This Didn't Happen #013

This Didn't Happen is a limited edition collection of 99 unique works of art created by Clockenflap in collaboration with Truncation.xero.

What you get: 

1. One-of-one A5 (14.8 cm x 21 cm) archival quality print on acid-free paper, presented in an acrylic frame and boxed (see product reference images).

2. NFT featuring the one-of-one artwork minted on the Ethereum blockchain via DOTTED’s easy-to-use platform (redemption via QR code, no cryptocurrency or crypto-wallet required).

Artwork with NFT redemption codes will be set out from 31 March 2023.

This Didn't Happen

Founded in 2007, Clockenflap Music & Arts Festival came to an abrupt halt in 2019, due to political tensions. Little did we realise that COVID-19 was waiting in the wings, which resulted in another three years of postponed events. Of course, we appreciate that for many a cancelled festival would be the least of their worries, yet for us, festival organisers – these past few years have been a quagmire of poop. That said, we are a resilient and industrious bunch (how else would a festival named Clockenflap ever come to exist?!) and so we decided to use artificial intelligence to imagine what those missing festivals might have looked like. 

To achieve this no small feat, Clockenflap collaborated with truncation.xero (Amir Zhussupov), a new media and generative artist from Almaty, Kazakhstan, who explores generative adversarial networks (GAN) as an autonomous creator and creative instrument.

Truncation.xero ‘trained’ the GAN on a data set of over 20,000 past Clockenflap festival images which enabled artificial intelligence to composite new visual forms, or in other words: fictional memories of festivals that didn’t happen.

Whilst there is a certain amount of control afforded to the artist through the creation of a training set, a GAN has an inherent quality where materials develop uncanny lives of their own. The results took our breath away, and in that moment, we knew these individual works of art must be shared.

To create the NFT collection, Clockenflap collaborated with DOTTED to launch the collection to our community. DOTTED is the festival’s official partner for all things NFT and Web3.