The Art of Technology, The Technology of Art

0:00:03 Artists have been dealing with technological changes
0:00:05 and expressing the visceral feelings
0:00:08 of inhabiting new technological moments
0:00:10 for a very long time.
0:00:12 As a person who is looking at the history of artists
0:00:15 designing for particular mediums,
0:00:17 you could do stuff with mobile and social
0:00:19 that you couldn’t do before.
0:00:22 I think the notion that Pop Art proposed
0:00:24 that your role as an artist is to describe
0:00:26 how it feels to occupy that contemporary world.
0:00:27 And you’re not an ethical agent.
0:00:29 It’s just like, I go into the street
0:00:30 and I see a giant billboard
0:00:31 and it does something to my heart
0:00:33 and that is culture.
0:00:36 When they looked at NFTs for the first time,
0:00:39 I think a lot of them saw outsider art.
0:00:41 One of the interesting things about blockchain as a medium
0:00:43 I think is that the cultural asset
0:00:45 and the financial container is the same thing.
0:00:49 Throughout history, art has helped us make sense
0:00:53 of the most exciting and mystifying technology of the day.
0:00:54 And simultaneously,
0:00:56 technology has constantly rewritten
0:00:58 how we express our creativity.
0:01:00 Leonardo da Vinci, for example,
0:01:03 was influenced by his new understanding of anatomy.
0:01:05 Meanwhile, the industrial era
0:01:08 was welcomed by images of foreign machines
0:01:10 that would forever change society.
0:01:13 And cameras, then browsers, then phones
0:01:16 gave artists new canvases to create with.
0:01:21 Over and over, art and technology have evolved hand in hand.
0:01:23 And of course, today is no different.
0:01:26 In fact, artists are not just creating work
0:01:29 about the blockchain, but also on the blockchain
0:01:33 with Web3 changing the way artists can monetize their work.
0:01:35 This episode, originally published on our sister podcast,
0:01:38 Web3 with A16Z, features Simon Denny,
0:01:41 a global artist inspired by entrepreneurial culture
0:01:43 whose cutting edge work exists where,
0:01:46 once again, art and technology collide.
0:01:49 Simon’s is done with longtime A16Z podcast toes,
0:01:50 sonotoxy.
0:01:52 So if you like this episode,
0:01:56 be sure to check out more episodes of Web3 with A16Z.
0:01:58 In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this episode
0:02:02 that itself is at the intersection of art and technology.
0:02:09 (upbeat music)
0:02:12 – Welcome to Web3 with A6 and Z,
0:02:14 a show about building the next air of the internet
0:02:17 from the team at A6 and Z Crypto.
0:02:20 We’re excited to be back with all new episodes.
0:02:22 I’m Sonal, editor-in-chief at A6 and Z Crypto,
0:02:25 and today’s episode is all about how technology
0:02:29 has changed art and how artists change with technology
0:02:31 from the emergence of the browser, the iPhone,
0:02:36 and social media to generative art and blockchains to NFTs.
0:02:38 We also discuss debates that seem to come up
0:02:40 in every art and tech shift,
0:02:43 including between inventing versus remixing,
0:02:45 between commercialism and art,
0:02:48 between mainstream canon and outsider art,
0:02:50 whether we’re living in an artistic monoculture now
0:02:52 and much, much more.
0:02:54 Our special guest is Simon Denny,
0:02:56 and we recorded this live in London
0:02:58 a few days after we opened our London office,
0:03:00 which is fitting since Denny is a global artist
0:03:03 based in Berlin, but has shown his work
0:03:06 in various countries, Biennales, museums, and galleries,
0:03:09 including a metaverse landscape solo show
0:03:12 called Read Right Own at Altman Siegel Gallery
0:03:14 in San Francisco last year.
0:03:16 As a reminder, none of the following
0:03:19 is investment, business, legal, or tax advice.
0:03:22 Please see asyncansy.com/disclosures
0:03:23 for more important information,
0:03:26 including a link to a list of our investments.
0:03:28 The first half of our hallway style conversation
0:03:31 tours through the evolution of art with technology,
0:03:34 and the second half goes deeper into blockchains and art.
0:03:37 But we began briefly with Denny’s tech journey
0:03:40 and how he thinks of entrepreneurship as an aesthetic.
0:03:43 Obviously this is a crypto show,
0:03:45 and it’s also a technology show.
0:03:47 Crypto is all about technology.
0:03:48 One of the reasons I’m in this world
0:03:50 is it’s a very multidisciplinary field.
0:03:52 It brings together economics,
0:03:54 it brings together philosophy,
0:03:55 it brings the other networking,
0:03:57 it brings together security, cryptography,
0:03:59 like there’s so many layers to crypto.
0:04:02 And I definitely want to focus in on the art aspect.
0:04:04 Tell me a little bit more about your actual practice today too,
0:04:06 and then we’ll go back to the evolution.
0:04:09 At the moment today, I work across lots of different media
0:04:10 in lots of different contexts.
0:04:13 So I make both installations for museums and art galleries.
0:04:18 I paint as well, but I also am very involved in crypto and crypto art.
0:04:20 So I design NFT projects.
0:04:22 But I guess maybe where I really specialize
0:04:25 is I make things that join the museum world with the crypto world.
0:04:27 So I’m interested in the history of art
0:04:30 and artists who make for new technologies as they emerge
0:04:32 to kind of explore what’s possible on them
0:04:33 that wasn’t possible on other platforms.
0:04:34 Exactly.
0:04:37 But I personally got really interested in people,
0:04:38 the people who were making the platforms,
0:04:40 the people who were designing the systems.
0:04:42 Because these were new systems, we were experiencing them,
0:04:44 we were feeling different ways, doing different things on them.
0:04:47 One of the first times I encountered entrepreneurial culture,
0:04:50 for example, that just inspired me unendingly, right?
0:04:52 Because it was so different than the attitude of my artist peers
0:04:53 that I encountered.
0:04:54 They were excited.
0:04:56 They were bullish about the future.
0:04:58 You know, in my world at the time,
0:04:59 I think it’s actually different now,
0:05:00 but at the time in my art world,
0:05:04 it was very common to be incredibly critical in cynicism.
0:05:05 Cynicism was the go-to.
0:05:06 And I get that culture.
0:05:07 I kind of love that culture.
0:05:10 It’s sort of like indie rock or something like that, you know?
0:05:12 But then I encountered all these incredible optimists.
0:05:14 And I was like, “Wow, this is a force that I can’t understand.”
0:05:15 -Culturally, you know? -Oh, that’s fascinating.
0:05:18 I never thought about that you’re coming from a cynical,
0:05:20 kind of default cynical art world,
0:05:23 and then being like totally inspired by the optimism.
0:05:25 Because I feel like those of us in Silicon Valley take that for granted.
0:05:28 Yeah, I guess I’m really attracted to value systems,
0:05:29 aesthetically, because I’m an artist,
0:05:31 and I think visually and culturally,
0:05:33 that I don’t know everything about,
0:05:34 and I don’t completely understand, you know?
0:05:36 So I started to go to technology conferences.
0:05:39 And the first thing that I did is I went to a prominent conference
0:05:41 in Munich called DLD.
0:05:44 And I made an artwork about DLD in 2013,
0:05:46 a one-year history of the conference a year later.
0:05:50 I made a maze that people would walk through in this museum space,
0:05:51 just down the road from the conference,
0:05:55 where there was a graphic panel for every talk panel, basically.
0:05:56 -Interesting. -So you would look at pool courts
0:05:58 that I’d pulled out from the entire conference
0:06:00 and encounter things that Jack Dorsey was saying,
0:06:02 the things that the founder of Wikipedia was saying,
0:06:03 Pavel Durov was saying,
0:06:06 like interesting entrepreneurs that they were able to gather there,
0:06:08 and the things they were saying about the world.
0:06:10 -And it was kind of overwhelming. -Sounds really immersive too.
0:06:12 It was super immersive, but very digital.
0:06:14 I also leaned into the design interfaces that were contemporary at the time,
0:06:17 which look really ancient now, which is really interesting too,
0:06:19 because it was like iOS when it was skeuomorphism.
0:06:22 So it was like all of these bookshelves as stages,
0:06:23 as whatever, digital buttons.
0:06:25 And that was the kind of graphic language I used.
0:06:28 It was like cartoon font that looks very strange.
0:06:30 But it gave this overall sense of this really vibrant community,
0:06:32 which I hadn’t really encountered before as an artist.
0:06:35 Again, the art world’s a little different in terms of culture.
0:06:36 And that was one of the first times that I was like,
0:06:37 “Wow, this is incredible.
0:06:40 There are people here who are really optimistic,
0:06:42 super excited about the future.
0:06:43 Yes, they’re critical thinkers as well,
0:06:45 but they really want to build something.”
0:06:47 And that was the first time I encountered that culture.
0:06:51 Tell me a little bit about how you actually came as an artist to the technology world.
0:06:53 So, yeah, I grew up in New Zealand.
0:06:56 I went to university at the University of Auckland to first study art.
0:07:00 Like, that was the thing that I fell in love with as a painter when I was younger.
0:07:03 New Zealand’s amazing, but it’s also very small and quite remote.
0:07:06 And I learned about how big the kind of contemporary art world was,
0:07:08 which made me want to go study in Germany.
0:07:11 Germany is a really special country for contemporary art.
0:07:16 Every little town has a major contemporary art museum, which is really unusual.
0:07:17 In the post-war period,
0:07:20 it’s been a really important place for lots of different artists internationally
0:07:22 to kind of do museum shows early.
0:07:23 There’s also an incredible education system there.
0:07:26 So, I went to art school then in Frankfurt
0:07:30 at this very special school called the Städelschule in the mid-2000s.
0:07:35 And at that time, the director of the school was also the director of the Venice Biennale.
0:07:38 And all the teachers that I was learning from there were these international artists
0:07:40 that I saw in the cover of all the magazines that I was reading.
0:07:44 So, it was a really exciting hub of international practice.
0:07:47 And there I got super interested in the history of technology and art
0:07:51 because I moved there in 2007, the year the iPhone came out.
0:07:53 And, like, I moved with a laptop.
0:07:56 Didn’t have an iPhone because it was a brand new, very expensive thing.
0:08:00 But we were all just starting to use social media, like Web2, in a really interesting way.
0:08:03 And of course, because I moved away from all my friends and family,
0:08:05 that was one of the things that really kept me connected.
0:08:08 Laptop I used for education, watching movies,
0:08:11 but also keeping in touch with friends in a really intense way.
0:08:13 And so, a bunch of artists that were studying at that time
0:08:17 got really interested in this new wave of, like, technological stuff
0:08:19 that was enabling a different type of engagement.
0:08:21 And Berlin’s a, for those who don’t know Germany,
0:08:24 it’s like Berlin’s, I guess, a place where a lot of contemporary artists live and work.
0:08:26 And there were, like, this little hub of people
0:08:28 that were really interested in the history of contemporary art,
0:08:33 the history of art made for digital platforms, like WebArt from the 1990s,
0:08:35 which is a very interesting specialist field.
0:08:39 So, when browsers came about, when the World Wide Web started,
0:08:42 when people started using Mosaic and Netscape,
0:08:44 there were artists designing for that as a specific medium.
