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Beyond the Blocks Addendum - BUSY by James Merrill
Recorded: April 9, 2025 Duration: 0:29:28Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, artist James unveiled his innovative generative art project, Busy, currently auctioning unique pieces on Artblocks. With a focus on sustainability and local influences, James is set to redefine the intersection of art and blockchain, offering collectors not just NFTs but also physical artworks, all while exploring the complexities of generative design.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. This is a game of love. And it was you, the one that would be breaking my heart
When you decided to walk away
When you decided to walk away Thank you. When you decided to walk away.
When you decided to walk away. Welcome, everybody.
Good morning. I'm happy to be here. Welcome to this special episode of Beyond the Blocks with me, Raven. I am very happy to jump in here. And I had a chat with, you know, and welcome first. Let's welcome James to the show. Hey, James.
Hey, hey. How's it going, everybody?
How's it going?
Nice to talk to you.
And I was chatting with James last night and wanted to jump on here.
James obviously has an Artblock security project going on right now called Busy,
which is for sale and the auction is ongoing. So I encourage you to check that out.
And we're going to talk about that today. This is a project that I got to see in person in Marfa
this year and was super excited about to see the scale of it being plotted on this huge table.
I told James at the time, I never have seen a plotter this big, so we're gonna have to talk a little bit about that.
Uh, and, um, you, you even were going back and forth in and out of the art blocks house, like, you know, uh, making sure that the plot was working.
So, um, first off, welcome to the show, James. And, uh, it's, it's great to have you here.
Welcome to the show, James, and it's great to have you here.
Yeah, thanks. Super exciting to be here.
Glad you're able to come out in Marfa and check out the Busy in Marfa part of this
and see what has happened since then because a lot has changed.
We can talk about it, but I actually got access to a plotter.
It's like double the size of the one that I had in Texas.
You can see in my background, that's kind of the scale that I had in Texas. Like you can see in my background, that's kind of the scale
that I typically operate on. And for busy, we had a prototype pen plotter built that was twice the
size. Like it was crazy. So you can kind of get into that a little bit too. That's great. I love
to start out with just talking about how you got into plotters and maybe just talk about generative
art in general. Let's start with when did you start doing generative art? Like what got you interested in that? And when did you
start actually doing generative art? Yeah. So I, um, I basically those things happened at the same
exact time. Um, but prior to that, I had been doing digital art really. It's been almost 20
years now. Um, and I was really into
just creating digital art posting it online a lot of abstract work a lot of group exhibitions
and spent many years focused on that and whenever I saw generative art I actually didn't like it
that much I didn't see anything that was that inspiring because I really wanted like absolute
control over every pixel and I wanted to be able to paint and illustrate every single little thing.
And then in 2019, I was just basically browsing hacker news.
And someone pointed out in a comment or an article that there was this little community on Twitter called Plotter Twitter.
And once I saw that, my mind was kind of blown i was like this is the
coolest thing ever um so i ended up ordering an axi draw from evil mad scientist which is a pen
plotter that plots at 11 by 17 and getting it shipped to my house and i was basically like
this is such a frivolous purchase i'm gonna make this machine pay for itself. So I'm going to set up like an Etsy account
and I'm going to sell drawings for like $135 a piece. And I'm going to teach myself how to code
art. Like I feel like I was a creative coder in my professional life, but to make art with code
was something I never really attempted. And I just, I feel like on a screen, like I could just,
you know, open up Photoshop or 3 Studio Max and make something that I liked, but I couldn't do that and get it on paper.
So that was like kind of where the necessity of programming occurred and having a background in JavaScript, it was like kind of a great fit so i actually challenged myself to drop all of like my preconceived notions about how to
program and started a baseline generatively so i started with processing i was able to figure out
how to like make basic things occur and send them to the pen plotter and that was kind of how it all
started that's great and um no it's also how you how you also how you said that plotter was actually like when you first
got into generative art, like from the beginning, you were thinking of
plotters and actually using, you know, machine instead of just it being all digital.
