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🌆 CITIES by @EfdotStudio x @0xdiid
Recorded: June 16, 2025 Duration: 1:03:51Space Recording
Short Summary
Art Blocks launches the Cities Project, a collaborative effort between FDOT and DID, set to mint 500 unique pieces, emphasizing community engagement and innovative generative art.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you
you I've been at this for a long time, so excited to let everybody know.
Can everybody give a thumbs up? There you go.
I'm going to go to the app.
Speaking.
I don't know. Thank you. Can you hear me?
Yeah, what's going on?
What's going on?
How's it going? Big day.
Yeah, yeah. Man, I'm so excited.
Doing well. I see Jordan's trying to come back up yeah i'm gonna
get jordan back up here
gm everybody gm
all right i think i think we got this figured out.
Typical spaces issues, but I think we're good.
I'll kick this off officially, fix the audio issue.
Hopefully you guys can hear me a little better.
What's up, everybody? I'm Jordan Lyle from Art Blocks.
We have an amazing pre-drop talk spaces today.
It's finally here, cities by FDOT and DID.
After months and months of work and planning and scheduling and prepping and building and FOMOing, we're finally here.
Today we're celebrating the Cities Project, and we'll get into all the details do why don't we just why don't we just make a quick intro. FDOT do you want to intro and then hand it off to Did? Yeah sure. How's
going everybody? My name's Eric. Most people know me as FDOT. I'm an artist and
illustrator, muralist, designer from New York.
I've been working with Did on this project for a little over three years now, on and off.
So it's really amazing to be here and stoked to be dropping with Artblocks for the first time.
Let's go yeah we're we're ecstatic to uh to finally have you on our site and uh minting
um here at artblocks i think this is exactly what the studio platform was built for uh so we're
really excited to see everybody mint um did can you say hello and give a quick intro
jim jim yeah um hi i'm i'm did very very very happy to be here like eric said it's been it's
been a long time coming we've been working very hard on this project since before i even went as did as a pseudonym if that puts a puts a marker on how
long we've been working on this so yeah super excited to be here super excited to finally drop
this and it feels like a kind of a culmination of my entire coming up in web 3 so happy to be here
with you all oh that's amazing that's amazing. That's amazing. All right. So
let's take care of the administrative stuff. And then I want to hear more about this project. But
so everyone's aware in the next hour. So we're talking like 50 minutes from now.
The allow list mint window is kicking off. So anyone that's on the allow list can mint from artblocks.io.
We'll get into the details of how you can get on the allow list if you're not already on there.
But this kicks off like the first minting window.
and that's going to run for a while.
And that's going to run for a while.
We'll celebrate together in New York City next week.
And then at some point down the road
will be a public sale.
So it's a little bit different
than the typical Artblocks release,
but it's really exciting
to get different communities involved
and to kind of celebrate together
with a bunch of different people
in a bunch of different communities.
So it's something that we're really excited about.
At the top of the hour, noon Eastern time, 9 a.m. Pacific, we'll kick off the AllowLift Mint. There's 500 pieces in total, and the wait is over. I think that's how you
framed it, Eric. Do you want to maybe get into some of the specifics about the project
and introduce it at a high level and then we can dig in? Yeah, sounds great. Man, this is surreal.
So this project started maybe four years ago as an inception of taking these drawings and
paintings that I was creating originally on
paper and starting to break them down into a system. I thought it would be really cool to
try and capture the invisible rhythms that we all feel and see and notice when we're in cities,
especially bigger cities, and create something that was bigger than just a drawing series,
something that I could collaborate with someone on that could be flexible and expand and represent this idea of the infinite city.
Because when you see an image of a cityscape, a lot of times it bleeds past the edges.
And I just sometimes wonder, what does that look like for my drawings? What goes past the edge?
And I was working with a couple different people on this idea who couldn't
really take it to the finish line. Then I met Did, and he was so enthusiastic about the project. He
wanted to break down my drawings into steps and systems so that it could actually be made piece
by piece and accomplish everything I wanted to do. And I hadn't yet found a collaborator. So
really excited that he approached me
and that we connected.
We've actually never met in person, which is crazy.
But we've been chatting on and off for three years.
And in the span, he moved across the country, had a kid.
There's a lot of things that went down
that are a part of the story. And I'm so glad
because the little refinements that we made over the years made this what it is. And it represents
a lot of things that I love about cities and not just New York, but all the cities that have
affected me, all the cities I've yet to travel to. I love that, man. It's clear just when you
look at it, you get that city's vibe. You get the grid.
I'm traveling to New York City for NFT NYC next week, so I'm already feeling those vibes of
exploring Manhattan. And I know so many other cities, too, have a special place in a lot of
people's hearts. When we first started talking about it, we were probably as far away from a big city as you can be in Marfa, Texas last year, when we met in person
for the first time, Eric, and you introduced this idea to me, or at least you kind of brought this
to the table. And we don't normally, you know, in the past, we haven't had an opportunity to feature new artists to the platform in the studio project.
