Field Guide - Imagined Specimens and Ecosystems

This essay is in support of Field Guide, an online exhibition curated by Jason Bailey that opens on Feral File on January 20th, 2022 at 9 am ET.

Before they go into the water, a diver cannot know what they will bring back. —Max Ernst

Digital art, and specifically generative art, is exciting for its ability to dramatically open up possibilities for artists looking to discover and share new worlds. Exploring hundreds of variations of a single image or theme using analog tools for drawing and painting can take years or decades. With computing and digital tools, we have the ability to rapidly generate near-infinite variations, exploring ideas faster and deeper through systems of our own design.

Rather than act as a mirror, dutifully recreating or reporting back on the world around us, these artists often act as a portal to an entirely new universe. A universe where the artist has crafted unique entities from scratch through many compressed cycles of evolution. A universe where fascinating beings and impossible environments blend the foreign and the familiar, giving us a sense that there is life here, but perhaps not life as we’ve known it. 

For Field Guide, I’ve curated a selection of artists, each with their own distinct aesthetic, but all of whom I believe share a circuitous process of artistic discovery and a remarkable ability to breathe life into new forms. As a curator’s prompt, and in a nod to the new life and habitats created with generative art, I’ve asked the five artists to create a set of two new works around the ideas of “specimen” and “ecosystem.” 

In this show, I wanted to focus on the artistic process for each artist, highlighting how the proliferation of work afforded by digital tools often leads the artist to spend as much time curating as creating. However, it can be hard for the viewer to gather much context when looking at just one or two works by an artist. So as part of my prompt, I also asked them to leverage Edward Tufte’s concept of small multiples. Small multiples display a set of images in close proximity to each other, typically in a grid-like pattern, to facilitate comparisons across the full group of images at a glance. 

While small multiples is a concept borrowed from the field of data visualization and information design, it is a technique often adopted knowingly (or unknowingly) by artists seeking to share process and evolution in a single image. From an interview I conducted with Jared S Tarbell in 2020:

Another particularly powerful lesson I learned from Tufte was small multiples, which applies to generative systems. You can build this machine that generates an infinite number of forms, but all very similar forms. But how do you show [people] what the machine is doing…? The way to do that is by just laying small multiples right next to each other. When the outputs of the machine are all next to each other, you get an idea that this is a system — this isn’t a single image.

With Field Guide, I was hoping the simple prompt around “specimen” and “ecosystem” combined with the display of small multiples would provide unifying conceptual and aesthetic guardrails without dampening the artists’ creativity. I couldn’t be more thrilled with the work the artists came back with.

Iskra Velitchkova

The NFT explosion this year has created an arms race toward increasingly loud and fast-moving digital imagery jockeying for attention (and sales). Against this backdrop, Iskra Velitchkova’s work stands out in contrast to all the noise for how quiet, subtle, and meditative it is.

Velitchkova is an artist currently based in Madrid. Her work explores the present and potential interactions between humans and machines, and how instead of making technology more human, this relationship can push us to better understand our limits. She believes that roots and tradition can nurture her work with greater truth. After a stint in the tech and artificial intelligence industry as a visual thinker, Velitchkova decided to apply her knowledge and experience to her own research using art as a medium for generative explorations. Her work is based on mixed techniques: both digital and physical.

Hypothetically Micro, Iskra Velitchkova, 2021

Hypothetically Micro confronts us with a dozen bold ribbon-like entities placed against flat backgrounds of solid color. Familiar on the surface, they become increasingly difficult to place, particularly in terms of scale. Velitchkova’s lyrical specimens are artfully cropped in a way that suggests we may be looking at the tail, wing, fin, or frond of a much larger organism. Yet, something about the color palette also recalls the dyes used in microscopy: These forms could just as easily be microorganisms as they could larger birdlike or fishlike creatures. Her work shines next to other generative artists for its elegant biomorphic forms and subtle exploration of color. Velitchkova is a magnificent biological architect, painstakingly crafting visual systems while bringing delicate new creatures to life.

Hypothetically Macro, Iskra Velitchkova, 2021

Hypothetically Macro is a mysterious cluster of glowing semitransparent organic primitives. The artist leverages the Processing programming language to deeply explore several variations of a single visual theme. Exploring the creation of new worlds through generative algorithms, Velitchkova presents us with images that could just as easily be on the other side of a microscope as they could a telescope. One might seem like a nucleus with quasi-biological elements embedded into a transparent cytoplasm at one minute, and the next, a celestial body with an orbital structure and a background of infinite darkness. The grid reads almost like an animatic or a storyboard propelling us through a single ecosystem frame by frame.

Ilya Shkipin

By mid-2021, despite my best efforts, I found it almost impossible to ignore the avalanche of cutesy PFP (personal profile pic) NFT projects featuring cartoon apes, cats, penguins, etc. Around that same time, generative art also captured the public’s eye, but sadly, it, too, quickly devolved, turning into a flood of hastily constructed, hard-edged geometric abstractions produced to meet the new market demand.

Never had I been surrounded by so much imagery that left me feeling so flat. I found myself craving the grotesque. I wanted to be shaken, made to feel uncomfortable, made to feel… anything, really. It was about this time that I discovered the work of Ilya Shkipin. His work makes me feel like I blacked out in a cheap motel room and woke up to find Polaroids under a dirty ashtray documenting the bad life decisions from the night before. Yet it also has its own deep sense of beauty.

Shkipin is a classically trained artist that received a bachelor’s degree in illustration at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. For many years, he has experimented with expressionistic figurative painting, and he worked as an artist in the Bay Area before incorporating neural networks into his work. He uses various neural networks such as VQGan, Clip, and Styletransfers to achieve his vision to “disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.” With his work, Shkipin explores the blending and deconstruction of a figure through abstraction, kind of like how dreams deconstruct forms and memories.

Blooming Valetudinarian, Ilya Shkipin, 2021

Blooming Valetudinarian is a stunning interplay between attraction and repulsion. As a group, the forms read as 100 beautiful winged insects, a diverse entomological collection of moths or butterflies. But upon closer examination, many of the butterflies reveal a surreal vignette of entangled biomorphic forms that feel voyeuristic, if not bordering on pornographic. Shkipin’s specimens elicit unsettling emotions similar to works from Egon Schiele or Francis Bacon. The images pull in just enough elements from reality to hint at the familiar, while largely leaving us on our own to fill in the blanks. The emotional resonance, compositional awareness, and sensitivity to color brought by Shkipin highlight what neural networks like CLIP are capable of when placed in the hands of a true artist.

Malade Imaginaire, Ilya Shkipin, 2021

Malade Imaginaire appears to be a lovely mosaic of vibrant gardens, a logical environment for Shkipin’s butterfly-like specimens from Blooming Valetudinarian. But planted alongside the abstract floral structures are twisted limbs and biomorphic forms that belie the serenity of a calm and peaceful garden. Given only partial and conflicting visual information, we struggle to place the proper emotional response, forcing us to spend additional time deeply examining the artist’s individual ecosystems. Shkipin leverages the popular neural network CLIP to generate his images; however, this is just a starting point. Leveraging his classical training as a painter, the artist then painstakingly retouches each carefully curated image to achieve the desired effect.

Sasha Belitskaja

Sasha Belitskaja is an Estonian architectural designer, NFT artist, and UX developer whose work centers on novel interactive design models and the interplay of new emergent aesthetics. Her projects focus on utilizing computer graphics and game engine technology to explore new forms of connectivity between audience, creator, and community. She received her bachelor of architecture from the University of Dundee, graduating with distinction, before continuing her master’s studies at Die Angewandte in Studio Greg Lynn.

As with several other artists in this show, I first discovered the work of Sasha Belitskaja on HEN (Hic et Nunc), a rich platform for digital artists that blossomed in early 2021. I fell in love with a series of pulsing abstract forms she created that felt like invented human organs. As such, I knew she would be a great fit for this exhibition. 

Belitskaja brings a unique perspective to the Field Guide exhibition as an artist with a background in architecture working primarily in 3D. Thinking more spatially, almost in terms of building blocks, Belitskaja’s work stands out for its mechanical aesthetic and playfulness.

In Search of Your Digital Self, Sasha Belitskaja, 2021

In Search of Your Digital Self lightheartedly explores the trend toward people becoming increasingly emotionally (and financially) invested in their metaverse avatars. Injecting a welcome sense of humor into the exhibition, Belitskaja presents us with an army of twelve curious bots, each with their own distinct biomechanics, marching toward the viewer in lockstep. Though we typically think of machines as being designed to perform specific tasks or work, the artist’s bots feature quirky plumage and imaginative ornaments that appear to serve no purpose other than self-expression. Each has its own sense of fashion, though most appear to be wearing the same shade of lipstick, perhaps in preparation for a night out in the metaverse.

