Hello everyone, GM GM and welcome to a audio gallery special with Jeremy Cowat who isn't here. He's just messaged me. He's been on with coffee with a captain and he's talking so he's probably going to be a few more minutes.
So I'm going to have a chat for a minute before we do that with Sigrid and G-man's going to come up definitely and speak to me I can tell. Feel free to come up for a minute and then hopefully we'll get a few more people to come in and join. Do me a favor please. Retweet the
room that would be wonderful. And yeah we'll hang out for wait for Jeremy for a moment. Hey G-man how you doing hey Sigrid? G-M how you doing? Good good getting excited about
Vcon. Oh yeah, so you're on your way when it starts. We still have like a week and a half I think or something so a little time nice and then and then hopefully right behind that I'll see you in Lisbon. That'd be nice. I'm not booked yet but that would be nice it's a good idea.
I don't know why I'm not booked to be perfectly honest. It's an obvious one right on my doorstep. I keep hearing it's like the one to go to so I'm gonna Paris was so great that I'm doing it. I'm going for it. Nice. Good to hear. I think the whole Rug Radio crew are there right?
A lot of the Rug Radio crew is going to be there. Yes. Awesome.
It goes to show you know how by the way, Jim, and why have you not got your little rug radio little sticker next to your name? I do. If you look at my profile, I should have it. I don't know why it's not showing up here. I don't see it yet. Okay. It's just me. Hey, Tristan.
Hello, how's it going? Oh, it's okay. It's quiet. Goes to show you need to plan these spaces well in advance. You know, it's funny. I actually did a space once with a friend of mine also at OpenSea and it was really just her fun and we had to like go through like a
approval processes and make sure everything was like, you know, above board and we were okay. We go into the spaces, it just ends up being like a conversation between me and him for like an hour on this space. Yeah, sometimes, sometimes, but there's a lot happening. I've just been, so I was just in coffee with the captain where Jeremy's talking at the moment. I know he's finished
soon. But like the morning shows on, there's a massive Pepe coin show on right now. Wow. Yeah, it's got 600 people in it. There's another one insights from NFT NYC and ETH Global, which has got 1.2K in it. There's a lot of spaces happening this morning.
Wow. So hopefully when Jeremy comes over, we can follow a few in, but how are you doing? All right.
Yeah, alright. Kingham Lane just been a busy, busy few days getting ready for Jeremy's Drop, which is really exciting. He is fantastic. I can't wait. I was listening to him talk about it a little bit and
I am super impressive to look at. So am I right? So it's like the backgrounds are changing. There's projection onto the green screen of the person. There are multiple people
being photographed and there are lights in particular angles which basically mean that there are like eyes here now. Look at that, he can tell me himself. Add as speaker.
Good morning. Oh, I think he's in the I've got him in the end. Hey Johnny. Hey doing good. How are y'all doing? Yeah, good. Thank you. There's only eight of us here. I'm so sorry. I hope you didn't just drop out of coffee with captain. No worries. We had a great combo. So it's all good. Cool. I was listening in. How
How was it good? Yeah, fantastic. Awesome. Yeah, I know. Thank you all for bringing me on. I needed a tweet about the space as well. So, good morning, say come. Cool. Well, if everyone could just drop it a retweet, if they haven't already, that would be amazing. We've got some extra people coming in now, which is super hay life.
I'm going to invite Jeremy you could have find out if you people up to speak and we can have a little bit of a round rob any conversation would be nice. Yeah, that'd be great. How are you feeling? Are you nervous? Are you excited? Like what's it? What's the feeling like this morning? You know, I've just never carried the skinny rolls. I am literally death-correct.
moderator customers were you know me or it is the team maker. Well I can relate I know exactly how that feels but for what it's worth going into it the drop looks amazing the drop page looks
amazing the videos and all of the assets that you've dripped out so far look incredible. So I'm super excited to see what the collection starts to look like. I have a question for you and then we can start properly in a minute. But is it like auto reveal or if you've got like a you know,
Yeah, it'll be a delayed review. I'll probably a couple of days cool. Okay. I love that. That's good. Well, I will kick off then properly and I'll say hello everyone. And thank you for joining. Appreciate you coming in. It's a recorded space. So anyone who does come up and speak just be as be aware that it is recorded. Also,
as with all of my spaces, not financial advice, do your own research, stay safe. Don't click on any silly links. You can go straight to OpenC.io where you'll find Auras is on the homepage banner and in the drops page as hope. It should be really, really easy to find.