Usually it's former Artblocks artists that can use the studio.
But this project was so special.
The two of you are such a great collab that it felt right to make an exception and to allow and to kind of help promote and provide a
home for the city's project. And we've been chatting on and off for the last, I don't know
how long it was, eight, 10 months since Marfa. And it all kind of culminates today. So we're
really excited to have this here. But it's cool that at least from my side,
the beginnings were in Marfa, which is another special place for Artblocks community.
Yeah. What, six months ago now or seven months ago, it was a teaser we did with White Walls
and Marfa. And I was so nervous about being there there there's so many incredible artists that go to
Marfa every year and they have such a command over this medium and I just really hope that what we
built here does it justice there's just so much you can do with generative art when I first
discovered it my mind was blown going to Marfa made that feeling even deeper and meeting the
artists so getting to be here today and share a project that's so long in the making that first was shared
in marfa it's like a full circle moment and i really hope that uh that the art blocks family
accepts us and enjoys what we created here oh for sure for sure we're definitely off to a great
start uh really great turnout today and the spaces. Welcome everybody. Just as a reminder,
we're here in a pre-drop talk. We used to do a lot of these pre-drop talks back in the day
in 2021 and 22. We stopped doing it as we kind of reset, but we've done this a couple times this
year. And I think it's just a great opportunity to highlight the work that's
coming to our platform and we're really excited about this work so we're going to be chatting for
the next 45 minutes or so um prior to the release of cities on art block studio uh so we'll have an
opportunity for potentially for people to come up and ask questions. We'll dig into more about the project
and the vision and then maybe even the code that's behind it. But before we do, just want
to remind everybody at 9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern at artblocks.io, you can go there now
and explore the collection. But at that time, we'll start the allow list minting window.
And, yeah, so that's coming up in 45 minutes.
So we're here chatting with the artists.
So we're really excited about cities.
Eric, do you mind walking through maybe the high-level situation of how the allow list works and how people can
can learn more about it?
Absolutely.
So when I thought about creating the community and the allow list for this
drop, first,
we wanted to reward people that have been supporting for a long time.
So we went through our top 100 holders,
created some presale spots for them, as well as free outputs for my one-on-one holders who signed up on the form. The form that we have
is on my website, and I can pin up the tweet here in a minute. Basically, we wanted people to help
us build a story around this collection. Being that it's abstract and a lot of the subject matter is implied, I wanted to
know your memories from the cities that have affected you.
So on the Allow List form, we have people submitting their own memories.
We can even share some of those today.
And we'll be updating that Allow List tonight with any more people that come in today on
the form.
But so for now, it's closed until the drop, but we will update it later and we'll see how
fast things move.
Amazing.
I'm pinning a couple links here.
You can add a couple as well, maybe specifically for the allow list.
But great.
I really appreciate multiple communities coming together here.
You've done an amazing job with what you have planned for New York next week.
You've got the Schiller team as part of this.
I know Moonpay is involved.
It's really cool to see a bunch of different communities and personalities and artists and collectors come behind this.
Can you guys talk about how this is kind of like a group project? It's a bunch of people coming together to get this off the
ground. It's super cool. And it's just like classic NFT community. It's great.
Yeah, well, I did picture it in my mind what would happen if we just did an open drop
and the scramble of trying to get the word out to all these different people at the same time didn't make sense to me. It felt like if we're going to build a city,
we need to do this right and get the right parties involved. It's such a big idea. It's
my first long form collection, even though it's a collab, it's still my first. I still consider
it my first long form collection and you only get one chance to do that. So we, we called in
Shiller to help us with getting these allow-list spots out to more communities,
and we had some really great people come and be involved.
Just a few. I'm not going to name all of them, but Vinnie Hager, Letters, I see him down in the audience.
Big shout-out to Vinnie.
24 Hours of Art also gave spots away.
There were so many people.
Jack Butcher came through and gave some spots to his community
did of course had his own people that he wanted to invite Burrito Dow
yeah it was it's a big celebration of all the people that have been supporting our vision see
what we're doing want to be there to celebrate on opening day and we just we're just so happy
that Schiller could help out, get it, get it to more people.
That's great to see you like, you love to see that.
Well, let's, looks like did dropped on my screen, at least. We'd love to hear more from him around maybe the production of the, of the work.
But before we do that um here we go he's
coming up did do you mind getting into maybe the technical side of this and how the collab worked
and how you guys work together and uh maybe how you approached it from the code side
yeah yeah for sure can you guys hear me okay i got rugged there for a second
yeah you sound great to me okay sweet yeah it was you know eric's referred to it a couple of times
but when it first started i had just reached out to him and said, like, you know, very simply, there's aspects of your do for a typical project, was just like planning and categorizing.
