gilles-dc is a web3 essayist who writes long-form theoretical essays about memes, culture, and technology, publishing them as NFT-minted posts on his own site under series including Into the Memeverse.,He is also an artist who reworks web3 and art-historical imagery in NFT pieces.,He describes Into the Memeverse as “a first-principle explainer of the paradigm shift that makes JPEGs expensive”.
In Into the Memeverse, he argues that the Catholic Church's control of text production gave it a monopoly on meaning in medieval Europe. He traces how the printing press broke that monopoly to argue that NFT technology could similarly break up centralized control over digital culture today.
Alongside his writing, gilles-dc makes visual NFT art responding to other web3 projects. In January 2023 he minted Genesis Check on Zora with the tagline “Seize the meme of verification”, part of the wave of derivative works that grew out of Jack Butcher's Checks project.Another Checks-derivative piece, The Persistence Of Status, reworked Salvador Dalí's painting The Persistence of Memory. It was part of a wider pattern in which he put his own spin on well-known works of art history, including pieces by René Magritte.
He has also released editions tied to Opepen, including Kairos³, minted across Opepen Sets 012 and 015.
