ROBNESS is a California-based digital artist who began minting on Bitcoin's Counterparty protocol in 2016 and became an original contributor to the Rare Pepe card collection, an early proof of concept for non-fungible tokens.,In 2020 he tokenized 64 GALLON TOTER, a GIF of a trash bin taken from the Home Depot website, and its removal from the platform SuperRare launched the #trashart movement he helped originate.,,
His interest in visual and audio aesthetics began at twelve, sparked by buying the Velvet Underground & Nico album for its Andy Warhol cover art. In 2019 he began working with the platforms SuperRare, KnownOrigin and OpenSea, entering a period shaped by the vaporwave music scene.
The #trashart movement also included artists Eric P. Rhodes and Max Osiris, alongside whom ROBNESS was banned from, and later reinstated to, SuperRare in 2020.,,In 2021 he collaborated with Norman Harman on A Visionary's Row.The two also created The Last Confirmation, regarded as one of the earliest collaborations between artists in crypto art.In 2022 he released PEPESHINICHI as part of the Fake Rare collection and collaborated with Campbell McGrath for theVERSEverse, a blockchain poetry collective.,
In 2023 two of his works were included in “NFT: Poetics of the Immaterial, from Certificates to Blockchain” at the Centre Pompidou, alongside Jonas Lund, Claude Closky, Rafaël Rozendaal and Larva Labs.,He also exhibited at L'Avant Galerie Vossen in Paris and is included in Taschen's book On NFTs.,The documentary What the Punk!, directed by Hervé Martin-Delpierre, premiered at Digital Art Mile during Art Basel in 2024. It follows ROBNESS as a central figure alongside two other key figures in the CryptoPunks story.