What drew you to kind of maybe that analog side of it?
Do you have ever thought of that, of, you know, like instead of just going into the
digital and being fine with that, but actually printing your work and in this case, plotting
your work?
What drew you to that, do you think?
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a couple of magical things about pen plotting that are almost impossible to replicate with any other artistic practice.
So, you know, for me, I do like to draw and paint and that sort of thing.
But I never really found myself committing to 100 hours to draw something in pen or paint.
100 hours to draw something in pen or paint so for me that was like the huge unlock is that
i could make traditional art but i could use my mind as opposed to necessarily my hand
the the machine will kind of take over that part of the process and do it methodically and
that part of the process and do it methodically and fairly perfectly. There is some slippage
that occurs whenever you're using physical media. There are things that pop up that you might not
expect. And I kind of love that aspect of it in a sense. And it's still typically way more refined
than I would be able to do. So a lot of the artwork I create digitally that gets drawn by the pen plotter, I could never see myself or most people being able to actually do that with
a pen on paper. And to me, that is like a huge, hugely exciting domain to work in.
That's great. Yeah. And let's, I think this is a good time we can jump into your latest project
because it is very much about pen plotting. I would love to just,
I'm just going to show some of this. I know James, you can't really see what I'm doing right here,
but I'm just going to be showing some of the outputs from the collection.
And maybe we can just talk about it as we're looking here.
What, I guess, what made you think of this exact like composition?
You know, when we're looking at busy, you know, it's obviously, you know, if you zoom in, in some cases, buildings, all these different little intricate
details in these compositions.
What made you come up with this concept?
Yeah, I think I wanted to create a feeling.
I wanted to make something that took you to a place mentally that I was trying to build
place mentally that I was trying to build a world around. And that to me is kind of this idea of
a world around.
chaos at scale and the lack of context making you believe it's chaos. So imagine yourself in the
middle of a city and everyone's going about their day. There's vehicles, there's people, there's
noise, all that can feel very chaotic.
And for me, it was very anxiety inducing when I was in that situation at first.
And then as I got a little more used to it, I realized that with the context of the place,
with the understanding that these were actually all systems that were layered on top of one another, whether it be a transit system, a work day, all these different things
that actually there was a lot of order. Everything kind of happens on a set schedule. And that was a
great realization that reduced a lot of my anxiety being, you know, a person who lives in Vermont and
currently, you know, is visiting New York on a regular basis for art related events. That was a big moment for
me. So it's almost an expression of that transition in my life. I think to me, I wanted to
create artwork that gave you the sense that there was so much happening. It was kind of chaotic.
You don't understand what it is. You may see one thing when you look at it in the first 10 seconds, but then when you sit with it for a couple of minutes, you realize that there's all these underlying systems. And that's really what I wanted to convey. And the compositions arose from that.
And I love how you said that, you know, showing a hidden order through what seems like chaos.
And I think that that is really a cool, it just made me think immediately and realize it resonated with me, definitely.
Because I think what you said, like, you know, just the world can create a lot of anxiety, right?
Especially what's going on the last week.
So to kind of find order when there's a lot of chaos going on is something that I think we all hope for.
So I think it's really cool that in this piece, you kind of, you know, you're representing that in a way.
And I can totally see that, you know, it seems so chaotic.
But then as you're diving into these outputs, you know, you see, you do see the order.
And also, I love how, you know, we'll try to show how it's how it's happens now.
we'll try to show, um, how it's, how it's happens now, but I, I love how you, um,
the generation on the live view, which we're seeing on the screen now. Um, can you talk to
us a little about that? Cause this, this, like, it's just really cool. Like, like the, you know,
the load, little loading screen, but then the way
it just kind of explodes out and then it kind of like explodes back in and then kind of fills in
the details more. Can you explain like a little, maybe technically of like what's going on there
and like, like, how did you think of actually like, you know, showing that kind of animation logic?
like, you know, showing that kind of animation logic?