Jeremy, welcome. How are you doing? I'm so good, man. So, honor to be here. Great. Okay. Well, why don't we start then with you giving me a very, very quick introduction to you and maybe then we'll go straight into, let's talk about Aura's, tell us what's happened
tell us what it's all about how you've pulled it together and we'll go from there. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm an artist and photographer. I've been shooting entertainment celebrities for the last 15, 18 years. Also been doing a lot of human engineering projects around the
the world. I do a lot of volunteer work after natural disasters. I've done hurricane and tornado and wildfire relief projects and found a nonprofit years ago where we photographed people in need around the world. I just chased ideas for living pretty
much and sometimes the idea isn't going to make money and sometimes they don't. So I'm a bit of a lovely NFT space and a few months ago I just had this world here idea to create a tin case and not to the iconic tin case projects of this space but with a different
which was to create a 10k in like no time like 20 minutes and even though it's a 20 minute 10k it's literally taking me a decade to figure out how to do this. I was just gonna say you say 20 minutes but I know that a lot more time went into this than 20 minutes. Oh yeah years and years and years.
in this forest really is the culmination of all of that experimentation in late night and bed going what if I move this light over here and what if I add this projector over here and what if I you know just what if over and over and over for a very long time and so so yeah we know
We held a live event last Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee where we had a live audience of 150 plus people and then an online live broadcast as well. And we did it. I mean, it wasn't working all day long and I was freaking out. And then when it started,
It still wasn't working. There were three minutes where the screen went black and my camera remote like died and we were freaking out. So finally it worked. We started and we successfully hit a 10k and about like 19 minutes or something. It was crazy. That's amazing. And so the project is called
or the collection is called Auras. It's available in 18 minutes actually if you're one of the lucky folks who is a block Queen's holder. But yeah, it's a 10,000 collection and why don't
you give us a heads up then before we get into kind of the meaning behind it, et cetera, just talk us through the production method, like talk us through how you created these 10,000 individual PFB style images in such a short space of time.
Sure, yeah, I had a 130-foot LED volume screen behind me, which produces a very, very bright projection image. And so I built basically a movie of about 200 photos on those
images and those images contain about half my own paintings and photographs and polaroids and then the other half was things I made using AI and so then my camera is shooting on burst mode so like I don't know 15 frames a second and while my camera is rapid
firing, you know, constantly the background behind me is changing images just as fast as the camera. And the same thing is happening on my body with a different projector and different imagery. And so you just have this total absolute chaos of imagery.
happening live. In addition to those things, I had this robotics thing built for the front of the lens where it was like waving prisms around the front of the camera element. And so then I was holding a laser pen on my left hand, shouting that at the camera I was triggering
the camera with my hand. So I was multitasking even as I was posing and then I would stop the remote and I would change physical hats and so I put on different hats and then I would look different directions and then I had about six different lighting setups, fire, random
as well. And then the way I edited the photos, there are eight different photo editing styles applied. So all of that is built into the rarity as well because some of the photo editing styles are only like 3% or 5%.
Excuse me. So it was just total chaos like utter chaos. And thankfully it worked and I'm really excited about the final result. And it's being chaos since, right? Oh my gosh. I've never ever worked this hard. Yeah, I'm killing myself.
I saw a tweet that you posted over the weekend that said that you and a group of people were applying rarity manually to all 10,000. Explain that process then. So has it become
a subjective rarity or is it is there actually a process to what you did? Oh there's totally a process for sure and we had about 20 plus people who signed up around the world not volunteers that are all paid the 20 plus people to you know
go in and we had to teach them and train them how to do this, how to apply the rarity. So we had all these drop down menus in the spreadsheet where they could just click the pose, the editing style, the lighting setup, the images. And when you do
2000 photos with humans applying rarity there is going to be mistakes. That's the hard thing or the or the charming thing which whichever way you want to look at it. But it was an extraordinary amount of work to do that. It took us about five days my friend Jonathan
Smith helped me manage it but yeah it was just crazy and so literally Sunday night you know, 2.90 we finally wrapped that up and got all the metadata finished up so there are going to be mistakes but I still think given what we accomplished it's pretty cool.
That's insane. That's absolutely wild. Jeremy, who's inspiring you right now? Like which artists in Web 3 and Beyond have been inspiring to you more recently? I mean, people, people inspired me just from his, he's really the reason I heard about NFTs.
