Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Snowfro x Friends: Celebrating LIFT
Recorded: Aug. 14, 2025 Duration: 1:01:06Space Recording
Short Summary
Glitch's 'Lift' project launches a groundbreaking intersection of art and gaming, featuring unique token experiences and strategic partnerships that redefine engagement in the crypto space. With a focus on personalized gameplay and community involvement, this initiative signals a significant trend towards individualized digital assets in the blockchain ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, y'all. We're just assembling the crew. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll just
be a minute or two as the people come in. Thank you. We'll get started in just a minute or two.
Welcome to our Lip Celebration Spaces combo.
We're so glad you're here.
Just waiting for a couple more people from Art Blocks
and Generative Goods to join and then we'll get started. This will be a conversation predominantly
with Eric and Derek from Glitch Marfa and then we will shift around and talk about all of the
people who made Lyft happen. Thank you so much. Let's get started, actually. Do you want
to do a brief intro, Derek, and just kind of explain how it works while everyone's getting
set up? Yeah, can you hear me, Madison? Yes, I sure can, Derek. Awesome. And Eric,
is your mic working? Good morning, good afternoon. Let's go. All right. Well, my name is Derek. I'm
an owner and one of the three curators at Glitch. Glitch is a gallery that's physically based in
Marfa, Texas. Much of the work that we do is on the internet. And we use internet native spaces
and crypto and blockchain as the predominant vehicle by which to storytell the amazing work that's being done at the intersection of fine art and technology.
We have been around for a few years and we've had the pleasure to roll out a few different products. The first product we built was a product called
Every 30 Days.
And for one full year, we ran 12 exhibitions
with 12 amazing artists.
And for 30 days, we story told a work that they had built
or a collection that they had built
with a live exhibition in Marfa
and concurrently running
it live over the internet. After a year, we created our second product called 30 Days in
Marfa. It's a residency product and that leads us here today. We've had three amazing artists that
we've worked with over the last year and a half. The first artist is Dive With The Most Likes,
who created a generative art collection,
his first ever, called Nameless Dread,
with the Artblocks team.
The second artist was Joe Peace,
who created a 30-piece collection with Transient Labs
called Everything Versus Nothing.
And the third amazing artist, the artist here with me today,
is a close friend, a colleague, someone who I deeply admire
as a creative technologist and an artist.
And it's a full circle moment for me to be on this side of the table with Eric.
And that's Snowfro.
You may know him as the creator of the Chromie Squiggle,
which led to the creation of Art Blocks, which then led to his newest long-form collection with Glitch called Lift.
So, Eric, maybe you can start us off just by talking a little bit about what the heck is Lift, because there's a million moving pieces.
the heck is lift because it's there's a million moving pieces there's a lot going on you know we
There's a lot going on.
we've um you know myself madison and malta over the last month have tried to keep up with you
on all the amazing things that you're building into this project all the incredible directions
um that you've taken it uh both on chain and and through kind of uh you know this the social
sphere of of game boys and and off-chain gaming
and there's a lot to unpack here we'll try our best to do some of that here but
you know more broadly just maybe start riffing on lyft and and what inspired you to make this work
and and and and share it with the world thanks eric i really appreciate uh the intro and uh
you guys will have to bear with me.
I'm running on a little sleep, a bunch of coffee and no food here.
But yeah, this is, it's been,
it's been kind of a crazy journey just in the last few years,
but then tackling something like this,
I guess this is the most ambitious project I've ever worked on.
And I think it didn't start out that way.
I mean, this started out with an idea, a very simple, you know,
video game with a rock.
And it then, over the course of the six months that I've been working on it,
evolved into something much, much, much more complex.
And that's, you know, I think that's the beauty of being, I guess,
a creative technologist, as you mentioned, Derek, it's a cool way to describe it. Like,
you know, getting to work on stuff when you have an idea and then getting to be in there with,
you know, roll up your sleeves and be in the code and immediately be able to test the results,
it leads to so many different paths and vectors. And I think that's one of the most exciting parts
about all the technology that's kind of at our fingertips today.
You know, if this is a project that I had to, like,
ask someone to build for me,
it would look just so incredibly different than it looks today.
And a lot of that is just because we get to navigate forks in the road
at every step in real time.
The project is literally originally,
it was just going to be like the Pixel Man
and then you could download the ROM.
And then so it was going to be all about the game.
And in the end, it is all about the game,
but this is crypto.
I think that I'll feel very, very lucky
if 5%, maybe 10% of the people that own this artwork
actually play the game, just because that's kind of the level of interact the daily kind of step and repeat of being in the crypto space.
And I think one of the things that evolved that makes this project so much more meaningful for me is the ability to kind of include a bunch of the people in our community that have been there helping support for the last few years.
have been there helping support for the last few years. And ultimately, the premise is that, you
know, we wake up every day, and this is our passion, this is our lives, this is all we do is
focus on the intersection of blockchain and generative and, you know, now, you know, physical
manufacturing, and people come and go, and, you know, markets come and go, and vibes come and go and, you know, markets come and go and vibes come and go.
But like the, the goal is still there and it doesn't change.
And it hasn't changed since I claimed my CryptoPunks in 2017.
And so, you know, you just kind of, it's like the ebbs and thighs of,
of anything else. I could just, we wake up and we still do what we need to do.
And so some days we get more support and, you know,
especially like when the markets are a little bit better, when there's,
you know, a new release or something like that. And then, you know,
some days things kind of really taper off and it does feel lonely.
