The a16z Show - The Art of Technology, The Technology of Art

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

We know that technology has changed art, and that artists have evolved with every new technology — it’s a tale as old as humanity, moving from cave paintings to computers. Underlying these movements are endless debates around inventing versus remixing; between commercialism and art; between mainstream canon and fringe art; whether we’re living in an artistic monoculture now (the answer may surprise you); and much much more. So in this new episode featuring Berlin-based contemporary artist Simon Denny -- in conversation with a16z crypto editor in chief Sonal Chokshi -- we discuss all of the above debates. We also cover how artists experimented with the emergence of new technology platforms like the web browser, the iPhone, Instagram and social media; to how generative art found its “native” medium on blockchains, why NFTs; and other art movements. Denny also thinks of entrepreneurial ideas -- from Peter Thiel's to Chris Dixon's Read Write Own -- as an "aesthetic"; and thinks of technology artifacts (like NSA sketches!) as art -- reflecting all of these in his works across various mediums and contexts. How has technology changed art, and more importantly, how have artists changed with technology? How does art change our place in the world, or span beyond space? It's about optimism, and seeing things anew... all this and more in this episode. Resources: Find Denny on Twitter: https://x.com/dennnnnnnnnyFind Sonal on Twitter: https://x.com/smc90 Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Artists have been dealing with technological changes and expressing the visceral feelings of inhabiting new technological moments for a very long time. As a person who is looking at the history of artists designing for particular mediums, you could do stuff with mobile and social that you couldn't do before. I think the notion that Pop Art proposed that your role as an artist is to describe how it feels to occupy that contemporary world. And you're not an ethical agent. It's just like, I go into the street and I see a giant. and billboard and it does something to my heart, and that is culture. When they look at NFTs for the first time, I think a lot of them saw outsider art. One of the interesting things about blockchain as a medium, I think, is that the cultural asset

and the financial container is the same thing. Throughout history, art has helped us make sense of the most exciting and mystifying technology of the day. And simultaneously, technology has constantly rewritten how we express our creativity. The Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was influenced by his new understanding of anatomy. Meanwhile, the industrial era was welcomed by images of foreign machines that would forever change society. And cameras, then browsers, then phones, gave artists new canvases to create with. Over and over, art and technology have evolved hand in hand.

And of course, today is no different. In fact, artists are not just creating work about the blockchain, but also, on the blockchain, with Web3 changing the way artists can monetize their work. This episode, originally published on our sister podcast Web3 with A16Z, features Simon Denny, a global artist inspired by entrepreneurial culture whose cutting-edge work exists where, once again, art and technology collide. Simons is done with longtime A16C podcast host, So No Talk Seat. So if you like this episode, be sure to check out more episodes of Web3 with A16C.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this episode that itself is at the intersection of art and technology. Welcome to Web 3 with A6 and Z, a show about building the next air of the internet from the team at A6 and Z Crypto. We're excited to be back with all new episodes. I'm Sonal, editor-in-chief at A6NCrypto, and today's episode is all about how technology has changed art and how artists change with technology. from the emergence of the browser, the iPhone, and social media to generative art and blockchains to NFTs. We also discuss debates that seem to come up in every art and tech shift, including between inventing versus remixing, between commercialism and art, between mainstream canon and outsider art, whether we're living in an artistic monoculture now, and much, much more.

Our special guest is Simon Denny, and we recorded this live in London a few days after we opened our London office, which is fitting since Denny is a global artist based in Berlin, but has shown his work in various countries Biennallis, museums, and galleries, including a metaverse landscape solo show called Reed Righton at Altman Seagull Gallery in San Francisco last year. As a reminder, none of the following is investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see A6NZ.com slash disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investment.

The first half of our hallway style conversation tours through the evolution of art with technology, and the second half goes deeper into blockchains and art. But we begin briefly with Denny's tech journey and how he thinks of entrepreneurship as an aesthetic. Obviously, this is a crypto show, and it's also a technology show. I mean, crypto is all about technology. One of the reasons I'm in this world is it's a very multidisciplinary field. It brings together economics. It brings together philosophy.

It brings together philosophy. it brings together security, cryptography, like there's so many layers to crypto. Yeah. And I definitely want to focus in on the art aspect. Tell me a little bit more about your actual practice today too. And then we'll go back to the evolution. At the moment, today I work across lots of different media in lots of different contexts.

So I make both installations for museums and art galleries. I paint as well. But I also am very involved in crypto and crypto art. So I design NFT projects. But I guess maybe where I really specialize is I make things that join the museum world with the crypto. world. So I'm interested in the history of art and artists who make for new technologies as they emerged to kind of explore what's possible on them that wasn't possible on other platforms previous. But I personally got really interested in people, the people who were making the

platforms, the people who were designing the systems. Because these were new systems, we were experiencing them, we were feeling different ways, doing different things on them. One of the first times I encountered entrepreneurial culture, for example, that just inspired me unendingly, right? Because it was so different than the attitude of my artist peers that I encountered. They were excited. They were bullies. foolish about the future. You know, in my world at the time, I think it's actually different now, but at the time in my art world, it was very common to be incredibly critical in cynical. Cynicism was the go-to. And I get that culture. I kind of love that culture. It's sort of like

indie rock or something like that, you know, but then I encountered all these incredible optimists. And I was like, wow, this is a force that I can't understand culturally. Oh, that's fascinating. I never thought about that you're coming from a cynical, kind of default cynical art world and then being like totally inspired by the optimism. Yeah. Because I feel like those of us in Silicon Valley take that for granted. Yeah, I guess I'm really attracted to value systems, aesthetically, because I'm an artist and I think visually and culturally, that I don't know everything about and I don't completely understand. So I started to go to technology conferences. And the first thing that I did is I went to a prominent conference in Munich called DLD. And I made an artwork

about DLD in 2013, a one-year history of the conference a year later. I made a maze that people would walk through in this museum space, just down the road from the conference, where there was a graphic panel for every talk panel, basically. Interesting. So you would look at pull courts that I'd pulled out from the entire conference and encounter things that Jack Dorsey was saying. Yeah. The things that the founder of Wikipedia was saying, Parveld Duroff was saying.

Like, interesting entrepreneurs that they were able to gather there and the things they were saying about the world. And it was kind of overwhelming. Sounds really immersive, too. It was super immersive. But very digital. I also leaned into the design interfaces that were contemporary at the time, which look really ancient now, which is really interesting too, because it was like iOS when it was

schoolomorphism. Right. So it was like all of these bookshelves as staged. as whatever digital buttons. And that was the kind of graphic language I used. It was like cartoon font that looks very strange. But it gave this overall sense of this really vibrant community, which I hadn't really encountered before as an artist.

Again, the art world's a little different in terms of culture. And that was one of the first times that I was like, wow, this is incredible. There are people here who are really optimistic, super excited about the future. Yes, they're critical thinkers as well, but they really want to build something. And that was the first time I encountered that culture.

Tell me a little bit about how you actually came as an artist to the technology world. So, yeah, I grew up in New Zealand. I went to university at the University of Auckland to first study art. Like, that was the thing that I fell in love with as a painter when I was younger. New Zealand's amazing, but it's also very small and quite remote. And I learned about how big the kind of contemporary art world was, which made me want to go study in Germany. Germany is a really special country for contemporary art. Every little town has a major contemporary art museum, which is really unusual.

