“...and posting ‘i'm rocking chrome hearts shooting basketball just like i'm drake’ makes u feel like Veeze feeling like Drake”
–Paul (from bible), the river: part I
Spiky is spiky.
Spiky is a DJ.
Spiky likes anything and everything with spikes on it.
Spiky will give you a “spiky” version of your profile picture if you ask him.
Spiky has a few catch-phrases: “Spiky DJ mate,” “erreh, erreh”
Spiky is cool.
Spiky DJ is a character. He’s also the subject of an NFT series of the same name. Spiky is the creation of a collective of slackercore millennial NYU kids called FPBJPC; the name doesn’t really stand for anything, but there’s a channel in their discord server where you can give suggestions. FPBJPC has a diverse body of work: performance, painting, sculpture, several albums of difficult-to-categorize music. As a whole, their work doesn’t seem to have any mission or narrative. It’s chill. It isn’t serious. It’s about having fun with your friends. This attitude helps them fit in better than other 30-something artists that have entered the NFT sphere, which is generally distrustful of anything from the “art world.” They seem to get it.
Left: FPBJPC, image from “The person I love most is an artist” dumpster exhibition, 2016. Right: FPBJPC, image from “YMCA”, 2019
Spiky DJ, the project, has many attributes of a typical NFT pfp project: various textures are applied to an avatar in blender, there’s a discord with a “gm” channel. Spiky DJ, the character, is an active personality in the “avant NFT” community on twitter and discord, where he periodically hosts small events on cryptovoxels and often gives people just-for-fun “spiked” NFT profile pictures. After six months there still isn’t a mint date. Like other FPBJPC projects, this isn't serious. The point here obviously isn't to “make it,” and that’s okay.
spiky dj, “spiked” profile picture, 2021
Art that’s fun can still be taken seriously. It breaks down the barrier between the artist and the viewer; you’re part of the performance, you’re friends for the night. One thing that separates an NFT project from traditional art is that for the token project to be successful it has to be fun: if art online doesn't encourage people to appreciate the work mimetically, riff on it, bring it into themselves, it’s pretty much dead on arrival. Unlike in traditional art, online there isn’t much of a need for maintaining an independent author-identity. Once it’s weaned off the body, identity is free to come and go, expand to enclose many people or just one, be discarded, or outlive its creator. Most NFTs are profile pictures because choosing an image and putting it on gives you some of the image’s being. Like the shaman becoming the spirit he is dressed as, we like to imagine the mask as closer to our true selves than what's underneath.
You own an NFT avatar so that you can become the thing contained in that image. You hold Spiky DJ so that you can be Spiky DJ.
It’s fun to be Spiky DJ. The character is both well-defined and incredibly simple. It's fun to be spiky. It's fun to say “erreh, erreh” and get excited when you see something with spikes on it. The character is so incredibly simple that it obscures what’s happening underneath: the artist becomes the work becomes the viewer. This subject-object blurring means that Spiky DJ can live forever, become unrecognizable through permutations on permutations of people playing the part.
These aren’t new ideas, though generative NFT pfp series do make them more operable. The internet is perpetually fascinated with both masks and clones because to be online is to break off a piece of your identity and give it to something else. Anime girl posters are as old as the internet. Groypers and others seemingly emerged fully formed out of the collective subconscious some years ago. Similar entities can now be designed before being released into the wild. NFT pfp projects promise life after the undead algorithmic holding cell: buy one and you can be part of a society again.
The community that develops around NFT projects is often overlooked by outside critics. Much of the bafflement that art critics have at avatar series would disappear with more understanding of this; NFTs are simply not appreciated in the same way as traditional art. Of course it’s absurd to put a profile picture in a gallery. It doesn’t go there! That doesn’t mean it isn’t art.
FPBJPC, image from “The Godfather: The Game”, 2018
“The Godfather: The Game,” a FPBJPC project from 2017, includes an image of what appears to be a short script reminding the listener of “the puppet problem.” The page of text wonders at the proliferation of what it calls ‘puppet art’. “Why all the puppets now?” it asks. “Does the room need to be filled? … What do these figures stand, sit and lie for?” These questions may not have answers, though an answer of some kind feels much closer now. Erreh, erreh.