I think a lot of people can probably attest to that regardless of whether
you're an artist or a builder or a collector, even just like, you know,
sometimes you feel like you're kind of alone uh in thinking about your conviction towards the future uh but but but ultimately that
you know vision is there and the goals are very clear and um and we just got to keep pushing we
just have to keep lifting and so yeah so the uh i mean i don't know if you want me to go into
specifics because i can ramble forever,
but yeah, for sure. Well, we're, we definitely can't wait to hear, um,
you talk about on a couple of these more granular things,
but maybe just taking a step back, Eric, the, the thing that I've,
I've continued to reflect on over the last couple of months is like,
you have continued to call this, um,
your most technically ambitious projects that you've ever built.
And, you know, early on when we were just sitting across from each other and chatting about the residency and you were sharing kind of the idea with me,
I was like, OK, I can see how that would be technically difficult.
But then as we've dived in, I think it's dawned on me that this is really like four or five projects wrapped into one.
it's dawned on me that this is really like four or five projects wrapped into one.
I mean, you've built functionally a program that allows people to interact with creative work on blockchains that I have yet to see anyone do.
And I think maybe that could maybe be best understood through this self-portrait character of the Pixel Man and the different ways that the Pixel Man
as a self-identity marker can be explored through this artwork.
There's the game itself, of course.
There's the artwork that renders in Live View.
But then there's also these interactions with Pixel Man
that extend off-chain.
And so maybe putting aside the game for a moment,
I think it would be great for people to hear a little bit
about who Pixelman is.
Pixelman is a vehicle for the different ways to explore this artwork.
You know, everything from the DST files that exist on chain and allow you to download your
unique one to how the art works and the things that you can do with Pixelman inside of the
artwork and then the game itself and why the Pixelman is important to you and why you've used it as kind of this vehicle to
showcase all of the different ways that your creative practice have maybe extended over the
last four or five, six years. Yeah, I think I can kind of draw a parallel between kind of
entrepreneurship and the Pixelman and that like as someone that has a bunch of ideas almost every day,
you know, literally over the last, you know, 40,
well, since I was thinking about ideas,
you literally think of hundreds, thousands,
but then you pick the ones that like resonate.
And those are the ones that you then start getting obsessed with.
And I think similarly as an artist, I think that's a similar concept.
Like I literally just rearranged
a set of extra leftover blocks back in 2012 or 13
when creating this like sculptural pieces
that I used to make into this little character.
And it just kind of, I was like, oh, that's cute.
And I took a picture of it.
And then that was it.
I moved on, you know, cleared the table. There was no more blocks. I didn't glue them together. It was just kind of
this like moment. And then I found myself coming back to it more. And I found myself as I was
exploring new mediums, uh, you know, there's, there's two ways to go with it. You can have the
kind of, uh, organic, uh, non, uh, sorry, my brain is not working right now. The, uh, non-figurative
way of doing things, which is, you know, honestly what I love about generative art.
And then you have the more figurative things. And so every now and then I'd be working on a
new medium, a new idea, a new concept, and I would arrange those tiles and tiles are, you know,
in my blood from, uh, since I can remember, uh, into this
little character. And I find myself rearranging into that character more and more, uh, whether
it be projection mapping or even using watercolors. And so the pixel man over the course of the last,
however many years has just found its way back and surfaced. And I think that's that parallel
I'm kind of
trying to draw in terms of entrepreneurship. I mean, it was the same thing for art blocks,
right? Like, you know, the idea comes around and then it just kind of keeps poking itself back up
and it's like, okay, all right, there's something here because otherwise it's just one of the
thousands of other things that you think about that just kind of get forgotten and so i'm really excited to kind of like finally bring this this character to life in a way that is permanent and um and immutable and i get to
share it with people but a lot of what was really important about this project for me was that it
didn't just look like you know the snowfro show with like this little character as the central
figure what's beautiful to me about the little man character the pixel man character is the fact that it is um so blank that it can be a
canvas for people to see themselves and it's not super specific to me yes it's got a little bit
bigger of a head kind of like an afro which i you know in college i had a really big afro and today
i'm i've been i've been not cutting my hair for the last six months
to kind of get closer to that um i feel like it's the only excuse i have uh for my family who thinks
i look homeless when i let my hair grow out is you know getting to release this project so um
putting you know putting all those things together it just it just felt like the right time
to to do something with the pixel man and this is is the way that I've been able to communicate it.
In the end, all generative art going even back to the 60s
is software.
We're reinterpreting computer software
into something that can send a message
other than an Excel spreadsheet.
It actually sends a message.
It's trying to communicate an idea, a concept visually.
Sometimes it's just really beautiful pixels arranged idea a concept visually sometimes it's just
really beautiful pixels arranged on the screen sometimes there's some deeper meaning to it
and when you know you know back to the kind of the the scope expansion of this project it's like
the more time you spend building this thing the more you realize and you know it's not like we
forget but like you know we're so focused on like the rendered jpeg in our ecosystem which is fine i mean that's the beautiful part about art is that
it looks good rendered but um there's so much more that this unlocks when when i created the
chromie squiggle i made a point of you know you have this like static image but it was really
important to me that you could click it and it would move. And what that demonstrates, it proves that it's live code running in the browser versus an animation in the, you know,
MPEG or whatever. And so, yeah, the expansion of the project was based on just really leaning
into the idea that, you know, this is software running in the browser. And when you, you know,
you can do anything with software. I mean, every
single app that we use every single day, technology is overwhelming us more and more every day,
it's just software. It's just computer code. And so I got really excited about being able to dive
into multiple layers and facets of how people can engage and interact with this project. I'll post
a picture later today,
but like we just finished embroidering Mint Zero,
the little man, the pixel man from Mint Zero.
