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ARTISTS IN THE CITY 🏙️🎨 #1 @0xdiid
Recorded: June 4, 2025 Duration: 1:12:49Space Recording
Short Summary
Exciting developments are underway with the upcoming launch of the Cities project in collaboration with Art Blocks, featuring a structured token launch and a focus on community engagement. This initiative highlights the power of partnerships and innovative fundraising strategies in the evolving crypto art landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Music Thank you. Music GM. Hello, everyone. Thank you all for coming to this episode, this first official episode
of Artists in the City. Today, we're joined by our friend, our collaborator, the genius himself
did, as well as some friends from Schiller. We have Buna and
Fungible who are going to be joining and asking questions today. We're going to be diving deep
into our Cities project that's coming out soon with Art Blocks. Last week, we went into My Story
and the roots of this collaboration. Today, we're going to go more into Did's story because he
wasn't able to join last week.
Yeah, welcome everyone. Thank you for being here. It means a lot. How's it going everyone?
Doing alright. How are you?
I'm good. I'm still getting the hang of these spaces, but that jam got me pretty fired up to chat today. That was some jazzy sounds from Misha Panfulov.
Wow.
Yeah, I gotta say that was, um, a really nice way to transition.
Um, I was, I just got out of, uh, 113's intro to computing arts course.
So that was a nice decompression um if you will to this space
yeah i have a bunch of playlists that i listen to that kind of sound like that they just put
me at ease they get me into the creative mood the city needs a good soundtrack for sure uh
hey fungible how you doing i don't know yeah it's nice to be here with with all of you
and that music was incredible i it sounded familiar but um i can't tell if that was just me
recognizing a pure jazzy vibe uh i i don't know if i've actually ever heard it before, but yeah, we need the playlist drop somewhere.
If you haven't published that before, I would absolutely love to check that out.
But yeah, really, really excited to chat today.
And you're doing great at hosting, FDOT.
You're a natural, man.
Excited to dive more into the collab and into DID today.
Yeah, I'm sad I didn't get to join the first space,
but very grateful to be here.
Yeah, thank you for making the time.
I know half of your team is out in Lisbon right now enjoying NFC.
We all wish we could be there and we're sending love
to the team that's on the ground over there. But we're all connected in this internet city so it
feels great to be able to just meet up each Wednesday now going forward. Even past this
project I'm hoping to keep these going and interview more artists. So anybody who's interested
let us know.
Where do you want to start today?
Should we just introduce Did and talk about his roots as an artist?
Yeah, I'm kind of down to kick this off here.
Yeah, first and foremost, it feels great to be asking some questions again. It's been quite some time.
And so could not think of any better way to kick it off with getting to Die Than some questions again. It's been quite some time. And so could not think of any better way
to kick it off with getting to dive into Did's story.
And I also love how we're saying diving into
as he's got that fish as his PFP.
Feels really fitting here.
So let's get started.
But starting with one of the,
just starting with kind of a more
of a foundational question for you did.
When it came to code, what initially drew you to code and what keeps you coming back to it?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think I'm somebody who always liked building things.
I'm somebody who always liked building things. I also have pretty severe ADHD, as I'm sure a lot of us do in this space.
And I found that oftentimes building physical things, I didn't have the patience required to finish something and have it be perfect.
And code is just a way, it's a much faster iteration process.
You know, you can prove your ideas a lot faster.
You can tweak things slower.
So it's kind of this combination of I get to put something out there,
you know, really fast especially
in this day and age with all the vibe coding and stuff and then i can tweak it and perfect it over
time as i have the motivation and the dopamine to do that so i think it was just a good fit for both
the way my brain works and the amount of patience that I have.
Yeah, can appreciate that. As someone who grew up with a dad who was like a handyman who loved
to do things outside and build things, I just couldn't be bothered with that. So I definitely can relate to that sentiment there. That's wonderful, man.
And I love how you kind of called out the, you know, in response to some of the vibe coding
that's happening. Something that's been rattling around in my mind is, you know, still like vibe
coding is great, but it also at some level, like the people who vibe code, quote unquote, the best,
at least have a fundamental understanding
of the language that they're coding in
so they can ask it the right questions
and tell it to do the right things.
So yeah, just wanted to share a little bit on that.
Yeah, that's a phenomenal answer.
And maybe want to transition into,
when we saw this collab or this collab
felt like it fell in our lap here at Shiller and we just immediately jumped uh to to help out i'm curious how you guys found each other
you know i'm curious like how this collaboration maybe started um and kind of what maybe the first
interaction between you and f top were yeah for sure um in a in a previous life under a previous pseudonym,
we started this project a long time ago.
And we actually started this project
before I even created art under the did pseudonym.
