on my wall in cryptovoxels or niftyisland or just the interior mental space of my desktop computer.

I even connected with soso a while ago to make a couple designs together which I supplied materials for and he finished masterfully. It was really satisfying. If I had to describe sosogutter, I would say they come across as surly and impatient with the tedium of marketing and social media mechanisms, but that artistically soso knows he’s found a thread of something alive and unique and cooler than cool and so he keeps at it. Once in a while I still collect a sosogutter piece, and once in a while soso jumps back into tezos or eth markets and mints a ton of work at once (again: no patience for pacing or trickling). It’s simple work in a signature style that feels pegged to early computer art aesthetics without feeling tired or antiquarian. If you browse the sosogutter objkt page and can’t find something that makes you say “wow” at the same time it refuses to overwhelm you with more and more noise and color, I just don’t know what to say to you.

2. Ciput (https://twitter.com/chiquitaputri)

I had the good fortune of stumbling on Ciput when she was just starting out in NFTs. She was making aggressively simple abstract works, I think she mentioned it was with a mobile app or something. I had been exploring the idea of just riffing on some mid-century book covers I had, and one of the things I’ve always found hard to wrap my head around was when shapes are rounded, shapes are overlapping in really simple ways, shapes are irregular - that is, it’s one thing to work with stacking and arranging geometric primitives, it’s another to have a wavy free-flowing ability to move in and out of the rules of geometry to make something neat and (like sosogutter) be done when you’re done.

Sometimes you look for an artist that’s a virtuoso and doing something no one else can do, and sometimes what you find is that the art you actually want to be looking at is not the most sophisticated but is created by someone with a powerful aesthetic sensibility. She just kept coming up with new incredibly simple little takes, and they were perfection in the most pure and easy sense:

Collecting from new artists is usually cheaper, too - and if you’re counting on your income from art to be what sustains you I don’t personally feel you have a strong obligation to dump it back into other artists. It can be nice to do so when you feel you can, but the gaggle of voices suggesting artists are obliged to collect other artists are - in my mind - suggesting we create a closed loop economy that can’t possibly benefit people who need to pay for real world expenses, family bills, etc. I collected Ciput early on because she wasn’t charging much and the work was sublime. Collecting masterful artists at expense can be fun too, but discovering new artists and helping them grow into their rightful place of contemporary practice can be very rewarding.

Ciput has been very open from the start that she’s a mother of a couple boys, living in Indonesia. For someone like myself bouncing around USA - I imagine our lifestyles are pretty different - but that authenticity of just clear thoughts, sentiments, and honesty connects across cultures. The clarity of these little thoughts is what is striking - and you can see that clarity carry across into her work that poured out over the next year or so since then. I’ll sample just a few different styles she experimented with to demonstrate the consistency of that quality I believe she had from the beginning: sensibility.

Above here are some 8x8 bidou designs. If you missed that trend, there was a market that cropped up on Tezos that leveraged simple 8x8 pixel designs as its gimmick and did really well for a while. They’ve just recently been listed by OBJKT.com so we’re seeing sort of a renaissance of that moment. Ciput also has two generative series that turned out great (one in collaboration with 0xPhiiil) that tinker with geometry and lines in smooth sweeping shapes. With an artist like Ciput, it’s worth following to see what she’ll try next and trace when that spark of inspiration she possesses innately will flourish into something beautiful and refined and then carry on bouncing along creating new things in a hopefully never-ending stream.

3. TheBreadArts (https://twitter.com/TheBreadArts) formerly TheGlitchedArts

TheBreadArts (from here on TBA) is one of those artists I discovered early on when I was just beginning to take myself semi-seriously as an artist. When I say semi-seriously I just mean that it’s when I lost interest in most all other hobbies and compulsively searched and saved and explored artists doing things like what I was doing - learning how they navigated their world and what they made of it. There was a sort of too-cool-for-school glitch art called The Glitched Arts account I followed for a while that I eventually sent a message or two to just to see what they were like. They invited me to a Telegram (what’s Telegram?) channel with a guy running a few glitch art aggregator accounts who took it upon himself to teach us all about how Instagram algorithms worked. I don’t know if I ever got the hang of it - but I did get to rub shoulders with TBA and see a constant stream of incredible glowing pixelsorts, blocky shifting arrangements, jumbled pillars of color and light that he put out at an incredible rate.

TBA and I would go on to share a few different hangouts on Discord or various marketplaces. Essentially, TBA shares some of the same virtues that Ciput and sosogutter possess: a sensibility for what to make. There’s a restless need for experimentation that TBA shares with me, and you can see the bubbling up of thing after thing in slightly new styles and colors - united by a sensibility of when something feels “right” that TBA has more than any particular set of rules you could try to apply.

I may be cherrypicking here, but I’m personally still a fan of when TBA does simpler works (which still have a lot of detail, admittedly):

TheBreadArts occupies a kind of new space that I think the art world is still catching up to : glitch artists who use technology and effects as they are instead of creating them. Someone who takes the tools that exist and asks every single day, “but what can we make with them?” We need artists doing this, otherwise what we find is that we just become perpetual tool-makers who never expand the horizons of what our tools can do - who never create the bodies of work our tools are meant for. The requirement for being a good tool-user, as I’ve said over and over, I believe is sensibility. TBA has this in droves, and you should absolutely follow their instagram account and beg them to mint more work so that the collecting world can offer their support and enthusiasm for what TheBreadArts loves to do apparently simply for the sake of doing it most of the time.