You know, one of the things that brings me the most joy is seeing people's phones with squiggle stickers on them
or like wearing a squiggle shirt or squiggle tote,
squiggle hat.
We like to, in the same way that we put our PFP on Twitter to represent us
as a certain part of a certain community or part of a certain interest group,
we like to, you know, share what we do in person as well. And so, you know, even down to from,
you know, from the very, very top of like, this is a generative artwork, all the way down to
physical product produced
products that can come directly from instructions that are built into the algorithm i i felt it was
a really interesting thing to kind of cover as many different layers and facets and elements
of interactivity within the work itself and so the game is just now is now just one of the components
interacting with the project clicking around on
that landing screen seeing you know your friends as the supporters seeing the the slideshows and
the poster and all that kind of stuff there's more you can spend more time not even counting
the game you can spend more time exploring this algorithm than the squiggle or any other work that
i've ever made. And that's really
interesting to me that like, you know, it's, it's almost like a forcing function for people to spend
more time with your art. And I think that's, you know, the more and more that we can do that,
the more that we can, you know, when you wear a hat with a squiggle, someone's spending a lot
of time with your art, but we're talking about the digital age here. And so, you know, rambling
again, but yes, that's, you know, there's so many different layers to here. And so, you know, rambling again, but yes, that's,
you know, there's so many different layers to it. It just, for me, it's like, how many boxes can I check off of things that I like to do every single day and how I like to represent myself and how I
like to interact with art and maybe how I feel rewarded when I engage with an artwork. And I
feel like I've gone out of my way to try to check as many of those things off.
I want to loop in generative goods here because I think they worked so closely with you in bringing
life to that very clean and that line that you always try and straddle in your creative practice,
Eric, this line between what is on-chain and what is off-chain. And I would love for you,
maybe before we loop in generative goods,
that in this interaction that you're describing,
both with Pixelman and the game assets,
there are a number of on-chain objects
that can be pulled out of every generative output.
So everyone's generative goodies that they can pull out of their artwork
is going to be different than everyone else's.
And if you interact with the code,
if you interact with the program in very specific ways,
you'll be able to pull things that are out unique to you out of out of the artwork.
There's a number of interactions here that that you've secretly built into the into the artwork.
So maybe you can talk about a couple of those things like the poster
and the generative box cover and and the Pixel man TST files to allow you to kind of, you know,
extend life into things that exist off chain.
And then maybe we can hear a little bit from generative goods about how
they're playing a role in some of this and bringing life to some of these
ideas, Eric.
Yeah. So, and generative goods may not be able to to jump on but i'll go check in just a little bit
because we're we have something going on here at home genitive goods is a family business by the
way so the uh genitive goods icon here is my wife mara who's on the other side um and i just can
hear she's dealing with something but um the interesting thing i guess guess, in terms of like the artifacts that are generated.
So, you know, a typical video game, you, you know, you make one copy and then every single
copy is identical.
And so you get to granularly control each pixel sprite, each sprite pixel by pixel,
generally drawn first and then interpreted into code that can then gets injected into
the game.
What I thought was interesting about the opportunity to be able to make these unique
video games was, you know, not necessarily the injecting of the sprites into the game,
although from a technical perspective, that's part of what makes this project so ambitious
for me, at least, because I'm kind of a noob coder. But what's interesting is the fact that every single one of them
is generated algorithmically.
So some of the items, for example, the little squiggle worm,
the base structure of the sprite is not generated algorithmically
because we want the same kind of flow of the squiggle
as it goes across the screen.
And so if you start changing it up too much, it gets a little bit hectic but like the color palettes as they are assigned
are generated algorithmically on the other hand the clouds the plants yeah even like the the little
shadowing and detailing that happens on the on the pixel man character uh as or the or the the
kind of the snow for the human version of the character all of that is
generated algorithmically like there's no preset sprite in code that code is assembled at the time
of mint and then injected into the script so uh it's really you know it's like if going back to
the squiggle you know there's a lot of different things that you can do when you have access to the core elements.
So the squiggle, for example, it generates a PNG when you look at it in the browser after the fact.
We figured out a way to kind of generate an SPG so that it can be, you know, you can download it and you can scale it and you can send it.
You can use it for all sorts of different things, especially in clothing.
We wanted that to
be available in its raw form from the start so when you press the a button when you're looking
at the at the at the live view it gives you a list of every single asset in the game and not
just the asset but every frame of every asset in the game so anyone that's ever messed with
sprites uh sprites are the words
that we, is the word we use to describe kind of pixelated assets in these older video games.
Anyone that's ever messed with sprites knows that you have what's called a sprite sheet,
which is essentially just kind of like the frames, the multiple frames that that sprite
takes on during its appearance in the game. And so for every one of the assets, for example, the rock,
every 25% of the time elapsed in the game,
the rock crumbles a little bit.
It's subtle, but every few days,
the rock changes from being totally solid
to being a little bit more messed up.
And then eventually it just breaks into four pieces
and falls apart.
