XCOPY

di Ivan Quaroni

A legendary figure among the most influential crypto artists, XCOPY is a mysterious character about whom little or nothing is known, except that he operates in London and is one of the pioneers of the NFT revolution, active even before the development of the Ethereum blockchain on the ephemeral Ascribe platform and then on avant-garde marketplaces such as RARE Art Labs and Digital Objects. His works have been appearing on Tumblr since 2010 with a rough and scratchy style, reminiscent of DIY productions and early multimedia experimentation. In the aesthetics of the network, his images stand out for their stylistic originality and strong graphic impact, but also the critical messages towards contemporary society. Realized in the form of Gif, superimposing synthetic images similar to graffiti characterized by an essential chromatic palette, the works of XCOPY strike precisely for their communicative effectiveness, a combination of bare drawing and minimal animation all played on intermittent effects. The subjects are almost scribbled faces, monstrous masks, skulls, or skeletons that flash on monochrome backgrounds. They are visions disturbed by glitches or the typical "snow effect" caused by the interference of electromagnetic signals on the screens of old cathode ray tube televisions, the same evoked by William Gibson in the famous opening of "Neuromancer." The visual language of XCOPY is the child of the antagonistic culture of hackers, but also the digital evolution of the anarchic aesthetics of Punk.