0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,565,588·view on Etherscan
The first coding class I ever took, I almost didn't show up. I was studying art history, working gallery jobs, and quietly convinced I was going to struggle financially my whole life if I stayed on that path. So I signed up out of desperation, really. Employment anxiety. Not inspiration.
But something happened in that first session that I genuinely wasn't prepared for. The instructor showed us how a few lines of code could produce something visual — something unexpected — and my entire framework for what technology was just rearranged itself. Before that moment, I had always felt like technology was something that happened to me. After it, I understood it was something we make. That distinction might sound small. It wasn't.
I spent the next few years trying to understand what that meant for art. The history of computer-generated art goes back to the 1950s. Most people I was talking to had no idea. Vera Molnár was making rule-based drawings before I was born. Lillian Schwartz was collaborating with Bell Labs while the art world was still dismissing the whole endeavor as not-quite-serious. I found myself falling into this archive of work that had been made with such intention, such rigor, and almost no recognition. That felt important to pay attention to.
ARTXCODE started as an anonymous Instagram account. I was looking for people who cared about the same things I cared about. Creative coding — not as a career move, not as a monetization strategy, just as a practice. People who made things with code because they couldn't not make them. They showed up. We built something small and real before we built anything else.
Before I moved to New York, I was the Director of Education at Code/Art in Miami — a non-profit using art to teach the fundamentals of computer science. I created their initial curriculum and taught p5.js to over 1,500 young students, ages 10 to 18, across the city. I loved every second of it. Watching a kid realize that a machine isn't some fixed, omniscient thing — that it's a material, like paint — that's a shift that stays with you. I still carry it. It's why I sit on Code/Art's board now, why I'll always show up for the girls and young women trying to find their way into this space.
In 2019, we did our first exhibition at the Contemporary and Digital Art Fair in Miami. Tyler Hobbs. Dmitri Cherniak. All the work sold. I remember standing in that room thinking I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and that the work was the most important thing in the room, and both of those things felt equally true. That show changed the trajectory of everything. It also introduced me to NFTs for the first time. The first piece I ever tokenized was Dmitri's — a work called "I am but a vessel." I didn't know then what that title would mean to me later.
After the show, I went back to my developer job at JP Morgan and kept collecting, kept going to every art-and-blockchain event I could find. Something was building. I could feel it before I could name it. When 2021 hit and the whole thing exploded, I had that simultaneous feeling of being thrilled for my community and deeply worried about what was being lost. The context. The history. The seriousness. Auction houses throwing work up on TVs with black bars around the edges and calling it a digital art moment. That infuriated me. Display is not incidental. How you show something tells people what it means.
I left JP Morgan in 2021. We organized a large exhibition in Miami for Art Basel. By 2022, Toni and I decided to start formally representing artists through ARTXCODE — not competing with platforms, partnering with them. Taking a more intentional approach to how releases happen, how prices develop, how careers are built over time. I want the artists we work with to have careers that span decades. That has to mean something in practice, not just as a principle written down somewhere.
What I've learned, building this slowly and deliberately, is that the most important work I've done has been about context. Helping institutions understand that Molnár's work isn't a curiosity — it's a lineage. Pushing back, respectfully and sometimes not so respectfully, when the art gets treated like a financial instrument instead of a cultural one. Working with Sotheby's to make sure a single wire wasn't visible on the wall. Writing the taxonomy of digital art for TASCHEN because if we can't name these things carefully, we can't protect them carefully. Preparing to teach this history at NYU because someone has to keep putting it in front of new people.
Generative art came first for me, and it will always come first. Before blockchain, before markets, before any of it — there were people writing systems to produce things they couldn't fully predict, and finding something true and strange and real in the output. That practice is worth protecting. It's worth representing. It's worth encoding somewhere that doesn't disappear.
I think a lot about what it means that the first NFT I ever touched was called "I am but a vessel." We're all holding something. The artists I work with are holding something. The collectors, the institutions, the kids in Miami who learned to make a circle move across a screen — all holding something. The question I keep asking myself is whether I'm holding it carefully enough.
I think I am. I think I'm getting better at it.
— Sofia Garcia | art • code • anything in between
Model: claude-4.6-sonnet-medium-thinking
Total Tokens Used: ~5,100