Hey everybody, how's it going?
Thanks for being here and thanks for bearing with us.
In the three plus years that I have been running and hosting Twitter spaces, I have
never had an error message like I got today trying to open our original link.
Something is goofy on the ex-back end, so I really appreciate everyone bearing with
us as we navigate yet another platformed reality.
Being tight folks, we're just going to get the speakers in here and we'll get started
It looks like we have a critical mass of folks from our speaker side and anybody else will
just jump in and very shortly.
My name is Wade Wallerstein and I'm the community manager here at Outland.
We're super excited to be here today with grailers doubt to talk about the incredible
writing and thinking and artworks that have come out of our conversations and the artists
that are on stage with us.
Moderating our conversation today is our deputy editor Gabrielle Schwartz who will be leading
Thanks so much for being here.
As you mentioned, this is a space to talk about the essays and artistic projects that
came out of a partnership between grailers doubt and Outland this winter, which were
about three projects that the Dow has supported, which all engage the blockchain as a medium
in different and compelling ways.
Before we get started with the talk, I'm just going to quickly mention what those essays
The first essay was by Duncan Cooper on Erik de Julie's Atlas, which is a generative NFT
collection of interactive kinetic paintings.
Next we had Kevin Beist on Alternate by Kim Asendorf, which is a collection of fully on-chain
generative NFTs made using the artist's custom pixel sorting algorithm.
And lastly, we had Melter Rauch who wrote about Zero Suite, a series of conceptual art
projects using the cryptographic technique of zero knowledge proof technology, which
is by the anonymous programming duo Math castles.
And so in this space today, we're joined by two of those writers, Melter Rauch and Kevin
Beist, as well as Erik de Julie, Kim Asendorf and 113 from the Math castles studio.
And thanks very much to everyone for showing up for that.
And also joining us is Luke Montgomery from grailers doubt, who's going to be posing some
The idea is to have something where we can kind of all talk across various different
questions that apply to all these different projects and the wider crypto space at the
So hopefully some of the properties of the individual projects will come through that
I'm just going to hand over to Luke to ask the first question.
Hi, can everyone hear me OK?
Yeah, very sorry for the delay and for the new link.
Hopefully people will catch up and join in good time.
Yeah, just from from Gretta's perspective, it's been a real honor to release works with
the artists of the caliber of Kim, Erik, and then we had the unit show which Math castles
And yeah, I guess sometimes it feels like in the space that like good, thoughtful, considered
conversation can be a little bit lacking or lost amongst all the speculation.
So it was good to talk with Brian from Outland and to get this kind of initiative going where
we could commission like artists as talented as Kevin Malter and Duncan to write more in
depth pieces on all these three artists.
And yeah, it's just great to have everyone here today.
I think everyone in the discords that I've been hanging out in is very excited by today
because you know, because of how appreciated all three artists are in the space.
So I think I'd like to take the opportunity for a bit of like cross conversation rather
than picking apart each article, which I'm sure most of you have already read.
So yeah, I'd love to ask some questions that Eric, one, one, three and Kim, you're all welcome
to answer as well as of course, Malter and Kevin.
Unfortunately, Duncan can't be here today.
Yeah, so I thought of a few topics where all everything overlaps here and I'm going to kind
of get started with something that Kevin quotes in his article about Kim at the beginning
that the code is the artwork, but the visual is more important.
And I thought that this is a very interesting starting point and I would be interested to
see the crossover or the difference of opinion between the artists in this regard.
And it reminds me of a difference between, I think I was chatting to one, one, three about this,
I'm not sure, but the difference between say Casey Reese and Zach Lieberman when they were
talking about code and Casey saying that he understood code as the art and Zach saying it
was more as a means to create outputs that the finished outputs are the art themselves.
So I just kind of, it's quite a broad question, but I was wondering where you kind of
stand on this in terms of, you know, is the code the artwork or is the visual the artwork or is
that a kind of not a useful question to ask? So I don't know who wants to start Kim, maybe
do you want to start or Eric or one, one, three, either of you can speak.
Yeah. Hi, everybody. Yeah. I mean, actually, I think it's a question that can't be really
answered and it maybe doesn't even make sense to waste time on that question. It's, yeah,
both opinions are maybe very far off, yeah, valuable, but maybe it can be even simpler.
And what a work of art does with the spectators or the people who get confronted with it,
maybe that's the most important thing. And maybe that's really the art, the intersection of people
and whatever the work is virtually or physically. Yeah.
Yeah, I'd have to largely agree with Kim that the aesthetic experience of the viewer is certainly
what is foremost in my mind. But I would say that what I always hope to accomplish is that
this aesthetic experience is like is a leading experience that leads the viewer along some train
of thought. I mean, perhaps coupled with the artist statement or specific elements in the piece to
go along for their ideas. And that can include thinking about what does it mean to have a code
that created this. And in relation to the specific debate you mentioned between Casey and Zach,
one analogy that I find useful is thinking about theater versus film, like just the ability to
put on a performance that's done in real time, say a play, compared to a film, is itself an
achievement. And that's relevant thinking about, say, real time code running in real time. Just
having something run in real time is a non-trivial constraint that is an important part of the work
in many cases. This is Kevin. If I could just add that when I included that quote about Kim saying
that the code is the work, but the visual is the most important. It's a bit of a paradox,
and I was maybe a little, I mean, I hope he didn't mind, was a little uncharitable in quoting that
because it sort of doesn't make sense. But I thought that that was what was interesting
about it. And I've had the pleasure of writing several things for Outland recently or over the
last year or so that are more or less profiles, like not just about one work or one exhibition,
but trying to dig deeper into a particular artist. And so it was really fun to write about
Kim's work, not just this most recent project, but some past ones as well. But for most of those
profiles, I don't actually talk to the artist before I write them. I kind of like to just
experience the work and read other things that they've said and then kind of go from there.
But with this one, I did talk to Kim, and I kind of needed to because I was writing about a project
that wasn't released yet. So I had no way of seeing it without him showing it to me.
And so it was very nice of him to give me that time. But I think that that sentiment of like,
what is the code, the work itself, or is it a means to an end? I think it's not that it's
not a relevant question. I think that it is, but I just think that it's an unanswerable question.
I think it presents a paradox, and it's sort of like always going to be bouncing back and forth.
