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While it's a common belief that everything must slow down in summer, that is only sometimes the case when discussing digital art.
So here we are, back from a very hot season, enriched and inspired by what July and August had in store for us. At least for me, but I am here to share with you.
What if I were to ask you: what do digital frogs and Carrara marble have in common?
Let's start from the beginning, and every beginning always goes back to Pepe. So once and for all, who is Pepe? (I tell you a secret: there will never be such a thing as once and for all, Pepe is forever evolving).
Pepe the Frog originated in Matt Furie's 2005 comic Boy's Club, where he was a laid-back character with the catchphrase "feels good man." Around 2008, Pepe became a popular meme on platforms like 4chan and Reddit, where his adaptable expressions allowed him to convey a wide range of emotions. This versatility made Pepe one of the most widely recognized and used internet memes.
In 2016, Pepe’s influence expanded into the crypto world with the creation of Rare Pepes, digital artworks tokenized on the Bitcoin-based Counterparty protocol.
These Rare Pepe cards were some of the earliest examples of blockchain-based art, with each card being unique, scarce, and tradable. This gave birth to a new form of digital art collecting, following the game Spells of Genesis, and especially a new way of being an artist, where everyone could submit their art from anywhere, at any time, and with any skill. Pepe became a pioneer project in what we call today crypto art.
The Rare Pepe project’s closure in early 2018 didn’t mean the end of Pepe's journey in crypto art, though. The community’s enthusiasm led to the creation of subsequent movements, and later, we experienced the emergence of Rare Pepe-inspired NFT variants, like Fake Rares and Dank Rares.
You can read about the amazing variety of creative Pepe communities here. To check the entire collections of Rare Pepes, Fake Rares, Dank Rares, and even more derivative projects, check out the one and only source directory.
Today, Pepe stands as a cultural and artistic icon, evolving from a simple meme into a symbol of creativity, digital ownership, and the decentralized spirit of the internet.
But why am I talking about Pepe? First of all, I AM ALWAYS talking about Pepe, but also because on August 10th, artist Beeple and his team organized a Pepe fest at his studio in Charleston, South Carolina.
"Pepefest at Beeple Studios was a community-led celebration of all things Pepe. During the day event we had a diverse set of speakers and panels curated by Eleonora Brizi who delved into the origins and cultural significance of the beloved meme. The artist showcase highlighted the creativity form over 200 artists within the community, with stunning works on display from artists around the world. The event also featured live painting from Pepelangelo all day as well as a Pepe drawing competition that brought out amazing creations from the attendees.
The gathering was a true celebration of the vibrant Pepe community, with Peptopians from around the world connecting and sharing their passion.
The event was a testament to the enduring influence of Pepe in popular culture." https://beeple-studios.xyz/event/pepe/ I was involved in the festival as a curator, and I organized and moderated the content programming with panels and talks.
From 1pm to 3.30 pm, we tried to finally give some order to the story and history of Pepe, starting with my introduction to historical NFTs and contextualization of the space, then going through the first discussion about the origins of Rare Pepe, featuring on stage the best of the best: Joe Looney: Rare Pepe scientist, creator of Rare Pepe wallet; Theo Goodman: Rare Pepe scientist, Rare Pepes auctioneer; Shawn Leary: Rare Pepe scientist, creator of DANKPEPE; Rare Scrilla: Rare Pepe artist, creator of DJPEPE and co-curator of Fake Rares.
You can enjoy here Joe Looney demoing the Rare Pepe wallet in 2018 at Rare AF1 in NYC, when for the first time ever, the few platforms and people who back then knew about blockchain and its applications to art met and gave birth to one of the most iconic events in the history of crypto art.
Joe recently reviewed and updated the wallet to make it simpler to use, and this is why it was possible for everyone participating in the event to draw their own Pepe on paper and being able to mint it instantly in a special collection that Joe created for it, as he already did last year when we organized the first Pepe fest in Paris.
In the panel we also discussed Counterparty, still one of the most advanced protocols on the Bitcoin blockchain - if we think about when it was developed (started in 2014) and the real innovation it brought regarding what you can do with a digital asset.
Today, being all of us very familiar with Ethereum, there are still issues that Ethereum didn’t solve but that were always present with a more conceptual and primitive solution on Counterparty.
Continuing with a discussion with those who are the core of everything, the artists, we finally ended with a talk by Nina Roehrs titled: How a viral meme went from outcast to art museum.
But this amazing day didn't only offer the opportunity to dive deep into the story of the frog that revolutionized the digital culture.
Besides the massive, majestic, marvelous immersive room, Beeple Studio also hosts amazing galleries where Beeple’s art is exhibited. It looks like one of the most beautiful museums, but it is more fun, and all this magic was accessible at night to everyone. It was exciting, mesmerizing, to see the “Everydays: the first 5000 days” displayed physically on a vast wall that really gave justice to this masterpiece.
Amongst all the nerdy fun things that I experienced at the festival, one of the funniest ones was the captions of all the different artworks on the wall, all written by Beeple, with very pop language and characters.
I am not sure where to end this article.
How do you stop writing when talking about Pepe and Beeple, knowing that you were also blessed by god in having experienced the eternal matter of marble?
We will find each other in the next one, but in the meantime and forever: for everything Pepe, you know where to find me. Even Pepe found me, and since then, I have never left.