Yeah, so what you're seeing is basically like,
it's computing a lot of different things at one time.
So there's a lot of kind of steps that you're not seeing,
but you're arriving at basically this set of geometry
that is ready to plot.
You can't right-click and plot this necessarily,
but it's doing all the same calculations
that would deliver that kind of plotted
specific output of SVG.
And one of the big things with that
is having occlusion
so that the buildings have kind of depth and dimension
and they sit on top and behind other elements.
And in order to do that,
you could do everything in one fell swoop. And with programming,
you kind of sometimes you want to do that you want to do a large calculation at once. But it's not
always necessarily the best user experience to have things just like hang for 10 seconds. Instead,
it's better to trickle them out. So to kind of can do it in 10 segments and iterate as opposed to
like, I'm going to do it all right this very second, because you'll be able to get visual feedback a lot faster.
So it's actually not really a creative choice to do it that way.
It's more of a technical choice.
And if you look at Ori and actually a lot of projects in general do this, like they build, they don't just kind of appear.
It's hard to make things just appear.
So, you know, I kind of had that happening and it
wasn't very interesting and then a simple trick of just figuring out like the distance of all the
things related to the center of the canvas and then um using that as a sorting mechanism so
things kind of are sorted by their distance and well then as you iteratively draw them they'll
start from the center and move
outward and if you reverse that sort it'll do the opposite so it builds in three steps so first it's
the pipes then it's what i call the landmarks which are like a hundred different illustrations
that have drawn that get kind of slurped up by the generative algorithm and inserted into the artwork
and then there's these things for lack of a better term i just call them micro units but
they're basically like little tiny elements that just can appear in like one or two areas of the
grid so they're not very big and they just fill in all the gaps so there's like a lot of computation
to fill this grid and then whenever that doesn't quite fill all the way i just insert all these
little little tiny elements to give you that depth and that's kind of like that third phase that you see build at the very end.
Yeah, it's really cool.
And I love how you say, you know, this wasn't like an artistic choice, but it almost becomes an artistic choice.
It becomes a really cool part of it, I think, of seeing exactly how it's a bit of seeing how the bread is made, right. Uh,
you're seeing it being, being composed and kind of in, and calculated in real time and laid out,
which is really cool. And I think like, that's probably something in a lot of art blocks projects.
There's some really cool, um, you know, loading logic or the way they're kind of, um, you know,
displayed, especially for static pieces
like this, that kind of gets lost a lot of times because, you know, the people are just looking at
the, um, the saved, you know, um, output or, you know, that, that flat file right at the end that
gets produced. But there's a lot of, uh uh art blocks projects that have some pretty cool uh
you know animation to get to that point right so uh it's something that you know people definitely
should should check out on the live view um you know just wanted to while we're on this page uh
just uh check in it looks like you got we got an hour and 42 minutes left in the auction of these 50 pieces.
The four right now, as far as the minimum bid, is 0.21. So just wanted to highlight that. There's
still time to get one of these pieces. It's got an hour and 42 minutes left on the bidding on artblocks.io.
And again, this is for anybody who doesn't know, you know, these are just samples that we're
showing. This is obviously a generative collection. So what will happen is, is that, you know,
once the winners of this bidding happen, these will all be generated, um, live. So,
uh, these are all just sample outputs from the algorithm. However, you know, uh, the 50 will be
generated. And I think the magic of, of generative art, especially long form generative art, which,
you know, on art blocks has really pioneered is, you know, the fact that
James doesn't know what the final outputs are going to be. I don't know what the final outputs
are going to be. No one does. Only the blockchain gods do at this moment, which is amazing. And I
think it's something that's really has, you know, historically generative art hasn't really been
this way for the most part.
And I think it's something that, um, is really cool. Like it's just, uh, it's, it's scary for us
artists for sure, but it's, it's really fun to, you know, have it be completely emergent like
that. Don't you, don't you agree? I do. I actually a couple of things.
