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AUTHOR'S NOTE
I work on this artistic project in my spare time, in public, independently, and at the pace of a turtle. The first coding blocks of the project appeared online in November 2017. From the beginning, the creative process was intuitive, progressed non-linearly, and is time-stamped by a digital clock.
This text document has been a work-in-progress since May 2021. Countless public drafts and serene outdoor walks have shaped it into its current state, akin to a therapeutic craft and exercise. To view the history of its changes, visit GitHub.com (Last modification: Aug 3, 2024).
A visual chart showing additions and deletions to this document, on a weekly basis over a long time window, can be viewed at https://github.com/awalkaday/about-awalkaday-art/graphs/code-frequency.
READING GUIDE 1. Introduction to the Photo Series 2. Beyond Pixels: A Stroll into Nature 3. Mobile Studio and Digital Toolkit 3.1. On-the-go Photography 3.2. Cameras and Photo Editing 3.3. Gaming Laptop 4. Chronicle of Milestones Navigation 4.1. Ongoing Pathways 4.2. Internet Footprints 4.3. Blockchain Records 5. Evolution of a Trek on Platforms 5.1. Instagram 5.2. GitHub 5.3. Web Gallery 5.4. X (Twitter) 5.5. Ethereum 6. Artist's Proofs and Ethos 6.1. Public Git Commits 6.2. Git Usage History 6.3. Open Source Software 7. Artist Profile 7.1. Human Identity 7.2. Training Ground 7.3. Project Inception Story 8. Contact
Welcome to awalkaday.art, a collection of 263 photographs created by Chris-Armel (daqhris) and published on the Ethereum blockchain since February 2023. This digital body of work captures the enchanting beauty seen in diverse landscapes of various Belgian regions through a captivating series of monochrome photographs. Each photograph was assigned a unique identification token on a public blockchain, guaranteeing that they are authentic, traceable and collectable.
Embark on a visual journey with awalkaday.art, where the mission goes beyond pixels to ignite a passion for the great outdoors. More than just a visual spectacle, this collection is a call to embrace the rejuvenating power of nature, urging everyone to go outside, enjoy the fresh air, be captivated by the surroundings and cultivate well-being through the simplicity of regular walks, whether short or long.
In an age of rapid urbanisation and hyperconnectivity, many people feel disconnected from their local environment and lack the inspiration to explore unfamiliar landscapes. The art of walking, one of the least tiring yet most rewarding physical activities, remains overlooked by most.
Through the lens of Chris-Armel, awalkaday.art is more than just a photo collection. It is a testament to his passion for photography and a vessel for sharing his creative skills across borders and oceans. The web gallery and the blockchain smart contract were openly developed and are seamlessly interlinked to ensure effortless navigation for all who wish to discover and engage with the travelogue in a digital setting.
The collection revolves around locations in Belgium and explores a diverse range of scenes that include streets, landscapes, architecture, and nature. The monochromatic scenes document sightings of peculiar real-life environments and preserve the visual memories of a human wanderer, exiled away from homeland, on an intuitive quest propelled by regular walks.
These photographs were captured during walks through the streets and alleyways of Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels, regions within Belgium. The process of photographing spanned six years, with a gap of three years between time intervals: 2017-2018 and 2021-2022.
Traveling on foot became essential after the outbreak of a global pandemic in 2020. Therefore, the artist resumed his leisure activity and morphed it into a therapeutic mobile project. A minimalist technical plan was adopted to reduce the lingering fear of losing electronic tools (stolen, hacked, or malfunctioning) and to fuel a digital quest progressing at the rhythm of frequent and abrupt moves around a terrestrial territory seen as a land of adoption and refuge.
At the beginning of this travelogue on Western soil, between 2017 and 2018, a Xiaomi smartphone, purchased in Beijing around 2015, was the tool in-use for recording and editing still images.
In early 2021, a smartphone operating under Android One software system was purchased to meet the need for a dedicated mobile camera which regularly receives secure software updates from its American creator, Google. This low-cost phone, designed by a Finnish firm and bought on Belgian soil, was equipped with two rear cameras, including a 13-megapixel primary sensor and a 2-megapixel depth sensor.
The Nokia's longevity and endurance have earned it the merit of being compared to a cheap handheld Air Force One in the hands of a moving target of celestial attention and protection. In a stunning turn of events, all of the devices cryptographically signed as his on a cyberspace board in the summer of 2022 were hit by a cyber attack, the following season, deniably sponsored by a nation-state, resulting in the Android One proving its resilience against malefic interference, and indicating the cut-off date of the photographing process.
