Few artists embody the contradictions of the NFT era as clearly as 0xDEAFBEEF. Rising to prominence at the height of the boom, the Toronto-based artist became known for works that combined generative systems, sound, code, and conceptual rigor. Yet while much of the conversation around NFTs revolved around speculation and financial opportunity, 0xDEAFBEEF remained skeptical of the narratives that were driving the market.
Rather than celebrating the frenzy, he turned it into material. His project First satirized the culture of hype, legitimacy, and manufactured significance that surrounded NFTs while raising more than one million dollars for charity. Years later, the work remains both a time capsule of that moment and a sharp reflection on the stories people tell to create value.
Today, 0xDEAFBEEF’s practice extends far beyond blockchain culture. Drawing on the histories of electronic art, generative systems, sound, and computation, he moves fluidly between digital and physical forms. Whether discussing oscilloscopes, synthesizers, cryptography, or hand-forged sculptures, he approaches technology not as a trend but as a cultural medium. This summer, he presents new work at Zero 10 by Art Basel in collaboration with Asprey Studio, bringing together generative sound, oscilloscope sculptures, and historical references to early pioneers of electronic image-making.
In conversation with Anika Meier, 0xDEAFBEEF reflects on the legacy of NFTs, the relationship between craft and code, and why art ultimately derives its meaning from the social relationships that form around it.
Anika Meier One of your earliest NFT projects was First, which has since become something of a cult classic. It emerged at the height of the NFT boom, yet it also seemed to satirize many of the narratives, claims, and mechanisms of legitimacy that were driving that moment. How did the project come about?
0xDEAFBEEF I was having a lot of fun during those early months in the spring of 2021, when everything surrounding NFTs still felt new. But as the year went on, especially over the summer, things accelerated very quickly. For me, it was quite anxiety-inducing. I remember thinking, “What is going on here?”
Scrolling through Twitter at the time, it became increasingly clear that there were all these manufactured narratives. People were constantly inventing reasons why a particular NFT was significant or why a project was special. It didn’t matter whether they were artists, collectors, influencers, or commentators. Everyone seemed to be constructing stories to justify what was happening.
After seeing enough of it, I started noticing recurring patterns. It almost felt as if I was training an AI model simply by reading my feed. Certain phrases, claims, and appeals to authority kept appearing over and over again. I realized I could probably reproduce those narratives with a very simple program. Nothing sophisticated. Just something that assembled fragments of text, almost like Mad Libs, where you substitute words into a predefined sentence structure and get an unexpected or humorous result.
AM So you decided to turn those observations into a project.
0xDEAFBEEF I wrote a smart contract that generated absurd claims about “the first NFT.” It combined all sorts of ridiculous achievements and endorsements: the first NFT on the moon, the first NFT to travel at Mach 1, the first NFT endorsed by a museum, an auction house, the SEC, the U.S. government, the Vatican, or some imagined authority figure. The project mixed together every possible source of legitimacy and prestige into these increasingly ridiculous combinations.
The contract generated 5,000 unique statements, all recorded on the blockchain at that specific moment in time. The strangest thing is that, over the years, some of the most absurd predictions have actually come true. That’s what has made the project so entertaining in retrospect. Even now, years later, some bizarre headline will appear and someone will point to a token from First and say, “Well, apparently that was already on the bingo card.” It’s become a gift that keeps on giving.
There was also a charitable aspect to the project. I didn’t personally earn any money from it. It was released right at the peak of the speculative mania, and all of the proceeds went directly to GiveDirectly rather than to my own wallet. In total, it raised more than a million dollars. Looking back, the scale of the speculation at that moment was completely surreal.
AM At the height of the NFT boom, you made the unusual decision to step back from selling work and direct the proceeds from First to charity. What motivated that decision?
0xDEAFBEEF I had sold work earlier in 2021, and even then it already felt somewhat surreal. People were offering amounts of money that I found difficult to comprehend. But by the summer, things had accelerated to a point where I became deeply uncomfortable with what was happening. I stopped minting work altogether. I couldn’t really justify participating in it.