And every line has to have a purpose and every line has to have a category and a system applied to it and all of that.
that. So when we kind of started building this out, I took all of the example pieces and the
hand-drawn one-of-one pieces that he had done, and I was able to kind of break them down into
their individual pieces and how we built up a city through these things that we kind of know
and love about cities. What constitutes a building?
What constitutes a sidewalk?
What constitutes, you know, the motion through the city
and the energy that's put in there through these glyphs,
through these little drawings that are kind of in place in the city.
So from a technical perspective, it really just builds largely on that
and then a whole lot of math, as you would expect with any generative collection.
We take the entire city and build out the city grid,
and then it gets kind of rotated down into the isometric perspective,
and then we gently lay the glyphs on top of it.
And the entire time we're keeping track of where things are colliding, where things are sitting, how close the different aspects of the cities align. And then something that was really important for me and was definitely not the most efficient way to do things from a technical perspective was that it was completely random.
So the entire city is built up just with like the collision detection as the central core of what restricts it.
as the central core of what restricts it.
All of the lines are placed randomly throughout this process
as we build up the buildings and as we build up the streets.
And sometimes things are reordered.
Sometimes we stack multiple things on top of each other.
And it's all just kind of much like a city would be populated.
You get this influx of all of these
points and lines and streets and it it provides it that character that feels a little bit more
chaotic but controlled just like a real city would be so that was something that was very
important to us and then on top of it and i I think a few people have called it out, which has felt good,
we probably spent two months just on the texturing.
It doesn't come out super well in social media sometimes, but if you get in there, you get in the Explorer,
you full screen it, all of that, you'll start to get a little bit better of an idea
of all the textures that are involved so we workshopped those and the final test was i sent
f dot one of his like lifts one of his drawings except it had been drawn by the computer and not
except it had been drawn by the computer and not by him.
And he didn't notice it.
So we called it good at that point that all of the texturing
and everything felt so good that he couldn't tell it apart
from his own actual pen and paperwork.
So when you get all that together it's something that feels
it feels genuine to his creative practice we've introduced a few kind of reintroduced a few more
randomness and a few more glitchy outputs and a little bit more chaos than you might see in a hand-done piece, just because it takes a long time to intentionally draw a line on a piece of paper.
So we've kind of introduced all the things that you might see in a generative collection,
but hopefully it feels very true to the FDOT City style,
and that was really my my main goal here
That's great, thanks for walking through that that's really cool. That's such a cool little
Story of creating his art back to him in code and being unable to tell the difference between
You know hand-drawn code and code created, um, uh, you know,
hand-drawn code and code created in art.
That's when you know you've done something interesting. Uh,
really cool to hear that. Um, I, what I,
what I love about it personally is even though it's, it's not animated,
even though it's a, it's a static drawing,
I still get the feeling of movement
because it's hard to imagine a city without movement,
without continual hustle and bustle.
So I still get the vibes that there's activity, there's a lot going on,
things are moving, whether it's cars in streets or people on bikes
or taxis and subways.
And I really like that you get the sense of movement.
I'd love to hear more about maybe about specific cities that come to mind.
I know everyone kind of has their city that comes to mind.
that comes to mind new york for a lot of people as we next week as we uh as we come together to uh
to meet to discuss nfts and and participate in several other kind of community events um
it's always a fun time to get together it's always so new york is always a great place
because it's so easy to get around um so i think that's one that really comes to mind for a lot of people. What other cities for you, FDOT, is important to you and maybe influence this
project? Yeah, first I just want to comment on what Did said about how the system's really made
up from collisions and collision detection. It makes a lot of sense because when you look in the city, it's really made up not just of buildings and streets, but of its people.
And the spaces between the people is something that's fascinated me for a long time.
How everyone has their own little personal space bubble.
How some people, that bubble's a little smaller.
For some people, they're willing to get on a subway that's packed to the brim with people.
For some people, they're willing to get on a subway that's packed to the brim with people.
And that's always changing, that density, those patterns between how people move through the city, whether they're on a train or on a skateboard or just walking, or some other vehicle flying through the air on a helicopter.
There's a lot of little things that you notice in big cities that show these patterns.
And it wasn't just New York. For me, I lived in
Buenos Aires for a couple of years. I lived in Philadelphia for four years. And those cities
both had a really strong effect on me. I also lived in Prague for a summer and in Lithuania
for a summer when I was in my 20s. So Eastern European, kind of going back to my roots and trying to see these ancient cities,
even visiting ruins and seeing Mayan pyramids in Mexico. All these things informed how I draw and
how I see the world. I imagine people moving around ancient cities and what that must have
and what that must have looked like, what that must have felt like
looked like, what that must have felt like when everyone wasn't staring down at their phone.
when everyone wasn't staring down at their phone.
And the color palettes are something that I can go on for a long time about
because some of the color palettes are named after cities.
Some of them are named after times of day or vibes in the city.