0:08:48 Yes, I want to go back to how, when you were in art school,
0:08:50 you and your cohort came across the iPhone for the first time.
0:08:51 Oh my God.
0:08:54 And you don’t necessarily immediately think it viscerally about the iPhone
0:08:59 as, like, a creative medium, the way one thinks about caves for cave painting,
0:09:02 or paper for drawing, or canvas for painting,
0:09:07 or LED lights for certain kind of electronic art installations at mass scale,
0:09:09 or whatever, neon.
0:09:13 It’s funny that you mentioned that, because it’s like just sort of like this little tiny,
0:09:14 like, it’s a device, it’s a computing device.
0:09:18 So, can you tell me a little bit about how you and your cohort at the time sort of experienced
0:09:21 the advent of the iPhone as, like, the moment that tipped into your interest
0:09:23 and the intersection of technology and art?
0:09:26 I mean, I think it was a conflation of a few different things
0:09:28 that I was really compelled by when the iPhone came out.
0:09:31 One was the really strong marketing component to that.
0:09:32 I think I was particularly impressed by that.
0:09:34 Like, the Steve Jobs moment was very compelling, right?
0:09:35 The narrative part of it.
0:09:36 The narrative part of that.
0:09:39 You know, like, the way that Steve and other entrepreneurs around him at the time
0:09:42 seemed to be offering a really cohesive vision of the world,
0:09:43 but also the aesthetics.
0:09:45 There was a kind of design hegemony that got installed,
0:09:51 but also as a person who was looking at the history of artists designing for particular mediums,
0:09:55 you could do stuff with mobile and social that you couldn’t do before, right?
0:09:57 Artists had been making amazing artworks for browsers.
0:09:59 There’s an incredible history of that.
0:10:02 They’d even been making artworks that dealt with the culture of companies.
0:10:06 There was an amazing browser-based group in the ’90s who were called E-Toy.
0:10:09 And E-Toy was a real company.
0:10:11 – Right, I remember that, actually. – And E-Toy started before E-Toy’s.
0:10:13 But they tended to be quite antagonistic.
0:10:16 A lot of browser-based work from the ’90s came from artists who were really resistant
0:10:18 to the commercial aspects of the internet.
0:10:19 They were really anti-commerce.
0:10:21 There was a periodist about the internet for just communication.
0:10:22 Exactly.
0:10:26 And I think they really idealized moments where it was a more collective experience
0:10:28 and the commercial part seemed to be a difficult thing.
0:10:29 But E-Toy, I think, was an amazing collective
0:10:31 because they were completely anonymous
0:10:35 and they basically ended up coordinating a DDoS attack on E-Toy, the real company.
0:10:37 – That’s like activist art in some ways, right? – Exactly.
0:10:39 – Activist art was really close to that browser-based work. – Right.
0:10:42 Now, me and my cohort were less anti, right?
0:10:45 Like, I’d come up already through a commercial art world that was offline.
0:10:48 I really valued the work that commercial agents were doing
0:10:51 to make the work known, and I didn’t have a problem with that.
0:10:53 And I think a lot of the people who were using social media early
0:10:56 were also okay with the idea of promoting themselves.
0:10:58 So, we were less against.
0:11:01 We designed things that didn’t necessarily have this kind of anti-commercial message.
0:11:03 I mean, there’s always been this long history intention,
0:11:05 as you obviously know, with artists and the commercial aspect.
0:11:09 I mean, Andy Warhol is the most obvious example that comes to mind for that.
0:11:13 And it’s interesting because we’ll get to how this may play out with the NFT world.
0:11:16 You talked about the early days of Web 2.
0:11:20 Browser-based art is maybe the moment in your age and demographic.
0:11:25 Web 1, Browser-based, Web 2, Instagram, social and mobile.
0:11:29 One of the greatest examples, I think, of people making artwork for social media
0:11:33 plus mobile was this work that a friend of mine, Amalia Ohman, did a little bit later,
0:11:34 like in the early 2010s.
0:11:37 And this was when Instagram was really the medium
0:11:40 that everybody was using in the art world, at least, in our art world.
0:11:43 And we were all posting our exhibition photos on there,
0:11:44 posting selfies of ourselves, whatever.
0:11:46 But she was using it in a different way,
0:11:49 where she really occupied this proto-influencer idiom.
0:11:51 She started taking photos of her.
0:11:54 And then gradually, over time, her image changed.
0:12:00 It was less art world girl, more basic, quote unquote, looking person.
0:12:03 Her makeup was more extreme, her body became more extreme.
0:12:06 And then at one point, she was announcing that she was going to have surgery on her body.
0:12:10 And then we, as a community of artists that knew her, were like,
0:12:13 “Wow, Amalia’s really changed. This is really super difficult.”
0:12:17 And then she had these incredible pre and post things of an operation or whatever.
0:12:19 And then it came out that it was all a performance.
0:12:21 And we were all completely duped by the whole thing.
0:12:23 It was really, really believable.
0:12:27 And again, it used all of these emergent properties of that medium
0:12:30 to really do something that said something about the way that the world was going.
0:12:32 Yes, that sounds like performance art.
0:12:33 I actually think I heard about this.
0:12:37 Exactly. And speaking of the specific properties of that medium,
0:12:39 you also mentioned the word proto-influencer,
0:12:40 which I think is very interesting,
0:12:44 because obviously there is this element of influencers today on Instagram
0:12:47 and beyond in social media and influencer culture.
0:12:50 So this is sort of pre, that sort of case.
0:12:51 It was emergent with it, I would say.
0:12:52 Mergent with it, okay.
0:12:53 And I think this is what artists are good at doing.
0:12:56 They’re good at seeing emergent properties that are happening,
0:12:59 both in visual conventions, like how photos are looking,
0:13:00 because that was another thing.
0:13:03 Like visually, there was a particular style to these images, right?
0:13:05 That came from the hardware, came from the way that the phone looked,
0:13:09 came from the lighting that was common in a bedroom or whatever.
0:13:12 All of this also was a kind of an aesthetic layer to it.
0:13:14 It was also constrained by the technology at the time, right?
0:13:18 Yeah, exactly. And all of those things come together to make a particular medium possible,
0:13:21 including the network, which I think is also interesting
0:13:22 if we’re thinking in the future about NFT.
0:13:25 When you say the network, do you mean the network is in the community around her
0:13:28 or the network of her followers and her social graph,
0:13:29 or what do you mean by network?
0:13:31 I think there’s a few different layers to the network thing.
0:13:33 The performance, if you categorize it as a performance piece,
0:13:35 happened first to her friends that knew her,
0:13:38 because the strangeness of experiencing that change
0:13:40 was the thing that made the effect, right?
0:13:45 But that network of friends also had a second order network of people that knew of her.
0:13:48 So this classic social network kind of social graph world,
0:13:50 it spread out into, but also the hardware,
0:13:52 like technological layer of the network,
0:13:56 where you couldn’t have these distributed performative moments
0:13:59 without iPhones, without satellites, without cables.
0:14:03 So it’s really like quite a lot of things coming together in this network, I think.
0:14:06 Interesting. So then Simon, on that note,
0:14:08 what are some of the other milestones for your experience
0:14:11 in evolution as an artist in the technological moments?
0:14:14 I mean, artists have been dealing with technological changes
0:14:17 and expressing the visceral feelings of inhabiting
0:14:20 new technological moments for a very long time.
0:14:23 Surrealism and data is an early 20th century moment
0:14:25 that dealt a lot with the changes, both in advertising language
0:14:28 and mediums around communication.
0:14:31 Surrealism really leaned into the illustrative aspect of that.
0:14:35 But data and stuff, artists like Picabia and people making images of machines,
0:14:38 of post-industrial revolution kind of worlds.
0:14:41 A lot of early modernism is depicting machinic worlds.
0:14:45 When you then jump, let’s say, to the post-war period in the 1960s and 70s,
0:14:48 you started to have groups of artists around pop art and neopop,
0:14:50 dealing again with the language of advertising and ambivalence
0:14:52 called commercial culture.
0:14:55 Artists like Robert Rauschenberg, who was a kind of proto-pop artist,
0:14:58 working with people like in collectives like EAT,
0:14:59 the experiments in art and technology,
0:15:02 which happened in dialogue with Bell Labs at the time.
0:15:04 Oh, I didn’t know about that. Tell me a little bit more about that.
0:15:07 I mean, I’m not an expert, but there was this really amazing moment
0:15:10 where these very prominent people were in dialogue with people in Bell Labs,
0:15:15 and so they made experimental, technologically-enabled sculptures.
0:15:16 There was one Rauschenberg piece that I’m thinking of.
0:15:18 Actually, I don’t know if you made it in EAT or not,
0:15:21 but it was like a bed of mud that was bubbling
0:15:23 that then had a sensory component on it as well.
0:15:26 Like really amazing kind of machine and object-based work,
0:15:29 but also a lot of kind of theater-based experiments and performances
0:15:32 which were also done with early computer systems.
0:15:35 There was also people being given, for example, early porta-packs,
0:15:38 which was the kind of first video equipment by Sony.
0:15:40 So Sony was really involved in donating to artist groups,
0:15:42 and there was an artist group that was in New York
0:15:44 that was really adjacent to the whole earth catalog
0:15:45 in the Stewart Brand World.
0:15:46 Yes, yes.
0:15:48 There was another magazine called Radical Software,
0:15:50 which was produced at the time as well,
0:15:54 and Radical Software was run by an early artist corporation
0:15:55 called Raindance Corporation.
0:15:56 They incorporated themselves,
0:15:58 and they had a space in New York
0:16:01 where several porta-packs were that artists could come and use.
0:16:03 They would make footage, they would bring the footage back,
0:16:05 and then they would make artist libraries
0:16:08 that you could pull as stock footage and make montages from.
0:16:10 So that was also like a really interesting early moment
0:16:12 that inspired me a lot.
0:16:14 And out of that group came early experiments
0:16:17 in broadcast television and cable network television.
0:16:20 There was an amazing collective called Top Value Television,
0:16:22 and they, for example, produced one of the most amazing
0:16:24 artist-made documentaries that was then screened
0:16:26 on cable television at the time,
0:16:28 looking at Madison Avenue and advertising producers,
0:16:30 but also a Nixon convention.
0:16:32 They went and made a kind of political documentary.
0:16:34 And then, of course, there’s like more famous examples
0:16:36 like Warhol Television and stuff like that
0:16:37 and cable networks.
0:16:40 When you said that the example of the early stock library type
0:16:42 of idea that people could take,
0:16:44 and that you said that inspired your work,
0:16:46 what really stuck in my mind about that is like,
0:16:48 that’s like an analog version of remix culture.
0:16:49 Absolutely.
0:16:51 And so tell me about how it inspired your work specifically.
0:16:53 Well, I’m a bit of a historian,
0:16:55 and I actually made a show here in London in 2012
0:16:57 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the ICA,
0:17:01 where I managed to convince the broadcasting network
0:17:03 who were changing over from analog broadcasting to digital
0:17:07 to give us one of the old analog broadcasting machines.
0:17:10 And I dumped that in the middle of the Institute for Contemporary Art
0:17:13 and put all of these libraries of old network videos
0:17:15 made by people like Randolph Corporation and the Peers
0:17:17 around in a video library where people could watch them.