And I was just kind of releasing generative art projects
that were meaningful,
but maybe a little bit thrown together
and a little bit thrown together and a little bit imperfect and I knew parts of my
artistic practice had to change I wasn't feeling like satisfied in what I was doing
and there were two bits to that but the biggest one was just collaboration so before I knew I
wanted to really dive deeper into on chain stuff and
solidity and kind of what makes up my a large portion of my practice today
i was looking to create almost like derivative collaboration generative art projects and
fdot was the first person i reached out to because i loved this
art and also because it felt like a good balance of something that could be put into a system
you know the designs of cities are very much so artistic but also like regimented and there's
rules involved and things like that you know
the grid is always a grid no matter what angle it's on and I think it was it was an interesting
thing to me for that reason and I reached out to him and at that point I had like you know
I think like 500 600 followers and um I did not expect a response, but we started talking about
it and I built some quick prototypes and then we've just been working on it and tweaking it
ever since. So the basis of the project really resides there like three years ago in those,
three and a half years ago in those initial conversations
and we've just been building on it ever since
so you have to raise your hands go for it man you breeze right past what i thought was the one of the
coolest things of our first uh interaction and maybe you didn't think it was as cool as i did
i mentioned it on the last space but i I had this idea before we chatted.
I was trying to get the right collaborator, but then you came along
and you made this presentation for me that showed me piece by piece
how the city could be built from the ground up.
Do you remember doing that?
Yeah.
So I spent early on before we had like agreed to do anything or I did any prototypes, I spent a couple of days tracing all of the existing cities that FDOT had in Figma, like line by line, and then grouping all of those lines into categories and then assembling it so you could
see like bit by bit how it was assembled and a lot of that still it's all still a part of the
algorithm today the cities are very much so based by stacking different elements on top of each other. And the first thing always is setting the grid.
And from there, everything is built on top of that.
There's a whole bunch of like randomness,
but also it's just like collision detection
and seeing where we need to add new lines
and things like that.
So yeah, that was the real true start of it.
It was so cool. Just the fact that you took the time and you cared enough to do that. And then
that piece ended up becoming your city, right? That was Street View.
Yeah. Yeah. I saved up. So a lot of my early 101s, like Genesis collection, under did, ended up going into, you know, I saved up for Street View, which still is one of my favorite works of art ever.
I just think it's so beautifully constructed. And that kind of acts as the baseline for what we wanted cities to be
that's awesome man that's a great after thanks for kind of tapping in and uh calling out that
uh just subtle based presence like subtle thing that probably most people don't think about doing
uh that's that's amazing and thanks for kind of sharing that that nugget here um want to yeah i think you kind of
touched on a little bit around collaborations uh in a in a general sense from above that's kind of
where your roots were before you uh kind of came to the space um or maybe operated more under the
pseudonym of did um but i'm kind of curious how just like in general
you think about collaborations,
specifically when it comes to code
and primarily digital art.
I think that's a relatively unexplored collaboration.
It's a relatively unexplored space.
I know Jordan Lyle, who's now at Artblocks,
was really experimenting
that with the Prohibition website. And there was a pretty great community that was fostered there.
So I know it's something that deeply, you wrote an article about around on-chain art. So I was
really wanting to maybe focus on, at least for this part, it's like, yeah, how do you think
about collaborations when it comes to the mix of code and what we would call just digital art today? Yeah, I think it's important
to have a lot of different perspectives and have a lot of different sources of inspiration for
artwork. And I think that comes through the strongest when, you know, you're kind of 50-50 involved with someone who has had a completely different path than you.
I'm a big proponent of diversity in that way and that everybody has something to teach us.
And I think we have a unique opportunity here in this space in that, like, I have friends across the pond in the UK
or in Europe in general I have friends in Southeast Asia and the first project I ever did I was just
writing the smart contract for but the artist for that project was exactly 12 time zones away from
me so it was just like literally the opposite side of the world for me.
And I just think there's something so special about that when you get to involve people
who don't share the same process or the same view on art as you do. And I think the best things really come out of that. I think as
developers, as software engineers, as creative technologists, as technical people, that becomes
especially important because people who don't have as much of an analytical mind might be able to put more of a story-driven or creative spin
on things that you wouldn't have thought of before.
So I think it's really important to have the more kind of creative, hand-drawn creative type interact with the more technical creative technologist type
because that's how you get things that's that are really greater than the sum of their parts
love that answer yeah it's it's always really exciting to me to see artists I love coming together, especially when they mostly practice in different mediums.
I feel like you two are a really interesting pairing.
pairing very similar in terms of vibe in your own way as well as your ability to
discuss and express complex emotions concepts and topics in seemingly or in actuality, simple and elegant ways.
It's also really cool to hear that story of how you kind of came together.
I definitely was hit by a wave of nostalgia when we first started chatting with you guys
and FDOT about this release.
I think it was my very first time in Miami where I stumbled upon FDOT IRL for the first time, I how unique the week of Art Basel was,
and how cities can contain and foster certain energies
and essences of culture.
But then we started talking about something
that FDOT really wanted to build and release at some point,
which was a generative art series
that allowed him to express in his visual language and style in a generative fashion,
and ideally with Artblock somehow, and maybe some great creative developer and artist that
could help him on the code front.
I think that was like two and a half years ago or something along those lines,
maybe three and a half now.
Just very cool to see it come together.
I think one thing I want to ask you did and maybe FDOT,
we can go to you after because yeah i feel like you might have
an answer to it of your own did you have this what's from the observer's perspective seemingly
um intense action and fascination with employing systems and creating and deploying systems to
strongly present and play with concepts in their most simple, elegant form. Your work in dithering and compressionism, as well as just creating these really elegant
means of outputting work on chain or otherwise. And you've discussed this like analytical side
of yourself as well as this very creative side of yourself and found this like fascinating visual language to embody
that.