So, you know, it's not only that we're not going to know what these are and they're going to get generated and that's going to be a surprise, but I'm going to draw all 50 of these and you'll be able to claim the drawing complimentary.
So if you own the NFT and 24 hours after the auction ends, the claim window opens, then you can go in there.
If you own the NFT, you can enter your
shipping address, that sort of thing, and you'll get the drawing delivered to your door, no extra
charge. And I actually, I want to mention like, you know, back when generative art and digital art
was really, really new, this is actually kind of how it worked. So you would write a rudimentary
program, sometimes on a punch punch card and you would take it
to a mainframe it would process that and then it would output whatever the results of the program
were on a pen plotter and you would look at that so your flow was like really really hard to do
programming and then pen plotter and you didn't know what you were going to get you didn't know
if the program would actually have an error or not. But that was like the beginning and the end of that process.
And that's effectively kind of what we're doing today
where I've written the program.
I don't know what it's going to do,
but I have to plot it with the pen plotter
to figure that out in a sense, you know?
Cool.
I got some questions coming in.
One of them was around the color palette choices.
Do they have any meaning for you?
How did you come up with the color palette for this project?
Yeah, so the color palettes are dictated by what's available in terms of archival quality ink.
So there's a lot of really interesting inks out there and a lot of them will fade if
they're exposed to UV light dye-based inks. So, you know, for busy, it was really important to me
to make something that will last many decades that hopefully someday will end up in a gallery or
museum. And because of that, I was very specific about the colors that I opted to use and trying to work with this reduced palette in a way that I could make multiple different color palettes that evoke different senses, have different brightnesses, that sort of thing.
That's where they all kind of were derived from.
But the really interesting thing is even if there's two outputs that are the same color palette
the balance of colors could be shifted quite a lot so you'll find some might have a cooler tone
or warmer tone and there's definitely a lot of room for chance in terms of what we're going to get
and there's one color palette that's just called the mega palette and it uses so many different
colored inks i think it uses 12 different colors wow and that's the rarest because that's going to take me
literally running the plot 12 times like the plotter 12 times with 12 different pens with
12 different colors to actually create um and they look like radically different from like
output to output because there's so much chance in there of like what's going to actually become
prominent so i'm excited to see what's going to happen yeah like that's that was my next question
is that you know immediately i was thinking because you know i've i've done different plotter
projects i did shields with plotables and uh the one thing i know about this stuff is that you know
changing ink change changing uh pens you know and ink colors is not like that easy right
it's uh it can it can go it can go bad uh so and you also have to be there to remember i mean these
plots take like like how long are these plots going to take each if you could tell if you could
i think like 10 people perspective right yeah 10 to 15 hours a piece yeah so yeah i'm gonna make all 50
regardless of whether they're claimed or not um anyone who buys an nft on secondary it's unclaimed
they can claim it at any time in the future and i'll have that plot done in the flat file behind
me ready to ship so it's gonna take a while um switching the inks is very difficult. I've spent almost a year on this.
And at one point I was very focused on the production side of things and how to ensure that I'm able to do these multicolor plots and have them turn out okay every single time.
As opposed to what would happen in the past with my art, which is when I did multiple inks, I had to be really exact about how I put the pen back in the plotter and if it was off then the alignment would be um
inaccurate and then the whole plot was kind of ruined and busy is like literally the hardest
project to execute on for this because every single like pipe and tube is basically composed
of like five or six different colored inks yeah all with super tight registration so if anyone is off it's immediately obvious like it's basically me
just challenging myself and spiting myself to do it this way um so i basically was like this needs
to be the way it's going to happen i'll devise a solution so i got into 3d printing and design
parts that allow me to basically do this in a way where I can always
get it accurately. That was a long process to figure out. Amazing. And you also have some,
the plotter you're using, right? Can you describe about that, the company behind that? And
it's a newer version of that plotter, right? Yeah. So there's multiple plotters in the mix at this point there's about to be more
so i guess i'll start with the one behind me is axidraw a1 which is made by evil mad scientist
i bought that the beginning of 2024 they'd been acquired later that year by bantam tools
and they moved the company from sunnyvale california out to peak skill new york and the
people who um ended up acquiring them are like the best like literally they threw a big party
they supplied all the technology uh for the harold cohen exhibition at the whitney they're bantam
tools and if you go to their offices it is like a plotter art museum. It's insane.