In the post-war period, it's been a really important place for lots of different artists internationally to kind of do museum shows early. There's also an incredible education system there. So I went to art school then in Frankfurt at this very special school called the Stedlschule in the mid-2000s. And at that time, the director of the school was also the director of the Venice Biennale

and all the teachers that I was learning from there were these international artists that I saw on the cover of all the magazines that I was reading. So it was a really exciting hub of international practice. And there I got super interested in the history of technology and art because I moved there in 2007,

the year the iPhone came out. And like, I moved with a laptop, didn't have an iPhone because it was a brand new, very expensive thing. But we were all just starting to use social media, like Web 2, in a really interesting way. And of course, because I moved away from all my friends and family, that was one of the things that really kept me connected. Laptop I used for education, watching movies, but also keeping in top of friends in a really intense way. And so a bunch of artists that were studying at that time got really interested in this new wave of like technological stuff that was enabling a different type of engagement. And Boulinza, For those who don't know Germany, it's like Berlin's, I guess, a place where a lot of contemporary artists live and work.

And there were like this little hub of people that were really interested in the history of contemporary art, the history of art made for digital platforms, like web art art from the 1990s, which is a very interesting specialist field. So when browsers came about, when the World Wide Web started, when people started using Mosaic and Netscape, there were artists designing for that as a specific medium. Yes. I want to go back to how when you were in art school, you and your cohort came across the iPhone for the. the first time. Oh my God. And you don't necessarily immediately think it viscerally about the iPhone as like a creative medium, the way one thinks about caves for cave painting or paper for drawing or canvas for painting or LED lights for certain kind of electronic art installations at mass scale or whatever, neon. It's funny that you mention that because it's like just sort of like this little tiny, like it's a device. It's a computing device. So can you tell me a little bit about how

you and your cohort at the time sort of experience the advent of the iPhone is like the moment that tipped into your interest and the intersection of technology and art? I mean, I think it was a conflation of a few different things that I was really compelled by when the iPhone came out. One was the really strong marketing component to that. I think I was particularly impressed by that. Like the Steve Jobs moment was very compelling. The narrative part of it?

The narrative part of that. You know, like the way that Steve and other entrepreneurs around him at the time seemed to be offering a really cohesive vision of the world, but also the aesthetics. There was a kind of a design hegemony that got installed. But also as a person who was looking at the history of artists designing for particular mediums, you could do stuff with mobile and social that you couldn't do before, right? Artists had been making amazing artworks for browsers. There's an incredible history of that.

They'd even been making artworks that dealt with the culture of companies. There was an amazing browser-based group in the 90s who were called E-Toy. And E-Toy's was a real company. Right, I remember that, actually. And E-Toy started before E-Toys. But they tended to be quite antagonistic. A lot of browser-based work from the 90s came from artists who were really resistant to the commercial aspects of the internet.

They were really anti-commerce. They were sort of curious about the internet for just communication. Exactly. And I think they really idealized moments where it was a more collective experience and the commercial part seemed to be a difficult thing. But ETOI, I think, was an amazing collective because they were completely anonymous. And they basically ended up coordinating a DDoS attack on ETOI, the real company. That's like activist art in some ways.

Exactly. Activist art was really close to that browser-based work. Right. Now, me and my cohort were less anti. Like, I'd come up already through a commercial art world that was offline. I really valued the work that commercial agents were doing to make the work known. and I didn't have a problem with that. And I think a lot of the people who were using social media early were also okay with the idea of promoting themselves.

So we were less against. We designed things that didn't necessarily have this kind of anti-commercial message. I mean, there's always been this long history and tension, as you obviously know, like artists and the commercial aspect. I mean, Andy Warhol is the most obvious example that comes to mind for that. And it's interesting because we'll get to how this may play out with the NFT world. You talked about the early days of Web 2, browser-based art is maybe the moment in your age. It's like Web 1 up in a way. Web 1, browser base, web 2, some of those Instagram, social and mobile.

One of the greatest examples I think of people making artwork for social media plus mobile was this work that a friend of mine, Amalia Ullman did a little bit later, like in the early 2010s. And this was when Instagram was like really the medium that everybody was using in the art world, at least, in our art world. And we were all posting our exhibition photos on there, posting selfies of ourselves, whatever. But she was like using it in a different way where she really occupied this proto-influencer idiot. She started taking photos of her, and then gradually over time, like, her image changed, right? It was, you know, less kind of art world girl, more kind of like basic, quote-unquote-looking person. Like, you know, her makeup was more extreme. Her body became more extreme.

And then at one point, she was announcing that she was going to have surgery on her body. Whoa. And then we, as a community of artists that knew her, were like, wow, Amalia's, like really changed. Like, this is, like, really super difficult. And then she had these incredible pre-imposed things of an operation or whatever. Yeah. And then it came out that it was all a performance. And we were all completely jupped by the whole thing.

It was really, really believable. And again, it used all of these emergent properties of that medium to really do something that said something about the way that the world was going. Yes, that sounds like performance art. I actually think I heard about this. Right. Exactly. And speaking of the specific properties of that medium, you also mentioned the word proto-influencer, which I think is very interesting. Because obviously there is this element of influencers today on Instagram and beyond in social media and influencer culture.

So this is sort of pre, that sort of phase. It was emergent with it, I would say. And I think this is what artists are good at doing. They're good at seeing emergent properties that are happening, both in visual conventions, like how photos are looking, because that was another thing. Like visually, there was a particular style to these images, right? That came from the hardware, came from the way that the phone looked, came from the lighting that was common in a bedroom or whatever.

All of this also was a kind of an aesthetic layer to it. It was also constrained by the technology at the time, right? Yeah, exactly. And all of those things come together to make. make a particular medium possible, including the network, right? Which I think is also interesting if we're thinking in the future about NFT. When you say the network, do you mean the network as in the community around her? Or the network of her followers and her social graph?

Or what do you mean by network? I think there's a few different layers to the network thing. The performance, if you categorize it as a performance piece, happened first to her friends that knew her because the strangeness of experiencing that change was the thing that made the effect, right? But that network of friends also had a second-order network of people that knew of her. So this classic social network kind of social graph world but also the hardware, the technological layer of the network

where you couldn't have these distributed performative moments without iPhones, without satellites, without cables. So it's really like quite a lot of things coming together in this word network, I think. Interesting. So then Simon, on that note, what are some of the other milestones for your experience and evolution as an artist in the technological moments? I mean, artists have been dealing with technological changes and expressing the visceral feelings of inhabiting new technological moments for a very long time.

Surrealism and data is an early 20th century moment that dealt a lot with the changes both in advertising language and mediums around communication. Surrealism really leaned into the illustrative aspect of that. Right. But like data and stuff, artists like Picabia and people making images of machines, of post-industrial revolution kind of worlds, a lot of early modernism is depicting machinic worlds. When you then jump, let's say, to the post-war period in the 1960s,

70s, you started to have groups of artists around pop art and neopopop, dealing again with the language of advertising and ambivalent school commercial culture, artists like Robert Rauschenberg, who was a kind of proto-pop artist, working with people like in collectives like EAT, the experiments in art and technology, which happened in dialogue with Bell Labs at the time. Oh, I didn't know about that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not an expert, but there was this really amazing moment where these very prominent people were in dialogue with people in Bell Labs.

And so they made experimental, technologically enabled sculptures. There was one Rauschenberg piece that I'm thinking of, actually, I don't know if you made it an EAT or not, but it was like a bed of mud that was bubbling, that then had a sensory component on it as well. Like really amazing kind of machine and object-based work, but also a lot of kind of theater-based experiments and performances, which were also done with early computer systems.