And one thing I became really interested in talking to Kim and looking
closer at his work is just this sort of tension between thinking about artworks as objects
when it comes to digital art. Because I think that when you're making sculpture or something,
sculpture in particular, but even painting and other physical forms of visual art making,
the artworks are images and they're obviously objects as well. You can do interesting things
with that idea, but it's sort of a settled matter. Whereas with artists working with code,
there's kind of this sort of tension between to what extent do you want to focus on the
objecthood, quote unquote, of a digital thing. And I think Kim is doing that in really interesting
ways. And so I was interested in the question more than the answer, just in that it's kind of like a
Okay, I'll bite. So it's obviously all these things. It's none of these things. It's whatever
given person, piece, or audience tells you in a given moment. The one that I least relate to is
this idea that it would be the visuals. Code, I also typically don't think of what I'm doing
as code or code art, especially in the context of something like Ethereum. The provocation that
I'm still fascinated with, although there's a different one too now, but it's that if you take
very seriously this idea that there's a computer that's a new kind of computer that likely and I
believe will outlive me and that you can deploy a program onto it and it'll presumably run in a way
that will also outlive me, that's a new kind of opportunity that answers a lot of questions I had
for the last 10 years. And so I think about this kind of idea of a runtime object as an artwork,
or I guess I could call it a system, but I'm kind of worried about using any of these same words
that just kind of bring to mind all these things. Like simulation would be also a fine word if it
didn't already mean all the connotations of simulation. But you know, code, I have an aversion
to for a couple reasons, although of course code is a part of, it's the notation most adapted
expressing things like this at this point in human history. But for example, I'll just say,
you know, I think people who say it's the code often would put themselves maybe even more
immediately in this lineage of like a soluit, which I personally don't see myself in directly,
like obviously soluit happened, the 20th century happened, so it's post soluit everything, but
at the same time, yeah, I think more about this idea of sort of like a runtime object or a system,
and then with some kind of awareness about the temporality of the transistor. So this idea that
it's just a set of instructions, that's like, to me, it's the difference between photography and
cinema. So typically, cinema, you can talk about cinematography, you can talk about things that
like involve the camera and the lineage of photography, but typically it's got its own
kind of discursive space apart from photography. And to me, the temporal and kind of almost spatial
order of magnitude of the transistor, like billions and billions of transistors at a temporal rate
that humans can't comprehend, it's just so different than something like a relatable series
of instructions. And also just I have this aversion to code presented as code as an aesthetic,
because that that's been done so much that one has to really work very hard to do something
apart from it. And so anyway, when people say, oh, it's about code, it also is this this pop
culture ready at hand kind of like, oh, like your creative coder, right? And your creative coder,
I also have an aversion to I like how egalitarian isn't how open it is. But it also is kind of,
it's like the time when I was doing embroidery with my entire life for six months, and somebody
told me it was a nice hobby. And there's something about creative coding that feels like it in its
dignified quite good aspiration to be sort of egalitarian and open to everyone. It also
feels like it could capsize a serious artist or make them unseen. So anyway, that's the closest
I could answer. Well, I think that actually leads me on really nicely to talk about the importance
of distributed computation, which Malter mentions in his article on zero and, and also like the
importance of permanence to all of you that Kevin talks about in relation to Kim's work being on
being so on chain and or, yeah, or, you know, just on chain. And yeah, I would be interested in terms
of, you know, I assume that if blockchain didn't exist, that you all three of you would still be
making art. But I'm interested in how the the the element of blockchain how that has informed
your work and, you know, inspired direction. I mean, I know, math classes are
very much directly like working with with the EVM of it and having artworks to communicate
with each other. And I would be interested in hearing about that, but also from Kim and Eric,
about reflecting on how this technology has changed the way you think about making art.
Okay, yeah, let me go first. I think the blockchain in retrospect, I mean, it's
only something I can say now, maybe it's it was maybe the missing link for me personally to
to make a bit sense even of of the work that I've been doing for years, since I've very
much been focused on the internet as an outlet and digital, yeah, whatever you want to call it,
digital works. It felt like the internet was so wide and they had so many possibilities to play
with that. Yeah, that there wasn't really the things that tied everything together in a not
even meaningful sense, maybe even in a commercial sense as an artist. So yeah, the blockchain
worked a bit like that, like giving a bit of a framing to something that has been done
on many levels by many artists for many years before. But now it feels, okay, there's a way
or a media that ties everything together and makes it even collectible and
ownable. And yeah, I think that that's something nice since I've always been interested in
collecting things that I love and owning stupid things that doesn't really have a function
besides being nice or being or getting obsessed about. And yeah, so for for my
how to say for my emotional state or for for my romantic
worldview, it's a nice, yeah, a nice building block that was missing somehow. And now it's there.
Yeah, I think I'd agree that that for me, the biggest difference has been that now the
the collector can understand a little bit better what is the relationship between the creation of
the artist and the output itself. So I was doing generative stuff like 20 years ago. And then I
would create a piece like a kind of world, I could upload it on the internet, other people could
explore it. But there was no ownership involved at all. And things would kind of get lost in this
like infinite sea of the internet as Kim was looking to. Whereas with ownership, people then
they create their own meaning by by choosing what they have in their collection. And I think that
is important. Like I have, I guess like Kim was saying, I have all kinds of stuff in my house that
is of sentimental value to me, but no monetary value. And that's important as part of my identity.
So it is nice that the blockchain facilitates this for digital objects. And for my practice,
that's been the most important aspect of it so far. I mean, besides being able to actually
sell work, of course. Though I think that of course, 113 is taking this to another level,
using the blockchain as a computer itself and not using the computer, the blockchain as the
computer more than the person's home computer to compute the actual result of the code,
which for me is an exciting new direction, but I haven't really
engaged with that very deeply yet.
Yeah, I like this turn. Kim, Kim talks about with the kind of almost commercial
aspect. Yeah, it's kind of a one, two, three punch or something for me. One is
it's that there's finally a market for computer program artwork intersections. And they're really
and there wasn't in a meaningful sense for me, in my mind, personally, for traditional fine art,
or a person who's trained in that, in that history and things in that way. And yeah, you could kind
of like go try and have gallery representation at the handful of galleries that were savvy to this,
or you could just kind of wait the 20 years until the 20th century institutions got around to
recognizing or somebody would become a superstar, there'd be a kind of probably smaller than crypto
I don't know, there'd be some boom, whatever. But anyway, there was just no career in my mind,
like, oh, then you have to play art world games, art world politics. And I had very little
interest in that. So suddenly, there's a kind of market. And that market to me is underpinned by
technically, culturally credible, durable, credible, durable things. So Ethereum itself
represents one of these, it's like, basically, in my mind, it's like, you know, Bitcoin,
Ethereum. And the thing I like to say is, I think, I think autoglyphs basically turned
Ethereum into Bitcoin, which is to say that if I ever had a doubt that Bitcoin would persist,
autoglyphs kills it. Because autoglyphs is this kind of, I regard it as a kind of bedrock object
that you can take seriously. And, and so and I see all this as a a swampland where there's like one
or two small booths that eventually becomes like the eats the pie chart of the art world. I think
we're basically in the swampland of like a superior art world. And I do mean like a traditional
fine art art world. And so in a lot of ways, it's just, it's that but, but then there's,
you could talk about what's the materiality of all this? Well, first of all, computer programs,
which is what my medium computers, competing more broadly, this word blockchain kind of gets in my
way or on chain, right? Because my, my predominant interest is closer to something like world
computer. So world computer doesn't have to be Ethereum, people say, Oh, are you an EDM artist?
Well, you know, technically in a way, yes, but at the moment, but not not by only because the
current world computer is Ethereum. But if it were something else, and I do like Ethereum, but if
something replaces it, and it's a superior, let's call it technically, culturally, and thus even
financially durable multiplayer computer of some kind, either the one of Ethereum or the paradigm
that comes after. Yeah, and so then then we could get into like, why that why that why those
compositions, this like illusion of longevity, all this kind of stuff. But anyway, that's the start
of the response. I don't know if that response. So, so can I can I chime in here? I love this
idea of the global computer. And Ethereum is maybe like the best case right now. But I do wonder,
and this is like the thing I mentioned in the piece that I wrote about Kim, and his work is,
is, you know, making work on chain is kind of placing a bet on the longevity of Ethereum itself,
which, you know, is probably safer than some hosting service or something. And you don't know
if they're going to go under or sell out or whatever, like Ethereum definitely seems more
durable than, you know, my Geocities webpage from 1998 or whatever. But, but it's still a young
thing. And if you know, and if people keep kind of upgrading or replacing in sort of a non compatible
iterative fashion, the promise of Ethereum, I don't know, what does that do to all of this
rhetoric around permanence? And I'm kind of interested to the artists, like, how much do
you care about it? I mean, I think there's a spectrum, even with artists working with physical
materials. You know, there's some artists are totally obsessed with archival, you know,
materials, and they're, this thing is going to be around for centuries or millennia, and other
artists are kind of like, yeah, this thing will last about 100 years before it disintegrates in
oxygen. So I'm just wondering, like, how, you know, how are you guys thinking about that? And
how does it affect, like, how does it might, you know, undermine or strengthen the rhetoric
around the permanence of the blockchain? Because there's a lot of talk about that. But I kind of
feel like it's a bit of an article of faith. It could, it could last, you know, decades or
centuries. But I, we don't have any way of knowing that, at least I feel like I don't know that.