The Future of Your Digital Space, Sasha Belitskaja, 2021

The Future of Your Digital Space is a grid of fantastic machines, each with its own whimsical locomotion. While we are used to machines engaging in more utilitarian work, the artist’s contraptions appear to feverishly dance or exercise. They recall the absurd devices conceived of by early twentieth-century artists like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, only these mechanisms are better suited for the metaverse than the machine age. With a background in architecture and 3D, Belitskaja brings a unique perspective to the exhibition. Rather than modeling her ecosystems from scratch, she cleverly disassembles the bots from her companion piece In Search of Your Digital Self and reassembles the parts as bot-specific imagined environments.

Sofia Crespo

Sofia Crespo is an artist with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object.

Crespo looks at the similarities between techniques of AI image formation and the way that humans express themselves creatively and cognitively recognize their world. Her work brings into question the potential of AI in artistic practice and its ability to reshape our understanding of creativity.

When I initially came up with the idea for a show built around field guides to imagined specimens and ecosystems, Sofia Crespo was the first artist I had in mind. Her description of her own process as “creating new experiences with the familiar” could just as easily have been the subtitle for this exhibition.

neural swarm, Sofia Crespo, 2021

In contrast to the other works in the exhibition, neural swarm is arranged in less of a gridlike formation and more of a clustering that recalls the display of insects at a natural history museum. It is only upon close examination and through additional context that we even realize these bee-like insects are of the artist’s own design, and that they don’t in fact exist in the natural world. As Crespo puts it, “These specimens are part of a collection from a particular neural expedition, a swarm of relatives in all their shapes and life stages.” At first glance, her world appears to be our world. It pulls from colors, patterns, and shapes that are deeply familiar to our conscious and subconscious and plays them back to us in forms that seem fathomable, yet fantastic. The end result is a surreal illustration of an imagined lifecycle for an exquisite species that never existed.

hedgerow still life, Sofia Crespo, 2021

hedgerow still life presents us with an uncanny valley of botanicals. The forms are beautiful, floral, and delicate in nature. They leverage a visual language we think we all speak, but the specifics of the vocabulary are of Crespo’s own device. The closer you look, the less familiar they become, dissolving into something new. It’s like when you have a vivid dream and you are back in your childhood home only to have someone else’s parents walk around the corner. The artist uses neural networks trained on large data sets of images from nature to extract textures, reimagining and remixing our reality into fantastic new worlds.

Jared S Tarbell

Jared S Tarbell is a generative artist who writes computer programs to build software machines. The machines generate geometric structures. Most machines output an infinite number of forms. The forms are expressed as graphic images, machine-cut physical artifacts, video animations, and interactive experiences. Jared graduated from New Mexico State University in 2000 with a degree in computer science. He was the founder of Levitated.net. In an effort to create a better way to sell his digital art online, he co-founded Etsy in 2005 where he was known as the “wizard in the desert.”

My passion for digital art, specifically generative art, started in the early 2000s when I stumbled upon the work of Tarbell. Until that point, I was an analog art bigot with no interest in what I saw as the inhuman and artificial art of machines. Tarbell’s work changed all that. I immediately fell in love with his work the way I love the trees in a forest or the waves in an ocean.

Demo Video - “Entity,” Jared S Tarbell, 2021

Entity is a wonderful dance of life. Colorful microorganisms are born, engage in naturalistic individual and group behaviors, evolve, and then terminate, making room for new specimens to emerge. The balletic choreography is governed not by linear animation, but through the artist’s deep exploration and understanding of force-repulsion fields. Indeed, work with this complexity and nuance would seem impossible to animate by hand and feels closer to systems and behaviors that we are accustomed to seeing only in nature. Such is the unique brilliance of Jared S Tarbell that his work does not capture nature, it rivals it. 

This work is a programmed system and the video artifact was a capture of live interaction by the artist. The collectors will receive the interactive software as part of the acquisition. The music in this piece is Infinity Machine by Tonepoet.

Demo Video - “Environment,” Jared S Tarbell, 2021

Environment is a series of 13 short performances in small multiples capturing the interplay between the artist and his system. We enter the work through a static surface encrusted with primordial barnacle-like corpuscles. The building blocks slowly come to life as the camera pans back, revealing alternative ecosystems. Particles coalesce and disperse under the influence of masterfully programmed forces. According to Tarbell, variations of the system were created in Processing “through an assortment of bitmap assets to represent the nodes and modifications to the flux and warp of the noise field.” The result is a series of stunning environments that range from effervescent and oceanic to celestial and cosmic in feeling. The work is sublime and poetic, and it reflects a lifetime spent mastering computer science and reflecting on nature by emulating its majesty through systems of the artist’s own design.

This work is a programmed system and the video artifact was a capture of live interaction by the artist. The collectors will receive the interactive software as part of the acquisition. The music in this piece is Echoing the Love Words I've Heard From Above by Tonepoet & Wings of an Angel.

Closing

The Field Guide exhibition has been a unique experience for me. As a curator, I typically go through large amounts of existing work with the artists to select which works to include. In this case, I curated the artists, but not the art. It was a bit of an act of faith on everyone’s part. Once given the prompt, they then went off to create new work to be included in the show. I tried to select an eclectic group of artists whose styles contrasted while overlapping enough conceptually to provide a unified show. That it all worked out is a testament to the quality of the artists, and I remain incredibly grateful that they were willing to participate.  

I’d also like to thank Casey Reas and the rest of the Feral File team. As an early adopter of NFTs, I’ve been in the space for several years now, and had an interest in generative art for several decades. It was always my hope that those two interests would collide in a meaningful way. And now they have, through Feral File, a platform that values curation and serves as a showcase for both well established and emerging talent from the field. Lastly, I hope you enjoy the exhibition as much as I enjoyed working on it and encourage you to continue learning more about the amazing artists who participated.

Back Up Your NFT Art or It Could Disappear

Today, I’m excited to announce the formal launch of ClubNFT, a company dedicated to building better solutions for NFT collectors. Marketplaces have evolved quickly through competitive pressures but the rest of the NFT infrastructure has fallen behind. I believe there’s more to NFTs than just buying and selling. We are focused on the protection, discovery, and sharing of NFTs. But first, a little about how ClubNFT came about.

 In 2017, I wrote an article on Artnome titled “The Blockchain Art Market is Here” and went on to lecture around the world about the many virtues of creating a digital art market on the blockchain. In the article, I argued that there are at least four major areas where blockchain will disrupt the art market:

1. Driving digital art sales through digital scarcity

2. Democratizing fine art investment

3. Improving provenance and reducing art forgery

4. Creating a more ethical way of paying artists (through artist’s royalties)

Subsequently, I began writing and sharing what I learned about the space. I also became an avid, early collector of NFTs. I was collecting because I believed—and still do—that the blockchain can help us build a new economy for digital artists. I had no idea that some of those early works would be worth millions of dollars someday.

Panel on blockchain and digital art at Christie's Art + Tech Summit in London, 2018. From left to right: Jason Bailey, Artnome - Masha McConaghy, Ascribe - John Zettler, R.A.R.E. Digital Art Network - Matt Hall, CryptoPunks - Judy Mam, Dada.nyc

One line that made it into all my interviews and presentations was: “Even if the marketplaces go out of business, your CryptoArt (this was before we called them NFTs) will always be safe because they are decentralized on the blockchain.” I was wrong. 

By mid-2018, cryptocurrencies started to crash and NFT marketplaces disappeared along with the art, and sometimes even the NFTs themselves. I still own the first NFT by the artist XCOPY, whose works have recently sold to collectors like Snoop Dog for millions of dollars. Mine, too, would be worth millions of dollars today, but I purchased it from a marketplace that went out of business. Now, it is worth nothing.

Similarly, I purchased several works on R.A.R.E Art Network, but most of them are no longer supported since that marketplace went out of business. Though, to their credit, they are trying to help recover them. Same story for works I bought on many other marketplaces that did not survive the 2018 bear market… Editional, Digital Objects… the list goes on.

Back then, this was not such a big deal to me because I was spending tens of dollars at the most. But now, these early NFTs are highly sought after and there is not much I can do about it. Worse, the core problem that leads to the image/video files disappearing still hasn’t been addressed. We now have a market where billions of dollars have been spent on NFTs and the majority of collectors lack the technical skill or an easy-to-use tool to assure the media files associated with their NFTs don’t simply vanish. 

