Hi, everyone. We're just getting through setup here. We're going to wait just another minute
for folks to start popping in. And we'll resume and begin here very shortly.
We'll just give it another minute for folks to pop in.
We'll resume and begin here.
All right, everybody. We're going to get started here. I just want to say thank you,
first and foremost, to my co-creators of Glitch Marfa and the Every 30 Days product, Malta and
Madison. And we're very pleased today to present this roundtable with our esteemed guest,
Rupay Renisto, and welcome Raiden as the Every 30 Day Collector for our exhibition series featuring
Life in West America. A little context on Glitch for those that are popping in for the first time.
Glitch is a gallery in Marfa, Texas, and on the internet, our first flagship product is titled
Every 30 Days, where we choose one notable collection, one artist, and one collector
to feature. As I mentioned this month, we're welcoming Life in West America by Rupay Renisto.
Please welcome Rupay and Raiden, and a little bit of context on the object we're featuring,
owned by the collector Raiden. It's titled Parallel Reality. The full object can be viewed
at GlitchMarfa.com via livestream. It can also be viewed in real time in Marfa, Texas,
in our gallery. The exhibition will be up for the duration of January, at which point on February
1st, a new exhibition will take its place. And we have a digital poster for the exhibition
available until the end of the month as well. Up to a thousand of these digital posters will
exist each month. So go and read the full long form exhibition and check out the gift shop on
your way out. So to set the stage for today's conversation, we'll have a 45-minute discussion
roundtable with Rupay, who I will have introduced himself shortly, and we will leave some time at
the end for any additional community members or collectors to come to the stage and ask a question
or share a story, or engage in dialogue with any of the subject matter that we're talking about
here today. So before we get started, Rupay, I would love to hear a quick introduction on yourself
and just extend some thank you for joining us here. Yes, hey everybody. So thank you all
for joining the spaces. So my name is Terrope Rheinister. I've then heard the name pronounced
800 different ways. You don't think of how you pronounce the name in Terrope, so it has the
o sound, so it's the same. So it's Terrope and Terrope, so it's quite close. So anyway, so as I said,
so I'm a Finn, so I'm then from the Helsinki, Finland. I've been in the art space, the kind of
the NFT space now for a few years. So my then background, so before my then the kind of the
kind of the art life I have now. So I spent the first 20 to 25 years as a professional designer. So
I then studied then design. So I studied then UI design, UX design, then product design,
concept design. So I'm a Finn, so half a Finn and then design smartphones at the one stage.
So I also spent my first 10 to 15 years doing UI design, UX design, all types of design for then.
And then 2012, Microsoft then acquired the smartphone business then from the kind of
the kind of the Nokia side. So I then joined then for a few years I then worked there.
Then in 2016, I was the one of the founders of this virtual reality company called
Novario. So we do high end virtual reality and mixed reality hardware and software.
So that's also in my background. And in 2021, I turned 41. I guess that's the
classic age to have the kind of the midlife crisis. And I then had my own my own the midlife crisis. So
I then thought that I want to do something else. So I then started then to quit my job and I then
became an independent designer slash consultant slash the artist. So that's that's that's my
in a nutshell, that's my own background. Wonderful. We will go ahead and get riding up here as a
speaker here shortly. In the meantime, we'll kind of set the stage for the exhibition and we'll
start with a quote that we put together in the long form this month. Apologies again,
Rupe, if I don't quite nail the pronunciation, but Rupe Renisto debuted life in West America
in February, 2023. And with it, a seemingly new milestone in the advent of machine assisted
creative work was reached. Almost instantaneously, the AI generated collection sliced through the
stream of artificial media flooding our collective digital spaces. Renisto's innovation didn't just
include the novel use of a then new high resolution, high resolution diffusion model to create the
collections images, a tool that had just started to gain widespread recognition amid the year's
mainstream interest in artificial intelligence. Rather, the collection strength emanated from
the seemingly differentiated language distilled from these models, a cohesive collection of work
that possessed a peculiar mix of comforting familiarity and unsettling historical fiction.
