Emoji failed Moody’s NFT aims to add depth to online interactions
In American culture, there’s a brutal expectation to be happy, visual artist Tomer Hanuka said in a recent interview with NFT Now. “It equals success. If you’re not happy, there’s something wrong with you.”
“If you don’t present a happy face, you’ve probably failed very deeply in your journey,” he continued. “[With social media], you have to present the storefront of your life as something successful, sleek, polished — you jump between vacation spots, coffee shops, great food, great sweets. The concepts of social media and emoji are flat and easy to use, but have zero depth.”
Award-winning designer with graphic art creation for resume The New Yorker, National GeographicNetflix, and Sony, believe that the art of expressing emotions online — and in the NFT space — is painfully one-dimensional.
This is an increasingly important point. Emotional depth and mental health in Web3 aren’t words people often associate with the NFT space, much to its detriment. And it’s this lack of emotional topographical change that Tomer and his twin brother Asaf Hanuka – an award-winning illustrator and instructor at Tel Aviv’s Shankar Graphic Design School – aim to address with their latest Moody’s NFT project.
The generative-art collection, which was created in early August, includes 7,401 NFTs that visualize a wide range of emotions expressed through symbols, pop culture references and storytelling. Each Moody NFT is a portrait composed of five traits that modulate 32 unique emotions that the two artists mapped after Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.
“There’s also something about celebrating a win all the time,” added Asaf Hanuka, speaking to NFT with Tomer now. “With NFT, there are always winners to celebrate. But this ecosystem is unstable. Ultimately, there are people behind it, communicating through screens and icons. And we thought it would be interesting to just put it on the table, it’s a mess and you’re feeling a lot at the same time. And then the big challenge was visualizing it.”
Moody’s collection of NFTs is undoubtedly fantastic and diverse They also reveal aspects of the twin brothers’ respective artistic styles, which both contradict and complement each other.
“Drawing became a storytelling tool for me,” Asaf Hanuka said of his creative eye. “And I noticed that I was really trying to draw what I needed to draw to pass the information [to the reader] And the drawing is not very accurate. This way, there is something in the flow. Real art is looking at the image and reading the page and then imagining something.”
For Toma Hanukkah, however, the image takes precedence over the story. Significantly influenced by the Italian painter Lorenzo Mattotti and the Japanese graphic designer Tadanori Yoku, he believed that stories were vehicles for visual experience; Opportunity to make something interesting happen on the page.
A pay-what-you-feel minting mechanic
Instead of setting a minting price for NFTs, the Hanukkah brothers have introduced a pay-what-you-feel policy, in keeping with the project’s themes of personal expression and emotional diversity. Several Moody’s fans on Twitter praised the approach, saying it brings an element of sanity to an otherwise robotic minting process.
The Hanukkah brothers hoped that, through this meaning mechanism, people would slow down and take a moment to consider how much they value art, artists, and those things. “We created The Moodys in the dark for about a year,” explains Tomer Hanuka. “And we really wanted the community to write the next chapter. And we wanted to see what people would do, to tell them, ‘Okay, here’s a human being, I’m present, I have a heart, I have feelings. Now, I’m going to think about these people and projects.’ And the response was that an absolute majority gave zero.
The Hanukka brothers chalk this up to the reality of the current bear market but also appreciate how the collectors’ response has brought the story’s emotional focus back to them. Both expected that most people would pay nothing for the mint, but it was a reality they both had to decide how they felt about it.
“I was surprised. But at the same time, I said to myself, ‘What were you thinking? Of course it’s going to happen,'” Asaf Hanuka noted. “But it was a conceptual decision, and it aligned with what we did with the project. [the values of the project]”
Bridging digital and physical
The Hanukka brothers emphasize that the Moody’s project has two arcs: art and IP. When designing NFTs, they made sure to create high-resolution files that would allow collectors to print and own high-quality physical versions of their NFTs.
Asaf and Tomer Hanuka wanted their art to help create experiences with people in the real world. The Moody’s collection consists of 32 Pure Souls NFTs that are the template from which the rest of the project’s features are blended to create 7,401 unique pieces of the community. These 32 pieces are touring the world, appearing in Los Angeles and at NFT NYC 2022. Their next stop is Tel Aviv, where the Hanukkah brothers will exhibit the pieces in a cave-shaped gallery in Jaffa.
But the Hanukka brothers are creating high-resolution NFT files that are a critical component of the upcoming phase of the Moody’s project. However, the two remain tight-lipped about those details for now.
Project NFT takes the literal form of storytelling: one of the main characters in Moody’s story is what the graphic design duo calls Great Moody, a turn-of-the-century psychiatrist whose creation was inspired by Freud’s story.
“Freud wanted very badly to win the Nobel Prize for science, but he never did, because the Nobel Prize Committee said that psychoanalysis is not a science, it is closer to literature,” Asaf Hanuka explained. “There is this division between science and a kind of magic. The Great Moody is like this, and he goes on to invent the Soul Ray, which is basically a machine that can see through your soul and see what archetypes and symbols are inside your psyche. This character is central to the narrative branch of the project.”
Storytelling through NFT
The brothers say they have a “narrative production” in the works that includes some serious writing and voice talent, in addition to a “best-in-class” production studio, though they can’t divulge any further details. “We have a campaign going on right now on Twitter and Discord, dropping a letter every day,” Tomer Hanukka teased. “Once the sentence is complete, I think a lot will become clear.”
Speaking more broadly about how NFTs are an excellent format for storytelling, the Hanukkah brothers draw some interesting parallels between blockchain-based technology and comic books.
“NFTs are an array of creation,” declared Asaf Hanukkah. “Comics started out as funny strips in newspapers. And then, for 30 years, it was almost exclusively superhero comics. But ultimately, comic books are a language. You can talk about anything – the Depression, the Holocaust, something funny, or a trip that changed your life. It is a language. NFTs are the same thing. They are a format for telling stories through pictures. It’s just getting started, and it’s very exciting.”
The Moody’s brothers consider the project to be the first “fine art PFP” collection in the NFT space. You could argue that it’s not the first, but NFTs are vibrant and chaotic — each capable of evoking a flurry of emotions that tell unique, self-contained stories. The collection reminds us how, despite all the villages and WAGMIs, those who drive the NFT space forward are real, nuanced and inherently conflict-driven. Bringing this lived reality to center stage is truly heartwarming.
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