Ernesto Cisneros Cino
Musician · Digital Artist · Writer
Ernesto Cisneros Cino
NFT
A New Chapter in My Creative Life
1. Context: Entering Web3 During Global Collapse
In 2020, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was unemployed, isolated at home, and facing the psychological pressure that many artists felt during that period.
Through a small network of Cuban creators, I learned that a new global art movement was emerging online, one where blockchain technology became a tool for preserving digital artworks and connecting communities across borders.
This discovery shifted my perspective from survival to innovation.
2. The Conceptual Foundation: Blockchain as Infrastructure for Art
Although I had followed cryptocurrencies for years, NFTs presented a different paradigm:
the use of decentralized ledgers to establish provenance, uniqueness, and value for digital art.
Key realizations during this phase:
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Blockchain allows artists to retain ownership of their work.
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Smart contracts enable sovereign distribution independent of platforms.
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Global collectors can support creators without intermediaries.
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Communities form organically across languages, cultures, and time zones.
This wasn’t financial speculation, it was a new cultural infrastructure.
3. The Clubhouse Era: Knowledge Transfer at Scale
In 2020–2021, Clubhouse functioned as the core intellectual hub of the NFT ecosystem.
It enabled:
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real-time exchange of creative methodologies,
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open discussions on smart contracts and marketplaces,
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cross-disciplinary learning between musicians, coders, visual artists, and collectors,
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communal problem-solving during market outages and platform transitions.
The humility and generosity within those rooms established the cultural ethos that defined the early NFT movement.
4. Early Minting: The Tezos and Ethereum Ecosystems
My first NFTs were minted on Kalamint, an early Tezos marketplace that no longer exists.
These original works survived the platform’s disappearance and now live on:
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successors to the historic Hic et Nunc protocol
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artist-controlled smart contracts in Tezos FA2 standard
Later, I expanded into:
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OpenSea (Ethereum)
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Foundation (during its invitation-only period)
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community-curated drops and independent smart contract deployments
Each ecosystem required learning new standards, metadata formats, fee structures, and collector behaviors.
5. Community Dynamics: Latin American Cohesion in a Global Space
Although English dominated the NFT landscape, a significant number of creators were Latin American.
This common ground produced:
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multilingual collaboration,
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culturally specific discussions about scarcity, identity, and censorship,
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strong long-term support networks that extended into real life,
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a sense of shared resilience rooted in our own histories with economic instability and migration.
These bonds became fundamental to my long-term engagement in Web3.
6. Technological Integration: AI, Markets, and Smart Contracts
Parallel to blockchain, the rise of AI image models and large language systems became part of our daily tools.
Inside the community, we tracked:
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new generative models,
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metadata standards,
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IPFS vs. on-chain storage,
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contract templates,
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oracle dependencies,
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Ethereum gas cycles,
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Tezos governance upgrades,
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the social dynamics of Twitter → X migration.
Market exposure also brought direct conversation with global traders, leading to a deeper understanding of:
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liquidity cycles,
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collector psychology,
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narrative-driven valuation,
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long-term provenance strategies.
Learning smart contracts became essential, not only to mint, but to survive platform volatility.
I adopted practices such as:
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deploying independent contracts,
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separating metadata hosting layers,
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maintaining fallback archives,
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avoiding single-point-of-failure marketplaces.
7. Artistic Integration: A New Home for Multidisciplinary Work
After decades in music, the NFT ecosystem allowed me to merge:
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sound
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digital art
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video
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literature
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memory
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code
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community
For the first time, all disciplines converged naturally.
Web3 became a laboratory, not just a marketplace.
It offered autonomy, collaboration, and a sense of purpose during one of the most difficult years for artists worldwide.
8. Today: A Continuously Evolving Ecosystem
Today my NFT work exists across multiple chains and formats, always grounded in:
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technological sovereignty
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conceptual clarity
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multidisciplinary creation
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cross-community connection
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long-term preservation of digital work
The blockchain remains one of the most meaningful creative spaces I have entered,
a place where art, technology, and society meet with unprecedented possibility.
The bride of the Moon
Foundation - 2021 | 0.888 ETH | Collaboration with SPHYNX | Collected by @mentalis420
“The Bride of the Moon” marks my genesis on Foundation, a deeply personal piece created in collaboration with my friend and fellow Cuban artist SPHYNX.
Conceived as a dialogue between music and image, the work features a fish tracing a perfect circle, alternating black and white in precise synchrony with the music I composed. This circular motion evokes the cycles of life, return, renewal, repetition, and awakening.
It was born as a gift of art, soul, and friendship, and it reflects the collaborative spirit that defined my early steps in the NFT ecosystem.
