In the above example you see what results from inputting the address printed beneath the tile. It’s somewhat like the roll-of-the-dice feeling you get when minting other generative NFTs, except that in this case you can reverse engineer each die and decide how they fall. ETH addresses fit this criteria, of course, and when you input one you get what some in the Tiles community playfully call a chaos tile. You get to shape the art by inputting a unique string of 42 hexadecimal characters (that is, any combo of numbers 0 through 9 and letter a through f).

What really hooked me about Tiles was learning that minting is a creative act. While I do enjoy some of those projects, price speculation tends to make up too much of the conversation, which leaves me feeling uninspired and rather cynical about NFTs and about crypto, in general. It was a refreshing left turn from the scarcity chase, and from the gaggle of anthropomorphized cartoon animals that had begun to dominate my awareness of the NFT community. The irony is that this “equally rare” approach is itself rare in a space where rarity so often confers value. They are all fashioned from the same assortment of simple shapes and colors, but each in a unique way. Mathematically, all Tiles are equally rare. A reiteration, perhaps, of the intention to allow participants to make their own value judgments. A few lines from the Manifesto stood out to me: The minimal website belies the vast possibilities contained within the project. These 8 sparse, deliberately spaced lines give shape to the project. When I landed on Tiles.art I was struck with how different it felt from so many other projects. Only after my purchases did I dive deeper to find the really exciting details of the project. I picked two tiles to buy, purely for the aesthetic joy they brought me.

OpenSea shows no properties for the tiles, so there’s no filtering metadata for specific traits or rarity levels. I saw an assortment of abstract art: ecruish squares with seemingly random mixes of colorful shapes layered on a 9×9 grid. It was during a stalking sesh on OpenSea one evening that I stumbled upon a collection called Infinite Tiles. Wallet stalking is a great way to discover new art and artists - especially considering that the most popular NFT platforms still need better discovery mechanisms for those that want to do more than ape into the latest pfp project. Except instead of raising a brow at a curious tube of creams might get a glimpse of someone’s jpeg-investment portfolio. It feels a bit voyeuristic at first, like the proverbial peek at someone else’s medicine cabinet. If you’ve been in the NFT space for a while, you’ve probably done it at least once.

Tiles of the animals