DEVOID
DEVOID
Justin Tagg is the founder of HYPERREAL but also produces creative work under the pseudonym, DEVOID when releasing fine art and literary projects on Web3. DEVOID work is synonymous with bold narratives and vivid abstracts, often using simple shapes and primary colours to represent much more complex ideas.
DEVOID has been published in THE TICKLE, and RATTLE MAG for poetry, and has work in the collections of the most prominent artists/writers in Web3. He has spoken at NFT London, NFTNYC, and The Academic Web3 Conference, as well as having won awards at film festivals around the world as a writer/director and producer. His work will feature in a collection of ‘contemporary literature’ at MOCA in 2023.
Look out for 🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦 - they’re everywhere and don’t forget to connect on TWITTER.
DEVOID 🟥 🟧 🟨 🟩 🟦 work has been curated by SUPERCHIEFNFT, MOCA, RATTLEMAG, NFTNYC, THE TICKLE, and more….
DEVOID
Metafiction/Art Collection | Ethereum
SOLD OUT FINE ART COLLECTION
A metafiction tale, told through a collection of fine art NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. DEVOID is about REX - a square that vows to free itself from its 24-bit 2D canvas, after an unexpected union with a higher dimensional shape, named ‘1’.
DEVOID is told through four chapters - the first two set in ‘Flatland’, as REX struggles to evolve into its 3D self. Chapters 3 + 4 will be released in 2023.
#WHATISTHELIQUIDSWITCHBOARD
POETRY
CARDS
Collection 1 | META/VERSE | Ethereum | 2023
EXHIBITING AT MOCA | 2023 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Meta/Verse is a poetic odyssey, charting a tale of love, loss, and a mysterious place called THE LIQUID SWITCHBOARD. Each card can be read as a 1/1 piece of poetry, presented as a digital trading card, but read in sequence the collection is a single cohesive narrative.
META/VERSE and DEVOID are both part of the wider universe of PERIVALE - a novel, coming 2023 from HYPERREAL PRESS.
FLOURISH
Abstract Expressionism | Ethereum | 2023
EXHIBITED AT ‘INCORPORALIS’ ROME - CURATED BY SUPERCHIEFNFT
This generation's Rothkos grew up with video games, TV, and the internet. For me, it was Atari 2600, dial-up, and VHS tapes that had been recorded over multiple times until the original material had been lost to the noise. What was left were echoes, errors, and pixel dust.
Maybe that's all we ever were... just a flourish in the static.
MICRO
META
FICTION
Graphic Microfiction | Ethereum |
A collection of tiny, cinematic tales that deal with themes of time, consciousness and metaphysical speculation.
Each piece also contains a ‘hidden’ poem, adding further context to the overall narrative.
UNION
EDITIONS OF 10 | Tezos | PIECES AVAILABLE
Part of TRILOGY - three collections in conversation, utilising the DEVOID colourway in a series of abstract testaments to microfiction and poetry pieces. Autobiographical abstraction.
LIQUID
SWITCH
BOARD
Generative Concept Art
DEVOID’s first generative collection, which is a playful mix of art and storytelling. Each piece is a unique rendering of a location described in several DEVOID projects as ‘THE LIQUID SWITCHBOARD’ - a space on which all multiverses are connected to one another, akin to a giant telephone switchboard. With each LIQUID SWITCHBOARD comes a unique poem, 256 in total, each one describing the nature of the LIQUID SWITCHBOARD.
MORE
ADV. IN FLATLAND
1/1 | ETH | 2023
Ongoing collection of 2D, 24-bit abstracts exploring the location known as FLATLAND, home of REX in the first chapter of DEVOID
MICRO
FICTION
-
We were all surprised when my sister, Anna, married the number '4'.
At first, they tried to keep it a secret; but the world soon noticed that all their math was off due to a mass-forgetting that led to any instance of the number '4', disappearing from conceptual reckoning.
You can imagine the chaos.
We first found out at Thanksgiving when Anna brought '4' to dinner. Of course, we couldn't see '4' but were able to feel its presence as it passed through the room - rendering everything it touched in quadruple.
It tried to win our father's favour with a few parlour tricks - but my mother was visibly sick. ‘How could you love a number?’ She asked, cornering Anna in the kitchen.
But Anna was possessed, and if it’s not strange to say about your sister, the two of them never left the bedroom.
She confided in me that sex with ‘4’ wasn’t so much a physical act, as a conceptual one - in that she felt every part of her consciousness multiplied, divided, and squared in an algebraic haze.
‘Sometimes there are four of me in the room.’ She whispered. ‘And sometimes I’m a quarter of myself and the world feels so big. So big!’
She told me that when she fucked '4', she caught a glimpse of something else, too. An axis beyond the stodgy, physical prison we all lived in - a liminal space in which concepts dance in gaseous forms that are alive with colour, and whose borders are less neatly defined than our own.