The idea of creating a piece of work every day really is an extraordinary ability. I know he does them fast now, but even with his speed, there are still these really, really unique concepts and ideas that that's an impressive ability. I mean, Rafique and it all
There's no doubt is it was inspiring me I was like straight up starstruck when I met him last year in New York He's he's amazing. I definitely love the way that clear silver has partnered with AI. I don't I have a lot of concerns about yeah, and I'm not fully on board like
me even though I used it in the Oris, but I think the way that Claire collaborates with it is rad. I mean gosh there's so many other artists in the space that I'm watching and that I admire. That list is long and Web 2 artists of course. And I love finding artists in third world countries.
who don't have a following but are these kids in the middle of nowhere who are just cringing out the most insane beautiful work and so there's always inspiration every day. I love that and I also love this idea of you kind of like coming in and creating something
So, you know, having the idea to do something completely differently and nailing it in this way, I'm curious about your subject material. So like all of the projections, the images, the backgrounds, where has that body of work come from? Where have you
Is that like your archive of photography over years and years, or have you created things especially for this drop, where of all those assets kind of been born? Yeah, they're all mine. I would say about half is, moon analog work, photos and paintings and
puller is an even some block queens that's not in there as the projection. And then the other half is like a last minute scramble I did with AI. I was hesitant to do that because of my concerns but AI really didn't end up being a perfect partner for
I was doing with Ores because the projection images that are on my body, you know, that I really wanted to represent humanity, not just the self-portraits of me that I wanted to project this idea of other people on me. And so I was able to use the eye literally last
We can let just scrambling like crazy to build all these characters using, yeah, these one-line drawings, from the way those look when projected really just came off far better than I'd ever hoped for. So yeah, it all came together when we're another and I can be more happy with it.
That's awesome. Let's talk very quickly before we then maybe invite some questions up from some people in the audience. But let's talk about the kind of operation then now of the mint because there's a few sections and stages and there's various prices
And I saw you made a change to the price overnight and those kind of things. So let's really quickly talk about it. So people can go to openc.io right now and you are home page banner. They can go through to your drop page, which they can see some incredible
Ideography by the way absolutely awesome like it looks like it was a seriously cool event in itself the creation process so congrats on that and and then there are three stages right there's block Queens holders then there's an allow list and then there's a public stage can you give
was just a bit of info about those different stages. Yeah, of course. Be a block queen, start here in 10 minutes and I just wanted to award and my hoarders for the last collection and they've been asking for something all year
long and so I was like I promised someone to do something and so yeah block winds holders get a free mint and that will go for an hour and then all the people that join the pre-ment allow list and other collaborations with other communities
They're all on a collective allow us together and they get a cheaper meant for .033 at 10 AM central and then at 11 AM is the public meant for .04 for a month and I decided to drop the price just yesterday.
Just you know with overall market conditions a minute. It's just been crazy with gas prices and Mean coins and all that so I was just trying to help everybody out a little bit and Click them up and so you know that was kind of a game time decision yesterday to lower the price for everybody
I think it's a good decision given the crazy market environment. It is nuts out there at the moment. Although it appears to have let up a little bit in the last 12 hours, so hopefully you're timing this just right. Yeah, perhaps the eye of the storm, Jeremy. It might be really excellent timing. I hope so.
Yeah, same. Do you mind if I ask you a little bit about your concern with AI and where that stems from, why that concern and what you think the implications of the advancement of AI could mean for the space? Yeah, I mean I think what makes
being obviously the word AI is going to be a very big word. It already is like saying AI soon will be like saying the internet. You know, like there's going to be a lot of good and a lot of bad that comes with AI. But one of the things that concerns me is that a year from now or even last
Like every mobile device in the world is going to have AI tools that are even better than chat, GBT, and mid-journey. And essentially, everybody in the world is going to be cranking out and staying in scene visuals and media and audio and stuff every
day. What that means to me is that all of us that have actually learned a craft where there'd be painting or photography or video or all these things over time, they will no longer be borderline even interesting or impressive because we're going to be so
and indated with unbelievable AI imagery that human made or will not even like human made or over the last ten years as well as its impressive. It inspires us. It moves us to go create because some other human learn their craft and they learn how to
make something beautiful. Whereas now beauty is going to just be like a click of a button. And so I just think that makes me sad is that human made art will no longer really resonate as it has in the path because yeah, it will just be so equally gorgeous. Soon we won't even know which
is with. And so there's just a lot of sadness that comes with all that. I'm not here to be a hater. I'm not here to be, you know, I just think there's some sadness. And I do think it'll inevitably and obviously in take away a lot of careers, you know, there just won't be a necessary for
a lot of creative careers to exist that have over time. And so if our college students studying right now, I would be very concerned for the future of like, what am I going to do with this photography degree? What am I going to do? Is it, you know, want to be graphic designer like if, if all these are AI,
Oh Jeremy, you've cut down there.
