Did you know that David Lynch created NFTs with rock band Interpol?

David Lynch, the American filmmaker beloved for his dark, surreal and decidedly original oeuvre, died this week at the age of 78. An avid experimenter and experimentalLynch was always open to the new, even when it came to blockchain technology.

In 2021, then NFTs were new and strange to most people, Lynch collaborated with the indie rock band Interpol to create a series of eight audiovisual collectibles on the Ethereum blockchain.

Ten years earlier, in 2011, Lynch had – at the request of Interpol – created a series of images for the band’s performance at Coachella. Those images became the five-minute animated short film “I touch a man with a red button”, which accompanied Interpol’s then new song, ‘Lights’.

For the NFT series, that collaboration was revisited to create several immersive, psychedelic-feeling clips of “Red Button Man,” set in rusty television monitors – and uploaded to the Ethereum blockchain in perpetuity.

“Frankly, Interpol loves David Lynch, and we are overjoyed that we were ever able to link our names to his in an artistic forum,” the band’s frontman Paul Banks said in a statement at the time. “We humbly believe that digital artifacts are worth preserving in the infinite digital world.”

When the collection went live at the end of October 2021, it immediately struck a chord with collectors. One of the NFTs, featuring the video’s title sequence, sold within hours 20.7 ETH– an amount worth more than $82,000 at the time.

Lynch was not a specific evangelist of crypto or digital art. He never worked with blockchain technology again. But he was notoriously elusive, and of the many qualities that defined his unique life and career, one was a constant willingness to explore and embrace the strange and new.

Edited by Andrew Hayward