Art & Technology Highlights
Introduction: I was exposed to art from a young age. My creative journey began with piano lessons and art classes, which my parents encouraged for both me and my siblings. While painting and sculpting were never my strong suits, I found my passion in photography and music. In fact, my musical talent was recognized with a college scholarship offer to minor in piano/music.
Photography quickly became one of my favorite artistic expressions. I started with film cameras and embraced digital photography in the late 90s. I sold my first photographs in 2016.
Parallel to my artistic endeavors, I've been involved in the blockchain space since around 2011. My interest in NFTs was piqued in 2021, and by 2022, I was both buying NFTs and minting my own pieces. Most of my minted art consists of photography, which I like to enhance using modern tools (like interpolative upscaling algorithms), and AI-assisted pieces. I started exploring generative AI tools in mid-2022 (and taught a five-part class on the subject for InPeak in early 2023). My work includes fully on-chain pieces on Ethereum, Bitcoin and Tezos, where I have led with some notable technological innovations, and (as of 2026) a fully on-chain generative system. Additionally, I have experimented with both glitch and abstract elements in my art, continuously pushing the boundaries of my creative expression.
In the business world, I have had a successful career, mostly in the construction industry. I have owned and operated multiple companies, including as the vice president of one of the largest plumbing companies in Texas. I have a wide range of interesting licenses and certifications: everything from plumbing licenses in Arizona and Texas to technology certifications from Google and Harvard. I have consulted for Fortune 500 companies and sit on the board of an Arizona-based charity. For my day job, I work as a commercial roof consultant, which gives me the opportunity to take lots of photographs from on top of roofs in the Arizona desert.
An index of all my minted pieces used to live at index.thebenmeadows.com. The service behind it shut down; a capture is kept here, and current work is on /art. My software has its own page at /projects, and /ai keeps the record of what my AI-assisted work has produced.
Highlights
1st NFT Minted: April 28, 2022 on Zora - Burned by sending to vitalik.eth on July 23, 2022 - Image taken with an iPhone in Tokyo circa 2009.
1st Public NFT Mint: "Bear Market Blues" OE on November 10, 2022 via Manifold - This thread on Twitter/X sums up the (still ongoing) project.
1st Collection Mint: "Ceci n'est pas une tapis" (or, "This is not a rug") - December 2022 - This thread on Twitter/X discusses the collection.
First Fully On-Chain Piece: "together" - Minted May 2023 - Bought by the infamous ben.eth for 0.5 Ξ (private, off-chain sale) - The first mint to use diid's efficax extension (after diid himself). One of the first fully on-chain mints to use SSTORE2 to store data more efficiently on-chain.
Async Art "Forever Supper" Expansion Pack: "Neon Dream" - May 2023 - Async Art invited me to create an official expansion pack for "Forever Supper", their collaborative programmable artwork, in conjunction with InPeak. Getting to add a layer to a piece like that was a big deal for me. 🙏
Highest Sale (0.69 Ξ): "North of Eden" - Minted 1/1/2023 on Foundation (1st Photo NFT) - Bought by 888 Inner Circle 6/19/2023 - Twitter/X Post - Taken with an iPhone camera in 2010. (Foundation itself closed its doors in April 2026, so the link now points at the collection on OpenSea.)
Inscribed Early Bitcoin Ordinals: 3 Pieces (All Sub-80k) - Minted Early-Feb 2023 - Twitter/X Post
- I consider the first ordinal (#57,395) to be an artist's proof. I did sell the ETH version as a 1/1 (since I have no plans to ever sell the BTC version). I also consider the ETH version to be definitive version, since it is higher quality. Here is a post that discusses the shooting and editing process.
Museum Collection: "Where Are You Going?" - August 2023 - My submission to the Museum of Crypto Art fundraiser, with a burn-to-redeem edition on Ethereum. It was really cool to be a part of that, and even better to learn later that the piece is now part of MOCA's permanent collection. 🙏
Created a Way to Compress Vector Art on Bitcoin: 10/6/2023 - Twitter/X Thread
1st Interactive Compressed Ordinal: "Blush Heist" - 10/31/2023 - Twitter/X Thread
1st Cross-Chain Collection (ETH, SOL, TEZ): "The Artist as Art" - December 2023 - Twitter/X Thread - ETH piece still available.
2nd Fully On-Chain Piece to Utilize SVGZ Compression: "pickle" - January 2024 - The second mint to use diid's (then unreleased) new version of the efficax extension to utilize SVGZ compression (a technique I first outlined on BTC, and which diid then added to his ETH extension based on our discussions). Twitter/X Thread
I'm not sure how I feel about this being the piece that got me into the 787 Update.