Part of my concern was that I didn’t want people coming back later and feeling as though they had been taken advantage of. The atmosphere had become intensely speculative, and I wasn’t sure how to navigate that responsibly. At the same time, I didn’t want to position myself as someone who was publicly criticizing everything that was happening. I wasn’t interested in being negative, and I wasn’t entirely sure how to process my own feelings about it. There was a lot of pressure and anxiety during that period. Much of it was probably self-imposed. In a strange way, First became my way of dealing with those feelings.
AM Looking back, do you regret that decision?
0xDEAFBEEF I don’t regret it at all. I honestly don’t think I could have acted differently given how I felt at the time. Of course, some people still speculated on First, even though the project was very explicit about what it was. Some people made money, and some people lost money. I don’t know that I can take responsibility for that. What I do know is that I didn’t personally profit from it. Instead, the project redirected some of that enormous amount of capital that was moving through the NFT ecosystem toward a cause that I believed was worthwhile. I’m proud of that. More broadly, I’m proud of the work itself.
When I think about some of my abstract audiovisual pieces, it’s sometimes difficult to explain why they matter. You can always debate the significance of a particular artwork. But First feels different to me. It captured something very specific about that moment in time. It was both a reflection on and a response to the culture that had emerged around NFTs. It’s very much a product of its historical moment, and because of that I think it carries a meaning that extends beyond the work itself.
AM Speaking of firsts in the history of art, part of your presentation with Asprey Studio at Zero One by Art Basel includes work by Ben Laposky. What draws you to that early history of electronic image-making?
0xDEAFBEEF Computers, CRTs, terminals, symbolic graphics, and code-generated images were all part of my world as a child. That aesthetic is deeply embedded in my imagination. I’ve also always been fascinated by the way people romanticize technology. Electricity, radio, signals, and synthesizers have, throughout history, inspired a sense of wonder that goes beyond their practical function. There is something mysterious about them.
That fascination was one of the reasons I became interested in synthesizers, recording equipment, and eventually electrical engineering. I wasn’t only interested in how these systems worked. I was interested in the strange and beautiful things that could emerge from them.
AM Is that what led you to oscilloscopes and the pioneers who were using them creatively?
0xDEAFBEEF When I studied electrical engineering and later computer graphics, I became increasingly interested in the history of people using technology creatively, often pushing it beyond its intended purpose. The oscilloscope became an iconic example of that for me. It’s both a scientific instrument and a creative tool. It exists right at the boundary between measurement and expression.
As I learned more about the history of computer graphics and electronic art, I became fascinated by artists and researchers who were experimenting at those boundaries. People like Ben Laposky, Mary Ellen Bute, and Herbert W. Franke were exploring entirely new visual languages using electronic signals long before contemporary digital art existed.
AM How did that historical research influence your own work?
0xDEAFBEEF One of my earliest NFT projects was Synth Poems, a series of generative sound compositions. I knew the work needed a visual component because social media is such a visually driven environment. Pure sound is difficult to share in those contexts.
At the time, discussions around generative art often focused on a particular lineage associated with figures like Sol LeWitt, Vera Molnár, and plotter-based drawing practices. I wanted to show that generative art has a much broader history than that. The oscilloscope offered a way to connect my work to another tradition, one rooted in electronic signals, sound, movement, and time-based systems. What interested me was showing that generative art isn’t a single canon or aesthetic. It’s a much larger field of experimentation with many different histories and lineages.
AM And eventually you decided not just to reference that history but to bring some of it into the exhibition itself. That’s why you acquired several of Ben Laposky’s works.
0xDEAFBEEF They’re photographs of oscilloscope images from Ben Laposky’s Oscillons series. Last summer, a few of them came up for sale through Interface Gallery in the Netherlands. I had already been in contact with someone there through the NFT space, and they let me know they were available.
I’m not a major collector, but I felt these were works I should own. Because of the connection to Synth Poems and my own interests, it seemed important to preserve that relationship. I also thought that, if I ever had the opportunity to exhibit my work in a broader context, it would be meaningful to show those historical references alongside it.
Now we’re actually able to do that. At Art Basel, I’m bringing several of the Oscillons to exhibit alongside the oscilloscope sculptures that display the generative sound and visuals from Synth Poems.
AM You’re presenting them as a historical reference rather than as part of the artwork itself?
