There are rare moments in art history when the lived experience and the remembered past compress and coalesce: times when a specific technological maturation allows for a novel artistic style to emerge. For the anonymous, London-based artist known as XCOPY, this moment arrived when the blockchain allowed him to transition a decade of digital experimentation into a permanent, immutable legacy.
Before his ascent to becoming one of the top-selling crypto artists of all time, XCOPY spent ten years publishing work on Tumblr (XCOPY, 2010–2022), missing only a single month of posting between August 2010 and April 2020. It was during this golden age of microblogging that he refined his signature aesthetic: jagged, glitchy GIFs and vibrant neon colours that explored the darker corners of the internet. Many artists were experimenting alongside XCOPY at this time, but what is rare, to be seen perhaps once in a generation, is to create a novel artistic style that is beautiful, layered, and genre-defining.
Not since Warhol has an artist captured a societal transition and conveyed it so eloquently and economically, as visual art in the best hands is so apt to do.
A novel feature of blockchain technology is disintermediation. In the blockchain world, a bank loan does not require a bank, only a distributed ledger. In visual art terms, this innovation links artist and collector directly, without the need for a traditional gallery structure. What initially took the place of the traditional dealership, gallery, and auction models were curated marketplaces such as SuperRare and KnownOrigin.
This book documents a specific and pivotal era in XCOPY's career: 28 edition works comprising 586 numbered editions created on the Manchester-based marketplace KnownOrigin between October 2018 and October 2021. XCOPY was among the first fifty artists on the platform (KnownOrigin, 2018–2021), eventually becoming its biggest seller by a factor of three. While he is often celebrated for his high-value 1/1 works on SuperRare, his KnownOrigin editions represent a critical democratisation of his work, fostering a cult following and establishing a community of collectors integral to his rise.
XCOPY's work is instantly recognisable, characterised by raw, stencil-like lines and a monochromatic palette often punctuated by flashing neon pinks and turquoises. But the work is defined by more than illustration alone, it is defined by motion. XCOPY varies key elements of his drawings over time, creating energy through simple loops of just a few frames.
The works featured in this collection serve as a memento mori for the digital age. In The Doomed (2018), minted with the byline "Tech won't save us," XCOPY presents a pulsating skull that acts as a warning against technological utopianism. In Last Selfie (2019), he juxtaposes the human and the skeletal, asking what image we leave behind when there are no more images to take. In Disintegration (2018), the glitch becomes existential, depicting identity itself becoming unstable and corrupting before the viewer's eyes.
XCOPY is often described as a prophet of the digital apocalypse, channelling the anxiety of a hyper-connected society into visual manifestos on the fragility of our systems. Yet despite the nihilistic themes, there is a dark humour and a deep humanity in his critique of the 9-to-5 grind and the absurdities of the crypto space. As you explore these editions, you are witnessing what XCOPY believed would take crypto mainstream: the art itself.
The contributors to this volume are all XCOPY collectors and admirers, keen to document the emergence of a novel artistic style. The following pages are a homage to both the artist and the early collectors whose attention is easily verifiable via the blockchain: the permanent record of a community that recognised something significant.