Artmatr x Nouns - 1,001 Nouns

Thank you to Lil Nouns for your support and feedback over the last week. We garnered record support from the DAO, as well as valuable feedback from many members that helped improve our prop. We look forward to supporting the Lils and being part of the community!    

TL;DR:

• We are proposing to use our Matr Labs robotics to fabricate 1,001 Nouns on-demand from #0 to #1,000. Artmatr will develop custom software and hardware to pull off this feat, including an exclusive airdropped physical redemption token, MATRing portal with algorithmic and AI creative control, cutting edge tool development, and the extensive code development required to tie it all together. All Noun holders will have the right to customize and claim their respective physical copy(s).
• All shipping and handling costs to deliver the physical work to community members will be covered by Artmatr. We will create or employ a shipping system that ensures anonymity of any address information needed.
• Complementary digital content, including timelapse videos and high-resolution photography, will be available to Nouns holders and the community, and the airdropped redemption tokens will update to display the MATRed Nouns upon completion.
• We will produce a massive Nouniversary event at Artmatr’s gallery, showcasing some of the first MATRed Nouns with live MATRing throughout the day.
• This project will add a significant amount of new value to existing Nouns mints, as well as upcoming auctions. The content created by each Noun’s MATRing process will be widely distributed and shared, elevating visibility of the innovative ways Nouns can be works of art IRL, and the Nouniversary will be an opportunity to showcase that! We will also allocate any secondary royalties of the Matr Labs x Nouns token to the Nouns treasury.

   

Overview

Our last prop allowed Artmatr the opportunity to develop and create seven unique paintings of Nouns over the course of one week in March. Each day’s minted Noun was interpreted by our team of artists and engineers and “MATRed” on the same day as a 48” x 48” oil painting with our custom robotic hardware and code. The winner of each auction was given the rights to the corresponding painting. We celebrated the week of Nouns art with a successful public exhibition and VIP opening in our Brooklyn gallery, attended by major artists, gallerists, and auctioneers from the New York art scene.

We’re excited to follow up on the success of Prop 224 with a massive endeavor to bring physical art to every Nouner in the world. With the help of the Nouns community’s creative input, we propose to MATR 1,001 Nouns and distribute them globally to their respective holders. Each Noun-holding wallet will be airdropped a Matr Labs token that can be redeemed for a physical. We will update the metadata of the token upon redemption with a hi-res image of the Matr’d Noun, which will provide a digital Certificate of Authenticity for each physical piece of art. Supporting this huge development and production effort, we will deploy curated content across a variety of social channels, raising visibility of Nouns DAO and the ways Nouns create value and delight for the both broader Web3 community as well as the community of artists and art collectors that we are fostering.

This project aims to return on investment to the Nouns DAO in as many ways as possible, through high-quality content, marketing, and sponsorship visibility. We will publicly celebrate this endeavor with a huge launch party and exhibition near the August 8th Nouniversary and we will continue to promote this effort through dedicated social channels throughout the rest of the year and into 2024. We also propose that one of our cutting-edge MATR Labs machine racks gets built with custom Nouns sponsorship visibility, so that Noggles and Nouns branding can be seen in the content generated by every piece of art created on the machine.    

Recap

Prop 224 passed on February 13, 2023, to a resounding yes vote of 151 to 17. We immediately began developing ways we could use our custom robots and software to create a unique oil painting for each Noun over the prescribed week. We developed a number of stylistic directions that required new tools and hours of code development. Ultimately, we created paintings with unique robotically-created textures in the oil paint that brought dimensionality and life to Nouns, and embedded the mint hash into the paintings as well.

We wrote thousands of lines of code to reinterpret the digital images as paintings, honed the tooling, mixed the paint, and arranged the cameras. As proposed, we completed a unique painting of that day’s Noun, on time, and live streamed the entire process, as well as a 3D scan of each finished work for our virtual gallery. The project pushed our technical limits to the edge and allowed us to try new creative techniques that have greatly improved our art-making processes as a whole.

During production time our Twitter and Instagram feeds were full of Nouns as our content and marketing team came up with new and creative ways to showcase the community through the paintings. The project generated great buzz from the community, and generated auction prices above the previous 30-day average, including a 36.69 ETH sale on the genesis painting. The week was capped off with a successful first-ever exhibition in the Artmatr space in Brooklyn. The works have been seen and talked about by major collectors, artists, galleries and auction houses, including Christie’s, Pace, Pioneer Works, and many other VIP’s in the crypto and traditional art communities.         Since the passing and success of our last Prop, Artmatr has grown significantly. We’ve scaled up, adding seasoned Project, Operations, and Product Managers, as well as building a dedicated 3 person marketing team. Our engineering team has also expanded, driving our hardware and software development at breakneck speeds. We held an exhibition opening with Zancan at our Brooklyn gallery space that 500 people attended, and other art from the Artmatr lab has been shown at Pace Gallery and Unit London, among other established galleries worldwide. Our Twitter following has more than doubled, and we engage with a diverse and growing audience across our popular Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitch, and Discord channels. Our organic reach has been very strong, maintaining an impressive 10.5% average engagement rate, with over 400k impressions in the period following the original Prop.

