Banner for Manny Palou’s Manny’s Game, 2021The same guy who ushered in the era of short-form viral video also made one of the most influential NFT collections of 2021. Dom Hofmann is not usually described as an artist, but he arguably is. Like some other artists, he creates conceptual systems that establish protocols for behavior. If art and technology have often shared a common task—to make a system’s rules visible and expressive—then Hofmann’s work provides a concise case study in how those rules have changed.Launched in 2012, Vine predicted that short-form video would become the dominant mode of online expression, even as the major platforms were still focused on photos and snippets of text. The app allowed users to upload videos that were exactly six seconds long, which other users could watch on loop before scrolling to the next one. Hofmann and his co-founders imagined people casually sharing moments of their lives, but the constraint pushed users toward formal experimentation. Gestures were choreographed to land at the loop point. Sound sequences were planned with the tightness of a composer’s score. The limit was partly technical—short clips were easier to load on early mobile networks—but it became aesthetic.If Vine was ahead of its time, Hofmann’s NFT project Loot (for Adventurers) arrived at just the right moment. Launched in August 2021, Loot consisted of 7,777 tokens listing eight pieces of fantasy gear, harkening back to the random treasure lists in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, rendered as text and stored on-chain. At a moment when critics warned that many NFTs merely pointed to external media files that might not endure, Loot offered collectors the assurance that the collectible’s content was identical with the contract itself. The bags were free to mint, and their appeal lay in the distribution of rare items (“Demonhide Boots of the Fox”) among more common ones (“Studded Gloves”). Individual items could be swapped out of their original bags, and colle