There was also people being given, for example, early porta packs, which was the kind of first video equipment by Sony. So Sony was really involved in donating to artist groups, And there was an artist group that was in New York that was really adjacent to the Whole Earth Catalog and the Stuart Brand world, right? There was another magazine called Radical Software, which was produced at the time as well. And Radical Software was run by an early artist corporation called Rain Dance Corporation. They incorporated themselves. And they had a space in New York where several porta-packs were that artists could come and use.

They would make footage. They would bring the footage back. And then they would make artist libraries that you could pull as stock footage and make montages from. So that was also like a really interesting early moment that in. by me a lot. And out of that group came early experiments in broadcast television and cable network television. There was an amazing collective called Top Value Television, and they, for example, produced one of the most amazing artists made documentaries that was then screened on cable television at the time looking at Madison Avenue and advertising producers, but also a Nixon

convention. They went and made a kind of political documentary. And then, of course, there's like more famous examples like Warhol television and stuff like that and cable networks. When you said that the example of the early stock library type of idea that people could take and that you said that inspired your work. What really stuck in my mind about that is like that's like an analog version of remix culture. Absolutely. And so tell me about how it inspired your work specifically. Well, I'm a bit of historian and I actually made a show here in London in 2012 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the ICA, where I managed to convince the broadcasting network who were changing over from analog broadcasting to digital to give us one of the old

analog broadcasting machines. And I dumped that in the middle of the Institute for Contemporary Art and put all of these libraries of old network videos made by people like Randolphin Corporation and their peers around in a video library where people could watch them. And one of the things that I found in an archive of theirs was a way of categorizing different types of tapes. They made early data versions representing what was being made in those libraries. So I found those resonant with what people were doing on YouTube, what other artist peers of mine were making, which were kind of remixed things and appropriated things. A bunch of my work is very liberal with ownership. I believe that one doesn't invent something. I believe that one finds things and combines them with things. So I prefer the notion

of like a value add than like a kind of invention. So I don't believe that you can invent things. This is why I think movements like Pop-Up was so profound because the direct appropriative touch of making an image of a Campbell's Soup can and claiming that as an original thing, recontextualizing it was one of the biggest things. And I think sampling culture and all of that stuff like builds on the back of that assumption. I find that so personally fascinating too. So we talked about some of the pre-influences in the technological side. Let's talk about some of of the post-influences post-iphone. Are there any other technological moments? Yeah. So I think the next big moment in the mid-2010s, I was lucky enough to do the Venice Bienale Pavilion for New Zealand.

The Venice Biennale is kind of like the biggest art show in the world, and there's country-by-country pavilions. So I got to do New Zealand. And in order to do that, it was 2013, 14, I was working on it, and 15 I presented it. I was interested in the WikiLeaks moment at that time. Artists like Trevor Paglan were involved in those communities. So I was sort of peripherally aware of those groups around transparency and stuff like that. When they released all these documents, I found the kind of like clip art on the DoD and internal NSA documents. I found them really aesthetically surprising. Wow. There were these very playful images that were representing kind of very serious things. That's so interesting. I never thought about that. You had literally like a magic card

standing in for like a big offensive that was looking in on everybody's privacy or whatever. But I was so interested that I really wanted to find some concrete example of who was making those images. Who were those artists, right? And I found this one guy's LinkedIn page, this guy called David Dachicord and David Dachicourt was self-proclaimed on his LinkedIn, this is again social media art in a way he claimed that he was the creative director of the NSA for the 20

years preceding the leaks and he had a really big Adobe platform portfolio of his work on it as well so he had designs he'd done for the NSA slip mats, mouse pads training posters, all these things and I made copies of all of them I made giant interpretations of his work I changed medium from them

so I made sculptures out of things that were diagrams And I situated them in this library right in the middle of Venice next to the Dauja's Palace, which was designed by San Savino, this very important architect then. And that is a very ornate room that has images of druids and wizards and all these fantasy things that went into Tintoretto and all these artists that were working in that period. And I put his work alongside their work. And there were these crazy synergies, bearded men, strange books. Fantasy imagery that was throughout the NSA material in clip art form was very close and resonant

with these kind of like Renaissance images. And also, I guess the key thing was it was a performative piece because Dashiqot didn't know that I did this work. I was about to ask you if he knew and if you talked to him. So it was all appropriated. And the only moment that he found out that that happened was when the Guardian called him on the opening day. And said, hey, did you know, there's a bunch of stuff with your work? Where did he react, by the way? I think he was a little confused.

He's like, what is this guy doing with this? Yeah, I mean, it was really important to him at the time. And this came out in the Guardian article, too, when the Guardian spoke to him. But it was really important that he was attributed, which he was. his phone number was on there just like it was on the web. That was part of my gesture. And I think he found it really interesting, of course, as the gesture was a little bit like performing something like what the NSA was performing

on all of us, but on artistic work. And I think that was again complicated by the fact that I was from New Zealand. This is US culture in a certain sense. So I think there was a lot of really interesting tensions around ownership. Right. And it's funny because the technological underpinnings are fascinating to me, because you said briefly that in a way, him putting that he was a creative director for the NSA on his LinkedIn profile,

almost performance art. Exactly. And then the other point is that these materials you're talking about these artifacts were leaked online. Yeah. And I think this brings up

the kind of art networks that preserve and take care of culture. I think they take care of things that are otherwise not seen and not cared for. So I really like to act in that domain. But of course, that's a sort of object-based medium in itself.

You want to go into a room in a museum and you want to have a rich experience in there. Translating browser-based work into a projector in a room doesn't always work so well, right? Right. Did you create it for the BNO?

I created it for the Biennale. The way that it works is you get commissioned, you can kind of do whatever you like. You work with the curator. The government of the country sponsors that. And then the Biennale acts as a sort of presenter in a way. Were there any other technology milestones on the way to crypto and blockchain art? I'll say one more. So I mentioned this piece that I made where I was looking at entrepreneurs through DLD,

through going and hanging out at conferences. That was really inspiring aesthetically and everything for me. That's so funny to hear about entrepreneurship as an aesthetic. Yeah, I love it. And so this is the thing I leaned into the Berlin of that time as well. I made a series of works about young startups. So, for example, I took a wide roundup, like top 10 startups in Berlin, and I made almost like a deal toy meets a gaming computer,

meets a kind of like a piece that might go on a trade fair booth or something like that. And I would make these pop art-inspired sculptures that were celebrating the culture of entrepreneurship. That was something that I ended up culminating in a big show that I did also in 2015 at MoMA PS1, which was called The Innovators Dilemma. It was like named after. Clayton Christensen's famous book, yeah. where it brought together a bunch of different projects that are doing in general about entrepreneurship.

I made something about South Korean entrepreneurship. I made a big project about Samsung during those years as well, which looked at their turn to be more global in the 1990s. I also did a really big round of work based on Peter Thiel. It was inspired by a moment in New Zealand where it was realized that Teal was a citizen. And I made a big group of artworks that were based on board gaming and the language of gaming,

which mapped out ideological narratives that came from Peter's world, which is very, very influential in entrepreneurship. So I did a show that was at a small gallery in Auckland and New Zealand, not a kind of big space. But Peter ended up coming there. He ended up seeing the show. We ended up getting in touch after that when he was still based in San Francisco. Right.

And that was, again, this really interesting moment of bringing the way that certain ideas were received in a local space with something that was very influential in the business world and the technology world. I also made artworks about Kim.com, who was this German Finnish entrepreneur, who built a platform called Mega Upload, which was one of the most used piracy network things for downloading like Hollywood content. Yeah.

