A work of art can stay within the conventions of a specific genre, medium, or style.

Or, it can reimagine its own category.

Snowfro’s creative practice has always illustrated this latter path. Following in the footsteps of Larva Labs, he transformed the genre of generative art through the Art Blocks protocol, moving algorithmic systems on-chain and tokenizing their outputs. Chromie Squiggle, the first project released on Art Blocks, pioneered the concept of a unique digital artwork that is generated on-demand by a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain, where the hash of that transaction serves as the input for the artist’s algorithm. The concept of a tokenized generative artwork has become so natural to collectors that it is difficult to fathom how unintuitive and unlikely it seemed only five years ago, and how much Snowfro’s work has contributed to the appreciation of digital objects.

LIFT, Snowfro’s newest long-form work, imagines a different form factor for crypto art: a game that is both open to unique player experiences and deeply personal for the artist, recorded on the blockchain and at once playable on a device that gives it sculptural instantiation. Like Chromie Squiggle, LIFT challenges the expectations of what a work of art can be, thus introducing a new protocol open to further interpretation and exploitation.

LIFT operates across multiple conceptual registers. As Snowfro developed the work during his residency at glitch Marfa, the gallery sought to frame the work by exploring each of its thematic layers separately. This text gathers those perspectives into a unified narrative, with the hope of opening a dialogue around what the gallery believes to be one of the most significant works of crypto art.

The Interactive Object

LIFT is a piece of software stored on-chain through the Art Blocks contract, just like Chromie Squiggle. Yet it is not simply an output for the viewer to behold; it is a fully functional game, available to play.

Aesthetically, LIFT draws on the pixelated visuals and chiptune soundscape of the Nintendo Game Boy. For those who devoted countless hours of their childhood navigating the blocky terrains of Super Mario and Zelda, the generative audio and imagery will have a profound nostalgic resonance. Everything in the game is made from scratch. Snowfro coded all visual elements in the game and used a tracker program and custom Python scripts to convert his original guitar compositions into C code that the Game Boy Advance could interpret and execute.

Technically, the project represents a fully on-chain, generative algorithm, wherein each of the 1,000 iterations will enjoy gaming assets that are uniquely generated and preserved directly on the blockchain. In other words, each collector possesses a version of the game containing a specific DNA that is wholly unique. The game’s ROM is a 1/1/1000 in the same way that each of the 10,000 Squiggles is a unique output of the same generative system. Collectors can extract the game’s ROM for play on emulators, or transfer it to a cartridge and play it on a physical Game Boy device.

Theorists have pondered the relationship between art and games for centuries, noting that both entail a partial suspension of reality, open-ended processes, and the absence of a goal external to these processes. Yet contemporary fine art has a fraught relationship to the most contemporary form of play: video games.

Video games require the viewer to become a player – an active participant engaged in a sequential process that unfolds over time. They are therefore disqualified from passive display, and stand at odds with the contemplative disposition toward art enshrined by the modern museum (and the corresponding notion of the work of art as an autonomous object for contemplation). Hence the cautious distance that the art world has kept from the world of gaming – even though there are exceptions at some institutions, such as Serpentine Galleries in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and individual artists that use the medium, such as Ian Cheng and Cory Arcangel.

Because of this bias, LIFT will inevitably be confronted with similar questions about its status as a work of art. Yet Snowfro is no stranger to extending the audience’s conception of what art can be.

In fact, we can see the consistency in Snowfro’s attempts to extend the public’s understanding around similar ideas – from the now familiar notion of a digital artwork that reflects an instance of a generative algorithm, to that of an interactive game with many possible instantiations. This continues his long-term engagement with interactivity. His first generative works were projection mapping installations at musical festivals, aimed at “actively involving the audience in the artwork.”¹ The innovation of on-demand minting, pioneered with Chromie Squiggle and formalized by the Art Blocks protocol, pursued this interest further by making the collector a co-creator in the emergence of the work: the work comes into being when the collector triggers the transaction that leads to a mint.

LIFT further extends Snowfro’s interest in interactive art while still pushing against understandings of what code-based art can be. Much like Walter Benjamin observed that film and photography transformed the artwork into a “creation with entirely new functions,” the medium of video games questions notions of the artwork as contemplative object, an idea that Snowfro has persistently sought to reimagine through more playful and participatory frameworks.²

Self-Portraiture in Pixels

The protagonist in LIFT is a pixelated stick figure, whom Snowfro refers to as “Pixel Man” or “Little Man.”

The Pixel Man began as a simple arrangement of 3D printed blocks in 2014, but subsequently assumed many forms, from ceramic tiles to 3D projection mapped installations and vinyl cut stickers. It is a recurring motif in Snowfro’s iterative practice, one that he eventually came to understand as a self-portrait.

Pixel Man reduces the human form to its most elemental components, a testament to our propensity to recognize this form, our form, even in the most minimal abstractions.

It may seem ironic that LIFT and Chromie Squiggle, Snowfro’s most ambitious works, both center on doodles: squiggly lines and stick figures. They have the kind of marks one makes when allowing the imagination to wander freely, or when scribbling on paper during a tedious meeting. They are simple, yet their simplicity is essential. Chromie Squiggle demonstrates the endless variation that a generative system can produce from elemental forms and chromatic options.

The Pixel Man serves as a self-portrait of Snowfro the artist, technologist, tinkerer, and entrepreneur. LIFT invites the audiences to contemplate the passions of Snowfro’s existence, all of which are inherently playful pursuits. Moreover, it challenges viewers not merely to interpret the game as a metaphor for life as a whole, but to participate actively in its unfolding meaning.

