WarNymph

WarNymph
Social Media
Instagram	@warnymph

WarNymph is a digital avatar created by Grimes sometime in the Miss Anthropocene era (2018-2020). It represents the Goddess of I.D and Social Media. For her NFT drop WarNymph was reclassified as the "Goddess of Neo-Genesis."

Background

In an interview with The Face, Grimes explained:

❝ WarNymph is my digital avatar, aka my digital self. Everyone is living two lives: their digital life and their offline life. I want to untether my two lives from each other for mental-health purposes, haha. And also for fun.

When you see manipulated images on social media, it’s a middle world between real and synthetic. In games, people are living full, complex lives in preferable worlds and bodies.

The avatar allows us to play to the strengths of digital existence rather than be a human trying to navigate a world that isn’t made for us… For example, the digital body can age, die, respawn, change her face… There’s so much identity potential! My human self is much more limited. So there’s that simple, creative aspect.

I’m also pregnant. Having a digital body allows me to keep working throughout the later stages of my pregnancy, and after I have my baby, so I can spend more time with them. It’s hard for me to do photoshoots and fit into clothes at the moment, but WarNymph is here in your magazine promoting my album for me, haha. So another one of its functions is like… techno-feminism or something. A lot of my friends aren’t having babies because they’re worried about their careers, and we wanted to find a way to overcome this issue.

Another aspect of this is that we want to experiment in public and have the creative process be part of the art. Mac Boucher (who is my creative partner on this and handles the technical execution) and I have been wanting to do this for years, but we didn’t have the resources to compete with the more advanced avatars.

So eventually we decided that instead of making the perfect thing behind closed doors and debuting a finished product, you’ll see Version 1, Version 2, etc. She’ll start as a baby, age (she seems like she’s currently a teenager), die and come back better (as a new baby: Version 2). We’ll eventually figure out how to graduate to moving images and face-tracking and stuff. A big part of her story is that she’s in the lab.

We also wanted to develop a new species that would be ready for the next evolution in media. Something that can transport our identities to worlds that simply can’t exist in reality. We’re looking at the way gaming is radically changing the creative landscape and want to find a way to bridge into that world without being tethered to only one game. If our identities can be digitised, what else can be? We’re exploring a lot of the theoretical and technical ways we can evolve in this space. ❞

❝ WarNymph is the Goddess of Neo-Genesis. She battles the destructive force of obsolete ideas and systemic decay that threatens the future. She embodies the power of perpetual regeneration that manifests in a state of infinite infancy where she sheds her old skin of corruption.

The first of her kind, WarNymph is a digital entity spliced from a pixel DNA of the organic human, Grimes. Merging the raw images of a photogrammetry scan, enunciating her iconic tattoos, with a retopologized mesh that was sculpted, modelled, and morphed into a variety of forms before being permanently sealed into the body of a baby angel, a cherub. She exists in the liminal state of the virtual world, a Grimes narrative universe, within an alternate history of mythology and the infinite fragments of the future. She is a pioneer in the rapidly expanding metaverse. ❞

Two years later in an interview for Vanity Fair, Grimes said this when looking back at the project:

❝ (..) So, this is another failed project, but one that we tried really hard at. But I think it's cool because this was, like, before everyone was, like, into avatars and stuff. Me, my brother, and my manager and stuff were, like, and our friend Ryder Ripps made this, the WarNymph, who's our avatar.

I mean, the main thing that's cool about this is, like, we did it, I think we did it kind of early. I don't think we did a great job, like, we couldn't even render hair, so we just had to make her bald because we, like, couldn't get good hair, although it's kind of a look.

I mean, I do like the idea of digital pop stars. I'd like to control some digital pop stars eventually, and I have some better plans to make better digital pop stars than this. (..) ❞

NFT Drop

An NFT, or 'Non-Fungible Token', is a type of digital asset that represents ownership or proof of authenticity of a unique item, typically in the form of a digital image, artwork, video, or other virtual media. Unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which are 'fungible' and can be exchanged on a one-to-one basis, NFTs are 'non-fungible,' meaning each one is distinct and cannot be replaced by another identical item.

Grimes put up an NFT auction of images and videos of WarNymph on February 28th, 2021, on a platform called Nifty Gateway. After a day, sales reached 5.8 million USD, with part of that sum going to Carbon180 and their mission of removing excess carbon from the atmosphere.

Grimes gave look-back thoughts about this event in a 2022 Vanity Fair cover interview:

❝ Okay, this is from my NFT drop, which was one of the first NFT drops. Very sick NFT drop, life-changing experience for me. I know people have differing thoughts about NFTs, but, well, I think there are a lot of issues with NFTs at the moment, including power usage and stuff. I actually do think it's a great vehicle for art and artists, like, I think all art should be free to everybody, like, I sort of believe the patronage model is, like, a better system.

But yeah, I did this with my brother Mac, and my brother... like, my brother just kept saying, he's like: "We've gotta do... We've gotta get into NFTs." Like, we, no one had really, like, done anything really with them yet, and I was like: "Man, like, I don't know what this is. This seems crazy, but, like, sure, let's do, like, an NFT drop."

Yes, I have to shoutout my brother because he, like, just pushed this so hard, and everyone was like: "Ah, really? This... do we have time for this?", and it ended up being, like, a massively huge success. I'm a very pro-NFT person. I'm a very pro-blockchain person. ❞

Gallery

WarNymph Collection Vol 1.

Newborn 1

Newborn 2

Newborn 3

Newborn 4

Gods in Hi-Res

Rokoko Monolith

Battle of the WarNymphs

WarNymph Prototypes

Couture raving.exe

Pigly Thee Familiar

War Machine

AI Meditations lead by the WarNymph

Short video Preview AI meditations lead by the WarNymph

War Nymph Radio

Teenage WarNymph

War Nymph became a teenager and developed her first hobby. That is, she requested Overwatch to be part of the Winter Olympics. good luck little one!^{[citation needed]}

An early unreleased version of me.. things have improved since they gave me eyes

Elf-tech 🧝🏻‍♀️🪐💊

My only friend @rubyrubygloom styled, interpreted and rendered me for the cover of @buffalozine ! I love this! Interview with @hansulrichobrist

@thefacemagazine @dylan.kowalski.artwork 🦔

Grimes' Instagram

Appearance in music videos

• Darkseid
• Welcome To The Opera

Video	Credits
	Title	Darkseid (Lyric Video)
	Premiere	22 May 2020
	Length	3:41
	Featuring	WarNymph
	Director	Grimes
	Notes	Video created by Fid Jey.

Video	Credits
	Title	Welcome To The Opera (Visualiser)
	Premiere	08 Jun 2023
	Length	4:05
	SFX	Alessio De Vecchi
	Notes	Baby WarNymph is allegedly in the womb

Trivia

• WarNymph is the child of Tomorrow, a member from the girl group NPC.