Coping Mechanisms: XCOPY Between Fresh Hell and Old Ghost
August 25, 2025
XCOPY has never been an artist to follow cycles, he burns them down. Where much of crypto art has slowed under the weight of market fatigue, the London-based glitch oracle continues to release work that feels less like “drops” and more like transmissions: coded warnings, sardonic mirrors, and flashes of digital poetry. His recent sequence Empire Things, ICXN, Damage Control, and Cope Salada charts not just an artist producing, but an artist evolving, bending new structures to his will while reaching back to the ghosts of his past.
To see his recent evolution in motion, we dive first into Empire Things, a fragment of Fresh Hell.
Empire Things: a fragment of Fresh Hell
With Empire Things, part of the ongoing Fresh Hell series, XCOPY distills a single image into an indictment of systemic rot. The work doesn’t need a manifesto, its title says enough. The glitch, the blur, the deliberate collapse of form become shorthand for institutions that stand tall but are already hollowing from the inside. As with much of Fresh Hell, the piece resonates less as a collectible object and more as a shard of a larger cultural weather report.
ICXN: when code carries the glitch
ICXN marked a shift: XCOPY stepping into generative terrain. Built in collaboration with engineers, it translated his visual language, the stuttered loops, the anxious rhythm of pixels into an algorithm that could spawn hundreds of unique variations. Instead of diluting his vision, the generative process amplified it: each new mint revealed another angle of the same paranoia, another twitch of the machine. Collectors spoke less about “owning a token” and more about watching a living system unfold, glitching endlessly on-chain.
Damage Control: the anthology of exhaustion
Where ICXN was procedural, Damage Control was direct. Ten works, each sharp-tongued and wry, together felt like a late-night notebook of the space itself: the bots, the churn, the endless cycle of speculation and collapse. Titles like Heavy and Bot_Rot read as both punchlines and diagnoses. For many collectors, these works offered a mirror, darkly funny, brutally honest about what it means to still be here, watching a once-frenzied market now sag under its own weight.
Cope Salada: When Coping Becomes Culture
If Damage Control is a diary, Cope Salada is a collective joke. Released as 250 unique 1/1s on Shape L2, the series arrived already “doused in depresso,” each variation both comical and bleak. The originals remain canon, but the culture around them is unbound. In this way, Cope Salada isn’t just about coping it’s about sharing the act of coping, together, in the language of memes, edits, and derivatives.
Death Wannabe: ghosts from the RARE era
The reemergence of Death Wannabe, an early XCOPY edition stranded in the obsolete RARE Art Labs contract, underlines just how long his shadow stretches. Few pieces embody the archaeology of NFTs as strongly as these relics. When one surfaces, it reminds the community that XCOPY’s language of death, distortion, and digital fragility has been with crypto art from the very start. His monsters and glitches aren’t just contemporary, they are historical markers, artifacts of an internet that was already falling apart years ago.
Why XCOPY still matters
XCOPY endures not because he “innovates” in the product sense, but because each new work reasserts a posture toward the world: ironic, unsparing, deeply aware of its own absurdity. His pieces don’t chase trends; they expose them. In a cultural field where speculation often drowns meaning, XCOPY remains one of the few artists whose output is as much commentary as creation, art that laughs at the empire while glitching in its ruins.