I feel like in a way, collaboration can be this confound where you're bringing together
two complex systems of human beings and ways of thinking and creating.
And in an ideal scenario, as we've definitely been seeing in all of your outputs,
the product of that feels like a single entity created it.
This kind of beautiful synergy
of two creative spirits and minds.
I'd love to hear your take on, uh, you know, why and how you go about making the
complex simple or reducing things down to their most natural state.
Uh, and if you like categorically disagree with that, uh, assessment, then feel free
to tell me to fuck off but it's something that
i i feel like i've i've picked up over over the years with you and and it's really impressive to
see how it's taking shape and form uh as as you and fdot have been working together
yeah for sure. I think there's a lot of things at play, and I think it comes back to just what motivates me as an artist and as a human being.
I think part of it is, yes, an interest in building these artistic and representative and often compression related systems to create art.
And I think things like generative art that allow us to speak in this language of grids
and glyphs and streets and all that sort of stuff is is interesting for sure but i think for me the
most interesting aspect of it is that when you go into building something that is based entirely off
to off of randomization it feels more like you're having a conversation with the system than it does
that you're building something that is going to output something great every time it's more of
like a give and take relationship and I think for me one of the things I noticed early on, my first big project when I was doing generative art, I had 84 one-of-ones in that project. custom parameters and everything was kind of hard-coded to to create an artwork along with
a collaborator that kind of fit their their vibe and i found oftentimes the pieces that
i disliked the most my collaborators liked the most and they were more chaotic or more random or more dense than I would
have appreciated myself and I think a lot of a lot of creating generative
artwork and system-based artwork is that give-and-take is this like I'm gonna put
what I think is good instructions into this computer.
It's going to give me back something completely random.
And somebody out there is going to really appreciate that.
And I'm going to do my best to make it perfect.
But maybe other people will like different things.
And that's kind of cool.
So, yeah, I mean, there's an interest there for sure about the whole idea and the whole concept of creating systems to create art.
But fundamentally, the interest is more about having that conversation and creating something I didn't expect.
i didn't expect and i think we're kind of well into this with cities where even the smallest
changes of the parameters and the the different traits and things like that can create completely
unique and also very interesting pieces that i don't think FDOT or myself would have ever thought to create
using this same language that is the cities.
So yeah, that's kind of what interests me the most and why I keep coming back to it.
Thanks so much for the response.
Yeah, I know that was a bit of a novel of a question. You handled it great. So thank you for that. And it is so interesting having that give and take of control and surprise.
it's really cool to see that working out with you two as well as in your previous works.
And FDOT, maybe if it's cool, I'll pass it to you because from what I've understood,
you often go into your manual art creation mode without a super clear idea of what's
super clear idea of what's going to happen.
going to happen.
It just, from what did was answering there,
just made me think of moments I've seen you lost
in the process of creating,
using your own internal hard-coded,
or maybe soft-coded to some extent,
generative mechanisms to create something in physical space.
And your work itself is, again, this really interesting interplay between elegant simplicity and there's a consistent kind of recognizable language to the way you create.
But everything feels so unique and complex the more time I spend with it.
So I'd love to hear if anything that Didger shared about giving up some control or allowing things to
happen without a lot of planning resonated with you.
If there is any particular interest of your own between
the balance or interplay between systems of creating,
especially given your design background,
as well as the randomness of creating and expressing?
Yeah, great question. I do think in systems, to an extent, it's not completely unplanned,
because when you have a physical art piece, you have a substrate that you're drawing or painting on, and you have a tool that you're
creating with. So there's an inherent relationship between the size of the marks
and the color of the marks and the substrate. So if it's an 18 by 18 inch piece of paper,
which is the size I like to work at, and I have one of my big bold paint markers,
there's only a certain amount of detail that you can put into that artwork before it starts
to fall apart and not look like anything anymore.
So there is that inherent structure and system when I sit down to create, and those are some
of my favorite tools to use.
So there's these systems that I've built.
And then when I work digitally on Procreate mainly, sometimes Photoshop or Illustrator, there's layers and there's ways of applying strokes to the layers and the paths.
And keeping things consistent with the line thickness is something of a signature that I've tried to stay relatively consistent in across a lot of my collections.
I love that bold paint marker feel. So bringing that into my digital
work was just a part of that same system. The part where it gets really random, I think, is the
colors. Because as I would layer these pieces up, I actually don't know what color I'm going to pick
up next. It's based on feeling. And I don't know when I'm going to switch colors, just based on
when I think it's ready to have something added to it that's a little different.
But I think the other part of this is it hints at some of my other background that I didn't get a chance to share last week is I'm a huge lover of photography.
And I started doing skateboarding photography when I was much younger and gave that up as a career path.
photography when I was much younger and gave that up as a career path. But I always loved how you
never really know what's going to happen when you have the camera around your neck and you're
walking around the city. It could be something completely random that you've never seen before.
It just happens right in front of your eyes, especially in the bigger cities like New York.
So this collection scratches that itch for me as a photographer that never got it to be their career.
And also just loved building things as a kid, building with blocks and seeing what could be done, combining shapes.
So this definitely hits a lot of the marks that I wanted to do for a big collection.