So Rupe, in the piece we described that the release of Lewa felt like this watershed moment
and collectively our industry appeared to rally around the work as surpassing
what we described to be an invisible milestone for this type of work. Can you walk us through
what went on in the months prior to the release and how you arrived at this unique
visual language and whether or not you too as an artist felt like you were crossing into
uncharted territory? Yes, that's a good question. So I think
it's probably best to take a few years then or then to scroll back a few years. So I started,
I've been now working on AI art for roughly then two and a half years. I've been practicing
then photography for almost 30 years. So I got my first camera when I was 13 and I have a long
history then in photos. And then in 2020, 2021, of course, photography became super hard then
because of COVID. So it was hard then to move and then to grow somewhere. So then when I became an
independent artist and I started then to learn how to use AI, my first instinct was that, hey,
now I have this virtual camera. So now I can then continue to do my then photography but with these
new tools in a way. And of course, as we all know, AI isn't quite then at the 2021 age,
the AI wasn't really then photography, it was more like then painterly what you were able to achieve.
But I then started that way. So then in 2022, this thing called then Stable Diffusion came out,
which is this piece of the open source code and then available software. And it then didn't take
pretty long to actually understand that you don't actually, it's extremely powerful and you don't
actually start to create in a number of styles. And I pretty soon realized that I didn't do
something that now resembles photos. And that was really an exciting moment for me. And I started
with doing what I would assume, I started to replicate photos. So I started to try to make
pictures that you can't tell artists then, you know, real photos or not. And I was actually
quite successful with that. So I have a fair amount of art, which is high, high then quality in
that way. But at the same time, always when I was then trying to learn this, I encountered many
types of then of failures or things that I first thought are then failures. So, you know,
with things where the AI created something, then I then didn't expect it to do or it created
something then unseen. And at first I was trying to fly here, I was trying then to dismiss those.
But then at the same time, I realized that I found these ones to be much more interesting than the
ones that were successful. And of course, when you do this for a while, then just then one day,
there's a kind of tense, something then turns in your head, some type of the switch. And I
actually understand that I should probably do the things that I find then to be more interesting.
In a fundamental way, the more real the AI photos that look like the more
fate they started in the field to me, and then vice versa. So I was kind of like usually then
inspired by a few of the examples that were kind of like, you know, some call that they were complete
failures, but I think in a way that they felt much more interesting to me. So,
that was really the kind of the turning point in a way that I actually understood that for me,
the purpose of AI is not to replicate something else, but it's actually try to create something
that I can't then do with, you know, the existing means. So why create perfect looking
photos? Because then I do have my camera. So if I want those, it's much more interesting to try to
create something that I can't then do with my camera, or then with these tools. And I think this
is fundamental, the switch that then happened in my mind, that led me then towards this path.
That then a life in August America is the perfect example.
Wonderful. I want to invite Raiden to introduce as much of themselves as they would like at this
stage, and also kind of follow up Rupe's awesome answer with a little bit about your first
impressions with the work, what was interesting, what was exciting, what was notable about collecting
from Lewa, if you care to share Raiden. Yeah, for sure. First of all, I just want to say thanks
to the Glitch team, and Maddie, and Maltie, and Derek for selecting my piece. As much as I am
a Rupe and the Life in Once America collection, I'm just as big a fan of Glitch and Glitch's team.
So thanks again for letting me play just a very small piece in this exhibition. I'm Raiden,
so I'll kind of join Rupe with having a difficult to say name, but I've spent my entire career in
the hedge fund and family office world. I guess it was relatively late to crypto as an individual
in late 2016, but relatively early kind of on the institutional and family office side.
Completely missed out on digital art initially, just like we may be initially missed out on
Bitcoin from zero to a thousand or Ethereum from 30 cents to nine dollars, but we didn't miss the
second cycles there and didn't intend to miss the second cycle here. So we've been active both
personally, which is one of the pieces I have exhibited here with Glitch as well as for the
family office with a little bit of a different thesis than what I do personally. One of the
things that really attracted me the most to Life in Once America, and honestly, I wouldn't have
even found it without Derek, which he probably didn't even know, but I think he mentioned it
briefly passing for maybe a minute or two on a proof podcast a couple weeks before it was supposed
to come out. But that kind of led me into diving into the collection and learning about brain drops
and upcoming mint. And this idea, Rupe touched on it briefly, but one of the reasons I'm so
attracted to AI art and a lot of my personal collection is in AI art is this machine failure
aesthetic. And I think the reason is the engagement that it causes with the collection
and the specific pieces. When you look at like really successful kind of pieces that have
crossed over in digital art to traditional art, whether it's like Rafiq's piece at the MoMA
or Beeple and Human One, the success is based on engagement, like the time spent viewing. And
I see with Life in West America and all of Rupe's artwork, my engagement with those collections is
just so much higher than many other collections, whether it's every time you scroll through OpenSea,
you'll see a piece you don't remember seeing before, or you have a piece that you may own,
and there are so many these little areas of machine failure where whether Rupe did it intentionally
or the model did it on its own, it keeps you coming back and you're spending time with it.