And he was sued by the US government, I think in 2013, 2012 even maybe. And there was a massive bust on his home, which was a collaboration between the New Zealand Armed Forces and police network and the US. And they tried to extrad him ever since. Of course, we did a cover story on Kim.com at word. That cover story I was very inspired by at the time. And also because he was based in New Zealand. And the whole bust went down in this very glamorous property in Auckland. I have to say he's still living in New Zealand.

I never managed to actually successfully extradite him. And he made other platforms since. I was also watching all of my content on his platform actually at the time. There was another thing. Living in Germany, you couldn't get Netflix at the time. Yeah, we were all pirates at some point in our career, especially if you grew up in any point in the 90s and onward. It was all pre- Netflix.

That was the only way to get things. You remember burning CDs. Oh, of course I remember burning CDs. Exactly. You wouldn't download a car, you know. Well, now I look back on it as a creator. And there's a big difference when you talked about how you were doing literal appropriation art in the case of that NSA artist. That's like a specific performative type of thing.

It's a gesture. Exactly. Now I'm mortified as a creator at how I treated other creators' works when I realized that we just like burn CDs, pass them to our friends. This is like a Web 2 question as well, right, a little bit. Because it's also about like what is promotion, what is popularity, what is attention value worth and where do you monetize that? Burning CDs is a proto expression of that problem, right? You've mentioned a few times actually this tension between our people. art and commercialism, and I want to go back to it. Yeah.

It's quite fascinating. It's a thread in your work. You seem very inspired by advertising culture. Oh my God, yes, yeah. And, like, a lot of people would argue advertising is not art. Yeah. So clearly you fall in this other camp. Yeah.

Tell me more about that. I mean, I think it's also not so unusual within the art worlds that I occupy. But essentially, Pop Art is a really great example because everybody's heard of Warhol. But there's many practices that came in the wake of that big idea and also the scale that he was able to bring to that big idea. I think the notion that Pop Art proposed that your role as an artist is to, describe how it feels to occupy that contemporary world. And you're not an ethical agent.

It's just like, I go into the street and I see a giant billboard and it does something to my heart. And that is culture, right? That is the claim of pop up. That is culture. Yeah. But one thing I do have to ask you about on the advertising and also globalization, so two themes here.

But I think back to like when I used to go to India and I'd see like Bollywood posters, which is its own aesthetic. Yeah, hand painted often. Totally. That actually is a dying art now. But it was an incredible thing to see that art for him, especially in my parents' tiny village. Yeah.

Incredible. It's like this pop of college. color in this kind of almost desert landscape. Yeah, and glamour as well. It's very glamorous. Exactly. Exactly. I edited one of my friends. She's also an author, Virginia Apostrial. She wrote a book called glamour, which actually, it's funny you said the word glamour because it has certain specific connotations to it, which I think is great. But I do have to ask you, Simon, like, do you think there's also this kind of monoculture that's happening because of that

globalization and in that aesthetic? Because I feel, especially in the case of pixel art, that there was a point when everyone got a little too digitally influenced, and everything started looking like the 8-bit thing, and I got very bored of that, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And so I just wonder if you think there's this sort of homogenization happening as well in the aesthetic. Yeah, I guess this is a narrative that comes up from time to time. I mean, it's not only an art that it comes up, right? Right. I mean, Netflix culture is a great example. Netflix culture is a great example, too, but I think people bring it up politically, which is like the most charged context for it. Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. You know, there's these kind of conversations about how homogenous things are becoming because of like the

the speed of travel, the ease of travel, these kinds of things. But I don't really believe that that will ever make a true homogenization. And my understanding of the way that cultures have emerged is they always emerge in hybridization. There is no such thing. Again, this is an originality question, right? Like, there's no such thing as a true original flavor of X or Y. There's no first anything. And there's only kind of encounters.

And I tend to think I'm sort of like an encounters maximalist or something like that. I like that. An Encounters Maximus. I mean, that's something I literally just coined. I love it. We were inventing things on the podcast. That's how we go. But I tend to think that more hybridization is always positive, and I don't believe that this true

homogenization really ever happens. There are kind of trends and moments where certain boringnesses settle into a market or whatever where a lot of people try and do that thing. And yes, I get very bored about that very quickly. Boring homogenous stuff is boring and homogenous. And I think the way that NFTs stratified very quickly in 2021 into particular genres, bored the hell out of me. I mean, this is true in the art, art world as well as the NFT art world.

like expensive things are considered to be important but on the edges of those things I could tell you 10 examples of things that did incredible stuff with the kernels of things that went into those strata but then did something truly amazing on the side of it at the fringes at the side of those movements are always something where there's somebody mixing that

was something that's never been seen before and then that makes something new and I think that's a very old story I also think globalization is a much older story than is often assumed colloquially cultures have been mixing across Eurasia for example for very long, Oh, totally. I love that you pointed out that this kind of intermixing has been happening for

like eons. That's great. There are many examples across the history of art and culture of things that happen on the fringe of those environments that are a little harder to see at the time that certain enthusiasts get really excited about around them as they happen, but don't scale in the same way, don't reach the same price points, don't enter the same museum collections, that are then kind of later looked back on and seen that there's things that happened there that were just super exciting, right? That's fascinating. When I think of even the outsider art movement.

Right. And, you know, this is a very literal interpretation of fringe. And I know what you mean as fringe is more nuanced than that. But I have a piece by Howard Finster. Oh, interesting. It's one of his dinosaurs. It's like this little cardboard cutout dinosaur on like a little platform. Wow.

And he's handwritten in Sharpie, all these biblical verses, like kind of like fire and brimstone. And it's really fascinating because he was an ex-minister. And to me, that's an encounter between like Christian faith and thinking, combined with this encounter with evolution and what it means because it's so bizarre to have biblical verses on a dinosaur. Yeah, that's incredible. It's like so great. Oh, my God, I want one.

Oh, yeah. I think what's really interesting about outsider art in general as a category is really interesting because I think a lot of people that came from the art world that I've been talking about up until now, like the world that kind of circles around museums and art fairs and galleries. When they looked at NFTs for the first time, I think a lot of them saw outsider art, right? Because it was people who were not trained in the art tradition

who were given a certain technological stack, who were then able to create and promote and sell whatever work. And that kind of opened up to a whole lot of creators that were definitely not schooled in the canons. And then lots of super interesting weird stuff happened on the side of those, which I personally found as a wealth of compelling examples of emerging culture. And then they became own kind of homogenizations and canon buildings within that sub-community around NFTs.

And those things I found often a little less interesting. You know what I mean? Yes, I totally agree. I'm about to ask you about blockchains and NFTs in just one more minute. I'm also trying to think of when outsider art becomes establishment in other ways. Henry Darger is a very canonical example.

It's a very strange hierarchy that gets established, especially with the use of the term outsider. It also kind of brand somebody is not legible and included them in the canon. But as an outsider, right? I mean, these tensions are very strange. It's about academy versus not and certain people who are able to say

that's important and that's not and value and where money lies and all these other things that are really interesting around culture. Okay, great. Let's talk now about blockchains and crypto art. So you mentioned all these technological milestones on your way to your evolution as an artist.

Tell me about how you came to blockchain art. Yeah. So, of course, if you're muddling around in Berlin, in the communities that are building new products and new companies in the early mid-2010s, you come across Bitcoin. And the more I dug into Bitcoin culture, the more fascinated I was. Right, right. As somebody who's looking for new aspiring narratives, this notion of sovereign free money, I then started to pay attention to people who were kind of advocating around Exa versus

voice and also self-examined. sovereign. I read the sovereign individual as a book. And then, of course, in Berlin, you heard about Ethereum as it emerged because the Ethereum Foundation was getting set up and started there. So for the 2016 Berlin Biennale, I made my first big piece about crypto. And that was three different fictional trade fair booths based on three different entrepreneurs that were looking at three different narratives that were emerging from blockchain. One of them was Blythe Masters. So Blythe Masters was coming from the banking world, right? She came out of securities in the 1990s. and she made this company at the time called Digital Asset.

