Bonkler: Critical Notes
What is Bonkler? Bonkler is a World Fair for the Internet. Bonkler is a citational supercomplex. Bonkler is a year-long prank on price discovery. Bonkler is a daily present, Bonkler is a daily puzzle.
Bonkler is the auction that runs forever, higher & higher, with you & me, together.
Bonkler is a Grand New Experimental Financial Adventure from your friends at the genius avant net art collective, Remilia Corporation. Like the internationally renowned and beloved Milady Maker collection, Bonkler is a synthesis of Milady Sonora Sprite and Charlotte Fang, in union with the Remilia Collective as a whole¹, tour de force once again propelling net art into brave new frontiers:
If Milady used NFT to answer the question of a network art, Bonkler uses it to answer the question of a finance art.
The eternal loving heart of Milady
The crystal and iron soul of Bonkler
An auction that runs forever, higher and higher with you and me together.
Bonkler is a Grand Experiment:
A new Bonkler is generated with each consecutive auction, lasting 23 hours (allowing the ending time to roll across timezones) with a 15 minute auction extension—if a bid is placed in the final 15 minutes of the auction, the auction countdown is extended back to 15 minutes. Auctions are bid with a minimum 0.1 ETH increment, and bids are returned if you’re outbid.
Redeemable shares are encoded in each Bonkler when it is minted based on the final sale price. Shares can be redeemed for proportional ETH from the Treasury by burning the Bonkler. The Bonkler Treasury is fueled by the final sale from each auction minus 30% fee to Remilia team.
400 Bonkler capped supply, deflated when Bonklers are burned to redeem share for Treasury reserves. Each Bonkler is generated with different set of assets in a hidden rarity algorithm. The rarity of each asset will only become known over the year-long process of the auctions.
Bonkler’s Paced Generative Mint progressively unveils rarities over a daily auction, obscuring price discovery in a speculative complex that contrasts aesthetics and rarity; Bonkler is the first Reserve-Backed NFT with burn to redeem shares in the treasury, securing an innate value and resulting in a deflationary supply.
Bonkler was designed to introduce a genuine conceptual art to blockchain understood as a medium of finance. Each element of the design is directed towards creating a complex speculative market which simultaneously elevates the art object into an entity imbued with the weight of monetary appreciation as it synthesizes the innate market elements of fine art into the unpacking of the work itself.
The English Auction is normally a relatively efficient model for price discovery, and efficient price discovery conflicts with exciting speculation, so our design seeks opportunities to obscure it as a work of experimental finance.
By pacing the auctions out over a year, the rarities of each trait are slowly revealed; the earliest Bonklers are expected to have the greatest mismatch between innate share value and objective scarcity-based value, while simultaneously setting a base trend for the overall socialized price of the collection.²
Bonkler is delivered a third degree of complexity by the aesthetic valuation, which can be broken down into visual and conceptual: the surface visual beauty of the randomly generated piece, as well as the conceptual elegance in the contrast and cohesion of its citational elements.
As the shares are redeemed by burning Bonklers, this system not only provides a protected value to auctioneers, but also results in deflationary supply and unpredictable variation to rarities. Due to the paced nature of the auction obscuring rarities, it’s difficult to predict which Bonklers will be burned as it will be a result of inefficient price discovery overrating the share value compared to its rarity-aesthetic value.
Finally, the Auctioncore sub-collection is being developed with a plan to create bidding incentives and further gamify the auction process. Each bid on a Bonkler will generate an airdropped “Auctioncore” NFT generated with its own set of random traits. These traits are also designed with rarities, and the higher the current bid, the more weighted they are to roll rarer traits. This design rewards bidders on Bonkler, and further encourages higher bids leading to a "game of chicken” at the top as they attempt to farm rare rolls.³
The Hypercitational Art of Bonkler
“Looking at Bonkler gives me the same visceral feeling I used to get when I’d watch Gundam with the neighbors at my grandmothers as a kid. Nostalgia doesn't effectively describe it, it's not missing anything, nothing's lost. It’s an overwhelming sense of congruency: This is right.”
While Bonkler is a generative NFT like Milady Maker, it is not intended to engage the space of pfpNFT, as a digital identity informing a certain performative posting style⁴. The Bonkler is an artifact, it’s a collectible, each is a coveted and rare trophy displayed with pride on the figurine shelf—and so it’s appropriately built primarily out of equivalent real-world collectible objects sourced from auction networks.⁵
The wide breadth of sourcing and the depth of each citation result in each generated Bonkler developing its own complex of meaning, much like the financial art design underlying its production and presentation.
