“DEAFBEEF Series 0: Synth Poems” is the genesis NFT collection by artist-engineer 0xDEAFBEEF, a Canadian creator whose work sits at the intersection of code, sound, and visual art.
Over the past two decades, he has explored music, electrical engineering, computer animation, generative systems, and even blacksmithing, bringing a deeply experimental and cross-disciplinary perspective to onchain art.
What makes Synth Poems unique is that the self-contained C code that generates both sound and animation is stored entirely on the Ethereum blockchain, meaning the media can be reconstructed in perpetuity without reliance on external storage like IPFS. This approach reflects DEAFBEEF’s philosophy of working as close to the “bare metal” as possible, using a minimal toolset like a C compiler, text editor, and low-level programming to treat code as artistic material.
"Deafbeef began an as art project in 2020 at the start of the COVID 19 pandemic. I emerged after 7 years living under a rock while my kids were young, to discover that modular synthesizers had come back into style. Having a background in electrical engineering, sound recording and music, I was excited the culture of synths had re-emerged. However, there was a certain amount of consumerism in the new culture, and I decided to take an alternative ascetic approach of using 'nothing' to make music, rather than sink time and money into expensive hardware that many seemed to view as magical "black boxes". Nor did I want to upgrade my 10 year old laptop to be able to run the latest DAWs. I opted instead to rebuild from scratch, using only a cheap laptop running Linux, emacs text editor and a C compiler. The intent is to work at a fundamental level, scrawling numbers directly into digital storage media later to be interpreted as sound and images." -- 0xdeafbeef