There's a lot of color palettes.
There's over 100 of them,
which was probably the hardest part for me to narrow down all the palettes.
And you'll see that each one also has a time of day assigned to it in the metadata.
Not just the morning, evening, night.
There is one of those, but there's also a specific time on the clock.
So the collection can be laid out from midnight to midnight as a full day.
midnight as a full day. Say that part again, because I want to make sure people understand
it with the full day thing. How does that work? Yeah. So there's 112 color palettes.
There's four categories of different energies in those color palettes. There's rising, living,
palettes. There's rising, living, fading, and resting to cover sort of these four quadrants
of the day. And within that, you'll notice some of them obviously feel like nighttime.
Some of them obviously feel like daytime, but there's some exceptions. There are some
that feel like golden hour. There are some that feel completely not like a time of day
at all, but more like a vibe when you are inside of a building
somewhere in the city. But each of these palettes has a 24-hour time associated with it, like
military time. So it'll say 12.55. And so that one's early afternoon. And you'll see it in the
colors, but it'll be reinforced in the metadata of each piece.
And then some of the pieces are actually any time. They don't have a time because they're cloudy
and it really could be taken at any time as if it was a photo. I really see a lot of parallels
between this project and street photography, which was something I did for a long time before I
committed to the type of visual art that I do, photographing skateboarders, just being in the city
and having a camera was everything.
Climbing up to the top of a building
and seeing what the view looked like.
And I never got to pursue that for my career.
So this collection really does scratch that itch
of not just being a builder and playing with shapes
like I was a kid playing with blocks,
but also this photographer exploring the city,
finding unique angles at different times of day.
Love the variety that so many color palettes bring.
I don't know if I've seen a project with over 100 color palettes.
That's insane. Kudos to you guys.
I can go a little deeper on the color palettes if you want like how you do yeah yeah yeah so uh it looks like did's got
his hand up what's up oh i was gonna go in the opposite direction of the color palettes um but
just to touch on it real quick i think think another thing that's really cool and really interesting about some stuff we've added to the collection is the water features.
You know, for me, a lot of the cities I've lived in have been very unique in terms of water features and even places I've visited, I grew up kind of in the prairie in Colorado.
And Denver itself has a river that borders it that ends up being very impactful to how the city moves and flows.
And then I also lived in Madison for three years, which sits on an isthmus.
So it's a kind of stretch of land between two lakes.
And yeah, I think the water features are just another way
that make the cities very unique
because it changes how people move
and interact with the cities.
Yeah, that was an interesting one,
picking the colors for the water, because sometimes
when you look at the city, there's a reflection on the water and you see the sky color.
And then other times when it's darker or when it's cloudy, you don't get the reflection,
so the watercolor feels dark compared to the land.
So some of the pallets have a lighter river color and some of the pallets have a darker
watercolor.
And then in each palette
there's about 15 colors. So there's a background color that kind of sets the tone.
There's the two grid colors which go left and right diagonally to sort of build the base of
the city. Then there are four bold colors, most of which contrast the background. In some palettes
they're more subtle and not really bold at all. Then there's four subtle colors that create the illusion
of depth off the background. There's two spot colors which are mostly applied to
the glyphs and details scattered around compositions. And then there's the river
colors which has four that's choosing from random, I believe.
And the little lines on the river also have a separate color attached.
Some of the pieces have invisible rivers where it feels like it's just the same color as the land.
But most of them have a color that's slightly different.
I love the variety.
And you get a great sense of the collection and the different color palettes when you scroll through the outputs, which you can do now at artblocks.io.
If you pin to the homepage, the first slot featured on the Artblocks homepage is the city's collection that we're chatting about now.
is the city's collection that we're chatting about now.
And you guys have kind of done an artist mint
or a community mint of 150 prior to this Allow List mint.
So we have a bunch of outputs,
and it's really fun to explore all 150
that have been already minted.
And you get a great sense of the variety uh you can
see different not only the patterns but what you're talking about with like um time of day
and the color temperature and the rivers uh it's in my mind it makes up a great generative project where it's truly a one-on-one of X, where you get so much variety and so many unique pieces, but they're all coherent in a collection.
I think that's what generative art, to me, that's what makes a great collection, when you truly have these one-on-one pieces grouped in a collection.
And with so many color palettes, over 100, I think just math works out where you're going to have many one-on-one pieces grouped in a collection. And with so many color palettes, over 100,
I think just math works out where you're going to have many one-of-one pieces, right?
We may even see some color palettes not even get minted.
I think that's really special, too, where some people may get, you know,
one-of-one color palette.
Did that go into your thinking as you're thinking about the different palettes? A little bit for sure. I wanted some of the palettes to
be more rare as if it's like a rare time of day. Sometimes you go outside and the light
is just incredible. It's something you haven't really seen in a long time,
the way the light's being broken by the clouds or just the atmosphere. So I wanted those color palettes specifically to be more rare.
