Sliderverse × White Castle

Someone online who was starting a company in New York messaged me out of the blue; we had a meal, and that was how it began: White Castle was turning a hundred and wanted a set of NFTs. What they had in mind was collages of illustrations, which looked like flyers; I proposed painting the burgers with mathematics, with the feel of a brush. Every ingredient is a brush of its own: bacon curls the way bacon does, the bun is thick and dotted with sesame, and each stroke starts with a random momentum and rotation, so no two burgers are alike; then, following the whole menu, fries, onion rings, chicken rings, shakes and sodas are added, and a physics simulation stacks them into a meal. The burgers also sing: each stroke is a note from a chord, each burger a track, and the kick, snare and hi-hat are synthesised live in the Web Audio API without a single sample, a lo-fi beat of its own for every edition. White Castle kept telling me the burger did not look like theirs, and I kept reshaping it.

It was torn apart. People who knew my earlier work saw burgers at the end and found it far too commercial, Andy Warhol’s soup cans. I still think it was ahead of its time technically: the whole work lives on chain, it was the first brand partnership built on Art Blocks’ generative minting technology, and on 17 December 2021, the day of the public sale, one thousand and forty-five editions were minted. I do not mind whether it is famous; what I mind is whether every piece of work tries something new.