The problem is that the media files associated with NFTs are typically not stored on the blockchain itself (the blockchain is not efficient for storing larger files, as of 2020, storing 1MB of data on the Ethereum blockchain would cost you approx. 17,100 USD ). Instead, the digital art files are stored on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data. IPFS is a fine solution for distributing the image files associated with a given NFT, but somebody must still pay to actually store them. So, when collectors purchase an NFT, they are dependent on the marketplace to continue to pay the storage fees for the media files (aka, the digital art); otherwise, the art will disappear.

I love NFT marketplaces and I consider my friends who built them and stuck with them through the lean years to be among the true heroes of the NFT community. I was the first collector on SuperRare, and KnownOrigin credits my early article “What is CryptoArt” for “kickstarting the birth of KnownOrigin.” The way I look at it, if NFTs continue to grow and take off (and I am certain they will), we will eventually see marketplace consolidation. In other words, I am certain that two years from now, time-tested marketplaces like SuperRare and KnownOrigin will still be around but many other marketplaces will be gone. If we are not careful, many NFTs will be gone along with them. 

Having learned my lesson by living through the last bear market, I decided to build a team and raise money to solve this problem for collectors and artists. I believe in NFTs, and I think this unsolved storage issue represents the single greatest threat to the NFT ecosystem.

Startups are hard - I know because I’ve spent most of my career in them. But this issue is so important. Having spoken with hundreds of artists and collectors, the biggest threat to NFTs today is that collectors have zero control over the art associated with them.

We are not the first company to realize that this is a huge problem. There are services out there that charge collectors a monthly fee to pin the art from their NFTs to IPFS. This ongoing tax on the NFTs you own brings a new set of questions with it. You already paid for your NFTs, why should you have to pay a monthly fee to a pinning service? And what happens if the pinning service goes out of business, or experiences data loss?

Others have developed  “forever storage” solutions that charge NFT collectors up-front for permanent storage of their image files. This amounts to paying the total cost to store the files forever, when that collector may very likely want to sell them soon. It’s a bit like someone asking you if you want to pay for the next 200 years of electricity in your house today instead of over time. What if you move next year? These forever storage approaches are also blockchains unto themselves, which means you now have another failure point to worry about, and a new ecosystem + cryptocurrency you need to put your faith in. 

We realized that, for collectors to truly own their NFTs, they needed a tool that made it easy to download all the files associated with their NFTs at the click of a button. This empowers them to make their own decisions over how to safeguard their NFTs, and we can offer this for free and without locking anyone into a single solution. We don’t care where or how you store your backup, that’s your business. As the true owner of the NFT and its media, you could now store your art on Google Drive, AWS, a pinning service, a “forever storage” solution, or anywhere else. It’s up to you.

Today, my startup ClubNFT announced $3M in seed funding; our official company launch; and our first solution, which will allow collectors to safeguard their NFT investments by downloading the media associated with all their NFTs in a single click. I’m proud to be joined by CTO/Co-Founder Chris King, formerly of Google; and CFO/COO Danielle King, the former Manager of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA.

If you are a collector, join us on our journey of building next-generation infrastructure solutions to discover, protect and share NFTs for digital artwork. Learn more about our new product here and start protecting your NFT investments by signing up for the beta here.

Why Museums Should Be Thinking Longer Term About NFTs

In 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, a young Walt Disney turned down a deal with United Artists because they wanted to own the rights to his cartoons in a new medium that few had even heard of… television. “I don’t know what television is, and I am not going to sign away anything I don’t know about,” Disney reportedly said at the time. It was a bold decision during uncertain economic times that showed great foresight on Disney’s part. By 1966, it was estimated that an astronomical 100 million people were tuning in to watch Disney television shows.

Coming out of a COVID-19 shutdown, many museums have found themselves in their own financial depression trying to recover from a prolonged absence of ticket sales. And with news stories of Christie’s selling an NFT for $69M and the NBA making hundreds of millions in NFT sales, it makes sense that museums would look to NFTs as a potential source for new revenue. But how museums choose to use NFTs could significantly impact their digital transformation and have unforeseen implications that could potentially haunt them long into the future. I would encourage museums to follow Walt Disney’s advice and “not sign away anything they don’t know about.”

Source, The Economist

But first, what are NFTs? NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are rare collectible digital assets that are registered on the blockchain. NFTs have taken off primarily as a way to monetize natively digital goods like digital art, video game assets, and property/land in the metaverse. Because these goods have no physical component, they were historically difficult to buy and sell. By making digital assets ownable and giving them proven scarcity, NFTs have unlocked a new market for digital goods that exceeded $2.5B in the first half of 2021 alone.

In addition to selling natively digital goods as NFTs, many people have explored the process of minting or “tokenizing” physical objects into digital NFTs. The idea behind tokenizing a physical object, such as a painting, is that you could then own/buy/sell/lend that NFT as a digital proxy for the physical object.

While I have found that older generations often struggle with understanding why an NFT would have any value at all, this concept is rather intuitive for younger folks who grew up buying and selling video game assets, spending time with virtual reality, and hanging out in the metaverse.

So where does this leave museums? Museums own, protect, and share the world's most important cultural treasures. The obvious NFT play for museums desperate to raise money fast would be to tokenize the physical objects in their collections and sell off the official digital copies as NFTs to the highest bidders. The problem with this approach is that it requires museums to mortgage their digital future in the long run for a small payout in the short run.

Doni Tondo, Michelangelo - 1505–’06

In May, the Uffizi Gallery minted and sold a single edition NFT of Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo (1505–’06) for $170,000. The museum reportedly earned $65,000, splitting the profits 50/50 from the sale with technology partners Cinello for leveraging their patented DAW® (Digital Art Works) technology.

According to Cinello’s website, “All revenues from DAW® and from exhibitions are shared equally with our partners to ensure a new revenue stream without introducing any restrictions on ownership or current rights.” However, this statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the emerging NFT/metaverse culture.

Cinello are correct that the Uffizi is likely not legally signing away any digital rights, especially given that works like the Doni Tondo are technically in the public domain. The value of the NFT comes from the public perception that since the museum owns the physical work, it therefore would be the most respected authority to mint and sell the official NFT. But having sold this as a single edition, the Uffizi no longer has ownership over the NFT for the foreseeable future. Why does this matter? Because NFTs have become the standard format for owning digital goods, particularly in the metaverse.

Perhaps you are thinking, “Jason, you are a huge nerd. Nobody cares about your dorky NFTs and the metaverse.” But what you may be missing is that this combination of buying digital goods in NFT format for use in the metaverse is quickly becoming mainstream.

Shopify, the second-largest e-commerce solution behind only Amazon, just announced support for their 1,700,000 users across 175 countries to sell NFTs directly from their online stores. Last month, Facebook, with its 2.7B users, shared that it is betting its entire future on the metaverse. Zuckerberg defined the company’s “overarching goal” as “helping to bring the metaverse to life.”

Just as physical assets (drawings, paintings, sculptures, etc.) draw the public to physical museums, NFTs of their iconic masterworks will become the draw to museum’s digital properties in the metaverse long into the future.

What if instead of selling an exact replica of Doni Tondo, the Uffizi commissioned a digital artist to make an NFT inspired by the Doni Tondo? This would be a win/win in that the partnership would elevate the contemporary artist by associating them with the prestigious museum while allowing the museum to avoid digitally deaccessioning important artworks from their collection.

For example, the Italian CryptoArt duo Hackatao recently sold a series of NFTs inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing Head of a Bear, referred to as Hack of a Bear. By comparison, the combined sales from the Hack of a Bear NFTs significantly outearned the Doni Tondo NFT. The Hackatao work was done in partnership with Christie’s, who was auctioning off the actual da Vinci drawing. It is not hard to imagine how artists like Hackatao could also form similar partnerships with prestigious museums like the Uffizi for similar initiatives.

Head of a Bear, Leonardo da Vinci - (Around 1480)

Hack of a Bear, Hackatao - 2021

Museums may also want to consider experimenting with NFTs as an opportunity to reduce dependency on donations from ultra-wealthy patrons who often have problematic roots. Perhaps instead of selling a single-edition NFT of Doni Tondo for $170,000 — reinforcing the idea that art is only for the rich — the Uffizi also could have sold an edition of 1,700 NFTs for $100 each. At this price point, a larger number of patrons may have been able to participate in the sale, creating a shared sense of stewardship over the NFT, the physical work, and the museum (much like the TopShots NFTs have for NBA fans).

I recently had a chance to moderate a panel with a museum that has taken quite a different approach from the Uffizi. The Whitworth Gallery at Manchester University has teamed up with tech partner Vastari to launch an NFT inspired by William Blake’s watercolor etching Ancient of Days.

William Blake, Ancient of Days - 1827 (from the Whitworth)

The Ancient of Days NFT

Rather than minting and selling an exact replica of the original Blake work as an NFT, the team has decided to mint a very cool spectrographic scan of the work in an edition of 50 on the ecofriendly NFT marketplace Hic et Nunc.

