Unchained - Why NFT OG Mitchell Chan Has Released Just One Project This Year - Ep.302

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

Mitchell F. Chan, who released one of the first NFT projects on Ethereum back in 2017, discusses his projects, making art on a blockchain, how NFTs are transforming the traditional art world, and more. Show topics: Mitchell’s art career before NFTs how Mitchell was inspired by Yves Klein’s 1950's work 'Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility’ the story behind Mitchell’s OG NFT art project: ‘Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility’  what the traditional world thinks about NFTs who is collecting NFT art the story behind Mitchell’s 2021 NFT project: ‘LeWitt Generator Generator’ why Mitchell has not minted any more NFTs this year – even though the market has been on fire whether Mitchell thinks NFTs are changing the art world (hint: he thinks yes) NFTs and the financialization of art why Mitchell can empathize with some of the backlash about NFTs coming from the traditional art and gaming industries Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021        Nodle: https://bit.ly/3AXGydJ         Brave: http://brave.com/Unchained     Episode Links   Mitchell Chan Twitter: https://twitter.com/mitchellfchan Discord: https://discord.com/invite/4QdtdZWMpN  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mitchellfchan/  Gallery: https://chan.gallery/    Content: DIGITAL ZONES OF IMMATERIAL PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY (Sotheby’s NFT - $1M+) Sotheby’s Sale: https://metaverse.sothebys.com/natively-digital/lots/digital_zone_of_immaterial_pictorial_sensibility  33 Page Essay: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmcdKPjcJgYX2k7weqZLoKjHqB9tWxEV5oKBcPV6L8b5dD https://twitter.com/mitchellfchan/status/1465699544436330496  OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/ikb-cachet-de-garantie-1  TL;DR: https://twitter.com/LeonidasNFT/status/1470397221548052480  Video Essays on NFTs (super interesting) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtUGpOe-zE4&list=PLVRveZVaYYqHZKN_5oH8wC5QBRMMlXdBT&t=25s  Sol Lewitt Generator Generator https://medium.com/@mitchellfchan/nfts-generative-art-and-sol-lewitt-e99a5fa2b0cb  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the December 28th, 2021 episode of Unchained. Buy, earn, and spend crypto on the Crypto.com app. New users can enjoy. zero credit card fees on crypto purchases in the first 30 days. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 with the code Laura. Link in the description. Brave wallet is the first secure wallet built natively in a Web3 crypto browser with no extension required. You can store, manage, and grow your crypto portfolio all from a safer wallet. Visit brave.com slash unchained to get started. The Notal Cash app makes earning crypto on your smartphone as easy as turning on your Bluetooth. Notal Cash is private, secure, and available on iOS and Android.

Visit nodal.io slash unchained. That's NODL.e.combe. Unchained to start earning Nodalcash. Today's guest is artist Mitchell F. Chan. Welcome, Mitchell. Hi, Laura. So you created your first NFT art in 2017. and in that process, I guess I would say, and you can correct me, that you discovered an artwork that you could well argue was the first NFT ever and that that existed long before blockchains existed.

But before we get into all of those details, why don't we just fill people in on your background before your career as an artist before you even got into crypto? Sure. So my career as an artist probably begins in. 2006, when I began working and exhibiting professionally. And I began as many artists do as a mediocre painter, but I was sort of just mediocre enough to be scraping by. And as time went on, I started incorporating more and more technology into my work. I started learning about technology as an art medium and the history of technology-based art, largely just through workshops at Artists Friend Centers here in Toronto, particularly at Interaccess Media Arts Center,

and then began incorporating more of it into my work with the idea that I was interested in making work that is about the society that we live in, and the society that we live in is very much technology-driven. And so if you want to make work about a technology-driven society, you ought to understand technology pretty well. And if you want to be really clever about it, maybe even use technology in your artwork. And so that's what I did. I continued my studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and eventually, you know, sort of had a career exhibiting work sort of around North America and creating public artworks, large-scale installations,

architectural scale projects, you know, big 12-foot-tall sculptures that would sit in a park and never move and never be resold. I was, you know, most of my career was creating the complete opposite of NFTs, very big physical artworks. And that was most of my career, but sort of as I was doing that, you know, I was also creating these projects for art galleries, for exhibitions that were about parts of our society that are invisible, right, structures, these things that affect us very profoundly but have no physical form and realizing that when you understand some of these invisible technologies, you can make art out of them and you can give them form.

And that's sort of where I was. And then, of course, you start thinking about, well, you know, there's this economic system around us that is, you know, everywhere and that it seems to inform every aspect of our lives. but it's very difficult to make a mark inside that system. It's very difficult to mold it into an artwork. And I discovered that, you know, well, but, but actually there's this new money and it exists on the internet and it's programmable. I know a thing or two about programming.

And if I can program money, then I can make a sculpture out of this currency. And to do that, but I probably want to think very deeply about what it means and what it's all. about. And that's how I ended up in crypto. I ended up in crypto literally looking for an art material. I saw it as something that could be molded and sculpted. And before we actually get into that, I do want to tell people about one of your artworks. And why don't you actually, because I'm sure you'll do a better job explaining it than I will, but it involved water vapor. And I'm just curious, yeah, if you could describe that and tell people what that artwork was about. Yeah. So this was me on the precipice of discovering

crypto, all right? And crypto skeptics will have no difficulty here seeing how one led into the other, because prior to crypto, I was making sculptures about as close to nothing at all as possible, or at least as making sculptures with as close to nothing as possible. So the sculpture I'd made right before I created my first crypto artwork. It was, it took up an entire room. And the room was largely empty, save for two holes in facing walls. And out of these holes in the walls would come two clouds of water vapor. And they were almost invisible, except for some very dramatic lighting that I'd installed in the room. Each of these clouds of water vapor was maybe three feet in diameter. And they would move slowly. They were shot out of the wall and they would move towards each other until finally,

in the middle of the room in the center of this ring of lights, they would collide. Poof. And they dissipate into nothingness. And this would happen every 12 seconds. There'd be new clouds and a new confrontation and a new collision and then new dissipation and nothingness. And all this would happen over an algorithmically generated score that I'd produced. I'd written a program out of code that was pulling headlines

from the New York Times in real time. And it was kind of putting them through a vocoder and setting them to this algorithmically generated cello score. And so it was just reading the news and it was this really incredible time. It kind of feels like they've all been incredible times when it comes to reading the news. But this was right around the time. It was right after Trump had been elected and right before his inauguration. And, you know, and so there would just be these words that would repeat over and over again.

