Coming soon from Variant...
gm! This month, Variant will roll out our newsletter.
We are extremely excited to deliver our team’s latest writing and ideas directly to your inbox, and to mark the occasion, we’ve commissioned a special art piece from Giorgio Balbi that you can mint for free if you subscribe the cryptonative way, on Mirror. (More on the artwork in a moment.)
We know a lot of people are suffering from newsletter fatigue, and we recognize adding another to your plate is a big ask. That’s why our goal with all of our writing is to only produce content that helps push the space forward. We also aim to create a conversation, so we’ll want to hear your response to the ideas we posit.
About the subscriber NFT
Before Giorgio Balbi became a generative artist, he was an industrial engineer who explored not just how things work, but also their geometric beauty. His idol is the fellow Argentine artist Eduardo MacEntyre, who also reconciled the mechanical with the natural. But Giorgio’s process is all his own, combining technical drawing with coding—and plenty of colors, like in his collection “Speranza,” which launched on Canto earlier this year.
In 2021, he began turning his art into NFTs. He starts with a hand-drawn sketch, which he uses as the basis for an algorithm. Once he’s programmed the design using software, he creates multiple pieces and modifies those he likes until he’s happy with every pixel.
You can see that mathematical influence in his new piece made exclusively for Variant, “Técnicismo,” with its ever-expanding circles and spirals against our Variant-blue backdrop. The immediate effect is to “[expose] mechanical concepts of distribution of forces such as gears and pulleys,” according to Giorgio. But those who look closer will find a “hidden universe in the details.”
Once you’ve subscribed to our Mirror site, you’ll be able to mint the NFT below:
We felt the piece was just right for our newsletter, which will seek to peek inside the machinery of crypto systems, and link the disparate ideas that power this ecosystem.
Or you may certainly choose to stick to Substack. Either way, we hope you’ll enjoy our forthcoming issues, and forward it along to fellow crypto builders.