0:17:20 And one of the things that I found in an archive of theirs
0:17:23 was a way of categorizing different types of tapes.
0:17:26 They made early data versions representing
0:17:27 what was being made in those libraries.
0:17:30 So I found those resonant with what people were doing on YouTube,
0:17:32 what other artist peers of mine were making,
0:17:35 which were kind of remixed things and appropriated things.
0:17:38 A bunch of my work is very liberal with ownership.
0:17:40 I believe that one doesn’t invent something.
0:17:43 I believe that one finds things and combines them with things.
0:17:45 So I prefer the notion of like a value add
0:17:47 than like a kind of invention.
0:17:48 So I don’t believe that you can invent things.
0:17:51 This is why I think movements like pop art were so profound
0:17:53 because the correct appropriative touch
0:17:55 of making an image of a Campbell soup can
0:17:57 and claiming that as an original thing,
0:17:59 recontextualizing it was one of the biggest things.
0:18:01 And I think sampling culture and all of that stuff
0:18:02 like built on the back of that assumption.
0:18:04 I find that so personally fascinating too.
0:18:07 So we talked about some of the pre-influences
0:18:08 in the technological side.
0:18:11 Let’s talk about some of the post-influences, post-iPhone.
0:18:13 Like are there any other technological moments?
0:18:15 Yeah. So I think the next big moment in the mid-2010s,
0:18:19 I was lucky enough to do the Venice Biennale Pavilion for New Zealand.
0:18:22 The Venice Biennale is kind of like the biggest art show in the world
0:18:24 and there’s country by country pavilions.
0:18:26 So I got to do New Zealand and in order to do that,
0:18:30 it was 2013-14 I was working on it and 15 I presented it.
0:18:32 I was interested in the WikiLeaks moment at that time.
0:18:35 Artists like Trevor Paglin were involved in those communities.
0:18:37 So I was sort of perfectly aware of those groups
0:18:38 around transparency and stuff like that.
0:18:40 When they released all these documents,
0:18:43 I found the kind of like clip art on the DoD
0:18:45 and internal NSA documents.
0:18:47 I found them really aesthetically surprising.
0:18:48 They were these very playful images
0:18:51 that were representing kind of very serious things.
0:18:52 That’s so interesting. I never thought about that.
0:18:55 You had literally like a magic card standing in
0:18:58 for like a big offensive that was looking in on everybody’s privacy or whatever.
0:19:00 But I was so interested that I really wanted to find
0:19:02 some concrete example of who was making those images.
0:19:04 Who were those artists, right?
0:19:06 And I found this one guy at LinkedIn page.
0:19:08 This guy called David D’Arcicourt.
0:19:10 And David D’Arcicourt was self-proclaimed on his LinkedIn.
0:19:12 This is again social media art in a way.
0:19:15 He claimed that he was the creative director of the NSA
0:19:17 for the 20 years preceding the leaks.
0:19:21 And he had a really big Adobe platform portfolio of his work on it as well.
0:19:24 So he had designs he’d done for the NSA, slip mats,
0:19:26 mouse pads, training posters, all these things.
0:19:28 And I made copies of all of them.
0:19:31 I made giant interpretations of his work.
0:19:32 I changed medium from them.
0:19:35 So I made sculptures out of things that were diagrams.
0:19:37 And I situated them in this library
0:19:40 right in the middle of Venice next to the Doge’s Palace,
0:19:41 which was designed by Sansevino,
0:19:43 this very important architect then.
0:19:47 And that is a very ornate room that has images of druids and wizards
0:19:49 and all these fantasy things that went into Tintoretto
0:19:51 and all these artists that were working in that period.
0:19:53 And I put his work alongside their work.
0:19:58 And there were these crazy synergies, bearded men, strange books, fantasy imagery
0:20:01 that was throughout the NSA material in clip art form
0:20:04 was very close and resonant with these kind of like renaissance images.
0:20:07 And also, I guess the key thing was it was a performative piece
0:20:09 because D’Arcicourt didn’t know that I did this work.
0:20:12 I was about to ask you if he knew and if you talked to him.
0:20:13 So it was all appropriated.
0:20:15 And the only moment that he found out that that happened
0:20:17 was when the Guardian called him on the opening day
0:20:20 and said, “Hey, did you know there’s a bunch of stuff with your work?”
0:20:21 Where did he react, by the way?
0:20:23 Oh, I think he was a little confused.
0:20:25 He’s like, “What is this guy doing with this?”
0:20:27 Yeah, I mean, it was really important to him at the time
0:20:29 and this came out in the Guardian article too
0:20:30 when the Guardian spoke to him.
0:20:32 But it was really important that he was attributed, which he was.
0:20:35 His phone number was on there just like it was on the web.
0:20:36 And that was part of my gesture.
0:20:38 And I think he found it really interesting, of course,
0:20:41 as the gesture was a little bit like performing something like
0:20:45 what the NSA was performing on all of us, but on an artistic work.
0:20:48 And I think that was again complicated by the fact that I was from New Zealand.
0:20:50 This is US culture in a certain sense.
0:20:52 So I think there was a lot of really interesting tensions around ownership.
0:20:55 Right. And it’s funny because the technological underpinnings
0:20:58 are fascinating to me because you said briefly that in a way,
0:21:01 him putting that he was a creative director for the NSA
0:21:03 on his LinkedIn profile is almost performance art.
0:21:04 Exactly.
0:21:07 And then the other point is that these materials you’re talking about,
0:21:09 these artifacts were leaked online.
0:21:12 Yeah. And I think this brings up the kind of art networks
0:21:13 that preserve and take care of culture.
0:21:17 I think they take care of things that are otherwise not seen and not cared for.
0:21:19 So I really like to act in that domain.
0:21:22 But of course, that’s a sort of object based medium in itself.
0:21:24 You want to go into a room in a museum
0:21:25 and you want to have a rich experience in there.
0:21:28 Translating browser based work into a projector in a room
0:21:30 doesn’t always work so well, right?
0:21:32 Did you create it for the Biennale?
0:21:33 I created it for the Biennale.
0:21:35 The way that it works is you get commissioned.
0:21:36 You can kind of do whatever you like.
0:21:37 You work with a curator.
0:21:39 The government of the country sponsors that.
0:21:41 And then the Biennale acts as a sort of presenter in a way.
0:21:46 Were there any other technology milestones on the way to crypto and blockchain art?
0:21:47 I’ll say one more.
0:21:48 So I mentioned this piece that I made
0:21:51 where I was looking at entrepreneurs through DLD,
0:21:52 through going and hanging out at conferences.
0:21:55 That was really inspiring aesthetically and everything for me.
0:21:57 That’s so funny to hear about entrepreneurship as an aesthetic.
0:21:58 Yeah, I love it.
0:22:02 And so this is the thing I leaned into the Berlin of that time as well.
0:22:04 And I made a series of works about young startups.
0:22:09 So for example, I took a wired roundup like top 10 startups in Berlin
0:22:12 and I made almost like a deal toy meets a gaming computer,
0:22:16 meets a kind of like a piece that might go in a trade fair booth or something like that.
0:22:18 And I would make these pop art inspired sculptures
0:22:21 that were celebrating the culture of entrepreneurship.
0:22:26 That was something that I ended up culminating in a big show that I did also in 2015,
0:22:29 that MoMA PS1, which was called the Innovators Dilemma.
0:22:30 It was like named after…
0:22:32 Blake and Christensen’s famous book, yeah.
0:22:34 Where it brought together a bunch of different projects
0:22:36 that are doing in general about entrepreneurship.
0:22:39 I made something about South Korean entrepreneurship.
0:22:42 I made a big project about Samsung during those years as well,
0:22:45 which looked at their turn to be more global in the 1990s.
0:22:48 I also did a really big round of work based on Peter Thiel.
0:22:50 It was inspired by a moment in New Zealand
0:22:53 where it was realized that Thiel was a citizen.
0:22:54 And I made like a big group of artworks
0:22:57 that were based on board gaming and the language of gaming,
0:23:01 which mapped out ideological narratives that came from Peter’s world,
0:23:03 which is very, very influential in entrepreneurship.
0:23:06 So I did a show that was at a small gallery in Auckland in New Zealand,
0:23:10 not a kind of big space, but Peter ended up coming there.
0:23:11 He ended up seeing the show.
0:23:13 We ended up getting in touch after that
0:23:15 when he was still based in San Francisco.
0:23:17 And that was, again, this really interesting moment
0:23:20 of bringing the way that certain ideas were received in a local space
0:23:22 with something that was very influential
0:23:24 in the business world and the technology world.
0:23:27 I also made artworks about Kim.com,
0:23:29 who is this German Finnish entrepreneur
0:23:31 who built a platform called Mega Upload,
0:23:34 which was one of the most used piracy network things
0:23:37 for downloading like Hollywood content.
0:23:41 And he was sued by the US government, I think in 2013, 2012 even maybe,
0:23:43 and there was a massive bust on his home,
0:23:46 which was a collaboration between the New Zealand Armed Forces
0:23:48 and Police Network and the US.
0:23:50 And they tried to extradite him ever since.
0:23:52 Of course. We did a covers during Kim.com at work.
0:23:54 That cover story I was very inspired by at the time,
0:23:56 and also because he was based in New Zealand.
0:24:00 And the whole bust went down in this very glamorous property in Auckland.
0:24:02 I have to say, he’s still living in New Zealand.
0:24:05 They never managed to actually successfully extradite Kim.
0:24:07 And he made other platforms since.
0:24:10 I was also watching all of my content on his platform at the time.
0:24:12 There was another thing, living in Germany,
0:24:14 you couldn’t get Netflix at the time.
0:24:16 Yeah, we were all pirates at some point in our career,
0:24:19 especially if you grew up in any point in the 90s and onward.
0:24:20 It was all pre-Netflix.
0:24:22 Like that was the only way to get things.
0:24:24 Do you remember Burning CDs?
0:24:25 Oh, of course I remember Burning CDs, exactly.
0:24:26 Now I look back on it.
0:24:27 You wouldn’t download a car, you know.
0:24:29 Well, now I look back on it as a creator,
0:24:30 and there’s a big difference when you talked about
0:24:32 how you were doing literal appropriation art
0:24:34 in the case of that NSA artist.
0:24:37 That’s like a specific performative type of thing.
0:24:38 It’s a gesture, exactly.
0:24:42 Now I’m mortified as a creator at how I treated other creators’ works
0:24:45 when I realized that we just like burn CDs, pass them to our friends.
0:24:47 This is like a Web2 question as well, right?
0:24:48 A little bit.
0:24:51 Because it’s also about what is promotion, what is popularity,
0:24:54 what is a tension value worth, and where do you monetize that.
0:24:56 Burning CDs is a proto expression of that problem, right?
0:25:00 You’ve mentioned a few times, actually, this tension between art and commercialism,
0:25:01 and I want to go back to it.
0:25:02 It’s quite fascinating.
0:25:03 There’s a thread in your work.
0:25:06 You seem very inspired by advertising culture.
0:25:06 Oh my God, yes, yeah.
0:25:09 And a lot of people would argue advertising is not art.
0:25:09 Yeah.
