TheBenMeadows, also known as Ben Meadows,is a photographer and digital artistworking across entrepreneurship, art and technology.Their practice centers on their own photography, enhanced with AI tools and upscaling algorithms, alongside experimental work minted fully on-chain on Ethereum and Bitcoinand Tezos.Outside their art, they have worked mainly in the construction industry, including as vice president of one of the largest plumbing companies in Texas.
TheBenMeadows began with film photography and moved to digital photography in the late 1990s, later selling some of their photographs by the late 2000s. They had been active in the blockchain space since around 2011, and their interest in NFTs grew in 2021, leading them to begin buying and minting their own pieces in 2022. Their first NFT was minted on Zora on April 28, 2022, and their first fully on-chain piece, together, followed in May 2023.
together used the developer diid's efficax extension and was among the first fully on-chain mints to store data with SSTORE2, a more efficient on-chain storage method. In October 2023 they devised a way to compress vector art on Bitcoin, and used it that month for their first interactive compressed Bitcoin Ordinal, Blush Heist. In January 2024 they released pickle, using a then-unreleased version of diid's efficax extension to add SVGZ compression, a technique they had outlined for Bitcoin that diid then adapted for Ethereum.
In 2025 they released You Didn't Build That on Gamma Originals, a Pepe-themed piece that takes its title from a 2012 speech by Barack Obama to question whether any art is created ex nihilo. First conceived in late 2022, the piece combines multiple generative AI programs with upscaling techniques and traditional image editing to probe authorship and authenticity in digital art.In 2026 they released essentialism on Tezos, a 44-edition, fully on-chain generative work built from two of their photographs, Blue Tree and Natural Gradient, each reduced to a small grid of grey. Each edition remembers less of the source photograph than the one before it, so the piece degrades toward pure grain as the edition number rises.In 2023 they also curated ABC Art World on Foundation, a project that generated more than 13 ETH in sales and over 200 collectors within its first year.