0xDEAFBEEF They’re not part of the project itself. They’re there because the reference was intentional from the beginning. When I created the visualizations for Synth Poems, I was consciously drawing on that history. Part of what interested me was the way certain artistic lineages become dominant within the canon. We all know figures like Sol LeWitt, whose influence is firmly established within contemporary art history. When generative art became popular in 2021, people were often looking for ways to connect new work to those recognized lineages.
But my own influences came from somewhere else.
AM What did you feel was missing from those discussions about generative art?
0xDEAFBEEF At the time, I have to admit, I didn’t even know who Sol LeWitt was. He simply wasn’t part of my background. My entry point into generative thinking came through computers, electronic music, signal processing, and the history of electronic media. From my perspective, people had been working with instructions, systems, and rule-based creation through computing long before many of the figures who were being discussed in those conversations.
What that made me realize is that there isn’t a single canon. It’s more like a constellation. There are multiple histories, multiple traditions, and countless connections between them. As someone coming from outside the traditional art world, my references were different. I knew the work of John Whitney. I knew Mary Ellen Bute. Those were the people who had influenced me. They shaped how I understood generative art. And I still believed that what I was making belonged within that broader field.
In 2021, generative art was extremely popular, and people were eager to trace lineages and establish narratives of influence and primacy. That’s understandable. But I wanted to point toward another history rooted in synthesizers, electronic signals, oscilloscopes, experimental film, and electronic art. To me, those traditions are just as relevant to understanding generative art. It may seem obvious in retrospect, but at the time I felt it was important to make those connections visible.
AM Trevor Paglen, who is curating this edition of Art Basel’s Zero One, has argued that much of the post-blockchain art space has suffered from “weak curation.” He specifically mentioned your work as an example of something that would hold up in any institutional context, regardless of whether it was associated with NFTs or blockchain technology.
Given that you’ve often described yourself as an outsider to the traditional art world, how do you react to that kind of recognition?
0xDEAFBEEF A lot of that honestly goes over my head. I don’t always know what to do with those kinds of statements. What I do recognize is that I’m very fortunate to have the opportunity to show work on a stage like this. At the same time, I know that Art Basel is an art fair. It’s a very important and influential art fair, but it’s still an art fair. There are institutions, markets, politics, money, and all the other dynamics that come with that.
I don’t really feel as though I’ve been failed by weak curation. My experience has been much simpler than that. I’ve mostly just been making the work that I wanted to make and putting it out into the world. I feel fortunate that people have paid attention to it and that an audience has formed around it. Beyond that, I try not to think too much about where I fit within larger narratives.
AM It seems that NFTs didn’t just allow you to bring together your different interests. They also created a path into the art world that might not have existed otherwise. Do you see that moment as an opportunity that fundamentally changed who gets to participate?
0xDEAFBEEF One of the positive aspects of that period of speculative mania is that, for a brief moment, people from very different geographic, cultural, and professional backgrounds were suddenly able to participate in an art market that had often been difficult to access through traditional channels.
If you weren’t living in the right city, if you didn’t have the right institutional connections, or if you weren’t able to dedicate yourself fully to pursuing a career in the art world, there simply weren’t many opportunities available.
In my case, I was living in Canada, I had family responsibilities, and all of this was something I was doing on the side whenever I could find the time. Then suddenly there was this ability to connect directly with people around the world, to share work, to transact, and to participate in a global conversation. That was unprecedented. There are many artists with similar stories. People from diverse geographic backgrounds and unconventional career paths who would likely never have entered the traditional art market. For a brief period, that door opened.
AM You’ve spoken about the need for stronger critical discourse around digital art. What do you think the NFT space still lacks?
0xDEAFBEEF To connect this back to what Trevor Paglen was saying, I don’t think digital art can survive if it becomes completely detached from broader artistic conversations. It can’t simply be a space where anything goes, with no standards, no criticism, no historical awareness, and no connection to larger cultural contexts. If that’s all it is, I think it eventually fades away.
For the work to endure, there has to be some level of critical engagement. Not all work is equally strong. Not every project is meaningful. These things need to be discussed, evaluated, and situated within larger histories. That’s why I think the most interesting future lies in the cross-pollination between digital art and the broader art world rather than treating them as completely separate domains.
