About Xylocats™ NFT Collection

The Xylocats™ NFT Collection encompasses multiple NFT smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. The images are AI generated, each image is individually unique compared to every other image. This is a drastic departure from current high volume NFT collections which tend to feature the same base image with different attributes. Each Xylocat™ image is a completely unique composition. The Xylocats™ NFT Collection is the first of its kind to date, the first ever massively generated, publicly available AI based NFT collection.

The smart contracts deployed use the ERC721 standard to create compatibility with your favorite NFT trading sites. This means that each image is individually owned, there are no shares or multi-token images which is what you would find with an ERC1155 NFT. All minting fees are hardcoded as flat fees, no backdoors for reserving tokens past the designated supply of the NFT. There are no pre-sales or approved minting lines. If an NFT is deployed anyone can mint it until the supply is exhausted. All code is available and verified on Etherscan for transparency. All smart contracts will eventually have their ownership renounced. For more technical information including contract addresses please visit the NFT Collections page. If you would like to receive notifications about future NFT collections make sure to subscribe to our Twitter.

Hex Luthor

hex luthor The Xylocats™ project was created by the visionary 0xH3XLUTH0R aka Hex Luthor. Hex has over 30 years of experience engineering software, designing and creating digital art. Everything from the images, blockchain code, design, website creation, etc, was created by one person. There are very few people on the planet that have the intersection of skills, experience and spark to solo create a project of this magnitude and quality. By immersing himself in the low level technical details as well as high level visual abstractions Hex is a quintessential digital artist, the art starts with the code and ends with the experience. It's almost as though Hex has been preparing for this project since the 1990s. Besides being a visionary he generates a constant field of inspiration that draws from the source. Over the years some of his nicknames have been The Wolf (from Pulp Fiction), The Fifth Element and Dr. Strange.

Hex is also a classically trained artist who can paint and draw using traditional mediums like oil, acrylic, tempera. Despite his training in the traditional arts his primary focus has always been New Media and Computer Science. This project was created in the vain of New Media, a fusion of art and technology intersecting with human interaction and culture. Hex is very excited to bring you the Xylocats™ NFT Collection and has many ideas about new and novel ways to innovate NFT content and features in the future. He hopes that you share a tech-positive vision of the future and become a Xylocats™ NFT patron.

Artistic Statement

The pop artists of the 1960's wanted to make a statement about the life and culture of their times. Often these artists would paint mundane objects or create fictitious comics as art. This practice inverts the perception of ordinary objects to create something special through process. When Andy Warhol painted 2^5 Campbell's soup paintings in 1962 he did so with the intent of presenting ordinary life. An individual soup can painting could represent a single can in the home. Together in a gallery with all of the soup cans hanging on a wall it resembled the everyday experience of going to the soup aisle in the grocery store. Similarly Roy Lichtenstein gained fame for painting comics adapting their content to have a tongue-in-cheek meaning which was commentary on the daily life of the time.

Fast forward from the 1960s to 2023. We are living in a post-internet society. A lot has changed however a lot has not changed. The artistic technology of thousands of years ago was the brush. Hundreds of years ago the cutting edge artistic technology was the camera obscura. Today we have blockchain and AI as new tools for creation and distribution. The fundamental message however of the daily experience is very similar to the past. We are more connected than ever but still crave connections. Often the excess of connections lead us to feel further apart than ever. We still mass produce items like soup cans, comics and cars except now it's AI art, digital tokens, cat pictures and memes. We are but one soup can individually in an aisle of soup cans. We are all the same but unique in our own ways, just hyper-connected through technology compared to the 1960s.

The Xylocats™ NFT Collection is an artistic endeavor that uses the new tools of our time to reflect back truths of the time. Using human controlled AI to direct and curate a large collection is a reflection of our state of the art times reminiscent of the massive amounts of image data we find in our daily feeds. Like the brush, if the software engineer digital artist truly understands how AI works under the hood and can shape, direct and transform the results to their desired result then AI is just another tool in the workshop.

Generating massive amounts of similar content is a reflection of the industrial manufacturing process in a digital form. In 1962 Warhol painted 32 soup can paintings for a handful of patrons lucky enough to be able to physically go to the galleries. Today artworks are digitally distributed to 8+ billion people worldwide compared to a fraction of the 3 billion in people 1962 that could physically go to a gallery. The massive scale of an NFT collection with 10,000 images reflects the global need for "more". Curating the images for the collection creates the narrative of the project, the tone, the message. Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the massage. In this case the process is part of the statement. In many ways we also curate many items in our lives, friends, experiences, bosses curate employees. We also curate pictures and playlists on our phones and feeds, similar to massive collections of NFTs.

Traditional art will not be going anywhere, it will always be with us. This however is the new art, massive digital collections accessible to billions of people 24/7 on a global scale. Similar to Warhol's soup cans each individual Xylocat™ picture can stand on its own as a piece of art. However, the collection as a whole is also a piece of art that reflects back the nature of our times.

NFT Information

The Ancestral collection is "Collection 0". All code is tested on testnets like Goerli and/or Sepolia however as a seasoned software engineer will tell you there is no replacement for a live production test. This collection is essentially an initial production test of all Xylocat™ systems and processes. With that said however everything has already been fully tested at the time of deployment. This NFT will be fully supported just like any other NFT produced by Xylocats™

To reward early adopters of the Ancestral collection it is a distinctly different image format compared to the future lines. It is also a much smaller collection comprising 1,337 images. According to supply and demand theory this should create a scarcity effect for the Ancestral collection. Another way to look at this collection is that it is similar to an artist's early works. There will only be a few of them and they will be more rudimentary compared to their classic works.

The Eclipse collection is an NFT collection of 10,000 Xylocat™ images. This collection represents what all future NFT collections will look like. It features individually unique images of cats in space wearing different styles of armor and clothing. These images also have a much more polished look with specific lighting to enhance their presence. This is in direct contrast with the Ancestral collection which is specifically meant to look rough around the edges.

Future NFT collections will also be released. These releases are further down the road and many details need to be hammered out between now and then. Each subsequent NFT line however will have a distinctive theme. There will also be a hard cap on the number of Xylocat™ NFTs in the wild. There are some ideas about where those limits are however it is too soon to decide specific details.

For more information about the different NFT Collections please visit the NFT Collections page.

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