Is that just me or has Jeremy disappeared? No. Well, hopefully.
Oh no. The robots in the bottom.
It looks like it's gone. Yeah. See, Jeremy, if you can hear, that was a really amazing bit of conversation.
there that was really enjoying. Let's see if I remove Jeremy as a speaker and then Jeremy comes back up hopefully.
We can sort that out in the meantime
Tristan. Hey, hey, how's it going? All right. What are you guys requested to come back up? I'm here to be the filler. Thanks. So working on my stand up routine. We got a tap dance in the wings right ago. Sorry about that. Great tap dance.
Hey Jeremy, yes good. That was a really poignant point you were making. I'd love to hear from anybody who wants to request to come up and speak or has a point to make regarding AI and that point that Jeremy
made, I think it's a really fair point. The only thing I think I would say is that the kind of like the abilities for humans to tell stories right is a real skill and I think like
what's going to probably come to the fore is the ability for people to create incredible imagery and then cross it with an amazing story, an amazing concept and to be able to articulate it. And that's something that I think, regardless of what happens from an AI point of view, like I think,
that human touch is something that will be really tough to replicate on term. But I could be completely wrong. Jeremy, sorry, you were cut off. Do you want to continue? Yeah, where was that cut off? You were cut off when if you were an art student in college, you'd be
Yeah, just be concerned if I'm one of the graphic designer and you know, yeah, I can now I mean I know so many people already and even myself like using chat GPT instead of hiring a writer like it's all it's all already happening and so it's
just going to be exponential over the next year to where we just won't need each other because we'll just be using it. So I think if I'm a kid, I'd just be real concerned. Am I going to be okay with all the C-Astab happening? But at the same time, I do love
that people, I do believe there's probably millions of people out there with wild imaginations who don't know how to paint and who don't know how to make clothes and now they'll at least be able to like use AI to see their imaginations come to life and of course I think that's great and that's awesome.
So there's, you know, it's going to be a lot of good that comes with it, but man, I'm still I'm still going to grieve my fellow creatives and colleagues whose careers are going to be in trouble, you know, inevitably. So as an artist who leveraged the eye, Jeremy, I just want to follow up on that.
point because clearly I think throughout history we see innovation and technology come into play and remove lots of jobs but then ultimately create industry. So I am curious if you are excited at all by what
you're able to accomplish with AI, especially in your experience collaborating with AI programs for this particular project. - Yeah, no, I am, I mean, oruses no doubt better because of AI. Like it really enabled me to,
do things that I couldn't have done without it, especially given the time crunch that I was under in the end. And so I'm very grateful for AI in this particular process. You know, I just will never personally, again, this is just a personal decision, don't judge me on
not judging others who do it, but I will never sit behind mid-journey and prompt something and then meant that as an NFT. I think maybe issues with that, but that's my personal conviction. I do think that using AI as a part
of the process is cool but I basically what I mean by that is when I create something in mid-Journey that is insane. It's never been seen by the human eye before. There is zero sense of pride for me as an artist. It's just like oh well.
like Gajabi, that's insane, that's amazing. I compare it to like a caddy on a golf course. Like the caddy on a golf course is like advising the golfer, but the golfer is going out and shooting the scores and you know hitting the birdies and all that stuff and using
using AI, it's like taking credit for the golfers score when all you were was the catty. And so that's again, just what I feel like, I don't feel like I actually hit the balls. I just sat in the golf cart and drove around. But those are all just my thoughts.
interesting point and I think Tristan there's definitely space for you and I to host a few shows by the way with from an AI point of view I think there's so much of this conversation still to be had I don't know how about you how you feel about that? Absolutely I mean I think there are so many artists that have such unique perspectives on how AI is going to be
impacting their industry and what it is that they do. And I think Jeremy, you have such amazing perspective on having used AI and what, I think there's a much larger conversation here, which is what is art, right? And I think that's a conversation that's been happening forever at this
point. And it's definitely one that will continue to be like be discussed throughout time regardless of like what the inputs are, like what is used sort of as the medium. And I just think that it's like a really fascinating, not even debate, just conversation to have about like what AI is going to do to the
creative industry overall, how it could grow, how it will change, concerns, things that we're excited about. Ultimately, what I hope comes from technology as an optimist here is it taps into something that we were unable to do before
And you know creates better efficiencies or allows us to really explore expressing ourselves in new ways that maybe wasn't thought of before and so I think collaborating with machine can be a really exciting thing but to your point I you know my I have family members who are artists and the
The theory is very real. It really does change the landscape of the things that we know. So hopefully, the human spirit is able to be nimble and agile enough to continue to prove its value as we have time and time again throughout time. So it's a really interesting one. I would love to get so many more perspective on this.