AM What you’re describing makes me think of Brad Troemel’s concept of “athletic aesthetics.” He argues that social media has changed how artists are perceived. Instead of being judged primarily through a few major works, artists are increasingly followed through an ongoing stream of activity, ideas, and experimentation.
When I look at your practice, it seems that people aren’t just responding to individual projects. They’re following a longer trajectory, one shaped by your sustained interest in technology, generative systems, sound, history, and material processes.
Do you think social media has made that continuity more visible and perhaps even become part of the work itself?
0xDEAFBEEF I think what I’m doing is really just documenting one person’s relationship with technology over time. A lot of these projects come out of curiosity but also from trying to work through the world as I experience it. Sometimes that’s excitement. Sometimes it’s fascination. Sometimes it’s anxiety about the way things are changing around us.
I don’t usually begin with a grand plan. Most of the time I’m just following questions that I find compelling and trying to understand them by making things. One project leads to another. An interest in computer games leads to programming. Programming leads to generative systems. Generative systems lead to sound. Sound leads to synthesizers. Synthesizers lead to oscilloscopes. One thread keeps connecting to another.
Social media has probably made that process more visible. Twenty or thirty years ago, people would mostly encounter finished works. Now they can watch ideas develop in real time. They can see experiments, dead ends, influences, obsessions, and connections as they’re happening. What’s interesting to me is that people often remember those connections better than I do. They’ll point out recurring themes across projects that were made years apart, and sometimes I hadn’t consciously realized that I was continuing a particular line of inquiry.
So if there is a continuity to the work, I think it comes from that. It’s not something I’ve carefully engineered. It’s the result of returning to the same questions over and over again from different angles.
In that sense, maybe social media does become part of the work. Not because the posts themselves are the artwork, but because they allow people to see the process rather than only the outcomes. Many of the opportunities I’ve had, many of the conversations I’ve had, and many of the people I’ve met came through sharing those processes publicly.
AM One project that comes to mind is Hashmarks, which you created with Bright Moments. In some ways, it seems to bring together many of the themes we’ve been discussing: cryptography, physical objects, history, place, and collective experience. How did that project come about?
0xDEAFBEEF Hashmarks was created with Bright Moments, which organizes generative art exhibitions and live minting experiences in different locations around the world. I was invited to create a project for their residency in Patagonia. The team had gone there beforehand to scout locations, and the challenge was essentially, can you make something that responds to this place?
That led me to the idea of creating one hundred hand-forged iron talismans. Each one was unique, and together they formed a grid that existed as a complete work before being distributed to participants. As I was thinking about Patagonia, I became interested in the region’s geology and, in particular, the concept of glacial erratics. These are large stones that were transported by glaciers and deposited far from their place of origin. Before people understood geological time, these stones seemed mysterious because nobody could explain how they had arrived where they were found.
Ideas like time, movement, information, and mark-making became central to the project.
AM The forged objects were also connected to the blockchain.
0xDEAFBEEF Each talisman had a hexadecimal number engraved on the back that connected it to a cryptographic token. I won’t get too deep into the technical details, but the relationship was designed around the idea of hashing, which is fundamental to how blockchains work. A hash function is easy to compute in one direction but extremely difficult to reverse. That asymmetry is one of the mechanisms that makes blockchain verification possible.
What interested me was how that concept echoed the geology of the place. A glacial erratic isn’t going back to where it came from. Time moves in one direction. Certain processes leave traces that can be followed forward but not reversed.
AM It sounds as though the social experience was just as important as the objects themselves.
0xDEAFBEEF What made the project special was that all one hundred talismans existed together only once. For a brief moment, they were arranged in a perfect grid in a single space, surrounded by the people who had come together for that experience. After that day, each participant took one, and they dispersed across the world. Some of them may cross paths again, but the complete work will never exist in that form again.
That impermanence became part of the piece. It wasn’t only about the forged objects or the blockchain component. It was also about a unique gathering of people in a particular place at a particular moment in time. Once it happened, it could never be repeated.
AM At a moment when so much attention is focused on AI-generated images and increasingly frictionless forms of creation, you seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Has the rise of AI changed the way you think about craft and materiality?