The Whitworth views the Ancient of Days NFT as an open experiment, having launched it in conjunction with their upcoming 2023 exhibition “Economics the Blockbuster” and inviting the public to track the primary and secondary sales of the NFTs over the two years leading up to the opening of the exhibition. As part of the exhibition, the Whitworth institution intends to “work with a range of practitioners - from artists, writers and activists to environmentalists, bankers and technologists - to explore alternative economies.”

As a museum dedicated to using art for social change, the Whitworth views this NFT as part of their wider transformation. All proceeds from the NFT will be used in socially beneficial projects in partnership with communities, organizations, and constituents of its surrounding neighborhoods and networks. According to their website, these projects will focus on education, health, environment, and social cohesion.

I think the Whitworth and Vastari have pioneered some great best practices here that other museums could learn from. By choosing to mint the spectrographic scan of the work, the Whitworth cleverly avoids the premature digital deaccession of an important work from their collection. Issuing the NFT as part of an exhibition exploring economics gives the NFT purpose and context within the museum’s scheduled programing and public mission. The use of the spectrographic scan also adds a nice twist in that it highlights Whitworth’s work as a research institution. Opting to mint an edition of 50 instead of a single edition makes it easier to reduce the price per NFT and increase the number of patrons who can participate in collecting the work. Finally, they were thoughtful about deploying the NFT in a way that aligns with their mission to transform into an institution for social change.

The truth is that nobody knows for certain how things will turn out with NFTs in the future. But that alone is reason to use caution and to engage thoughtfully. I don’t mean to pick on the Uffizi — there are many museums following a similar strategy of digital deaccession. I was driven to write this post because I love museums and I see great potential for them to thoughtfully and creatively use NFTs for fundraising and to engage with their communities. I would just encourage them to think like Disney did when asked to sign over his television rights decades before TV became omnipresent and “not sign away something they don’t fully understand.”

GreenNFTs Hackathon Brings New Ideas, Awareness, and Solutions

Historically, making a living as an artist has been extremely challenging. For many artists and their families, the digital art economy built around NFTs has saved them financially, particularly during COVID with its uncertain economy and poor job market. However, minting NFTs on some blockchains has been found to be very energy inefficient and damaging to the environment. This created an unhealthy division and friction among creatives that reached a fever pitch in early 2021 when the mainstream media related the news more widely. 

While it was initially important to draw attention to the issue of the environmental impact of NFTs, I was eager to see the human energy that was being wasted on finger-pointing and shaming artists redirected towards something more productive. On February 8th, 2021, I tweeted the following:

The response from the community was overwhelmingly positive. This motivated me to put together a proposal of how the bounty might work. I broke the grant down into two parts: an awareness bounty and a solutions bounty. A third bounty focused on carbon offsets sponsored by Regen was later added to round out the grant. I’m excited to share that, thanks to the generous donations of thousands of members of the NFT community and the support of Gitcoin (particularly Connor O’Day), we have awarded 60,000 DAI ($60K) to 39 teams who submitted projects to the GreenNFTs Hackathon! 

The submissions for the awareness and solution prizes were judged by Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larvalabs, creators of CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs, and Meebits, and NFT art advisor and respected community member Fanny Lakoubay. The voting was done using quadratic voting, a system intentionally designed to empower the judges to express the degree of their preferences and not just the direction of their preferences (avoiding winner-takes-all situations). The Regen prize, generously sponsored by StakeFish (and managed by Daniel Hwang) was judged by Daniel Pittman, community manager and user advocate from Regen.

I encourage you to check out all 39 winning submissions to the GreenNFTs hackathon. Details are attached in this spreadsheet. Our goal is to build out a site in the near future to give all of the submissions a permanent home where they will be more easily accessible to the community. For this post, I will briefly highlight the three projects that received the highest number of “voice credits” for each bounty.

Top GreenNFTs Hackathon Projects

The GreenNFTs Regen Prize - 1st Place, Team FungyProof

Blockchains predominantly run on one of two consensus mechanisms: Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Stake (PoS). With PoW, computers around the world (miners) compete to solve a computational puzzle to mine the next block. This requires a vast amount of computing resources which consume a significant amount of electricity, accounting for the majority of the carbon footprint of NFTs. By contrast, Proof of Stake is a concept where a person mines or validates block transactions according to how many coins they hold. By removing the need for massive amounts of computing, PoS consensus mechanisms dramatically reduce the environmental impact of NFTs. However, the majority of NFTs have been minted on PoW systems, and this is likely to be true until Ethereum (the most popular platform for minting NFTs) moves to PoS. 

One strategy to try and offset some of the carbon cost of NFTs minted using PoW is to purchase carbon credits. Regen Network is a Cosmos SDK-based network that offers a platform to verify, mint, buy, and sell tokenized carbon credits in an open marketplace for climate solutions. At its core, the network is built around ensuring stewardship of the planet from a first-principles approach of a fair and decentralized medium to provide provably verifiable carbon credits and facilitate liquidity to this growing market.

Team FungyProof, brothers Mike and Brandon Roth, came in first place for the Regen Prize. FungyProof is a web application and API which uses blockchain and NFT marketplace data to surface an accessible and objective grading system for NFTs. The team created an embeddable badge for token holders and token creation platforms which enables the display of an NFT’s Eco Impact, Immutability, Metadata, and Marketability grade using signed validation of token/contract ownership.

For the Regen bounty, the Roth brothers submitted a paper outlining an elegant solution for purchasing and offsetting carbon emissions of NFTs directly from a cryptocurrency wallet by integrating their FungyProof app for producing embeddable badges with the Regen Network. They outline the user flow for this below.

Given time for further exploration, the team would like to look into making use of the Cosmos gravity bridge so that Ethereum transactions could theoretically be used to purchase Regen credits. 

Coincidentally, Mike and Brandon also won prizes for submissions to the awareness and solutions bounties, making team FungyProof the top vote-getting team for the entire GreenNFTs Hackathon!

The GreenNFTs Awareness Prize - 1st Place: Team O.N.C.E. 

The goal of the awareness bounty is to provide clearer information on the impact of different approaches to producing NFTs. We believe that arming artists, collectors, and platforms with better information helps them make more informed decisions in regards to the impact of NFTs on the environment.  

Measuring the impact of NFTs on the environment has proven to be particularly tricky. Team O.N.C.E. (Operation Nifty Carbon Emissions), led by Brendan Graetz and Gaurang Torvekar, drilled down all the way to the transaction level, showing that different transaction types (deploying, minting, and transferring) have varying gas usage, and thus, varying environmental impact. They also note that energy sources used for mining can vary in their mix of renewable sources and fossil fuels. All these elements should be taken into consideration when estimating the actual impact of NFTs on the environment.

Team O.N.C.E. submitted an extensive light paper, their full code base, and a data visualization app. The clever app allows you to select a transaction type (deploy, mint, or transfer) within a given smart contract as well as an estimated energy mix (percentage of fossil fuels vs. renewables). Once you input your custom settings, the app creates a chart comparing the estimated carbon cost resulting from the transaction types and energy mix. To make it easier for end users to understand the environmental impact, the team compares the transaction's carbon footprint to other known activities such as felling trees or miles driven in a car.

The end goal was to provide non-technical users with an easy-to-use and easy-to-understand way to conceptualize the carbon costs of their interactions with NFTs on blockchain networks. 

In their light paper, team O.N.C.E. acknowledges there are limitations to their approach. Specifically, they attribute all energy consumption and carbon costs of a blockchain to the transactions which are successfully executed on it. While they believe this is where the majority of the energy is consumed, they acknowledge some energy is also consumed by other activities that should be accounted for in future work. They would also like to go beyond measuring only on Ethereum to include other blockchains, work on analysis separating read and write transactions, and further analyze and account for proportions between gas and energy consumed per transaction.

The GreenNFTs Solution Prize - 1st Place: Team CALM

As exciting as the blockchain is, we at GreenNFTs are mostly encouraged by the community of bright, young creatives that have formed around it. Yes, there are many efforts in progress to improve efficiency, but most of these are company/platform driven. We believe great ideas can come from anywhere. We created the solutions bounty to encourage the development of more efficient NFTs by driving some out-of-the-box thinking from the community to complement existing approaches. 

One way to reduce the total carbon cost of NFTs is to avoid minting them until there is a potential collector interested in buying them. 

For many years, the standard paradigm for NFTs involved artists minting a large number of artworks onto various marketplaces with the hopes that collectors would see their work there and buy it. This approach has several setbacks. For starters, on a day when gas fees are high, the cost for an artist to mint a single artwork can be hundreds of dollars. With no guarantee that a given artwork will sell, these fees can add up and become prohibitive for many artists. Additionally, a large portion of the minted artworks contribute to the carbon cost of NFTs, but are never actually sold. 

