For the last four years I have been poking around in the NFT world like a bloke sticking his hand into hollow logs looking for treasure and mostly finding angry spiders.
I started on VoiceHQ. It shut down. Then I moved to Revel. It shut down. Then Rodeo Club. That shut down too. Now I have been on ZeroOne. It has not technically shut down, but after enough crashes, glitches and getting locked out of my account, it feels like being trapped in a relationship where the other person keeps forgetting your birthday and occasionally changes the locks.
At first the whole thing made sense to me. Artists could connect directly with collectors. Digital art could have provenance. Ownership could be tracked. New creative possibilities opened up. I even made some money. Unfortunately, I never cashed it out. Along with the money went countless artworks scattered across platforms that no longer exist or accounts I can no longer access.
There is something strangely fitting about my latest dream journal image. A bloke sitting underwater in a suit giving the middle finger straight to camera while a fancy cocktail party carries on above the surface pretending everything is fine.
That image feels like an honest self portrait of my NFT experience.
The funny thing is I do not regret it.
The NFT world pushed me creatively in ways I never expected. It forced me into experiments, strange ideas and visual directions I probably would have avoided otherwise. It gave birth to my Hypno Bat series. It helped launch My Visual Dream Journal, where I brought my dreams to life with ai. Day after day I made work without overthinking it. Following dreams. Following instincts. Following weird little threads into dark corners.
The journal made it all the way to Day 227 before ZeroOne finally locked me out for what appears to be the last time.
To everyone who supported my work on those platforms, thank you. Those artworks still exist out there on the blockchain somewhere, floating around like digital ghost ships. The support was real even if the platforms turned out to be built on foundations about as stable as a mosquito on a ceiling fan.
So instead of mourning what was lost, I am starting again.
Day One.
The title seemed obvious.
Fuck You.
My Visual Dream Journal Day One.
This time I am taking ownership back.
The new dream journal will live through my website and my email community. Every day I will release a new limited edition digital artwork. The only way to collect them is by connecting with me directly.
Each edition will be logged in your name with a certificate of authenticity and recorded on a digital register. You do not own the copyright. You own your edition of that image. If you ever decide to sell it, you can relist it through my website. Ten percent royalties come back to me so the artist is not completely cut out of the equation the moment something changes hands.
The dream journal pieces themselves are not really standalone artworks anyway.
They are fragments.
Field notes.
Dream fossils.
Pieces of a much larger creature.
Every one hundred nights I will create a handcrafted physical artwork containing all one hundred dream journal images from that chapter. A one of one original piece. The digital works are the footprints. The physical artwork is the animal.
It probably sounds confusing as shit.
The short version is this.
I want to give away work in progress digital artworks.
I want to build direct connections with people who care about what I make.
I want to stop handing control of my creative life to platforms whose business model seems suspiciously similar to a bone eating snot worm slowly dissolving whatever it is attached to.
Most of all, I want to own more of my own work.
The same thinking is starting to shape everything else I do. Print on demand once felt like freedom. Lately it feels more like renting a tiny corner of somebody else’s shopping centre while they take a cut of every sale.
My long term dream is to become my own print on demand service. To print my own work. Pack my own orders. Build something real and tangible with my own hands. Not because I want to become a logistics expert, but because I am increasingly interested in shortening the distance between the artist and the person hanging the work on their wall.
Maybe that is where all this has been heading the whole time.
Less platform.
More people.
Less extraction.
More connection.
Less cocktail party.
So if you would like to be the first to collect my first visual dream journal limited edition digital artwork please drop me your email and I’ll transfer ownership and send your some art.
Kids Book Illustrator Andy C Marshall 