And that randomness is one of my favorite parts about it, of what we're going to
see at the next run of outputs. We've been looking at them in series of 1,000 over the last couple
years and seeing the patterns that emerge and seeing the rare things that pop out that we don't
expect has been such a joy. I have so many JPEGs saved from this project and it's eating up my hard drive space.
But the collaboration has been fantastic and I've learned a lot about systems just
through working on it with you. Hell yeah. No, I appreciate those questions,
Fungi and FDOT. I remember when we were talking about photography a few days ago, and since having that very brief kind of interaction, reexamining some of the art that you – or the outputs that you put out on the timeline, it can't help but feel like it's just like a snapshot, like certain views of what the algorithm sees.
It's almost like it's taking a photo of it.
So I can't help but see that element within these outputs once you said that. So
as someone who fell in love with photography as the first medium I largely collected,
definitely can appreciate that viewpoint and that perspective here. I want to pass it back
to Dave here. I think it's an appropriate time to bring this up or it feels like a good transition
here. What were some of the unique challenges in building
cities? You've done quite a bit one-on-one, but also just kind of wondering, yeah, just when it
came to building this from the ground up, you know, what were some of the main things that stuck out
to you? Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of it will end up being the kind of things that hopefully people don't
notice at all um the kind of things that made it really difficult one of those is just the
the sheer amount of math involved in laying out a grid in this like kind of isometric form.
It's a lot of trig, it's a lot of math,
and it's the kind of stuff that has to be perfect
or the entire thing breaks down.
So everything is built out in these grids
as if you were looking from a bird's eye view and then it's kind of rotated down to the
diagonal isometric view and then on top of that we have to layer all of fdot's glyphs his characters
the eyes the mouths the puzzle pieces and everything else into this grid that is now rotated down without
completely steamrolling over everything else so it's it's a very intricate balance of
getting all of the math there to work and getting it to to end up being well composed and make sense in context so that
took a really really long time many many notebooks of of just trying to work all of that out but i
think the result is hopefully not even noticeable it's hopefully like you you wouldn't even care the amount of
work that i did there um because it just it just works and it just functions and yeah i think
there's a lot of stuff around that that it seems super straightforward on the surface to draw lines you know in a pattern and in practice it ends up being
pretty crazy so it reminds me so much of when i first learned logo design
it's like you have to capture so much in this one little mark and the best logos look so
effortless like they just meant to be that way. You know what I mean?
Totally. For sure. It's yeah, it's, it's crazy.
I appreciate you. Yeah. Like I appreciate you going into that.
And this might be, you know, I forgive the additional question here.
Hadn't planned this, but since you, since you brought that up, when you're,
when you're talking about some of these systems of like Trig going into this and kind of filling up notebooks,
where do you even start?
Like, what does that even mean?
Because I just think about command-lined prompts
and coding in Java and Solidity.
Like, is there an equation?
And just forgive this question if it's
not part of it but uh yeah just genuinely curious with like what you even mean by that
um yeah for those that care yeah for sure um so the way it all works is we kind of have this
build up of the cities which is very much so inspired by legitimate like city planning.
You'll see when the collection drops, we have things like traits for the amount of traffic on the streets and stuff like that.
So we build it up very much like you would design a city.
We set the grid and we determine where the streets are which streets are the main streets
and which streets are side streets we start putting cars on the streets with those wines
um i there's some code in there to do things like sidewalks as well as fill the buildings and make parking lots and parks and all of that sort of stuff.
So that aspect of it just kind of builds on that grid system.
And then once we get towards the end there, it's time to make that grid look like it's diagonal,
an isometric, kind of more 3D instead of just top down like it's a map because really
it's it's a painting of a city it's not a map of a city right so that perspective change really
lends a lot to the final artwork and when that happens you start getting into essentially doing three-dimensional transformations
within a 2D canvas. And it's all kind of perspective shifting stuff like you would think of
in traditional art, but it all has to be extremely regimented and extremely mathematical.
extremely regimented and extremely mathematical.
So yeah, in that sense, it makes it very interesting to get all of that perfect.
What makes it even more fun is that the entire canvas is built up entirely randomly using
only collision detection as like the composition.
So every single line and every single piece of every line has to know when it's about to run
into something else. And when you get to the glyphs and the characters and the eyes and things like that those things are not rotated in
perspective they're just flat almost as if they sit on top of the city providing it that character
so we actually have to do the collision detection with those things separately from the diagonal city but then they have to interact so it it just gets
very weird very fast at its core though it's it's two different coordinate systems and a couple of
sine and cosine functions with some custom logic that help you move between them and rotate between them.
It just gets a lot more fun past that.
Yeah, bringing me right back to learning some of these basic math functions
and different languages in high school.
So I'm getting a little PTSD from that. But it's
really dope to hear how you kind of combine everything. And I think it's one thing I've
learned a lot about with generative art just in general is that there's always a way to balance
harmony when having multiple elements kind of in the same picture or the same canvas, if you will.
So it's really dope to hear that.
I won't dive too much deeper into that, but I'm sure you could.
So one of the things that I'm sure,
especially with both you and FDOT curating these outputs,
there's probably a lot of things that you really enjoyed,
but you've had to
discard or to maybe remove from the final output or the final algorithm.