0:25:11 So clearly you’ve all in this other camp.
0:25:12 Yeah.
0:25:12 Tell me more about that.
0:25:16 I mean, I think it’s also not so unusual within the art worlds that I occupy,
0:25:18 but essentially pop art is a really great example
0:25:19 because everybody’s heard of Warhol.
0:25:22 But there’s many practices that came in the wake of that big idea
0:25:25 and also the scale that he was able to bring to that big idea.
0:25:28 I think the notion that pop art proposed that your role as an artist
0:25:31 is to describe how it feels to occupy that contemporary world.
0:25:33 And you’re not an ethical agent.
0:25:36 It’s just like I go into the street and I see a giant billboard
0:25:38 and it does something to my heart and that is culture, right?
0:25:38 Yes.
0:25:40 Like that is the claim of pop art.
0:25:40 That is culture.
0:25:41 Yeah.
0:25:44 But one thing I do have to ask you about on the advertising and also globalization,
0:25:45 so two themes here.
0:25:45 Yeah.
0:25:47 But I think back to like when I used to go to India,
0:25:50 and I’d see like Bollywood posters, which is its own aesthetic.
0:25:51 Yeah, hand painted often.
0:25:51 Totally.
0:25:53 That actually is dying art now,
0:25:55 but it was an incredible thing to see that art form,
0:25:57 especially in my parents’ tiny village.
0:25:58 Yeah, incredible.
0:26:01 It’s like this pop of color and this kind of almost desert landscape.
0:26:02 Yeah, and glamor as well.
0:26:03 It’s glamor.
0:26:04 Exactly.
0:26:04 Exactly.
0:26:06 I edited one of my friends.
0:26:08 She’s also an author of Virginia Postural.
0:26:09 She wrote a book called Glamor,
0:26:11 which actually, it’s funny you said the word glamor
0:26:13 because it has certain specific connotations to it,
0:26:14 which I think is great.
0:26:15 Right, right.
0:26:16 But I do have to ask you, Simon, like,
0:26:19 do you think there’s also this kind of
0:26:23 monoculture that’s happening because of that globalization
0:26:24 and in that aesthetic?
0:26:27 Because I feel, especially in the case of pixel art,
0:26:30 that there was a point when everyone got
0:26:32 a little too digitally influenced,
0:26:35 and everything started looking like the 8-bit thing,
0:26:36 and I got very bored of that, isn’t it?
0:26:37 Yeah, yeah.
0:26:39 And so I just wonder if you think there’s this sort of
0:26:42 homogenization happening as well in the aesthetic.
0:26:44 Yeah, I guess this is a narrative that comes up
0:26:45 from time to time.
0:26:46 I mean, it’s not only an art that it comes up, right?
0:26:47 Right.
0:26:48 I mean, Netflix culture is a great example.
0:26:50 Netflix culture is a great example too,
0:26:51 but I think people bring it up politically,
0:26:53 which is like the most charged context for it.
0:26:54 Oh, yeah, yeah, totally.
0:26:55 You know, there’s these kind of conversations
0:26:57 about how homogenous things are becoming
0:26:58 because of like the speed of travel,
0:27:00 the ease of travel, these kinds of things,
0:27:01 but I don’t really believe that
0:27:03 that will ever make a true homogenization.
0:27:06 And my understanding of the way that cultures have emerged
0:27:09 is they always emerge in hybridization, right?
0:27:10 There is no such thing, again,
0:27:12 this is an originality question, right?
0:27:13 Like, there’s no such thing as a true
0:27:15 original flavor of X or Y.
0:27:16 There’s no first anything.
0:27:17 Right.
0:27:19 And there’s only kind of encounters,
0:27:20 and I tend to think I’m sort of like
0:27:22 an encounters maximalist or something like that.
0:27:24 Yeah, I like that, an encounters maximalist.
0:27:26 I mean, that’s something I literally just coined.
0:27:26 I love it.
0:27:28 We were inventing things on the podcast.
0:27:28 That’s how we go.
0:27:31 But I tend to think that more hybridization
0:27:33 is always positive, and I don’t believe
0:27:35 that this true homogenization really ever happens.
0:27:37 There are kind of trends and moments
0:27:41 where certain boringnesses settle into a market or whatever,
0:27:43 where a lot of people try and do that thing.
0:27:46 And yes, I get very bored about that very quickly.
0:27:48 Boring homogenous stuff is boring and homogenous,
0:27:52 and I think the way that NFTs stratified very quickly in 2021
0:27:54 into particular genres bought the hell out of me.
0:27:56 I mean, this is true in the art art world
0:27:57 as well as the NFT art world.
0:28:00 Like, expensive things are considered to be important,
0:28:01 but on the edges of those things,
0:28:03 I could tell you 10 examples of things
0:28:06 that did incredible stuff with the kernels
0:28:07 of things that went into those strata,
0:28:09 but then did something truly amazing on the side of it.
0:28:12 At the fringes, at the side of those movements
0:28:15 are always something where there’s somebody mixing that
0:28:16 with something that’s never been seen before.
0:28:17 That’s great.
0:28:18 And then that makes something new.
0:28:20 And I think that’s a very old story.
0:28:22 I also think globalization is a much older story
0:28:23 than is often assumed colloquially.
0:28:26 Cultures have been mixing across Eurasia, for example,
0:28:27 for very long time.
0:28:28 Oh, totally.
0:28:30 I love that you pointed out that this kind of intermixing
0:28:32 has been happening for, like, eons.
0:28:33 That’s great.
0:28:36 There are many examples across the history of art and culture
0:28:38 of things that happen on the fringe of those environments
0:28:41 that are a little harder to see at the time
0:28:43 that certain enthusiasts get really excited about
0:28:45 around them as they happen,
0:28:47 but don’t scale in the same way.
0:28:48 Don’t reach the same price points.
0:28:50 Don’t enter the same museum collections
0:28:52 that are then kind of later looked back on
0:28:54 and seen that there’s things that happened there
0:28:56 that were just super exciting, right?
0:28:57 That’s fascinating.
0:28:59 But when I think of even the outsider art movement–
0:28:59 Right.
0:29:01 And, you know, this is a very literal interpretation of fringe.
0:29:04 And I know what you mean as fringe is more nuanced than that.
0:29:06 But I have a piece by Howard Finster.
0:29:06 Oh, interesting.
0:29:07 It’s one of his dinosaurs.
0:29:09 It’s like this little cardboard cut-out dinosaur
0:29:11 on, like, a little platform.
0:29:14 And he’s handwritten in Sharpie, all these biblical verses,
0:29:16 like, kind of like fire and brimstone.
0:29:20 And it’s really fascinating because he was an ex-minister.
0:29:22 And to me, that’s an encounter between, like,
0:29:24 Christian faith and thinking
0:29:26 combined with this encounter with evolution
0:29:27 and what it means.
0:29:29 Because it’s, like, so bizarre to have, like,
0:29:31 biblical verses on a dinosaur.
0:29:31 Yeah, that’s incredible.
0:29:32 It’s, like, so great.
0:29:33 Oh, my God, I want one.
0:29:34 Oh, yeah.
0:29:35 I think what’s really interesting
0:29:37 about outsider art in general as a category
0:29:39 is really interesting because I think a lot of people
0:29:41 that came from the art world that I’ve been talking about
0:29:43 up until now, like the world that kind of circles
0:29:45 around museums and art fairs and galleries,
0:29:47 when they looked at NFTs for the first time,
0:29:50 I think a lot of them saw outsider art, right?
0:29:52 Because it was people who were not trained in the art tradition,
0:29:54 who were given a certain technological stack,
0:29:56 who were then able to create and promote
0:29:58 and sell whatever were.
0:30:00 And that kind of opened up to a whole lot of creators
0:30:02 that were definitely not schooled in the cannons.
0:30:04 And then lots of super interesting weird stuff
0:30:05 happened on the side of those,
0:30:08 which I personally found as a wealth of compelling examples
0:30:09 of emergent culture.
0:30:12 And then there became own kind of homogenizations
0:30:14 in cannon buildings within that sub-community
0:30:15 around NFTs.
0:30:18 And those things I found often a little less interesting.
0:30:18 You know what I mean?
0:30:20 Yes, I totally agree.
0:30:22 I’m about to ask you about blockchains and NFTs
0:30:23 in just one more minute.
0:30:25 I’m also trying to think of when outsider art
0:30:27 becomes establishment in other ways.
0:30:29 Henry Darger is a very canonical example.
0:30:31 It’s a very strange hierarchy that gets established,
0:30:33 especially with the use of the term outsider.
0:30:35 It also kind of brand somebody as not legible
0:30:36 and included them in the cannon.
0:30:38 But as an outsider, right?
0:30:39 I mean, these tensions are very strange.
0:30:41 It’s about academy versus not.
0:30:43 And certain people who are able to say that’s important
0:30:46 and that’s not and value and where money lies
0:30:47 and all these other things
0:30:48 that are really interesting around culture.
0:30:49 Okay, great.
0:30:51 Let’s talk now about blockchains and crypto art.
0:30:54 So you mentioned like all these technological milestones
0:30:56 and your way to your evolution as an artist.
0:30:59 Tell me about how you came to blockchain art.
0:30:59 Yeah.
0:31:02 So of course, if you’re muddling around in Berlin,
0:31:03 in the communities that are building new products
0:31:06 and new companies in the early mid-2010s,
0:31:07 you come across Bitcoin.
0:31:09 And the more I dug into Bitcoin culture,
0:31:11 the more fascinated I was.
0:31:12 I was just like, well, as somebody who’s looking
0:31:14 for new, inspiring narratives,
0:31:16 this notion of sovereign free money,
0:31:18 I then started to pay attention to people
0:31:20 who were kind of advocating around X versus voice
0:31:22 and also self-sovereign.
0:31:24 I read the sovereign individual as a book.
0:31:25 And then of course, in Berlin,
0:31:26 you heard about Ethereum as it emerged
0:31:28 because the Ethereum Foundation was getting set up
0:31:29 and started there.
0:31:32 So for the 2016 Berlin Biennale,
0:31:34 I made my first big piece about crypto.
0:31:37 And that was three different fictional trade fair booths
0:31:39 based on three different entrepreneurs
0:31:41 that were looking at three different narratives
0:31:42 that were emerging from blockchain.
0:31:44 One of them was Blythe Masters.
0:31:47 So Blythe Masters was coming from the banking world.
0:31:49 She came out of securities in the 1990s
0:31:52 and she made this company at the time called Digital Asset.
0:31:53 I made a big kind of installation about her.
0:31:56 I made a big installation about Bellagy
0:31:59 and about 21.ink before it was changed or whatever.
0:32:01 And then I made a big one about Ethereum and Vitalik.
0:32:03 And it was like those three narratives
0:32:04 I was looking at at the same time.
0:32:06 I made little postage stamps
0:32:08 that I worked on with the German postal
0:32:10 because I thought postage stamps were both expressions
0:32:11 of sovereignty, right?
0:32:13 They were also design objects
0:32:14 and they were also kind of a currency,
0:32:15 like a parallel currency.
0:32:17 That’s also, by the way, fascinating about postal stamps
0:32:20 is that they are an expression of sovereignty
0:32:22 but they’re also like ways to get out.