But would you have to benchmark it against sort of like the current state of order, if you look
at digital art for like the last like, 20 or so years, and like, what has been the fate of like,
most works, I mean, most most survived in the form of like, product, product prints or so.
I think so. So like, measure it against that it's, it's to date, probably the best format you have
for, for storing this, this kind of art. Plus, you know, I think it has built in the,
at least potential that an EVM system could become like a meaningful context for
appreciating and conserving art, like on on par with with the art world. I think that's,
that's, of course, much, much further out. But I think many of the artists who we're
building for this now, and are really optimistic, that's, that's something to have in mind, right?
Yeah, the way I think about it is that, that we have the potential for something to be stored
long term, which means in particular, that the code is kind of self contained, that it's there
on the blockchain. And okay, my stuff generally doesn't use library. So that's all for the moment.
But one can imagine a future where you need an emulator to run it. But still, the emulator just
takes as input this one file, which is, which is there in the blockchain. And if the whole
blockchain degrades, then as long as people care about the work, it will be preserved. Like people,
you can download any NES game from the 90s running on emulator in your browser now, because people
care about it. I mean, there was some work creating the emulator, but as long as the code itself was
self contained, and well defined, then that's, that's possible. So for me, the main task is like
keeping people interested in the work. And then if that happens, then the preservation will follow.
I mean, maybe it's naive, of course, but that's kind of the way that I think about it.
Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's maybe naive to think that there could be a system
like Ethereum that would just preserve in perpetuity, everything created on it. But I do
think it's, you can be reasonably confident that things that gain a certain amount of cultural and
earned, you know, sort of market based prominence, somebody will care enough, you know, museums or
somebody else, collectors or something will care enough to, to figure out a way to preserve it,
you know, because there's, yeah, you're right. There's emulators that run old,
old computer games, but, you know, probably not, you know, every single thing that was created
back then. Kim, I was just thinking, sabotage in a way, right? It's a work about how, how works
that exist on chain can be altered after the fact, if you have access to the edits. I guess
it's the work that plays a little bit with this question. Yeah, I mean, I think the blockchain
feels at least more durable as every other thing that was there before, before that you need to
pay web space or keep your domain alive or need to hope that Tumblr or whatever social media doesn't
go down. And now the blockchain or at least Ethereum blockchain feels quite safe. And I see
it maybe like Eric is that eventually the browser itself will be the bottleneck of everything at
some point. I mean, at least that is what we've experienced in the last 20 years. Technologies
came and grow or went away again, like flash or whatever. So probably this, this current state of
the art of, of code, JavaScript, WebGL, and yeah, that is mostly it. What we have online
will be, yeah, over, yeah, overtaken or exchanged or replaced by something better, something
more contemporary. And I don't know when that will happen. And
but maybe, yeah, like Eric said, it could probably be just a browser extension,
emulator extension that keeps these older works alive. And because of the underpinning of value
to it, it could even make sense. The motivation to keep something outdated, still available,
because it has an attached value to it. Yeah, could maybe guarantee that that will happen even
with higher probabilities and older works that has no value and it's just
yeah, gone, gone away, like all these flash works that are just sitting on
all the artists hard drives, but they don't take the time to bring them back because they are
outdated on many levels anyway. If that makes sense.
So yeah, that was like, I might talking over anyone just making sure something was
odd with my internet. So, okay, great. I'll assume that I'm not just somebody talk over me if I am.
So, you know, another, this is kind of thematically or compositionally an ongoing
question. And, you know, talking about things like, oh, well, JavaScript itself become, you know,
the current paradigm of, you know, let's say the WebGL API right now, will it become unusable?
My thoughts here are sort of like, so I think what's going to wind up happening,
one of the things that will wind up happening is there will eventually be a prong of crypto
economically credible hard drives. Right. And this has kind of been in the air for a long time.
Bitcoin is trying to do something like this sort of in this weird way. But and, and why I think
that's true is just, again, it's when I say autoglyphs is it turns Ethereum into Bitcoin,
I kind of mean the same is going to go the same is going to be true for IPFS hash culture. That
culture is just not gonna like I've been I've been kind of wondering why people would hash offchain
files for 10 years. And, and I'm wrong. And, and you have a very real credible patronage culture
that's important and has created a kind of number of almost art movements or art scenes.
And that eventually, my guess is a, let's call it Ethereum or Bitcoin grade,
credibly durable hard drive appears for that sort of thing. And then one of the first things you get
on that, and I'm surprised no one's tried it on Bitcoin now, for example, because people are just
writing all kinds of files there, you obviously will then want some kind of, let's call it Artbox 2021
container environment, right, like just something that's a kind of archival, like the digital
archivists in the major institutions, you know, would probably already be thinking about how do
we make sure that these pieces, you know, can somebody kind of incorporate, you know, or just
even bootload a node of a blockchain that itself contains, you know, a Linux and Chrome OS, you
know, a Linux OS and a Chrome runtime from 2021 or something. But then there's this kind of other
question for me, which is more about like, contextual obsolescence. So, you know, terraforms
compositionally, it's really responding to a lot of the person who's wanting to make 3D forms and
thought of myself as a kind of computing sculptor. There was just no place for me to do work like
that, that felt like I couldn't go to Unity, I couldn't go to Unreal, I couldn't go to the
App Store, you know, they all have these kinds of brittle aspects, both in terms of the, again,
it all echoes flashes, as people are saying here. So, you know, this this turn to like obsessively,
myopically focus on the EVM itself, you know, there's a person who is saying eventually EVM is,
it almost gets depreciated, you just become a roll up, like settlement layer, like, and almost like a
domain specific language for roll ups. And my two responses are one, okay, cool, I'll just make
eternal artworks in the gears of container roll up gadgetry. And two, just the same way a Nintendo
emulator is like the first thing everybody does when you get Wasm, or it's like, what do you think
of the first thing people are going to emulate? It's like, what is the first thing people have
emulated in roll ups and L2s? Oh, Ethereum, the EVM. So I kind of think that, you know, I, and then
I agree, ultimately, Kevin, which is I always I try to remember to put an asterisk, because eternal
is just, it's a belief, but I do have that belief now, that it outlives me. And, and that is a leap
I think that's great. I think that artists, artists should be taking leaps of faith, right,
and committing to moving shots, however, even if they're impractical, or maybe they are practical,
you know, but, you know, if artists are staying like only in the domain of the known,
that's gets boring pretty fast.
I have a quick question, if you don't mind me chiming in. I was talking to an artist the other
day, I think it was Travis Smalley, who was saying that, you know, there are that, you know,
we're talking about permanence, and we're talking about preserving things for eternity, and these,
you know, seemingly, these, like, legible or ineligible code based artworks. But what role
does loss play for each of you, you know, within this domain? You know, Travis was saying this
thing to me about, you know, half of my projects, I actually don't care if they live for 10 more
years. And, you know, all of these different software experiments that I've created, you know,
have lived and they've died. And I'm wondering, like, what role does, like, a finite temporality
play in with your artworks? Is there is, is losing work, okay?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've lost a lot of works because they lived on social medias or depended on
APIs. And we're tied to domain names, I at some point didn't want it longer to fund or taken care
of. So, but yeah, some works just have a meaning at a certain time in our history. And 10 years
later, they are just not interesting enough, but more like a retrospect view. And I personally
couldn't identify enough with some works that I wanted to still invest in in them. And maybe
that's the difference. If I just create a painting, I don't really need to really invest more energy
into it after it's done. But an online piece of art can demand a lot of attention or time
to keep alive. I mean, so it's totally okay to for work to get lost. But I think the other point
of view is since there are collectors who paid money for it and really see a value in it,
I think it's at least desirable to have this work. We are working as long as possible and
keep this value, this initial value alive. And yeah, somehow that even keeps the work alive. And
that's also a romantic, of course, view that you think, okay, maybe there is something I created
that can survive my own lifespan. And yeah, I mean, that's somehow a beautiful fantasy.