“Bonkler's art consumes citation, rendering potentially any reference into an asset in its dreamlike kitbash. Its in line with online mode of consumption-as-curation; a visual hypertext as generative NFT. Its a beautiful & endearingly funny process to watch.”
Bonkler is an eclectic gestalts of all things material and tangible. Bonkler gives life to objects you'd never think would exist together, as a beautiful whole.
“The Bonkler is a timeless artifact that speculates on the future of the internet & the possible conception of what a post-post historical contemporary could be.
The Bonkler mission is Synergy. It is synergy of the contemporary, the post-contemporary, the post-post contemporary, & historical contemporary.
The Bonkler is a religious artifact.”
Bonkler’s hypercitation is presented through Sonora’s lefthand style⁶ in the medium of pixel art, rendering the references under the playful and magical lens of child’s toybox. The crude and innocent pixel work omits detailed shading and takes on the saccharine RGB colors of MS paint, refining each items its most readable indicators like the thumbnails in an auction listing and imaginatively teasing out a cheeky charm from the inanimate objects.
Accordingly, Bonkler’s launch party that concluded Remilia-Con 2023 Tokyo featured a Draw Your Own Bonkler for attendees with provided crayons and markers, earning them an NFT airdrop of Sprite’s The Last Love Song on this Little Planet (Sprite Remix) (Wim Mertens Score),2023. The commitment to childhood innocence is implicitly in pursuit of the wonder and beauty of spirituality—no child is a cynic, no child is an atheist.
This motivation was spelled out clearly in Bonkler’s announcement poster⁷:
Bonkler is the Internet’s World Fair. It’s a Grand experiment, involving millions of dollars and thousands of participants, in a daily finanical festival.
The soul of Bonkler is transcendent. Beauty was plucked out of the internet in a deep curation, and each Bonkler is born elegantly out of serendipitous generation; the generation is a dance with the Work and the Artist, rather than a subordination.
Bonkler shines with the light of God discovered online”
Bonkler is falling up and up and up, forever.
Addendum
I’ve much lamented the lack of art criticism engaging Remilia’s work, to the point where I find myself in the position of writing our own appraisals as if a bystander, such as this article. I don’t consider it authoritative, just very well-informed—the commentary is still skewed towards my own interests, taste and judgement. The following is a handwritten note from a Milady turned Bonkler superfan giving her perspective on the art’s alluring appeal:
As Sprite commented:
“One of the surprising parts of Bonkler launch for me has been the girls that are extremely passionate fans, spending hours in the creator, going on bonkler picnics and commenting in awe of every new one. I didnt expect Bonkler to get a pink-gel-penned thank you note on day 1.”
Footnotes
[1]:
“Fang and Sonora were in fact the Charlie Manson and McCartney… of net art in the last decade... Fang was the most goated when it came to mobilizing TL energy itself as an evil fun quantum function forcer and Sonora has Renaissance-level cartoony-y visionary powers. (Sprite is the funniest poster in the whole of world Discord.)”
—Angelicism01, “R.I.P.P. ‘C.T.’: THE NEGATIVE 'VIBE SHIFT’”,2022
[2]: The paced auction model was borrowed from Nouns NFT, which I criticized in the past,lacking Bonkler’s rarity design, limited supply and aesthetic depth, besides its poorly considered DAO model.
[3]: Auctioncore is a companion collection to Bonkler under development by Sprite, sourcing directly from the same hobbyist sources of found objects, presented as a cut-up like collage as if each piece is an auction listing itself. The curation is much more narrowly committed to real auction objects, serving as an experential moodboard for Sprite’s surfing practice. Auctioncore is intended to be generated as an NFT for every bidder on Bonkler—the higher the bid, the higher the weighting towards rolling rare assets. It would be retroactively airdropped to current bidders as well.
[4]:
Posting is the new art…a new performative-literary art happening every day, 999MPH on the information highway, we post hard & neverstop: lucid, carefree, delirious POSTING is wickedly funny yet deeply insightful—jokes come from the beyond always containing the seed of truth: the only meaningful theory.
—Remilia Collective, “What Remilia Believes In”(2021)
[5]: Though irreverence is the rule at Remilia, and curveballs are included that maintain the depth of citationalism but venture playfully beyond the strictures of the design.
[6]: I use “lefthand style” here as in “drawing with your non-dominant hand”, drawing with a mouse instead of a tablet, playing instruments you don’t know how to play. This DIY ethos embracing unskilling is a refreshing contrast from overly technical efforts—and in line with the acceleration of automated assistance in creative work. See: Beat Happening - S/T(1985)
[7]: From Heavy Traffic Issue 2(2023).