Just The Sawdust
The Just the sawdust collection is just that. Sawdust. It starts with a single shaving of wood labelled Sawdust 1 and continues all the way to 100. It is conceptual art by Matthew Hirschey and I like it a lot. You can see where the blade has combed through the timber with each stroke of the hand.
Conceptual work plays with an idea and it became obvious that the MintFace collection needed to pick up a shaving of sawdust for myself. Fortunately, I managed to get in early on the Just the sawdust collection as the artist Matthew Hirschey was a recent alumni of the NFT Digital Artist Economy workshop.
Matthew Hirschey, scientist and University professor
Matthew's work crosses genres and media, ranging from illustration and design to generative and computational.
Sawdust 2 spoke to me as a creator, because while it is easy to create one of something...it is much harder to create the second. Going from zero to one is the most difficult thing. Going from one to two is the next most difficult.
"Sell the sawdust" has become a battle cry for a new generation of content creators. What started as a joke about "selling sawdust to a sawmill" has developed into a strategic business plan of the entrepreneur. The ability to capture value and interest from the things that the creator is already doing is truly selling the sawdust." Matthew Hirschey.
Some may enjoy the later numbered sawdust compositions more. There is an already an established to each piece like most ongoing projects...but my preference is still the early ones. There is more flexibility and dynamism at the early stages of a creation and that is what I see in Matthew's conceptual art.
The Gene(rative) Collection
Moving on from sawdust... Matthew has launched a second collection, this time thanks to an invitation from Alpha Centauri Kid to join Foundation. It is also conceptual in nature.
"The gene(rative) collection is a generative art project where each human gene is depicted as a barcode, a symbol that represents a unique idea." Matthew Hirschey.
Each element of the barcode encodes specific information according to Matthew. The first number is the chromosome where the gene is located. The gene name follows, and is filled with 0x and then a string of random numbers.
The bars of the bar code are established positions of chromosome banding patterns. The gray bar is the location of the centromere between p- and q-arms and the red bar is the location of the gene. I had to copy this from the artwork description because this giga-brain 🧠concept has flown right over my head 😂.
"This collection starts with two of the 50 most researched and published genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2) and will grow in sequence as the pieces are collected; however, custom requests are available for your favorite gene via DMs on Twitter." Matthew Hirschey.
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