The Creative Story Behind My NFT Artwork.
This is my first piece of writing on Medium so be gentle.
I have been doing some research of late and decided to try my hand at selling some artwork on Opensea as NFT’s. At the time of writing this blog everything is prepared, however I am being careful with the initial gas fee which you must pay along with a wallet initialisation charge. The gas price, as it known, can be monitored more or less live along with an historical heatmap at: https://ethereumprice.org/gas/
Once the price gets a little lower, it varies wildly depending on the day and hours within any given day, I’ll go ahead and press that sell button and they will be available. If you are by some miracle reading this early on they may not be there yet, but keep trying. You can check them out and buy them at:
https://opensea.io/collection/the-corrideon-realm
There has been much said and written about the good and the bad aspects of selling art or for that matter anything as an NFT. It mainly seems to be naturally centred around the harm it can do to the environment given that the NFT token, aka, your masterpiece, is created on a blockchain. This process, as you may know or can perhaps guess, uses a lot of energy as it is generated by computers whirring away day and night eating up who knows how much electricity. That said it appears to be here to stay and will likely only increase in popularity over time and they give creative artists of all kinds another method to sell their art and have it seen by the world. The good news is that changes to the Ethereum blockchain in 2022 will eventually reduce the energy consumption considerably, I’ve read by as much as 99% but that remains to be seen I suppose.
So, despite the above downside, I have decided to have a go on a small scale, this to reduce my contribution to climate change as much as possible. That along with turning my heating down 2 degrees, using my kettle a lot less, swapping all my house lights for LED’s oh and of course promising that I will buy an electric car next time around.
I have created the six original pieces of artwork drawn from concept ideas i came up with in the screenplay I am currently writing. These have taken many hours of sweat and tears to produce, (ok, a lot of time in Adobe Illustrator Adobe Photoshop and Procreate moving my hand around with a mouse and stylus), but you know what I mean.
Who knows if I’ll ever finish and sell my screenplay? Well, I’m halfway through Act 2 as I write this, so I’m confident I will finish it. However, then selling it as an unknown and unrepresented screenwriter, and then getting it produced to a movie you can go and see is akin to winning the lottery in terms of odds. But say I do, you never know. The movie is suddenly the next Avatar, or any other billion-dollar box office smash you can think of. I’m then very famous practically overnight. ( I know, I’m a fantasist and would hate that part of it) My NFT artworks would follow suit and become very valuable too …. just saying :) Financially speaking, we all wish we had bought some bitcoin on day one, or a Bored Ape on launch or even just helped Mr Bezos when he was starting out in his garage. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Corrideon Realm
So my to my story then which inspired these artworks. It is simple in many ways, but very conceptually complex at the same time and has a strong message for mankind. I won’t go into the details of the plot, for obvious reasons. After all, for all I know you may have plagiarism tendencies and be able to surpass my mediocre 40-wpm touch typing speed, steal my idea and write it first. Please don’t :) However, suffice to say it is an action-adventure sci-fi story, a genre that I’ve been a fan of all my life.
A small part of the story involves the ‘aliens’ ability to travel the vast distances across the Universe(s) using a place known as the Corrideon Realm. This is everywhere around us but we cannot see it from Spacetime of course, any more than we can see dark matter or energy or the air we breathe. To access it they utilise a Cortran Portal, a device originally manufactured by an even more advanced and ancient alien life know simply as Thran. Thran are a species who have now evolved to a point they no longer need a physical form. The portal is made from a combination of Gravity Waves and Slices, incorporating things such as Gravity Mass and Strands in a dense mixture of that very invisible dark energy.
Cortran Portal
Thran positioned Portals in trillions and trillions of locations all over the Universe, but in fact the technology used to create them can form small short lived versions of them too. These so called Local Cortran Portals are often created to facilitate, local movements on-planet or between nearby planets, moons or perhaps a space dock for example.
Traditional movement within Spacetime is still commonplace though as very few species ever advance enough scientifically to discover the complexities of access to the Cortran. So, for the majority space-travel is mostly advanced fusion engines, traditional warp and transwarp drives depending on technological development of the species at the time.
Why use Portals at all? Well, long ago when Thran had a physical form and first discovered the Corrideon, they travelled widely as you would no doubt expect them too; after all who wouldn’t? The thing was they would often unknowingly exit the Corrideon back into Spacetime at a different point in their Universe’s natural timeline and not realise it. For example, if I sent you in a space craft to an earth like planet at the other side of the Milky Way, you would have no idea when you emerged back into Spacetime and established orbit that you had arrived say a thousand years before you were born, or the same in your future, as you would have no local reference point or data to check. It’s not as if you could ask a local, “Hey there, what year is it? This unconstrained galactic travel at the time lead to a temporal catastrophe which eventually claimed the lives of trillions of lifeforms. The implementation of the Cortran Portal reduced the risk of exiting the Corrideon before or in advance of your NowSlice to virtually zero, thus preventing any such event happening again.
NowSlice
This is your natural place on your Universe’s timeline, your present, your now, where you exist on time’s arrow, call it what you wish. NowSlice entered = NowSlice exit. The other benefit of the Corrideon and the NowSlice exit point is of course life extension. Once inside the realm you are temporarily out of existence you could say, and even the cells in your body respond to this ‘state of being, yet not being’. Technically speaking you could live there forever I suppose, but believe me when I say this, you wouldn’t want to! One thing I have learned in my longish life is this. Life only has meaning and purpose because it ends at some point, this is true for all species.
So, there you have it. I believe art must come have a life or a backstory or at least something behind it. It could be a nod or reference to things in the real-world, past or present, or a completely imaginary one. If not, it is just paint on a canvas or pixels on a screen. No matter how pretty it may or may not be, it means nothing and has little value.
Well, this first piece ended up a bit longer that I planned, so thank you if you got to here. (Note to self: look up the definition of brevity for future writing.)
I hope you enjoyed my explanation and creative, albeit possibly fictional, backstory of where the inspiration my newly minted artwork comes from.
Imagination, storytelling and art combined, don’t you just love it.
Until next time.
S
Don’t forget to go and look at https://opensea.io/collection/the-corrideon-realm
You can also visit my website at arionar.com. which is where this was first published on 30/12/2021