And they would just go, alternative, facts, boof. And these clouds would dissipate into nothingness. It was like, Kellyanne, Conway, and boof, nothingness. And this was what I was making. And it's probably the best way to summarize the type of art that I was interested in, which is that we had this system of discourse and this way of presenting ideas. And all of it seemed to be spectacular, but none of it seemed to have any substance at its core. And yet that it was insubstantive, that did not preclude the possibility of it having a dramatic effect on the world, you know?

And so it's just like, this is my frustration as an artist. my goal, how do you, it's, it's fine to criticize and say that there's nothing there, right, that there's no substance. But you may be missing the fact that it still has a dramatic effect. Just being set up as a spectacle means that the nothingness bleeds out into real somethingness, you know? And this was my aim of what to represent as an artist, that threshold between nothingness and definitely, definitely somethingness. Okay. So I feel like this is the perfect segue to discussing your first NFT art because, you know, there are a lot of themes around the actual artwork and then the either experience of that artwork or

the commodity value of it that you played with in that first artwork. And it's so incredibly fascinating. So yeah, why don't you describe how you came to create that first NFTR and what it was? Sure. So I'm coming, like, I'm coming fresh to crypto from 2017. I have a, like, it's 2017. I have, you know, some awareness of it. I know a little bit about Bitcoin, but I'm sort of just discovering Ethereum for the first time. And so I'm sympathetic to a lot of the, you know, criticisms, or shall I say skepticism about crypto. You know, there's nothing there. It's insubstantial.

It's not tethered to anything. It is free floating. It doesn't represent a certain quantity of gold in a vault somewhere, but I'm a conceptual artist. So that doesn't bother me. In fact, I understand that, in fact, its untetheredness and its free-floatingness is what could give it power, right? And, of course, I'm an artist. I'm also most interested in, yeah, what does this mean for art? not that at this point does it seem like ever, you know, there's going to be a significant amount of art that is created on blockchain or transacted on blockchain.

That's a preposterous idea in 2017. But I mean, yeah, what if? What if? This will be a fun little thought exercise. And so I learn a little bit about the technology. I teach myself a little bit of solidity. I read about, you know, read the Bitcoin white paper and the Ethereum white paper, et cetera. I begin to understand the ideas behind it.

It becomes clear to me that you cannot create an artwork on the blockchain as I understand it, right? I can't put an image on there. It's simply too big. There's too much data. Of course, there were other people who had figured out some things about, you know, representing art on blockchain and pointing to artworks through blockchain. But I'm not in deep enough to recognize yet the work of, you know, Ria Myers who had been talking about that. and even Cryptopunks hasn't yet come out when I begin this, right?

So I'm like, all you can do really is have a pointer, like a pointer to something. You can suggest, you know, ownership of a thing, and you can trust that the thing which is pointed to does in fact exist and have merit and have, you know, artistic sensibility to it. And I think, well, has this ever been done in art, right? and I research and I research artists who have worked with markets and artists who have, you know, turned finance into their medium. But really the interesting conversation is the artists who tried to work with nothingness as their medium. And there's one story in particular that sticks out to me as being so perfectly representative of what art on blockchain would be. And that

was the story of Eve Klein and his zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility as they came to become known. So this was a crazy story and it happened. And it started in 1958. So I'm looking at some of this like 60 years old at the time. And this artist was best known for creating these blue monochrome paintings. All right. They were this incredible dazzling hypnotic blue. It was a blue that he'd actually patented. and he was an artist who he eventually critics would call him and the artists who are like him new realists because they weren't trying to abstract things. Normally when we think of extreme minimalism, like we think of abstraction. But he was trying to create something that was even more real than a representation of like,

you know, you paint a house on a hillside, and that's not really a house on a hillside, right? But he wants to create a real feeling. and he's very famous, even at this point in his life, for doing this. But he's really frustrated by the fact that as long as it's paint on canvas, there's always this expectation that the paint on canvas is supposed to represent something. And if it's supposed to represent something, that can't be real at all, right? So he creates his exhibition in 1958. It premieres in a small gallery in Paris.

And there is apparently a lineup of like 3,000 people. waiting to see this. Because as I said, Eve Klein is very famous at this time. He is like, you know, star art boy. And they enter the room after waiting in line and they walk through this blue curtain and they get into the room and there's nothing in the gallery at all. It's completely empty. And what Klein insists, and look, at this point in the year 2017 and the year 2022, whatever, this sounds like a bad joke. It sounds like a really low effort first year. project, and now it is because there's a very low barrier to entry to copying this. But we have to believe that Klein does this with the utmost of sincerity and that it fits in the career trajectory

that he's on in his pattern. It fits, right? What he insists is that he insists that he has, quote, overcome the problematics of art. That what is in the gallery there with you is the pure sensibility of the color blue, just the feeling of that he is imbued by the power vested in him. He is imbued this space with the color blue, but it requires no material indicator, no material referent, right? It is just pure belief. And so this kind of resonates with me in blockchain, all right? You can think about this in a positive way, or you can think about this if you want to

lean into the critique of blockchain. It is true that there is nothing there, and that can make it a scam, or it can make it extremely profound, right? I mean, the fact that there is nothing there but a promise, if you believe in the promise, in the case of Bitcoin, the promise of a set issuance schedule, all right, or the promise of the ideologies that inform the technology, that can be more powerful to a lot of people than the promise of being tethered to gold bars in a vault, right? Or the promise of a centralized government.

In some ways, that lack of direct referent is very empowering. But it doesn't end there. It's not just that this guy says that there's something there and there's nothing and that's just like blockchain. That's only kind of one layer of the story. The other layer is that he sells these things, right? And he's very interested in, just as I was as, you know, as a young artist, the idea that actually the immaterial is more powerful than the material.