0:32:24 They move objects around the world.
0:32:24 Exactly, they’re infrastructure.
0:32:26 It’s so fascinating, right?
0:32:26 Exactly.
0:32:28 So I thought they were like the perfect sculptural form
0:32:29 for work about this emergent network.
0:32:33 So far you described how you were using blockchain
0:32:35 and crypto as inspiration for your art,
0:32:37 the subject matter of the art.
0:32:39 But now blockchain is a medium.
0:32:40 Let’s talk about that.
0:32:42 Yeah, so there were a few people at that time
0:32:44 who were starting to design kind of web-based art,
0:32:45 like browser art that I described earlier
0:32:47 or web 2 art, let’s say,
0:32:50 that was based on coding on emergent blockchains, right?
0:32:52 So there was a project called Ascribe
0:32:54 which was actually something Vitalik worked on
0:32:55 as well at the time,
0:32:58 which was an early system that tried to put artworks
0:33:00 and link them to the Bitcoin network.
0:33:03 There was a conference in 2014 at 7on7 that Rhizome did
0:33:05 which was connected to the new museum
0:33:08 where they pair an artist with a technologist
0:33:11 and at the time they designed something based on colored coin
0:33:13 which was essentially an NFT.
0:33:16 And then I started to learn about other projects.
0:33:17 I’d learned about TerraZero
0:33:18 which was a really interesting project
0:33:20 which was a group that were proposing
0:33:23 to make trees own themselves as entities.
0:33:24 Trees own themselves.
0:33:26 Yeah, exactly.
0:33:26 They were like, look,
0:33:28 if you can do a blockchain system based on Ethereum,
0:33:29 if you can have smart contracts,
0:33:32 then why not give the sovereignty of ownership to the trees?
0:33:34 Why not have a commercial forest
0:33:36 on the produce of its own work?
0:33:37 I was fascinated by that.
0:33:39 So I curated a little show in 2018
0:33:42 at a space in Berlin called the Schinkel Pavilion
0:33:43 and that was about artists
0:33:44 that were doing these experiments.
0:33:47 So also included in that was CryptoKitties.
0:33:47 Okay.
0:33:48 So I don’t know if you remember this
0:33:51 but Christie’s did a weird little collaboration with Consensors
0:33:54 where they sold a hardware wallet
0:33:56 with a specially designed CryptoKitties on it
0:33:58 where Gile Twardowski
0:34:00 who was the guy who invented the visual aspect
0:34:01 of the CryptoKitties project,
0:34:02 so not the kind of mechanics,
0:34:04 but the actual cats.
0:34:05 Yeah, made a special one
0:34:07 and they sold it as a hardware wallet
0:34:09 which was also specially designed in an auction
0:34:11 and it was big news in the New York Times.
0:34:12 And so I included that in the show.
0:34:14 I included Keira Zero,
0:34:15 this forest project in the show.
0:34:17 I included other artists like Kea Kroetler
0:34:20 who was also working around Nosus at the time,
0:34:21 doing interesting designs for that.
0:34:23 And the whole show was set up.
0:34:25 The curatorial premise was also based on blockchains
0:34:28 because I didn’t want to decide everybody in the show.
0:34:29 I asked somebody else to choose two things
0:34:31 and then they would choose two things.
0:34:33 And then we did a transparent publishing
0:34:35 of all of the decision-makers on the wall
0:34:36 as a curatorial protocol.
0:34:39 So you turned curation, the act and art
0:34:42 of curation itself into a form of art
0:34:45 that actually also showed the process behind the outcomes.
0:34:46 Exactly, transparency, networks,
0:34:48 all of these things that kind of so important to blockchain.
0:34:50 Decentralized decision-making, right?
0:34:53 And so yeah, we had this kind of protocol that we designed
0:34:55 where everybody knew who picked them for being in the show
0:34:57 and I wasn’t making all the decisions.
0:34:58 And that show was called Proof of Work,
0:35:00 but that was way before NFTs were a thing.
0:35:03 Yes, and before we talk more about NFTs,
0:35:06 what do you think is unique about blockchains
0:35:07 as a medium for art?
0:35:09 You know, one of the interesting things
0:35:10 about blockchain as a medium,
0:35:13 I think is that the cultural asset
0:35:16 and the financial container is the same thing, right?
0:35:18 That’s sort of true in art in a way,
0:35:19 but literally as an NFT,
0:35:22 those things are much more structurally combined, right?
0:35:24 And Web2Art and Art Design for Social Networks,
0:35:27 they’re also like networked objects.
0:35:28 They’re connected to other things.
0:35:30 And settlement is immediate, right?
0:35:31 I mean, one of the things that artists
0:35:33 got really, really excited about
0:35:34 with the emergence of blockchain art,
0:35:37 and this is really going into the NFT moment now,
0:35:40 but the idea that you could have settlement immediately on sale
0:35:42 and that you wouldn’t have to have an intermediary
0:35:43 because, you know, gallerists and whatever,
0:35:45 it’s a very complicated system.
0:35:47 So the simplicity and the directness of that
0:35:48 was really attractive,
0:35:50 but also this notion of resale royalties.
0:35:52 The idea that you would sell something on a secondary market
0:35:54 and immediately the original creator
0:35:56 would receive some compensation for that,
0:35:58 that’s been something that the art world’s
0:35:59 been dreaming about since the 70s.
0:36:01 There’s a conceptual art piece
0:36:03 by a very famous curator, Seth Sieglaub,
0:36:06 that he did in the early 1970s, called The Artist Contract.
0:36:08 So let’s talk about NFTs specifically.
0:36:10 So we’ve obviously been dancing around
0:36:12 that this entire conversation,
0:36:15 but I think crypto art is bigger than just NFTs, to be clear.
0:36:15 Right, agreed.
0:36:18 And blockchains as a medium is bigger than just NFTs.
0:36:18 Agreed.
0:36:19 So we agree on that.
0:36:21 But let’s talk about NFTs specifically,
0:36:23 because that’s the thing that really captured
0:36:25 the mainstream attention,
0:36:29 and actually maybe even catapulted crypto
0:36:30 into much more mainstream awareness.
0:36:32 And to be clear, I mean this well beyond
0:36:34 the financialization aspects.
0:36:36 Like I’m talking about as an artistic thing.
0:36:38 This includes multiple auction houses,
0:36:42 like doing NFT auctions, like being participating in it,
0:36:45 multiple people who only came to crypto
0:36:47 for the first time and set up a wallet
0:36:49 in order to buy NFTs.
0:36:51 Like who knew, of course we knew,
0:36:53 that culture would be the thing
0:36:54 that brings people to technology.
0:36:56 I mean, retroactively it looks logical,
0:36:58 but I don’t think that was a given.
0:36:59 Oh, interesting.
0:36:59 Tell me why.
0:37:00 Well, I don’t know.
0:37:02 I mean, I think the moment that changed from me,
0:37:04 from knowing about a small group of people
0:37:05 messing around with blockchains,
0:37:06 making art with it,
0:37:08 to like the post-people auction moment,
0:37:09 I guess that’s maybe like the…
0:37:10 People is the right thing.
0:37:11 People post people.
0:37:12 BB and PB, yes.
0:37:13 Right, exactly.
0:37:14 BB and PB.
0:37:16 And that was also in cohorts with the auction houses.
0:37:18 I mean, people was not an unknown entity
0:37:19 before that auction,
0:37:21 but he was known in the graphic arts world, right?
0:37:23 Like he was a very, very well-known figure there.
0:37:25 But then with the signal from the blue chip art world,
0:37:27 you know, from those auction houses,
0:37:28 I think those are the things
0:37:30 that created that change in awareness.
0:37:32 Yeah, say more like why you think
0:37:34 it wasn’t a given that this would happen.
0:37:36 Well, if I think back to Web 2, for example,
0:37:38 I don’t think culture was the thing
0:37:40 that brought that into like mainstream awareness and usage.
0:37:42 I mean, unless you count kind of
0:37:43 “sociality” as a layer of culture,
0:37:46 which I guess one could and I guess I do in a way,
0:37:47 but it’s not high culture.
0:37:49 Like you didn’t learn about Facebook or Myspace
0:37:51 because of an exponent art.
0:37:53 Whereas I think a lot of people’s mainstream adoption
0:37:55 and understanding of Web 3
0:37:56 came around that moment,
0:37:58 which was associated with an art and an artist.
0:37:59 Web 1 also didn’t happen like that.
0:38:01 You know, you didn’t hear about the internet
0:38:03 because you heard of some artist piece being made by an artist.
0:38:05 No, I agree. I totally agree with you.
0:38:07 You’ve said multiple times about this conversation
0:38:08 that culture emerges.
0:38:11 And so what do you think about this moment
0:38:13 made this like the time, like why now?
0:38:15 Well, I mean, I think auction houses
0:38:17 are always looking for new things, new markets.
0:38:18 They’ve constantly done that.
0:38:19 You know, before the 1970s and ’80s,
0:38:20 they didn’t sell contemporary art.
0:38:22 For example, they only sold old masters.
0:38:25 So moving into new areas is kind of like a textbook thing.
0:38:27 But then DeFi Summer came
0:38:28 and there was all this liquidity created
0:38:31 in the ecosystem from people who’d been successful,
0:38:33 which then they started to filter into these cultural assets.
0:38:35 And I think that was what built up to the crypto market.
0:38:37 Yes, but why the art?
0:38:38 Because they could have also funneled that liquidity
0:38:40 into something else.
0:38:41 You know, I can’t answer that question.
0:38:43 But I think people want to buy art
0:38:46 that support the cultures that they believe in.
0:38:47 It’s about identity and belonging.
0:38:48 Yeah, exactly.
0:38:49 And affiliation.
0:38:51 And people who’d been excited by what was possible
0:38:52 within the state by world,
0:38:54 within the kind of crypto world in general,
0:38:56 saw an emergent cultural package
0:38:58 that kind of embodied the value of that.
0:39:00 And they were like, okay, I believe in this culturally.
0:39:03 And I think that mostly really happened around PFCs.
0:39:05 Yes, like profile pic type art.
0:39:07 Profile pic type art, like crypto kitties and crypto punks.
0:39:09 Artistically, it’s really an interesting mechanism.
0:39:12 You sell something initially to a large community.
0:39:14 A bunch of people hold the same thing.
0:39:16 And then that also moves around in networks.
0:39:18 It changes ownership, owner to owner, right?
0:39:19 And with that, the community grows.
0:39:21 The people who have touched that asset.
0:39:24 And that means that a large group of people
0:39:27 are suddenly almost fractal participators
0:39:29 in kind of one cultural moment, right?
0:39:31 And one cultural asset, you know what I mean?
0:39:31 Yes, exactly.
0:39:33 They’re designed to participate in networks
0:39:35 so that the provenance is important.
0:39:35 Yes.
0:39:36 You know, where it came from,
0:39:38 where it’s going to is important.
0:39:41 Tracing these relationships as a part of the medium
0:39:42 is what’s so super interesting about that.
0:39:43 It’s fascinating.
0:39:43 Yeah.
0:39:45 And the networks themselves are in the cloud.
0:39:46 Yeah.
0:39:47 Or blockchain.
