ThankYouX: Doom Scroll Comes Off the Screen in Marfa
ThankYouX brings Doom Scroll, his datamoshed series built from real feed footage, to Marfa on October 24 during the Art Blocks Marfa Weekend.
ThankYouX is taking Doom Scroll off the screen. On October 13 he announced a showing in Marfa, Texas, on October 24 at 114 E El Paso St., tagging Transient Labs, OpenSea and Art Blocks. The date falls during the Art Blocks Marfa Weekend, whose schedule lists Doom Scroll by ThankYouX as co hosted by OpenSea.
The project began with what he calls a breaking point: the realisation that the algorithm had become a curator nobody asked for. Instead of logging off, he recorded the scroll, then destroyed it and rebuilt it as art. "I got sick of the algorithm telling me what to look at," he says. "So I turned it into something I actually wanted to see."
Every work starts as raw, unfiltered feed footage, exactly what the algorithm served. A custom datamosh tool built for the project fuses 2 videos into a single clip and lets the corruption take over, so frames bleed into each other and compression artifacts multiply until the content dissolves into texture and motion. The output is then fed back into the input, and each piece mutates differently. The project site describes the series as simultaneously a protest and a portrait, and a reminder that creation is the antidote to consumption.
Doom Scroll was released on Ethereum on August 11, minted exclusively on OpenSea through OpenSea Studio with Transient Labs as technology partner. The project site describes 64 unique 1/1 videos, while the OpenSea collection page now lists 256. The site billed Marfa as part 2 of the project, a chance to show the work at scale in the West Texas town Donald Judd turned into a pilgrimage site.
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