When you go and you press A, and then you press, I think it's R for rock,
it downloads the four frames of the rock that were generated for your Mint specifically.
And it generates them in a format that you can then import into any kind of software
that allows you to play with pixels.
We want people to play with these things.
We want people, and I think if I'm not mistaken, Derek,
like the people that were making all these beautiful videos that you guys have put together were able to kind of use some of those assets in the videos
without having to kind of if you can imagine you know trying to ask yeah imagine trying to mask
off a photoshop image with all these characters versus just individually being able to use the
raw assets so you know i really want people to be able to make these things we you know with generative
goods we're pretty excited that you know you should be able to log in eventually and be able
to like maybe make a shirt that that's your rock and so if i made the shirt that's your rock and
it was just being made with like cutting it out of a of a big image it's very different than just
being able to download a real asset and put it on a shirt. So there's a ton of those, including every single supporter.
Every supporter has two frames.
Huge props to everyone that made one,
because I know that they were a huge pain in the butt to make.
But those two frames, when you download the sprite sheet for all the supporters,
you get all 324 supporters and you get both frames for each of them.
So that you can, once again, you can reproduce them on whatever medium you want um then there's the goodies side like you mentioned
so if you press the g button uh this is all initially this wasn't going to be exposed it
was only going to be via url parameters not to hide it but um because it's like there's already
so much going on in the game and in the in the
nft and the artwork and it just felt like it could be a little bit confusing but then we're
really proud of these assets and so um if you press the g button you get a list of all of the
things that generative goods will eventually be able to use to make a box set for the collection
and the box set's meant to feel as close to when you go to the store
to buy a video game. It's the exact same dimensions. We've bought a bunch of original boxes and like,
you know, we bought a die and a die cutter so that we can cut it exactly. And so when you
download the box, for example, it downloads it in a format that works perfectly with a die cutter
that's built exactly to the specifications of a normal Game Boy box.
That's all being generated on-chain.
Same with the little sticker that's going to go on the cartridge.
It takes just the top part, the part that says lift, where it randomly picks five of the supporters out of the 20 in a minute, and it kind of rearranges them kind of poking out. And if you want to see the inspiration for that, like the Super Mario, oh my gosh,
one of the Super Mario games on Game Boy Advance
had that kind of thing
where they had this like brand mark at the top
and the little characters were sticking out from that.
And so all of those are the components
that we will then use
from a like production manufacturing perspective.
And what's important for those
to get a little bit technical
is that they're available via URL parameters because if we send off to a printing company
and say hey i need you know a thousand of these posters made and they have to open every live view
and press g and then press b they'll like it defeats the purpose of as many of y'all have
kind of heard me say in a world where you can make a million things that are unique for the same price as a million things that are the same, people might choose the unique
version. So what we've done is made it with URL params so somebody can run a script that literally
just pings every token and automatically downloads the asset so that it can be automatically
integrated into various different systems. And yeah, those are nuances, but those are the nuances
that we've discovered over the last however many years working in trying to produce physical things
and working with generative goods and working with actual production manufacturers. These are
the things that we've discovered. As an example, a quick note, generative goods makes these
cards for Far West and for these projects that we've released in the past.
And the cards, the physical card, the one that's an IYK card that we put the IYK sticker on,
from the live view, you can't download it. But if you put a URL param, you can't. So if we need to do a batch of, because we normally batch these things in batches of 2,000, if you need to do a
batch of 2,000 cards, you run a script that pings the 2,000 live views with the URL parameter and simply
just downloads the front, the back of the card with the crop marks. Nobody else needs to see that,
but it's all built into the algorithm so that we can do it on chain. So the goodies part, I guess
the last thing I'll say about the goodies is maybe one of my favorite parts of this project,
which is the poster. And this will come with the box set. But when it comes to the box set, we're mimicking the
kind of nostalgia of old school video games. It's going to come creased. And I mean, you know,
the box is tiny and we want to put a poster in there. So it's going to come creased and folded,
just like when you opened up Super Mario back in the day and opened up the poster.
But we want people to have access
to that to be able to go and have it printed if they want in large scale, a nice paper without
the creases. And so you can download the poster directly from that set. And it's really important
to note that this came up early on with CryptoPunks where the images on the website, if you ever go to
the Punk site, you right click a CryptoPunk and you download it, and then you open it big on your computer,
it looks really blurry. And that's because you are downloading an asset that's literally
24 pixels by 24 pixels. And your screen has thousands of pixels. So depending on what kind
of computer, on a Mac, for example, when you expand it in the image viewer, it expands it pixel perfect, but on some of them it doesn't.
And if you go to Photoshop and try to expand it, it makes it look really blurry unless you click, I think it's called exact match or one of the settings.
But the idea here is that the poster, when you download it, it's actually really tiny.
And I made that mistake yesterday.
I posted the poster, but I posted the downloaded version of it.
And so when people zoomed in to kind of find themselves in it it blurred it um the poster downloads tiny
because every single pixel on that poster is one-to-one and so then what that allows us to do
is expand that even beyond you know there's limitations in the browser these are just
browser limitations right now of how big you can run a generative
algorithm to extract a high-resolution image.
I want to say 5,000 pixels or 7,000 or 8,000 pixels.
I can't remember.
There's limitations there just because the browser can only do so much over time.
That should be something that gets fixed or just gets adapted.
Right now, there's not really a big reason to render a website that's 8,000 by 8,000
pixels.