And you'll get some of the most successful investments, whether it's in tech, whether it's
tech applications, they're all measured on an engagement level, whether it's daily active
users or time spent viewing. And you're starting to see that in digital art now with how the
success of Rafiq has been and the success of Beeple. And I think you can see a lot of those
same characteristics in Rupe's work, because it's a collection and pieces that I continually
come back to and see new things in versus maybe some other collections that you'll give
a glancing pass to. Wonderful response. I'll hand it over to Malta.
Yeah, thanks so much. And Brian, great to have you on. Rupe, great to connect.
I'm similar to Rupe. I'm German, but I have a Danish name, so that typically gets mispronounced
as well. Yeah, my question Rupe is really about the aesthetics of the collection and its links to
documentary photography. So I think there's this interesting sort of gesture of inscribing
yourself in the history of documentary photography, and one can think of people like Robert Frank.
But then even with the title, it's obviously undermining the reference as well,
because it so clearly is not a photographic documentary. So I was just wondering whether
you could share some of your thinking around both referencing a documentary aesthetic and then
clearly marking also that this is something, of course, entirely different and how that
concept of like documentary might apply or change something else here. Yeah, I mean, certainly,
I mean, you mentioned then Robert Frank. So that's, of course, a huge inspiration of mine.
I mean, even starting from the kind of the subject matter here, I think, you know,
that's been kind of like a bit thin. I think when I quit a few years ago, I started to learn two
things. So I started to learn AI, and then I started then to learn screenwriting. I've been
reading a lot of screenwriting books, then storytelling books. And I think one thing that
is of course very important in the screenwriting is this idea of the conflict. So I mean,
what then creates interest and then engagement in all stories is the sense of that the story has
the conflict. And I think that then applies, hopefully applies, and I then do it purposefully
then try to try to apply it in my art in the multiple sense so that there's this conflict
between, I mean, this, I mean, let's say that it has this warm and then nostalgic first impression
style. And then you go out then kind of the more, you go the more into each piece and you start to
get the conflict between the warm and the nostalgia. Or you have to style a sense of
like the kind of the realism. So if you only see the inner thumbnail, you might assume that it's a
realistic piece. And then you go into the details and you see all the things that the
it's then hypergen easy to understand that is not, you know, unrealistic, but it still has the kind
of the feeling of being realistic. So I think that that then creates all types of interesting
conflict. So the fact that it's it purposefully, it's it then tries to be both at the same time.
And I think that then creates this sense of kind of like, is this the reality or not? And I think
fundamentally, if I if I think about photos, I mean, I always say that photos are not real.
I mean, photos, even without a I mean, they're not real, they are then 2D pictures that then
try to try to portray a specific moment in time. And we have the social then rules that we try to
hope that that, you know, the photos that we see are not fake. But I mean, photos are not are
they not real. So I think it's kind of like, here, it's more than purposeful in that sense
that I don't try to hide the fact that it's like AI. But then at the same time, I think
in a way, they are real, or they then portray a reality, but in a combined way. So a photo,
a normal photo is usually one, the moment in time, one perspective, you know, one subject matter,
one reality. And I think AI, AI art here is a kind of like combined sense. So the way that the AI is
the first train, it's, it's a combined sense of life, the kind of humanity. So then when you start to
create art with it, it's, it's, it's recognizable. So we do recognize the pieces that are real. So we
recognize that these are your people and buildings and cars and so on. So it's how it's not something
that we don't understand. And in that way, it is real, but it's not just, you know, one moment in
time in one real place. You don't have people with like, seeing from the multiple perspectives
at the same time, you don't have the multiple viewpoints, you don't have the multiple
moments in time. So I think, you know, if I have a person there that has like four hands,
I actually see the in a kind of temporal sense. So it's kind of like, it's like in a cartoon,
you don't show that the hand was first here, and it was then there. So it's kind of like,
you're starting to play also then with time. And I think all of these ideas are, for me,
they're extremely exciting. And they point towards this potential of actually being able to tell
stories, the style of the photographic stories in like brand new ways.