The promise is more powerful than the gold bar in the vault. He says, you can buy these things, but you will have to give up a, quantity of pure gold. You ought to pay for these things in pure gold. So he knows what he's doing. He knows that he's playing with ideas of material durability and the real durability, which is an immaterial and very spiritual promise. You can buy these things for pure gold. If you give him a certain amount of gold, you get in exchange this paper token, all right, a paper receipt. It indicates exactly which invisible artwork you have, which artwork you own that has no physical aspect, it's just an empty amount of space, imbued with an idea, you get this, this piece of paper,

right? And I'm like, okay, if I'm going to sell artwork on blockchain, like that's what I'm doing, right? I can make these currencies. I can make, you know, a currency very easily. I just have to imbue faith, imbue a sense of myself into it and essentially make a promise that there is something here, right? And Klein's project, Eve Klein's project, went further, right? Because, again, he's really playing with art as a promise versus art, like, art as a profound promise versus art as a financial promise. Okay. And so you have this ticket, this receipt, this, what is in every way, a paper version of a non-fungible token. And he says that now that means that you legally have ownership over it. And indeed, if you had one of these things today, if you got them,

I'm sure you could get a pretty penny putting it up for auction. I'm sure museums would be happy to have it. It's a very important artwork in the history of the 20th century. But he says to really, really own a piece of art. That means that it becomes a part of you. It becomes inextricably linked to you. So if you meet me at the River Sand, we'll perform this ritual together and we'll burn your paper token. The only physical proof you have that you just handed over a certain amount of gold to me for an invisible artwork, but you're going to burn it and I'll throw half that gold in the river. And then, only then after this sort of like spiritual journey that we've taken together, do you become the proper owner of this artwork, which is pure sensibility? And it is,

and then it can't be resold. It can't be a financial commodity anymore. it is simply a part of you. It is an experience that we have shared, right? And that is imparted onto you. And that was the thing. And I'm like, holy smokes. Like, I mean, holy smile. Like, I'm not, like, I'm reading this and I'm learning about this.

I'm going through all his journals, right? I'm finding all the old papers I can. And I'm like, this is what art on blockchain is, right? We are like, I know that I can make these tokens. I know that I can make a currency. But it is going to be like that is going to represent the separation of like an art's commodity form, which now on blockchain would be super duper liquid, super duper transferable. It would not just be a commodity form of art.

It would be the Uber commodity form of art, right? Versus the immaterial idea, the concept is behind an artwork. And now it is super. It is the Uber like immaterial artwork, right? And I'm like, this is it. So I guess I'm just going to do this. And I am going, and I wrote a 33-page essay that I cheekily called the blue paper that sort of juxtapose these histories, the history of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the history of conceptual

Ardenieve Klein, and just so that readers could kind of make that connection themselves. And I made a, you know, I made a smart contract for a modified ERC 20 token. And it was different in the sense that, you know, it had, you know, there were specific tokens. that were identifiable, and it ended up being essentially a non-fungible token. And all I was doing was really trying to translate these ideas from conceptual art that were 60 years ago into solidity. And that's what happened. Yeah, I love so many bits of this story. By the way, the one commentary that I absolutely have to make is I love how the people who wanted the kind of like the apotheosis,

of this artistic experience had to burn their entire receipt and he only had to give up half of his gold. I think that's hilarious. I love it too. And I mean, I've actually been uncomfortable with that element of the story for so long until like now my uncomfortableness with it delights me. Because, you know, I think that, you know, surely like you've been in this. space long enough to know that it's really difficult ever to understand how pure everybody's

motives are, right? And even those with the purest of motives, they can't totally extricate themselves with the context of some sort of showiness or even if you wanted to be ungenerous scamminess, you know, like it's part of it. You're always buying light, like you're always prone to the possibility that you just got duped, you know? Yeah, yeah. But I mean, well, do you think that people did? I mean, so first of all, out of all the people who bought the Eve Klein works,

the only three of them burned them as far as I understand. Yeah. And so let's, why don't we, before we keep going, why don't we fill in people on what you did? Because you essentially kind of like copied the receipt, but, you know, put your own speech. spin on it. And so when people were buying your NFT, just explain what it was that they were getting exactly. Sure. So my piece, it was like very much a derivative work, right? That is a stream of

art that I'd been on for a long time where I often will recreate historic works using a new technology with just enough of a spin. And for me, this is because I'm someone who very much cares about art and art history. And I care about it because I believe that artwork are a really useful tool in understanding the world around us. And so when I recreate previous works using new technologies, I get to figure out, okay, were the ideas in that artwork, like, were they good enough that they're still relevant today? And then I look at the new technologies that I'm, you know,

that I'm sculpting with, and I'm saying, all right, and when I try to sculpt this idea with this new technology, what does it tell us about the technology? Does it have a sort of intrinsic, intrinsic bent towards good or evil or whatever, you know, I mean, simplified, you know. And so I'd previously tried to, you know, reproduce works by, you know, the conceptualist Solowit with code. And I'd previously tried to reproduce works by JMW Turner out of like kinetic robotic components, things like that, right? And so this was a derivative project.

And I feel like this is an important thing for me to do just because it's going to help me and anybody who stumbles across this project kind of have a new perspective on what blockchain and crypto is all about and it's going to help anybody who's coming at this from an art perspective understand the the like promise or potential peril of crypto but you know in a language that they understand so i did i like i really i just i researched all of the rules for the transaction of this artwork um and i copied them in solidity and like when you do that it turns out that you make a non fungible token whether you wanted to or not not. And believe me, like, I'm a pretty hack coder. Okay. I'm not a code genius. So I couldn't, like,

just invent non-fungible tokens on my own, all right? Not that, I mean, people had already done that unbeknownst to me, whatever. But like, but then, you know, it was also important. The other side of this beyond just the technology, the rules, the financialization is, you know, the meaning, the profound meaning. And that was important to me to make sure that I actually believed in this. So I wanted to understand more the ideology of crypto. I wanted to understand like the extremely emotional connection that people have in this space, which is sometimes, you know, very idealistic, sometimes very unhealthy. So I really did immerse myself in crypto, trading, you know, for nonstop for, for six months, trying as hard as I could to be in communities. And I tried also to think

very much about, you know, my own art and my own sensibility that was imbued in this piece. You know, I went so far, I traveled. I did color studies about, you know, what do I, you know, really, can I really like concentrate and focus on this idea? And writing the essay was central to that as well, because, you know, just putting that effort into communicating is, I think, what lets people know that I'm, you know, sincere about this. That this is not somebody who's just kind of, like, having a joke. You know, this is a really, you know, profound investigation for me. So I created all that. There were these tokens. I presented and premiered them at Interaccess Media Arts Center in Toronto, where I learned, you know, most of my trade. And it was a, the room was packed when I exhibited it and

we minted the first token. It was always set up so that, you know, there were no, no marketplaces. I ended up, Cryptopunks ended up coming out about a month before I finished this. They had a marketplace that was built right into their smart contract. I wasn't smart enough to do that. And so, but I was happy about that. To buy it, people had to actually, like, interact with the smart contract. And even as the project was rediscovered all these years later, I made sure never to make a front end app.

