Deafbeef

0xDEAFBEEF is a pseudonymous artist and engineer based in Toronto. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's from the University of Toronto, where he worked on computer animation research, and he brings a long background in music, sound recording and blacksmithing. He started DEAFBEEF in 2020 with a deliberately small kit: a cheap Linux laptop, the emacs editor and a C compiler.

His programs write raw numbers that become sound and moving images, and the code behind each piece lives on Ethereum, so the media can be regenerated from the chain alone. The DEAFBEEF contract holds six series released in 2021, which a Sotheby's catalogue treats as a single work, like an album: Synth Poems, Angular, Transmission, Entropy, Glitchbox and Advection. Synth Poems pairs short synthesizer pieces with oscilloscope traces, and each Entropy token loses quality whenever it changes hands. Phillips sold Advection Token 222 in London in 2022, and Sotheby's sold Angular Token 134 in 2023.

In 2023 he made Noumenon and Chronophotograph for LACMA's Remembrance of Things Future initiative with Cactoid Labs, drawing on Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies. Owners of the 16 Noumenon animations trigger an onchain shutter to capture new still sequences. HASHMARKS links 100 hand forged iron sculptures to tokens and was presented with Bright Moments in Patagonia.

Other projects include FIRST, satirical generated texts whose proceeds go to GiveDirectly, the slot machine collection DEGENERATIVE, and PAYPHONE, where anyone can call him on the blockchain and leave a prompt that may become a new work.