Beginning in the 1970s, Andy Warhol collected stuff and stored it in 612 brown cardboard boxes, the so-called Time Capsules.
To date, only 100 of these boxes have been opened and examined. Everything Warhol deemed interesting and worth keeping—from precious objects to the most quotidian of souvenirs—was gathered together in these boxes.
The collecting strategy was very straightforward: Warhol would keep an open box beside his desk, dropping in the daily flood of correspondence, magazines and newspapers, gifts, photographs, business records, collectibles, and ephemera that passed through his hands. And the Time Capsule in progress would be taped shut and dated by an assistant when Warhol deemed it complete.
Capsule 21 is the home of experimental, artistic, derivative and 100% on-chain NFT projects. All current projects were originally conceived and developed by Middlemarch, PIV, and dovetail but projects by other developers who share the same philosophy and inspirations will be added to the Capsule 21 Collection in the future.
Capsule 21 projects can basically be about anything, but there are a few common features. Technically, they are always 100% on-chain, meaning that the token's metadata and image are stored directly on the Ethereum blockchain. The projects may turn out to be interesting now, or fifty years from now or it will be up to the aliens to figure it out. But that doesn't matter at all, because they are forever waiting on the blockchain.
All projects are put together fairly quickly, tested and added to the Capsule 21 collection. Andy said: “Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”
Every Capsule 21 project is experimental. How big can an NFT project be? Can it have a few million tokens? In that case, should some kind of batch minting be considered? Can you make a work of art made up of profile pictures? And can you extract these profile pictures from the artwork? And put them back? Can you make an NFT faucet? What would Andy have done? We love these kinds of questions.
Artistically, all projects are derivative. They work with what already exists. We believe that in art, everything has already been done once. But also that by doing the same thing over and over, you will eventually make something new.