Kind of curious how you thought about that, or maybe what were, yeah, how did you choose
what stayed in the canvas and stayed in the code of what was removed when you guys were collaborating
here.
Yeah, I mean, that's really just about the conversation.
So we've done tons and tons and tons of test generations.
I'll generally run a test for a thousand pieces, upload it to Google Drive, and then FDOT will pick his favorite ones
and note any things that don't look intentional
or maybe that we want to change.
But I would say overall it's been a lot more focused
on just fixing things that look broken.
And when it comes to including things or excluding things,
we typically have shoved that into various rarity categories
and made things more rare, less rare,
so that they still kind of show up.
And I think a lot of that goes back to what I talked about
with that conversation related to what i talked about with that conversation
related to gen art that we have a ton of different ideas for what we think looks good and what
functions but i think the coolest aspect about art blocks and about long-form gender of art in general is that we kind of hesitate to impose our own ideas
from start to finish and rather let the randomness and the market decide what belongs and what
doesn't. So our main focus was that everything here, everything within the algorithm should look intentional, not necessarily that it belongs or it doesn't belong.
It's literally just typing down a thought you mentioned there to remember of like imposing, imposing your ideas.
imposing your ideas um that just felt really strong uh and i think it's it's kind of it's
That just felt really strong.
also a meta commentary around like our algorithms that on our feet in general like we almost have
to impose our will on social media for to curate our algorithms to give us exactly what we want
uh versus let because if we just let it uh fall to the reins of the of the following tab um you
know or the for you tab,
it gets a little, it gets a whole lot of what we don't want to see.
So appreciate you. Yeah. Diving into that.
And it's really dope to kind of hear the inner working is like how you guys
went back and forth here. It's in to,
it was just I keep reminding myself that this is a multi-year collaboration
because sometimes I think our concept or perspective of time
just gets so skewed here in this industry
and probably the rest of the world
now that we're living in a new era of AI.
So it's really, I'm just imagining Fungi
shared a couple of images in the comments
around how we think about you guys ping-ponging this back and
forth um so thanks for yeah thanks for tapping in there uh and it's really yeah really dope to hear
but definitely going to linger and probably meditate on the the imposing or just the idea
of imposing um our ideas on certain systems um but fdot, man. If you don't mind, I can answer just from my side while we're on that question.
Absolutely.
For me, I think the hardest thing to decide what's in the collection and out of the collection is
the color palettes. I mentioned when I'm creating, they just sort of happen randomly,
starting with the background color and then building up from there. And I love so many of
them. And some of them are just subtle variations on each other.
And it feels very much like walking through a city for an entire day.
You see the buildings change colors very literally.
And the shade and the clouds distort what the image looks like.
And I don't know how I'm going to decide.
We still haven't fully narrowed it down.
But I have about a week to pick the final color palettes.
I feel like that's also something really,
I'm not sure if it's just with art in general,
or if it's just, I know in the crypto space it is as well,
but just like usually like there's planning things.
There's like the kind of like the loose outline of what's supposed to happen, but then everything really comes together days or a week before the thing is actually supposed to be done in kind of this really beautiful way.
So yeah, that's awesome to hear that, man.
And I think there's – I have one more question on the lines of collaboration.
or question on the lines of collaboration,
given that this was like a multi-year,
you know,
endeavor and we're,
we're getting to see the fruits of that and,
and hopefully a lot more here soon.
I'm curious if there was any disagreements when it came to like what this
should be or like what the vision is.
Yeah.
Just like whether it was on from did or from UF dot.
Yeah.
I'm kind of curious if there were any disagreements.
And number two, like how you guys kind of worked through that.
Yeah.
You can take it.
Oh, go ahead.
I was just saying, you can take that one.
Okay.
Yeah, so I think in general, there haven't been any real major disagreements.
And I think a lot of that goes back to kind of having the blueprints with the one-on-one cities that FDOT has done.
I kind of always knew that my goal was here is we want to build a collection
that looks and feels like the cities that FDOT has done by hand but also
feels like it it's bigger than that like it feels like if it would have been done
by hand it would have you know taken hundreds of hours and years and years of time.
So I think the only necessary disagreements are more along the ranges of what we like better.
fundamental aspect of like fully random long form generative art is cool because we can include
stuff for everybody and we can include stuff that I like and we can include stuff that he likes
and I think that's just what what makes it super cool so one of the things I I fought for a little bit were the super zoomed in cities that only show like one or two blocks and then just like one or two glyphs.
And it's very focused and it's more of a showcase of the texture instead of the movement necessarily and then f dot on the other hand really likes the super super
zoomed out cities that show hundreds of blocks and everything interacting all of these glyphs so
yeah i think a lot of those things were resolved just by just by including everything and
having something for everybody to love.
Yeah, that's about what I'll say.
Amazing.
Hell yeah.
Thanks for tackling that.
Yeah, I can't imagine.
I just think it's real easy in this space.