To get around the issues of artists paying high gas fees for NFTs that use up energy but may never sell, the platform OpenSea introduced the concept of “lazy minting” in late 2020. According to OpenSea, lazy minting “...allows creators to make NFTs without any upfront gas cost, as the NFT isn’t transferred on-chain until the first purchase or transfer is made.” In other words, the artist uploads their artwork to the marketplace off-chain and gives the platform permission to mint it if a collector comes along and expresses interest in buying it.  

Lazy minting works great. We have even seen well-known artists like Pak calling on other platforms and artists to embrace it. Unfortunately, the lazy minting solution for OpenSea and other platforms like Mintable are closed source. The first-place winner of the GreenNFTs solutions bounty, Nicholas S. and Thomas Gauthier-Caron of team CALM (Content Addressed Lazy Minting), created an open-source standard and reference implementation for lazy minting that any platform or artist can leverage. 

Team CALM explain:

In addition to its gas-saving environmental benefits, by dint of being open source, CALM enables NFT creators to deploy their own minting contracts to Ethereum. We believe that enabling NFT creators to deploy their own contracts will increase their participation in network governance. If NFT creators express their concerns, such as their interest in the environmental impact of consensus mechanisms to the core development community, this will positively affect the prioritization of more ecological solutions.

As with Team O.N.C.E., Team CALM acknowledges that each transaction has its own carbon cost. While lazy minting reduces the ecological impact of NFT creation by reducing the total number of NFTs created, subsequent transactions (minting, selling, transferring) remain on the blockchain. To further enable creators to mint NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain without the overhead of the Ethereum mainnet’s PoW system, Team CALM demonstrates the use of lazy minting on the Matic PoS chain. In their words:

Matic PoS chain delivers the ecological and EVM gas-saving advantages of Eth2 today while maintaining compatibility with existing Ethereum wallets, NFT EIP standards, development languages, and tooling (Bankless).

For their next steps, the team would like to further refine their solution with a professional contract audit.

What’s Next For GreenNFTs

We are thrilled at the level of participation in the first GreenNFTs hackathon. Having learned a lot during the process, we plan on running a second hackathon in the fall where we will distribute the remaining funds from the Gitcoin Grant. We acknowledge that there are many large private organizations that are much better funded working on these same environmental issues and that, once Ethereum shifts to PoS, many of the concerns will go away. But we also believe in decentralization and the ability (and need) for the NFT community to take ownership over this and other challenges that will arise in the future. We hope that the GreenNFTs grant and hackathon will inspire similar community-driven efforts moving forward.

Stay tuned for more initiatives and join our Discord to continue the discussion.

Constructive Instability - The Art of Lucas Aguirre

Lucas Aguirre, a digital artist from Argentina, has almost single-handedly changed my opinion about the potential for digital 3D as a tool of expression for art of the highest quality. 

I spent the first half of my life in painting and sculpture studios and the second half of my life essentially in front of a computer. I was actually pretty slow to appreciate digital art, which may seem funny now that it is my life’s passion. Digital art executed in 3D, in particular, always seemed cold, sterile, and devoid of humanity to me. Even after spending years learning Maya 3D and working as an animator in the early 2000s, the medium always left me feeling flat. 

It was not until very recently that I first saw 3D work that captured all the visual nuance, emotional complexity, and sophistication of the painters I grew up admiring. And while sometimes a medium evolves slowly, improving incrementally across several generations of artists, other times you get a hyper-leap in a medium from the work of a singular artist. Such was the case with Lucas Aguirre.

As a curator in art and tech, I’m a bit of an addict when it comes to finding new talent. It’s not uncommon for me to stay up all night looking through a never-ending stream of work on various platforms starving for something new. It was on one such night that I stumbled upon Aguirre’s work fittingly titled Viejos problemas nuevas soluciones (Old problems new solutions).

Viejos problemas nuevas soluciones is the kind of work you can come back to over and over again without having a sense that you have somehow solved it. For me, the work was immediately loaded with questions that I could not answer. What am I looking at? What activity are these figures engaged in? How the hell was this created? And most importantly, who made this and where can I find more of it! 

In trying to figure out how this was created, I ruled out 3D right away. The figures in this work were far too emotive, the lighting too subtle, the mark-making too fluid, expressive, and natural. Perhaps it was a photo that had been digitally manipulated and then hand painted? …No, there was too much of a sense of dimensional space here. The work is sculptural and lacks the flatness increasingly common to digital photography. And while the splashes and smudges felt authentically organic, as if governed by gravity, it was also clear to me that they were likely CG despite any trace of an algorithmic origin.  

I read Viejos problemas nuevas soluciones as a tragic work, one where human figures are hurled like rag dolls into obscured rusty machinery that could just as easily be from the digital age as the machine age. A portrait of the violent pace at which humans have been thrust into technological whiplash with no time for reflection or recovery. 

I also know Aguirre is from Argentina. Knowing a bit about the country because many of my other favorite digital artists were born there, I wondered if Aguirre’s depiction of the crumbling infrastructure and tumult in this work were autobiographical? Aguirre shared with me that:

Argentina is kind of a chaotic and vibrant space, perpetually growing on an unstable equilibrium. That gives it a special way of living. In my 40 years existing there I already lived through a lot of economic crises, including a Venezuelan-like hyperinflation in the eighties, a two-days’ police strike that made my city go WILD, and having like seven presidents in a week in 2001. 

A large portion of the population are never comfortable, always searching for ways to survive. I lived in that state for the last 20 years. With the COVID, I think the world is now learning to share this particular mindset of instability. Lots of things are now re-examined. Fewer things are taken for granted. 

Aguirre makes the modern feel heroic and historic, which in some ways reminds me of the portraits of Kehinde Wiley. Only rather than using the tools of the old masters, he is using bleeding-edge technology. For the creation of his work, Aguirre uses an iPad and a 3D scanner, often working with live models to choreograph his compositions. He pays meticulous attention to the details. For example, in this work, the model is wearing clothes designed and stamped by a very close friend.

Once Aguirre has scanned the models, he loads them into virtual reality software where he further manipulates them, adding and subtracting material and painting the models. Aguirre shares:

This process is vital for me, as I can work in 3D with my whole body, as when painting a big-sized canvas, the velocity of my gestures, the pressure, all creates a particular aesthetic, and it’s infinitely more sensual than sitting at a PC using tools like ZBrush. VR was the real game changer for me, and photogrammetry and 3D scanning gave me the possibility to use pieces of the world, not generic 3D mannequins. In the final stage I use Photoshop where I get more freedom; I can tweak the 3D nature of the renders into something else. I love the gray area between the 3D realm and the 2D space of representation.

The results are stunning and have evolved into a lush signature style on display in the works below.

The majority of the contemporary digital artists I admire typically feel like a natural extension of twentieth-century art aesthetically and conceptually. Uniquely, Aguirre and his work often feel more rooted in the 1600s to me. His previous series of works are what I would imagine Caravaggio would produce had a supercomputer been sent back in time.

Aguirre’s womb-like masterpiece Vessel is rich with patterned drapery and rendered flesh cloaked in chiaroscuro that has more in common with works like The Calling of Saint Mathew and The Incredulity of Saint Thomas than more typical reference points for digitally generated 3D imagery like Toy Story or Grand Theft Auto. The work feels natural and deeply warm, as if built from earthen ground-up pigments and surface materials found in nature. Though painterly, it does not feel like a faux painting nor a 3D rendering, but is instead its own thing, a wonderful thing.  

Aguirre was recently invited by artist/curator Samuel Arsenault Brassard to show his work as part of a one-year cycle of XR (augmented, virtual, and mixed reality) shows at Art Mûr in Montreal to celebrate their 25th anniversary. The exhibition will present an installation of large giclée prints on framed cotton canvas, a virtual sculpture, and several NFTs, both static and dynamic.

I’m already planning out the six-hour drive to Montreal as I will not miss the opportunity to see these works live and in person. And while Aguirre shared that the show at Art Mûr will be his first international show, I’m certain it will not be his last. 

Aguirre’s power to emote and compose epic work inspired by the everyday through an astonishing new lens built on modern technology puts him in rare company among contemporary digital artists. It is this ability to show us new things and make us feel new feelings that I value most about art. Aguirre does this to great effect, and as I see the rapid evolution his work has taken, I am confident that despite the great bounty he has already given us, his best work is still ahead of him!

What Makes a Museum Object NFT Valuable Beyond the Scope of the Technology?