I made a big kind of installation about her. I made a big installation about Bilaghi and about 21. Inc. before it was changed or whatever. And then I made a big one about Ethereum and Vitalik. And it was like those three narratives I was looking at at the same time. I made little postage stamps that I worked on with the German postal because I thought postage stamps were both expressions of sovereignty, right? They were also design objects and they were also kind of a currency,

like a parallel currency. That's also, by the way, fascinating about postal stamps is that they are expression of sovereignty, but they're also like ways to get out. They move objects around the world. Exactly. It's so fascinating. Right. Exactly. So I thought that were like the perfect scoprull-proof form for work about this emergent network. So far you described how you were using blockchain and crypto as inspiration for your art, the subject matter of the art. But now blockchain as a medium, let's talk about that. Yeah. So there were a few people at that time who were starting to design kind of web-based art like browser art that I described earlier or web 2 art, let's say. that was based on coding on emergent blockchains, right? So there was a project called Ascribe,

which was actually something Vitalik worked on as well at the time, which was an early system that tried to put artworks and linked them to the Bitcoin network. There was a conference in 2014 at 7-on-7 that Rhizom did, which was connected to the new museum, where they pair an artist with a technologist. And at the time, they designed something based on colored coin, which was essentially an NFT.

And then I started to learn about other projects. I'd learned about Terra Zero. which was a really interesting project, which was a group that were proposing to make trees own themselves as entities. Trees own themselves. Yeah, exactly. They were like, look, if you can do a blockchain system based on Ethereum, if you can have smart contracts,

then why not give the sovereignty of ownership to the trees? Why not have a commercial forest own the produce of its own work? I was fascinated by that. So I curated a little show in 2018 at a space in Berlin called the Schenkel Pavilion, and that was about artists that were doing these experiments. So also included in that was Crypto Kitties. So I don't know if you remember this, but Christie's did a weird little collaboration with consensus where they sold a hardware wallet with a specially designed Cryptokiri on it,

where Gilei Twardowski, who was the guy who invented the visual aspect of the CryptoKitties project, so not the kind of mechanics, but the actual cats. Made a special one, and they sold it as a hardware wallet, which was also a specially designed in an auction. And it was big news in the New York Times. And so I included that in the show. I included Tierra Zero, this forest project in the show. I included other artists like Kia Kee, Croydler, who was also working at Ragnosis at the time, doing interesting designs for that.

And the whole show was set up. The curatorial premise was also based on blockchains because I didn't want to decide everybody in the show. I asked somebody else to choose two things and then they would choose two things. And then we did a transparent publishing of all of the decision makers on the wall as a curatorial protocol. So you turned curation, the act and art of curation itself, into a form of art that actually also showed the process behind the outcomes. Exactly. Transparency, networks, all of these things that were kind of so important to blockchain, decentralized decision-making, right? And so, yeah, we had this kind of protocol that we designed

where everybody knew who picked them for being in the show and I wasn't making all the decisions. And that show was called Proof-of-Work, but that was way before NFTs were a thing. Yes, and before we talk more about NFTs, what do you think is unique about blockchains as a medium for art? You know, one of the interesting things about blockchain as a medium, I think, is that the cultural asset

and the financial container is the same thing. Yeah. Right. That's sort of true in art in a way. But literally as an NFT, those things are much more structurally combined. Right. And Web 2 art and like art design for social networks, they're also like networked objects. They're connected to other things. And settlement is immediate, right? I mean, one of the things that artists got really, really excited about with the emergence of blockchain art and this is really going into the NFT moment now. But the idea that you could have settlement immediately on sale and that you wouldn't have to have an intermediary because, you know, gallerists and whatever, it's very complicated system. Yes. So the simplicity and the directness of that was really attractive, but also this notion of resale royalties. The idea that you would sell something on a secondary market and immediately the original creator would receive some compensation for that, that's been something that the art world's been dreaming about since the 70s. There's a conceptual art piece by a very famous curator, Cis, Seiglob, that he did in the early 1970s called the artist contract. So let's talk about NFTs specifically.

So we've obviously been dancing around this entire conversation. But I think crypto art is bigger than just NFTs, to be clear. Agreed. And blockchain as a medium is bigger than just NFTs. So we agree on that. But let's talk about NFT specifically, because that's a thing that really captured the mainstream attention and actually maybe even catapulted crypto into much more mainstream awareness. And to be clear, I mean this well beyond the financialization aspects. Like I'm talking about it as an artistic thing. This includes multiple auction houses, like doing NFT auctions, like being participating in it, multiple people who only came to crypto for the first time and set up a wallet in order to buy NFTs.

Who knew? Of course we knew that culture would be the thing that brings people to technology. I mean, retroactively, it looks logical, but I don't think that was a given. Oh, interesting. Tell me why. Well, I don't know. I mean, I think the moment that changed from me from knowing about a small group of people messing around with blockchain, making art with it, to like the post-people auction moment. I guess that's maybe like the people. People is the right thing. Pee and Peebe and Pee-B. Yeah. Right, exactly. BV and PV. And that was also in cohorts with the auction houses. I mean, BIPA was not an unknown entity before that auction, but he was known in the graphic arts world, right? Like, he was a very, very well-known figure there. But then with the signal from the blue chip art world, you know, from those auction houses, I think those are the things that created that change in awareness.

Yeah, say more. Like, why you think it wasn't a given that this would happen. Well, if I think back to Web 2, for example, I don't think culture was the thing that brought that into, like, mainstream awareness and usage. I mean, unless you can't kind of associate. as a layer of culture, which I guess one could, and I guess I do in a way. But it's not high culture. Like, you didn't learn about Facebook or MySpace because of an exponent art. Whereas I think a lot of people's mainstream adoption and understanding of Web3 came around that moment, which was associated with an art and an artist. Web 1 also didn't happen like that. You know, you didn't hear about the internet because you heard of some artist piece being made by an artist. No, I agree. I totally agree with you. You've said multiple times about this conversation that

culture emerges. And so what do you think about this moment made this, like the time? I'm like, why now? Well, I mean, I think auction houses are always looking for new things, new markets. They've constantly done that. You know, before the 1970s and 80s, they didn't sell contemporary art. For example, they only sold old masters. So moving into new areas is kind of like a textbook thing. But then DeFi summer came and there was all this liquidity created in the ecosystem from people

who'd been successful, which then they started to filter into these cultural assets, right? And I think that was what built up to the crypto. Yes, but why they art? Because they could have also funneled that liquidity into something else. You know, I can't answer that question. But I think people want to buy art that support the cultures that they believe in. It's about identity and belonging. Yeah, exactly.

And affiliation. And people who'd been excited by what was possible within the SEPI world, within the kind of crypto world in general, saw an emergent cultural package that kind of embodied the value of that. And they were like, okay, I believe in this culturally. And I think that mostly really happened around PFPs. Yes, like Profile Pick type art. Profile Pic type art, like CryptoKitties and Cryptopunks. Artistically, it's really an interesting mechanism.

You sell something initially to a large community. A bunch of people hold the same thing. And then that also moves around in networks. It changes ownership, owner to honor, right? And with that, the community grows, the people who have touched that asset. And that means that a large group of people are suddenly almost fractal participators in kind of one cultural moment, right? In one cultural asset. You know what I mean?