Maybe it's just on Twitter because it's not the greatest,
I guess you could call it a city
to disagree in public on, because it's just not
incentivized to actually have a healthy debate. But I think it's real easy to kind of be nervous
of collaborations or kind of disagreements or having kind of, you know, having different things
collide. But usually, you know, at least in my experience, that's usually when the best things
are made is the best of both worlds or the best of multiple parties that can kind of see the clear underlying
vision. So no, I appreciate you answering that. I have more, this is kind of stepping out of that
realm as we we've been kind of going at this for close to an hour. So did, I really appreciate you
kind of tackling all of these and FDOT. I think you've done a great blend of uh of weaving in here um where it makes sense to amplify kind of the story and kind of how you
guys think about it um one thing i want to uh ask is you know did you recently publish an article
uh around on china on chain art is boring it was featured by the ethereum foundation and followed
up by Space.
I'm curious what inspired that
for those who haven't read it yet
and how might you unpack that headline here?
Yeah, yeah.
It was inspired in part by some things
that I saw slowly happen
as I released artistic tools to do things easier.
So when I first released Effacax, which allows you to deploy on-chain art, Mint on-chain art, super, super easily,
there was kind of this big boom of people who really only just did on-chain art because they thought it was interesting
or they liked the permanence or they thought it could get them more money, which I think
wasn't necessarily the point of the tool or the point of on-chain art as a whole.
And I think here in this space, we have an opportunity to do things that are much cooler than just putting images on the internet. I think there's, especially since the market has gone down and things like that, there's better ways to earn money as a creator than minting NFTs.
as a creator than minting nfts and coming to terms with that was really important to to my
kind of artistic journey and my path forward for me art blocks is kind of one of the original
exemplars of that concept right because long form generative art where you click mint you click buy and at that
same time have a provably random piece of artwork that is something that cannot happen outside the
blockchain you know you can kind of fake it by having someone buy something and then have a random number generator but you never know if
that's if that's real if that's true so to me it's important to call out things like that
as well as the more complex games and and dynamic art and interactive art that people are doing
because i think it's important that
if you're going to stick around and you're going to keep creating art on the internet and on this
tiny tiny tiny small corner of the internet then it's important to have that in mind and
try and do things that feel like they have a bit more importance than just putting an image and having someone buy it.
So that was kind of the fundamental core idea.
I think despite being one of the simpler solutions to that problem, I think Art Blocks and Long Form Gen Art is a solution to that problem.
that problem i think our blocks and long form gen art is a solution to that problem and i'm
interested to see what people do this cycle because there's there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with
this blockchain thing you know and i'm interested to see what what comes up next totally I think the one thing
that came to mind when you were when you're sharing there was like you know there's always
probably a general like a hope or an intent with what people will do with tools but I also think
the way you release tools to the to the public and for free is that people can't, like, you really get a sense
for, like, where kind of the general, you know, consensus is that or, like, where people's
imaginations lie with, like, what people do with the tool. It's kind of like people make making
different, just different devices or different softwares or different whatever, but it usually
takes on a different meaning uh, meaning from what was
originally probably, uh, imposed or proposed, um, for better, you know, for better or worse.
Um, but it's wanted to just highlight the fact that like, it's a, one thing that really drew me,
um, to, to you and your, your work and was just the, the selflessness of kind of sticking true
to like some of the original ideas of the internet of like making things publicly available that are kind of a new,
and it's like a new way of thinking. So yeah, just wanted to add a little bit there and call that out. And that was a really great article. I think that one's going to stand,
that one's going to have some permanence and hopefully gets people to start thinking a little differently about this.
So, yeah, man, I have one more question before we kind of start wrapping things up and kind of share some collection details here is kind of circling back to one of the earlier topics around kind of how, you know, UNF.met and kind of how you guys have collaborated.
of how you and FDOT met and kind of how you guys have collaborated. For any artists who's,
let's just say, not super well-versed in code, or they have different mediums, but may want to
explore kind of a similar collaboration style that you and FDOT did, kind of where would you
point them if they don't know where to start
um like what questions should they be asking um and how could they get involved and where to find
people yeah um biggest thing for for all artists for all creatives for all even collectors who are
interested in learning new things it's just just build community just build community a lot of
building community for me comes from seeing something I like and then either replying or
dming the person and saying hey I like this this is really cool how did you do this? And just asking questions and being curious of like, oh, I really like this art.
And, you know, this drawing, this illustration in the middle of the art is really cool.
Or this texture that you've added on top is really cool.
Or the way, you know, you use different strokes of your paintbrush or whatever else is really cool.
And I'd love to learn more about that.
And I think generally people are really open.
You know, you, you won't get like a full description,
but you'll get a starting point and then just continuing to be curious and
continuing to be curious and continuing to to build on those things and
building communities and i think that's so important so so important to to creating anything
and over time you'll meet people who might be more technical and could help you with
these sorts of things so yeah i think it's really just about asking questions, being curious,
trying to learn more and we have more tools than ever to do it.
It's here. It's on.
So yeah, that's, that's kind of all I have on that.
Amazing, man.
Yeah.
Thanks for, thanks for taking that.
Um, and I know, I know FDOT's got some, uh, I know he, he runs a regular, regular event,
uh, in New York every year.
So I wanted to just transition and pass the mic, uh, over to him to kind of maybe comment
on that.
Thanks so much, dude.
Yeah, you were just talking about building community
and I had to give a shout
because coming up in three weeks,
we have our annual group show
that we do in New York City for NFT NYC.
It's at Loom Studios.
There's over 60 artists that will be featured.