As many readers will be aware, 2021 saw the introduction of NFTs into mainstream conversation, which has also gripped the arts sector and encapsulated the minds of artists, collectors, and even museums. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are a type of token stored on a blockchain that enables us to store assets such as artwork, and they can act as a certificate of authentication and ownership in the digital space. In this way, NFTs build a form of ‘digital thingness’ into digital artwork by giving if a form of identification and proof of ownership.

This ‘digital thingness’ is also understood as creating value in digital artwork, which enables the work to be commoditised. Monetisation, however, is only a by-product of blockchain, and this digital thingness offers far more than simply a way to make money. For example, my work with the National Museum Liverpool (NML) explores what alternative forms of value might be formed from engaging with NFTs in museums, and as I have been researching this space, it has become more evident that there is a need to consider what makes a museum NFT unique or different from the average crypto art NFT. 

Museums are important spaces; they are stewards of culture and history, they provide interpretation, understanding, education, entertainment, and can even support stronger communities and social cohesion. Therefore, I think it is important that museum object NFTs are more than commodities to be bought and sold; they should offer more than simply monetary value. Based on this premise, I want to consider the following: what makes a museum object NFT valuable beyond the application of blockchain technology? By examining this question, I wish to highlight some of the factors that museums might want to consider as they begin to experiment with blockchain technology. 

The NML Project 

My research with the NML explores how we might use NFTs in museums to create a sense of shared ownership and forge connections between a museum and the audience it serves. In brief, this has involved working with a group of participants over two workshops (January and July 2020), where we co-created an online exhibition called Crypto-Connections and produced NFTs developed from the digital images from this exhibition.

The initial workshop took place in January 2020 and we invited the participants to choose a personal possession and museum object based on their personal connection. These objects formed the basis for the Crypto-Connections exhibition where each object is displayed alongside a summary written by the participant explaining why they chose that particular work. Each image from the exhibition was transformed into an NFT using a specially devised decentralised gallery called ‘The Possession Gallery’, which is connected to the Ethereum blockchain through a smart contract. Any token created using this smart contract would appear in both this decentralised gallery and the new owner’s wallet, hence, the Possession Gallery is a space that depicts all of the tokens together.

Quartz Rock - An example of an NFT from the project displayed in the Possession Gallery

I often keep some kind of rock with me, especially ones with quartz running through them. I like to imagine them as liquid in their deep past and running my thumb over something that has been shaped by wind and the sea grounds me when I’m feeling like time is perhaps moving a little fast. The lines around this particular one seems vibrational; growing from the centre and acting like a reverberation of the stone’s shape. It shouldn’t be this perfect but somehow, that’s how it was knocked about on the sea floor and dragged up onto the beach. Its beauty exists as evidence of relentless violence. - Participant 8

During a second workshop in July 2020, each participant received a token that represents their chosen objects from the exhibition and their personal story permanently attached to the token. In doing this process, I explore in my research to what extent these tokens can help to digitally bind the participants to the museum, which, in turn, adds a new layer of value to the process of community engagement in museums. 

A Personal Touch

What I like about this is that it gives you an added layer of history to something, as it were, or you know an interpretation that you don’t get in a gallery space and that for me is the most important part of it.

(Participant A, Workshop 2, July 2020) 

My work takes a participatory design approach, which fosters a more democratic model to the development process by working with participants in co-creating content, and this enables individuals to embed their voice into the project. In doing so, this shifts a museum visitor from being a passive viewer to an active participant whilst also creating content, exhibitions, and interpretations that feel more relevant to museum audiences (Simon, 2010). Participatory approaches also leverage shared authority as cultural institutions need to relinquish some of its control over the process of design or interpretation (although this process of sharing control often remains problematic see Davies, 2010; Lynch and Alberti, 2010; Frisch, 2011). Nevertheless, there is value in taking such an approach because it encourages participants to invest in both the project and the cultural institution, and this has the potential to harness a greater sense of belonging and produce content that is more resonate than the current, and often singular, narratives told through museum collections.  

In the case of the NML project, the application of blockchain adds a new layer to co-production as the participants gain a token that depicts their personal contribution to the project. Indeed, the NFT is a representation of their personal connection to the museum object, which no one else owns. Therefore, the addition of blockchain creates an economically valuable token that also feels like a possession because the embedded interpretation creates personal value. 

As museums begin their NFT journey, I think co-production will be a significant factor in NFT value creation because this process allows museum objects to be layered with new forms of interpretation that are not normally evident in the physical gallery space. Indeed, interpretation is an important part of a museum’s role as a steward of its collections because it brings context and understanding to cultural artefacts and artwork, as such, interpretation also helps us to distinguish a museum-based artefact from an artefact being sold as a commodity in the art market. In the same way, museum object NFTs will need to hold some form of interpretation to help identify it as a museum-related object rather than simply another commodity in the NFT space. Therefore, taking a participatory approach to interpretation has the potential to make more personal NFTs that also depict a more diverse set of perspectives about the original museum objects.

The Museum’s Authority 

Clearly the authority and credibility of the digitising institution will play a critical role in validating digital data just as it does in preserving and relaying data associated with material objects.

(Knell, 2016, p. 4)

This above quote from Simon Knell’s book on contemporary collecting highlights another important point of value creation; the museum itself. Museums have always been considered to be in ‘the authenticating business’ (Burton and Scott, 2003, p. 58), in other words, by accessioning objects into their collections, museums validate these objects as significant forms of culture and heritage.    

This idea of validating culture is a significant point when it comes to the digital space and the debate that came out of the Global Art Museum (GAM) social experiment in March 2021 only reinforces this point. In brief, GAM initially promoted on Twitter that they were listing public domain works from four museums with open data policies on the OpenSea token exchange without seeking the permission of these museums. This raised interesting questions on Twitter about the ethics of tokenising NFTs without a museum’s permission, and open data policies in museums (see Liddell, 2021), but this also raises an interesting point about the museum as an authenticator of NFTs. 

GAM stated that they were never going to sell the NFTs listed on OpenSea, but, in my opinion, these NFTs would not have a sale value anyway because they were minted without the permission of the original museums. In other words, these NFTs do not hold an exchangeable value because the original museum did not ‘validate’ them. Of course, this compares the museum as a form of miner who adds a layer of authentication to NFTs that cannot be derived from blockchain technology and this power stems from the authority cultural institutions hold over their collections because, and as mentioned earlier, museums are stewards of their collections. 

The same can be seen with my research where the NFTs created are closely entwined with the NML because the process worked collaboratively with the museum to co-create the NFTs. Therefore, the role of the NML is to reinforce an authenticity in these tokens and provide these NFTs with a ‘stamp of approval’ that cannot be ascertained through the technology. 

As the art NFT space develops, I believe that it will be increasingly important that cultural institutions use their authority and their reputation as a body of trust to create NFTs that can also be trusted. Blockchain supports a ‘trust-less’ system of exchange and an authenticity in digital objects, but this discussion indicates that traditional authorities such as museums also play a role in informing the integrity and authenticity of NFTs. In this respect, blockchain technology cannot do away with traditional authorities and instead the two could support one another to create multiple forms of authenticity in digital object and this, in turn, could build a stronger NFT digital art space.  

Translating Value  

The factors discussed so far, however, are dependent on the participant’s views on the digital. For example, the second workshop in July 2020 highlighted an interesting discussion on the role of NFTs in preserving the physical objects and in this discussion a couple of the participants noted how the NFT could be a symbol of the object and their personal story if the original were lost or stolen. This indicates that the NFT is a potential store of personal value which the participant will activate if and when the physical is no longer accessible, and this suggests that the value created through blockchain is meaningless unless the physical counterpart cannot be access. 

Of course, this holds resonance with the actions of the company Injective Protocol who bought a Banksy artwork and turned it into an NFT only to then burn the physical piece. In doing so, they argued that ‘the value of the physical piece will then be moved onto the NFT’ (Ennis, 2021). Likewise, the participants in my research see the potential value in the NFT if they were no longer able to access the physical counterpart, which raises the following: will we only value museum object NFTs if we can no longer access the physical original? And how might museums go about addressing this perspective on value? 

These questions highlight how we still prioritise the physical experience over the digital, which might seem like a barrier to the application of NFTs in museums, but I also wonder if this could be a new space for investigation. Museums holds thousands of works in their collections many of which are too fragile to be put on display; could the NFT be a way of displaying these works and offer individuals a way to interact with them that is impossible to do in the physical gallery? This would mint an NFT that is like a museum object in its own right and it would hold a unique value because it would encourage visitors into new forms of engagement with the collections whilst also providing a way for museums to address this tendency to prioritise the physical over the digital. 

What Makes a Museum Object NFT Valuable Beyond the Scope of the Technology?

