FAQ

3FACE is an artwork that adapts to you. There exists only 4096 3FACE artworks, represented as non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

Sometimes we need a mirror to see ourselves. Your 3FACE mirrors the inner daemons that define your personality and your way of moving through the world. Use 3FACE to explain yourself. “It wasn’t me, it was my 3face.” Use 3FACE as a branch of you: Vitalik3Face. Use 3FACE as your alter ego. “My 3FACE says yes.”

3FACE performs a reading of your wallet's public transaction history and infers your immutable Nature, your semi-mutable Nurture, and your mutable Posture. Then it renders an existential portrait of you. Under the hood, 3FACE consists of the 3FACE Wallet Stats, the 3FACE Personality Model, and the 3FACE Art Renderer.

3FACE Wallet Stats calculates Eth balance volatility, NFT diversity index, dex interaction, sell/buy ratio (paper hands vs diamond hands), bluechip/indie ratio, willingness to spend gas, conviction score, and overall wallet activity across short and long time frames. Crucially, it also calculates the deltas between different time scales to derive meaningful signals of behavioral change.

You are not a single unified person. You are a composition of subpersonalities. The 3FACE Personality Model uses the signals surfaced by Wallet Stats to infer the dramatic interplay between three inner daemons: Nature, Nurture, and Posture.

• NATURE is the immutable daemon that drives you. This is the fundamental source of energy and deep aim in your life. The high-level archetypal Nature drives are: STRUCTURE, BELONGING, CHANGE, TRANSCENDENCE.
• NURTURE is the semi-mutable daemon that mediates your Nature. This is the scaffolding that civilizes your Nature and scripts your life as an archetypal story arc. Nurture is often in misalignment with Nature’s deep aim. The high-level archetypal Nurture scripts are: HEIR, NORMIE, NOMAD, PROMETHEAN.
• POSTURE is the highly mutable daemon that mediates the balance between Nature and Nurture. This is the “you” that you most identify with because it is the “you” that you can consciously control. The high-level archetypal Posture modes are: CONTENT, RESENTFUL, MONSTROUS, GROWING.

Check out the metadata on your 3FACE to see the personality inferences made by the Personality Model.

The Art Renderer visualizes the inferences made by the 3FACE Personality Model into a psychological portrait. The top of the portrait maps your 3FACE’s Posture. Nature is represented as an energy daemon. It wrestles with Nurture, represented as an archetypal character from familiar fairytales. All art assets are hand-drawn by the artist. Their integration is accomplished using generative warping and re-lighting processes that are driven by the personality inferences.

As your wallet changes over time, you may wish to update your 3FACE. Like you, some 3FACE traits remain immutable, while other traits change dramatically across life stages. Gas fees apply when saving your updated 3FACE.

Your 3FACE maintains its state until you choose to update it. When you do update your 3FACE, its last prior state is preserved as a detail in the 3FACE artwork that you can zoom in and inspect. In this way, 3FACE retains a memory/trace/stink/aroma of its adaptation to a past wallet.

3FACE features both immutable and mutable traits.
Immutable traits are derived at mint time, and remain with each 3FACE regardless of updates or wallet transfers. Immutable traits include your chosen Nature archetype, Nature subtraits, character type, among many others.
Mutable traits are driven by the Personality Model. These traits may change as you update your 3FACE. Mutable traits include the Posture daemon's expression, the Nurture daemon's artwork, the wrestling configuration of Nature and Nurture, lighting conditions based on wallet status and usage, among many others.

Check out the 3FACE metadata to inspect the list of traits.

We're proud of the artistic and technical innovations made with 3FACE. Among them:
- Both mutable and immutable traits
- Latent space on mutable traits
- Holder-influenced archetype rarity at mint time
- Signal rich metadata on wallet
- Blended hand-drawn and generative SVG art processes
- Prior artwork state fully embedded inside current artwork state

3FACE currently operates with a 5% artist royalty and a 2.5% Outland royalty. These percentages help the 3FACE project cover its ongoing operating cost for providing the wallet reading and analysis functionality that is core to the updatable features of 3FACE, encourage further refinement of 3FACE features, and support the artist in his artistic endeavors.

3FACE embraces the CC0 license with respect to all 3FACE artwork and personality metadata. Do whatever you want with 3FACE. We believe in reducing the friction for cultural evolution to happen with greater ease than ever before. If 3FACE imagery and/or personality metadata inspire you to build upon, integrate, reproduce, adapt, or mutate it for your own projects, commercial or noncommercial, go for it. Make a 4FACE. Make your own visualization of the personality metadata. Use 3FACE for your psychological novel cover. Use 3FACE to power your metaverse NPCs with richer personalities. And holders, use your 3FACE as an exclusive controller to affect and influence anything built upon 3FACE. The only thing CC0 does not surrender is certain uses of intellectual property relating to the 3FACE collection identity, such as rights to the name 3FACE or the name Outland Art, nor rights to the artist’s name on derivative projects. For details, see the full ownership license linked at the bottom of this FAQ.

Ian Cheng's Life After BOB (LAB) is an episodic anime series built and simulated in the Unity game engine and played back in real-time. 3FACE extends the psychological models used to write and develop Life After BOB and adapts it to you. There are LAB easter egg traits distributed throughout the 3FACE collection. 3FACE and its rich personality data serve as a primitive in the LAB universe, and may power NPC characteristics in upcoming LAB episodes and simulations. Learn more about Life After BOB at lifeafterbob.io

Since 2012, artist Ian Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative agent whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of the simulation. Recently, he has developed BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI creature whose personality, body, and life story evolve across exhibitions, what Cheng calls “art with a nervous system.” Currently Cheng is developing Life After BOB, a real-time anime miniseries.

Cheng has exhibited widely including solo presentations at MoMA PS1; Serpentine Galleries; The Shed; Leeum Museum of Art; LUMA Foundation; Carnegie Museum of Art; De Young Museum; Sharjah Biennial; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Julia Stoschek Collection; and group presentations at Venice Biennale; Museum of Modern Art; M Plus; MoCA LA; Moderna Museet; Whitney Museum of American Art; Hirshhorn Museum; Tate Modern; Louisiana Museum; Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Learn more at http://iancheng.com

Ian Cheng – artist
Christopher Y. Lew - curator
Oren Shoham – artwork renderer development
Cezar Mocan – artwork renderer development
Danning Sui – data scientist
Ivaylo Getov – personality model development
Jacopo Daeli – pipeline development
NFT Culture – web3 development
Digital Practice – web3 development
Unseen Digital – frontend development
The Unloved – ui design
Produced by Outland Art
Published by Metis Suns
Special thanks to Jason Li, Veronica So, Ben Vickers, Rachel Rose

3FACE Ownership License