About DankyLabs

The Gallery

DankyLabs is a digital art studio and gallery founded in 2021. Our mission is to produce original works, to curate and exhibit, and ultimately to preserve and advance digital art culture. We aim to offer an entry point for anyone curious to explore digital art. Our exhibitions bring art, technology and cultural memory into globally accessible, permanent virtual exhibitions.

Season 1.1 — Life of Ye

The Life of Ye exhibition is conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk: a biographic portrait series and custom exhibition space as a single work. It presents Ye as the archetype of creative genius, a modern Tannhäuser, the artist suspended between sanctification and appetite, who can be neither wholly condemned nor redeemed on his own terms.

The collection adopts and evolves the iconic 24px square format, made famous by the CryptoPunks collection. Built for permanence, the image data is encoded directly on the Ethereum blockchain.

The work takes the severe constraint of a tiny canvas as an exercise in reduction, repetition, and variation. Color, silhouette, and expression differentiate 73 1-of-1 portraits of a single person. Each portrait connects to a significant moment in Ye's public chronology.

The Artist

Jasper (@jd_franky) is an artist based in Berlin. He is the founder of DankyLabs and created the Life of Ye portrait series and the virtual exhibition.