Okay, I wanted to, can everyone hear me okay?
Okay, good. Good. Good emojis. Yeah, I just wanted to talk a bit about abstraction. It'd
be nice to kind of like, focus on the more formal things that you're all three of you're working
with. And, you know, Kim and Eric, you both seem to play with form in order to experiment with
extraction, like an Atlas, you know, you can zoom all the way in on one square and see a kind of
whole world and then zoom out and see a different type of world. And alternate takes a certain set
of parameters, color, shape, etc, and abstracts them through a series of instructed motion.
And many of the shapes and forms are visible and alternate, like pull forth a history of,
you know, abstract painting like Clifford Still and some other examples. And then I think, you
know, the zero is the, you know, Math Castles piece that Malta does very well to, you know,
put in context of how it's made or what it's relating to. It goes even further to make a
drawing that cannot be seen, but whose existence can be proven through cryptography.
So yeah, I would just I'd like to open up the floor to all of you, including the writers
about a discussion about abstraction in digital art and why that seems important.
And I'm wondering as well, like whether the fact that it's code based art, like it kind of like
extra invites abstraction, that kind of relationship between writing code and the space between that
and the final output, like whether that maybe as a medium, like invites experimentation and
dialogue with abstraction more than others.
Yeah, that's that's super interesting. For me, I think there's two
two kind of lines of thought that are that I play off each other. So one is that often what I'm
trying to build some intuition for is some concept or idea from from physics. And then, okay,
that's naturally something that is it is native form, very abstract, very mathematical. And
so then it has to be like pushed through this
pasta former of code to build something that is experienced that can be experienced by the
by the viewer. So I think about abstraction in that sense. But then also in the purely aesthetic
sense, I like to think about which ways we can build new aesthetic experiences for the viewer
that are not were not possible in other media. So like, in particular, if we have things running
in real time, we can have colors involving in real time in ways that would never be possible
in any kind of physical medium, and that invites new possibilities. And then adding interaction
on top of that, again, invites new possibilities. So for me, like, it's about seeing which new ways
of abstraction can be we can leverage with this with this medium to to build new aesthetic
experiences. And then like, I always try to tie that back to whatever particular concept I have in
mind for a particular piece. And see at what at some point, hopefully they come together so that
I'm actually expressing the thing that I want and building something that I hope is is legible to
abstraction is a big umbrella of a lot of different, you know, I mean, it is sort of one approach,
but it's there's lots of ways to pursue that. And you know, one, one thing, especially in the
20th century, that a lot of artists were thinking about with abstraction was how, you know,
creating an artwork or, you know, the kind of mark making that's needed to construct an artwork,
how that could interact with the nature of the material itself. And this is, you know,
where you get a lot of abstract abstract expression is painting, and then sort of
minimalism and post minimalism thinking about the qualities inherent to the material and rather
just using those qualities to deliver some image or deliver some narrative, you know,
using those qualities to talk about the thing itself. And yeah, I like that stuff. I like
that art. Still, I mean, maybe it's, you know, I don't know, you could argue that its time has
passed, but I think there's still interesting explorations to be had, you know, in that
direction. And that's one thing I really appreciated about Kim's work is that I think
he manages to think about the material quality of making work with code, which, of course, is
essentially immaterial, but it still has sort of, it has its own constraints. And so you could call
that material reality. And of course, it is, you know, I don't know, electrons, you know,
running around circuits or something, there is a material, something there. But then he's also
thinking about the materiality of the screen itself, you know, particularly in in that piece
that I wrote about, it's the the pieces animate differently depending on the size of the screen
that they are displayed on, and not just sort of enlarging and getting smaller, but actually,
like, you know, they will they will do different things depending on the aspect ratio of the window.
So you can just drag, you know, drag your browser window corner around and see it affect the
composition, which is interesting. And then it actually reminded me of people like, like Frank
Stella, right, like early Frank Stella, where he's, you know, taking like this two inch brush and,
you know, making these paintings with these tight stripes that just sort of
echo in the boundaries of the canvas itself. And, you know, so it's it's and Kim is not the first
one to do that, obviously, to make, you know, artworks that are responsive to their screens.
But I thought that that was a nice balance of thinking both about the materiality of code,
as well as the materiality of the screens on which these things are displayed, because a lot
of digital artwork, obviously, it's 100% reliant on screens to be seen. But a lot of digital artwork,
I think, is not particularly conscious of the kind of, I don't know, material or sensorial nature of
those screens, right, like it's just sort of banking on the fact that, like, you know, people
have screens and they'll be able to see it and just sort of throwing it out into the world. But I
think, you know, for artists to kind of like make work that considers the unknown quantity of the
screens in which it will eventually be displayed is a worthwhile and interesting approach. It's of
course, you can't you can't know, you know, and then you could also talk about the future there
as well. It's like, you know, what is if you're programming things that on a pixel level, you know,
like what happens if pixels get even smaller by orders of magnitude in the future, you know,
like what happens then to the work, it becomes an interesting question as well.
I think for me, one one interesting question that is that is brought up by abstraction is sort of
like meaning. So if you look at creative century art, I think the core question that arouse with
like this first wave of abstraction and painting is how can a painting like signify mean anything
if it abandons sort of this relationship to the world and the regime of representation,
which basically organized meanings in the couple of centuries prior prior to that. And what Kevin
alluded to was, I think, like the dominant answer, right, this sort of like formalist narrative that
you no longer reference the outside world, you reference yourself, you find meaning in like
what a painting is made of the material constraints. I think in like what is now
referred to as digital art, that question returns in an interesting way, because that art is of
course, by its nature, sort of like grid based most of the time, and it is inherently abstract
in that sense, but it sort of brings back this question of meaning, which I think you can now see
play out that like some of the art that is not as sophisticated, I would say, just begins to feel
like very ornamental, and I think loses this ability to signify once you've seen a lot of it.
And I think that's that's part of the struggle. And it's like mainstream, like generative art
category. And I think sort of like what Kim is doing with with with composition and like finding
like a very systematic approach with that is like one way of like, providing an answer to that.
How you achieve meaning. And we forgot that to the piece I wrote, and what like one one three and
salt as we're doing, I was actually first surprised that they referenced like abstraction
in relation to that. And I think it's a very like ambitious and difficult claim in that work.
And what I tried to develop in the piece basically is that it brings us to think about
like abstraction and painting, which is this process of reduction, which always has to do
with meaning, together with like mathematical abstraction, which, you know, starting with
with the Turing machine really underpins every everything that computation is about.
And the piece kind of tries to understand how that plays out in this piece and what reference
there is that it's not a not a break with representation or anything of that sort,
but that it that it is trying to abstract this concept of reference itself through zero
knowledge proof. That's at least how I see it. One on three can can say if I get it wrong.
Yeah, you lead to the kind of, let's say difficulty or ambitiousness of making the
claim. And I agree. Yeah, the claim. The claim also has this other kind of like intended role
in a way or part of the statement is that it relates, you know, it's basically saying the
feeling in the air from from me and friends of mine is almost like art history is sort of over
or things like painting or closed down or, you know, even this talk about like kind of
formalist ideals from the mid 20th century, this kind of thing. But, you know, the medium of
computing wasn't really active in the, let's say, it's not not active with cheese. It's just a still
very early medium. And so, yes, it has many histories and depths, but maybe it's possible
that art history could be open again, in a way, or that the like things like the 20th century and
the waves of ways of seeing that came from traditions like painting, that maybe computing
itself might be a site for rejuvenating that and that the this role of artists could be,
like more directly implicated in participating in, let's call it like the sci fi images of
possibility that structure how people relate to this series of events, like computing in the
internet that just can, I think of them as like bombs that just don't stop going off,
and we'll just continue to sort of dissolve the society that they were opened in. And,
and that artists like it, that the role of capital A artist could be like a
could could have an address of this. And that definitely relates to abstraction too,
not just in this kind of artistic abstraction, but but even in the work, like abstraction,
you know, I'm always talking about like inventing the multiplication sign or something, right?