Most of the photographs were edited using Android software applications, such as Snapseed, White Border, and Scrambled Exif. Overall, the cameras had basic features to balance highlights and shadows in photographs, produce decent detail in well-lit conditions, and assist with scene recognition and optimization, but these were limited by the mediocre sensors.
A laptop computer, branded as Hasee God of War and acquired on the Asian continent, was very useful for coding sessions while building the online gallery on top of digital foundations. This device was one of the few items that he was able to keep after being arbitrarily detained by Chinese authorities in June 2016.
Unfortunately, the gaming computer mysteriously crashed during a malware analysis, six years later, in the winter of 2022. The nearly decade-old computing device, still alive and undiagnosed in his care, eventually regained basic functionality under Linux software. It's worth noting that the creative tools and works were more than once rescued, recovered or revived thanks to pieces of computer software, Linux and Git, brought to life by a Finnish-born inventor.
Let's dive into key moments that have shaped his artistic journey — an odyssey navigated in solitude on the creative path leading to awalkaday.art. Each milestone not only marks a significant achievement, but also adds another chapter to an evolving story. Join us as we explore the turning points, triumphs and transformative experiences that have shaped the nature of this photography series.
The photo collection has evolved since its inception. Over the years, the artist has:
The visual art practice, reinforced by web surfing, began in July 2017, when a photo was posted on Instagram with the caption: Don't watch the clock. Do what it does. Keep going. The first and last photographs, preserved in the collection, appeared online respectively in November 2017 and September 2022.
The Internet domain awalkaday.art was officially registered in May 2021. One year later, a meaningful milestone was reached when selected photographs graced the virtual walls of the MONOLITH Gallery inside Sellen Hall in July 2022. Since September 2023, the smart contract and the contract deployer are labeled by Etherscan. A congratulatory message citing the virtual exhibition hall was posted by the .ART web domains registry on two social media networks in February 2024.
The blockchain publication of the collection was achieved with the creation of an eponymous smart contract in August 2022. This was followed by the registration of awalkaday.art as an Ethereum domain in September 2022. About half a year later, 263 WALK tokens were minted on Ethereum in February 2023, marking a significant moment in the on-chain history of awalkaday.art.
In the virtual realm of blockchain-based art platforms, the artist has created a profile on behalf of his work and listed artworks on Coinbase, Foundation, Rightclick, The Hug, Zora and SuperRare in the second half of 2023. As an artist, coder and hacker, he participated for the first time in an international hackathon organized by ETHGlobal in Brussels, a 36-hour software tournament focused on Ethereum in July 2024. Since then, after honing his skills as an Ethereum app developer and overcoming the learning curve of a hackathon, his next blockchain-based artistic project has been launched: ZinnekeRescueMission.
Instagram enables users to showcase their creativity and connect through imagery and visual storytelling. The monochrome photographs were originally posted on Instagram by @walk.day (managed by @iamdaqhris), on an almost daily basis, continuously for years, with shooting geolocation attached and platform timestamp appended.
GitHub offers a collaborative environment to programmers in addition to version control and project management tools. The underlying source code for the awalkaday.art Photo Collection is hosted and runs on GitHub, where all changes can be tracked and audited. The public code repositories, available in Git format, contain all commits and code changes from day one of the project at github.com/awalkaday.
After the project resumed, the photos started being uploaded to a purpose-built web gallery, awalkaday.art, which hosts a catalog of 263 photographs from the collection in a custom-designed, interactive and responsive gallery. It prioritises a smooth and random order of display for each visit, allowing for ease of navigation and discovery of photographs. A 3D exhibition hall has also been set up to welcome all virtual visitors at oncyber.io/awalkaday.art.
X allows users to share short-form media works and fosters real-time engagement in public conversations. News and viewpoints related to the photo collection are broadcast on X, where the artist posting via @awalkadayart connects with a diverse audience and builds relationships with fellow artists and collectors.
For the final leg of a trek on digital platforms, thanks to angelic backing provided by a cryptoasset wallet set up in 2017, boostraped in 2021, and set in motion in 2022, daqhris minted the 263 photographs, miraculously recovered after another chaotic winter, and preserved for the long run as non-fungible ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
Ethereum is a decentralised blockchain platform that allows developers to create and deploy self-executing code in the form of smart contracts and applications.
The artworks were wrapped in the awalkaday.art Smart Contract and self-published on a public blockchain, where they can be verified, collected and exchanged.
The smart contract address is 0xE31801C2E58b151C3deD2cB29dA56147b7f27eB1.
The monochromatic sights were assembled, named and minted during a wintertime stay as a homeless person at the Palais des Droits, a former financial office building which had been converted into a squalid squat in Brussels. He was able to safeguard them on a state-of-the-art blockchain on Valentine's Day in 2023, fortunately one day before a planned eviction from the infamous shelter.