In this case, by starting with the core asset
in its pixel-perfect form, just like with punks,
being able to expand it means
that every single pixel grows in size.
And therefore, that poster,
if you wanted to literally make it
200,000 pixels by 200,000 pixels,
you could do that and 100% maintain the crispness
of each pixel. So that's how every single asset is generated. That's a pixelated asset in the game,
in the assets menu. And then the poster in the goodies menu is generated that same way.
Amazing. I'll just checkpoint there for a second to recap. Within the artworks live view,
you'll be able to, as a collector, get access to a whole bunch of on-chain production goodies.
And those goodies have life in the physical world. Generative Goods is going to be
essentially hand creating a thousand of these sculptures, these off-chain boxes that are unique to your output,
along with a cartridge with your game preloaded on it,
and the sticker of your exact Pixel Man on each of those cartridges,
as part of the artwork and extending that artwork into physical spaces.
There's also a bunch of other stuff that we'll let other folks figure out as time goes on.
But Eric said it best.
It's code.
It's a program running in browser, and it's being taken to some pretty insane destinations.
So excited for folks to dig in there and see what they can do.
But one of the most important directions and really the big moment for the piece is being able to download
this ROM and play a game. And so Eric, maybe we can shift over to just talking about the game
and how the game works and how to play it and really what you're trying to illustrate through
this Pixel Man's adventure and time as a medium and the support of the community around you through this very fun, I've had an amazing, amazing, amazingly fun time playing this thing, game that you've built.
Maybe talk a little bit about the game itself.
Yeah, so I'm not a game developer. And so, you know, I mean, when I think about making a game, my dream would be to make Zelda-type game, like full RPG interactions and all this kind of stuff. this project was built by two people. Myself and then my brother helped me
Yeah, so I'm not a game developer.
on some of the generative assets
that like turning some of the pixelated characters
into the generative assets
or helping me refine them.
And so, but the game itself,
like from scratch,
the entirety of the game was built just by me.
And so, yes, we have tools today
to help us build more and build faster and do cool things,
but it still is not enough to be able to build an entire world. Now, that said, I've enjoyed this
so much that I do have ambitions of maybe making something a little bit broader, like a whole
world. But then when you think about those games, those games kind of have a finite beginning and an end.
And I remember a while back, a friend of mine was like, okay, Eric, what happens?
What in real life represents the end of this game?
And the reality is that this game never really ends.
Yes, I'm going to give people the moment of completion when the rock breaks if you play it for long enough. But there's something really interesting
about being able to start this game over
and just continuously live this experience
that it's not just me,
like we've all felt within this ecosystem.
And so, yeah, the game itself is just a very simple,
almost Tamagotchi type game
where you just come back and feed the game every day.
In this case, feeding the game is pressing the A button
roughly 100 times a day.
It takes 30 seconds.
And when you press the A buttons, every five times you press the A button, you are adding a supporter.
And every time you add a supporter, the rock lifts up.
lifts up. And so basically it's, it's kind of a through line with like, you know, me or anybody
else that puts themselves in these shoes, wakes up and adds effort to the cause, like this cause
that we're all in. So every day we wake up, we contribute. If we contribute a lot, we get more
support. If we contribute less, we might get a little bit less support. And then within the game, there's these items that represent the kind of insane ecosystem that we're in that sometimes makes it tremendously more difficult to add support and sometimes makes it a lot easier to add support. item called bear market and when you hit the item that's called bear market instead of having to
press the a button five times to add a supporter you have to press the a button 50 times to add a
supporter the rock takes 24 hours roughly note that game boys don't have a clock so it's based
on frame rate and sometimes the frames are a little faster a little slower but roughly takes
24 hours for the rock to go from the very top to the very bottom and crush the character.
So the idea here is that every day, as part of a routine, instead of just like, you know, getting as far in Zelda as you can get one day, and then the next day you do a little bit more or a little bit less.
With this game, every day you wake up and you add, you contribute effort into the lifting of the rock.
And by doing so, you add supporters and the supporters help you lift the rock.
And then over the course of the day, the rock drops because the supporters slowly disappear.
Let's just say one supporter disappears approximately every hour over the course of 24 hours.
And that's really the game.
I had a little mini game just for fun,
just for flex where once every hour,
approximately at random,
a little squiggle comes across the screen.
To me, that's a really interesting component of this game
because if, I mean,
no one's going to be staring at the screen for 90 days
waiting for the squiggle.
It does make a little beep sound when the squiggle arrives.
So I envision my work day with, you know,
this little device sitting next to me playing this game.
And then just, you know, randomly I'm typing away at an email
and I hear that sound and I can just step, you know,
kind of move my hand over and press the B button
and capture that squiggle.
So it's kind of like a mini game within the game.
And then ultimately at the end of the game and one more feature here.
So the, um, one of the features, like an art box feature, like, uh,
Chromie squiggle has pipe and, and slinky, et cetera,
is that each game is assigned a days to win number.
And that number is between 30 and 90.
And with averaging at around 60.
So the majority of the mints will have 60 days to win.
Some of them are only going to take 30 days to win.
And some of them are going to take 90 days to win.
And you can decide what's interesting.
Like if you're going to lock in and do this, I think it's really interesting to get a mint that's 90 days to win.
Because I think the satisfaction of winning after 90 days is going to be really great.
But the idea that you might be able to have a copy of the game that can be beat really quickly,
I think is also interesting as well. So that's a feature that's assigned at mint,
and you'll be able to filter on the AirBlocks website for, you know, days to win on each of
the mints. And that's something that you don't see on the NFT screen.