0:39:48 One of our colleagues, Tim Ruffgaard,
0:39:51 and calls blockchains computers in the sky.
0:39:51 Yeah.
0:39:53 It could be operate without like any central.
0:39:55 In any matter, they’re accessible to all.
0:39:57 You talked earlier about coming from New Zealand
0:40:00 and this idea of like the borders and the inspiration
0:40:03 for you being like almost global by default.
0:40:04 Yeah.
0:40:05 This is that exact very example.
0:40:05 Exactly.
0:40:07 Like the portability of the asset.
0:40:08 It’s not just that.
0:40:10 It’s like the portability of your humanity,
0:40:12 your identity, like who you are, your network.
0:40:13 Yeah.
0:40:15 Or even belonging in a network, regardless of border,
0:40:19 place, location, into a different kind of identity online.
0:40:19 Yeah.
0:40:21 And I mean, there’s a sort of more humanity side
0:40:22 to this argument as well.
0:40:24 Like, you know, the Donna Haraway notion
0:40:26 of the community of kin.
0:40:29 But it’s that within a digitally designed artwork network.
0:40:30 I mean, that’s so beautiful.
0:40:31 They’re more of a community of kin.
0:40:34 Well, one of the cool things that I found in art school
0:40:36 was like me and this one other person
0:40:38 loved this one artwork by this one artist.
0:40:38 Yes.
0:40:40 And we found a passion in there that meant
0:40:42 we were compatible across all sorts of different things.
0:40:44 Oh my God, you’re so right.
0:40:44 Yeah.
0:40:46 One of my absolute favorite artists is this New Orleans artist
0:40:47 named Rebecca Raboucher.
0:40:49 I’m a big fan of her work.
0:40:49 Very fantasy.
0:40:50 She had a lot of portals.
0:40:51 Yeah.
0:40:52 I love that type of thing.
0:40:52 Yeah.
0:40:53 And I collect a lot of her pieces.
0:40:54 Oh, interesting.
0:40:56 As I went to her art patron dinner,
0:40:58 and I’ve been to multiple shows of hers.
0:40:58 Yeah.
0:41:01 And I feel like the community that comes around the art,
0:41:03 these are people I’ve never met before.
0:41:03 Right.
0:41:06 I have no history, no demographic in common.
0:41:09 It’s like an instant affiliation and true connection.
0:41:10 Yeah, exactly.
0:41:13 Because what better proxy for understanding
0:41:14 that kind of like-mindedness than having
0:41:15 that same shared love?
0:41:16 Oh my God, I totally agree.
0:41:18 It’s a really precise cultural signal.
0:41:20 There’s also another artwork that I want to mention here
0:41:23 that is maybe less known and is working differently
0:41:25 than many NFTs in terms of dynamics.
0:41:27 It’s a project by Sarah Friend,
0:41:29 which I actually showed in another curated show
0:41:31 that I did later on called Proof of Stake.
0:41:33 And that was all about ownership in particular.
0:41:35 And she did this piece called Lifeforms,
0:41:36 which were designed on polygon.
0:41:40 But the NFTs were designed to only live, quote unquote,
0:41:41 if they were transferred.
0:41:45 And so they had like a time life programmed into them
0:41:48 where if they stayed in one wallet longer than three months,
0:41:50 they would completely self-destruct.
0:41:51 Yeah, got it.
0:41:53 I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but OG Crystals?
0:41:54 Oh, yeah, sure.
0:41:55 And the artist was Michael Jew.
0:41:57 And he did it with Daniel Krivorichko.
0:42:01 Anyway, what’s really fascinating about it is that the NFT,
0:42:03 to your point, like that’s an example of like,
0:42:05 that has to be transferred in order to exist.
0:42:06 Yeah, with Sarah Friend’s Lifeforms.
0:42:08 And I love that it’s called Lifeforms.
0:42:10 This was really interesting on the coral reef diversity side
0:42:13 where every time you transfer this NFT,
0:42:16 like the properties of other things in that person’s collection,
0:42:19 inhabit, it’s like an organism.
0:42:20 Inhabit that NFT.
0:42:24 So what happens is, for instance, if you own like meabits,
0:42:27 then that NFT, the crystal, the form it expresses,
0:42:31 will have like this like 3D, like kind of cubic element
0:42:34 to the coral, exactly.
0:42:34 And it evolves.
0:42:39 And so the art itself evolves as it gets transferred,
0:42:42 which I think is so fascinating.
0:42:44 Like that is, I have goosebumps talking about this
0:42:48 because that is the essence of truly being native to the medium.
0:42:51 Because it’s not just taking something and then taking it
0:42:53 and like, oh, I’m going to apply it to blockchains.
0:42:56 It’s taking the inherent nature of blockchains
0:42:57 and evolving that with the art.
0:42:59 It’s just incredible to me.
0:43:00 Yeah, I agree.
0:43:02 And the online offline connection is also still really important
0:43:04 because even the virtual is so physical, right?
0:43:06 Because screens are real, pixels are real.
0:43:09 You know, like networks are made of atoms as well as bits, you know.
0:43:11 And the recent body of work that I made
0:43:14 that was actually named a little bit close to this book from Chris.
0:43:19 So I made oil paintings of other people’s metaverse property tokens.
0:43:21 Ah, you made the digital physical.
0:43:24 Yeah, in a way, because I thought about territory.
0:43:25 I thought about community.
0:43:26 I thought about history.
0:43:28 And I thought about like the fact that these tokens,
0:43:31 when I looked at something like Decentraland or Sandbox,
0:43:33 these very popular, you know, crypto-based metaverses,
0:43:35 when I looked at the ownership tokens
0:43:37 for owning a piece of property in those worlds,
0:43:41 I saw a grid that looked to me like mid-century painting.
0:43:42 Because it’s a grid.
0:43:45 These projects, if you buy a token, you get an NFT
0:43:47 that looks like a part of the map of the project.
0:43:48 But I was thinking, oh, that’s so interesting
0:43:50 because it looks so much like mid-century painting.
0:43:52 And then I was like, oh, wouldn’t that be funny to paint that actually?
0:43:55 And then I was like, that would be a landscape painting
0:43:58 of a piece of property in the metaverse.
0:43:58 That’s so weird.
0:44:00 And then I was like, what is landscape painting?
0:44:03 And that, again, goes back to my background.
0:44:04 I grew up in New Zealand.
0:44:06 The first thing we learned about is colonial landscape painting.
0:44:10 And I was like, oh my God, when I see these NFTs, this gridded system,
0:44:12 it’s like modernism is being projected onto the metaverse.
0:44:16 So it’s taking an old modernist trope and putting onto the metaverse.
0:44:20 But it was important for me to underline the networked element as well.
0:44:22 So while there were paintings of somebody else’s property,
0:44:25 I included two QR codes on the side of each painting.
0:44:27 And the first one links to the original property.
0:44:29 So you can kind of look at the property that the painting is also.
0:44:31 You know exactly because that’s interesting as well
0:44:32 about metaverse interfaces.
0:44:35 That’s already gone through a few rounds of UX.
0:44:38 So the painting is often kind of early version of a landscape.
0:44:41 And then you have a link to what the real one looks like now.
0:44:43 But then I designed an NFT that looks like an ownership card
0:44:46 that you would get a monopoly for owning a piece of property
0:44:48 and tells you who owns that piece right now.
0:44:51 And it links you to the person that owns that piece,
0:44:52 but it’s also permissionless, right?
0:44:56 So it’s a painting which is permissionless of a property that you don’t own,
0:44:58 that then you have a kind of other piece of ownership property
0:45:00 that always links you to the person who currently owns it.
0:45:03 It’s like so fascinating to explore the nature of ownership.
0:45:06 So this is the exhibition you debuted in San Francisco.
0:45:09 Why did you title it Read Write Own?
0:45:13 Well, I was really interested in always like what are good descriptions
0:45:14 of what’s different about networks, right?
0:45:17 And when I read about Chris’s book coming out
0:45:20 and Read Write Own was kind of like underlined as a way
0:45:22 to summarize Web 1, Web 2, and Web 3.
0:45:23 It was the title of the book.
0:45:26 It resonated with also the design on the cover.
0:45:28 It was a little square in the middle
0:45:30 and a kind of landscape like object around it.
0:45:33 And I was like, oh my God, like this is what I’ve been painting.
0:45:36 I’ve been painting the difference of ownership in Web 2 and Web 3.
0:45:38 And kind of how these things layer up.
0:45:41 Also like ownership is really something that’s really important in art.
0:45:42 It always has been important.
0:45:43 Yes.
0:45:46 And so people owning properties, people owning images of other properties.
0:45:48 Again, these notions around landscape.
0:45:51 When you paint a landscape, it doesn’t mean you own it, right?
0:45:53 It’s a picture of something you often don’t own.
0:45:56 The other thing that’s fascinating to me about what you’re saying about this
0:45:59 is that this idea of ownership and what you’re doing with the paintings
0:46:00 in your exhibit for Read Write Own.
0:46:04 It’s this idea too that we ourselves are transient humans
0:46:07 and the ways we put our stamps on the world sometimes,
0:46:09 like the only thing that endures is art.
0:46:12 Whether physical or emotionally, like the things we leave behind.
0:46:16 And it’s funny because I used to be a huge fan of Christo and John Claude.
0:46:17 Oh yeah, sure.
0:46:19 Big fan because I love landscape art.
0:46:23 You would think it’s so inane, like you’re putting plastic to cover trees.
0:46:25 How is this art?
0:46:28 But I love this idea that humanity is conquering nature
0:46:31 in a way that’s not like extractive,
0:46:34 but that’s actually beautifying it and showing our presence.
0:46:37 And I find that building, it’s just beautiful.
0:46:39 There’s something extremely exquisite about it,
0:46:41 which I’m bringing it up because it resonates
0:46:43 with what you’re describing with the Read Write Own exhibit you did.
0:46:44 Well, exactly.
0:46:46 I mean, John Claude, for those who haven’t heard of them,
0:46:49 they basically, as a giant sculptural gesture, would rap significant things.
0:46:52 For example, the Bundestag in Berlin, that was a really big one.
0:46:52 That’s right.
0:46:53 They just did in Paris.
0:46:57 Well, actually, one of them obviously died, but the spouse is still alive.
0:46:57 Yeah, John Claude.
0:47:00 Yes, and they just did the rapping of the…
0:47:01 Arch de Triomphe, exactly.
0:47:03 So often symbolic things, but also whole islands.
0:47:05 Surrounding the Florida Keys.
0:47:07 Yeah, and it makes a monumental gesture,
0:47:09 but it’s also at the same time a light touch, right?
0:47:11 You occupy it and then you unoccupy it, right?
0:47:11 It kind of comes back.
0:47:14 It’s like ephemeral, but it is light touch,
0:47:16 but it’s so heavy in the moment that it’s there.
0:47:18 And by the way, logistically, incredibly difficult.
0:47:19 Yeah, very resource-intensive.
0:47:20 Oh my gosh, yeah.
0:47:23 They’re like massive engineering projects, actually.
0:47:27 And I bring that up because it is an example of how art is engineering.
0:47:31 And you’re describing a lot of technology as art, as art is engineering.
0:47:32 Yeah, absolutely.
0:47:33 And I think that’s exactly what art does really well.