There's basically a baseline rarity for the color palettes,
and then some of them are twice as rare,
and some of them are twice as common.
But that's sort of the range that we created.
But it's very possible that some of the palettes won't make it in
because there is a 1 in 250 chance for some of them.
All right, just resetting for everybody that's just joined us.
We're here kind of celebrating the release of Cities by FDOT and DID,
Celebrating the release of Cities by FDOT and DID, which is going up for pre-mint or allow list only mint here in 25 minutes at artblocks.io.
If you're on the allow list, you'll be able to mint at noon Eastern, 9 a.m. Pacific.
and tweet to the space where you can, um, you can add yourself to the allow list or just DM any of
us up here or jump into the either discord and, and find a way to, uh, get access. Um, I'd,
I'd love to get into all that you have planned for New York city next week. And then through the,
through the end of the month, there month. There's a lot going on.
Do you mind getting into everything that you've got planned?
Let's do it.
So the first event that we have coming up,
we always do this every NFT NYC for three years now.
It's the Canal Street Show.
This is our big group show where we do open calls.
We invite multiple curators to have a screen at our show under the
show theme. This year, the show theme is the obstacles in our path.
Last year, it was pathways. So this year, it's about obstacles. And last year, I was trying to
get this city project out and thinking about how am I going to do both of these things. And this
year, I had an epiphany. I realized that the city is about these artists as well.
The city's project is about all the people that have affected my journey in Web3 and also just
in the art scene in general here in New York. And so the dots on the pieces represent these
people to me. And so doing the Canal Street show, being the first time to show the project felt really special. And so we're planning on showing the work behind the screens on the projector wall.
You'll see the cities kind of setting the stage for Canal Street show. But there's going to be
over 60 artists that we have curated along with 12 curators. That's going to be at Loom Studios on June 27th at 7 p.m. And then the day after that,
we always do an event in Brooklyn. This time it's special because it's not just an open studio,
but we're also doing a city's show. So you'll see this collection as well as the physical pieces
that led to it on display at our new gallery in Brooklyn. It's called Dot and Grid.
And I'll pin up the flyers for both of those so you can get the RSVPs.
That one's going to be at 5 p.m. in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
It's always a good time.
That's going to be fun.
It's always the highlight of the year is NFT NYC.
It's great.
It's always great.
We talk about this a lot in this community.
It's always great to be virtual, and there's a lot we can do over Twitter and Zoom and Discord.
But it's really unlike anything else to get together in person, especially kind of celebrating around a drop,
around a release. So for everyone that's going to be attending NFT NYC and these events,
I urge everyone to find a way to mint before you go. Mint today so that when you show up in person,
so that when you show up in person, you can show off your city's mint.
I'd love to...
Oh, it looks like we...
Oh, he's back.
Did must have gotten rugged.
We'll see if we can get you back on here.
There we go.
I'd love to hear more about your background and maybe your approach to this.
You're no stranger to generative art.
But I'd love to hear your story as it relates to digital art, generative art, and creating with code.
Yeah, for sure.
I kind of said it, I implied it in my intro, but this project really is kind of the culmination of my time in the art space and in Web3 in general.
And it's been really exciting to get this far. I started off in the space like a lot of people.
I've done a few cycles of trying to trade
and trying to make money.
I started off mining Dogecoin in my dorm room
because the power was free.
And that's really largely my introduction
to NFTs and digital art as well i was trying to flip
allow lists for money and um it was largely unsuccessful but i had won my last big bet
was actually the the dower darsal's mint which Schiller helped push the marketing for.
And that ended up doing well.
And with that, I was able to help a friend deploy my first smart contract for an NFT
project they were building.
And from there, it was just, I was hooked and I was stuck here, I think.
And my introduction to art is different than I think you'll hear from a lot of artists in the space or a lot of other people in the space,
which is that my introduction to art was largely generative art.
art. It was largely through Art Blocks and through the Art Blocks community because I'm a software
engineer by trade. I'm a programmer. I got my degree in electrical engineering. I had no basis
for creating art. And due to some physical limitations, I'm not very good at painting or drawing or anything like that.
And making art and creating with code is something that I was able to really find a passion in.
And I've tried to make it historically rooted largely.
rooted largely so I'm doing explorations based on things and ideas and artists that I've seen
in the past and throughout art history whether generative or not and that's kind of largely
the introduction to my story and since then I've just been creating nonstop, focusing a lot more on the blockchain and the unique affordances it has for creating art.
And I still stand by that Art Blocks was one of the first and one of the best examples of that.
You really can't do long-form generative art without a blockchain. And I think long-form
generative art is fundamentally cool. As somebody who can be, can desire for a lot of control,
I think you get into these scenarios as a generative artist where you have to let go
and just let the algorithm speak for
itself however that manifests itself and i think that's really cool already we've seen i think i
said it in one of our in one of our group chats at some point we've seen outputs come through that
i think eric and i would consider not ideal, like not perfect.