I always wanted people to have to go in and look at the functions and buy these things because it is about understanding blockchain, you know, like a little bit of an educational tool. And so, and, you know, a few people bought them that night and in the days after my presentation. But mostly they just sat there. Mostly they just sat there for about three and a half years. Yeah.

And then what happened? Then everybody found out about them. Slowly at first. And then all at once, you know, it's very much like kind of the story of what happened with NFTs in this crazy, crazy year, right? There are a number of people who are really, I mean, they do incredible works like scouring the blockchain for old projects. I'd become involved in a few communities. And a couple people heard about, oh, there's this like, you know, proto NFT from 2017, you know, seems early. looks rare.

You know, we should probably get that. And of course, you know, the people who got there first, you know, ended up being, you know, big, big collectors, because that's sort of how they became big collectors as they, you know, work hard finding stuff. So they were people who were really big in the crypto punks community. Those are the people who kind of bought up the last of the tranche that was available. And that was, you know, and that was really nice.

That was really nice. And then the smart contract is set up so that I could only make tokens available in bunches of 10. And so I would release another bunch of 10. And then all of a sudden, enough people found out about it, right? And then fingerprints Dow discovered. And they became the first, you know, major public collector and public advocates for the work as they were building this collection of artwork that they wanted to tell the story of art on blockchain. And so they were the first major collectors of the work.

publicly. And then every time I'd release a series of 10 tokens, they'd be snapped up, sometimes as quickly as like 90 seconds that they would go. The other thing that was happening is that every time a new bunch of 10 tokens was released, the price doubled, right? And this was hard-coded into the contract. These were sold on a bonding curve. And that was a feature of Eve Klein's artwork as well. I mean, you want to talk about how many weird things he was like really did first. NFT sold on a bonding curve. And so all of a sudden, I mean, at the time when I made them in 2017, it was not that much money. But all of a sudden, even like the initial sale price out of the contract was extremely high until the final tranche of 10 tokens was costing 12.8 each, right?

But it didn't matter. They were selling out literally in the same block that I would release them in. And then, of course, there were no more. The maximum issuance of this token was 101. And there were only 101 in the world. And of course, you know, we had ourselves a bit of a year, didn't we, in terms of NFTs? And so, you know, people are discovering this project. And not only is it rare, not only was it early, but I think there were a number of people who felt a real connection to the piece that in this piece, and in the essay that accompanied it,

it really was a statement of the values, like in the ideology that they believed in NFTs. Like, this really is the NFT thesis statement. It's sort of like, you know, so people like, you know, the ether rocks, right? People like the ether rocks because of their complete lack of utility, right? Because they refuse to point to anything beyond themselves. And, you know, somebody said,

EtherRox is the joke, and this is like the very profound explanation of the joke, right? That was made before that. And so it does, it connects to people. And so there ended up being a number of high-profile, you know, collectors, there was fingerprints Dow. There was Justin's son. There was zero XB1 who all kind of came in and became champions, you know, for this work. Justin's Sons-Ape NFT Foundation translated the blue paper to Chinese, which like exposed, you know, the ideas behind it to, you know, a massive new audience.

And the thing just kept going and going sort of probably culminating in an auction at Sotheby's, which happened in October, where, you know, one of the first, you know, tokens from the contract minted in 2017 sold for, you know, one and a half million dollars, which is... The scorebed app here with trusted stats in real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, Who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking.

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Conditions apply. Which is crazy. Yeah, one other thing that I love about the artwork is that the smart contract also imitated the way Eve Klein, you know, had that burning process. And so why don't you, yeah, tell about that and also tell about the one person who appears to have called that function. Sure. So just like Eve Klein's project, my project also, you can burn your token, right? And there's a burn function that is built straight into the smart contract. But it works not exactly like the burn project on most NFTs. If you burn. So one of the funny things about those primary sales of NFTs, right, is like I had to leave money in the contract. so that people could burn them, right? Because if you burn the token, you also destroy half of the money that I originally, quote, unquote, received for it. Right.

And so anybody can go and burn their token, and it will destroy half of the original purchase price. And it is this weird thing. Like, it's such a, it's a really beautiful little social experiment. Because, of course, since these things became value, and expensive. Nobody has done that. Nobody has done that, right? The only time that somebody did that was like the day after, the day after these things went on sale for the first time in 2017 at Interaccess, when they cost $29 or whatever, you know, that would have been the equivalent. You know, somebody bought, bought one and they burned it immediately the day after. And I don't know who it was,

right? It was done completely anonymously. I've been trying to track it down this year. I can't find it. I even looked at all my, I was like, did like, did I do that and like not remember? No, it wasn't me. Like it wasn't like I have no idea, but that was the only time that it has happened. But yeah, anybody, yeah, go ahead and watch and watch my account, a wallet balance go down. Okay, so if you are listening to this and you were the person who bought that NFT and burned it, I think Mitchell would want to talk to you. I would love to.

Yeah, okay, I really love this artwork and I just love how it is kind of like an extension of a conversation in art history and in a way like puts NFTs in that larger context, which is super fascinating. So in a moment, we're going to talk more about NFTs and the traditional art world. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. With nodal cash, you can earn crypto on your mobile device for free with no hardware to purchase. You just download the Nodalcash app, turn on your Bluetooth, and start earning. Notal Cash is private, secure, and easy to earn, whether you're on the go, stuck in traffic, or even while you're sleeping. You can even repurpose your old smartphones to earn Nodalcash.

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including Bitcoin, and earn up to 14% on stablecoins. With the Crypto.com Visa card, you can spend your... crypto anywhere. Enjoy up to 8% cash back instantly, plus 100% rebates for your Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime subscriptions, and zero annual fees. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 with the code Laura. Link in the description. Back to my conversation with Mitchell. So now that you've kind of experienced this ride with that initial, NFT project and since you, of course, also have extensive experience with the traditional art world, what's your take on how the traditional art world views NFTs? Do you think that they are embracing

this new art form or not? Well, that's an easy question. The answer is, I think, most definitely not overall. And there are a number of reasons for that. I think, I mean, I mean, you hear a number of criticisms of this space coming up. And I have a lot of time for these criticisms. But again, I feel that, you know, criticisms can be, you know, merited and valid and yet not tell even close to all of the story. One of the things that I think is, well, I mean, look, the first thing we should just talk about is the money, right?

there is the art world exists in this sort of, I think, somewhat disingenuous separation of church and state, where there is a commercial art world and there is an institutional art world. And the institutional art world, I think, likes to believe that they are like the custodians and keepers of our cultural history and that they do so while remaining separate from the vulgarity of the commercial art world. To be politic, I'd say I'm not sure how true that is. Maybe I should just come out and say that I don't think that is true.

