We are Project K, this is our manifesto.

Images, images everywhere.

Since we stand as humans animals, our original ability is to communicate abstract concepts and ideas.

With our bare fragile hands, we started to depict and sculpt shapes and colours.

We started to use tools and whatever we could spot in our environment. Every new tool, every new material, soil, plant or burnt piece of wood was a way to share what our electrically excited brain cells were generation out of chaos.

This incredibly complex intellectual mass, full of images, full of an inner world, is not something we could have kept locked in its box. It had to shine.

Carbonised wood and now NFTs: admit that, in an interval that geologists could call a snap, we made some interesting progress… at least on this specific subject.

Hear them claim that NFTs are just JPEGs that anyone can copy and that intellectual property is their precious.

Yes, we can copy. Images are just digital files.

Images are just what we create since we found this cavern wall to draw on.

Blockchain is “just” another wall.

We continue to create images. We continue to copy.

We can copy them, draw them on our own wall.

Nothing new here except 32bits colour palettes, 3D formats, video compression and high sampling rate audio.

The only difference today is that the copy is exactly identical to the original.

Don’t despise manual analog copies.

Lascaux cave drawings copies are extraordinary and even cave dwellers who draw the original would not see the difference aside from a slightly hotter and dryer air.

Wall paintings are not to be sneezed at either; they have far more shades and colours than our best digital images.

The violin sampling rate? It’s analog. There are no boundaries other than what our sensors can sense.

Colours? we can’t even see all of them with our human eyes.

We made art easier to share, but we did not change anything to the content itself.

Images are images.

Images on a wall, sculpted in wood or encoded on a quantum silicate substrate.

All made of molecules, made of atoms from explosion of stars.

Brain cell electrical chaos transformed into perceptible art, shared in a tangible form.

On screens, through optical-fibres, in museums, back on walls.

(We will keep using the images term in this manifesto, but understand that what we name images is anything from actual image to sound, midi files, 3D file or video and more.)

Art beyond tangible

Images, as splendid as they can be, are not original products of the blockchain.

We know images since ages, we only made them available through the chain.

We moved to a new kind of wall: decentralised, Turing complete, unbreakable, censorship resistant, immutable, always in sync, everywhere, always on, available.

And still, we draw on the wall with our bare fragile hands.

We can do so much more.

We can explore so many ideas.

We can go beyond the wall.

Art can not be only images anymore.

Welcome to protocol

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are well-known products of blockchains and is probably the spark for the mass adoption that we are all waiting for.

But NFTs are protocol before being anything else.

NFTs are standardised interfaces (the most known one being ERC-721.)

Without protocol standard and interfaces, NFTs are just smart contracts.

Ok, yes, that’s already a thing, but standard multiplies the power.

What makes NFTs so popular is that they all share these standard interfaces that makes them able to be shared seamlessly on blockchains, in marketplace, with many wallet applications.

This is far more powerful that many can expect.

This is so invisible when it works.

Standards are freedom to create.

We forget them as we use them all the time.

Protocols are not the message, not the idea, but they carry it.

NFTs are just empty shells of protocol.

Code in the shell

If there’s an interface, we need an implementation.

Standards provide guidelines and examples for implementations but don’t enforce reality as soon as the interface matches the expectations.

Project K NFTs are not images and our images are a bit raw (some say crappy) on purpose. Not that we don’t know how to draw (we won’t prove it though,) but we don’t want images to be the reason for our NFTs to be a thing.

Ok we try to have fun with images and make them match the tale, but you will all agree that compared to some superslick designs that can be found on the NFT marketplaces, ours don’t stand the comparison. We don’t even try. We won’t. We just admire.

Our ambition is under the surface.

The iceberg visible part is only ten percent and images in our NFTs are the tip.

Under the surface, in the cold blue deep water, lays the code.

Implementation is code.

What if NFTs added meaning at code level?

What if code carried political messages?

What if code was written to make us think?

What if code was beautiful, clever, worth the look?

What if code was playful, sometimes tricky?

What if code was a changing shape?

What if reading the code was part of the art experience?

What if code was enough?

Our work is in the implementation.

Our art will be the code.

Find Project K on:

• Twitter
• Portion on Palm network

Project K Manifesto by Project K is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0