But I think that's kind of the beauty of an algorithm like this, because other people
have seen those same outputs and said, holy cow, I love this.
This is incredible.
Like, this is so unique.
It's so glitchy, or I like this effect or whatever else.
And it's whatever we're not putting into the algorithm is what's coming through for the rest of the population.
And I think that's really cool.
So, yeah, my love for generative art persists, and I think this collection is a good example.
Fascinating to hear your personal story. That was great. Thanks so much for getting into that.
FDOT, Eric, I'd love to maybe pose a similar question. We touched on it a bit, but obviously with, with more of like a, you know, art, artistic and street art and, you know, more urban artistic approach, um, and you know, a long time artist yourself,
how did you discover generative art and what, what's been your experience with gen art and
art blocks in the past? So in about 2020, we were all indoors listening on Clubhouse, and I started to understand
this space a little bit more and seeing what could be done with the tools. There was a lot of
different projects coming out, but the ones that were some of the most fascinating to me were these
algorithmic artworks and these systems that were being created, I had just not really seen that before. I didn't know how they were making so many variations of their art that
looked, some of them looked handmade, some of them looked really custom. So it's similar to the
things I love about drawing and painting and how you can really control every edge of that canvas.
But with the system, it's just a whole other level. So I learned about squiggles, I learned about Fidenza, and just kept following art blocks. I loved seeing automatism come out by Yazeed, seeing what could be done with abstract mark making within art blocks.
me like Meridians. This is the beautiful vertical format. I think that informed a little bit there.
And in terms of capturing how I wanted to use the medium, it took a long time to feel
comfortable with this, to be ready to share that we're even working on it. There were years where
we were working on it behind the scenes, not talking about it. But the whole time I was drawing
and I was creating these cityscapes naturally. They were sneaking their way into my collections, whether it was a small
edition on Nifty Gateway or a one of one that I put on Super Rare. My first Super Rare piece was a
big live painting that I created in Miami that was called Eye of the City. And from there, I just
kept developing this visual language, starting to look at it through the lens of generative art.
Like how could I continue to expand the language beyond what I'd already drawn
that could feed into rules for the generative art? And getting it to be here feels pretty wild
because all the drawings, the spirit is there. Like Did said, when you look at it, you can't
really tell what's handmade and what's not a lot of the time. And that was really important to me because it feels like you can put
your soul into the code if you spend enough time, if you really make it feel fresh, like it's pushing
not just the medium, but your own artistic style. And that's what I'm so impressed about with this
is to be able to draw these pieces that are coming out of the algorithm right now would have taken me weeks.
And now we're going to get to see it all fly out of the Minter based on the system that we generated.
That's incredible.
That's such a great story.
great story and it's so cool to see you know this tech this decentralized tech paying off in a way
that kind of services the art or even you know extends the art and makes it a little bit more
accessible um and approachable and more varied i i love it when you when you get this i mean that's
that's why many of us are here is this crossroads of art and tech.
And it's really cool when you get this, I don't know, you get this synergy, for lack of a better word, where we get something that couldn't have existed before.
But still in your distinct style, which is really cool.
one of the pin tweets we have up here shows the video that you created.
One of the pinned tweets we have up here shows the video that you created.
And it's the very,
the very first one we pinned where it's,
it's your little promo video.
And I noticed in several,
several shots,
you're skateboarding,
which is interesting because that tells me,
you know,
that's,
it's an interesting way to explore a fast moving city.
And then interestingly, like the skateboarding cultures is is is really cool it's very similar to what i've
found in the nft art community and crypto community of this like this subculture uh
how has skateboarding maybe uh affected uh you you personally and maybe this project specifically, if at all?
Skating has affected me in so many ways.
It's the biggest teacher for me.
It taught me about persistence, taught me about style, because a lot of times when you see somebody do a trick, it's not so much about what they're doing.
It's about how they're doing it.
And a kickflip done in the right way could be more interesting than the most technical trick ever. A lot of times when you see somebody do a trick, it's not so much about what they're doing, it's about how they're doing it.
And a kickflip done in the right way could be more interesting than the most technical trick ever.
Also just exploring the cities that I've been to.
Anywhere you go with a skateboard, you instantly have community.
You show up at the skate park and people already get you to a certain extent.
And you can bond over a lot of things.
Even outside of the skateboarding, it has a visual culture. There's a certain extent. And you can bond over a lot of things. Even outside of the skateboarding,
it has a visual culture. There's a music culture. There's a way of looking at the world as if it's a playground and looking at architecture that has always stuck with me and definitely made its way
into this collection. As you see, we're creating these grids and then we're breaking them. We're
going outside. We're wiggling through them. We're finding ways to move around
these compositions in unconventional and unexpected ways. And that's the same way that I move through
the city on a skateboard. I think also the skate videos that I watched growing up were directly
inspirational for our promo video and our marketing around the collection.
