Strange Robots → The Hamily

On the night of 28 March 2021, in New York, chatting with a friend over voice, I wrote a hundred little robots: a ten-by-ten grid, each drawing its own size, colours, antenna, eyes and the curl of its mouth, turning their heads a little with the mouse. After that call I felt that everyone is unique, and wrote the poem: the little robots have crooked ears, some wear a straight green face; round or square, waving an orange antenna, smiling smugly, none of it is wrong; your odd shape is what makes you one of a kind. The code was public on OpenProcessing, and in May I even taught people to build a robot from scratch with it on a live stream.

In June another artist moved the code onto Art Blocks, comments and all, added glasses and lips, and released seven hundred and fifty sail-o-bots that sold out in eleven hours; in July someone noticed the two looked identical. I was abroad with no lawyer; in the end Snowfro, the founder of Art Blocks, arbitrated and wrote half of the past and future royalties on chain to me. The community thought the robots looked like hams floating at sea and began calling them Sea Hams; Dmitri Cherniak drew a slice of ham and sent it to me, the largest collector gave me number five, and the collectors organised themselves into The Hamily. I went into that Discord and talked with everyone who had stood by me, drew their stories by hand into twenty-six Craft Hams and gave them away, then painted three one-of-one Atoms of Ham for auction to seed the community treasury. It was a double-edged sword: without it, people would not have come to know me so fast. That robot was my doorway into digital art; I walked through it, it was stolen, and it grew into a family.