Amazing. Thanks. Thanks so much for sharing. So like directly related to that is my next question,
which is another another thesis of the article is that one of the things that makes life in West
America so fascinating thing is that it reveals itself as being made as being sort of like,
it, in a very interesting way, displays these glitches, these these failures in the in the image
generation. And in a way, one way to think about that is that it is not only documenting,
you know, set of portrayals of like American culture, but that it is also a kind of chronicle
of the state of generative AI, basically exactly one, one, one, one year ago. And then if you
look at earlier works, like like a service work, for example, you you see this emergence of form
from formlessness. And in your work, we probably see the the latest stage of the this presence
of glitches and formlessness in these images. And very soon, these these these models will
probably be so good that that all of that is eradicated. And so it would be fascinating
to get your you're thinking around the the time sensitivity of the model, and how the work
is also documenting this state of this technology in a way. Yes, I'm like, I'm extremely interested
in and I think that's an extremely important, important aspect. So I mean, yes, I mean,
as you said, I mean, AI is in progress and in such a kind of rapid phase that did that
the mainstream tools that many people use like tools like the mid journey and so on.
They don't, you know, have this issue that, you know, people have like 10 or 10 fingers and so on.
And I think that as as time and time then passes, they will, you know, continue then to evolve.
I think creating this, I mean, creating these collections in a sense of like understanding
that the time is here is now then so fleeting that actually, you know, trying to meet and to preserve
this aesthetics from 2022. I mean, in a way, then creates, then then then of course, it then
creates stars, then the creative strategy. So in a way that it's kind of like, it's, it's, it's
then unlikely that in the future, somebody will start to replicate them this specific style,
identity of course, then strategy is good for art. But I think of course, I mean, I,
I think this sense of like engagement and kind of like the mystery is kind of like very
powerful. And I think we recognize it. When art then leave something for our own minds to process,
you know, I'm some sounds, I've sometimes said it half jokingly and half seriously that
these artworks made normal photos sometimes feel pretty then dull. I mean, normal photos, of course,
I don't want to, I mean, the normal photos and then photography is hugely important and
it's kind of like hugely powerful. But I think it has this kind of like, it is not a flaw. It's,
it's actually something, you know, highly specific. And it's, and it's something that,
you know, it would be hard to then to replicate with, you know, like camera, you're actually able
to tell some stories or then to make people feel some things that are extremely hard to do,
then elsewhere, or, you know, then with, you know, then alternative means. And I think
this sense of like, trying to, trying to take full advantage of kind of like
it's kind of like each art form has its own style. So if you think about painting and you go
then closely into a painting, you see this, then see the kind of the brush strokes. So it has this
burst in specific kind of like form. And then if you go then farther away from painting,
you don't see those, then the kind of the stroke so well. I think in a way also if, if,
if AI art has this kind of AI brush strokes or AI forms, I don't see it as a flaw. I actually
see it as something that is like highly interesting. And I think that's, that's the thing that I've
in my art here. And then elsewhere, what I'm doing right now, I'm actually then trying to preserve it.
Rupe, another theme of LiWA that I think we were fascinated by is the complex relationship
you provide between America, as it's been represented historically, and your version
of West America that lives throughout the collection. The complexity of this relationship
is also present, as we noted in the article. The training data for the project is based on
America self representations over time. And we write to a global audience life in West America
offers a sense of deja vu of recognition or perhaps a vague recollection of the cultural versioning
of America depicted over time. Can you discuss the social dimensions of the work and how it
serves as a documentary of American archetypes and at least share a little bit about your thinking
about why those specific American archetypes you found interesting to investigate?
Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question. And it also interestingly relates to how this,
how if you think about this AI overall, so how is the AI nowadays then trained? So
AIs are trained with like, the material you find, find them online. And I think that that material
is of course not then it is, it's then in multiple ways, it's then skewed. So it's skewed with the
material from like mass media, or the popular culture and so on. So yeah, so it is not like,
you know, realistic in that way. And I think I've always found these subjective viewpoints
highly interesting. So one of my favorite film directors is Lars von Trier. And he's made
multiple films, then about the kind of the US. And he's famously then never actually been there.