I wanted people to feel like they're with me on that adventure.
Also, the song that we used is from a famous skate video called Mind Field.
I recommend you guys all watch Alien Workshop's Mind Field video,
and it's Tyler Bledsoe's part.
It's a very artsy edit.
A lot of skateboarding videos have just tricks,
but I loved how they mix together some of the lifestyle. And that song always spoke to me
called The White Flash. So we used that song, worked with our friend Weesh to capture and edit
this video. And I'm so happy. It feels like a five-year vision, like something that I had so
long ago in my mind has come to life. And with the algorithm, with the
pieces that are coming out, with the video, I just am so happy. So thank you again to everybody who
helped us. No, we love it, man. It's such a great community project. We just saw Snowfro kind of
drop his seal of approval for the project by tweeting it. Really excited to, you know, from the ArtBlox
community, from the ArtBlox team, this is a really great project and we're excited to get behind it
and support you and support Did and the community that you've built. Really excited to play a role
to kind of host it on our platform. So many things have happened for the good and bad in the last few years, but
Artblocks has kind of put in a place where it has to be a little bit more sensitive, it has to be
a little bit more strict with the art and artists that land on the platform,
strict with the art and artists that land on the platform, which is why I'm really excited to be
promoting this, you know, the studio, the artist studio, which allows for a little bit more
flexibility, allows for more experimentation. It's essentially, you know, a sandbox where we can
allow, you know, give artists tools and then see what they create and they can bring their community to it where we're just kind of the, you know, the destination for minting.
But a lot of it happens, you know, within your community.
And this has been really cool to see.
Maybe even cooler that you guys have been grinding, pun intended, on this for five years.
finding, pun intended, on this for five years. A question that I love hearing from artists is,
like, what was the biggest challenge that you faced bringing this thing to life? Because you
guys have been working on this for such a long time. What was the biggest challenge?
You want to go first, Ed?
first did? Yeah, sure. I think so much of the project has just been kind of a grind of just
adding new variety and adding new textures and adding new whatever else, elements and things
like that. But I think the most challenging part,
because it's the part that we wouldn't have even been able to get off the ground
without it, was definitely the math behind the grid.
So you'll notice when you see the pieces,
the pieces there's kind of two ways for things to fall there's either lines that are bound to the
there's kind of two ways for things to fall.
grid in that kind of isometric viewpoint and then there's an entirely separate layer on top of that
which is all the glyphs all the drawings all the icon icons from fdot's library. And like I said before, the entire thing is composed purely via collision
detection. So not only do we need math to place those lines in that kind of diagonal isometric way,
we need math to be able to go back and forth between the two different grids,
these two different aspects in a way to compare them
and see if anything is colliding or bumping into each other.
So all the math behind that is it was a lot to get done.
Once it got done, though, it just kind of works.
So everything past that was just
building on it and iterating on it and adding new variety, adding new lines and everything else.
But yeah, I really do think that was the most difficult part was that math.
how did you how did you get through it is just just continuing to to work at it uh yeah yeah
yeah uh notebooks and notebooks and notebooks of trying to figure out the correct trigonometry for laying out an isometric grid.
You know, it's, the math is pretty straightforward in one dimension.
Like if you're just trying to transform one of the two directions, either X or Y,
but once you get it into two dimensions, it gets really weird.
And then effectively it's a three-dimensional viewpoint.
So a lot of the times I would do all the math and have all the equations,
and then something else just didn't work right or didn't feel right
or didn't sit on the canvas right.
So, yeah, getting all of that kind of tuned up,
it was a lot of trial and error,
a lot more trial and error than any mathematicians in the audience might want, but it really did
kind of fit. Love to hear that. That's awesome. What was the challenge for you personally, I thought?
I think just reeling in the vision.
There were a lot of different places I had been that affected me,
and I wanted them all to be reflected in the grids.
In the end, it made more sense to focus on this main grid,
this isometric, more rectangular grid.
I was even giving did drawings of like
radial plans, octagonal cities, some of the ones that made it into my last chapter for this project,
which was in Italy. So I created like city grids inspired by real cities that are kind of winding
streets. And I wanted so badly for them all to fit in one collection. But I realized more and more
that those are special, those are custom. To do do that with generative art it wouldn't make a lot of sense because it's about
randomness in addition to um to plan spontaneity so so just like being okay with letting go some
of my ideas was was probably the biggest challenge being okay with it being what it's going to be. And also, like we were looking at
these in series of 1000. As we were reviewing the algorithm over the last few years, we would
did would upload 1000 outputs to Google Drive folder, and I would go through and look for the
patterns, look for the things I like, look for the things that needed tweaking. And there's just a lot
of things that aren't going to be included, because it's going to be half of the size of that.
