Ed Balloon is a multidisciplinary Web3 artist and musician who works across stop-motion animation, film, music, and generative art.,His flagship project, Run Ed, follows a struggling musician puppet named Ed B, and directs half of its secondary sales into the Ed Balloon Generational Wealth Fund, which buys work by Black and other underrepresented artists in Web3.,,
He has collaborated with Timbaland, TIME's TIMEPieces community, and Avalanche.In January 2023 he released a genesis music NFT on SuperRare paying homage to Black hair, inspired by the artist Yatreda.That work followed an earlier SuperRare piece, Trap Balls On A Loc Tree (Are We F&%Ked?), a music piece for which he manipulated his own locs into the shape of a tree branch.
In July 2023 he released Beauty Supply Is Out of Du-Rags: A Personal Synthesis of Protection and Timeless Style on the newly launched Prohibition platform, billed as the first on-chain generative art project to feature box braids and locs. Coded to render Black hairstyles algorithmically, the project grew out of memories of being told as a child to shave his head or hide his locs to get a job. Ed Balloon has described it as a cathartic, deeply personal work, and of an accompanying piece built around a du-rag he said “The du-rag is a way of hiding, but you don't have it, so you have to let the world see and accept you for who you are.”
Ed Balloon has said Web3 gave him the flexibility to move between music, visual art, and disruption instead of the linear, siloed path he felt bound to before entering the space. He has said that even within Web3, people knew him for his puppet and stop-motion work but not as a musician, despite his telling them so directly.
