VOID BEACONS

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VIEW ON OPENSEA

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The year is 2017 and I am taking images of pretty landscapes and interesting sights professionally for some time now. I love being outside, the thrill of discovering new places with my own eyes, and I love to carve out the final image that is hidden in the raw file, leaving my mark on well known perspectives as well as new ones. There is nothing missing and I am looking forward to the trip to Switzerland. We will see the Rhone glacier which used to be one of the bigger glaciers in the region but, as with almost all glaciers, it has shrunken a fair bit over the last one hundred years. What draws me to this particular glacier is the fact that it is partly covered in white canvas to protect it from melting, elongating the annual life cycle of the ice cave carved into the glacier's mouth.

I will not come out of that cave the same person I was before for I will find something in there that I now consider my grail piece: The best photograph that I have ever taken. An image that continues to bring me joy and inspiration every time I lay my eyes on it.

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Flowing lines and a contrast that covers almost the whole brightness spectrum lead the viewer's eyes to the center of the image where they find an ever growing rift from where the light of day enters the cave – giving birth to countless reflections and refractions, dancing through the translucent, age-old ice. Turning it even more surreal than it already is – the fact that glacial ice is so compressed that it actually is blue will never leave me unmoved.

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Capturing this image was a transformative moment for me, even if I did not realize it at the time. Only after many hours of looking at it, editing it again and again, the true intricacies of the way light covers the cold surface began to slowly make sense. As if I could see behind the code. The zeroes and ones making up the raw capture conveyed their hidden language to me in the understanding of this one fleeting moment. In the capture of a structure that literally does not exist anymore, I found my way forward and was able to solidify my view on my own work, my artistic values and in the end, my vision of how I want my art to be. My former infatuation with water and ice became an intimate and loving relationship at this very moment and is now the central theme to my work.

Taking this image made me the artist that I am now.

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On other occasions I talked about silence and serenity a lot. Silence and serenity are the two attributes that are so inadvertently connected to my work that they have become immovable and immutable values of almost everything I create. This image shows them best in that we see the ice's flowing forms shaped by wind-erosion, time and sunlight letting in just enough light to seemingly create a network of glowing veins. Reaching out into the dark surrounding the piece, beacons in the void. Yet also a part of it. The composition would not work without the contrast. Only the balance between light and dark gives the piece its balance, its hypnotic character, its inner silence and transcendental serenity.

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unlocks after the NFT is sold

Once this NFT is sold, the rights are made available to the entire world under the Creative Commons Zero license ("CC0 "). This means that after the sale, everyone has the right to download, distribute and use this image for private and commercial purposes without having to ask permission from the artist or the collector.

The image is now minted as 1/1 NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Its sale releases the image to the world, free to use, forever.

For the collector, this gives the opportunity to own my most important image while sharing its use with the rest of the world.

I believe, Void Beacons represents an alternate path for traditional image licensing and usage rights and an exciting experiment at a crucial point in time for the internet and the metaverse.

VOID BEACONS

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