The Story

The story of ethnic artwork depicting its people and places is a culturally significant one. Ethnic indigenous art is not only the most valuable, the most trafficked, and the most sold items in the black market in reality, even fictional stories about them in main stream movies create an awe to the consumer. Who can forget the holy grail quest, lost ark raiders, empress' jade pin, king solomon’s mines, the fula tribe’s war hammer, and the kohinoor diamond. This is our attempt to return these priceless pieces, albeit digital ones, to the public eye.1

ICPics started out as a NFT project for the masses—people around the world belonging to different ethnic communities. We chose the DFINITY’s ICP blockchain as our delivery medium because its enthusiastic developer teams, a glimpse of their future prospects, and the vibrant community that stands by them.

The first collection that we are going to launch is named the generation ZERO collection—a collection of 1,000 text-2-image AI generated artworks. The AI rendering of images has been coming up in the recent years, thanks to endeavors like DeepAI and Dall.E. As opposed to the modular layered approaches prevalent in the NFT market, each of these 1,000 images are rendered in a trail-n-error loop using no less than 12 keywords describing each feature of the image. Only one-in-three images are suitable for production. Then, we use the infamous HashLips art engine to add attributes that amplify the beauty of image—the page curls, the exotic wooden frames, the fastening rivets, and micro imprints. Together, the results are nothing short of spectacular!

Due to the personalized nature of our image rendering, the ICPics project’s Discord, Twitter, and Instagram platforms have been used both to display our creations from time-to-time and to avail followers' feedback, requests, and suggestions on what they would like to see. We dedicated 1% of our image rendering to follower requests and cataloged it as “special mentions,” which is the rarest set of our collection. You can see some of them here.

Stay tuned for more updates in the coming days!

Connect with us and let us know your thoughts…

The Team

  • Nancy: Cultural Liaison, Research Accuracy expert. Ethnic cultures enthusiast. Proficient in data mining, compiling, and cataloging.
  • Paul: Tech, Investor Development economist. Proficient in AI, machine learning, and adaptive learning systems.

Though not a part of our team, the Toniq labs' Entrepot team that help mint our collection and set up the secondary marketplace also carries a special mention here.

So, there you have it… enjoy!

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We have spoken.

  1. Disclaimer: The About us is the most difficult page to write. The story of ethnic indigenous societies have been written and rewritten so many times that it was hard to curate an accurate depiction of all cultures of the world. But, this is our humble attempt. All errors are our own and we are open rectify any aspect of our artwork in subsequent editions. ↩︎