The piece was immediately acquired by the renowned collector @mentalis420, becoming a meaningful milestone in my journey on Ethereum.
The Veil
Foundation - 2021 | 1.5 ETH | Collaboration with Juan José López (@ojovivomotions) | Collected by Blocksandart
“The Veil” is part of my first collaborative collection on Foundation, created in partnership with the extraordinary Argentine visual and motion artist Juan José López, known in the digital art world as @ojovivomotions. His striking visual language and my musical composition converge here to examine the ancient and recurring symbolism of the veiled female face.
For millennia, women have been veiled, sometimes celebrated, sometimes erased. Whether out of fear, reverence, envy, or control, the veil has appeared across cultures and eras: in weddings, temples, funerals. Always present, always ambiguous. Decoration and punishment. Ornament and silence.
In this work, the veil becomes metaphor:
a marble tombstone that lasts for generations,
a prison of ice and salt,
a fabric concealing the locked soul of courageous women.
Through movement, texture, and sound, the piece reflects on these layered meanings, confronting the viewer with what the veil reveals and what it forcibly hides.
Collected by Blocksandart for 1.5 ETH, The Veil stands as one of the defining milestones of my early Ethereum journey and a powerful example of the creative synergy that arises when artists from different backgrounds merge their visions on the blockchain.
Seguir Viva
Tezos - 2021 | Collaboration with Kevin Beovides Casas & Greisi González | Music & Editing by Ernesto Cisneros
Available on objkt: token #770121
“Seguir Viva” is a three-way artistic collaboration born in one of the most intense creative periods of the Cuban digital art community. The piece brings together the poetry of Greisi González, the visual experimentation of Kevin Beovides Casas, and my own work in music composition and manual frame-by-frame video editing.
The Poem
At the heart of the piece lies “Seguir Viva,” a raw and luminous poem written by the Cuban poet Greisi González. Her text speaks from a place of exhaustion, rebellion, tenderness, and survival, the voice of someone who insists on existing despite the weight of her island’s ruptures. Rage, memory, childhood, and resistance flow through her verses like a declaration of identity in a world that attempts to erase it.
The Visuals
Artist Kevin Beovides Casas created a series of digitally manipulated portraits using ASCII Art, a technique that transforms images into patterns of text. Each frame contains fragments of Greisi’s poem encoded into the image itself, turning language into structure, poetry as visual architecture.
I later took each ASCII-generated frame and re-edited it manually, constructing a fully handcrafted sequence. Every transition, every light pulse, every distortion was sculpted by hand to preserve the expressive fragility of the original images while giving the piece cinematic rhythm.
The Music
The soundtrack was composed specifically for this work, a musical environment built to follow the pulse of Greisi’s poem. It moves between tension and release, echoing the emotional cadence of her words and the visual fragmentation of the ASCII textures. The result is a hybrid form of digital poetry, video art, and sound design.
A Work About Survival
“Seguir Viva” is not only a collaborative NFT, it is a testimony.
A testimony to the Cuban artistic diaspora during the pandemic,
to the power of digital communities,
and to the stubborn determination of an artist who writes, creates, and breathes to remain alive.
Token Details
Blockchain: Tezos
Link: https://objkt.com/tokens/hicetnunc/770121
Discordant
Tezos - 2021 | 1/1 | First NFT minted by Ernesto Cisneros Cino
Original link: https://objkt.com/tokens/kalamint/8057
“Discordant” marks the beginning of my journey into the NFT space.
Minted on May 10, 2021, it was the first work I ever placed on-chain, a piece created in a moment of intense vulnerability and artistic tension.
Origin of the Artwork
The drawing was born minutes before an important concert.
I was overwhelmed with nerves, unable to settle my mind. Instead of fighting the anxiety, I let it flow through the lines: chaotic, tangled, spiraling. Every stroke became a way to release tension, a visual echo of the inner noise before stepping onto the stage.
From Chaos to Clarity
When the lights finally came on, everything shifted.
The chaos clarified.
Sound transformed into images, and images returned to sound, that mysterious alchemy that only music can achieve.
The artwork captures precisely that transition:
from inner discord to illuminated calm,
from fear to flow,
from trembling hands to music taking over.
“Discordant” is more than a drawing.
It is the emotional snapshot of a performer right before the ritual of creation begins.
N50 (The Betrayal of the Cycle)
Tezos - 2021 | 10 editions
Link: https://objkt.com/tokens/hicetnunc/132544
“N50 (The Betrayal of the Cycle)” is a digital artwork built entirely from a single mathematical pattern, an architectural sequence that repeats, reflects, and folds onto itself following the logic of geometric order. Every structure in the piece originates from that one source, meticulously replicated until it forms a seemingly infinite lattice.