But it's an easy lie to maintain because the commercial art world operates through a dearth of information. The commercial art world operates by being a black box, right? Initial sale prices are rarely published, and the commercial art world gives us just enough information on the secondary art world by doing public auctions and whatnot to feel like we have some waypoints

in terms of understanding what values are. But of course, the vast majority of sales of artworks in the secondary market happen privately, and those sales numbers will never really be disclosed. And if you and I both call, you know, one of the handful of mega dealers who control the flow of, you know, most of the, you know,

masterpieces of contemporary art, you and I would very likely get quoted different prices on the same artwork, right? And that's how it works, right? It is a lack of information and it is opacity that makes the commercial art world work, right? and in this NFT world, of course, everything is radically transparent, right? And in fact, knowing everybody else knowing exactly what you paid for an artwork is part of the point, isn't it?

Right? And I don't know, like, that is part of the point. And it's, I wonder how different that is than the sort of like the art world, again, at the highest, levels. I'm talking about the highest, highest levels of the commercial art world, of the contemporary art world. But that certainly is a threat, you know. But then, of course, most artists don't work at the highest levels, like, do they, right? Most artists are struggling. Most artists do not, you know, don't end up being represented by one of the mega dealers like David Zwerner or Larry Goghossian and seeing their work fetching millions of dollars in secondary. Most of them are struggling for

their next show at an artist run center where they may receive a modest grant and hoped to be, you know, to eventually make it to a mid-tier commercial gallery and straddle these institutional and commercial worlds at the same time. And in the NFT world, you see that a lot of the entrance are people who wouldn't be perceived to have paid their dues in that system, right? And so the question becomes, well, why are all these artists making all of this money all of a sudden? They're not even the best artists, right? I mean, they're not even the artists who deserve to make money, right? I think that some of the posturing is often that, you know, we want artists to make money, but, you know, not these artists.

And, you know, like, I, and look, I do, I get that. I think it's natural to see if you've been working in the art world for a lot. long time. And then you see once again only a handful of artists and often ones that you don't recognize succeeding where you've worked with so many who struggle. It's a lot easier. It's so funny, in broken systems, somehow it becomes so much easier to criticize the unworthy few who succeed than the system that has led the worthy many to fail. Right? That's just an easier thing to point at and criticize, I believe. So these are, I think, some of the, I mean, some of the reasons why I think we've seen skepticism. And the other thing is just that institutions are very

slow to move, right? Even I've, and I should say, this is like not, this is not been my experience with everybody in the art world. I've had a number of meetings with people at museums and galleries and curators who really do have open minds and are curious to hear more. And, you know, I tell them my stories, I tell them about, you know, about other artists who I feel do a great job telling this story. And they are really receptive. And then they just say, okay, but, you know, we move really slowly here. You know, it'll take some time. Yeah, I mean, I do think it is, you know, on the French's, I mean, not that I'm like really on the up and up with all the art stuff. But, you know, clearly we've seen Christie's and Sotheby's this year have

these auctions. So I think, you know, they kind of recognize, oh, right, there was something there. But I was curious for the people who collected your IKBs, which are the international Klein Blue, is that what they're called? Which, yeah, those are your digital zones pieces that we discussed earlier. Did they tend to just be crypto people or did you find any traditional art collectors who were interested in those? they were i mean i would say all of them crypto people first i mean i would say that all of them were i mean i mean so many of them are i don't want to make totally the distinction because i actually think so many of the people that i've encountered in crypto you know do you know first of all they did have

an art appreciation right you know and so many of the people i've encountered in this space both you know people who've collected my work and people who haven't you know have had i i just met so many people with genuine curiosity, right? And we're, it's remarkable. But I would say they all came to it from the crypto pathway, much more so than from the art pathway. But then what about the secondary sales? Are those also crypto people or? Also crypto people. Oh, wow. Yeah, I personally don't see a lot of art people in the market right now. Oh, interesting. Because, you know, since this artwork is very much in conversation with, you know, a pivotal art work from the traditional art world, I would have thought there would be more interest. But that actually leads me to your other project, which,

so I'm a big fan of Solowit. This came up in the, I don't remember if it came up, but at least, I was at least thinking about it while I was writing the questions for my episode with Ria Myers. I don't remember if we actually discussed it. But Salawit was a really great conceptual artist. And you ended up creating something called the Luit Generator Generator. So why don't you explain what that is and your inspiration for it? And then we can talk a little bit more about traditional art versus NFT stuff. Sure. So, I mean, look, I think a lot when a new technology comes out and I don't understand it because

I'm not a futurist or a scientist or whatever, right, I use art as a tool to understand it. And so, you know, generative art. And I'm thinking about these conceptualist school of artists who were active in the 1960s, right? And so one of the foremost conceptual artists is this guy named Salawit. And he's very famous for he would create instructions on how to make a drawing. All right. And when you wanted to buy a piece by Salawit, he would sell you those instructions. Just the instructions, right?

And the instructions were like also provided authenticity that whatever came out, however, you know, the instructions were manifested, that was a Solowit drawing. And so this is, I mean, from a conceptual point of view, it's about, all right, it's the idea, is the actual location of artistic merit and whatever. But now all of a sudden, and so I made an artwork about that in 2015, where I'm like, okay, this is essentially basically saying that code can be art. I make this computer code, you know, that also translates, you know, one of Solowitz's wall drawings, wall drawing number 118, right? But then blockchain makes me rethink this all in terms of, okay, we understand that Solowitz's work implies that the idea is the center of artistic value. But what about the center of financial value? This is really interesting because it is the case that when a museum would buy a Saul Lewitt, and this was the case, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, whatever, they were buying just instructions.

they were buying information, they were buying data. And most of these instructions, they were very simple. They were almost poetry in their simplicity. They could easily be put on blockchain. And so the idea, right, and then whatever comes out, the other side is fine. That is still a Solowit drawing, but it is not as important as those instructions, right? And this is fascinating. And this is fascinating to me when I discover art blocks, right?

