RMRK Artist Spotlight #18: SFY and the Donkey Gang

On this episode of RAS, we spoke to SFY, a team of digital creatives who create art together. They are the creators of Donkey Gang, a collection of badass NFT donkeys that live on Kusama and can be interacted with via Singular.

The team first caught our attention when they participated in the Kanaria Art Contest, submitting bird-art that blew us away. They deepened their impact in RMRK by also participating in the RMRK 2.0 Idea Contest. We spoke about their journey into NFTs, their creative process, and a lot more.

RMRK: How did you start your art career?

SFY:

The SFY team was formed in 2012 and is made up of digital creatives who for years have been creating exclusive products for the film industry, publishing and companies without excluding culture and the pure art of design.

How did you get into NFTs?

A friend who was already part of the Kanaria community presented us with the opportunity to participate in the Art Contest created by the RMRK team. We created a first artwork for him, but we didn't know what to expect, we thought we would produce a couple of works and hope to win the prize up for grabs.

Immediately after submitting we were contacted by the RMRK team to join the list of featured artists. From that moment our conception of the crypto and Nft world has changed and we have begun to understand and study this sector a lot.

What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on?

It's too easy to answer this question: Kanaria's artwork and our first Donkey Gang collection published on Singular. The collection required a lot of effort and coordination between all team members, from artists to web developers. By creating a collection where all traits could (very soon) be swapped out, we understood the great work the Rmrk team did for Kanaria. Many problems arose in the creation phase but in the end we managed to solve everything while having fun. This was very important to us.

NFTs have provided accessibility and exposure to various forms of digital creations. Do you have new artists that you follow and what do you find interesting about them?

Personally we have understood that NFT will be milestones in the future web 3.0, we are mainly focused on 3D but over the years we have had the pleasure of collaborating with musicians and writers for example so we are also very interested in other types of "artistic forms". If we have to name a few, surely: Hackatao (our compatriots) for their distinctive trait and Mad Dog Jones for the dynamic and surreal combination of music and 3D design.

What is your creative process like?

SFY is tests and ideas, drafts and sketches, comparisons and suggestions.

It all starts with a creative brief that turns into input for our 3d artists. We then work on our concepts mainly with SketchBook to define styles and shapes of our future artwork. Once the concept has been approved, we move on to 3D modeling in Zbrush and Blender and to the realization of all the small details that distinguish us.

Where do you get inspiration from?

Each team member has a different sensitivity and we influence each other. For every work there is a story and the inspirations come every time from something unexpected. We are proud to be so different and united!

What are your goals in the NFT space?

Honestly, we don't have a specific goal, also because things in this world evolve at the speed of light, but there is a long-term project that we would like to complete, in fact a few months ago we participated in the RMRK ideas contest presenting "Historical Memory".

The project involves the digitization of art (statues and paintings and books) and architectural elements of particular importance. Historical memory also fits perfectly with the concept of nested NFT. A museum is a place for collecting and first of all cataloging objects. Without a precise structure, the tokenization of works of art in NFTcould in many cases lose meaning if not associated with a specific context or other objects.

How do you see the NFT space shaping up?

As we have told you, we at SFY come from a reality unrelated to the crytpo world, but in the last year we have noticed the explosive growth of this sector, especially of NFTs. NFTs can be the revolution that takes the digital world and the trust placed in it to a higher level. The web 3.0 through the use of NFTs that always use a principle of decentralization as a basis will redefine the concept of value in digital.

What would you most like an NFT platform to have?

Singular is becoming an established reality, we believe it is on track to become one of the best platforms. It is difficult to mention something specific, we could trivially say that royalties especially in the figurative art sector could give greater importance to the work of artists.

In our specific case, it would be great if the 3D viewer supported PBR Texture

Imagine a use case for RMRK 2.0 powered NFTs. / Have you considered making use of RMRK 2.0 functionality in your future works? To get context, you can check out this post.

Of course! Our Donkey Gang collection was conceived precisely in the perspective of RMRK 2.0. Each single Nft is made up of different levels, all the attributes with their different rarities will be exchangeable as soon as it will be possible to interact with the new protocol. For us this is really exciting and will lead to the creation of new dynamics in the market.

What exciting new stuff can we look forward to from you, and where can people find you?

In the near future there will be a lot of new creationsand we are already working on a new type of artwork that we bet will please everyone (Fusion of music and graphic art) especially Donkey owners.

You can follow us on our official channels for new updates:

https://twitter.com/StickyFactoryIT

https://twitter.com/DonkeyGang_SFY https://t.me/DonkeyGang

[email protected]

SFY's Historical Memory idea is one of the most interesting use cases of RMRK 2.0 tech. A happy marraige of the real-world and the metaverse, an expression of future-building technology in service past-preserving history. We hope that a team eventually builds something like this.

What is most exciting is the immense creative energy unleashed by the power of nested NFTs and other NFT 2.0 legos. We recently wrote an article covering more novel use cases here.

We enjoyed our time with SFY and look forward to the evolution of their Donkey Gang project. You can explore SFY's place on Singular.

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