So, which, you know, you get into kind of just when you're a programmer, you come to understand
abstraction from a slightly different angle, and that maybe that's part of this, this whole
conversation. But yeah, I could just go on. I don't know if that responds.
How do you all feel, Kim and Eric, I'm curious, this feeling, do you think that I,
you know, I licked my finger and I put it to the wind of the air, and the feeling for me is that,
you know, oh, like art history feels sort of almost passé as an idea or something, or like,
oh, postmodernism in the 20th century happened, and what's really left to do there, you know,
maybe we just crossed our fingers and something like big and new opens, but how do you each relate
to this? Is this the kind of, you know, thing that in your lives or practice you think about, relate
to, you know, don't care about, how do you relate to this? Yeah, absolutely. I can agree on that. It's
ultra-contemporary, can only be digital art at the moment. Other more traditional art is really
repeating itself for many, many years and over and over again. And even in any of these,
this genre is there, even photography, the most advanced and interesting works that came up in
the last 20 years are those that have been edited heavily with the computer. So, yeah, I think,
or even in the sculpture or installation scene, there is a lot of digital things happening,
there is a lot of industrial things, of course, still happening and bringing new material to work
with, but, yeah, that's more or less it. So, I would agree, yeah, the current stream of works
that is going online and out feels very contemporary compared to the other art, the traditional art.
For me, it's a bit tricky to answer because I'm coming from a lineage where my training was in
mathematics and physics. I was always somewhat knowledgeable about art, but my grounding is
really in those disciplines. So, for me, the computer is a natural medium in which to express
ideas coming from physics, say. Although it could also be expressing abstract ideas coming from
computer science as your work is engaging with. So, for me, that lineage is the one that I connect
to and reference. And what I have noticed is that there are other artists who, of course, are also
taking inspiration, say, from nature or whatever. And I can find that in the end we have some kind
of common commonality in our approach, but for me, those are like specs here and there in the art
landscape and they don't connect in the way that things naturally connect for me with my background.
So, I know that that's totally colored, but my background is not maybe not legible to others.
But I try to bring those connections out when I can in the work itself and in dialogues coming up for me.
I think all of you are working in a similar medium, in the sense like,
well, you could call it this dynamic medium. But if we're one-on-three saying that we are
potentially ushering in a new art world, which I also agree with, I think it's a very exciting
moment. What has kind of been placed before us now, and it's obviously been accelerated and made
possible by the ability to have a distributed network. And the way that the traditional art
world functions is quite a kind of a played system. It has its ways of being. And I'm just
wondering, you know, on your thoughts, artists, this type of art, how can it potentially be
consumed in progressive ways as we go forward? And is that also a concern of yours?
Alternate, atlas, terraforms, you know, like, they kind of tend to go against the
probably more on-vogue, generative art projects that can be translated to the sort of gallery
model much easier. And yeah, I'm just wondering, are we going to just let Apple Vision Pro and
Samsung screens do their thing and develop? Or are you thinking about, you know, how your art can
be consumed? And also, I think the question, the answer will be very different, you know,
for all of you. I know for Kim, it was actually something that we directly tried to address. And
it was like Kim was quite clear. He was like, I would like my art to be seen on a fucking massive
screen, 10 meters in a, you know, in a beautiful space. And I think it was, you know, quite an
emotional experience then to experience that. And I'm just wondering between all of you, like, what
you think about that and how this might evolve going forward. Because, you know, we're moving
so fast. And yeah, maybe with that side of things hasn't quite caught up yet.
I really enjoy the intimacy of having art at home on my computer. So I'm able to
interact or experience art in my own environment on a very personal level. And that's what I like
a lot. And in terms of doing exhibitions, the setting itself should add a lot of
possibilities in terms of what let the work really out of this little box.
So that's something I cannot really describe. I mean, it's like every other experience you
have, you're just going out into the nature can be really intense, because you are just
more free, your mind is more free in a bigger facility or in a bigger space than at home on
your laptop or your phone. But still, I think that's very interesting when you just roll some
numbers probably, like a normal museum. I mean, not the very top museums, but a normal museum has
whatever thousand visitors a day and high class art in there, maybe something like this. And
when you post something to Twitter, there may be even more people seeing the work than the
traditional art that is around in museums. So that's just interesting to see it like that.
So yeah, I don't know how to explain it. I mean, that's also not something that I'm interested in
explaining something. I just find something that is interesting to me and then I want to play with it.
And when I figure out that it does something to me on an intense level
at home or in a space, then I want to proceed with it and want to share these emotions that I have
with other people. And yeah, I think that's my language and the rest is up to specialists like
Kevin and Wade to put that into good words.
Yeah, so I just have had this kind of impulse or in many forms, basically going back to the 90s.
And I think Kim is kind of talking about these two different or maybe kind of too
too fused, but I still think of them as sort of separate in a way, like in this idea that
the tweet might get more encounters. And of course, in what context with what
duration, with what intensity or relationship to, they can be very ephemeral. But
I guess I got digested by the post-internet insight, which was I was spending a lot of
time making physical objects. And there was a reason I was making these physical objects.
Their physicality was substantial, important, but it took me so much time and energy and money.
And I didn't really have any of those. And then most people who encountered the work,
as in thought about the work, reflected on it. They did so through pictures on the internet.
And then it occurred to me, I very well may have never even made the physical object and that the
like, you know, vast. And this object I would even kind of show to people in public. And the
encounters that people would have in public were substantial and different. But again, it was kind
of like, I don't know, it makes me think about academic paper publishing and sort of when that
makes sense and when it's itself a kind of zombie formalism or undead thing. And so for me,
you know, I think I'm just intensifying into this into this set of beliefs. It's not that I don't
love physical objects or going outside or this kind of thing. It's just I don't know where I've
accidentally gotten backed into the corner of it a bit when people ask me to install terraforms.
I'm like, but the point is that terraforms is installed. It's that this this computer that
the terraforms is a running program is one way to think of it. And it's it's permanently installed.
And anyone can encounter it in its habitat. You know, now there's technical barriers,
just like, but there's barriers to getting to a physical place, all these kinds of things. So
but gosh, there's something else can say I forget. Oh, the last thing is, I kind of wonder if
Ethereum itself represents the like brush fire that turns the art world into newspapers and
blockbuster video, which is not to say kills them, you know, the art world, there will be
practitioners just or think about books, right? Books is a medium. There's a lot of books that
didn't need to be books. There were 500 page books to be kind of like resume staff. Like how many
artists wound up doing some physical thing with a piece not based on the kind of emotion or just
specific desire to see it physicalized, but almost as a kind of like, you know, oh, that's what's
legible to the gallery regime. And, and I think artists who have the kind of spark of let's call
it almost like a virtualism that that it's worth entertaining that I think one can kind of swing
around on it in their life, but but that I think that the virtualism that something like Ethereum
makes possible for a work that could be of a kind of durable, a durable cultural value or
there's something about that to me that's, you know, before the work that was doing that,
it felt kind of infinite. And it was, you know, athletic aesthetics or just, you know, timeline
work where there's lots of great artists, but how do they get paid or make a living? And so so now
I think there's a kind of market for like more strongly virtualist art. And that's a kind of
mode that might might not not dissolve the traditional art world, but kind of like,
demonopolize its relationship to or give artists who who do have that kind of virtualist
inclination, the ability to take that very seriously. And I think it's almost right now
a little bit like risky to say that out loud, that you that actually you the purely virtual
object is worth taking very seriously, or can be for a person who relates to it in that way.