Exactly. They're designed to participate in networks so that the provenance is important. Yes. You know, where it came from, where it's going to is important. tracing these relationships as a part of the medium is what's so super interesting about that. It's fascinating. And the networks themselves are in the cloud or blockchain. One of our colleagues, Tim Ruffgarden, calls blockchain's computers in the sky. It could they operate without like any central intermediary, they're accessible to all. You talked earlier about coming from New Zealand

and this idea of like the borders and the inspiration for you being like almost global. Yeah. By default. This is that exact very example. The portability of the asset, it's not just that. It's like the portability of your humanity, your identity, like who you are, your network, or even belonging in a network, regardless of border, police location, into a different kind of identity online. And I mean, there's the sort of more humanity side to this argument as well, like, you know, the Donna Harroway notion of the community of kin.

But it's that within a digitally designed artwork network. I mean, that's so beautiful. They're more of community of kin. Well, one of the cool things that I found in art school was like, me and this one other person loved this one artwork by this one And we found a passion in there that meant we were compatible across all sorts of different things. Oh, my God, you're so right. Yeah, one of my absolute favorite artists is New Orleans artist named Rebecca Rabouset. I'm a big fan of her work, very fantasy. She had a lot of portals. Yeah. I love that type of thing. And I collect a lot of her pieces. Oh, interesting.

And so I went to her art patron dinner and I've been to multiple shows of hers. Yeah. And I feel like the community that comes around the art, these are people I've never met before. Right. I have no history, no demographic in common. It's like an instant affiliation and true connection. Yeah, exactly. Because what better proxy for understanding that kind of like-mindedness than having that same shared love? Oh my God, I totally agree. It's a really precise cultural signal. There's also another artwork that I want to mention here that is maybe less known and is working differently than many NFTs in terms of dynamics. It's a project by Sarah Friend, which I actually showed in another curated show that I did later on called

Proof of Steak. And that was all about ownership in particular. And she did this piece called Lifeforms, which were designed on Polygon. But the NFTs were designed to only live, quote-unquote, if they were transferred. And so they had like a time life programmed into them where if they stayed in one wallet longer than three months, they would completely self-destruct. Yeah, got it. I don't know if you've heard of this, but OG crystals. Oh, yeah, sure.

And the artist was Michael Jew and he did it with Daniel Kvarochko. Anyway, what's really fascinating about it is that the NFT, to your point, that's an example of like that has to be transferred in order to exist. With Sarah Friend's life forms. I love that. It's called life forms. This was really interesting on the coral reef diversity side where every time you transfer this NFT, like the properties of other things in that person's collection, it's like an organism. Inhabit that NFT.

So what happens is, for instance, if you own like me bits, then that NFT, the crystal, the form it expresses will have like this like 3D like kind of cubic element to the coral. Exactly. And it involves. And so the art itself evolves as it gets transferred, which I think is so fascinating. Like that is, I have goosebumps talking about this. Because that is the essence of truly being native to the medium. Because it's not just taking something and then taking it and like, oh, I'm going to apply it to blockchain. It's taking the inherent nature of blockchains and evolving that with the art.

It's just incredible to me. Yeah, I agree. And the online offline connection is also still really important because even the virtual is so physical, right? because screens are real, pixels are real. You know, like networks are made of atoms as well as bits. Yes, yes. And the recent body of work that I made that was actually named a little bit close to this book from Chris. So I made oil paintings of other people's metaverse property tokens.

Ah, so you made the digital physical. Yeah, in a way, because I thought about territory, I thought about community, I thought about history. And I thought about the fact that these tokens, when I looked at something like Decentraland or Sandbox, these very popular, you know, crypto-based metaverses, when I looked at the only ownership tokens for owning a piece of property in those worlds, I saw a grid that looked to me like mid-century painting. Because it's a grid. These projects, if you buy a token, you get an NFT that looks like a part of the map of the project. But I was thinking, oh, that's so interesting because it looks so much like mid-century painting. And then I was like, oh, wouldn't that be

funny to paint that, actually? And then I was like, that would be a landscape painting of a piece of property in the Metaverse. That's so weird. And then I was like, what is landscape painting? And that, again, goes back to my background. I grew up in New Zealand. The first we learned about is colonial landscape painting. And I was like, oh my God, when I see these NFTs, this gridded system, it's like modernism is being projected onto the metaverse, you know? So it's taking an old modernist trope and putting onto the mirror. But it was important for me to underline the networked element as well.

So while there were paintings of somebody else's property, I included two QR codes on the side of each painting. And the first one links to the original property. So you can kind of look at the property that the painting is also, you know exactly, because that's interesting as well about metaverse interfaces. that's already gone through a few rounds of UX. So the painting is of an kind of early version of a landscape. And then you have a link to what the real one looks like now.

But then I designed an NFT that looks like an ownership card that you would get a monopoly for owning a piece of property and tells you who owns that piece right now. And it links you to the person that owns that piece, but it's also permissionless, right? So it's a painting, which is permissionless of a property that you don't own, that then you have a kind of other piece of ownership property that always links you to the person who currently owns it.

It's like so fascinating exploring the nature of ownership. Yeah. So this is the exhibition you debuted in San Francisco. Why did you title it Read Right Own? Well, I was really interested in always like what are good descriptions of what's different about networks, right? And when I read about Chris's book coming out and Read Right On was kind of like underlined as a way to summarize Web 1, Web 2 and Web 3 was the title of the book. It resonated with also the design on the cover. It was a little square in the middle and a kind of landscape like object around it.

And I was like, oh my God, like, this is what I've been painting. I've been painting the difference of ownership in Web 2 and Web 3 and kind of how these things layer up. Also, like, ownership is really something that's really important in art. It always has been important, you know. And so people owning properties, people owning images of other properties. Again, these notions around landscape, when you paint a landscape, it doesn't mean you own it, right? It's a picture of something you often don't own. The other thing that's fascinating to me about what you're saying about this is that this idea of ownership

and what you're doing with the paintings and your exhibit for Readwerey, right own. Yeah. Is this idea, too, that we ourselves are transient humans and the ways we put our stamps on the world, sometimes, like, the only thing that endures is art. Right. Whether physical or emotionally, like the things we leave behind. Yeah.

And it's funny because I used to be a huge fan of Christo and John Claude. Oh, yeah. Sure. Big fan because I love landscape art. You would think it's so inane. Like, you're putting plastic to cover trees. Like, how is this art? Yeah.

But I love this idea that humanity is conquering nature in a way that's not like, But that's actually beautifying it and showing our presence. And I find that building, like, it's just beautiful. There's something extremely exquisite about it. I'm bringing it up because it resonates with what you're describing with the read-ridoen exhibit you did. Well, exactly. I mean, John Crifton-Claude, for those who haven't heard of it, they basically, as a giant sculptural gesture, would wrap significant thing. For example, the Bundestag in Berlin, that was like a really big one.