It's something that you only see once you download the ROM and start the game.
That's great, Eric.
I want to bring up Madison for a minute just to get a look on the glitch side.
Some of the storytelling that we've done around the complexity here of the project, Eric.
There's so many moving parts. And I think one decision that we made very early on internal
was that we were going to try and break the story into five, six, seven parts, and be able to kind
of really spend time with each of these parts in a singular way, and then at the very end,
kind of recap them all. um you know something uh this decision
that we made uh very early on was to find a group of video-based storytellers that could help us do
that effectively so madison maybe you can speak a little bit about our creative process there and
how we worked with them to to showcase the the complexity around the different pieces of eric's
work over the last month and a half sure i'm I'm Madison, everyone. I'm the director of Glitch
and one of the curators along with Derek and Malta. And importantly for this drop, I'm not a
gamer. And so we would have these meetings with Eric and I would be like, what? Like the word
ROM or like ROM, I'm like, what is happening? So I would be taking all these
notes. And then I think to Derek's point, what we realized is to really help break down
the complexity of the game for one, but also the kind of meta level and the meta analysis that I think as passionate art people we found
really interesting and important to highlight was also the second aspect of how we approached
the video design. At Glitch, I think we just really care about telling the story of the artist and the work through various activities.
And video, I think, is a really powerful way to talk on social media.
So we found an amazing team named Ways and Means that is based in Los Angeles.
And they've done just some great videos that you'll probably recognize
from Netflix and from LACMA they do a lot of fine artwork as well storytelling the fine artwork
and so Derek early on kind of spent time with Snowfro and just really unpacked the five
important parts of the game and so if you go back on our social media, you can see all the videos from the reveal video
and then we've separated out
into what we call chapters of the game.
And Derek teased out these five important chapters
that we thought would be very,
like on a vital level and on a fine art perspective,
really important for people to understand
that it is a game, but it's also a fine art piece. And we, and we wanted to contextualize
the fine art portion through the storytelling. And so you can go through the videos, but, uh,
it was, I called it like a Herculean effort. We have this, these amazing young video people in Europe who are, right, just staying up all night,
playing the game, figuring out what's important, and being able to communicate that to our
community and our followers.
And yeah, it has been sort of a marathon around these.
This has been like the project within the project for us where it really has
been a marathon on the glitch side to go back and forth with our video team. And
what I think is really special that felt very unique about this process is that you can really
tell that the team understood what was important to highlight in the crypto community
and also in a fine art community.
And we were just racing against the clock to get the instructional videos out.
And they just did a beautiful job with a bunch of Easter eggs.
If you go back to all the videos, there's just a ton of interesting things that they put in frame by frame that I think the community will love.
And it also just like expands upon what Eric is trying to do.
And I think one thing I do want to highlight that Eric's very humble about is like every part of the game that is touched from the storyboarding and from the programming
and also from the music composition, which maybe we can talk about,
is Eric's work.
And so every Mint has his own composition.
And one of our favorite, I think, emotionally resonant videos
is when Eric's just playing the guitar of his own composition that shows up in the game.
So I'm just, I'm really thrilled and proud at the way, you know, we can break down such a complex
piece of art in a way that for somebody like me can understand and feel very excited about collecting.
Thanks, Maddie. That was awesome. I'll also just add maybe on that last point. Yeah, something that always strikes me about Eric's work is just like the thoughtfulness that goes into the very tiny, that there was thoughtfulness at the margins and jumping into that discord
and being able to unpack that with Eric, you know, back when there's only 15, 20 folks
in there as just a, uh, was a very special time and seeing him run that back and those
ideas back here on a scale that's so much bigger and so much wider and, and, and so
much more interesting, uh interesting has been just a
pleasure for us on the glitch side to be able to kind of work through and help tell that story.
Just to echo Maddie's last point there, you know, even the font that you see in the game itself,
it looks like, you know, like Eric's chicken scratch. That font was actually built pixel by
pixel. Eric was clicking his mouse pixel by pixel
to make every single one of those letters that show up in the game across the uh across the
entire collection that's the type of insane detail we're talking about when we talk about eric and
his craftsmanship every single part of this this game has been thought about has been created has
been designed in a way that matches kind of
like the integrity of his high bar for creating art and for creating work. And it's just a pleasure
to watch the master work in that way. You know, I want maybe Eric to respond to some of that. And
then I've got a final question that I'd like to ask around the game itself. But maybe Madison,
you can also maybe some, a few folks can raise
their hands and we can get a couple of questions in here as well, but Eric, maybe jump in.
Yeah. I mean, fun fact on the text, I was starting to add text to the game and I needed to,
when you add text, coding in C is just complete, especially for the game, is just a completely different animal than coding in JavaScript.
And so I go to add text and realize that, well, text isn't built in.
And so you have to actually have a sprite for each character.
And so initially, I actually kind of, it took a couple hours,
but I just rushed through making all the letters myself.
There was a library that was available uh to download of text but i'm really sensitive i want to make sure that
i'm not like you know i don't have to like chase down the creator of that and like go deal with
like you know just making sure that i'm not like stepping on any toes and i was like okay i'll just
make it myself and it's it did look like chicken scratch and it still looks like
chicken scratch because I then have subsequently played the game hundreds of times in the last six
months. And it grew on me because it does feel more like it represents who I am as opposed to
kind of a more perfect font. And, you know, some of the, some of the brightest designer minds in
the world, uh, strongly cautions that I should probably change the font to make it a little bit more legible.