The gameplay centers on a recursive self-portrait: the Pixel Man caught in perpetual motion, lifting the same stone again and again. Players must commit to this ritual across thirty to nintey days, becoming complicit in the character’s Sisyphean labor.

Over time, as players feed the game by pressing the A button, they summon supporters who help lift the stone higher. But without constant input, the supporters drift away, leaving the character alone with the weight of the stone crushing down on him. Certain items appear over time—tokens of bull markets and collaborations—that shift the burden, making the task either heavier or lighter.

This act of lifting gives the work its name and serves as Snowfro’s metaphor for existence within the space. Creating and building here mirrors the endless task at hand, an obstacle that persists through ups and downs, made bearable, the artist seems to suggest, only by the community that surrounds the work.

The Pixel Man stands as the game’s protagonist, yet his narrative follows no heroic arc. Instead, it unfolds as a fundamentally human story, one of introspection and discovery that metaphorically renders the struggles and achievements of Snowfro across his varied roles.

The figure’s abstraction invites players to identify with him, to recognize their own journeys of self-discovery in the narrative of the game. This aspect of the work – that it is simultaneously a self-portrait of the artist and a mirror for the player – is further emphasized by the invitations Snowfro extended to several players in the cryptoart space to create their own characters, which he incorporated into the game.

On-Chain Instructions, Off-Chain Objects

Prior to the 20th century, the idea that instructions could be part of the artwork was foreign to practitioners of fine art. Painting and sculpture, the dominant fine art media, left no space for explicit conceptual content beyond the aesthetic surface. But this changed when artists reckoned with the advancements brought about by emerging technologies. Many artists in the 20th century independently arrived at the idea of an artwork as a set of instructions.

The more specific notion of artwork as instructions for the purpose of production was arguably pioneered by the constructivist László Moholy-Nagy, whose work sought to integrate art with technology and design. Moholy-Nagy’s “Construction in Enamel” (or “EM”) series from 1923 was produced through new technologies and without direct involvement of the artist.

The abstract composition was created by an enamel factory following precise instructions given by the artist. Moholy-Nagy stated that he placed the order by telephone, which gave the paintings their unofficial title “Telephone Pictures.” By rejecting unique, handmade artwork in favor of serial mechanical production and information transmission via phone, Moholy-Nagy emphasized the role of the modern artist as a creator of ideas to be communicated and manufactured through technological means.

Instruction-based artwork reemerged in conceptual art, most famously with Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings, and in early generative art, where punch cards fed instructions directly to plotter machines. Despite their different forms, both of these trajectories treat the idea, expressed as instructions, as the essence of the artwork, making any physical result secondary to the ideational origin.

Almost a century after the constructivist integration of art and technology, a new surface area for artistic experimentation emerged with the advent of art on the blockchain. Snowfro’s creation of the Art Blocks protocol allowed artists for the first time to store the code of a generative system on the blockchain and to incorporate Ethereum’s entropy in the creation of the work. Over the last four years, Snowfro has also experimented with artworks that refer to digitally instructed physical objects throughout his collaborative projects, from the Friendship Bracelets series (2022) to Heart+Craft (2023). In both cases the digital object gave the collector instructions to produce a physical counterpart.

LIFT further explores the digitally instructed physical object. Here, the digital object does not merely include a set of instructions that can be used to create a physical object. Rather, the unique game assets and ROM logic, which is a wholly on-chain digital object, can be downloaded and played on various physical devices. This allows for a tighter coupling of digital and physical objects, insofar as the software moves from the on-chain to the off-chain object, making it a true, verifiable instantiation of the digital artwork.

The relationship between on-chain and off-chain objects is worth pondering. It’s not a case of representation in the strict sense, since the off-chain game does not rely on symbols or signs to represent a physical origin, as in painting. And yet the relationship also differs from software’s existence as endless copies with no discernible “original.” Instead, LIFT does have a unique origin in the on-chain object that can manifest in a physical copy without becoming a derivative.

The blockchain provenance thus allows for an entirely new relationship where the physical artwork is an iterative version of its digital origin. It yet again demonstrates how Snowfro, the artist and tinkerer, continues to develop new primitives of how blockchain objects can be art. Snowfro suggests that translating the on-chain object into a physical device represents the work’s intended exhibition form. The game, playable on a handheld device, can even be “recessed in a nice frame on your wall.” ³. In this way, LIFT becomes Snowfro’s first work with a native physical display format. The box cover art and cartridge visuals are also embedded within the fully on-chain algorithm. Generative Goods, a company focused on using generative algorithms for the production of individualized physical goods, is releasing the complete bundle as a vintage-style game box, including the cartridge itself.

LIFT is at once playful and complex. It is the most ambitious project that Snowfro has released since Chromie Squiggle, and, like that work, it reimagines what art on the blockchain can be. LIFT is visionary in many ways: as a proof of concept for linking physical and digital objects, as a self-portrait in the guise of a game, as an ode to gaming culture and technical tinkering, and as a commentary on the digital art scene and Snowfro’s place within it.

Still, every game poses the question: What is its goal? Why do we play?

“There are at least two kinds of games,” wrote the historian James Carse. “One could be called finite, the other infinite.” While the former is played to win, Carse explains, “an infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play.”⁴

While the gameplay of LIFT (a self portrait) comes to an end, its purpose never will.

The end of this game is play itself.

glitch Marfa wishes to thank Snowfro for trusting us with his story of LIFT. As well, a special thank you to our video production team for taking our storytelling to new heights. It was a herculean effort to make it to the finish line, but we did it.

As always, thank you to our team, friends and family for continuing to support us in building this labor of love that is glitch Gallery.

See you in Marfa.

1. Snowfro Interview with the author (2022) ↩

2. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 26. ↩

3. Tweet by Snowfro ↩

4. James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 3. ↩