David Lynch, the American filmmaker beloved for his dark, surreal, and decidedly original body of work, passed away this week at the age of 78. An avid experimenter and experimentalist, Lynch was always open to the new—even when it came to blockchain technology.
In 2021, back when NFTs were new and strange to most people, Lynch worked with the indie rock band Interpol to create a series of eight audiovisual collectibles on the Ethereum blockchain.
A decade prior, in 2011 Lynch had—at Interpol’s request—created a series of visuals for the band’s performance at Coachella. Those visuals became the five-minute animated short film “I Touch A Red Button Man,” which accompanied Interpol’s then-new song, “Lights.”
For the NFT series, that collaboration was revisited to create several immersive, psychedelic-feeling clips of “Red Button Man” situated in rusty television monitors—and uploaded onto the Ethereum blockchain forever.
“To be frank, Interpol is crazy about David Lynch, and we are over the moon to have ever been able to align our name with his in an artistic forum,” the band’s frontman, Paul Banks, said in a statement at the time. “Humbly, we believe that as digital artifacts go, these are worthy of preservation in the infinite digital realm.”
When the collection went live in late October 2021, it immediately struck a chord with collectors. One of the NFTs, which featured the video’s title sequence, sold within hours for 20.7 ETH—a sum worth over $82,000 at the time.
Lynch was no particular evangelist of crypto or digital art. He never worked with blockchain tech again. But he was famously hard to pin down, and of the many traits that defined his singular life and career, one was a constant willingness to explore and embrace the strange and new.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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