That's right. They just did in Paris. Well, actually, one of them obviously died, but the spouse is still alive. Yeah, Jean-Claude. Yes. And they just did like the wrapping of the... Arch de Triumph, exactly. So often symbolic things, but also whole islands. Surrounding the Florida Keys. Yeah. And it makes a monumental gesture, but it's also at the same

time a light touch, right? You occupy it and then you unoccupied. Exactly. And it kind of comes back. It's like ephemeral. Yeah. But it's light touch, but it's so heavy in the moment that it's there. And by the way, logistically, incredibly difficult. Yeah, very resource intensive. Oh my gosh. Yeah. They're like massive engineering projects. Yeah. And I bring that up because it is an example of how art is engineering. And you're describing like a lot of technology is art is art is engineering. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's exactly what art does really well. That's what NFT art is doing really well for kind of blockchain networks and other types of crypto art as well, like Terra Zero that we design, you know, the notion of kind of being able

to give ownership to trees over their own sovereign space. You know, these kinds of things are only possible because technologists have architected a certain platform or a certain environment. Yes. So let's do some quick lightning round style kind of wrap up. But first, there's a a couple of recurring themes. So let's just kind of pick them up and bring them back full circle. Yeah. So one is, you've talked a lot about commerce and the relationship to commerce. What do you think about this in the context of NFTs and like art and NFTs? Like what would you say beyond obviously the valuation aspect? Yeah. Well, one of the things about NFTs and art, the fact that the kind of financial container is the same as the artistic container. One of the knock on effects that has happened

because of that is that often value is accrued completely to price. And I think that is not necessarily the case for all culture, right? Like, there's a term like priceless. Often you talk about priceless cultural works. But also there's this notion that something cheap can also be something valuable, you know, and I think that's harder to express in the current technological stack of NFTs. What do you think the opportunity is to build there? Well, I think that there should be another layer of accruing and showing value in NFT projects that is not about how much they cost. I'm thinking about like something that could be like a curatorial infrastructure for giving different signals that aren't only expressed

and how expensive something is. Of course, expensive things that are in museums are important, culturally, invaluable in that way as well. And part of the price of them being so expensive is about how much they're loved as culture. But you can make something experimental that might not sell at first or that might not be expressed as something expensive as first

that will later be something that is cherished and really valuable. There's this notion of the avant-garde, which is something really important to modernism, where you can have a small group of people doing an experimental thing that is really unpopular and very hard to understand at the time that then later gets interpreted and valued in a different way. And I think that's a little bit missing from the NFTR world,

where financial success is the only expression of cultural value. It's not that I want to divorce that completely. No, you can't. I just think that it needs to be more complex than that. I would say multidimensional. Because it's basically like if you think about all these properties, like there's community, there's belonging, there's expression, there's the aesthetic, there's the technological underpinnings.

There's so many different dimensions. You can assess something on this. It's a reputation. Yeah. Like, I totally agree that there needs to be more dimensions on that. Yeah. One example that I think is really fascinating here, so I co-edited a piece by Kai Sheffield, who works at Visa. And he wrote a very thoughtful piece on fantasy Hollywood and this idea that you can essentially create characters that can be represented by NFTs.

Oh, wow. And essentially create, like, a whole set of storytelling around these characters. Uh-huh. And so the idea is. that NFTs are characters. Yeah. And the other point is it's really about who gets to make. This is a recurring theme in what you've been talking about.

Yeah. Who gets to make these characters? Right. Right. Right. Or like a certain type of artist. Yeah, the IP world. Yes, exactly.

And so this idea that you can actually share and create this IP. But the real idea here is that NFTs in that sense represent community. Yeah. Belonging, character creation, collaboration. And then like a community of storytelling. Yeah. And it's funny because I was debating this with Bob Iger a couple months after we did our podcast together with Chris Dixon that we did on the show, which he kind of brought up, like, is it really possible to tell really good stories in a decentralized way? And I was like, you know, it's funny you say that because you acquired Lucasfilm.

Right. And we talk about Star Wars like this franchise that was created out by one person. Yeah. And after that, many people took over and extended the canon and did different things with the stories. Yeah. But there's actually a pre-story that no one talks about, which is that Star Wars itself is oral myth and storytelling that's been propagated over centuries. Right. Yeah, based on these hero story archetypes.

Exactly, like the Cambelian myths and the archetypes, exactly, the Jungian ideas. And that bubbled up into what became Star Wars, which now has become, there's a canon, and then that went beyond canon. And then we went back to a new canon. And it's like continuing. And so if you think about the NFT aspect, like, this is very empowering. for people and you could add value that way. This relates back to my pop art thing and also the best parts of NFT art, which is this permissionless thing that I was leaning into with my canvases, you know, this notion that

you can kind of take something that has a powerful effect in the world, like a Campbell's soup can or whatever, that has a cultural effect that you live in and live with. And you can work with that and make expressions of your own. I mean, that's kind of what Andy Warhol did, right, in a way. And there was no kickback to Heinz, but in a way there was an attention kickback or a kind of valuation, a branding kickback maybe eventually, because it's like the the notion of the candle soup can is retroactively. But I think there could be a more nuanced ecosystem around defining where value is added in that exchange. That's right. I do want to ask you a question

about where you think generative art and blockchains intersect. I think we get to a little bit of a problem here with like term definitions as well because like I understand the broader definition of a generative piece is where you set up a protocol, you put something through a protocol and it has a series of outputs and those outputs are artworks. Right. But I think generative art now has come to me colloquially like a particular aesthetic, actually. That is not about the process. Oh, you're right. It's rather about like, oh, this looks sort of like an abstract shape.

It has a gradient to it. Yeah, you're right. I find that trope, unfortunately, a little dull because this is where the homogenization question comes in and it actually starts to get really boring. But the notion of like artists setting up protocols and having outputs and that being a methodology, that I find super interesting. I agree. So I would say there's three layers.

So one is the generative as like you actually have a beginning of something and it sets up a protocol and it creates a certain output. There's a dynamic nature. I mean, the OG Crystals project that evolves is by definition generative. And a lot of PFP projects are also generative by definition, even though that's maybe not what you think of of generative art because this is a by necessity thing as well, right? If you want to make a collection of a thousand things, you're not going to design every single one from scratch the same one.

You make up a protocol and then it produces a thousand of those. That I would argue is a different definition because this comes to the debate between customization and configuration, which is there is something that's truly generative. It's like unknown what the output's going to be. Yeah, right. Some of the PFP projects fall in this category, not all, but some of them just to be even more nuanced about it. It's actually, in that case, more that you have a set of attributes that you're just applying like Cryptoven, like, you know, each of those witches. They have a very thoughtful.

They've actually written some beautiful pieces. I'll link them in the show notes on how they thought about like sort of the properties that would manifest as different people minted the witches and how they sort of constrain them. That's another aspect of that. So I agree with that. And then there's a third part, which you're saying you're kind of bored by and I don't disagree. to some extent, which is sort of this aesthetic, where now this is all what generative art looks like. I personally do love that aesthetic. I have to say. There's nothing wrong with the aesthetic. No, no, I agree. I agree. But there's Zancan and there's like really interesting people who are doing

very interesting riffs on it. Those are the people that immerse to the bubble and the Helena Serran. I love her work. Like there's a lot of artists who's like work bubbles up in that sense and they bring a certain element to it. But like Solowit. Yeah, sure, exactly. How would you connect him into this movement? Well, yeah, Solowit is this mid-century artist who basically designed instructions. And when you bought an art piece of his, you bought the right to perform the instruction or even the right to employ somebody to perform the instruction. So it's kind of an algorithm that you buy, which is really amazing. These are for wall drawings in the case of Solo Wood. And like coincidentally, they look like what we think of as generative art.

Because it's based on kind of vectors and like, you know, gradients and lines and patterns and stuff like that. So it has this kind of abstract element that reminds us of what we think of as Generative Art now. But SoloWitt to me, the interesting part is weirdly, so I'm going to say something maybe controversial here. Love it. Like the notion of buying the idea is the thing that I like about SolarWit. The way they look on the wall. Eh.

