Introducing Electric Catnip's Nine Friendship Tokens

I’ve created Nine Friendship Tokens, an experiment with physical media, inspired by digital NFTs.

These Nine Friendship Tokens are 10” lathe-cut vinyl records with animated lenticular art covers, featuring a surreal sound journey through music and dialogue. The covers are all hand-crafted by me, and the records were cut by Tangible Formats.

The lenticular covers move like my videos. Photos can’t show what it’s like to physically hold one of these albums. You gotta experience them in person. 

I’ve given each of the Tokens to nine of my friends with three rules:

• Don’t keep this record

• Don’t sell or trade this record

• Give this record to a friend
  

There are nine copies of this record, and that’s all. I’m not making more. I trust my friends to pass them around so as many people as possible can experience them.

Here’s how the NFT-inspired “proof” in the Nine Friendship Tokens works: The gatefold sleeves open like a ledger, and there are lines for everyone to sign to show who gave it to who. This ledger records the movement of the tokens through the “Chain of Friendship”. Verification is physical & personal.

This Chain of Friendship is like a hand-rolled blockchain, where your name is listed alongside people who knew you were cool enough to share the experience. 

I removed the concept of monetary value from this project altogether. A person who holds one of the Tokens invested $0. If they paid for it, what they have isn’t one of the Friendship Tokens anymore —the person who sold it to them broke the rules, so they own what used to be a Friendship Token. It’s like a tangible version of the old saying that “you can’t buy friends”. 

This is an experiment in what can happen to a piece of physical art when it’s not supposed to be sold. Can it pass hand to hand among friends forever? Let’s find out.