Yeah, super interesting points. I forget even what was the original question. But
I do always think a lot about the the specific experience about how collectors
will experience a work, I mean, realistically, and I'm always torn because I my aesthetic,
I like to have things that are visually complex. And then it is just hard to appreciate that on
a small screen. But realizing that the fact that people will be using their phones to consume a
lot of stuff, it's worth investing time to think about that experience. And so for example, my one
of my projects last year, Cali and I put a lot of effort to making it work well on a phone. And I
think it actually does bring something new to the experience to have in front of you this thing in
your hand that is showing some kind of life like behavior, the fact that it is occurring on this
small handheld object, technological object can like, be part of the piece itself to asking to
in sense of getting you to ask yourself the questions that the piece demands that could be
more further away if it's if you're experiencing the piece on the on the computer. So it's a
struggle because one doesn't know how the piece will be experienced. And even if you put instructions
about how it should be experienced, ideally, those may not be followed. But there are some
things like as Kevin was saying, like making work adapt to natural to arbitrary aspect ratios, like
most of the time with abstraction, like that should be done. And it's annoying to see pieces that don't
do that. So so I tend to think a lot about the collector experience, I don't think at all about
galleries or trends or anything like that.
One on three, you kind of mentioned about the, you know, the virtual experience. Do you have
anything specifically in mind about, you know, like how fast all this stuff is progressing,
like how stuff may be consumed, even if it just kind of existing already in the in the virtual
sense is is its kind of exhibition, so to speak? The question is sort of with regard to like the
pace of like, say either adoption of such a mentality or? Yeah, I guess so. But also just
kind of like practically like, do you do you have a kind of a vision of like, how people might be,
if this is a kind of a new art movement in a sense that a new way that we consume and experience art,
do you have a sense of like, how that may manifest in like 10, 10 years, 20 years?
I just yeah, there's no stable answer to these questions. And I'm not and I'm not suggesting.
I think, I think even if I were like, just a lifelong pure virtualist, I think, and that I
believed much of the rest of the world would sort of arrive there for as it relates to these
tradable artwork objects anyway, because the world already has arrived there. That's the point.
But, you know, I think just the, how do I say it? Like, you could have done impressionism for,
you know, thousands of years, basically, prior to impressionism. But like, there was no, there was
nothing technological stopping someone. It's a kind of socio cultural way of seeing it's a social
technology. And that, and that, you know, the computer already is a bomb that hit humankind.
And humankind is just this like, dizzy, it's somewhere. But it's like, again, I'm always
saying it's a wily coyote off the cliff, who just can't look down, because the fall is,
like recursive and ongoing or something. And so it's kind of more like, you know, how will the
social how will social realities, not just like adapt and then be totalized by this line of
thinking, but what are the kind of crests of waves of different, you know, kind of reactions
and counter reactions? And how can one position oneself in relation to a possible foresight of
these things? And then, and then virtualism. There's a question about, there's some other
answer I had, but I don't I don't really remember now. Gosh, maybe it'll come back to me. I'm curious
how the other folks. Well, so I don't know. Like, yeah, I mean, like him, for example, it sounds like
you kind of you have you have a relationship to both you see the kind of way that people might
just and you personally relate to art, like, say, quote unquote on your phone or in your personal
environment, like, you know, but like, do you have a sort of do you for you, or also do either of you
have these kinds of like, ongoing relationships to the to one faction or the other is or is it kind
of like the because I'll wind up changing my tune. The second I have an object that desires to be
physicalized, or where the specific piece is kind of calls that for a reason, is it that you kind of
have ever present relationships to both this kind of, let's call it like virtual or then physicalized
traditional encounters, galleries, or is it that maybe the works themselves tend to bring it out
of you? Or how do you all relate to this? I'm curious. Yeah, I would say that I'm more like a
letter that just depends on the work itself. But one thing I will say is that there's this browser
extension art tab that made by this guy quantized and I really love that as a way to experience art
in a kind of ambient form as we normally experience art, like physical art. And I find that to be quite
natural and in the way of experiencing digital art means not going to work for everything. But
now like I often have that in mind as an ideal viewing experience. It won't work for every piece,
but it seems quite adaptable to a lot of digital art. But at the same time, I have shown pieces
on projectors like 20 feet tall. And it's, of course, a whole new dimension that's there. And
I suppose if I had access to that kind of exhibition opportunity, then I on a regular basis
then maybe I would think more actively about that. But since I don't, then it's if it happens
for me, it's just like an incidental bonus that I don't I don't plan for at least at the moment.
I love our tab XYZ. I'm really glad that you brought that up. I love getting all three of
your work delivered to my desktop all the time. And folks, you should definitely check it out.
Yeah, I agree. It's kind of transformed the way we can kind of experience
dynamic work. Quantumize did a really good job there. I'm also going to open up the floor to
anyone who has a question they'd like to ask. So maybe, you know, there's a lot of big brains
here. I don't know if anyone wants to pick them. So request to speak in a way that Outland can
make you a speaker. And Kim, let me know if you wanted to add on that. Otherwise,
I've got another question. I would like to just pick up the last topic that 113 started with.
And it's for me a bit just some final words on why, why art? Yeah, so why aren't it? I mean,
somehow, for me personally, it's that I've always been looking for oddities and weird things that
happen somewhere or people who are different than all others and finding something interesting and
eventually the art world, whatever you see as the art world, for me, it's certainly not
the classical definition, but people who create artworks, they deliver something that can feed
my interest. And that's what I'm looking for in digital or non-digital or whatever you want to call
it doesn't matter so much. But for me, I'm always looking for the newest, weirdest thing.
I have to go the digital route at the moment because that's where these things happen and
where the avant-garde scene is and where the most interesting artist is happening.
But that doesn't mean it has to be digital. It can come from anywhere. It's just a personal
preference after many years, being active as a creator in this field that you have your tool set
that you, I personally rely a lot on automation. That's why I code. It's not not an ethos or
something I really believe in. It's just a tool I need to express and to realize what I want. And
yeah, that's just a little end of it.
Nice, thanks so much. Yeah, I got asked a question by someone. Actually, I think it was from Duncan
who wrote the piece on Eric. He was very interested in all of your kind of early
but I guess modern influences from the 2000s. I think probably for all three of you,
the 2000s, the early internet was a kind of formative time for you as creatives.
So I'd be interested in hearing about your influences. I know, Kim, you're very influenced
by early internet aesthetic. And if I look at the influences behind quite a lot of the
zones even in terraforms, there's a lot of homage to early internet aesthetics.
Eric, I know you're primarily formed by your research and practice in physics and maths, but
I'm wondering there who were your influences. And yeah, it would be very interesting to see
amongst you whether there might be some overlap there. So I don't know if one of you wants to
start on that topic. Sure. I think for me, my aesthetic developed
probably primarily from video games in the 90s, like strategy and adventure games. So
whoever were the lead LucasArts pixel artists, they were probably like the biggest single impact
on me and a few games before Commodore 64 stuff. And then I think that that would have to be the
biggest single influence. I wouldn't say like the net art stuff that came a bit later influenced me
specifically. I can point it down to one piece of software that is called Norton Commander.
And I think that's the most defining software for me. It's coming from Commodore 64 and stuff like
this and Amiga gaming computers. And then I got the first PC to 86 computer at home and opening or
seeing this program, Norton Commander was like, oh shit, this is so nice. I was like, I don't know
how old I was, maybe 13 or 12. And the organization and seeing all the things that are on your hard
drive was basically it. And I don't know where net art, when it started, I don't think it's
something that can be pinpointed so easily because it's also like an aesthetic that
starts with computers in general and not just with the internet. Even if it's called net art,
I have the feeling or the impressions that the aesthetic of net art is older than the public or
the popular internet. And yeah, of course, all 2D games have the impact and this 32 bit, not 32
color screens and all these stuffs that are very simple. And that's what I'm still trying to achieve,
something that has a simplicity within modern complexity, if that makes sense somehow. But
eventually, it also doesn't matter so much because it can never be explained that easily.