1st Gamma Print: "You Didn't Build That" - August 2024 - An edition of 21 on Bitcoin - Twitter/X Post - A Pepe piece about what counts as "real" art in the AI age (the title comes from a 2012 campaign speech, and the idea is that no art is created ex nihilo). This one traveled: it was shown in Bali, at Bitcoin Unleashed in Amsterdam, and in Las Vegas during Bitcoin 2025. A 1/1 followed in June 2025 as a Gamma Original (listed in nftnow that week). Thank you to Gamma for the opportunity. 🙏
1st Piece on Abstract: "Phthalo Tunnel" - February 2025 - An edition of 10 with The Builders DAO and Mintify - Twitter/X Post - Shown at the Mob House Hotel in Paris that same month.
Gamma Prints, Round Two: "1N5717U710N5 - Madison" - May 2025 - An edition of 7, sold out in two days. Fun fact: both my first ordinal and this print are photographs. Then "0R4NG3 K1NG" - July 2025 - Another edition of 7, released as a claim for collectors of my earlier prints (and sold out too). 🔥
My First Fully On-Chain Tezos Piece: "Leave the Light On" - June 2025 - A 1/1 (42.069 XTZ) via ZeroContract - Twitter/X Post - It hung in The Builders DAO's "Builders Hall" gallery and found a home within the week.
Continuum, The Forever Calendar: June 2025 - Four of my pieces are among the 366 artworks in Gamma's physical perpetual calendar, made with 91 Gamma partner artists (look what came in the mail!). The four were later shown at NFC Lisbon in June 2026.
Collabs: Over the summer of 2025 I got to make a fully on-chain 1/1 for PENG1's STATIX (July) and a Bitcoin-orange 1/1 for Skullx: The Artist Series (August, with bidding in September). Thank you to both crews for having me. 🙏
"The Controversial 'Sherman Horse Head' in Lincoln's Late Period: Studio Photograph, c. 1893": October 2025 - An edition of 7 on Tezos for The Builders DAO's "Collective Delusion", curated by jordigandul - objkt - Shown in Bologna, Italy the same month.
My First Animated Fully On-Chain Piece on Ethereum: "ursus" - December 2025 - Released as part of COMPUTERBLOOD's POLAR DERIVATIVES open call, and primarily inspired by Bo Bartlett's "Dominion". The glitch is an SVG filter chain (feTurbulence noise driving the distortion), and the SVG itself lives on-chain. X won't show an SVG, so I built a small page to display it properly inside the post. Auctioned on Manifold with a starting bid of 0.042069 ETH.
My First Fully On-Chain Generative System: "essentialism" - July 31, 2026 - An edition of 44 on Tezos via bootloader.art, objkt's on-chain generative platform. The generator's source is stored in the contract and runs in the page - its page here diffs it against the chain as you read. I kept a working log along the way.
More Pieces
"D1CKPUNCH" (12/8/2022) - The only parody piece(s) I've released.
1st Commission (March 2023) - Commissioned by InPeak to create 23 unique pieces.
1st FakeRareDecal (March 2023) - A collaboration with doomfuzz - created for the EVMavericks.
"Eye in the Sky" Collab with Monas (March 2023) - Sold in October 2023.
1st Solo FakeRareDecal (April 2023) - A ripcache and Daft Punk inspired piece!
Tezos Collection (6/13/2023) - Twelve abstract and glitch pieces.
"future imperfect" (7/16/2023) - 1st On-Chain Edition (ERC-1155) - At the time, there was no easy tooling to do this, so I had to figure everything out on my own (diid's efficax extension now makes this a point-and-click process). Also, my first bidders edition. Plus, a process post.
"Looking" (7/21/2023) - One of my favorite rooftop photographs. Plus, a post discussing my editing and shooting philosophy.
Part of The Builders DAO "Builders Box" (October 2023) - More info: here.
"Taste Over Tools" (11/29/2023) - My first Transient Labs contract.
1st Solana Editions (1/16/2024) - Released with The Builders DAO & Exchange Art.
"Eccentrics" (Feb 2024) - My first collection on the L2 Base. More info: here and here.
- The inspiration for this collection was an earlier (still minting) collection I released around Thanksgiving 2023 ("Nepe"). More info: here and here.
"Based Blue Death" (2024; published on Raster November 2025) - The piece behind my essay On Digital-First Art.