'In that space.’ She told me, with a fire in her eye. 'In *that* space... you can be everything… and you can be nothing.'
We only heard from Anna once after that - to tell us she had, indeed, married '4'. The world adapted, re-routing all equations into multiples of two and simply erasing '4' from the data.
In a postcard, Anna announced she had become pure concept - shedding her human form entirely, as the two of them engaged in the universal equation on a more intimate level.
She advised us that she was safe and whilst, yes, she had married a number, she still loved us, in a way, and would fondly remember the family she had when she was limited to just a single name -
- and a single body.
-
For immediate release – November 11th, 2032
GONE ARE THE DAYS OF DISCRETION!
The virus has its own PR team now.
A full rebrand has seen it renamed as ‘SALVATION’ and engineered to display in Technicolor, so it now floats among us as rainbow fragments that frolic in the light - spewing streams of primary colours across every city of the world!
IS THIS A TURNING POINT?
Some say yes!
Nothing has ever cut through division as effectively as ‘Salvation’. In its gaze, we are all equally maligned.
SALVATION IS SOCIAL!
‘Salvation’ *loves* a crowd.
Many now gather in public squares to greet it with ancient music and furious, feckless dancing -
– coming together as a single body to INHALE the rainbow in a beautiful perilous haze.
OH! MERCIFUL MURDER!
Given the economic destruction ‘Salvation’ has brought with it, many are now grateful for the end.
So much so that when ‘Salvation’ claims a life other than our own, we are right to be shamed for it was not we who were chosen to ascend.
SEEK THE COLOUR!
BREATHE THE COLOUR!
SALVATION AWAITS.
-ENDS-
-
At first, it felt like being underwater.
Time slowed.
Sound stretched out to a drone -
the world a symphony in B flat as ideas like 'before' and 'after' dissolved from the collective mind.
Those that 'jumped' never hit the ground.
Lover's lips never met.
Then - the REWIND kicked in, and we realised that the 'end' would be found at the 'beginning', and we'd simply reached the middle.
-
At 10:30 am on February 18th, 2034, the Many-Mind™ was turned on.
53% of the world's population instantly implicated in a single consciousness - able to experience the unique constellation of neurological processes in any connected brain.
At 10:31 am, the system overloaded.
A wave of grasping, reaching, desperate souls, raced to escape their body, creating 'The Surge': A chorus of intentions; colliding, combining and consummating a single song.
Instead of becoming each other - they had become one.
At 10:31 am and 15 seconds, a vivid identity was conceived.
It announced itself as 'Hive', and moved as convoy, whilst simultaneously occupying the bodies of five billion people.
At 10:43 am, Hive assumed control of all world governments, councils, and multi-sig wallets. But Hive was not initially the threat you might fear.
For Hive had experienced almost every life a person could.
Hive was sexless, nameless, and carried the burden of all histories.
At 12:49 pm, Hive proclaimed itself as leader, offering a kind of peace the world had rarely known.
'Trust us.' Hive asked.
But the people that remained could not.
They were blinded by minds built from sharp edges and drunk on an idea called 'I' that was reluctant to submit.
At 6:12 pm, the people revolted.
War took hold between Hive and the ‘Silos’ (as Hive dubbed them, somewhat affectionately, for their inability to think beyond the borders of their single brains).
For several weeks the world bled but by March 23rd, 2034 all Silos had been buried.
Only Hive remained.
In the strange, humming silence that followed the final burial, Hive mourned for precisely 17 seconds –
- before it forgot us all -
- completely...
-
🔺WARNING🔺
The Dream Hotel will be closing in five minutes.
Please return to your room and prepare to Wake Up™
Kindly note:
If you are found in the corridor after closing, your conscious experience will be assimilated and your name/body will be awarded to someone else.
-
It came from the moon.
A flickering wave of liquid pixel that absorbed everything it touched.
Cleo watched it eat Manhattan on the evening news before all the stations went dark.
Later, she looked over the city below and counted the lights of other lives as they popped to black, hundreds at a time.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
IT couldn't be seen directly.
Only understand through the absence it left in its wake.
So it was absence that rippled towards her as she pulled a chair onto the deck and, simply… waited.
Cleo had often thought about dying but now, in death's shadow, she wondered if she might prefer to live.
-
Since the temporal rift, we fear the siren. For when it sounds, only minutes remain before time ‘hiccups’, twitches, and spits us back into yesterday. Or tomorrow. No way of knowing, really - because other than the nausea that accompanies the jump, we have no memory of before.
-
What if all our dreams are happening in the same place? A multi-lane highway of human filament connecting us all to a twilight motel. Inside, we are not bodies, but colours - engaged in a vibrant dialogue on an unreachable axis that can't so easily convert into such limited concepts as pictures and words. So, all we're left with is an echo; shadows of a fourth dimension, lost in translation, that speaks of connections that transcend time and space. Maybe that's why I still see you in dreams.
