Power Holders: connect your wallet to mint a new Power token.
"Modernity is a deal: Humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power."
- Yuval Noah Harari
Power vs Meaning is a conceptual blockchain artwork based on historian Yuval Noah Harari’s idea that modern society is a deal in which humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power. The series consists of two looping animations (Power and Meaning), each minted as an edition of 8 NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.
Playing on the idea of utility and collector rewards as prevalent themes in the NFT space, holders of Power will be granted the power to reward themselves with an additional edition of their NFT whenever they wish. Meaning, on the other hand, is simply a piece of art, and holders will not be granted any sort of utility or rewards. During the primary sale, collectors must choose between one or the other and are not able to bid on both.
A social experiment that will only be able to fully tell its story as people interact with it, Power vs Meaning asks viewers to confront their own motivation for collecting NFTs in the first place. While Power offers utility, interaction, collector rewards, a rarity system based on exponential growth, and the potential for a community to organically form and evolve, Meaning offers nothing but the chance to own a digital penguin that infinitely waddles towards some sort of glowing metaphor for human motivation. As time goes on, how will the collection change, and what will it say about us?
Power
Meaning
Burns
Editions of Power can be burned to redeem new artworks for free. Earlier editions of Power can be burned for rarer artworks. Burns do not have a set end date but are periodically closed from time to time to ensure that 8 Gavin Shapiro artwork burns are open at one time.
Rarity System
Since holders of Power can mint a new edition whenever they wish, a simple rarity system was implemented to ensure that tiers of scarcity will always exist within the collection, even if it expands to an infinite number of editions. Every time Power reaches an edition number that is equal to a power of 8, a new rarity tier is created.
For example:
- Editions 1-8: 8^1 rarity
- Editions 9-64: 8^2 rarity
- Editions 65-512: 8^3 rarity
- Editions 513-4096: 8^4 rarity
Currently, the highest edition of Power is , and new editions of Power will be minted under the 8^4 rarity tier. editions remain before the 8^5 rarity tier begins.
About the Artist
Gavin Shapiro is a digital artist whose ultimate goal is to produce work that makes you smile. He focuses primarily on playful conceptual artworks that explore how we can use digital tools to confront our expectations of what's possible in a traditionally physical art world. He's lived in New York, Osaka and Paris, working on a large variety of projects including tv shows, commercials, outdoor displays, large-format stage visuals, and animations for casino games.
His personal work, released under the name “shapiro500,” has been used as visuals at music festivals and concerts all over the world, and has been shown on digital billboards as part of art exhibitions in New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. His animations have accumulated hundreds of millions of views across Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Giphy, and have been sold as NFTs on Nifty Gateway and SuperRare since mid-2020.