While blockchain produces value, clearly, there are many more factors to consider in the process of minting NFTs in museums. Participatory approaches engage in the production of personal and social value in museums and blockchain could add a new layer of value to this process by creating ownable and more personal digital objects. Meanwhile, museums could also play a critical role in adding a new layer of authenticity in the NFT space because these institutions could use their authority as authenticators of culture to embed trust and authenticity into digital artwork, thereby creating a store of value in NFTs that cannot be gained from using blockchain alone. As such, the cultural institution and blockchain technology are both authenticators and could interplay with one another in the digital space to create more meaningful and trusted digital cultural objects. 

These factors are also contingent on the participant viewing the digital object as a valuable asset, and as I have suggested, museums could strategically use NFTs as a way to present works that cannot be displayed in the physical world. In doing so, this would address the tendency to value the physical over the digital and create NFTs that are like entities in their own right that also allow museum visitors to engage with the museum object in a new way that does not harm the physical object stored in the museum. 

In this respect, it is important to remember that cultural institutions are also ‘value producers’ when it comes to minting NFTs, but this value is more social, cultural and institutional in nature, and, as the field develops, I look forward to seeing how these two ‘value producers’ will forge new connections and develop understandings of value in the cultural sector. 

References 

Burton, C. and Scott, C. (2003) ‘Museums: Challenges for the 21st Century’, International Journal of Arts Management; Montréal, 5(2), pp. 56–68.

Davies, S. M. (2010) ‘The Co-Production of Temporary Museum Exhibitions’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 25(3), pp. 305–321. 

Ennis, P. J. (2021) ‘NFT art: the bizarre world where burning a Banksy can make it more valuable’, The Conversation. Available at: http://theconversation.com/nft-art-the-bizarre-world-where-burning-a-banksy-can-make-it-more-valuable-156605 (Accessed: 19 March 2021).

Frisch, M. (2011) ‘Sharing Authority Through Oral History’, in Adair, B., Filene, B., and Koloski, L. (eds) Letting go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, pp. 126–137.

Knell, S. J. (2016) Museums and the Future of Collecting. Florence, UK: Taylor & Francis Group

Liddell, F. (2021) ‘“Disrupting the Art Museum Now!”: Responding to the NFT social experiment’, Cultural Practices. Available at: https://culturalpractice.org/disrupting-the-art-museum-now-responding-to-the-nft-social-experiment/ (Accessed: 10 April 2021).

Lynch, B. and Alberti, J. (2010) ‘Legacies of prejudice: racism, co-production and radical trust in the museum’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 25(1), pp. 13–25.

Simon, N. (2010) The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, California: Museumz.

In Search of an Aesthetics of Crypto Art

We studied the historical data on works of NFT Art across the SuperRare marketplace*. This is what we found.

*Data as of end of March 2021

• Futuristic, retro and sci-fi themes are frequently explored and highly coveted by collectors

• “3d” art is the most viewed with higher selling points, perhaps reflecting a ‘medium’ specific to crypto art 

• In general, number of views highly correlates with price: the hype machine is real

• As in the traditional art world, NFTs tagged with “drawing” tend to sell for less

• The average color palette of NFTs tends toward purple, reinforcing an aesthetics rooted in technostalgia

We have sought to identify, based on available data, what NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are actually contributing to visual culture beyond simply fuel for financial speculation and environmental extraction. Our premise has been that it stands to benefit crypto artists to be aware of their community’s aesthetic and thematic priorities. However, the data may also be of interest to traditional fine artists, who may be looking to migrate to an artistic arena less dependent on intermediaries than the contemporary art scene, and who might bring with them certain conceptual tools which could prove valuable to crypto art’s long-term future. 

Point of Information

This text considers the terms ‘crypto art’ and ‘NFT Art’ to be interchangeable. However, clearly not all digital (nor indeed physical) artifacts tied to NFTs constitute NFT Art. Given the increasing tokenization of collectibles, there is already some agreement that NFT Art stands apart and that its value depends on more than mere scarcity, in much the same way that traditional fine art was separated from decorative arts for centuries. Whether such segregation is appropriate in this instance, however, is highly contentious, given the democratic principle by which, in theory (and on Rarible), any digital artist can tokenize their creativity as an NFT. To then introduce a separate field of NFT Art into which only some works qualify automatically implies hierarchy and structural unfairness. 

We use the term ‘crypto art’ therefore to alleviate this problem by accepting the possibility that all creative works issued with NFTs might be considered NFT Art. It is also to remove the sense that the primary object of interest in NFT Art is the NFT itself, rather than the creative process. At the same time, ‘crypto art’ is broad enough to encompass a variety of approaches, such as Plantoids, that seek to explore the blockchain as a wider ecosystem. It therefore accepts that, while an aesthetics of crypto art should prove useful, its associated privileging of artistic originality is no longer adequate when evaluating art today. 

In practice, the storage limitations of the blockchain dictate whether or not the work itself is stored “on chain”, as in the case of Autoglyphs, or “off chain”, as with CryptoPunks. We question whether such collectibles, despite being marketed separately from the vast majority of NFT Art, aren’t in fact its purest incarnation. This text therefore seeks to disentangle the making of art from the manufacture of markets.

A new conversation

One motivation for this study is that the issue of aesthetics has so far been overlooked in the mainstream commentary about NFTs. Given the market’s exponential growth, as well as the urgency of debate surrounding crypto art’s environmental cost, this is perhaps unsurprising. However, it offers an opportunity to ground the question of aesthetics in data, rather than the kind of lofty rhetoric often used to drive up prices artificially. We have sought to start a conversation about aesthetics in a way which acknowledges the concept’s historical freight, while prompting us toward greater awareness of the creative toil behind crypto art. That one of the hallmarks of NFTs so far has been a kind of beguiling slickness may be one reason why the craft has gone largely unmentioned up till now. When that craft also reflects a multitude of digital approaches it makes the question of aesthetics even more problematic, if no less intriguing. Ultimately, what is at stake in the debate over aesthetics is not simply the question of “what makes good crypto art?” But “what is crypto art?” Since without a frame of reference on which all parties agree, those who control the market will invariably determine what constitutes crypto art itself, and therefore who gets excluded. 

The search for an aesthetics of crypto art therefore requires investigating the standards by which crypto artists, as well as collectors, currently distinguish works of NFT Art as more than simply digital artifacts that have been tokenized. This is important because it acknowledges the existence of different skillsets and levels of technical facility among the community of crypto artists, whose talents have been honed well away from traditional art institutions. It’s also something artists themselves are clamoring for, as a way of rebalancing the debate away from a fetish for the token itself. 

About the data

Supported by Artnome, Flash Art and MoCDA (The Museum of Contemporary Digital Art) our team has examined a wealth of data relating specifically to the SuperRare market. We chose SuperRare for its overall market share as well as its role in popularizing the collection of crypto art. Of course, a market is more than the sum of its artists and collectors, indeed SuperRare’s selectivity when assessing artist applicants reinforces the continuing role of gatekeepers in defining the bounds of artistic legitimacy. We therefore have to accept a sample that is biased according to SuperRare’s curation, and also constricted by the current artwork formats supported.

At 22,018 works, however, the sample is significant enough to allow us to establish the priorities of the key parties. While the relative youth of the marketplace as a whole means that its founding community of artists, collectors and owners remains invested in securing a stable level of quality, or ‘Rarity’, in the art circulated therein. The fact that all of SuperRare’s NFTs are issued as single editions, in contrast to other marketplaces, also highlights its privileging of aesthetics over mass production – quality over quantity. In the long term, however, this attempt to enshrine SuperRare as a guarantor of quality will depend on mutual agreement about what constitutes quality in the first place. Based on the data, there is already some evidence as to how one might define in words such a nebulous concept. 

What artists are tagging

We considered the role of tags in clarifying artists’ labelling of their work according to common, as well as outlying, categories. Given that the market for NFTs is now a nexus for multidisciplinary artists from across the spectrum of digital creativity, there is a strong case that any aesthetics must build upon grassroots foundations. We have therefore tracked the relationship between artists’ tags and the price their works have sold for. In this way, our aesthetics articulates the motives of artists themselves, whilst acknowledging the qualities valued by collectors.

The SuperRare Tag Network: A visual representation of 344,050 artist-selected tag combinations

The data visualized in the above network accounts for every artist-selected tag minted on SuperRare. It reveals the uniqueness of certain tag combinations: for instance, Robbie Barrat’s tagging of #MachineLearning together with #Artificialintelligence for his AI Generated Nude Portrait #2 (2018). It also shows the overall complexity of relationships between tags. In total, there are 17,887 unique tags, as well as 344,050 unique combinations of tags, which suggests that artists tend to select them in a manner that distinguishes their work. This emerges more clearly when one segments the network, as in the below sample of 1,000 tag combinations.