It's a well made point. By the way, Jeremy, congratulations. You're mint is live. It is. It's crazy. So good stuff and you're often going to have like an existential debate. Yeah. I'm literally just hit me that it's not no one. I was like, Oh, well, we're going
Yeah, you're on. I'll take a couple of questions from people and then Jeremy, I'm really conscious of your time. You've got a busy day, you've got all of this happening, so I'll let you go. But Lila, I saw you came up a moment ago. Did you have something to say? Yes, I on this topic, but I do want to come
So Jeremy, just huge congrats to you and I wish you so much success. Ben, just real quickly as a one-of-one traditional artist, I really wanted to share my viewpoint on the AI issue. And yes, I think it is certainly a lot of
material for another space. But while I understand and appreciate a lot of artists' concerns, I'm actually very optimistic because I think that hand-painted art will actually become more appreciated because it's a skill that in my case
I've spent 10,000 hours doing it while I had a day job on Wall Street. So I hope it doesn't go away, but on the other hand, what Tristan said, it behooves all of us to be nimble, to learn, and maybe, you know, I already have a game plan of how I'm going to tackle this.
I'm not going to share it here. It's a deeper conversation, but I'm really positive. And I think two things. One is we're at the dawn of a new paradigm. So all of the old rule books are going to be thrown out. My personal view is that one of one
and traditional hand painted art, whatever that's defined as is not going to go away. The second thing I want to say is there's been news about 300 million jobs that are going to go away over the next decade. And I think that's what Jeremy was alluding to. On that front, yes, I agree a little
lot of jobs sadly are going to go away, just the way, you know, machines have replaced humans for more than a century. But I also think that possibly 100 million new jobs will be created. So I just wanted to share those two things that while I understand
and appreciate all the concerns. I think we should think about it differently and just say how can we learn? It's definitely raised the bar for all the bus, whether it's developers, whether it's creatives in every field. But I just want to say, you know, be think positive and you know,
would just send this to you together. So that's it. Thank you all and I appreciate it. Yeah, I'll just agree with her. I'm going to do think that human bitter will be more even more appreciated, but the impact will be so it's almost like looking at
Of course, we all think vinyl and shooting film are the coolest things ever, but they're still vinyl in the 70s was everything. It was the mainstream way of listening to music. And now it's this cute little thing that we all love from people who have vinyl.
Yeah, it's a niche. And so even though what she's seeing is true, we're still inevitable that it will become more neaf and most artists already are struggling. We don't want it to become even more of a niche, just smaller anyway. But yeah, she's definitely right. But yeah, it's
still. It's the concerns do remain. We have on the niche. Sorry, I agree with you Jeremy on the nation. It is going to be hard, but thank you. Thanks Lila. Appreciate it. I'm Tristan. I know you have to drop down. So I just wanted to say thank you for coming up. Great to see you again. Yeah, thank you Tristan.
Thank you and Jeremy else I'll be too very soon and Ben I'll probably see you in there. Yes, I will do We have a block Queens holder up so medieval shrink has requested to come up a medieval shrink. How you doing? I'm doing good. Let's go Jeremy. Let's do this
I gotta say this is crazy. I don't know if you guys are on his discord. This guy is doing spaces. He's hosting this discord. He's on Twitter tweeting. He's doing all this at the same time. I don't know how he's paying attention to anything incredible. How many how many hands have you got?
Jeremy. It's been a lot of work. Where in the world? That's awesome. Well, I'm Eddie with shrink thank you for coming up. It's great to hear support from Jeremy's broader community. I think it's great. I think we all share
in your positivity and your belief that this is something really cool, Jeremy. It's clear that you worked so hard to put it together. So congratulations in advance. I'm really looking forward to being able to win myself a bit later on. And yeah, I hope you have a great
I'm gonna kind of let you go I think but if there's unless there's anything else you want to add now yeah I probably should I'm literally already dealing with like tech support people saying hey well while I thought working I'm like oh my gosh see yeah I better ran and try to help people out um
Thank you so much for having me. It means a lot. I appreciate it. I've recorded it. I'll turn it into a little podcast. I'll process it and you can share it with your community. Amazing. Well done. Thanks for coming up and thanks to an audience for coming up and listening at very, very short notice today.
but I do appreciate you all as ever. And I'm going to play out with Aura by Bicep, which is a very cool dance track, which felt like the right thing to play. So everyone, have a great day. Thank you so much for your time and see you all again soon.