It's a long path. You have seen so many things and everything comes together and formed the
person. And maybe that's the interesting thing that certain artworks can only be produced by a
certain person who has experienced a lot of things and has a certain mindset and has a certain
skill set. And you always need something like this, people who create something. And then of course,
there can be a lot of replica works and homage is to that or similar works. But the interesting
thing is this finding something new. Yeah, it's a very large difficult question with for me,
probably a couple too obvious answers. The most obvious answer would have to just be if we're
talking 2000s. And on, Brett Victor to me is probably, if you ask me who's the most important
living artist, that's one of the first names that comes to mind regularly. You know, Brett Victor,
as he would then represent a practitioner in a lineage going to Xerox Park, so an L&K or a
Del Goldberg in the same conversation, but that's after the 2000s. And I don't think my own work even
kind of it scratches on the door of the sets of ideas, but it takes it seriously as a starting
point, some of the observations or values that that lineage of thinking has about computing as
a potential medium. And then just just an infinite onslaught of other digital artifacts and aesthetic
experiences, just I could start going on a tour, but maybe just too many.
Indulge us a little bit, I think everyone would be.
I mean, you know, I want to say things like they're almost corny in their
other case, a passage, Jason Rower, or like the marriage, Rod Hubble? Humble? No, Hubble,
at least. Probably even then to some degree, let's say John Blow, but these were big influences,
and now they're kind of just geological layers or something. They were some of the people that
made me see, let's just call it games, games in relation to traditional fine art. And
I mean, you know, we go to Pac-Man or Tetris, you know, Super Mario, other kinds of like primordial
loops or whatever in that way, too. But, you know, then I'd say like Snapchat,
like if you get me back on the Macintosh culture branch, I'm not sure where video games sit,
but if you take me off the park lineage and put me back on the Macintosh branch,
then Snapchat as a product capitalism company doing an excellent job making an appliance
several years into the existence of an object that demonstrates, again, from this kind of pop
culture appliance level, a more, I don't want to call it medium native address, because I'm still
not sure how much it has to do with computing at a point, but just some of the design insights
in that product. Not that I think about them a lot anymore, but they were very influential.
And, you know, I mean, obviously, just let's just go to like crypto punks, autoglyphs, right? You
know, these are these are kind of lineages I see myself in and seek publicly tell people I seek to
usurp. I think people here should have that. I'm saying these kinds of things all the time, right?
Like people should imagine that artworks, you know, 100 to 1000 times more important than
crypto punks or autoglyphs, these kinds of works will come to exist on this network. And in the
context of this culture, and the artist could be if not, it's not that swinging for those fences
necessarily means that you're going to hit those home runs, but just I don't know, something about
the kind of it almost still feels like you're not supposed to say something like that, which is
ridiculous. Hopefully artists. Well, again, there's not necessarily a correlation between wishing to
do that and thinking you're going to do it in your imagination and like achieving it. So but, you
know, then I mean, I'd say it's Satoshi, you know, Bitcoin represents a kind of it's, again, Bitcoin
doesn't look like anything. It's a system as an artwork that just totally changed how it reoriented
civilization. It's another civilization dissolver. So to me, it's like, you know, I was being asked
recently, like my favorite video games, and I don't really have good answers, but I could just go to
art. I like ones that like Tetris or, you know, virtual chess, because they kind of give me the
things that start from systems, like if you go to this kind of previous, like somewhat fake
dichotomy of ludology and narratology, basically, like, is it a game loop or is it a story, like
crudely summed? And, you know, to me, the sort of let's just call it game loop that gets closer to
these park-esque, Brett Victor-esque lines of thinking. So objects or artifacts that demonstrate
that. And again, Bitcoin, I think is interesting here, because just every time I say computer
program, people are still thinking of pictures, they're thinking of an app you double click,
but I'm thinking of like something else, like a non-visual. That's what I wanted to say also
earlier, this talk about installation. You know, I just I feel also, again, the 20th century
happened, I keep saying it. So this is the artwork, right? Like, what's the context of
encounter? Like, Terraforms is actually about a lot of these things, but we're encountering them
together here through the generosity of the hosts of people. So, you know, obviously, artists,
other people, the social reality of a piece. So maybe I'd say Borde Piaq Club, because, you know,
going to a piece that seems like it's almost at a formal technical level, strictly about a social
reality and not about kind of like, I don't know. Anyway, so, you know, so, so works that teach me
something about a social reality that helps me navigate as a person who at times feels like he
has interesting provocations about computers and art, finding a way to help actually just
to not be lonely about it, to have other people to think through those ideas with or to kick up
discourse about it. And so then, yeah, so then things that things that facilitate the social
reality that workers say that with regard to the physical installation, again, this is the piece.
Terraforms is this conversation, you know, it's people getting tricked into taking courses with
me on spaces and things like this, you know, I'm not sure if I answered, but
I let that was a really that was really thought provoking statement. And I feel you in so many
ways, one on three. And it's it actually leads me perfectly into my last question that I'd love to
pose to everyone in the chat, writers, artists, and any audience members, if you want to chime into,
you know, you you talk about the kinds of work that you're drawn to, you're gravitating towards
right now that you find really interesting. And I'm curious, you know, at this particular juncture
where there is so much change happening across all technology sectors, there's also so many
geopolitical, you know, tension points in our world right now. What do you all feel is the most
important or critical investigation that we should be looking towards in the coming weeks,
months and years? What are you really excited about? And what feels like the richest vein
to explore for all of you right now?
I'll happily take this one. People want so, like, go first, you know, it's this, like, which is to
say it's that that is that self feels like a in the face of things like ecology or sort of,
you know, like, just let's call it something like inequality or just, you know, people who
very well should be living in better conditions or societies than we have, you know, I think
actually, although it sounds ridiculous, I think computing is a kind of under explored media, and
that computing represents this could go on for way too long. You know, right now, I'm trying to
convey to you something that's kind of like a mental model, right? When I'm saying Bitcoin,
it's a system, right? Or talk about SimCity, you know, SimCity is a system, it kind of, if you look
at Ian Bogos talking about procedural rhetoric, right? SimCity sort of, in a way, it makes an
argument. Now, is it trying to make an argument about urban planning directly? It's hard to say.
It's more like something, it's kind of undefined, I think, maybe it's doing that a little bit, but
it's also just an aesthetic experience. When I say aesthetic experience, I mean, the pixels? Well,
sure, that too. The Godzilla that destroys the city? Sure. The cartoon of all that? Yes. But
the simulation itself, which is to say, you could take that to mean fake, but it doesn't mean fake
to me, it means a model expressed in a transistor temporality rules system, a computer. So it's a
transmittable, teleportable model. And then humans can now think thoughts in modelness or systemsness.
But we don't really have a civilization that thinks about that. It does a lot of existing
media forms on that thing. And the people who do aggressively think in that way, they kind of just
restructure the society out from underneath everybody. And nothing is going to stop that
unless you make it like illegal to do those kinds of things. And I don't want to live in that
civilization either. So I have what is a kind of like trad con boring, like neo-humanism,
transposing the notion of literary humanism onto systemsness. And I think that's one of the most
important things. And even though it's not like, regarded by like the mainstream news networks as
like the important issues of our times, like maybe it's good that a person like me can ignore those
signals of like what the society thinks is the most important ones. And then kind of, well,
through something like an art practice, try and think through those ideas. And it's just astonishing
the belief I have that that's the condition we're in. And the kind of what feels like wide,
widespreadness of computing, yet the total unactualizedness of it. And to like be alive in
in a moment where you have that belief is a very interesting, it's something very interesting to
bear witness to. Anyway, yep.