0xDEAFBEEF I’m not opposed to AI. There are obviously ethical questions, environmental questions, and all kinds of issues that need to be discussed, but I’m not fundamentally against people using AI to make art. People use assistants, fabricators, and all sorts of technologies in their practices. To me, that’s all part of a long history of artists working with tools.
So I’m not deliberately avoiding AI, and I’m certainly not a Luddite. I’ve even explored themes related to AI in some of my own work. What I do think, however, is that craft and material engagement take on a different meaning in an era of generative AI.
Not necessarily a better meaning—I’m not making a value judgment—but a different one.
I have this workshop in my garage where I spend a lot of time. I loved being there before the current AI boom, and I’ll continue loving it regardless of what happens next. For me, it’s a site of exploration. What interests me is tactility.
I think a lot about embodied experience, and that has become increasingly relevant as we begin asking what distinguishes human experience from simulated experience. Tactility is one dimension of that question. We’re already very good at fooling the eyes and ears. AI can generate convincing images, convincing voices, convincing music. Virtual reality can create remarkably immersive visual experiences.
But touch is different. Tactile interfaces are still incredibly crude compared to our visual and auditory systems. There is something about physical interaction with materials that remains resistant to simulation. I don’t expect that to change dramatically anytime soon.
AM So for you, the value of a work like Hashmarks isn’t only in the object itself?
0xDEAFBEEF Hashmarks is partly about that question. What is it that people actually value? Why does a particular object matter? Why does a shared experience matter?
I often think back to my years making handmade wedding rings. People would pay me hundreds of dollars to forge a ring out of a relatively inexpensive material, even though they could have bought something similar online for a fraction of the price.
The difference wasn’t the material itself. It was the story, the process, the relationship, the meaning attached to it. That experience taught me a lot about how people assign value to things. My working theory is that art is fundamentally social.
The meaning of an artwork isn’t inherent in the object itself. Meaning emerges through relationships—between people, objects, histories, experiences, and communities. That’s why projects like Hashmarks make sense to me. The object matters, but so does the gathering. So does the journey. So does the memory of having been there together. The significance comes from the network of connections that forms around the work.
AM Earlier you said that art is fundamentally social. In that sense, it seems fitting that you’ll be in Basel in person. You’re not only exhibiting work, but also participating in the Digital Art Summit. It sounds as though meeting people and having conversations is an important part of the experience for you.
0xDEAFBEEF I’m very excited to go to Basel because I want to have those dialogues with people. That’s really what it comes down to. I’m treating what I’m doing there almost like a small exhibition. I’m showing a range of works rather than focusing on a single project. It’s a bit of a snapshot of different things I’ve been exploring over the last few years.
What I’m most interested in is being able to show those works and talk with people about them, whoever they may be. That’s the part that excites me.
AM Looking ahead, you’ve gone from someone who knew very little about galleries, museums, and the traditional art world to exhibiting at Art Basel and participating in the Digital Art Summit. Has that changed your ambitions? Do you have new goals for where you’d like your work to go?
0xDEAFBEEF I’m still figuring that out. Since 2021, when all of this happened, I’ve had a lot of anxiety about what comes next. Suddenly opportunities appeared, and I felt this pressure—mostly self-imposed—that I was supposed to be doing something specific. I thought there must be certain goals I should be pursuing or milestones I should be trying to reach, but honestly, I didn’t know what those were.
At the time, I didn’t have much guidance. I was figuring everything out as I went along. I know a little more now, but not dramatically more. To be honest, my primary goal is still the same as it has always been: to continue making work around the themes we’ve discussed and to find ways to share it with people.
If that means exhibiting in a museum, great. If it means creating my own context for showing work, that’s fine too. If it means collaborating with people from the digital art or NFT space, that’s also great. I’m not trying to optimize for a particular institution or career path. I want to stay flexible, stay pragmatic, and remain open to whatever opportunities make sense.
Part of the reason is that everything feels like it’s changing very quickly. The role of galleries is changing. The role of museums is changing. Online spaces are changing. The relationship between digital culture and contemporary art is changing. It feels like we’re in a period of transition, and I don’t know exactly what those structures will look like in five or ten years.
So rather than aiming for a specific destination, I’d rather focus on making work that feels timely, relevant, and connected to the questions I’m interested in exploring. That’s really the goal.