I discover art blocks in, like, January of 2021. and I am like, oh, this is an evolution of this idea of artists, you know, creating instructions, those instructions being what is for sale and yet managing to preserve the uniqueness of different iterations, you know, it's like, like the iterations that come out of these instructions are no longer throwaway or discardable. Like, art blocks for me conceptually had upended actually so many ideas that the conceptualist had. Like, I think it's a really important project in digital. art history. But so anyway, I created a project on art blocks that ended up, you know,

being released in the summer in August that was where I, you know, similar process. I translated, well, I mean, I actually translated the program that I made in 2015 that translated Salowitz instructions from the 1960s. And it generated all of these wall drawings while taking advantages of some of the affordances from a blockchain and the art blocks platform. And so something that was fascinating to me was in the discord that you run, there was someone in your discord who said you kind of needed to do more drops. And, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think aside from the ICBs and then the Lewitt Generator Generator, I don't think you've done much more in terms of NFTs. And you made a little speech back to this person where you

pushed back on this notion that you needed to do more drops. So why haven't you done more drops during this NFT hype cycle? Right. I haven't released any more art during this hype cycle because I hate money. No, that's not true. That's not true. It's nothing so I wish I were so bold and revolutionary. No, it is because, you know, remember what I was saying at the beginning when I was talking about Eve Klein's work, how it is sincerity, like what underpins all of that work is faith and belief. And I really believe in that.

And it's, but we're, it's so weird. So much of what we're doing here in NFTs and in, in blockchain and crypto is like, we communicate kind of through the medium of the market, which is really weird. People talk about market signals, you know, and like what the market tells us. I know this is like a really like super like libertarian view, but it seems to hold true in crypto, right? And I think that it's very important. The way to communicate your sincerity and your belief in what you do to the market is probably to not abuse the market. You know, I think I've been very, the most important thing to me is being an artist and continuing to be an artist.

And an artist's career is built up very, very gradually. And you have to build a lot of goodwill as you go. And it's important to me that I believe in every single work that I do. And so even though this year, obviously, the digital zones blew up and did very, very well. But that was a project that I, you know, created when there was no money in it. And, you know, the Luit generator generators on art blocks. Obviously, that was produced this year, but it was, you know, a translation of a piece I created in 2014. And there is, look, it's, heck of a year. Heck of a year. And there's been a lot of money out there. And I am not, yeah, I am not actually

that, like, radical who can sit here and say that I, like, you know, hate money and don't want to be tainted by it. I'm prone. I'm susceptible to the same like temptations and self-interest that absolutely anybody is. And that is why I haven't really trusted myself to release artwork based on ideas that I've had this year. Because there is no way to tell whether those ideas are sort of tainted by a desire to grab cash. Okay. I just, I just, you can't, in the face of like such overwhelming market incentive, you just, you can't trust yourself. So, so I'm just, I'm going to wait and whatever ideas, you know, sit with me.

I am working. I mean, I'm working on new projects right now. But I will release them after a long time. And as soon as I know that they're my like real sincere beliefs and real sincere opinions. And that is, that is not altruistic. Like, that is self-interest. because, as I said, my goal is to be an artist for a long time. It only takes one really scummy cash grab to lose the goodwill that you built up with collectors.

So I think I'm just going to make sure that I don't do that, you know? One other thing I found fascinating is that you have been making, I don't quite know what to call them. I guess you were calling them artist proofs. And they're basically kind of like these physical works for the different collectors of the digital zones. and for the Lewitt generator, generator, or for those you're working on the physical works. So why create a physical memento? And are they just gifts for these collectors?

Or are you selling them? Oh, no, they're just gifts. I mean, yes, I have for both my projects. I've made physical gifts still in production. I do everything very slowly. And so, but I just generated prints for my collectors of Luit Generator Generator on art blocks, and those will be printed in January, and then hopefully mailed out by the end of the month.

And I've been creating physical books, physical copies of the blue paper for the 100 collectors of the digital zones. And I do that, they really are just gifts, because I do believe that, you know, I mean, we still do live in the real world, and it's nice to send something to people's houses.

I don't charge anybody. anything for them but I'm extremely grateful for the people who have invested in me and shown faith in me like I've been I've been doing this for a long time I've been like artists like you know I've been an artist for for 15 years it's really hard to get people to believe in you and it's just like even you know even people who get upset about flippers who buy their work you know for recent they all value or whatever. And don't get me wrong.

I'd prefer that they stuck around and absorbed the ideas. But man, I was doing this for a long time and nobody was betting on me. You know? So it's like somebody wants to bet on me. I'm like, sure, I appreciate it. I sincerely do. And so I just, you know, I'd like to, you know, make gifts for people. It's nice.

And so now that you have experienced kind of this, frenzied, NFT art market, but then also you have experienced the contemporary art market. I was curious for your take on how the two differ. It's weird. It is, obviously, I have had more success in these systems that are more transparent, right? Because you can see how sentiment develops, right? you can see how the pieces move from collector to collector, that is, you know, that's extremely helpful.

The, the, a traditional art market that I've been in is been very opaque, except it's very telling that where I was most successful, which was in making large-scale public artworks and large-scale sculptures, right, that is one of the more transparent art markets you can be in because most of these things are created with public money or as part of public programs. There is, like, it's very transparent. There is a call that goes out for expressions of interest. Who would like to make a 20 foot tall sculpture for this park? And then everybody puts up their hand.

And then they choose five people to develop a proposal. And then the proposals are public. And then they pick one. And that person gets, you know, a quarter million dollars or whatever to make their sculpture. And that was always, as long as the rules were out there for me, it was fine. Like, I could accept losing. And like, like, there would even losing would feel. like forward progress. Whereas I know that for so many people, the idea of who gets selected

and who doesn't in the traditional art world was extremely opaque. Like, it's extremely confusing. You can try to pick out patterns, you know, and analyze it. But at the end, you're kind of reading tea leaves, you know? So the NFT market has made more sense to me. However, it is also the case. I mean, criticisms about it being turbocharged and based on financial speculation, more so than artistic appreciation, those are also valid. Everybody who has made an NFT has chosen to make an artwork on top of a financial technology, which means that it is going to be a financial asset. And I don't know how that can change. I think you can just hope that you get the maximum number of people. to stop and think about your ideas and appreciate what you've made along the way. And all of these ideas are familiar and comfortable to me because I made public art for most of

my career, right? Like most of my career, I didn't exclusively make stuff that was going to be in a safe white cube gallery, like to be like revered and only ever experienced as an important, you know, unveiling of my soul, right? I made stuff that was the people walked past on their way to the subway station, right? And you have to accept that. And I had to at a certain point in my career, except that that doesn't debase what I'm doing, that I can tell stories that are just as meaningful and just as deep and just as profound as the stuff that is protected by that hermetic white cube, right?

