Harvey Rayner

The artist.

Harvey Rayner (born 1st January 1975) is an English artist and creative coder with over 25 years of digital and generative art practice. He attended The City and Guilds of London Art School and has had a diverse creative career working as a designer, inventor, programmer, and business owner while maintaining a dedicated daily art practice. His large and varied body of work reveals an evolution in formalized geometric approaches to art making. Rayner is dedicated to creating ambitious innovative projects that have generative artistry and community building at the heart.

punkFUKR is an honorary 1 of 1 animated artwork based on a chatFUKR trait of the same name. To place in context, chatFUKR is a playfully transgressive Ordinals collection at the intersection of PFP degen culture, contemporary fine art, and generative artistry. The collection both mocks and embraces degeneracy, taking a uniquely generative approach to representing the memes and symbols of the contemporary crypto art movement and collecting culture. punkFUKR is an obvious nod to CryptoPunks, arguably the most iconic PFP collection to date within the Web3 space.

The chatFUKR character represents a troll that has evolved independently of man’s direct involvement in the interconnected web servers and blockchain nodes. Inspired by George Dyson's idea of AI evolving in the wilderness of the global digital ecosystem, hiding from human attention for the sake of its own preservation. The second fun idea is that this troll feeds off the constant torrent of human degenerate discourse and spews it back into the Web3 message channels for its own entertainment. The trolling of course also satisfies its thirst for power over its domain and paradoxically feeds its need for connection, not unlike human trolls.

The scream of the chatFUKR is a birth roar, a representation of its first breath as this AI comes online. This scream is also representative of the particular flavor of existential angst we are all familiar with from spending too much time immersed in our cyber worlds. Edvard Munch’s The Scream was created at the dawn of the industrial revolution in 1893 - chatFUKR’s scream heralds the dawn of the crypto revolution.

punkFUKR uses a 24x24 cell grid like the famed CryptoPunk NFT collection, only punkFUKR is fully generative producing an SVG output, where each cell recursively becomes the container for another punkFUKR. This approach creates an authentic means of adding texture and depth to the classic clean pixel art simplicity. Within the modern crypto art movement, pixel art PFPs have a distinct and important place in the evolving history of the NFT art canon. Some would say a low effort solution to building a PFP collection, others would say a natural, elegant and authentic expression of the digitally native form.

In recent years the depiction of laser eyes has taken on a significant symbolism within the BTC and Ordinals community. Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, one of the biggest holders of BTC, changed his X (prev. Twitter) profile picture to include laser eyes in early 2021, sparking a trend among Bitcoin enthusiasts to use the symbol to signal a bullish conviction for the cryptocurrency.

punkFUKR morphs in an infinite loop never repeating itself. It cycles through three main phases but never repeats itself exactly. The three phases are pixelation, laser eyes and glitch. Pixelation and glitch have become fundamental visual languages synonymous with NFT art. The laser eyes are represented for the reasons covered above, but also are a reference to a third cartoonesque stylization that forms another cornerstone of NFT art. No matter where we are in the cycle, we are constantly revisited by predictable NFTs bearing these visual characteristics. In this sense, punkFUKR is both mockery and homage.

punkFUKR is inscribed using a seal parent created by the artist as his genesis Ordinals inscription. This seal will never be sold by the artist and is used to add an extra seal of authenticity to the Ordinals projects he releases.