And I think he's actually, that's not a flaw, it's actually, he's been playing
with the mental models in his mind of like, what this country is. Well, I've been to
into the US like, and 10 times. So I've won one one inspiration, I've also told is that I did
this coast to coast and road trip with my friends, like in 2020, 2011. We drove for like,
then three weeks. And I, and it's then when I started to create life in Western America,
it was quite then hazy in my mind. And it was also quite interesting to try to like,
create something out of these hazy things that I had in my mind of the country that I was
thinking about, okay, I want to do these types of scenes. And I, I had something in my mind,
and then tried to recreate those. So I think art is not, I mean, art is supposed to be then
subjective in the multiple ways. And I think it's, it's very interesting that this
it's the subjective to my views, and it is certainly has an element of light and social,
and then then then critique. So I mean, I said, so I'm from Finland. So I mean, we live in a country
that is quite different in a way that society is formed, and how, you know, we then treat people
for them for both the good and bad sides. So I think it certainly has the kind of the social
then then then creating in there. But it's also tries to have also a sense of the kind of the
people that go and chase the kind of the American dream. And I think that's a good thing, you know,
that people then then try to do that. So I tried to have the those sense in there also.
Thanks. Right now, I would have another another question for you. You've you've also been a big
collector of Rupe's second project, We World. And generally speaking, you've already teased
this a little bit. But how do you think about this this category of post photography? And,
you know, Rupe's work more broadly, specifically, reworld in relationship to to labor?
Yeah, I mean, I think AI art is just interesting. And in general, I think as being a markets person,
it sets out like this interesting intersection of demand from like crypto native wealth generation
and wanting to store value or, you know, collect fine art there, but also separate to that,
like AI technologists wealth generation, and as well as another demand side of like traditional
art demand for it, which I think you're starting to see for AI as well, whether it's, you know,
again, like mentioned, Rafik, but also even pieces of Rupe. I mean, he had pieces that,
you know, the reworld collection was shown at Perry photo. And I see Alejandro here in the
spaces. And I know he was vital to making it happen. But I mean, there has been institutional
adoption from, you know, large corporate curators spoken with the people on this spaces would have
heard of that have acquired pieces by Rupe. And a lot of that is, you know, due to one,
the quality of his work, but also someone like fellowship, putting in the elbow grease to get
these pieces exhibited, you know, important cultural institutions or important venues to
sell them. And when I think about reworld, I think that, you know, it seems maybe Rupe
can touch on this, but it's a little bit of an evolution away from life in West America,
where maybe it's focused less so on maybe the people of America, or the more kind of the
environments of America or this, you know, Rupe Renista University he's created.
So that's kind of like drawn me to it from just a little bit different, I guess,
concept versus life in West America. And also, again, just their benefits, they come with
fellowship pieces with like these prints. I mean, I can't explain the quality of the print
whenever you see these things in person. I mean, it's completely different than how you
would consume it maybe on a screen. I mean, the quality whenever it's blown up to a normal size
one, I think is like 50 inches by 30 inches. And there are some that are as large as, you know,
80 inches by 50. I mean, they're gigantic. And you just spend so much time with it because
there are just so many areas of detail that maybe just doesn't come across in, you know,
on a screen or how maybe a lot of digital art is consumed. But whenever it's displayed in a
different method, it can really kind of take some of the elements and let them shine a little bit more.
Yeah, I mean, if I if I can touch on that, I mean, I certainly yeah, the one kind of
drawback of a digital artist is that, you know, if you think about like a traditional
painter, and so on, they didn't choose the size of their canvas. So they didn't think of that,
I will now do a small painting or a big painting. And that's kind of like understood.
So the real world started from where a life in a Western America focuses on the kind of the
individuals, a real world focuses on the society then around it. So I'm, I'm a big fan of
Daniel, they kind of the hill of software. And he has this notion of like, there's the thesis,
and then there's the kind of the kind of the antithesis. And then when you combine them,
you get the kind of the soon thesis. And I think, you know, in my mind, our life in
Western America is the thesis about the individual, the individual, their hopes and dreams,
and the kind of the antithesis of life, you know, what is that forces that then push individuals down,
or then, you know, then try to give them form, or then to control them is the society, the,
the societal roles and forms and this, the kind of the structures or how we then start
then to behave in in 10 groups. So that's in real world. It just so happens that way these
forms, when you see them on a phone screen, you know, I, it's kind of the drawback of,
of free world when I was then creating them, I had this, the kind of the prints in mind.