But I have this other constraint to have to do it in. And honestly, and if like if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, pigeons poop on it, which they will. All right, that's okay, right? I can still tell stories in that medium. Actually, so much of my attitude towards the NFT role in the NFT market was informed by making public art, was informed of making art that was going to be for everyone, not always perceived as being completely delicate and special. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if I think about different public artworks that I've seen. Many of them are things that are super memorable.

So I definitely wouldn't say that doing that has any less value, even for the beholder. There's one topic that we kind of touched on a little bit, but I wanted to ask you about it directly. How do you think NFTs have changed access to the art world for artists? That's a big one. And now, of course, there's still a long way to go, right? because as we know, access to crypto is not evenly distributed, right? We know this.

And it's only getting worse as gas goes up as crypto gets more expensive. So access to crypto is a problem. I think that once a person is across that barrier, once a person is across that threshold, I do see, which is a big, you know, whatever, that's a big caveat. I get it. It's not perfect. However, I mean, going to art school, having our career is also insanely expensive, okay? I mean, people are coming out of my MFA program, like with $100,000 in debt,

all right? And no clear way, like, you know, there's no one waiting to scoop you up from out of art school out of your MFA program to give you a six-figure salary, okay? And there is a general sense that you have to do that MFA and, you know, take on the student debt to be taken seriously or have a chance of teaching or whatever. So there are barriers to access everywhere, whatever, whatever. I think that it provides access for a type of person who would not have... The barriers to entry in the art world are very subtle and very invisible. It really helps if you're sociable, all right?

It really helps if you're good at a cocktail party. It really helps if you live in a metropolitan center, all right? It is not a, like, it is not a coincidence that these major art movements, oh, like, it turns out that everybody who lived in the same apartment block in New York City in 1958 ended up being famous. What a weird coincidence, right? And nobody who grew up in Boise, Idaho did. You know, some of that is, you know, some of that is really tricky. And it's like, even for me, like, I'm a person who I began my, you know, art career as a person, like, at a time when, you know, I had a lot of family stuff going on.

I was, you know, starting my family just as I came out at grad school. I had to move away from, you know, the city where I did grad school, literally the day after my graduation, right? So I didn't have the network there that I supposedly spent all that money on, you know, a grad school, right? And then, you know, I would have, you know, a young family that couldn't go to all the parties. I certainly couldn't do the artist residencies, right?

And living online for all of its challenges. has provided access points for some of those people. And you see, I see even here in Canada, you know, when I see an artist like Mad Dog Jones, all right, who having all the success, having come from Thunder Bay, if you've ever been to Thunder Bay, that's not a place you move to if you're trying to make it

as an artist, okay? Like, it's like, and it's incredible to me that he's achieved what he's achieved. And you know, and a number of artists who've come from disparate backgrounds, not insiders, they've found a path. And that's, and that's a path. good. I just think that's good.

So what do you think NFTs have been doing for art? Do you think that they're kind of creating a fundamental change in what art is? Yes. I think that it'll take some time to see it, but yeah, I won't hedge it all there. And I will just say yes, because I think that every, NFTs represent a new kind of patronage model for artists. And, and I will just say, yes. And, and And I think that every time the patronage model for art changes, art changes. You know, as an example, right, I like to point to the Renaissance. Easy example. If you look at the Italian Renaissance, it is mainly paintings of this Jesus character and like maybe his mom and maybe some of his buddies.

And that's like most of what we paint in the Italian Renaissance. And then if you, you know, move north a little bit to the Northern Renaissance or the Dutch Renaissance. You see, you know, different types of paintings. You will see paintings of, you know, couples and, you know, pregnant wives and things like this. All right. And despite the fact that they have access to the same technology, what you're seeing is very different patronage models, right? Is that, you know, you have one place where work is funded entirely by the Pope and one place where, you know, work is funded by, you know, by, like, in emerging, like, bourgeoisie. and that means that art changes, you make a different kind of art, right?

And it's the same. And every time, like, so often whenever you see big changes in art, romanticism, is because a new patronage model emerges. And so for better or for worse, if this is how we're buying and selling art now, it will be reflected in the content of the work itself. it takes some time to figure that out, but it will happen. And whenever we see how this new patronage model and this new type of collector, you know, begins to make their presence felt in the institutional world, then we're going to see some even bigger changes. And that will happen, I believe.

And when you say that, you're talking about like major museums or something, is that what you mean? Yes, I believe so. I mean, I believe that there are major collectors who are. interested in preserving the cultural legacy of what this moment in time, right? And it's inevitable that we will see eventually, it will happen slower than most people think, but we will see institutions who have to interact with this moment and reflect on it and figure out what it is meant for society and for culture and for the art world, right? And typically, you know, those moments of reckoning and institutions do often end up being mediated by the commercial concerns behind those works. Well, speaking of commercial concerns, capitalism and financialization

are not only big parts of the world right now, but becoming more so, I would say, with with crypto. So I was curious if you have a take on how the art world has tried to represent those trends and how well you think NFTs are doing in terms of representing or critiquing them? Yeah. Okay, that is so interesting, right? So, yeah, I mean, I made a work, you know, based on Eve Klein making a work that was like very much about the difference between and artworks, expressive form and its commodity form, right? And to me, that's a very profound conversation. But it's like what I was saying at the beginning of this conversation, which, is that one, that commercial world operates, like, its superpower is opacity.

