Born as an almost automatic response to an urge to draw, to keep his artistic flow going even while at work, the Papercuts series became a carefully calibrated exploration of optical aesthetics and the first official steps Mattia Cuttini made towards his career in crypto art. Yet, as its title suggests, this seminal series has its roots in its physical, paper-made version, so let’s deep dive into the Papercuts’ genesis.

It was back in 2016 when Cuttini started taking the first notes around the concept at the basis of the Papercuts. Squared notebooks were his inseparable companions while he was working as a graphic designer. The squared pages provided him with a constructive grid, a fixed reference within which he could jot down visual clues and reflections or actual drawings. At the time, while attending a course on how to create a font, he got closer to the optical aesthetic often admired as a boy in the works of Gruppo T and others. Cubes, prisms, black and white mazes, and traces of the famous logotype with which he now signs his works began to appear in Cuttini’s notebooks. Accompanying him during these graphic explorations in his free time was also his son Mirko, involved by the often playful nature of his father’s seemingly methodical experiments.

Cuttini’s deep connection with printing techniques and a conversation with his friend Steve Nardini soon inspired the idea of attaching a blade to a plotter and using it as a machine to pierce and cut paper sheets. With this vision in mind, he began to sketch the first Papercuts on paper, in the shape of two squares side by side where various lines would intersect to create full areas and voids to be cut. From the first, hand-drawn prototypes, Cuttini immediately imagined a digital version of the project and started working on the analog algorithm to create other variations of the initial design. Yet, experimenting with the plotter as a cutting machine, he found out it would often tear the paper sheets. An alternative solution was needed.

Cuttini then began to use the co-working space Lino’s and Co in Udine, his current headquarters, where there was also a laser cutting machine. In January 2017, Kickstarter encouraged its community to create a series of 100 works through crowdfunding. Chance – or perhaps fate – was offering a subtle hint to a man who knows how to seize them, and Make 100 became the framework for the actual development of Cuttini’s series on laser-cut paper. Interestingly, Sparrow Read – aka Blackbox.art – also participated in Make 100, unawarely parallel to Mattia who she would later meet and support in the NFT realms.

The new era of Papercuts

The Papercuts project is significant also as it became Cuttini’s first test of crowdfunding mechanisms, co-working collaboration and community support. This is because through Kickstarter he managed to create a small but devoted group of supporters of his work, a sort of first community of known and unknown people, local and international, in view of his future entry into the crypto art community.

After various tests, in the Spring of 2017, the series began to actually appear in Lino’s and Co’s workshop, at a slow pace of 4 pieces per day. Each artwork features two groups of multiple, concentric squares chasing each other in space. In order to be laser cut, the works were first generated using Illustrator starting from the paper prototypes and an algorithm in Cuttini’s head. This analog algorithm – a forerunner of recent generative art outcomes in his practice – involves duplicating the first work and reproducing it with systematic alterations in the coordinates of each grid of concentric squares. Translation, rotation and overlapping of the same grids are thus the basis for the variations. 

Each work is like a single frame, a crystalized instant taken from the potentially inexhaustible movement of the grids of squares in space. The optical effect characteristic of the series is achieved using Illustrator’s XOR control, with the black areas on screen representing the black paper and the white ones becoming the void areas in the physical, laser-cut work.

In June 2017, the paper series was completed and Cuttini held a party to celebrate the project’s birthday with all the supporters who could attend. Of the 100 physical artworks created, about 30 got mysteriously lost while 20 turned out to be duplicates due to some printing errors, for a total of 90 versions. The digital series mirrors the physical one, and the “duplicates” became special versions, reversed ones, so to speak.