So just learning to be okay with that. And then finalizing the palettes that took a long time,
just in the last month, it really came together for that part. As we were, as we're getting
closer to mint date, I just had the, I had the deadline on my mind of how are we going to
organize all these colors, all these ideas that I have. And then it came to me like the system, how to organize them. Not sure what it was. I think
I spent a lot of time locked in the studio the last few weeks getting ready, but also just taking
the breaks, walking around my neighborhood, talking to different artists about my project.
There's so many inspiring people in this space that have a unique way of looking at
at the world, also at light, at color.
I'm partially colorblind as well, so like getting over the hump of it's not going to be perfect.
It's going to have some weird quirks that, you know, I can use the tools I have to get
as close as I possibly can, but some things I'm probably just not seeing because
my deficiency is specific shades of colors.
I can't see the differences a lot of time,
unless they're very different colors.
Well, that's fascinating.
That's fascinating.
We could probably dive into that,
because that work is so colorful,
and there's a lot of, in some palettes at least,
there's not huge contrasts, and they're very related colors.
So I'd be interested to hear more about how colorblindness
affects your own work.
That's wild.
Well, I don't know what I don't know.
I don't see what you see.
I only see what I see.
And we all see color a little bit differently, as I learned when I went a little deeper into this.
We all have cones and rods in our eyes that create this illusion of colors.
And I didn't really have to think about it too much.
It was just working in a spreadsheet with all the hex codes and then tweaking
them, tweaking them, um, forever. Like until we were ready to,
to put it live, just a lot of different batches of,
of mints or of outputs before I was happy with the color balance.
But again, I don't, I don't see what you see. I just,
I'm using my best judgment.
Amazing.
Um, i don't i don't see what you see i just i'm using my best judgment amazing um
we are at we are nearly at mint time for the allow list uh in in just one minute 350 pieces from cities will go on sale at artblocks.io um 350 pieces uh we'll go to the allow listed uh collectors if there's
any left over we'll talk about a public sale down the road i believe but here's an opportunity for
those of you on the allow list to participate uh once again as we as we kind of um wrap this up i
think a couple of us have to jump but if f FDOT, if you want to continue as host, you're more than welcome.
Just from Eric's perspective, from the Artblocks team's perspective, we couldn't be prouder to be hosting a work, especially one like this that is so uniquely FDOT.
uniquely FDOT and we're really excited to participate with you and you did you've done
And we're really excited to participate with you.
an amazing job of bringing just FDOT to the blockchain and uh it creating an algorithm
that so matches the vibes and the style uh so we couldn't be more proud to be hosting this release
and it's now it's 9 9 a.m pacific so that means we're live on the site
so congrats and kudos on behalf of art blocks uh we just could not be more proud to have
your work now in the art blocks ecosystem so congratulations everybody
yeah so excited oh man surreal just had to play some music for the occasion.
That was epic.
All right, guys.
Well, we're going to hop.
Again, congratulations.
We're going to jump, but continue the vibes.
Congrats.
Excited to go mint a piece and really excited to follow along and see all the outputs.
So kudos, everybody.
Thanks so much for hosting, Jordan.
Yeah, we'll keep this going for a little bit.
I would love to hear from more friends
if they want to come up and chat, ask questions.
And we'll keep it going for maybe another 20, 30 minutes, max.
But as there are questions,
was there anything that you want to chat about, did,
now that we're finally live?
Should we just pay attention to what's happening?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, crazy that we made it.
Everything's looking good.
You know, one of the benefits of using a platform is everything just works.
I'm not used to that.
I think this is my first drop on any platform. I've always kind of coordinated things myself.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just super, super excited that we made it. I mean, we made it to this point. We've already sold 35 pieces, which is insane.
sold 35 pieces, which is insane. And I'm excited to see how things turn out and what people get.
I think probably the thing I'm most excited for is, you know, I don't necessarily prescribe to a
certain variation of this, but I think art has a way of picking people of choosing people and we got all of these allow
lists largely from people who gave us a piece of them who gave us their memories of a city or
where they grew up or where they spent time or where they learned to ride a bike or whatever
else so I'm excited to see what happens when those people mint
and get to see the city that they've been given
by this entirely random algorithm
and how that might connect with them.
So yeah, I mean, super excited, super thankful to be here.
And this was a long time coming.
So clicking that button felt good.
Yeah, man, congrats.
We definitely earned it.
And thank you again for your hard work all these years.
I haven't been able to see what's being minted yet,
but I can't wait to see.
If you wouldn't mind sharing the space
or posting what you're minting, we can't wait to see. If you wouldn't mind sharing the space or posting what
you're minting, we can share it to the top and welcome some more people up on stage. I know
that there's some people who are collecting in the audience. I did also mention earlier that
my one-of-one holders will be getting a piece from that initial reserve that we minted, so
look out for that a little bit later. I'm going to be going through all the memories that you submitted on the form and trying to find a city that that feels right
but for now Thank you.
Host
Art Blocks
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