Rhett Mankind

Rhett Mankind, born Rhett Dashwood, is an Australian digital artist who signs his work Mankind. He trained in electronic publishing and multimedia at Swinburne University and in film and television with a visual effects specialisation at the Victorian College of the Arts, then spent about two decades in branding, advertising and motion graphics. He worked at the Eclipse Group, which became Deloitte Digital, at AKQA and ID Force in London, and later at EmeryFrost and Tribal DDB back in Australia. Around 2020 he turned to crypto art full time, and his work has since been shown through Nifty Gateway, Foundation, SuperRare and Sotheby's. He also built a large teaching practice on YouTube, where he explains digital art, NFTs and the mechanics of the market to other artists. His art is quiet and figurative, built from photography, 3D, hand digital painting and, more recently, AI, and it keeps returning to the question of how a person finds hope inside dread. He credits a health crisis and Leo Tolstoy's A Confession as the starting point for that inquiry. In 2023 he asked ChatGPT how to build a memecoin with a budget of 69 dollars, released the result as Turbo, watched it reach a market capitalisation in the tens of millions, and put the Turbo Toad character into the public domain under CC0.

Makes still and animated digital work that blends photography, 3D rendering, hand digital painting and AI, usually built around solitary human figures, light and decay. Releases in tightly conceived named series rather than one offs, including Still Movements, Speculation, In Your Hands, Scarce Abundance, Transitions, Generations, Hopecore and Apotosis. Treats the release mechanism itself as part of the artwork, from no reserve auctions to buybacks and burns.

• Scarce Abundance, 100 unique 1 of 1 works auctioned with no reserve in 2021
• Still Movements, his 2020 Nifty Gateway debut of animated interiors
• Generations, the illustrated Book of Generations series
• Lutetia, shown in the Oddly Satisfying sale at Sotheby's in 2023
• Creating the Turbo token with ChatGPT and releasing Turbo Toad as CC0
• Teaching digital and crypto art to a large YouTube audience

On the show