So quite the many of the artworks are, I didn't agree, of course, I mean, but I mean,
the prints are just, just, you know, then fantastic. And you know, in the print sizes,
they, you know, really tense, I didn't actually show the scale, which I had then intended,
when I see some of the real world pieces on my phone screen instead of like beat them frustrating,
because it's kind of like you try to see a film on your iPhone screen and it's kind of like,
yes, it's there. But you know, sometimes actually, the sense of scale is something that
that's the one kind of drawback of a kind of digital artist of kind of like,
in the web tree space that sometimes the art works best on a certain scale.
We're going to start inviting folks up who may have questions or stories or comments about today's
session or for Rupe or any of his work or any of the topics we're covering, or for Raiden as well.
While folks are raising their hands and Madison will start accepting people to be speakers,
I'll have one more question for Rupe and for Raiden. Rupe, you know, while folks are thinking
of their questions or coming up to stage, you've started to tease your next collection on Solana
titled Smile. You've also started to share a bit about your collaboration with Bright Moments in
Paris. Later this year, you're also going to be releasing video works with fellowship.
These projects are taking a different visual direction than both Lila and Reworld, which
we've talked about. I think folks would be interested to hear a little bit more about
how you're thinking about these upcoming projects, how you think about making creative work,
and what you're trying to investigate as an artist over the next 12 to 18 months.
And Raiden, I would love to hear you speak on some of the early work that you've seen
from some of these new collections and how you view them in the lineage of Rupe's work on Jane.
Yeah, so if I start first, I mean, I've been teasing, so the two things that I have done
now then announced is my first collection on Sol, so I'm a big proponent of like the kind of
the multi-chain approach for an artist. That made sense for multiple reasons. You know,
they probably have time to go into that now, but of course that's, and then as I said,
so in February, there's the Bright Moments, a collection of 100 pieces on each. I've also
said on Twitter that I will be releasing, so something that is probably the most closest to
the style that I have in life in West America and the real world. So I'm certainly not
trying then to not continue in that style. So I've been working for
past how many months now? Six months on one more major collection, which will be on
it, which is a continuation of this post-photographic scene, and it will be the best time that I've
done so far, but I don't want to, that will not then happen in some months. But yeah, I mean,
that will then also happen. So even though smile and the bright moments, it's kind of a
departure in a relative sense from life in West America and then real world, I will also create
art this year that will feel more than familiar to these works.
I guess whenever I think about what we'd want to collect across AI, I mean, it's everything from
the beginnings of actually collect-able, the ability to collect in AI artwork, which
may be something like, you know, Los Robbies or super early GAN pieces, or maybe more kind of
liquid pieces that, you know, came out later, whether it's something like Deep Black. So
they're kind of different phases of do you want to collect GANs,
or do you want to, and then it kind of morphs into maybe some of these prompt based
AI art creations. And I think there's a little bit of a story to tell where you'd like to
own a little bit of something from all of these, you know, different styles of actual
AI art creation. So when it's all what we've done for the office, or what I've done personally,
it's really from the earliest to the most recent. And then the most recent, you know,
whether it's pieces that I've launched on brain drops or mirage, which was around a while ago,
has some interesting pieces on there, I think, Rupes has a collection on there as well,
it's Clear Silver. And then obviously, what Fellowship has done now, and one of the things
that's interesting with Fellowship is, you know, they're focused on, that's a dynamic
video based artwork. And again, if we're collecting digital art, it's really interesting to write,
I think it makes a lot of sense to focus on collecting digital art, that either the
blockchain, or it being online, enables something new. So whether it's dynamism, or
again, something like what Rupes would have done, where you have these constantly changing pieces
over time. I'd really like to focus on continuing to collect AI pieces where the technology of
the blockchain really unlocks something other than purely static images, even though purely
static images like something like from West America is more real or highly interesting. And,
you know, candidly, we have a bunch of them. Well, Sun, it's great to hear that this side,
and how your brain works, as you think about some of the work coming out.
It looks like we have our first guest speaker, Wayne is up here. Just a quick reminder for
anyone else that has questions or stories or comments about any of the topic or material we're
covering, please raise your hand and we'll get you up on stage. To kick things off, Wayne,
do you want to ask your question? That'd be awesome. So hey, Al, it's Wayne.