After landing on a blockchain terrain in a batch series, each photo began to carry a name, in the form of a logbook. A string of words and numbers that begins with the artistic theme awalkaday, then ends with a computer-calculated day of the year, linked by a hyphen to the year of when the photo was first dropped online without a parachute and crossed the radar of cyber warfare forces on a tourist visa (example: awalkaday 185-2022).
Git is a distributed version control software. Version control is a way to save changes over time without overwriting previous versions. Git commits represent snapshots of code changes in a version control system. Each commit captures modifications made by its developer(s). The commits of this public project are bound together by cryptographic signatures and organised in linear sequence within a lightweight file.
This art project treats the creative process as a series of iterative steps that rely on public Git commits. Just as an artist refines his work through proofs, the awalkaday.art project evolves incrementally, leaving behind a history rich trail of its development intact. It's not far from being seen as a novel concept that mimics what has been defined as evolution in the science of evolutionary biology.
The oldest GitHub-based commits written and signed by daqhris date back to February 2016. They may be seen as the remnants of an extracurricular passion that infused an innovative spirit into a student's life in the East, spent crossing over the Great Firewall of China and bypassing man-made virtual walls through private tunnels to wave hello to the world.
Much earlier fragments of his public coding blocks were likely archived inside the GitHub-sponsored Arctic Code Vault in February 2020, among notable human-crafted software works, for over a thousand years. Looking way back, an initial foray into GitHub in May 2011, at the age of nineteen in Bujumbura, Burundi (Africa), seems comparable to planting a seed of innovation in the fertile soil of a burgeoning digital platform. That seed has since blossomed into a time-stamped odyssey rooted in cyberspace and grounded on Belgian soil — awalkaday.art.
An open-source ethos which embodies principles such as transparency, collaboration, and community-driven development has been embraced with open arms.
To gain exposure to software-driven innovation, Chris-Armel (daqhris) has been an active contributor to the Free and Open Source Software Developer Conference in Brussels every year since 2020. The annual conference has enabled him to remain connected with the European software developer community, despite lacking the right to attend university or work professionally in the field.
As a volunteer, one of his memorable acts was standing on stage to introduce a talk about 'Open Source Software at NASA', presented by an American astronomer, in front of a packed amphitheater in February 2023. In the summer of 2024, he has published an online book, book.awalkaday.art, that shines a light on various aspects of his Git-enabled artistic practice and is built with a technical documentation tool, GitBook.
Chris-Armel (daqhris) is the photographer and software developer behind the digital life of the awalkaday.art Photography Collection. He was born in Burundi (1992) and currently lives in Belgium.
Chris started learning photography as a self-taught enthusiast during the early years of Instagram, around 2013. At the time, he was studying computer science and engineering and working part-time in the film industry in Beijing, China. His style combines traditional photography techniques with digital editing tools. The photographs are monochrome with a 1:1 aspect ratio and capture the timeless charm of the Belgian landscape.
During the summer of 2017, Chris resided in a Red Cross camp for asylum seekers in Namur, Belgium. To combat prolonged boredom and physical inactivity, an idea sparked in his mind, urging him to combine his skills in black-and-white photography, visual design, and software coding in order to create an artistic project.
Using rudimentary photographic equipment and online public platforms, coupled with an open-source digital toolbox, he has visually documented a years-long journey that artfully depicts his time-bound walks and publicly logs his footprints around a land of refuge. He had initially landed in Belgium in the winter of 2016, seeking a safe haven away from the persecution by authorities of his homeland while abroad in China and their Chinese counterparts.
After six months of posting on Instagram and coding on GitHub, the artistic project was put on hold due to the loss of electronic devices, in the aftermath of a laptop crash and a smartphone theft in the camp. Three years later, in 2021, it was relaunched as a part-time artistic practice, even though his legal status and human life as an immigrant remained uncertain, hopeless, angst-inducing and precarious.
Contrary to modern conventions, awalkaday.art is neither a state-sponsored artistic endeavor nor a brick-and-mortar art gallery. Since day one of the project, the artist has endured the human experience of lacking easy access to medical care, health insurance, humanitarian aid and banking services. He faced recurring unemployment, despite numerous skills, and burned only organic calories instead of emitting pollutants. To find out more, read his biography online at daqhris.com/about.
Thank you for your time and interest in this series of photographs. If you have any questions or comments about the collection, please don't hesitate to reach out. Get in touch with @awalkadayart on X or send an email to [email protected] or, if you are at ease with encryption, reach out via a Keybase message.