Welcome back to UFO news. A selection of news, music, releases and essays.
April has been a wild time. Much happening with communities like Higher arriving in the scene. The cultural creative realms are experimenting at the edges of what's possible, combining things like Zora, Party, Highlight and Farcaster.
UFO launched Season 4 and released the UFO Supporter Pass on April 5. There's already more than 100 Supporters which is incredible to see as we put all focus on getting the radio station on air. We also started up Happy Mondays in which the UFO network selects 20 mints on Zora each week and then tips artists with the UFO $Enjoy allowance.
UFO tips 20 mints with 6,128,084 $Enjoy on Zora.
Everything is ramping up to FarCon in Venice Beach, California where we're attending in May. Doing live podcasts with Zerion and a recording with Nounish Prof and Jonny Mack from Hypersub. Nick is moderating an onchain media panel at FREE WIFI hosted by Seed Club, Archetype VC, Slow Rodeo and Enjoy.
1st edition UFO Hat. 77 items. Available for holders of at least one of these /farcon and UFO passes: ∙ Farcon Summit Pass ∙ Farcon Community Pass ∙ UFO Supporter Pass (20% off) ∙ UFO Network Pass Optional collect your hat from the UFO team at Farcon (easy way) https://slice.so/api/frame-merch-drop/ufo-hat
Let's reintroduce the current lineup of UFO contributors and flow into the rest of this issue.
aiio [UFO]
Alvaro Delgado [Oval]
Ivano Salonia [UFO, Apollo]
Jihad [media dealer]
Leo Pastel [musician + designer]
Matthew Chaim [Songcamp]
Nick Hollins [UFO, Apollo]
Nick Smith [FAM]
Paff [Take Up Space]
Rafa [Folklore]
Simona Pop [ENS, Optimism]
Steph Alinsug [FWB]
Yuri [747 Airlines]
On the surface $Enjoy may look like just another memecoin, but if you squint a bit and look past the DIY design aesthetic and torrent of low-effort memes you’ll see something pretty special forming.
Instigated by the terminally onchain agents of chaos over at Seed Club, $Enjoy is an internet-native currency for a new generation of creators. This week saw active creators and collectors on Zora receive a weekly allowance that can be used to tip creators via onchain comments when minting.
This unlocks new opportunities for community curation and signalling, helping to surface high quality projects and creators. There is a rich design space for apps and tools to be built on top of Enjoy and I look forward to seeing the next wave of creative experimentation.
Words by iamnick.eth — /fam
All great cities have been accompanied by great literature and art. So, architecture, art, and language will be important means of resilience in the future.
“Perceptual expectations shape conscious experience”
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
A shared reality comes from the ability to create together without bounds, the art extending through time and space across different minds. Thinking of art as a spatial entity helps us inhabit it. Embedding values through practice and creating community-based incentives.
We're bringing something new into existence. Basically, we're just fucking around and finding out together.
social anthropologists will record how much wild shit @lght.eth instigated this year
I'm distributing 100k ↑higher (~$10k) to my favorite writing on the following prompt: "Describe a higher vision of the future." Deadline Monday 4/8 @ 12PM ET. 750+ words. Be as specific and imaginative as possible. Goal is to get people writing about aspirational futures that people can rally around. Higher.
Creating onchain in a permissionless way makes new abundances possible. Creatives are breaking free from the cages of corporate machinery and together growing a space for art and communities to evolve.
New modes of cultural production where value is recognised at the development process itself are being born. We’re contextualising the notion of becoming through concrete inflections of a moment and shared structures. We’re leaning into emergence.
the /higher creativity flywheel is unmatched. i joined this community 3 weeks ago and haven’t actually purchased any $higher yet, instead been rewarded for contributing words, art, memes & vibes. this was the latest from the last rounds.wtf drop. each time i get more conviction & energy to make more higher ↑ ↑ https://i.imgur.com/7QBppa2.jpg
We're aiming /higher.
