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.
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.
Let's reintroduce the current lineup of UFO contributors and flow into the rest of this issue.
news Contributors
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]
Let's do the UFO news ...
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
“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.
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.
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.
1,500
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.
I 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
Latest podcasts
54 Music Evolution with Topia — LATASHÁ
53 Flying Cars, Robots and Reality Oracle Computers with Faust — July
07 Learning and Teaching Crypto. Nouns — Nounish Prof
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
UFO is an onchain radio station. A club for music, arts and ideas. Subscribe to be in the loop.
