If you just woke up to and wonder what happened to the hic et nunc website and its "discontinued" twitter account here's some info what is going on as far as I know:
We are clearly facing the third hen crisis and this time it is the worst case scenario: Rafael Lima, the creator of hic et nunc got hit by a bus. Well, not really. Rather in an irresponsible act of rage decided to leave and turn the off-switch on everything he has access to.
As far as I can tell the damage so far is mostly affecting the facade of the hen ecosystem: the .XYZ website and the twitter account. The 500k+ OBJKTS minted and the smart contracts are still there and can be accessed through other community sites, like hicetnunc.art
I made this work in addition to the 25 prints that will be part of the "Now You See Me Now You Don't" group show and features the work of 22 artists who portray highly endangered animals and plants.
I will donate 100% of the primary sales profits of this NFT to the Finish Natural Heritage Foundation which is an NGO that buys old-growth forests and prevents them from logging, thus protecting rare animal and plant life as well as reducing CO2 emissions. luonnonperintosaatio.fi
The idea of building an autonomous entity that is able to be creative or at least co-creative in some form goes back hundreds of years. Literature is full of examples of machines or contraptions that could be seen as some precursor of the idea of AI: frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
I guess anyone who starts with generative art quickly comes to the question: "how can I automate this fully?". For me that moment came when I wrote my first "try out every possible pixel combination" program back in 1985 or so on my Commodore C-64.
Of course I quickly had to realize that brute-force does not get you anywhere and you need more intelligent approaches to separate the interesting from the noise or the banal. So I had to wait for more than 20 years for AI to get to the point where it became feasible.