0:47:36 That’s what NFT art is doing really well for blockchain networks
0:47:39 and other types of crypto art as well, like TerraZero that we design.
0:47:44 The notion of being able to give ownership to trees over their own sovereign space.
0:47:46 These kinds of things are only possible
0:47:50 because technologists have architected a certain platform or a certain environment.
0:47:51 Yes.
0:47:53 So let’s do some quick lightning round style, wrap up.
0:47:55 But first, there’s a couple of recurring themes.
0:47:57 So let’s just kind of pick them up and bring them back full circle.
0:48:04 So one is you’ve talked a lot about commerce and the relationship to commerce.
0:48:08 What do you think about this in the context of NFTs and art in NFTs?
0:48:10 Like what would you say, beyond obviously the valuation aspect?
0:48:10 Yeah.
0:48:12 Well, one of the things about NFTs and art,
0:48:16 the fact that the kind of financial container is the same as the artistic container,
0:48:19 one of the knock-on effects that has happened because of that
0:48:23 is that often value is accrued completely to price.
0:48:26 And I think that is not necessarily the case for all culture, right?
0:48:27 Like there’s a term like priceless.
0:48:29 Often you talk about priceless cultural works.
0:48:34 But also there’s this notion that something cheap can also be something valuable, you know?
0:48:39 And I think that’s harder to express in the current technological stack of NFTs.
0:48:40 What do you think the opportunity is to build that?
0:48:45 Well, I think that there should be another layer of accruing and showing value
0:48:47 in NFT projects that is not about how much they cost.
0:48:51 I’m thinking about like something that could be like a curatorial infrastructure
0:48:55 for giving different signals that aren’t only expressed in how expensive something is.
0:48:58 Of course, expensive things that are in museums are
0:49:00 important culturally and valuable in that way as well.
0:49:03 And part of the price of them being so expensive
0:49:05 is about how much their love does culture.
0:49:09 But you can make something experimental that might not sell at first
0:49:12 or that might not be expressed as something expensive as first,
0:49:15 that will later be something that is cherished and really valuable.
0:49:16 There’s this notion of the avant-garde,
0:49:18 which is something really important to modernism,
0:49:21 where you can have a small group of people doing an experimental thing
0:49:25 that is really unpopular and very hard to understand at the time,
0:49:28 that then later gets interpreted and valued in a different way, you know?
0:49:31 And I think that’s a little bit missing from the NFT art world,
0:49:34 where financial success is the only expression of cultural value.
0:49:36 It’s not that I want to divorce that completely.
0:49:37 No, you can’t.
0:49:39 I just think that it needs to be more complex than that.
0:49:40 I would say multi-dimensional,
0:49:43 because it’s basically like if you think about all these properties,
0:49:45 like there’s community, there’s belonging, there’s expression,
0:49:49 there’s the aesthetic, there’s the technological underpinnings.
0:49:50 There’s so many different dimensions,
0:49:52 you can assess something on those, a reputation.
0:49:55 I totally agree that there needs to be more dimensions on that.
0:49:58 One example that I think is really fascinating here,
0:50:03 so I co-edited a piece by Kai Sheffield who works at Visa,
0:50:07 and he wrote a very thoughtful piece on fantasy Hollywood
0:50:11 and this idea that you can essentially create characters
0:50:13 that can be represented by NFTs
0:50:18 and essentially create like a whole set of storytelling
0:50:19 around these characters.
0:50:23 And so the idea is that NFTs are characters,
0:50:27 and the other point is it’s really about who gets to make,
0:50:30 this is a recurring theme in what you’ve been talking about,
0:50:31 who gets to make these characters,
0:50:34 because right now it’s like centralized Disney,
0:50:35 or like a certain type of artist.
0:50:37 Yeah, the IP world, right?
0:50:37 Yes, exactly.
0:50:41 And so this idea that you can actually share and create this IP,
0:50:44 but the real idea here is that NFTs in that sense
0:50:47 represent community, belonging, character creation,
0:50:51 collaboration, and then like a community of storytelling.
0:50:53 And it’s funny because I was debating this with Bob Iger
0:50:55 a couple of months after we did our podcast together
0:50:57 with Chris Dixon that we did on the show,
0:50:59 which he kind of brought up like,
0:51:02 is it really possible to tell really good stories
0:51:03 in a decentralized way?
0:51:05 And I was like, you know, it’s funny you say that
0:51:07 because you acquired Lucasfilm,
0:51:10 and we talked about Star Wars like this franchise
0:51:11 that was created out by one person.
0:51:15 And after that, many people took over and extended the canon
0:51:16 and did different things at the stories.
0:51:20 But there’s actually a pre-story that no one talks about,
0:51:24 which is that Star Wars itself is oral myth and storytelling
0:51:26 that’s been propagated over centuries.
0:51:28 Right, yeah, based on these hero story archetypes.
0:51:31 Exactly, like the Cambelian myths and the archetypes,
0:51:33 exactly the Jungian ideas.
0:51:36 And that bubbled up into what became Star Wars,
0:51:38 which now has become, there’s a canon,
0:51:40 and then that went beyond canon.
0:51:43 And then we went back to a new canon and it’s like continuing.
0:51:45 And so if you think about the NFT aspect,
0:51:47 like this is very empowering for people
0:51:48 and you could add value that way.
0:51:50 This relates back to my pop art thing
0:51:52 and also the best parts of NFT art,
0:51:53 which is this permissionless thing
0:51:54 that I was leaning into with my canvases.
0:51:57 You know, this notion that you can kind of take something
0:51:59 that has a powerful effect in the world,
0:52:01 like a Campbell’s soup can or whatever,
0:52:04 that has a cultural effect that you live in and live with.
0:52:07 And you can work with that and make expressions of your own.
0:52:09 I mean, that’s kind of what Andy Wall did, right, in a way.
0:52:12 And there was no kickback to Heinz,
0:52:13 but in a way there was an attention kickback
0:52:15 or a kind of valuation, a branding kickback maybe,
0:52:17 eventually, because it’s like the
0:52:20 the notion of the candle soup can is like, is retroactively.
0:52:23 But I think there could be a more nuanced ecosystem
0:52:25 around defining where value is added in that exchange.
0:52:25 That’s right.
0:52:27 I do want to ask you a question about like,
0:52:30 where you think generative art and blockchains intersect.
0:52:32 I think we get to a little bit of a problem here
0:52:34 with like term definitions as well.
0:52:37 Because like, I understand the broader definition
0:52:39 of a generative piece is where you set up a protocol,
0:52:40 you put something through a protocol,
0:52:42 and it has a series of outputs.
0:52:44 And those outputs are artworks, right?
0:52:48 But I think generative art now has come to mean, colloquially,
0:52:50 like a particular aesthetic, actually,
0:52:51 that is not about the process.
0:52:52 Oh, you’re right.
0:52:54 It’s rather about like, oh, this looks sort of like
0:52:55 an abstract shape.
0:52:56 It has a gradient to it.
0:52:58 Yeah, you’re right.
0:53:00 I find that trope, unfortunately, a little dull,
0:53:02 because this is where the homogenization question comes in
0:53:04 and it actually starts to get really boring.
0:53:07 But the notion of like artists setting up protocols
0:53:09 and having outputs, and that being a methodology,
0:53:10 that I find super interesting.
0:53:11 I agree.
0:53:12 So I would say there’s three layers.
0:53:14 So one is the generative as like,
0:53:16 you actually have a beginning of something,
0:53:19 and it sets up a protocol, and it creates a certain output.
0:53:20 And there’s a dynamic nature.
0:53:22 I mean, the OG Crystals project that evolves
0:53:24 is by definition generative.
0:53:26 And a lot of PFB projects are also generative by definition,
0:53:28 even though that’s maybe not what you think of
0:53:30 of generative art, because this is a by necessity thing
0:53:31 as well, right?
0:53:33 If you want to make a collection of a thousand things,
0:53:35 you’re not going to design every single one from scratch,
0:53:35 the same one.
0:53:38 You make up a protocol, and then it produces a thousand of them.
0:53:39 That I would argue is a different definition,
0:53:41 because this comes to the debate between customization
0:53:44 and configuration, which is there is something
0:53:45 that’s truly generative.
0:53:47 It’s like unknown what the output’s going to be.
0:53:49 Some of the PFB projects fall in this category, not all,
0:53:52 but some of them just have even more nuance about it.
0:53:55 It’s actually, in that case, more that you have a set of attributes
0:53:57 that you’re just applying like Crypto Coven,
0:53:59 like each of those witches, they have a very thoughtful,
0:54:01 they’ve actually written some beautiful pieces.
0:54:02 I’ll link them in the show notes
0:54:05 on how they thought about the properties that would manifest
0:54:07 as different people minted the witches
0:54:09 and how they constrain them.
0:54:12 That’s another aspect of that, so I agree with that.
0:54:13 And then there’s a third part, which you’re saying
0:54:16 you’re kind of bored by, and I don’t disagree to some extent,
0:54:18 which is sort of this aesthetic,
0:54:20 where now this is all what generative art looks like.
0:54:22 I personally do love that aesthetic, I have to say.
0:54:23 There’s nothing wrong with the aesthetic.
0:54:24 It’s just a lot of it.
0:54:26 I agree, but there’s Zankan, and there’s really
0:54:30 interesting people who are doing very interesting riffs on it.
0:54:32 Those are the people that immerse to the bubble,
0:54:34 and Helena Sarin, I love her work.
0:54:37 There’s a lot of artists who work bubbles up in that sense,
0:54:38 and they bring a certain element to it.
0:54:42 But like Solarwit, how would you connect him into this movement?
0:54:44 Well, again, Solarwit is this mid-century artist
0:54:46 who basically designed instructions.
0:54:47 And when you bought an art piece of hers,
0:54:49 you bought the right to perform the instruction,
0:54:51 or even the right to employ somebody to perform the instruction.
0:54:53 So it’s kind of an algorithm that you buy,
0:54:54 which is really amazing.
0:54:57 These are for wall drawings in the case of Solarwit,
0:54:59 and like coincidentally,
0:55:01 they look like what we think of as generative art.
0:55:03 Like long e-aesthetic.
0:55:06 Yeah, it’s based on kind of vectors and gradients and lines
0:55:07 and patterns and stuff like that.
0:55:09 So it has this kind of abstract element
0:55:11 that reminds us of what we think of as generative art now.
0:55:14 But Solarwit, to me, the interesting part is weirdly,
0:55:16 so I’m going to say something maybe controversial here.
0:55:17 Love it.
0:55:19 Like the notion of buying the idea
0:55:22 is the thing that I like about Solarwit.
0:55:25 The way they look on the wall, I mean, fine.
0:55:26 I’m with you.
0:55:27 But like, it’s, you know.
0:55:29 Oh my god, I’m 100% with you, Simon.
0:55:30 In fact, this is a great example
0:55:33 where I think people, and as a collector,
0:55:35 I’m very careful to watch myself
0:55:38 for if I’m falling for the idea of the thing,
0:55:40 and also the actual visual response of the thing.
0:55:42 So sometimes I have to hold myself back
0:55:44 because intellectually,
0:55:46 and definitely that’s a component of my decision-making,
0:55:49 for sure, I have to intellectually respond to it.