And they're just committed to basically building machines that allow plotter artists to make museum quality artwork.
Like that is their stated goal.
And I could not be more excited about it.
And for Busy, at the very last minute, we kind of had this dream, like, how big can we make this thing?
And I went to them with a proposal and they ended up building a prototype pen plotter,
which you can't see now,
but it basically doubles the size of that one.
So it could do 72 by 24,
an amazing cinematic size.
And there's really nothing else out in the world like that, except for this one machine.
And I fortunately was able to use it
for like a week and a half and
was able to do five busiest drawings which went up to auction and sold out in eight minutes uh
two days ago now and those are like crazy i mean they're basically like the they're what i've
always wanted to make like since the first time i've ever seen a pen plotter that's what i wanted
to do and i was able to finally execute on it with their help. And it's like the best feeling in the world.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
And I saw that.
I think I saw that one in Marfa.
That was the one you're using there.
That's a little different.
That was, that's like their newer version of the Axidraw.
Okay.
So there's an even bigger version than that that I didn't see.
Wow.
That one was huge.
It's crazy.
This technology and how good it's getting
it's it's amazing and i i've so like you said it's really hard to actually have a pen execute
with these tight tolerances like this and then having multiple um you know colors on top of it
this is really like a uh you know as far far as technicality of execution, like you said,
on a plotter, this is like, you know, really, really high up there of like difficulty, right?
So it's really amazing that you've made something that does, that's not only, you know, looks great.
And, you know, I think it's also on the execution side, you have a really a achievement here as well, which is to be celebrated.
A couple we got a few minutes left. The couple one other question was, you know, are these like city are these kind of cities inspired by any type of city in particular?
by any type of city in particular?
And if so, do you plan on doing other versions of this
that maybe incorporate other cities?
Yeah, so I had to think about this one a lot
because I didn't want to just like put the Eiffel Tower
in the middle of the artwork.
That didn't feel authentic to me.
It's basically an imaginary world
that I've built and illustrated
over the course of the last year.
That's inspired by cities, absolutely,
but has no specific landmarks from any known city.
It's just being creative, having fun with it
and seeing where it can get.
But I spent a lot of time in Baltimore
when I was younger and spent a couple years living in the city.
So there's an aspect of that.
There's an aspect of New York.
There's an aspect of just like worldwide cities.
But the really interesting thing for me is this is more now
a framework than a single artwork.
And as you saw in Marfa in Texas,
I have the ability to like take that framework and adapt it to locations
i'm calling this hyper local artwork or generative art where i can make generative art on location in
specific places that has some sort of element of the place like imbued within it so i could do that
in a high desert i could do that in a big. And there's a lot of conversations occurring right now,
like where this is going to happen next. And without saying too much, I can say it's going to be
really, really interesting where this happens a couple months, hopefully, it's going to be around
the world. And basically, I'll take this framework, remove a lot of what i've done and then incorporate that specific location and then go
there with a pen plotter and create the artwork there and um the other thing i did in marfa is
i burned all the artwork after i left so that you had to be there to see it i don't know if i'll do
that again we'll have to say well i'm glad i saw it so It's very dramatic going for the performance art at the end of it, I say.
A little bit of Burning Man.
That's amazing. Well, James, it's been so great. We're getting to the end here.
It's been amazing chatting with you. I always enjoy, you know, chatting with you about art,
about everything, you know, that every time I see you,
we always have great conversations.
So thanks again for joining.
I know people are really digging this project
and digging a lot of the other projects that you've done
and appreciate you coming on and chatting about it.
I really appreciate your time. It's always a pleasure and just want
