Installation view of Obama’s Last Night in Office (left, 2017) and Biden’s First Day in Office (right, 2022):

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NFTs allow artists to market digital works directly, which is really convenient. Previously, I would have made prints or paintings from works that begin as Photoshop renderings in hopes of selling them. When an artwork exists as an NFT, however, the blockchain provides an undisputed claim (and potential trail) of ownership, which is pretty exciting. Moreover, whenever an NFT is resold, the original creator can get a small percentage of all future sales.

The process of “minting” a digital work or artifact as an NFT comes with a very real cost, however, and ultimately I didn’t want to invest that level of money into an experiment. So here are my three “Almost NFT” designs, available to anyone and everyone as a free download. Scroll down below the triptych to access the high-res versions. Note: these are designed at the larger iPhone 10 screen size (1125 x 2436px), but can be used on most any version.

Like my other RGB and Sometimes Y work, these screens begin with a screenshot from the ongoing RGB feed, which you can view here. The feed presents tweets in near realtime from the Twitter public timeline that mention to words red, green, blue, and yellow (in any context). From left to right, the backgrounds above were captured:

• June 6, 2021 at 6:43pm CST
• June 25, 2021 at 10:52pm CST
• June 28, 2021 at 3:19pm CST

From there, I added an RGB star, gradients, shadows, and the transparent cube pattern for additional texture.

Free to Download!

Grab any or all of the individual designs below for use on your own phone:

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Xmas Tweets (.com) is a website that presents tweets featuring the word “xmas”. The site searches Twitter’s public timeline in near real-time to present a fresh batch of captured tweets, revealing the wide spectrum of emotions found around the holiday.

Click here or on the “Launch Project” button below to view the work in a new browser tab.

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This piece, made up of three free-standing sculptures, is a visualization of the popular vote breakdown in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the 2016 presidential election. The height of each base is representative of the number of electoral votes of each state. The height of the smaller blue, red, and gray columns is representative of the number of votes for Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and all other candidates, respectively.

The post How She Lost appeared first on Brian Piana.

Trump’s Twitter Circus is a visualization of the president’s use of punctuation in his tweets. The piece chronicles his Twitter feed in real time, displaying the ending punctuation as a block on the screen. A viewer can mouse over each block to read the text from the source tweet.

Click here or on the “Launch Project” button below to view the work in a new browser tab.

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The post Proposed Design for a New Presidential Emblem appeared first on Brian Piana.

The two sculptures comprising Transition of Power (From Hope to Highrise Demagogy) are extruded favicons for political campaigns. A favicon (“favorite icon”) is a 16-pixel by 16-pixel logo that appears alongside the URL or inside the tab in most browsers.  Here, a block of wood represents each pixel of the favicon, with the height of that block determined by the pixel’s color’s luminance (perceived brightness). The darker the color of the pixel, the taller the block of wood.  The piece is made up of two sculptures:  one is the favicon for the Obama campaign in 2008 while the other is for the Trump campaign in 2016.  The Obama favicon was built in 2008 as part of Building a Better America (Two Plans).

The Trump favicon pictured in front of Proposed Design for a New Presidential Emblem at the Blocks exhibition in March of 2017.

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The post Untitled (T) appeared first on Brian Piana.

As with all RGB and Sometimes Y pieces, the color sequence of this image was generated by a real-time search for the color labels “red”, “green”, “blue”, and “yellow” over Twitter’s public timeline. Green and yellow are normally the least common colors to appear, which makes this palette particularly unique. It was captured in January of 2017 following President Trump’s executive order on immigration. There was heightened conversation regarding “green cards” on Twitter, resulting in the rare shift of the color feed’s palette to favor green.

The post Green Card Panic appeared first on Brian Piana.

Installation view of Obama’s Last Night in Office (left, 2017) and Biden’s First Day in Office (right, 2022):

The post Obama’s Last Night in Office appeared first on Brian Piana.