Art Log #23.01
Title: The Nouners
Medium: TV Pilot via Animation
Scale: Episodic Series
Year: 2023
Context: Developed within the Nouns DAO ecosystem as a grant-funded, community-supported animated project.
Description
The Nouners is an animated series centered on sentient Nouns—simple, modular characters native to the internet—grappling with existence inside a vast, abstract digital world. The series blends classic animation language with Web3-native infrastructure, pairing hand-crafted storytelling with decentralized funding and distribution.
The characters move through environments that feel familiar yet alien: feeds, forums, signals, noise. Humor is used as an entry point, but the underlying questions are philosophical—identity without bodies, meaning without permanence, community without physical proximity.
Episodes are accessed through NFT-based passes, collapsing the line between audience, patron, and participant. The show is not just about internet life; it is made and experienced within it.
Why This Piece Matters
This project represents a shift in how stories can be funded, owned, and encountered. Rather than a traditional studio pipeline, The Nouners emerges from a decentralized collective—an experiment in whether culture can be created collaboratively without collapsing into committee or marketing.
Thematically, the work mirrors a contemporary anxiety: what does it mean to exist primarily as a digital entity? The Nouns are playful and absurd, but their simplicity exposes something fragile. They persist only because others agree they matter. Their world exists only because people show up.
On a personal level, this project sharpened my interest in systems as emotional containers—how infrastructure, rules, and access mechanics quietly shape how stories are felt. The gating of episodes isn’t a gimmick; it forces a confrontation with value, scarcity, and belonging in modern media.
The series asks whether decentralization can produce not just content, but coherence—and whether humor can carry existential weight in a space designed for distraction.
Themes Introduced (that recur in later work)
Identity without physicality
Community as a constructed agreement
Humor as a survival mechanism
Systems shaping emotional experience
Art existing inside its medium, not adjacent to it
Series Note
This piece is part of an ongoing log of my creative work across formats and technologies. Whether working with film photography, narrative cinema, or Web3-native animation, the throughline remains the same: creating work that lands in the body before it lands in the head.
The Nouners extends that inquiry into a new terrain—where audience, artist, and infrastructure blur—and continues an ongoing investigation into how meaning survives in unstable systems.
View the full archive —> here.