And each year I've wanted to get this collab out
and then Canal Street Show happens and so many things sort of distract from doing a drop. And
this year I was like, well, it seems like they're both going to fall on the same time again. And
the more I thought about it, I realized that part of what I'm doing here is I'm
growing my own ecosystem with these collections and these collaborations, but I'm also shining a
light on emerging talent. And what a better timing to do both of them in the same month.
Sure, I'll lose a little bit of sleep, but a lot of the collectors that maybe weren't aware of my
work before because they only collect generative art for the most part, hopefully I can get their attention on
to some of these up-and-coming artists that are going to be at our show later this month.
So follow Canal Street Show if you're not already doing so. And the open call ended a couple days
ago, so we'll be finalizing the art selection soon, but there is a curation contest that ends tomorrow,
and the grand prize for that curation contest
is a screen to curate up to 12 pieces at our show
as well as a free round-trip ticket to New York City.
One person will win that,
and the last two years have been incredible,
so we hope to see what you have
in terms of what curation you would
do that fits our theme. And I'll pin up the post here. Also, the day after the Canal Street show
on the June 28th, we'll be showing cities at our new gallery in Brooklyn. So if you're in New York
City, look out for that RSVP soon, and we hope to see you. That's amazing, man. Yeah, like every time, I always get excited for New York for a lot of reasons.
And one of the reasons that has been a consistent pillar is the, wow, I just blanked the Canal
Street show.
I had it on the tip of my tongue before I said that.
So I appreciate what you guys are doing and leveling out this year.
And I think it's really dope to fly people out to get that experience. I think that's really special, man.
So yeah, definitely. I think FDOT recently penned that. So definitely check that out.
On the kind of last, if it's okay with you, FDOT, I know you're okay to go a little bit past the top of the hour.
We typically do about an hour, at least the way we used to run spaces,
is do an hour and then invite some friends up just to vibe and chat and ask questions and hang out.
So before we do that, I just want to ask you, we've been talking about the city's collection for a straight hour.
Been sharing a lot about it on the timeline.
For those who may have missed it, how can people get involved?
Is there an allow list?
And kind of what are some of the loose dates for this collection here?
Yes, let's get to the details.
So our allow list window is going to open in a little less than two weeks on June 16th.
Art Blocks makes it super easy for us to update that allow list as we go.
But for now, we're focusing on some
of our top collectors as well as building that allow list full of people who show interest and
help us build the lore around this project one of the things we're going to be asking to the people
selected for the allow list is to share a memory from their favorite city and to allow us to share that publicly after the drop happens.
These pieces are really abstract in a way, so I'm hoping that you see not just New York City,
but any city you've been to. Hopefully it sparks some nostalgia for you and you want to share that
with us as we build the allow list. I can share more details about a collection size and stuff if that's appropriate.
Absolutely. I think so. Yeah.
So we have decided that the collection will have 500 tokenized outputs.
150 of those outputs are reserved for ourselves, our collectors, our partners, such as Shiller.
And the other 350 outputs will be available for sale.
And the pricing is going to be around $350.
So 350 outputs for sale, $350 per piece, whatever the ETH equivalent is that day when we have to make it go live.
And the allow list will run from June 16th
all the way through NFT NYC.
And on the day of the show is when we plan to open it up
or shortly thereafter on the 28th.
Amazing, man.
Yeah, I'm really stoked.
Yeah, I'm just really stoked for this collection.
I can't remember who I was mentioning.
I think it was Ragema in DMZ the other day.
It's like,
it's,
this is one of the first collections that genuinely just has me hyped.
It has been a lot of great art on the timeline and a lot of great things
being put out,
but this,
there's just something that feels really special.
And I think the timing here surrounding NFT NYC,
the Canal Street show.
Yeah.
This is all just coming together really great, man.
And these outputs are just lovely to see on the timeline.
So thanks for letting us get involved here.
But yeah, also want to open this up.
Any friends that want to come up on stage
and kind of just hang out with me, F.Fungi,
feel free to request.
Anyone and everyone's welcome.
Don't be shy.
It doesn't have to be some crazy or shattering question.
If you just want to come say hey, that's also welcome as well.
I also want to just shout out one detail I forgot to mention,
which is that some of our top collectors are going to get to have some invites.
So they're going to help us build the city.
I can see a couple of my one-of-one holders in the audience,
and y'all are going to get a message from me tonight about this,
where you can start thinking about who you'd want to invite to the city.
It's totally optional if you want to just have your spot on the allow list.
But we want to spread far and wide beyond what we can do ourselves
that's how the best cities are grown so we're we have it in your hands you can see paper buddha
down there much love dude paper buddha got a one of one city from me last nftnyc so we're going
full circle i can see mcbeth is up on the stage though how's it going, Macbeth? Hey there. So a question I have is, I'm a huge fan of maps and city maps, and every time I go
travel, it'd be about collecting every subway system or, I don't know, a travel map I could
find. Long ago, I heard a podcast about how city blocks are different per city, obviously.
about how city blocks are different per city, obviously.
Originally, I'm from Salt Lake City, Utah,
and our blocks there are equivalent to,
well, now I live in Portland, Oregon.
And so one block in Salt Lake
equals like seven or nine blocks here in Portland.
So when someone says, oh, it's only a block away,
it's so different.