I mean, fine. I'm with you. But like, you know. Oh my God. I'm 100% with you, Simon. In fact, this is a great example where I think people and as a collector,

I'm very careful to watch myself for if I'm falling for the idea of the thing. And also the actual visceral response of the thing. So sometimes I have to hold myself back. Yeah. Because intellectually, yeah. And definitely that's a component of my decision-making, for sure. I have to intellectually, like, respond to it. Like the visual language, that symbolism, the lore.

But at the same time, I have to have a visceral response inside that I feel something. And visual response that I really want to look at it every day. And that's incredible and very difficult to capture. It's very difficult to get it. But that's the Holy Grail of the art experience. But I do think, like, some projects in the academic, let's say, conceptual art moment, which came up in the mid-century in the 60s and 70s, were explicitly anti-visual, right?

The work didn't exist. You were only moved by the pure idea, right? That was like a kind of aesthetic notion that came up around conceptualism. And I mean, the earliest example of that that has actually been interestingly revisited in NFTs, actually, is Eve Klein and this moment of the kind of invisible artwork.

He made a piece that was made in French. And basically, it was one of the first motions in the late 50s where people bought something that was actually invisible. And you were only buying the aura as a kind of genre. Interestingly, an artist, Mitchell Chan, also revisited that in 2017 prior to the protocols that became NFTs.

But he designed an immaterial artwork that was also based on that notion as a history because what felt like at the time you were buying when you bought an NFT was very ephemeral. And that work, for example, I love. Even though there's no visual necessarily associated with it, I'm as moved by it as I am by a very visceral painting. Sometimes just the idea is the thing that moves you.

Yes. There's also this thing that happens with early technologies where people are limited. They think they don't see the expressivity that's possible. Right. And so they almost go for the most reductionist way of interpreting that piece and thinking about it.

And that, to bring it back to generative art today, I think we're going to see a lot more very interesting things happen. One thing I will say from a technological perspective, I ask everybody this question because I'm obsessed of generative art. Oh, interesting. Again, for a very long time. Yeah. Which is what is unique about blockchains.

Generative art is not native to blockchains as a medium. Yeah. But it seems like it's found its native medium in blockchains. Yeah. And one of the technological answers I heard from one of the people on our team, Michael Blow, and a couple of people made this observation that at the end of the day, it was so compute-intensive to unfurl like the code and the package and the storage involved. So there's something really great about having this executable on chain that lets you kind of unfurl these things visually. So I think it'll be really fascinating to see as like the technological constraints get lifted.

Yeah. And we advance blockchain performance, scalability, everything. Yeah. What will then become possible when you can unfurl things online on. chain. Totally. I think we're going to see a lot, like the thing that you're frustrated by, which is a sort of generic aesthetic, I think we're going to see a lot more expressivity at that point. I mean, one of the generative projects that I really, really love that I think falls under your categories as well of finding it, is terraforms by Mathcastles. I mean, I think that is a project

which really does all of those things. And it plays with history as well because it's this ASCII component. It plays with complexity because of this territory component. Also this notion that you have this kind of metaverse of terraforms that you can kind of invert and participate in on different levels. Like all of that, I think it's like, again, pushing the medium of generative art to something like beyond just an output of an algorithm that is really boring.

So last question for you. Another recurring theme, especially with your own history, just come full circle where we started, where we've been talking. Yeah. So you have kind of traveled this legacy to digital art world.

Yeah. What are some of the things if you were to tell people on the legacy side about the digital side? Yeah. And then vice versa, for the digital world trying to understand

the legacy world, what would you sort of say as a person who travels between both of those worlds? I think about it a lot because I do exactly that. And I value those communities as much as each other. I think they're both really compelling places to be and to care about culture and to make things and to learn about things and to collect things. So I would say speaking to a legacy person about the digital art world, I would say take the time to get to know somebody who's passionate about what is going on there and don't start with the New York Times or whatever. Don't just look at what you see first and come with your priors and biases. Embrace the learning curve that is the exciting moment of getting to know somebody's passion and why they think this project is interesting and that project is boring. And what would you say specifically about crypto and blockchain art to that same?

Well, one of the challenges I've always had with addressing the legacy art world with crypto and blockchain art is that people in the legacy world hear the word crypto, hear the world blockchain and think, A, too complex, I'm not part of that community. I don't understand the technology, therefore it's too much work to engage. And two, they also have a whiff of kind of a scandal around it or a swindle. To a lot of art world people, that's really like a red flag for bullshit, you know. So they just don't want to see that. So I would also say this is like a little avant-garde community that has its own aesthetic dimensions.

Yes, there's a kind of a learning curve to understanding it. But honestly, in the art world, there's always a bit of a learning curve. You have to study art for several years to kind of really get into histories of the avant-garde and whatever. And that's a rewarding process. People stay there because they love that. They love to get into those complicated discourses and histories. So there's actually a lot of rewards for legacy art people if they would kind of take the jump. And then what would you see on the flip side?

For both the digital artists understanding the legacy world and then specifically for crypto. Yeah. So digital artists understanding the legacy world, I think there's a lot more continuity there than they might imagine, right? I think that often around these worlds, the notion of new things has a high premium. And I think understanding histories that actually have played into those is kind of undervalued. Right. So I would say to those people, and I actually often do this, oh, you're really interested in this artist that made this kind of digital artwork?

Here's this legacy art person who you probably never heard of, who did something like SolarWit or whatever that resonates with exactly that gesture. And they're often really charmed by that. And by the way, you're not saying that, I'm assuming this, in a pedantic way of, oh, like grumpy, like, oh, that happened before. It's more understand some of the previous movements because it might inform and inspire you. Yeah, I'm a pedagogue sometimes too, so I have to like watch my tone. But the situation is more like, you.

love this, you'll also love this. Lusters of interest. Exactly. It's like an Amazon recommendation or something like that. And that's about sharing passion again. That's a beautiful thing. And then on the crypto-specific side, what would you say to that, you know, group, not just digital thinking about the legacy artwork.

Well, I would do a more nuanced version of the same thing where I say, oh, you're interested in the history of networked artworks based on this particular asset form. You know, there's this amazing group of people that were making things for cable networks in the 1980s. Yes, yeah. Isn't that incredible? Look at this port-a-pack art that was created around this thing. And again, it's about encouraging and getting the kind of infectiousness of the love that comes at the core of those projects.

Well, I think that's a beautiful note to end on, Simon. Yes. This has been a fun conversation. And I'm so excited to see more of your work. The next thing I'm doing is building a big project about space. I'm looking at the kind of space networks and the way that people are imagining about building an outer space. I'm building an augmented reality work that is based on a sculpture of a megastructure that will hang in the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand. but we'll hopefully travel in the future as well.

And that is actually based on the work of a company as well. I love it because it's going all the way from the outer world to the inner worlds to like external like space world. Exactly. And technological paradigms enabling new types of culture and worlds. It's like a totally different kind of world building. Well, thank you so much for joining this episode of Web 3 with A6 and Z. Thank you very much.

I've been a long time listener, first time caller, I guess. Thank you. Yes, thank you so much. Thank you for listening to Web 3 with A6 and Z. You can find show notes with links to resources, books, or papers discussed, transcripts, and more at A6NCrypto.com. This episode was produced and edited by Sonal Choxi. That's me. The episode was technically edited by our audio editor, Justin Golden. Credit also to Moonshot Design for the Art and all thanks to support from A6NCrypto. To follow more of our work and get updates, resources from us, and from others, be sure to subscribe to our Web3 weekly newsletter.

You can find it on our website at A6NCrypto.com. Thank you for listening and for subscribing. Let's go.