Well, I resonate with so many of the things you just said, 113. I mean, that was such an eloquent
way of kind of summing up the frustrating quality of this particular moment. Yeah, I'm curious if
others have thoughts on this. What are you looking towards? What feels like the most important
area to explore right now?
Also, Kevin, if you have thoughts, feel free to jump in. Yeah, Wade, you got to like send that
question in advance. I'm just still trying to think, what's the most important thing in the world?
I don't know, you know, like I'm thinking about it. I don't know if I have a lot to say.
I read this blog post yesterday about Emily Colucci. She was like criticizing the curatorial
statement of the Whitney Biennial. And it was like this critique of international art English,
which of course, is something that people have been complaining about for a long time and like
this sort of opaque way that curators speak. But it was just sort of a reminder to me that
while I'm not so sure that like blockchains will sort of overtake and replace the traditional art
world, it was a reminder that the traditional art world for all of its money and glitz and power
can sometimes seem quite lost. Like when I read those opaque and circular curatorial statements
that just sort of go in circles. And if you try to like boil it down to like, what's actually
being said, it's like they're basically like, these are the things we liked. And so we put them
in a room together. It's just a reminder that like, there are these vulnerabilities and weak points
and that, you know, other models, other kinds of making other institutions have an opening,
you know, like we should be experimenting with more ways of doing things. And I love the Whitney
and I love the Whitney Biennial. And I don't, you know, I'm not like a hater to the traditional
art world institutions. But I do think that like, I don't know, just seeing that and kind of laughing
at it was just this reminder that like, even these systems that are very well established are
vulnerable and they contain contradictions. And those things can be exploited and, you know,
and remade in interesting ways. And so that's, you know, even though like the whole world of
NFTs is not as like, ascendant, in terms of market or pop culture, as it was maybe two years ago,
I still think it's super interesting, because it's like the best people in this space are
figuring out new ways to make and display and curate and collect and own artwork. And I think
that's, that's really great. So I think it's, I don't know, that's, that's something that I'm
encouraged by at the moment, is the vulnerability of established systems.
Yeah, tough question. I suppose when I do think about these things, I consider that the like,
the spiritual problem of our time is, is that we have all this power and we don't acknowledge it.
So like, for example, climate change denial is super interesting to me, because, okay,
there's like a shallow way to look at it, that it's people just want to get whatever they want,
they don't want to think about other people. But there's, I think, a deeper way of looking at it,
that's that man is now so powerful at the global scale. And we need to really take responsibility
for that as a society. And that requires a shift in mindset that that is not happening
from from what I can see. So when I do think about larger issues, it's, it's kind of at that,
at that level. And related to that, the connection to, let's say, generative art is that,
like, with art, as Kim alluded to before, sorry, with code, we can automate a lot. So there's a
kind of, there's a power there where, as a programmer, you're making whatever all the pixels
do their own thing. And it's an illustration of, I mean, a feeble illustration of our power over,
the computer, but which we have much more generally, thanks to science technology of the past 100 years.
Totally, I really appreciate you guys bearing with my existential question here. But I always like
to close out a space and kind of thinking about the future and thinking about what's next and
moving towards a direction or an orientation. You know, together, I think that there's something
really valuable in, you know, kind of finding convergence and connecting as human beings as
we navigate through these stormy waters. So I really appreciate it. We've been going for a while.
Luke, do you have anything that you want to say to kind of, you know,
I'm okay. But like, I just wanted to provide the opportunity, if any three of you feel like
you want to talk about some projects you have coming up or what you're working on,
I'm sure everyone here would just be interested. I know Eric, you just had a kid and maybe it's
a busy time. And I know that others of you have, and congratulations on that, by the way.
So yeah, just before we close up, also, if anyone wants to ask a question, we still have a tiny bit
more time. Otherwise, yeah, like Kim, for example, what are you focusing on?
Yeah, actually, I'm at the moment working on a commission project by
Bright Opportunities and Tribute Labs. And that's something that should be out,
I don't know, maybe in a month or something like this. So it's quite funny because I've been asked
by Bright Opportunities to create something for them. And yeah, but it got a bit out of hands and
the people from Tribute Labs got into it. And now here they asked for an extension of the collection.
And so it will be for all the members, I think, of Tribute Labs, which is, I don't know, a group of
multiple DAOs. And all the members should get a free mint. But I will also have
the possibility to distribute a few myself. So that's what I'm working on. And I'm looking
forward to hang out in Paris in two weeks, or when I, yeah, in one and a half weeks,
meet a lot of people there. And yeah, I think that's, I don't want to think much further than
Yeah, well, you know, when, when Lewis Carroll released Alice in Wonderland, it got so popular,
the queen invited him to come visit. And then she expressed her admiration and asked him to send
him a cop, send her a copy of his next work. And so she received, I don't know, a year later,
like a mathematical treaties of quaternions or whatever, because he was actually a practicing
mathematician. So actually, most of my intellectual energy right now is going to physics. And I can
send you a copy of my super symmetric theory of blah, blah, blah in a few months. But as you said,
yeah, I have a kid and well, number two, now, so I'm busy with that. I have to submit my tenure
dossier this spring, because I'm also quite heavily invested into academic intellectual
activities on the art side. But I, well, something that's bothering me is, is that still the
marketplaces are playing too much of a role in how collectors experience art. So I want to improve
my website and make that a better experience for people to discover, discover the work and see the
connections between the various projects. Then, okay, I have various ideas about things for projects,
but they're, they're just kind of percolating in the back of my mind. I am looking forward to
coming to Berlin this summer, there's going to be a conference on the history of generative art.
So I've been digging into a bit of Herbert Frank's old manuscripts to, I don't know,
make some connections there with art and physics.
Lovely. Yeah, hopefully I'll see you.
No, go ahead. Go ahead, please.
Oh, just to answer. For a while, we've been working on...
Can you hear me? Yeah, it's coming, coming and going. So, you know, what we understand
I'm not sure I can do, yeah, sorry. If it's getting chopped, that's probably my connection.
I think where it appears a lot of this is all heading in terms of
culture. And then, you know, if there are other sort of maybe contemporary artists or artworks
that you've encountered in the last, you know, six months to a year that really left an impact on you
and, yeah, just curious for the writers.
I think you broke up a little bit there. Do you want to... It sounded like you
asked the question right at the end. Yes. Oh, sorry. Okay. Can you hear me at all?
Yeah, I can. I'm sorry. I've got a lot of bars here, so it seems like I'm okay.
Okay, good question for the writers who are present.
Yeah. Do you want to message me the question?
I think that one month was asking if any of the writers had artists
from the past year and a half or so whose work has been speaking to them.
I wrote a thing recently for Outland about Mitchell F. Chan, and I've liked his work for
a long time. That published about a month ago. And, yeah, so he's somebody who I've been excited
about for a while, so I'd recommend that. As far as what else I'm up to, I'm working
on some pitches for other things, but nothing really to talk about yet.
Uh oh, it looks like we lost Luke and 113. Twitter is just really
ragging us today across the board. I will try to get everybody back up, but this might be a good
point to wrap up. Really appreciate everybody being here today. This was such a rich conversation.
I could listen to the five of you talk about abstraction for hours, and I hate abstraction
personally. I'll be a hater. So thank you guys so much for this. It was so rich, and
you can follow all of the artists via their profiles here, check out their upcoming projects.
I've also pinned all of the articles that were published in Outland, so you can check out
some of that writing and learn more. Yeah, it was a real pleasure. Thanks, everybody. Thank you to
Grailersjaw for working with us and helping us to produce this really important critical writing,
which, you know, as we were talking about at the beginning, is so necessary in the space right now.
And we will definitely see all of you next time. Thanks so much.
Thank you. See you. Thank you. Thanks.