And I almost did a couple of different times.
I mean, all it would take would be to go in and adjust a couple of pixels.
But the waviness of it just really felt right to me.
And I wanted to keep it that way.
And so to your point, Derek, like when you play the ROM and when you look at the NFT screen, every single asset is custom.
There's nothing brought in, pre-made or pre-baked from a library that exists.
Every single thing on the NFT, from how the pixels are assigned and created to how the colors are assigned for embroidery, every single part.
I can't stress that enough every single
part of this thing is built from the ground up and um you know today we rely and part of that
is just driven by this this you know constraints of programming and see today we rely on just
external things to make our lives so much easier but i can't i didn't feel like it was OK to make a game on an older system, partially because, you know, I have a tremendous amount of nostalgia and I love old video games, but partially also because only having to work within 160 by 240 pixels made this more achievable as well.
as well. And so you can't, I can't use that crutch of like, okay, well I can, I also can wrap my head
around this size screen, um, and then not actually build everything from scratch that goes into that
screen. So yeah, it's been, it's been really fun and a pleasure. And like one of the things that
you can download in the assets menu is the font. And so when, uh, on the NFT, when you see all the
text for the supporter names and all that stuff, it's reading the same pixelized font that I created and assigning the letters there.
And then as we make fun stuff with generative goods, we'll use those letters.
And it does kind of I think it does feel like it contributes to the experience and to the font people out there, because I know people get really into font.
I just apologize that this might make you just like want to jump out a window, but I, it, it felt really important to
me to keep that chicken scratch as is. That's great. I'm going to ask a question on our side,
but while I'm doing that, if folks have questions for Eric or for General of Goods or for Glitch,
if you could raise your hand while I'm, while'm asking this question while eric is answering um madison will go ahead and bring you up and and we'll get your questions
uh asked and answered um eric uh you know as if all of this uh ambition that you've built on this
project isn't enough i think you know the the thing that i continue to be struck by is just
like a tiny little sentence you buried into one of your explanations a few weeks back
about what you were building here.
And you wrote the following.
I imagine this one-of-one-of-x-ROM concept is not a first of its kind.
It's fun to explore and make up new words, though.
A monogameic game is one where every copy of the game
offers a singular gameplay experience.
Each owner possesses a version of their game containing DNA
that is not replicated anywhere.
And we've hinted at this type of experience for decades.
This idea of heterogeneous outputs with the homogeneity
that people could share collectively and sync on.
We've done it in
film and movies and music. And we've hinted at it in gaming. And this is a true instantiation,
a true sculpture of that idea. And I personally haven't seen it anywhere. And I certainly haven't
seen it as using kind of crypto and blockchains as the design principles for making that work so.
And so I'd love for you to kind of just share why that core insight is interesting to you.
And then I'd also just love to hear you riff on this idea of like this monogamic design
as a potential new artistic medium in its own right.
I mean, do you see this concept evolving even beyond lift into, into a broader movement,
much like generative art did after the Chromie squiggle?
Yeah. I mean, you know, I, I caution y'all for doing this, but if you go to chat GBT and you say,
based on everything that you know about me, tell me what the next 30 years of my life
are going to look like. It's, it's dangerous and terrifying to put that in there.
But I did that because someone posted it on Twitter.
And I guess I spend a lot of my time trying to think about the technical side of this.
And it basically was like, well, in a few years,
you're going to be running a platform for these unique games.
And that's definitely not the desire,
although I'd like to continue making stuff like this.
But it kind of responded in saying,
like, this is something that could be received
within the kind of homebrew community as interesting.
And again, it's not the first time
it's ever been done this way either.
But sometimes, you know,
generative art had been made for 60 years.
And sometimes it just takes introducing a concept to a broader
audience in a way that feels like it clicks more easily uh in order to get a broader audience to
be interested in it so if this uh triggers any kind of uh renewed excitement or joy around creating
you know uh old rom-based video games i think that'd be fantastic the
you know when you play zelda every single time you play it it's probably different as well every
time you generate a landscape you know i mean some things are going to be in the same place but some
things are not what's um and and i think there's a lot of video games today that do kind of take
you through a kind of choose your own adventureown-adventure path that generates some unique assets. Where this is different is in that it's in a hard-coded ROM.
And so based on the technology that we had available
when the Game Boy Advance came out or the Game Boy came out,
the ability to, when you have to manufacture something,
because up until the time that you could start downloading ROMs
and play them on your computer,
the only way to play the games would be to download it or to buy the cartridge and stick it in your device. And so
this goes back to digitally instructed physicals and how I find that so interesting, you know,
in the same things that I'm excited about, embroidery and, you know, generative lamps,
shout out to MP Cause and all the, all the fun stuff that kind of has happened around and will
continue to happen around like, you know, with Trem,
there's something really interesting to me
about being able to bring that level of production.
Yes, it probably takes longer
to burn a bunch of cartridges that are unique
only because you have to pick the file.
But that time that it takes to pick the file
is the only thing that increases the time. And you can automate that easily as well if you needed to but it's really interesting to me to
bring that concept to something that was otherwise like painstakingly laborious uh and probably would
have been out of the question back in you know in the in the early days of these cartridge-based
games so also i think we are a little bit more used to things being unique uh you know, in the early days of these cartridge-based games. So also, I think we are a little bit more used to things being unique.
