Shamanic PFPs and the history of portraiture, plus nomadic Metaverse thoughts this week
…welcome back to my on-going informal zoomed out thoughts about this digital revolution we are living through… We all know about the unhealthy social habits that the “i”Phone has helped usher in…this hyper focus on the self in relation/competition to others via exotic instagram feeds, or face filters that inspire plastic surgery, etc. …and now a curious turn of events with PFPs of cartoon animals or pixelated faces… now to not be your “self” is the latest flex of the self. Now your NFT PFP can show that you are part of an exclusive club, entered either by buying your way in, or by being an astute early adopter… I remember the early days of Friendster (2003/4?) (dating myself here, lol) where I had a profile pic of a kitten with a lime on its head. I called my self “MC Bitty Kitty”, and I would message random people with dancehall lyrics written from a kitten’s perspective. So I get the appeal of being anon again after years of fake profiles on Facebook being cracked-down upon and taking the fun out of the initial social web experience, and I can’t help but think about art history portraiture and how this all falls into place… I think about the first portraits… shamanic figures seen on Aboriginal and early human cave paintings/wall markings, and then the evolution to sculptures of Kings from Middle Eastern Royal dynasties.. Most average humans were depicted with general features, but the more money you had, the more accurately you could have yourself depicted (thinking of the late Egyptian sarcophagus portraits with Roman influence), and then we move into depictions of profits and saints, and popes, which still were more general than specific. During the Renaissance in the West and Mughal miniature painting movement in the East we see very accurate depictions of the elite class of nobles and wealthy families. Later these wealthy patrons were depicted solo or imbedded into religious triptychs that they had sponsored. Then the middle class came into disposable wealth to have their families immortalized in oil on canvas for a few hundred years, leading up to photography as the form of art which could most accurately capture a human being. Photography freed artists from the aim of accurate depiction of reality, and artists like de Kooning and Basquiat totally reduced the depiction of the human figure back to expressive marks. They were not portraits of specific people, rather something pointing back to shamanic Aboriginal forms of energy beings. So in a lot of ways, portraiture has completed a cycle, and now with NFT PFPs it feels like we are in a digital shamanic era. People are embodying animal spirits (bored apes, cool cats, toads, etc), and forms they feel empowered by. A crypto punk is a mask essentially. Who is behind the mask is not as important as what the mask wearer does or says (@punk6529) These are ancestral psychological motivations playing out on the digital landscape.
Speaking of the digital landscape, I had some thoughts on the Metaverse this week. Some friends and I were talking about when hunter gatherers transitioned to agricultural societies, and how this brought about concepts of ownership/possession that weren’t predominant in nomadic tribal culture at that point. It’s nuanced of course, Nomads had the possessions they carried with them, and the tribe had their collective objects of meaning, but agriculture brought about more solid idea of ownership (of the land, the dwelling, the objects that could be stored in the dwelling, etc). Ok, clearly this is basic reductive pattern observation, for the sake of understanding where we are in the Metaverse. In the decentralized world of crypto, the multiple Metaverses that exist are centralized. A company owns the land, and digital parcels are bought and sold and owned and built upon, etc. We have created a fractal experience. Sure somethings are possible in the metaverse that are not possible irl (ie: meeting avatars in a “localized” space who may be on the other side of the world), but we have recreated an old system with-in a new one. I wonder about Zuck’s Meta and what kind of ownership will be the most valuable in that new world he is building. Ownership of land? Ownership of data? Perhaps a decentralized nomadic Metaverse should be built. No land can be owned. No data can be tracked. A free space. Something simple and primal. A digital experience that echos the experience of who we were before we became tied to the land as owners or renters. A vast plane with no end. A space where imagination is decentralized, and not designed for you by a team of copy pastas.
Well, these are my thoughts as I recover from covid in southern Portugal, sitting in a small town square drinking fresh orange juice in the sun.
-Oliver Halsman Rosenberg. November 15, 2021