All right. The superpower of the commercial art world is controlling information. And, of course, which allows us to live in this fantasy world where those two things don't impact each other. It shouldn't matter how much a thing is worth if it is a great artwork. and yet and yet and yet, right? We simply can't avoid it so often. On a very basic level, I don't know, I imagine many of us have walked into a museum with our aunts and uncles and heard them say,

I can't believe my tax dollars paid a million bucks for this, you know? And so immediately their perception, their experience of the art is colored by what they know about its commodity form. That's a shame in some respects, but I can't deny that it happens. And yet there's also, it's also very powerful when an artwork can overcome that connection to its commodity value to create a genuinely transcendent experience. I just read a wonderful article by Richard Warnaca and Haslett, who talks about, you know, he was researching this Mark Rothko scan. And it led him all the way to the top. And it sort of like, it ends with him at the Trump inauguration and looking and seeing all of Trump's donors, all being

people who had paid millions of dollars for Rothcos and what did that mean. But then still when he sits down with the artwork, like he can't help it be completely overwhelmed. Like it doesn't matter. He's able to shed that. And that is really beautiful. But the nature of that relationship, whether the commodity aspect of the artwork stains our experience of it, or whether our experience transcends it, or whether in some rare cases they're able to have a sort of like symbiotic relationship. It is rarely addressed in, I think, like, the discourse, like the literature around art. And it's rarely addressed in art itself. And I do think, like, that Eve Klein is one of the only artists that I've encountered. And of all the artists I've encountered, he is the one who

has done it the best, who is willing to earnestly acknowledge that his artwork is, is spiritual and profound, that it is also a commodity, and that these two things will affect each other. Hence, you know, the ritual and the gold and the river, right? And typically, when artists have tried to address their role, like the financialization of their work, I think it has been a lot more like facile or sort of sophomoric. You end up with artists trying to be sensational about it, you know, like you end up with like, you know, Damien Hearst will make, you know, this crystal skull and part of the point of it is supposed to be that like

he sold it for $100 million. But he has too much to gain in that statement, right? I don't think he would like us to believe that he's being cheeky about, you know, how supercharged the art world is. But even if he is making that point, like, can I believe that that's his sole intention when he just has so much to gain from it? You know, and so, and it's not something that, and it's not something the artists like to acknowledge.

They don't like to acknowledge that, you know, the, the price of their work, you know, will reflect on their own legacy and the perception of themselves. NFT works, of course, being created on a financial technology, have the ability to talk more about the intertwining of, like, commodity and expressive forms of artworks. However, I do think that, you know, this medium is still in its infancy. Many of the artists who are working in this medium, you know, we're all still kind of figuring it out, you know? All right. So if we're going to, you know, have this discussion about NFTs, which we are, the probably main topic that we definitely can't miss if we're going to close out this discussion is the fact that every time. non-crypto organizations announce a move toward crypto or NFTs, there tends to be a backlash. Earlier this year, Art Station had to abandon its plans to launch NFTs because people

protested that. And then there's been some video game developers in studios that had similar situations recently, such as the company behind a game called Stocker 2 and then Ubisoft, I think, is still going to go forward with it. but they just quietly de-listed the video that announced it. Even the chat platform Discord, which is super popular in the crypto community, got a lot of backlash for kind of hinting at an Ethereum integration. So what do you think is going on here?

Why do you think the art world or the non-crypto world in general is so angry about NFTs? Okay. So I'll start off by saying very level-headed. Some of that is healthy. Some of that is healthy because say it with me, not everything needs to be a token, right? And not everything needs to be an NFT. So like a good chunk of these ideas getting kind of slushed out. That's incredibly positive and healthy, right?

But there is like there are valid reasons for skepticism from the outside world. Like I believe that. Like I've presented like a fairly like, you know, crypto positive. view here, but I hear the concerns. I hear the, I hear, and I hear a lot of the skepticism, somebody who cares about, you know, a game to expose the assets within the game to what is really, really, really, like a supercharged market, you know, right now. It is, it is dangerous. Like, it is scary. You know, imagine if you, you know, like, all of a sudden really, really couldn't afford your like, you know, some of the best assets in a game that you care about. I get it.

And also, like, gas is really expensive right now. And I know that anybody, any, like, serious game developer or mainstream company who's playing and putting NFTs online has got to be looking at like an L2 or a roll-up or something like that. But it's still, I mean, even spending, you know, a dollar per transaction every time that you want to interact with your game, that's, that's not great. So maybe not everything needs to be a token. And although I recognize that a lot of the concerns that are being fairly brought up, like gas, ecological impact, et cetera, there are solutions on the way. I don't expect people not in the crypto space to be fully informed and like understand that like, well, you know, whenever there's, you know, whenever Ethereum 2.0 comes out, this will be solved. And, you know, gas will go down as soon as Starknet goes like, nobody else is going to know that.

you haven't been spending all your time on crypto Twitter. So it's like, it's okay for people to be, like to be skeptical right now. Um, that is fine. And then you see some blowback from the NFT community, right? We don't need, we don't need Pepsi to be selling us NFTs. And it's because, again, the same thing that I was saying, like, look, we're all guilty of the same stuff. We're all guilty of the same stuff.

That kind of tribalism that I was talking about in the art world saying, well, we just, you know, it's not, it's just, it's just, those artists aren't on my team. so they don't deserve to get all the rewards, right? So, you know, crypto people who have been here for a while. It's like, well, they're not a crypto native. They shouldn't be making money on NFTs. That's not our tribe. You know, it's the same stuff.

We all do the same stuff, right? So it's like it's pretty, you know, it makes perfect sense to me. Okay. All right. Well, we'll have to see how all this plays out because I kind of can't imagine it's going to last forever. That's just my personal opinion. So you've said that you're kind of,

working on things, you're just not quite ready to release. But how will you know when the time is right to get back in? And in the meantime, you know, what should people watch out for from you? Ah, thank you. I will know, well, I will know that the time is right to release new work when I think that it is, when I think that it's great. And no and no sooner than that, which I think will be a while. But what people should look out for is, you know, I'm planned to stay extremely active in the community. There are a lot of ways to contribute to this space without putting out things that people can buy, which, and that can just mean staying active in your communities. I hope to do a lot more writing in the future, a lot of writing and criticism. I feel like, you know, criticism is a big thing that we

need in this space to have a healthy discourse and for the art to get better. And, you know, I hope to continue supporting the people who are doing that. And that's, and that's, and that's, And that's basically it for me until I have something really great to share with the world. Okay. And where can people learn more about you and your work? Yes, please. You can check out my work and see a lot of my crypto and non-crypto work at Chan. Perfect.

All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Thanks, Laura. It was great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Mitchell, check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin. with help from Anthony Youne, Daniel Ness, and Mark Murdoch.

Thanks for listening.