“The Black Tulip” is an NFT which challenges the volatile digital art market by making it impossible to sell for more or less than it was originally purchased for. Deployed using two interlocking custom smart contracts, it breaks the usual protocols of major NFT marketplaces by forcing it be exclusively traded on theblacktulip.bid. Echoing Dumas' exploration of rarity in the novel of the same name, true black tulips have historically been almost impossible, creating a speculative desire for one. The token's AI-generated visuals also pose questions about the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. To make the moving image work I finetuned a model to make a dataset of impossible black tulips, the results far weirder and more uncanny. I have been working with tulips and AI for the past five years and this work uses the original tulip dataset that I made in 2018 as its base, but transmutes it into a fantastical biological impossibility. /This piece serves as both a critique of value and a commentary on the evolving nature of speculation in the digital realm.