My affection for this glitch team knows no bounds. And I will be reporting on full set
analytics, the posters and generating memes until the day I die. So getting that out of the way.
Yep. I wanted to ask about the relationship between artist and platform,
and I'll set it up and then try to wrap it in something that is answerable.
So for that, in this case, it's you, Rupe, and brain drops. And to be honest,
I hadn't come across your work until Liwa started hitting the timeline.
And then on the brain drop side, I'd felt that attention and markets had aggregated
somewhat disproportionately around the initial day zero collections,
Claire Silber's Genesis, Gene Kogan's Brain Loops, and my man Pindar Van Armin's Podgens.
But then like the subsequent brain drops collections for the platform really hadn't
come close to those attention peaks. And then you, Rupe, Liwa, and brain drops came together.
And like it set off this Oppenheimer-esque chain reaction, like all this attention accrual
and market activity. So like, I'm just wondering if you could speak to how this artist-platform
relationship can result in an outcome like this.
Yeah, certainly. I mean, I owe much depth to kind of like, you know, artists that
it's always a kind of one number of steps forward. So I said the kind of the Mirage, you know, hosted
my first AI art kind of NFT collection, and I'm like hugely then grateful to them. And of course,
that's kind of always a stepping stone towards next one. So I think brain drops probably happened
through Mirage, and I then, Claire Silber had an AI art competition on her then Twitter,
and I then happened then also then to win that. And that probably led me to go into
contact then with the brain drops folks, then people like then Justin and so on. And I think
for artists, actually, my experience is that, you know, is that these platforms are hugely
then important and kind of like, then well appreciated. I think in a way, one of them,
the key problem, of course, in a way is then to discover. I mean, if you're a kind of
art art collector, you know, how do you discover new artists? And I think of those platforms that
have a proven then track record, and they have already found the kind of the community of people
they dare that, you know, want to get more art. I mean, brain drops was if I would have, you know,
launched a life in West America all by myself, I'm really not sure that the same thing would
have happened. I mean, sure, I mean, I strongly then think that there's the value in the art,
but of course, I think it does the require both sides that there's the kind of the visibility,
discoverability, a sense of kind of like, that it also might make sense as an investment, you
know, of course, art also has been that side. So I think it's a combination of all the sides.
I mean, I talked to hundreds of artists in my DMS, and of course, it's kind of like,
I highly, highly recommend them to try to engage with this, you know, platforms and try to
then to get on board there. I'm sure there's examples where you have found success even,
even without them. But I think certainly kind of like they do roles that most individual artists
are not skilled in, or they don't have the kind of the time or passion or understanding how to
perform well, I mean, nothing, anything you create, you need to tell the story to the world, or you
need to let the world know. And that's like the hyper heart. And I think, in that sense, all these
kinds of the platforms have a key role, naturally trying to be the kind of the bridge between the
artists and the end, and the person who then gets to get to enjoy the art.
Really appreciate that answer. Wow.
Thank you for the question, Wayne, and for the response, Ruppe. We have time for one more
question if anyone in the audience wants to raise their hand. We'll give it a few seconds.
Otherwise, we'll close and share final notes and final quote.
Great. Well, we'll close it here today. I just want to say on behalf of the Glitch team,
Madison, Malta, myself, we're so grateful to host this roundtable with artists, Ruppe,
Renisto, and with Collector Raiden as our every 30-day collector for our exhibition series this
month featuring Life in West America. One final note before we depart, there are a few more Life
in West America digital posters in our gift shop at GlitchMarfa.com. The remaining supply will be
burned at the end of the month when we start our new exhibition on February 1st. We always end
these spaces with a clip from our written statement. Malta put these words together to
close out that final statement, and I'll just read it off here. Ultimately, Renisto's Liva
offers a depiction of American society, not as it was, but as it chose to represent itself.
The collection is a documentary and fiction delving into the dreams,
archetypes, and fears ingrained in America's visual self-portrayals refracted through the lens
of AI. In this way, Liva serves as a broken mirror. It doesn't reflect our actual image,
but rather a prism of all the images we have consumed documenting past archetypes
and the visual language of a future that's already underway. Thank you for attending,
and thank you again, Ruppe and Raiden, for joining us today, and we appreciate all the
support from the community to join us during these sessions. Thanks, everybody.
Thank you, everybody. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.
Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Bye, all.