It started with frog baseball; two weirdo teenagers playing games out in a desert field, their parents nowhere to be seen, their eyes and mouths glitching out like early 2000’s internet memes. The year was 1992, and newbie animator, professional blues musician, and former engineer Mike Judge had just licensed one of his first cartoons to Liquid Television for $4,000.

Judge loved drawing cartoons, even as a kid, but it was after he went to an animation festival that he was inspired to draw for real. With a 16mm movie camera, some paper, a pencil, and cels, he went to work in his free time. In 1991, he began sending tapes—yes, physical VHS tapes—out to studios to see if anyone would take a bite. Judge’s style was rigid, producing animations that felt hand-drawn and homemade, and his characters were simple on the surface and easy to laugh at. Even the storyline for “Frog Baseball” was nothing complex. And yet, the people at MTV loved it, and knew their viewers would love it as well.

“I wasn’t trying to blow someone away with visuals,” Judge said. “I was going more for character and comedy.” Judge not only wrote and animated the short, but he also did the voices and composed original music for it.

That two-minute-long film would eventually turn into one of the most iconic cult classics of the ‘90s, a little show called Beavis and Butthead that still charms audiences today. Sometimes they’d be at school, or skipping school, or watching tv on their nasty couch, commenting how “that sucks” or “that’s cool” in the world around them.

Mike Judge’s work captures moments in time in a way that is approachable, unique, and belly-achingly funny. If it wasn’t helping to spearhead cartoons for adults (did I mention he also created and was a voice actor in King of the Hill?), it was writing and directing cult classics like the 1998 film Office Space, which captured the chaos of cubicle work culture during the internet revolution. Or maybe it was the 2006 hit Idiocracy, which ventured into the apocalyptic future of an America where evolution no longer favors the intelligent, and fast food, guns, pop culture and monster trucks are king. Or, it was satirising the crazy world of Silicon Valley, based on the world Judge saw as an engineer in his early career.

Each of these works has accrued impressive followings and grown better with age. Which is part of why so many people are excited for Judge’s genesis NFT, “Dancing Dan.”

There were cycles of walking, noted Judge, that gave him the idea that doing one of different people dancing would be, as Butthead would say, really cool. The animation—hand-drawn, of course—is of a stumpy man moving his hips to a funky little tune. It is accompanied by original music, a trio of guitar, upright bass and drums, composed and performed by Judge himself.

“Dancing Dan” is unique in that it makes the viewer feel nostalgic, but they’re not exactly sure why or what for. It taps into a style of animation that is not aimed at perfection, but rather the unique elements and imperfections that make something or someone a one-of-a-kind, making it a perfect fit for the blockchain.

Judge’s work coincided with a major cultural shift that was brought on by the digital revolution. But even with programs like ProCreate, that make it easier than ever to animate, Judge prefers a pencil and paper and a camera.

“People were worried when CG [computer graphics] came along, that it would ruin traditional animation,” Judge told SuperRare, “and it sort of did, but I’m guessing that when photography came along that people thought painters would be out of jobs. But that’s when great impressionist stuff happened. I think people, even just now, haven’t even scraped the surface of what can happen, just exploring CG. I think this could lead to a new explosion of art and innovation.”

Because when depicting reality is taken care of, it allows artists to look at the world through a different lens, to experiment, to explore.

Judge has been interested in NFTs for years now, and has even spoken at conferences like the Decentralized Web Summit in 2018. “I think NFTs are the next big step towards new artists finding success and connecting with their audiences directly. There aren’t quite as many gatekeepers, and there seems to be a big demand for it. I think it’s going to enable people to share their work in such an effective way.”

The NFT as a medium has also made it possible for artists to create works that, up until recently, did not have a place to be expressed, let alone sold for money. Judge remembered fondly how Chris Prynoski, a fellow animator who worked on the Beavis and Butthead movie, hosted something he called “five second day.” “Animators would submit something that was just five seconds long, and it really inspired people,” said Judge. Which was a relief for creators in an industry that often required each piece, each animation, to have a storyline and character development in order to be considered “finished.”

“Some people say animation is tedious or boring, doing tons of drawings, but for me it is the opposite. To me, illustrating is boring, rather than making something move. And often I’ll have a little idea, a cycle of something.” And now that little cycle can be presented, not as a scrap, but as a fully-formed product.

Judge is full of little ideas, and his work shows how big those little ideas can be. The movie Office Space started out as a little cartoon. Beavis and Butthead started out as a two-minute clip. “Dancing Dan,” and the other dancing characters he has in mind, started out, like so many of Judge’s ideas, as a joke. “Often when I get the urge to draw,” he said, “it’s because I see someone annoying and I am tempted to make fun of them.”

Which is perhaps part of why he has grown so popular and so beloved over the years. Mike Judge is not out to impress anyone, and yet, his satire has left a deep impression on the minds of millions. He’s just a dude with pencil and paper setting out to have a laugh, and inviting us to laugh along with him.

“This is my first NFT,” says NYC-based artist Sam Spratt. “It’s a by-product of basically 10 months of trying to understand [the market], and basically being an observer.”

The NFT space is Spratt’s next evolutionary stage in his artistic journey, one that includes a back catalogue of album covers for Janelle Monae, Donald Glover, Kid Cudi, and pretty much all of Logic’s discography. Spratt has also worked on Red Dead Redemption Two and has done comics and movie posters for Marvel.

And yet, despite this massive repertoire of commercial work, Spratt feels that working in the NFT space allows him more room to stretch. 

“So much of my storytelling was really telling other people’s stories,” he says. “I am fairly confident that almost no one knows who I am as a human being.”

Spratt will be dropping his inaugural piece, “Luci,” on SuperRare this October, based on the theme of awakening following a catalytic event in Spratt’s life.