We learned specific lessons from the execution of our first proposal. The most important thing is that we want to prioritize total community engagement, both the whole Nouns community and our growing Web3-curious traditional art world community. By scaling down the final pieces and allowing anyone to MATR a Noun using a redemption token, we think this project will have a much broader impact. We also want to stress the effort that we plan to put into this project to raise visibility of the Nouns DAO through our social channels. We see each MATRed piece as an opportunity to spread the word about the creativity of the community and promote the brand, and our automated cameras will capture and produce a timelapse video of the MATRing process of each created work. We will also explore collaborative Nouns MATRing with our community of blue-chip artists.    

New Prop

    Our new Matr Labs platform consisting of newly developed art-making software and scaled down versions of our large machines will incorporate technology distilled from our experiences with the likes of Tyler Hobbs, Zancan and other brilliant artists we work with. The technology is entering a production-ready state from an initial prototype, and we want the Nouns community to work with us as we continue to develop and scale. We are committed to pushing the envelope of technological creativity, and with the assistance of Nouns DAO, we will help define the bridge between digital and physical artwork for a future generation of artists.

We would like to propose that every Noun holder from #0 to #1000 will have the opportunity to use our new platform and generate a unique 18” x 18” unique physical rendition of a Noun (their own, another from the collection, or a new noun from the Playground). Each MATRed Noun will be shipped to the holder at no additional cost, worldwide.

User flow: User starts by connecting their wallet & choosing their Noun on the server > Personalizes the Noun > server generated a preview with the translation layer > users has three choices: Modify the artwork, Save the preview for consideration or send to MATR > during the MATRing process, the work is captured in high res and when the MATR process is finished, the work is minted and shipped.     The key to MATRing a physical Noun will be the 1,0001 redemption tokens, which will be airdropped to all wallets holding Nouns and will continue to be distributed as new Nouns are minted and won - up to #1,000. In the spirit of Noun’s CC0 license, a redemption token holder will be able to use any Noun in the collection as inspiration for their physical. The tokens can also be traded in the event that a holder does not want a physical, and royalties will be sent to the treasury.

The physical pieces created by the Nouns community and anyone outside who acquires a redemption token will generate increased visibility and value to the DAO, as existing holders and new auction winners alike will be given the opportunity to create a physical representation of their Noun with their own creative input. This creates both physical permanence for the Nouns in the world, as well as the possibility for virality for every related social media post that is shared. Additionally, we will also brand our newly-produced robot with Nouns branding, elevating Nouns visibility alongside the growth of this initiative. This machine will get heavy use, with time lapses and photos being core to the creation process, so the Nouns will be visually associated with the works created by incredible artists using the same tech.

Concept of Nouns Sponsored Matr Labs Rack

Having the Nouns community with us will give us the freedom to come up with exciting new ways to implement our technology that we may not otherwise have been able to do when operating within the constraints of an individual artist. We want to continue pushing the boundaries of our technology in order to make art that excites both the Nouns community and our community at-large. We are eager to develop and employ our new tech at the epic scale that it was built for. We went big with this project, and want the community to feel that their money is well spent. It is easy to quantify the project on a per-print cost basis, but do keep in mind that we are also committing to a constant stream of content, marketing, and PR on behalf of the Nouns DAO, an epic NYC event as part of the Nouniversary celebrations, and development of a new Matr Labs robot that will be Nouns sponsored and branded. We feel that these intangibles will bring a lot of value and visibility to the community, while allowing us the opportunity to build the tech to its full potential in a shortened period of time.

   

Timeline & Milestones

• Immediately following the acceptance of the proposal, Artmatr will begin development of a custom Nouns DAO creative interface and the construction of a Nouns-sponsored Matr Labs rack. We will open up private social channels on Discord and provide regular updates on the progress made on both the hardware and software development. We will stay active in those channels for enthusiasts of the technology to engage with our team of artists and engineers and also promote the project development publicly via our Twitter & Instagram.
• Artmatr will use the community Nouns as our test materials during the summer development process, and will publish the results as the works are formed.
• Near the public launch of the Matr portal, we will airdrop Matr Labs x Nouns redemption tokens to all wallets holding Nouns. We will continue to distribute those tokens to new holders up to #1,000.
• We will officially launch the token-gated Nouns website for the community to start generating works using the Nouns on August 1. Shortly thereafter, we will h

---

THIS PROP IS LONGER THAN THE MAX LENGTH FOR SNAPSHOT:

Read the rest of the prop at https://nouns.wtf/vote/301