CASTLES MADE OF PIXELS
The song “Castles Made of Sand” by Jim Hendrix begins at the end of a relationship between a man and a woman. As the man trails after the woman, she turns and yells, “you’re a disgrace!” She then slams the door in her pursuer’s face and he can only drop to his knees to ‘cry a garden green.’
The verse lasts a little over twenty seconds, but as a listener, we might imagine a whole relationship passing by. This couple may have loved one another deeply when they first met and began their relationship. Maybe they themselves had a favorite song they listened to, nodding their heads in the comfort of each other’s company. But as time moved on, something happened. The spark that became a flame of passion and love, burned out in the end and we’re left with a pair of tattered individuals at a crossroads.
The second verse revolves around a small Indian Brave. Jimi speaks about him and his friends playing as children, pretending to battle enemies they haven’t met at such a young age. The small child dreams of becoming a great warrior and maybe chief of his tribe one day. As many moons pass and the small child grows into an adult, his chance finally comes to join a battle the next morning. Unfortunately, his life is cut short when a surprise attack kills him in his sleep that night.
The third verse is as follows:
“There was a young girl, whose heart was a frown
Cause she was crippled for life,
And she couldn’t speak a sound
And she wished and prayed she could stop living,
So she decided to die
She drew her wheelchair to the edge of the shore
And to her legs, she smiled you won’t hurt me no more
But then a sight she’d never seen made her jump and say
Look a golden-winged ship is passing my way
And it really didn’t have to stop, it just kept on going…
And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually.”
In Jimi’s analogy, he considers people to be like castles–made up of small grains representing fragmented moments in our lives that build to make us whole. As vessels, we are composed of the food we eat, the music we listen to, places we visit, other people we meet, and the dreams and memories we share.
These small pieces of data are input into our personal database — the body and mind through external channels and more deeply, biological and psychological means down to the molecular level as formulaic traits through DNA. These intimate actions that take place every second of every day result in what we as a species regard as the formation of life.
When transforming the analogy of sand as physiological and psychological material units and turning it into bits of encoded digital data, there is a general Correlation between our idea of existence and NFTs.
“A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a digital ledger (blockchain).[1] NFTs can be associated with reproducible digital files such as photos, videos, and audio. NFTs use a digital ledger to provide a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership, but it does not restrict the sharing or copying of the underlying digital file. The lack of interchangeability (fungibility) distinguishes NFTs from blockchain cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.”
Source — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
What is unique or the idea of being unique? Generally speaking, it is the notion that there is no copy of a singular entity.
The idea of unique existence for example is that no human is alike — not even twins. They will contain a shared genomic set, but no two or more individuals can be alike due to anomalies surrounding them — time they were born, position in the womb, physical environmental considerations, and psychological constructs.
Traits may be considered almost identical to that of one’s parents. A daughter may have the same laugh or the son may grind his teeth like his father, yet, due to minute variances in time, place, environment, etc, the bodies and minds of the children could never enact those actions in the same manner.
As humans -
We are unique.
We contain various properties and traits.
We are biologically encoded to grow and change.
And so on.
Due to the cryptographic nature of blockchain technology, the intimately secure specificity of the filetype, and the possibility of evolutionary encoding to change over time, in many ways, NFTs are an inherently Unique life form.
They are castles made of pixels that slip into a decentralized sea of individuality, eventually.
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