“What it is more about is the narrative of progress,” says Spratt. “Learning the vocabulary of change versus actually changing are two very different things. And one requires a hell of a lot more work.”

Luci marks Spratt’s attempt at both articulating that feeling of change, and beginning the process of transformation, two things that are very much a part of the human experience.

Though an oil painting purest, Spratt has always had an affinity for digital art. “I have a traditional background, love the texture, the feel, all of the uniqueness that makes an oil painting. What drew me [into the digital] was this idea that these mediums are presently distinct,” he says. But, as the technology continues to advance, and more people learn to manipulate paints and pigments: “You could feel that these things are just going to bleed into each other.”

When he initially encountered NFTs, Spratt was skeptical.

“It’s not like I instantly saw it and was like, ‘This is the future,’” he says. “But the more you pull the thread and actually talk to people who know what they’re doing…they try to pass on some wisdom.”

Being, as he puts it, an “inherently calculated person,” Spratt did extensive research into the medium before he could even begin to create work that felt like it belonged in the space. Spratt began to learn the entire NFT stratosphere by talking to everyone from artists working in the medium to crypto experts and those building the infrastructure.

Following those months of research into the realm of NFTs, Spratt now approaches his work much differently.

“Even before I discovered NFTs, I was attempting to build my own world and story,” he says. “I was trying to articulate this feeling I have had; this desire to change and grow as a person.”

The Luci NFT series came from many ideas that Spratt has had before it, ideas that were fixated on the pain of life: “Just that feeling of: it’s sucking to wake up…to feel like you had been walking a bit in the dream state.” Adding: “In my opinion, that place is less interesting than the path out.”

“What was powerful about beginning to dig into the NFT space,” Spratt explains, “ is that I got to see that all of those feelings that had led to a sense of atomization of loneliness that I was siloed off; that I was feeling something no one could possibly understand.”

And through the artistic process, Spratt began to see that everyone has had those feelings, that funny sensation that something about our current world just isn’t quite right.

Spratt wants to show his appreciation to anyone who bids on the Luci project – or who took part in the process of its creation – by giving them a hand-painted portrait of the skull used in the series.

“Basically, anyone involved in that process, including some of my other friends and collectors, I just want to be connected to them in some way,” he says. “And you will have a piece of me to go with that.”

Acclaimed UK-based artist and designer Brendan Dawes utilizes cutting-edge generative processes involving data, pixel-generating techniques, machine learning, and algorithms to create unique NFTs that bend the boundaries between time, space, and our very human senses. A Lumen Prize Alumni, his works have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Big Bang Data show. He participated in three shows in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his groundbreaking work “Cinema Redux,” which creates a single visual distillation of an entire film, like a cinematic fingerprint, was acquired into the MoMa’s main collection in 2008. 

Dawes describes “Cinema Redux” as a turning point in his career. Though he has never attended art school, it is undeniable that he is an artist in the truest sense of the word. His practice involves constant experimentation and improvisation, pushing the boundaries of visual language to draw out aspects of the human experience that pulse beneath our everyday lives. Throughout his career, Dawes has kept true to his own pace, and with this NFT drop, the world is now starting to catch up. More recently, his series “The Art of Cybersecurity” was featured in Art Futura 2020 and “The Pandora Variations,” a collaboration with composer Logan Nelson and choreographer, actor, and filmmaker, Charlotte Edmonds, was auctioned at Sotheby’s this past June.

Dawes’ SuperRare genesis piece reveals a new series of works titled “Oblivion #1 (Your Nearest Exit May Be Behind You).” The series is inspired by a chapter in a 1961 children’s novel The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster where the main character discovers a city where the buildings start to disappear because the people don’t look up anymore. Dawes raises questions about our busying perception in the digital age. The distracting nature of consumer culture, with its endless notifications, can often leave us blind to the beauty that surrounds us when we allow ourselves to forget the simple gesture of looking up. This might sound strange from an NFT artist, but he assures me he loves screens; it’s a matter of striking a balance.

During quarantine we all experienced a slowing down, a reduction of our day-to-day life. We were forced to encounter the sudden vulnerability of the human body and found ourselves feeling gratitude for many things which we often overlooked. In this series, Dawes reminds us that our gaze has the power to alter our reality of time and space, how the things we oversee when we are distracted can literally disappear. 

A fun fact about Dawes is that he had a short-lived record contract during the rave scene in Manchester back in the 1990s. Though not a lucrative business, his track made it to the New York club chart. Not being a trained musician, he was, however, able to program the computer to entrance people on the dance floor. To this day his works draw from his deep love for film and music, as well as nature with its mysterious and complex forms. Dawes’ NFTs raise questions about beauty, memory, and the human experience. His works carve out fantastic spaces where visuals react to music in real time, and where data can dance with the emotive expression of a trained performer. Like dropping in on a dream or a scene from a film, Dawes’ works operate like a raft in the midst of powerful digital currents. 

Though deeply embedded in digital processing, something about the systems Dawes creates always connect back to the human experience. He explains, “With code and data it’s easy to get lost in the technical possibilities and lose sight of what the work is about,” but with Dawes’ works, no matter how much the physical human form is processed, with visuals standing in, like metaphors, the sensation of human experience always emerges through the inherent coolness of the machine processes. Though data and code are not the obvious tools for creative expression, Dawes is a master of the coding language, using rhythm, texture, and imagery, much like a poet would. He explains that working as a designer is about providing answers, while being an artist allows him to open up avenues of questioning for the viewer and to give form and texture to those human experiences that are often inexpressible, existing between the boundaries of the logical structures of the ones and zeros. He explains, “Art is a lens through which we can ask questions about the world” and his works do just that, they open an unlikely meditative digital space for the viewer to meet oneself and explore new ways of experiencing the world.