Grimes has released new music, but it’s not available as a physical release or via streaming services. Instead, the unreleased material accompanies cryptocurrency art pieces in WarNymph Collection Vol 1, a collaboration with her brother Mac Boucher which made Grimes more than $6 million via auction. The art isn’t physically available, either, but comes in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFT).
WarNymph contains 10 different pieces. As Exclaim points out, Earth is accompanied by the unreleased track, “Ærythe”, while Mars is soundtracked by “Mars Theme”. The collection was made available on the NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway and sold out in 20 minutes.
A percentage of proceeds from the sales will be donated to environmental NGO Carbon 180, presumably in an attempt to offset the electricity and carbon dioxide consumed by using blockchain technology. As climate activist Joanie Lemercier previously estimated, however, a prior auction for just two pieces of art on Nifty Gateway burned the equivalent of 49 years of electricity consumption and 103,129 Kg of CO2 emissions.
Read a description of the project:
WarNymph is the Goddess of Neo-Genesis. She battles the destructive force of obsolete ideas and systemic decay that threatens the future. She embodies the power of perpetual regeneration that manifests in a state of infinite infancy where she sheds her old skin of corruption.
The first of her kind, WarNymph is a digital entity spliced from a pixel DNA of the organic human, Grimes. Merging the raw images of a photogrammetry scan, enunciating her iconic tattoos, with a retopologized mesh that was sculpted, modelled, and morphed into a variety of forms before being permanently sealed into the body of a baby angel, a cherub. She exists in the liminal state of the virtual world, a Grimes narrative universe, within an alternate history of mythology and the infinite fragments of the future. She is a pioneer in the rapidly expanding metaverse.
Grimes, with the WarNymph project, explores the fluidity of identity in the virtual age: the ability to create, augment, and splinter ourselves into unlimited avatars, create boundless worlds, and build rich, complex lore.
NFT has recently entered the mainstream, thanks to the rise of NBA’s Top Shot partnership. Using blockchain technology, an NFT digitally verifies the authenticity and ownership of digital art, or in the case of the NBA, video clip highlights.
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This isn’t Grimes’ first online art auction. In May 2020, she unveiled a project titled Selling Out, in which she literally sold a piece of her soul. The Canadian musician also featured her WarNymph digital avatar in the collection.
On January 1st, Grimes released Miss Anthropocene Rave Edition, a reworked version of last year’s Miss Anthropocene. She’s reportedly been Grimes while in quarantine.