You know, I feel like back in the day, you know,
if I had gotten a Zelda cartridge and my little character
was different than somebody else's character,
it might have been a little bit more out of the norm.
But today we are kind of seeing across both code-based generative projects
and just projects within this ecosystem,
an appreciation for things that are unique.
And it's really easy to do that on a screen
because the pixels on the screen don't care what color they're being asked to render.
But the moment you cross the barrier into the physical space,
it becomes infinitely more complex.
And I spend a significant amount of my time trying to lower the delta or
reduce the overhead on what it takes to be able to produce these things. And over time,
if I'm successful and if we're successful with trim and generative goods and some of the other
platforms and projects out there that are interested in this, over time, you know,
manufacturers will recognize, hopefully, that people are drawn to things that are unique
to them and so they will build tooling and interfaces that are prepared to accept unique goods
into their production systems but right now it's going to take a while because right now
you order a hat and they made a million of that hat and that's how they keep the price down and
they have no reason no no need to expand beyond that. But as design can sometimes feel like it plateaus
and products feel like they plateau.
And today, just with globalization, whatever,
generally most manufacturers of quality
are making the same quality product
because we've kind of hit a ceiling on quality in machinery.
The way that I believe that these companies will be able to differentiate themselves
is not by trying to increase the resolution on a ceramic tile,
as what I saw happen over the 20 years in my tile career,
to the point where now you can't see the pixels on the tile.
It's like the human brain can't comprehend if you make it higher resolution, so who cares?
It's not going to be a matter of increasing the quality of the product, but increasing the variability while maintaining a lower production cost of that product.
And I truly, truly, truly believe that.
Like, I mean, you know, call me crazy, but like I truly, truly believe that the future way that manufacturers will differentiate themselves from each other is by providing
individuality. And someone that hand makes purses, for example, like really high-end
Veblum goods companies, well, if you're making it by hand, it's pretty much going to take the
same amount of time, very laborious to make a handmade purse. And so at the very, very high
value level, that has already been achieved. And people pay really big amounts of money for those
things. And what I'm trying to kind of put out there is that if you take that and you find a
way to package that to where everyday consumers can also have a purse that's unique to them,
or a video game that's unique to them, or a hat that's unique to them, that not just the people
that can afford the fancy purses, but everyday people will also be interested in that.
And so I spend all my time thinking about that.
And I think the automation and the technology that blockchain and art blocks and generative
code-based art brings really unlocks that.
And it's just going to be a matter of time before that becomes more ubiquitous in manufacturing
in society.
Great ref, Eric.
I want to open it up to the crew here. in manufacturing and society. Great ref, Eric.
I want to open it up to the crew here.
If there is a question, we have time for one question.
Otherwise, I'm happy to, we always like to end these sessions with a closeout passage from one of our essays,
which I'm happy to jump into.
Madison, do we have anyone in the audience
that wants to jump up here and ask Snow a question?
None from the audience, Derek. Come on, guys.
Well, he'll be online for the next couple of days answering questions, I'm sure.
But I'm happy to close us out.
And Eric, just want to say thank you for joining us up here and getting a chance to be a collaborator with you on this project.
It really has been truly, truly like a blast for all of us over here at Glitch.
You guys have knocked it out of the park.
And really like your collaborative spirit is world-class.
And I also just want to send thanks to Generative Goods
because as a company, we've shifted gears
to be able to focus on this release
as a kind of proof of concept of all of
the other nerdy things that we do in the generative goods ecosystem. And it's been a big shift,
but a huge shout out to my wife to help us organize all these physicals and to Danny to
kind of help me understand the procedural nature of generating some of these assets and the NFT
screen not being originally just the pixel man, but not this fun scene and then i just uh last um well two two more uh art blocks the team has been incredible
to work with i feel like the you know the last few months working with our blocks it's just it's
it's been a dream um and uh an incredible amount of support from that team and then finally the
supporters every single one of you guys that spent time making it, thank you very much. And to everyone that I did not ask to make a supporter, I just want you to
know that I feel it every time I see you on Twitter. And I just want y'all to know that the
way that I went about that was literally just I'd see people on Twitter and I'd reach out to them.
And that was my medium to find people. And I hope to find more opportunities in the future to be able to
include more and more of the friends that are in this ecosystem. So I appreciate everybody.
Thanks, Snow. All right. So I'll read a closing passage from our essay that we will be publishing tomorrow. This is from Malta's essay, a third curator on our team. He writes,
Lift is at once playful and complex. It is the most ambitious project that Snowfro has released
since Chromie Squiggle, and like that work, it reimagines what art on the blockchain can be.
Lift is visionary in many ways, as a proof of concept for linking physical and digital objects,
as a self-portrait in the guise of a game, as an ode to gaming culture and technical tinkering,
and as a commentary on the digital art scene and Snowfro's place within it.
Still, every game poses the question, what is its goal? Why do we play?
There are at least two kinds of games, wrote the historian James Kars. One could be called finite,
the other infinite. While the former is played to win, Karst explains, an infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play.
While the gameplay of Lyft comes to an end, its purpose never will.
The end of this game is to play itself. Thanks everyone for joining us.
Thank you, Snowfro, for making this work. Thank you guys so much.
Thank you all for showing up today. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate y'all.
Have a great day, everybody. Thank you all for showing up today. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate y'all. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you. Bye.
