Merchant Coppola is a German visual effects artist and poet based in Nuremberg. Working mainly in text-based, typographic NFT art, he makes concrete poems that explore words, symbols, and their meaning, or lack of it, drawing on interests ranging from pop songs and advertisement to Dada and found text.
Raised by a sculptor mother and a painter uncle, he grew up around art workshops and museums, and studied animation and creative writing at Nuremberg Institute of Technology.,He has worked as a visual effects artist in film and television for several years,,and also teaches university-level VFX courses.He began making text-based digital art after discovering NFTs during the Covid-19 pandemic, and in 2021 launched a series of experimental typographic pieces on the Hic et Nunc platform.,
His visual poems typically start from a single phrase or quote, whose visual presentation he reworks to add a further layer of meaning beyond his original idea. Under a separate project, advocate coppelius, he applies filters to photographs and ink drawings to make more associative, meditative pixel-bending pieces that blend physical and digital art.His work has been shown in the curated gallery theVERSEverse, alongside crypto artist-poets such as Aurèce Vettier and Pierre Gervois.
After the NFT platform Hic et Nunc shut down in 2021, he helped its community move to the community-run platform Teia, where he became project coordinator. In 2023 he helped organize TezQuakeAid, a Tezos community fundraiser that sold donated digital artworks to raise more than 95,000 tez in relief aid for NGOs assisting victims of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.
