hashnadoes, a collaboration with Scott Kidall, and presented by EXPANDED.ART is a generative long-form series of interactive “tornadoes.”

Each is literally (and literarily) made of its transaction hash: slices of spinning, cloud-like alphanumerals that are pulled directly from the blockchain, which also use your camera to follow you across your screen. Open the live view in its own frame, and give access to your device’s camera, to make the swirling tornadoes follow your motion on screen.

Every mint is an ecosystem of cyclones, rain, wind, and attraction, where the palettes are inspired by non-human or extraterrestrial planetary bodies, and every conceptual, aesthetic, and formal element performs some aspect of the bits and texts that make digital art “work.”

Key presses

hashnadoes follows my and Kildall’s longtime playing with performance and performativity online, from our collaborative net.art pieces like Wikipedia Art and Tweets in Space to our blockchain performance, NFT Culture Proof. Released on fxhash (link coming soon) in partnership with EXPANDED.ART, hashnadoes is performative in a number of ways.

From my and Scott’s interview on EXPANDED.ART (link coming soon):

…First, minting this live, generative NFT births it into existence; both as performance, and as text/data. When you click/submit, sending ASCII and bits and bytes as 0s and 1s, you are inaugurating that form.  Our choice to use the trans-action (also a performative reference) hash itself as the material make up of each tornado amplifies this for us. Second, when opened in its own frame and in live view, your movements – how you move and are moved – are both affective (moved-thought-felt)  in your body, and in the body/form/data of the hashnadoes that follow you. 

Yes, the hasnadoes “feel,” in that they takes account of their surroundings, and change. We often forget that the material forms of bits and bytes, as volts and current, or light, quickly starting and stopping through copper wires or fiber optics, the concepts and movements of time, what we had for lunch, my kids interrupting me, how much Eth is in our wallets… all of these things make a difference in what is, and what could be, including in the simple interface of our fxhash mint. This is where per-formance and ecology, are so interrelated. Ecological Aesthetics: humans, matter, concepts, things, not-yet-things, politics, economics, and industry are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelation.

… I like to compare ecological thinking to the complexity of weather patterns, to think about celestial bodies, winds and weights and gravity, food and thought and the news, all making change. These are referenced everywhere in HASHNADOES, from the coded gravitational pushes and pulls of the your movements and the tornadoes on each other, to the palettes we chose from extra-terrestrial planets and bodies.

Full interview on EXPANDED.ART (link coming soon)
hashnadoes on fxhash