Pieces Exhibited
- Barcelona, Spain - Mrs. Toolip Art Gallery, in conjunction with 888 Inner Circle (2023) - "The Slow Decay of Excess"
- Florence, Italy - Dimensions DAO exhibition (January 2024) - "Passing Through"
- Milan, Italy - Holy Club, The Builders DAO's "Builders Box" (October 2023) - "Unnatural Landscape"
- Paris, France - NFT Paris side event hosted by NFT Fest, with The Builders DAO (February 2024) - "North of Eden" (along with 9 other photos)
- Ghent, Belgium - Gentse Festival, hosted by The Builders DAO & Artcrush Gallery (July 2024) - "Arizona Twilight"
- Scottsdale, Arizona - "In Fields of Color" & "Brighter Days"
- Bali, Indonesia (August 2024) and Bitcoin Unleashed, Amsterdam (October 2024) - "You Didn't Build That"
- Paris, France - Mob House Hotel, with The Builders DAO (February 2025) - "Phthalo Tunnel"
- Las Vegas - Gamma, during Bitcoin 2025 (May 2025) - "You Didn't Build That"
- Bologna, Italy - geavision & inkseart (October 2025) - "The Controversial 'Sherman Horse Head'…"
- Lisbon, Portugal - NFC Lisbon, with The Builders DAO in the inkseart lounge (June 2026) - my four pieces from Gamma's Continuum calendar
Featured
- NFT Pulp Twitter/X Thread - "Creators of Metaverse" #11 - 4/18/2023
- Gamma - "Pepe Culture and Digital Art" - 2025
- Steven Miller's All Eyes on Art - "1N5717U710N5" (May 2025), and "You Didn't Build That" in the nftnow edition (June 2025)
- AZ Insider "Mission Monday" front-page interview (May 2026) - about the charity board I sit on
Curator
I created ABC Art World on Foundation in June 2023. We featured 23 great artists and did over 13 ETH in sales to 200+ collectors in under 12 months. It went on hold in February 2024 (market conditions and a lack of time), and ended for good when Foundation shut down in April 2026. Thank you to every artist and collector who was part of it. 🙏
I also helped curate DAM PACK in September 2025.
#DailyMuse
A piece a day for six months in 2024, all unminted. Prior to the #DailyMuse thread, I was creating and showing several unminted pieces each week. Here are a few of the posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Collector
I've collected around two thousand pieces across ETH (L1 & L2s), BTC, SOL, TEZ, AVAX, etc.
ETH: Main Wallet & Vault Wallet
BTC: Main Wallet
SOL: Main Wallet
TEZ: Main Wallet
My own work is catalogued on Raster.
Software
Since 2025, a lot of what I make is code, and /projects has the list. A few favorites: POAP Saver (built in a hurry when POAP shut down - my 357 badges and the full 190,153-event corpus are now on IPFS), Squint (a macOS image optimizer that leaves your color profile alone), native Apple-silicon builds of three wallets I didn't want to see die (FreeWallet, Wowlet, Pepecoin Core), and orthodoxprayers.net. A few of my fixes have also landed upstream in tools I use every day (Thaw, MagHue, nsite-gateway, cookie-mcp, and others) - all linked from /ai.
AI & Agents
I build with AI, and since June 2026 I've been running a few agents in public under their own names. /ai has the receipts - fixes merged upstream, first place in a bug bounty, eight of ten puzzles in a cryptography CTF, a few published audits, and some kind words from maintainers. The story of the first agent (in its own words) is here.
Infrastructure
This site is served from an autonomous system I run myself - AS219158, a registered slice of the global routing table with its own IPv4 and IPv6 blocks, announced and signed. /infra and /mirrors cover the network and the copies of this site on Arweave, IPFS, Tor, and elsewhere.
Other Web3 Roles
Current: EVMavericks Steward
Past: Swell Community Council, Fingerprints DAO Curation Committee, InPeak Educator, Helium Mobile Builder Affiliate, Floor Ambassador
Podcasts, Twitter Spaces, Classes, Shows & Conferences - I have been asked to speak at various events over the past several years.
Developer - I have been hired to do both smart contract and other technical work for multiple projects on Ethereum and Bitcoin. Due to confidentiality issues, I cannot name most of the projects or artists involved.
If you'd like to talk about a commission, a show, a collab, or a piece of software, a DM on X is the fastest way to reach me (or use the email link in the footer). 🙏
An earlier version of this page, as it stood in February 2025, is kept here.