Brooklyn Artist Embeds 500 Years of Colonial History into World Cup NFT Project

As the 2026 FIFA World Cup reaches its conclusion, thr33som3s delivers the most ambitious project of the artist's career

BROOKLYN, NY - For 35 days and across 102 matches, Brooklyn-based artist thr33som3s has been running a parallel tournament alongside the 2026 FIFA World Cup, one that tracks not just goals and on-field results, but five centuries of war, colonization, occupation, and invasion between competing nations.

The project, titled thr33som3s W3rld Cup 2026, centers around 48 original paintings, one for every participating country, each embedded with on-chain metadata documenting the historical conflict relationships between that nation and every other team in the tournament. The data, drawn from recorded history, maps aggressors and victims across every pairing. England emerges as the aggressor in 30 of 48 possible matchups. France in 28. Germany in 24.

As the tournament plays out, each match receives a conflict headline written by the artist, short, factual dispatches that reframe the sporting event as a continuation of history. The on-chain conflict matrix feeds into the dynamic tracking on thr33som3s' website and makes visible what the slick corporate broadcast refuses to: these national teams carry with them all of their historical behaviors against the field.

The project also directly confronts the economics of the modern era of sport as entertainment. Record setting ticket prices to attend premier World Cup matches are, in thr33som3s' framing, not incidental. They are the same mechanism of exclusion that has defined power relationships between nations for centuries. So he tasks his collector community to actively engage with this by creating a tiered admission system, where participation costs mirror the real-world pricing structures being critiqued.

Over the course of the tournament, collectors have burned editions of thr33som3s paintings to host matches, purchase admission, and predict winners of all the matches, even to serve as play-by-play announcers. These outcomes are followed in real time on a public tracker at thr33som3s.com/2026-w3rld-cup. The collectors' participation data with the more than 23,000 editions of the 300 total new works created for the project is recorded on-chain and reflected in each painting's unique metadata when the tournament concludes.

Contact: 3s@thr33som3s.com

QUICK FACTS
Project: thr33som3s W3rld Cup 2026
Artist: thr33som3s
Works: 48 original paintings, one per participating nation
On-chain: conflict matrix metadata embedded in each NFT

Duration: 39 days, 104 matches, June 11 - July 19, 2026
SUGGESTED STORY ANGLES
The conflict matrix - a data artist maps 500 years of colonial history onto the world's most watched sporting event
The ticketing critique - how a Brooklyn NFT artist is using tiered admission mechanics to expose the class warfare baked into World Cup attendance
Live conceptual art - a project that only exists fully when the collectors choose how the work is used, updating in real time with every match and every collector decision
The on-chain record - when the tournament ends, the conflict data remains permanently embedded in the paintings, a historical document that can never be altered

68 Jay St #206
Brooklyn, NY 11201

thr33som3s is a conceptual generative art project by a pseudonymous, Brooklyn-based artist that blends physical gouache paintings of outlandish, fictional baseball teams with interactive blockchain mechanics. The artist is highly regarded in the Tezos ecosystem for pushing the boundaries of NFT utility. Core aspects of the project include:Vintage Card Defacement: Reimagining antique baseball cards by painting satirical, absurd characters-such as ex-boyfriends, cardinals, and pregnant men. Generative Art : Algorithmically generated NFTs that dictate physical changes made by the artist's hand, allowing the art to continuously evolve and "dialogue" with the blockchain. The Grotto: A dedicated community that functions as characters, franchise owners, and juries in an ongoing fictional storyline. Dynamic Burn Mechanics: Using smart contracts and burning (destroying) mechanisms that allow collectors to physically and conceptually impact the lifespan of their artworks.

This release was published on openPR.