We are living in exciting times, many things happened in the past weeks in the space and in particular at Zora. Everyone is enjoy(ing) tipping, being tipped and in general minting a few coins such as $enjoy, $higher, $crash and $imagine. I won’t even get into the eclipse madness. As my first words contribution to this newsletter, I’d like to write about something that is not necessarily a new feature, but an underrated one in my opinion. Something that touched me more as an extended realities (XR) artist.
A couple of weeks back Jack Butcher minted The Physical Impossibility of Provenance -1988 as a 24-hour open edition on Base. Inspired by Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded (1993) by Damien Hirst. It came as a 3D mintable model in Zora, nothing new here. The interesting part is that people started to explore with the inbuilt AR feature that Zora has on the mobile version of their website.
For the easiest way to play with it, go to Zora and hit the AR button on the bottom right.
People then started sharing augmented images and videos of Jack's work in real museums around the world, including MoMa. The AR button is what I believe most of us never paid attention to, including me. I discovered it in a conversation me and Nick had with Kugusha, in which we decided to spin a 3D ↑ model together spit in between Apollo, Kugusga and Higher Collective. A permissionless exhibition of ↑↑↑ followed shorter after.
https://zora.co/collect/base:0x078b47513cc855f6debe2d746d34b22cae3a76bb/2I had previously minted a 3D Sculpture on Zora, so I was super curious to try the AR viewer and check it in real scale. I loved it. To be clear: as a seasoned artist it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen my own art in AR or VR, but the idea that AR art can live onchain giving provenance and being so accessible at the same time is exciting.
It brought me to bring some of my 3D Art onchain, to make more of it and discover more XR Artists like me.
I started a Zora XR channel on Farcaster dedicated to promoting and curating 3D interactive mints on Zora and I will be shining a light onto this underrated form of art through UFO Happy Mondays - the UFO initiative that allows network members to select 20 mints to share an equal split of our $Enjoy allocation each week… here we go, back to talk about tipping $
Words by Ivano Salonia — /ufo /apollo /zora-xr
54 Music Evolution with Topia — LATASHÁ
https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x4174f78b7769650c1b205a2e1ac69cd0e47bbe02/5453 Flying Cars, Robots and Reality Oracle Computers with Faust — July
https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x4174f78b7769650c1b205a2e1ac69cd0e47bbe02/5307 Learning and Teaching Crypto. Nouns — Nounish Prof
https://zora.co/collect/zora:0xe5a529063b0e20cf4b3c081338019bdaf51a4ed0/7
Ricky Nelson — Stood Up (1958)
The Everly Brothers — ('Til) I Kissed You
The Shirelles — Something's Got a Hold on Me
Eddie Cochran — Summertime Blues
Thom Yorke — Knife Edge
Earlier this week I spoke with the writer Nadia Asparahouva, author of the great book Working in Public. In our conversation, Nadia mentioned the classic piece "Status as a service" by Eugene Wei that details how Twitter functions (or functioned) as a giant status-seeking engine. This piece, Nadia proposed, crystalized
I was travelling at the end of the week so had to miss internet explorers and wasn't able to curate topics from the week in consumer crypto as I usua...
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Higher represents more than just a digital art project with a token; it symbolizes a paradigm shift in how we perceive and participate in the aspirational economy.
As we navigate the progressive crossing from web2 into web3, knee deep in the old boat as we build the new, we must take on more than a technological evolution; I believe we require a fundamental shift in our collective psyche.
Over the last few years the collective consciousness has risen. Some might call this the "woke agenda", which, hilariously - is not actually that far wrong. Unlike the recent smear campaign against the word, being woke simply means being awake to the realities of the world.
This piece was inspired by jihad's contest, which prompted writers to "describe a higher vision of the future."
I want to explore the concept of 'higher' as a fundamental evolutionary characteristic. Not just in terms of physical space but as a prominent ethos ...
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Welcome back to UFO news. April has been wild. Much happening with communities like /higher arriving in the scene. The cultural creative realms are experimenting at the edges of what's possible. ft. posts by @iamnick.eth @aiio @ivanosalonia https://news.ufo.fm/aim-higher-and-enjoy
UFO makes me want to go higher.