0:55:52 Like the visual language, that symbolism, the lore.
0:55:55 But at the same time, I have to have a visual response
0:55:59 inside that I feel something and visual response
0:56:01 that I really want to look at every day.
0:56:04 And that’s incredible and very difficult to capture.
0:56:05 It’s very difficult to capture.
0:56:07 But that’s the Holy Grail of the art experience.
0:56:09 But I do think like, you know, some projects
0:56:11 in the academic, let’s say, conceptual art moment,
0:56:13 which came up in the mid-century, in the ’60s and ’70s,
0:56:15 were explicitly anti-visual, right?
0:56:16 The work didn’t exist.
0:56:19 You were only moved by the pure idea, right?
0:56:20 That was like a kind of aesthetic notion
0:56:22 that came up around conceptualism.
0:56:24 And I mean, the earliest example of that,
0:56:26 that has actually been interestingly revisited
0:56:28 in NFTs actually, is if Klein,
0:56:31 and this moment of the kind of invisible artwork,
0:56:32 he made a piece that was made in French.
0:56:34 And basically, it was one of the first motions
0:56:36 in the late ’50s, where people bought something
0:56:37 that was actually invisible.
0:56:40 And you were only buying the aura as a kind of genre.
0:56:42 Interestingly, an artist, Mitchell Chan,
0:56:44 also revisited that in 2017,
0:56:47 prior to the protocols that became NFTs.
0:56:49 But he designed an immaterial artwork
0:56:51 that was also based on that notion as a history.
0:56:53 Because what felt like at the time,
0:56:55 you were buying when you bought an NFT was very ephemeral.
0:56:57 And that work, for example, I love.
0:57:00 Even though there’s no visual necessarily associated with it,
0:57:04 I’m as moved by it as I am by a very visceral painting.
0:57:06 Sometimes just the idea is the thing that moves you.
0:57:08 Yes, there’s also this thing that happens
0:57:10 with early technologies where people are limited.
0:57:14 They think they don’t see the expressivity that’s possible.
0:57:17 And so they almost go for the most reductionist way
0:57:20 of interpreting that piece and thinking about it.
0:57:23 And that, to bring it back to Generative Art today,
0:57:25 I think we’re gonna see a lot more
0:57:26 very interesting things happen.
0:57:28 One thing I’ll say from a technological perspective,
0:57:30 I ask everybody this question,
0:57:31 because that’s a Generative Art.
0:57:33 Again, for a very long time,
0:57:35 which is what is unique about blockchains?
0:57:38 Generative Art is not native to blockchains as a medium,
0:57:41 but it seems like it’s found its native in blockchains.
0:57:43 And one of the technological answers I heard
0:57:45 from one of the people on our team, Michael Blau,
0:57:47 and a couple of people who made this observation
0:57:48 that at the end of the day,
0:57:51 it was so compute intensive to unfurl the code
0:57:54 and the package and the storage involved.
0:57:55 So there’s something really great
0:57:57 about having this executable on chain
0:58:00 that lets you kind of unfurl these things visually.
0:58:02 So I think it’ll be really fascinating to see
0:58:04 as like the technological constraints get lifted
0:58:07 and we advance blockchain performance, scalability,
0:58:09 everything, what will then become possible
0:58:12 when you can unfurl things online on chain.
0:58:12 Totally.
0:58:14 And so I think we’re gonna see a lot,
0:58:15 like the thing that you’re frustrated by,
0:58:17 which is a sort of generic aesthetic,
0:58:20 I think we’re gonna see a lot more expressivity at that point.
0:58:21 I mean, one of the generative projects
0:58:22 that I really, really love,
0:58:24 that I think falls under your categories as well
0:58:26 of finding it is terraforms by math castles.
0:58:28 I mean, I think that is a project
0:58:30 which really does all of those things.
0:58:31 And it plays with history as well,
0:58:32 because it’s this ASCII component,
0:58:33 it plays with complexity
0:58:35 because of this territory component,
0:58:37 also this notion that you have this kind of metaverse
0:58:40 of terraforms that you can kind of invert
0:58:42 and participate in on different levels.
0:58:43 Like all of that, I think it’s like, again,
0:58:45 pushing the medium of generative art
0:58:48 to something like beyond just an output of an algorithm
0:58:49 that is really boring.
0:58:52 So last question for you, another recurring theme,
0:58:53 especially with your own history,
0:58:54 just come full circle of where we started,
0:58:55 where we’ve been talking.
0:58:59 So you have kind of traveled from this legacy
0:59:01 to digital art world.
0:59:03 What are some of the things,
0:59:06 if you were to tell people on the legacy side
0:59:07 about the digital side,
0:59:10 and then the vice versa for the digital world
0:59:11 trying to understand that legacy world,
0:59:13 what would you sort of say as a person
0:59:15 who travels between both of those worlds?
0:59:17 I think about it a lot because I do exactly that.
0:59:20 And I value those communities as much as each other.
0:59:22 I think they’re both really compelling places to be
0:59:24 and to care about culture and to make things
0:59:27 and to learn about things and to collect things.
0:59:29 So I would say speaking to a legacy person
0:59:31 about the digital art world,
0:59:33 I would say take the time to get to know somebody
0:59:36 who’s passionate about what is going on there
0:59:39 and don’t start with the New York Times or whatever.
0:59:41 Don’t just look at what you see first
0:59:43 and come with your priors and biases.
0:59:46 Embrace the learning curve that is the exciting moment
0:59:47 of getting to know somebody’s passion
0:59:50 and why they think this project is interesting
0:59:51 and that project is boring.
0:59:52 And what would you say specifically
0:59:54 about crypto and blockchain art to that same?
0:59:57 Well, one of the challenges I’ve always had
0:59:58 with addressing the legacy art world
1:00:00 with crypto and blockchain art
1:00:02 is that people in the legacy world
1:00:04 hear the word crypto, hear the word blockchain
1:00:06 and think, A, too complex.
1:00:08 I’m not part of that community.
1:00:09 I don’t understand the technology.
1:00:11 Therefore, it’s too much work to engage.
1:00:12 And two, they also have a whiff
1:00:14 of kind of a scandal around it or a swindle.
1:00:16 To a lot of art world people,
1:00:18 that’s really like a red flag for bullshit.
1:00:20 You know, so like they just don’t want to see that.
1:00:23 So I would also say this is like a little avant-garde community
1:00:25 that has its own aesthetic dimensions.
1:00:27 Yes, there’s a kind of a learning curve to understanding it.
1:00:29 But honestly, in the art world,
1:00:30 there’s always a bit of a learning curve.
1:00:32 You have to study art for several years
1:00:33 to kind of really get into histories
1:00:34 of the avant-garde and whatever.
1:00:36 And that’s a rewarding process.
1:00:37 People stay there because they love that.
1:00:40 They love to get into those complicated discourses and histories.
1:00:43 So there’s actually a lot of rewards for legacy art people
1:00:44 if they would kind of take the jump.
1:00:45 And then what would you say on the flip side?
1:00:47 For both the digital artists,
1:00:48 undershame the legacy world
1:00:50 and then specifically for crypto.
1:00:51 Yeah. So digital artists,
1:00:52 understanding the legacy world,
1:00:54 I think there’s a lot more continuity there
1:00:55 than they might imagine, right?
1:00:57 I think that often around these worlds,
1:00:59 the notion of new things has a high premium.
1:01:01 And I think understanding histories
1:01:04 that actually have played into those is kind of undervalued.
1:01:06 So I would say to those people,
1:01:07 and I actually often do this,
1:01:08 oh, you’re really interested in this artist
1:01:10 that made this kind of digital artwork.
1:01:13 Here’s this legacy art person who you probably never heard of,
1:01:15 who did something like Solar Word or whatever
1:01:17 that resonates with exactly that gesture.
1:01:19 And they’re often really charmed by that, you know?
1:01:20 And by the way, you’re not saying that in,
1:01:22 I’m assuming this in a pedantic way of,
1:01:25 oh, like grumpy, like, oh, that happened before.
1:01:28 It’s more understand some of the previous movements
1:01:30 because it might inform and inspire you.
1:01:31 Yeah. I’m a pedagogue sometimes too.
1:01:32 So I have to like watch my tone,
1:01:35 but the situation is more like, you love this,
1:01:36 you’ll also love this.
1:01:37 Lusters of interest.
1:01:39 Exactly. It’s like an Amazon recommendation
1:01:40 or something like that.
1:01:41 And that’s about sharing passion again.
1:01:43 That’s a beautiful thing.
1:01:44 And then on the crypto specific side,
1:01:46 what would you say to that, you know, group,
1:01:49 that is digital thinking about the legacy artwork?
1:01:51 Well, I would do a more nuanced version of the same thing
1:01:53 where I say, oh, you’re interested in the history
1:01:55 of networked artworks based on this particular asset form.
1:01:57 You know, there’s this amazing group of people
1:02:00 that were making things for cable networks in the 90s and 80s,
1:02:01 you know? Isn’t that incredible?
1:02:04 Look at this porta pack art that was created around this thing.
1:02:06 And again, it’s about encouraging
1:02:08 and getting the kind of infectiousness
1:02:10 of the love that comes at the core of those projects.
1:02:13 Well, I think that’s a beautiful note to end on, Simon.
1:02:13 Yes.
1:02:15 This has been a fun conversation.
1:02:18 And I’m so excited to see more of your work.
1:02:21 The next thing I’m doing is building a big project about space.
1:02:23 I’m looking at the kind of space networks
1:02:26 and the way that people are imagining about building an outer space.
1:02:28 I’m building an augmented reality work
1:02:31 that is based on a sculpture of a megastructure
1:02:33 that will hang in the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand,
1:02:35 but will hopefully travel in the future as well.
1:02:38 And that is actually based on the work of a company as well.
1:02:41 I love it because it’s going all the way from the outer worlds,
1:02:43 the inner worlds to like external like space worlds.
1:02:45 Exactly. And technological paradigms
1:02:48 enabling new types of culture and worlds.
1:02:49 It’s like a totally different kind of world building.
1:02:53 Well, thank you so much for joining this episode of Web3 with A6 and Zee.
1:02:54 Thank you very much.
1:02:57 I’ve been a long time listener, first time caller, I guess, yeah.
1:02:58 Thank you.
1:02:59 Yes, thank you so much.
1:03:07 Thank you for listening to Web3 with A6 and Zee.
1:03:10 You can find show notes with links to resources, books,
1:03:13 or papers discussed, transcripts, and more.
1:03:15 At A6 and Zee Crypto.com.
1:03:19 This episode was produced and edited by Sonal Choksi, that’s me.
1:03:22 The episode was technically edited by our audio editor,
1:03:24 Justin Golden.
1:03:26 Credit also to Moonshot Design for the Art
1:03:29 and all thanks to support from A6 and Zee Crypto.
1:03:31 To follow more of our work and get updates,
1:03:34 resources from us, and from others,
1:03:37 be sure to subscribe to our Web3 Weekly newsletter.
1:03:40 You can find it on our website at A6 and Zee Crypto.com.
1:03:43 Thank you for listening and for subscribing.
1:03:44 Let’s go.
1:03:47 [MUSIC PLAYING]
1:03:49 you