I was wondering if anything like that was taken into consideration for mapping out your whole city
planning you're saying that the shape and size of the blocks yeah just like you know the scale
of blocks and buildings are can be so different per city or wherever you live. Yeah, there was a lot that I wanted to put
in this collection that was outside of the initial system that Did had built, and that's part of why
I'm continuing to draw cities as I travel. I'm finding aerial photography and maps just as
inspiring as I did when I first started this. So in this collection, it does
have a lean towards looking like a simple grid with right angles and blocks seen from an isometric
perspective. That's what we wanted to focus on for this chapter and what was able to give us
the most versatility without breaking the system that we had already built. It would have been a whole separate collection to do radial grids or just off kilter, completely randomized grids like you
see sometimes in cities. So there's a lean towards Manhattan being the inspiration, an inspiration
point. I talked last week about how I grew up coming to the city, skating around from Midtown to Downtown to Uptown,
where the blocks get super long and they stretch out.
So you'll see as we reveal more of the collection that there's four different settings for almost every part, every variable.
Number four came from just four sides to a block.
So there's short blocks, medium, long, and then super long.
And the super long ones almost look like, what's a good analogy here? They almost look like bowling
alleys seen from the side, but the medium and long ones feel like uptown New York City. The more square
ones feel more like downtown or Brooklyn. But I wanted to put in a lot of variety while still
making it make sense to the initial inspiration and definitely going to continue drawing more
cities by hand and building that more hand-drawn map feel, top-down look.
I also wanted to say hello to Mech.
How's it going?
Long time no see.
Yo, yo, I'm good.
I just wanted to pop in because I saw you on Spaces and I thought, I never talked to
F that.
So I'm out here.
I see you got a show coming up, so I'm going to get the scoop and see if I can come up.
Yeah.
I feel like I run into you at least once or twice every year.
And hopefully you're still in New York.
Yeah, yeah.
Cool.
Did you have any thoughts or feedback on what we've been sharing?
Or did you just pop in kind of late?
No, I literally just popped in.
And I was like, I got to at least say hey Hey, and then try to find out what, you know, what the details are so
I can put it on the calendar. Yes. So it says like you got a contest, but then also you have a show.
So what's, what's the deal? So every year we do a group show. It's on June 27th this year. It's the Friday during NFT NYC. That's our day.
And we are doing that as we always do. But the day after, I'll be hosting in Brooklyn on June 28th
to present the city's collection, city's project, some physical art that led to the generative art
as well in our new space here in Bushwick. So there's two nights in a row of events.
Those are the main key dates.
Okay, dope.
I'm going to follow up.
That's far enough away that I could actually make a plan.
Cool, yeah.
And if you know anybody who might be interested in the contest,
the prize is a free round trip ticket to New York,
as well as a chance to curate alongside us at the show.
So feel free to pass that on.
Yeah, I'll share it.
Anybody else want to come up and ask a question?
I feel like we got through so much in this space
and did had to bounce.
Yeah, that felt like a, that felt like a uh that hour went by so fast man um yeah just his responses
were were absolutely incredible um it's always dope to kind of hear the other side of the coin
there um but yeah to one extent an invitation to anyone else who wants to come up uh again
no need to be shy no need to feel pressure to ask a crazy question.
If you want to just come up and give FDOT
and did some flowers, that's also welcome as well.
But yeah, probably if no one else does want to come up,
FDOT would probably just recommend
for anyone who's interested,
how can
people get in touch with you if they have questions or want to learn more about the work?
Yeah, well, I just led up to the stage, our new page, Dot and Grid. That is our gallery here in
Brooklyn. So if you're curious about the show coming up, you can follow along Dot and Grid.
We just finished up a show for my partner, Jesse, and we started a brand new Twitter account. So if you're curious about the show coming up, you can follow along Dot and Grid. We just finished up a show for my partner, Jesse, and we started a brand new Twitter account. So we
could use some love there if anyone wants to check it out, see what you missed and what's coming up.
But if you're curious about this collection coming to Art Blocks, you can just reach out to me
through DM or to Did, and we'll send you the link to share your city memory.
We want to connect with people who really find inspiration in this
beyond the initial visual aesthetic,
but through the storytelling too.
Yeah, our DMs are open.
I check my requests as well.
You're a saint for doing that.
Requests are always an adventure to go down
in this industry you gotta keep gotta keep your guard up for sure it's like it's like
self-defense yeah yeah man no doubt um well that's great man yeah any uh i know we're gonna
be doing um i know you're gonna be doing another show uh doing another show another space next week
any plans on who you may
like what the
itinerary is for that or
kind of just plan it by ear up to that point
I think with the shows
coming up and the release
coming up soon after that space
we'll probably have some
people from the Canal Street show
some artists curators who are
helping us with that as well as if art blocks is available but the week after that we'll have a
space an official space with art blocks so got a little bit of planning to do for next week still
oh yeah dude great i'm down to i'm down to wrap things up if you are man
should i put on that jazzy track again to to cue us out here read my mind Oh yeah, dude. Great. I'm down to, I'm down to wrap things up. If you are, man.
Should I put on that jazzy track again to cue us out here?
Read my mind.
All right. Thank you all for coming through.
This has been a great conversation and we'll see you next week on Wednesday at 3 PM. uh
Thank you. Thank you.