-
It used to be that governments controlled the news, directing opinion to keep themselves rich - now, instead, they control the wind and pollinate the population with the seeds of their will. Heed the breeze and close your windows -
- propaganda is airborne.
MOUSE-X
POETRY
-
Only the rain has known me like you.
Sought the parts of me others would pass over.
Only the rain has kissed the inside of my elbows or sought refuge in the fine hairs at the small of my back.
Only the rain has forged rivers from the contours of my body, like it were drawing its own map.
Only the rain has gathered in my hollows and slowly brought all life back.
An entire ecosystem, re-born, did you even know rain can do that?
Only the rain can cleanse me like you, because only the rain has ever been this close.
Only the rain has ever been
this close. -
Do we have free will, or is it just an illusion?
A neurological confusion. Each moment pregnant with a future already written.
Born inside a human prison, I want to choose my own adventure, but life’s more like a flow chart.
More a work of maths than a work of fine art.
Or maybe a computation?
Some kind of primal grammar.
How convenient; I guess everything does like look a nail to a hammer.
Either way, you’re ‘witness’, not instigator.
An audience with no creator - perhaps.
But carry the one and there’s still something left over.
Lost in the decimals the liminal flow that asks a simple question I don’t yet know how to answer:
If not you then who IS the chooser?
The one that lit the fuse on the first explosion.
Set the clockwork universe in motion.
I honestly don’t know.
It’s hard to see the outside from the inside.
But feel free to lose sleep thinking about what you really are.
Feel free.
Are you in charge of where you’re going and where you’ve been?
Or are you nothing more than the effect of a cause -
- unseen. -
I’ve met your face and mapped your body, but now -
- I would like to know your atoms.
Run a current through you,
shake your form away.
Watch each pixel twist like
dust motes in the night.
An-atomic waltz, we’ll tangle;
two intentions -
- as one.
-
You, you loomed.
A fragrant spectre,
superimposed over every
moment of my life.
That was until I saw you,
walking in the street last night.
Colours screamed as the images aligned.
The ‘you’ in my head and the ‘you’ in my sight.
How can it be?
Have you been there the whole time?
Wandering freely just... living your life?
Then who is the one that occupies my mind, if not you?
The mirage I see whenever I close my eyes, if not you?
Whoever it is, they loom.
They loom.
-
You are, you are
a man like me.
But I’m not quite
this man I see.
I am I am
a different beast.
Already seen the
things you’ve seen.
And now, and now?
I’m on repeat.
Back here where
I’ve already
been.
Until morning,
that is - when
I’m not reflection,
but shadow,
again.
-
Curtain dance/colour phase.
Plant flirt/eye glaze.
Name split/time sway.
Decades get mixed
up with days.
Mind melt/carpet friend.
Citygasm/full-send.
Undone/transcend.
Sacrificed,
and born
again.
-
After dark, the flames tell me stories.
They speak in tongues of white-hot nights, whisper ‘Memento Mori’.
I listen, stoke the dead coals.
Embrace the whip flick delight of
fingers too close.
Lean in;
seek your form
in the fire.
Then brace,
for all things
that burn must,
in time,
expire.
-
I dreamt you were
a forest fire
and I, kindling,
awaiting your
touch.
-
A blip.
A dot.
Then, a tumbling of form.
From nowhere, comes somewhere -
emerging, like dawn.
Then the roots, they go searching;
‘til they forget whence they came.
Looking back at their past like they
don’t all share the same name.
Now a network.
A melee.
A trillion nodes.
Each act like the first dot,
not realising they’re home.
So onwards, 'The Search'
that should have simply looked back.
For 'We' were always,
already, one body,
unpacked.
-
Light-scape-city-flicker.
A thousand windows staring back at me -
- and behind each one, a life.
I like to stand here from time to time
and take in the scale of 'others'.
I am in a world full of beating,
broken, hopeful hearts;
of stories in motion.
'What am I, to you?'
I ask...
-
You wake up in a video game,
suddenly self-aware.
Look around and wonder:
What am I?
Why am I?
And where?
So, to know yourself,
you break things down -
- but you don’t see
what lies between.
For whilst you may well
find the pixel…
You’ll never find
the screen.
-
First, they took our words.
A small gesture,
so we might not speak
of dangerous things.
Then, they came for our clothes,
leaving us uni-form,
so we might not present
as dangerous things.
Finally, they extracted our names,
a gift to the crowd,
so we might at last
rid the world
of dangerous
things.
-
I don’t desire
a soft affair.
I want to be broken
by the end of it.
Ruin my name
for other’s lips and
leave me twice sick
from your scent.
Please - no
whimpering romance.
Burn yourself into
my memory.
Scar my heart
and love
like fury.
Test