A Pioneering Collection of Architectural Photography on Bitcoin by Costo Bravo
Weird architectures from an alternate reality, Buidlings draw a parallel between art and “buidling”, the Web3 ethos of creating, iterating and producing meaningful work. Seamlessly blending film photography and digital collage, they’re immutably preserved on Bitcoin, the mother of blockchains. As a genesis collection, they promise collectors access to physical and digital iterations, curated perks, and a connection to the early days of Ordinals art.
A Genesis Story
In January 2023, Casey Rodarmor introduced the Ordinals protocol, effectively enabling NFTs on Bitcoin. This sparked a pioneering wave of early adopters, experimenters, and true believers, all inscribing their works, ideas, and collections in unison. Within just a few weeks, over 100,000 inscriptions were created. Today, there are tens of millions.
Unlike traditional NFTs, inscriptions store data directly on-chain. Images, sound, video, code, websites, libraries, text… immutably preserved, independent of centralised platforms like IPFS or AWS. The appeal to artists is significant: our creations live irreversibly, globally accessible for generations. Inscriptions are also chronologically numbered, and block space is limited. Two additional layers of scarcity that add depth to the value of digital art on Bitcoin.
In this context, just three weeks after Ordinals launched, the Genesis Buidlings were inscribed (#96099 to #289661), cementing their place on the most secure and historically significant blockchain.
Art is Buidling
Buidlings are complex creations. They result from a multi-layered process involving film photography and processing, digital collage, editing, compression, and of course inscriptions. Beyond their final form, Buidlings are also reused to train AI models and serve as style references for some of my more recent works. Each piece is made granularly, reinforcing the idea that artistic creation and ‘buidling’ aren’t so different.
“Being an artist is no different from being a founder, an art practice is no different from what we usually call a ‘project’ in this space.”
The phrase ‘Art is Buidling’ can be read in many ways. Artists today are expected to be marketers, content creators, finance specialists, community managers, distributors, accountants, roles that were never traditionally part of the creative endeavour. There’s virtually no difference between being an artist and being a project founder in Web3.
From a purely creative point of view, Buidlings weren’t built in a day. I begin by shooting on film: buildings, construction sites, or urban landscapes from around the world. I develop and scan each image before the digital work begins – texturing, collage, colour correction, cropping, replacing, duplicating, colourising, improvising… Almost brick by brick, these edifices are constructed from the ground up.
The phrase also works in reverse: ‘Buidling is Art’. Searching for beauty in everyday urban spaces, or creating it digitally from scratch, my practice approaches architecture with a poetic, almost nostalgic eye. Bold aesthetics emerge, transforming fragments of city life into singular pieces of art.
More is More
While I’m usually against the maxi mindset and cult-like behaviours, maximalism as an art movement is something I embrace wholeheartedly, because it carries a very different meaning: not exclusion, but abundance.
Everyone knows about minimalism. ‘Less is more’ has become one of the most cited mantras. And while minimalism can be soothing and visually refined, it’s also become the default, a go-to strategy for polishing one’s art, design, even lifestyle.
Buidlings take a different path. With a nonconformist spirit, they embrace chaos, bold colours, surrealism, and layers upon layers of both analogue and digital alterations. They find meaning in the multiplicity of textures, mediums, and ultimately interpretations.
The chaotic approach is also cathartic. The process becomes an improvisation, not unlike jazz: a main theme followed by infinite variations, spontaneous, expressive, personal, found in the moment and frozen in time. Art is the process as much as it is the result.
As such, an artwork is never truly finished. The artist simply chooses a moment on the creative timeline and freezes it. But we can always come back, iterate, remix, explore new aesthetics, expand old concepts, and ‘buidl’ on top of what already exists. Sometimes, complexity adds depth, and more is indeed… more.
A Collector’s Item
The genesis collection consists of a limited supply of ten 1/1 pieces, each completely unique. Historical significance, immutability, scarcity, and distinct aesthetics are all meaningful features of the Buidlings series.
Primary market collectors receive a signed 1/1 physical giclée print, carefully inked on 16" x 16" Hahnemühle FineArt paper, and shipped anywhere in the world.
As early supporters, Buidling holders also enjoy regular art airdrops, collab and whitelist perks, and early access to upcoming collections. For instance, there is always a reserved supply of the Megastructures edition series, which sees new experimental drops every few months. Other token-gated benefits are also regularly dispensed in the Discord server.
At the time of the collection’s creation, recursion (stacking or combining multiple inscriptions) didn’t exist, bribing miners for 4-meggers (i.e. paying miners directly to include files above the 400KB limit) wasn’t an option, and inscription services offered little to no control over image compression. Despite an effort to preserve decent file sizes and resolution, the nature of early Ordinals was a constraint – especially for photographic work. Photography is about texture, detail, colour, grain. While these inscriptions were already larger than most at the time, it has always been essential to offer off-chain, high-end versions upon request.
Finally, Buidlings pair with short loop animations (minted as NFTs on Avalanche at the time), which are also sent to collectors – yet another way to display the artwork.
A Buidling is more than a static image; it’s a conceptual and aesthetic experience that goes beyond a single format or medium. Collectors can enjoy Buidlings in many different ways.
What Came After
Buidlings were among the earliest photography and digital collage artworks permanently inscribed on Bitcoin. Paired with physical prints and cross-chain animated versions, they introduced a multi-format experience, bridging analogue and digital, on-chain and off-chain to this day. In hindsight, they may have been the first “phygital” fine art collection in the Ordinals ecosystem. A part of their legacy.
More importantly, they shaped an approach that continues to guide my work, rooted in architectural aesthetics, cross-media experimentation, and maximalist visual forms. They also helped solidify my interest in post-photography (where a photograph becomes material for digital transformation, rather than the final image). Both themes – architectural art and post-photography – remain central to my artistic research.
“The aesthetics created with Buidlings are experimentation material for months and years to follow. Animation, AI, 3D modelling, video editing, collages, the possibilities are truly endless.”
That direction continued in later works like Megastructures, Brickhead, and Architexture, each exploring different ways to distort, layer, or reimagine architectural forms through both analogue and digital tools. Elements of Buidlings were also used to train AI models for Buidlers, a separate, unreleased 1/1-art-meets-PFP collection developed at a later stage.
Buidlings marked the beginning of a journey that led to exhibitions, collaborations, and connections with artists, platforms and collectors across the Ordinals space. They remain a recurring point of reference in my current practice.
Collecting Buidlings
Buidlings are available on most major Ordinals marketplaces, along with their accompanying prints, animations, and collector benefits.
Explore the collection:
Gamma.io
Magic Eden
Join the Discord server:
Costo Bravo Social Club
Discover more art:
Linktree