Yet at the center, something breaks.
Two circles, the only elements not derived from the core pattern, introduce a deliberate asymmetry, a betrayal of the perfect cycle.
Concept
The work explores the tension between determinism and disruption, between the flawless precision of mathematical systems and the inevitable human impulse that shatters symmetry: emotion, intuition, choice.
The circles act as an anomaly,
a conscious decision to interrupt the sequence,
an organic mark inside a systematic universe.
Visual Reading
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The squared repetitions evoke algorithms, fractals, and digital resonances.
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The transitions between white, red, and black suggest a cycle in constant mutation, expanding, contracting, and ultimately altered.
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At the core, the “betrayal” becomes a reminder that no pattern remains unbroken forever.
N50 is a visual meditation on the inevitable:
every cycle, sooner or later, meets its exception.
Mother
Collaboration with Juan José López (Ojovivo)
Sold for 1.17 ETH to collector Liv - wallet: 0x691dd17A899FC88281e4DAfB4b8246706a92ce72
Foundation link: https://foundation.app/mint/eth/0x3BF563213bF5F38b7d13B0F1CE4a3875c882C74a/2
“Mother” is a cry, one that emerges from the deepest layers of the Earth.
It is a protest, a warning, and a wound.
The music carries a deliberately unsettling tension, mirroring the emotional gravity of the image created by Argentinian artist Juan José López (Ojovivo). The visual element is raw and explosive, as if the planet itself were exhaling a final, painful breath.
Concept
“Mother” speaks from the voice of Mother Earth, lamenting the irreversible damage inflicted upon her. It is a reflection on the signs we have been receiving for decades, signals of collapse, ecological grief, and the end of the world as we know it.
We have all seen the warnings.
We acknowledge them.
And yet… we do nothing.
Artistic Dialogue
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Sound: expresses distress, urgency, and the fragility of life.
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Image: erupts as a violent bloom, beauty and destruction intertwined.
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Together, they form a eulogy and a call for awareness.
This piece stands as an artistic outcry:
a reminder that the Earth is speaking,
and its voice is growing weaker.
The Sound of Our Souls
Collaboration with Estrujamentes & Mi Retratito
666 editions
NFT link: https://objkt.com/tokens/KT1JJzM2coLPLCUW54Gsv4s3peoTYBDbXxK4/0
The Sound of Our Souls is an intimate, emotional, and profoundly meaningful collaboration among three seasoned crypto artists, each contributing a distinct creative voice to a single, unified work.
What began as an invitation from Estrujamentes, who proposed the concept and crafted a powerful visual universe through her digital collage, evolved into a deeply moving musical journey. From this spark emerged the emotional piano composition by Mi Retratito, whose music carries the arrangement and the masterful interpretation of Ernesto Cisneros.
The resulting piece is dramatic and immersive, capturing not only the essence of the three souls involved but also the profound connection that binds them. Supported by video art that moves between fantasy and introspection, this work becomes a complete expression of creative synergy, art as communion, emotion, and shared resonance.
Artists
Estrujamentes - Visual Art & Concept
Digital artist, illustrator, psychologist, and writer, María Páramo (Estrujamentes) creates poetic devices of mental transgression through her visual language. Her work explores alternative systems of thought, aiming to provoke meaning beyond rational explanation.
Through digital collage and reflective writing, she builds metaphysical, cryptic, and cosmic landscapes, images and texts woven together as a single act of resistance to an overly rational world.
Mi Retratito - Music Composition & Video Edition
Actress and contemporary dancer with 25 years of experience across the performing arts, Mi Retratito has worked as an educator, producer, director, and executive producer for major Latin American artists and cultural events.
Her artistic practice spans analog and digital photography, with a deep love for capturing the fleeting gestures of the stage. Writer of poetry and prose in both English and Spanish since age 13, she carries music as a lifelong companion, and in the NFT space, she has begun exploring this side of herself with renewed passion.
Seafarers
Collaboration with Kevin Oramas
Sold for 0.90 ETH to collector Lluvias Imposibles - wallet: 0x26c83771508DfB1B451Ed866d0F2044357B75944
Foundation link: https://foundation.app/mint/eth/0xF704aF8F95F15822B723d21feaB118D9f59192F2/2
Heart Strings
Collaboration with Mariana Blatnik from Brazil
Sold for 0.40 ETH - wallet:0x537e15123949F195dA16336517ab2a35A0C0CB93
Foundation link: https://foundation.app/mint/eth/0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405/64925