First laser-cut test drive piece

“Time goes by, in 2018 Cuttini had his first solo exhibition of Rubberstamps at Kobo Shop, in Udine, most of the Papercuts’ physical copies had been sold, while the digital material remained secured in the artist’s hard disk. In the meantime, SuperRare, KnownOrigin and other crypto art galleries appeared. Drawn by curiosity, Cuttini soon approached the crypto art discourse and in the first NFT galleries’ chats, particularly in KnownOrigin’s, he shared his Papercuts. Ilan Katin’s keen eye noticed the works and suggested an exchange with his own, so the physical pieces began to circulate in this new community. After the crowdfunding campaign, with this series Cuttini seeked and found in the crypto art realms that same context, made of sincere connections between people and artists at a human and not only professional level.

In December 2019, Cuttini finally decided to tokenize the series, and chose to use pixura. Just as he was about to proceed, however, his laptop broke. His economic situation prevented him from replacing it immediately, but he did not abandon the idea. Little by little, like a digital craftsman, Cuttini found himself using a makeshift tablet to convert the pdf pages of a small self-produced publication on the project into png files, digitizing the series one piece after another.”

Eventually, the Papercuts appeared in the digital world through the Mattia Cuttini Produkt smart contract

Noku, the Web3 platform that features NFTs, play-to-earn games, and soon the metaverse, has announced the pre-mint date of the PFP collection ‘Heroes: Genesis’ on 22 June 2022 at 1 PM Italian time. 

The pre-sale will take place on Nokuchain to allow users to receive the NFT in advance and unlock the new features immediately, before anyone else.

Noku and the announcement of the ‘Heroes: Genesis’ Pre-Mint

Noku has announced the date to start minting ‘Heroes: Genesis’, the platform’s new PFP collection, developed via the NPFS PROTOCOL (Noku-Planetary-File-System). 

PRE-MINT ANNOUNCEMENT
This is a great day: we have the official pre-mint date!
On 22/06 you’ll be able to mint our Heroes: Genesis.
They’ll unlock straight away:
– farming
– reserved tournaments
– early access to our metaverse

Stay tuned for further details pic.twitter.com/28cBRbjKoa

— Noku / Crypto Heroes (@NokuOfficial) June 16, 2022

“PRE-MINT ANNOUNCEMENT

This is a great day: we have the official pre-mint date!

On 22/06 you’ll be able to mint our Heroes: Genesis.

They’ll unlock straight away:

• early access to our metaverse

Stay tuned for further details”.

As of 22 June 2022 at 1:00 PM Italian time, it will be possible to mint Heroes: Genesis on Nokuchain, and new owners will be able to unlock the following new features

• farming (staking the NFT to passively “farm” tokens and other NFTs);
• tournaments reserved for Heroes: Genesis owners with really interesting prize pools;
• early access to their metaverse, a play-to-earn environment with a VIP area reserved for owners of their NFTs. 

Users will be able to receive the NFT as a preview and unlock the new features now, before anyone else, without paying minting fees, and only bridge to and from ETH afterwards.

Noku and the PFP collection from ‘Heroes: Genesis’ on Nokuchain

Heroes: Genesis is the first NFT Cross-Chain project with Gaming and Farming in place, developed with a Low-Fee-Minting technology. 

In fact, the architecture developed by Noku for the ERC 721-N allows metadata to be shared between different chains, while maintaining a set of data for each, thanks to the NPFS protocol. This prevents dissimilarity of data across different chains and in addition helps users save a lot of money in gas fees.

In general, Noku is a Web3 platform dedicated to the NFT world with its own blockchain, Nokuchain. 

With more than 70,000 users, the platform aims to offer an all-round service with play-to-earn games, an NFT marketplace, a metaverse about to be released, and many other new features to be added this year. 

NOKU tokens and the gaming industry

Noku also launched its native NOKU token in 2017, already with the NFT gaming protocol, with the goal of bringing social freedom and economic independence to as many people as possible through secure means of exchanging value. 

Thus was born the Nokuchain, a scalable EVM blockchain that improved the performance of classic NFTs for gaming. 

Noku’s first NFT game is Crypto Heroes (July 2021) and in this context, the NOKU token is the centre of the entire ecosystem, settling NFT purchases and game rewards.

At the time of writing, NOKU is worth $0.31, following a price drop since 13 June that follows the general trend of major crypto such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.