Floating Alone

On Friday, February 19th 2021 at 4pm Pacific Standard Time, GMUNK returned to Nifty Gateway for his second NFT drop – this time featuring his longtime collaborator and dearest friend Bedtimes and presented their conceptual series 'Floating Alone'.

Having worked closely together for years at the legendary Autofuss / Bot & Dolly Collective, and also serving a four year stint as next door neighbors in San Francisco’s sunny Potrero Hill neighborhood, their relationship was both creatively fulfilling and brotherly. The drop was in part a celebration of their relationship over the years, and also their aligned aesthetic in the spheres of Optics, Emission and Illumination, Refraction and their forever obsession with the Specular. 

In a final act of desperation, a dying civilization has instilled their entire history into a data core sent into space, in hopes it may be found by an entity capable of saving their planet. In order to intelligently adapt to unpredictable situations, this capsule was gifted with low level consciousness in order to maintain itself on the thousand year journey.

This vessel was cast away into the vast empty abyss, floating alone, with only the memories of its origin, the love and pain of an entire planetary society to keep it company. For ages this body floated through space, replaying its history over and over again...reaching out for help. For milleniums it waded through black waters with nothing in sight. The few moments that it passed by anything with mass it cried out in numerical pings and filtered tones, grasping for hope.

Millions of years later the satellite was found… when the data was recovered, all that remained of the consciousness was a series of beautiful repeating patterns, a primal encoding mutated by the compression of the void. A million year meditation on life evolved into visual, geometric poetry.

Inspired by this story, GMUNK teamed up with his longtime collaborator Bedtimes to construct the essence of the satellite’s degraded consciousness - achieved by the filtering of various light sources through prisms and captured via optical anomalies - to initiate participants into these signals of solitude.