A segmented network of the first 1,000 artist-selected tag combinations

Some tags appear with very high frequency. The most commonly selected by artists is “3d”, tagged with a little over 17% of all SuperRare NFTs. Also in the top 5 by number of NFTs are “abstract”, “animation”, “gif”, and “surreal”, each selected with at least 10% of SuperRare NFTs. We focused on the top 50 tags by number of NFTs and the average selling price for works with these tags.

Top 50 Tags by Number of NFTs: Average Price ($) vs. % of all SuperRare NFTs with that Tag

At $7,394 (ETH equivalent at sale), “sci-fi” is the highest grossing tag by average sale price, often combined with “space”, another top 50 tag with a high average price ($5,730). “2d” and “surreal” are the second most expensive tags among the top 50, just shy of $6,000, a fact which reveals the equivalent value to artists of both aesthetics and thematics. “Nude” is the highest-value tag of fine art’s canonical subjects at $4,903, though “portrait” remains more popular. These values may have been driven by Robbie Barrat’s early dominance on the SuperRare platform, though they suggest the male gaze is still very much alive.

Unsurprisingly, tags related to blockchain and cryptocurrency rank among the top 50, including “bitcoin”, “blockchain”, “ethereum” and “eth”. Given the historical bond between NFTs and Ethereum, rooted in the ERC-721 standard, one might expect a predominance of Ethereum lore in crypto art. Yet, Bitcoin is just as infused into SuperRare mythology.

Ethereum vs. Bitcoin: Network of SuperRare tag combinations containing “bitcoin” or “ethereum”

The network above explores the relationship between NFTs tagged with “bitcoin” and/or “ethereum”. The purple dots to the left represent tags paired exclusively with “ethereum” but not “bitcoin”, while on the right in orange are tags paired with “bitcoin” but not “ethereum”. Tags with both are in green in the middle. In the Ethereum-only region, we find some tags common to the Ethereum narrative – such as decentralized apps (“dapps”) and the “0x” ETH address prefix. Tags paired only with Bitcoin include myriad references to the Bitcoin genesis story and Satoshi Nakamoto. Common to both are themes circulating in the crypto community at large such as “hodl”, “lambo”, “fiat”, and “blockchain”. While tags referring to Ethereum co-founder and de facto leader Vitalik Buterin are paired with both Bitcoin and Ethereum – perhaps indicative of a rejection of Bitcoin maximalism. Overall, NFTs with either “bitcoin” or “ethereum” tags fetched lower prices on average ($1,814 and $1,263 respectively) suggesting that these topics are now somewhat clichéd for the SuperRare community.

The “average” SuperRare NFT generated by blending 22,018 works together

Five of the top 50 tags are concerned with color, though specific colors are limited to “red” and “black”, with red selling for slightly more. Seeking to probe the palette further, we mixed the colors of the entire SuperRare universe together to produce the above representation. Dominated by pastel hues of red, pink and purple, the outcome is straight from the Rothko school of data visualization. Suggestive of libidinal melancholy, the ultimate palette has an unmistakable allure of technostalgia that fits the defining themes of the market. Coupled with the popularity of “abstract”, “psychedelic” and “surrealism” – the movement that imagined a melting world – it is an irony of this attempt at an aesthetics that we have ended up with an iconography of Web3. 

On the other hand, the stress on production process evident in the frequency of “2d” and especially “3d” – which is incorporated into 89 tags across the marketplace, from “3danimation” to “3dillustration” to “3drender” – signposts the new media most suited to crypto art. A sample of the 50 most popular tags also supports the impression of a break with tradition. 30 bear no relation to traditional fine art terminology, though five of the top ten do. This reminds us that, as a media ecology, the blockchain deserves media terminology, but as a discourse crypto art remains a hybrid of analog and digital media. 

Some media critics choose to adopt the Classical Greek term technē (‘craft’), rather than aesthetics, when considering the set of principles by which media texts are crafted today. In reality, aesthetics only became the defining aspect of art in the Enlightenment, prior to which issues of ‘technical’ quality and ritual function had predominated. While it arguably hasn’t been the priority of fine art since Duchamp repurposed the urinal from a bathroom wall to the floor of a New York exhibition space. This gesture marked the birth of conceptual art as an avant-garde strategy, beginning the process of divorcing art from aesthetics that continued for much of the twentieth century. 

Crypto art proposes a finite end to the requirement that art be physical at all, thereby extending the lineage of attempts to dematerialize the art object. While NFTs depend as much on the energetic process of minting, as well as the economic logic of the ‘drop’ (often occurring simultaneously) as they do on the aesthetic appearance of the digital artifact. Today, aesthetics is only one part of a composite whole whereby media + token = crypto art. Nevertheless, aesthetic appraisal remains a crucial means by which collectors differentiate one NFT from another, beyond considerations of price, hype, etc. One thing that crypto art shares with the so-called ‘legacy’ art market is that NFTs tagged with “drawing” tend to sell for less (averaging $2,216). In reality, despite their implication of a lack of finish, these ‘drawings’ are often highly polished. They therefore reveal a potential misalignment between tags and their perceived value, one that reflects an unfortunate hangover from crypto art’s prehistory.

What collectors are watching

Our analysis of collector views and favorites has allowed us to better quantify the priorities of each party to the market. SuperRare only counts views from its pool of 2,000 active collectors, meaning the data ignores those simply passing through. The fact that a significant proportion of crypto art’s early collectors are also artists adds to the impression of a shared set of principles underlying the market.

Top 50 Tags by Number of NFTs: Average Price ($) vs. Average Number of Views

Focusing on the top 50 tags once again, we find a high correlation between the average price and the average number of views by tag. It is of course hard to untangle this relationship but it may run one of two ways: the most popular NFTs are considered of higher quality and therefore demand higher prices or the NFTs that have traded for the highest prices attract viewers more interested in the outcome of transactions. 

Works with over 500 views are dominated by name-related tags, which implies that the hype surrounding individual artists, as well as their time on the platform, is responsible for escalating prices. The most viewed artists are Hackatao, XCOPY, Pak, Coldie, and Robbie Barrat, who together account for 116,544 total views or 7.7% of all views on SuperRare despite only producing 3.8% of SuperRare’s NFTs.

Users on SuperRare can also choose to “favorite” NFTs. Given that the option to favorite a work necessitates viewing it, a correlation between views and favorites is inevitable. However, there are some outlier works. ZOMAX’s 6088AD (2021) counts 109 favorites from only 1,224 views, which hints at the outsize influence of social media in driving demand. By contrast, Vitaly Bulgarov’s THE LAST TOKEN (2021) – a reinterpretation of Leonardo’s Last Supper (1495-98) – has 2,469 views but only 55 favorites. 

ZOMAX, 6088AD, 2021

Vitaly Bulgarov, THE LAST TOKEN, 2021

Only 14 NFTs on SuperRare had more than 1,000 views by the time of publication, the majority of which demand the highest selling points. It may be that these are the works deemed “good” crypto art by the SuperRare community. Yet FEWOCiOUS is also highly viewed despite producing works less seamless than the majority, evoking something akin to a Hoch-Guston hybrid. At only 18 years old, FEWOCiOUS offers an insight into a world unencumbered by training. On the other hand, his use of endlessly looping animations that stall the spectator between morbid curiosity and hollow consumption remains the essence of the NFT experience.

FEWOCiOUS, The Sailor, 2021

The problem of aesthetics

One characteristic of fine art over the last fifty years has been the proliferation of hybrid installations rather than discrete works of traditional media: painting, sculpture, etc. In practice, while this development exorcised old hegemonic actors, it gave over the measurement of quality to the keepers of the gallery system. This invariably created a dependence on hype – couched in the language of meaningless artspeak – to fill the void. That it coincided with the growth of floating exchange rates, especially the US dollar from the early 1970s, should come as no surprise. Contemporary art today is as much a function of financialized capitalism as any other marketplace. What crypto art stands to offer is a notion of quality that is potentially more secure than contemporary art because it is more coherent in its media.

While therefore useful, aesthetics remains highly problematic, premised as it is on the ‘disinterested’ viewpoint of a supposedly neutral agent who is, in reality, the very definition of an elitist white male spectator. Crypto art’s detractors might therefore argue that this kind of ‘aesthetics’ is no more than NFTs deserve. Certainly, it would take a monumental act of sophistry to claim for crypto art the same kind of ‘autonomy’ from mass culture that Theodor Adorno once tried to claim for art. If anything, crypto art is the most rarefied (or at least the most recent) product of the cultural industries, represented by exactly the community of multidisciplinary artists historically excluded from the art world. Its problem is how to reconcile further environmental damage with the potential of NFTs to redeem a generation of digital creatives from lives of economic precarity.

What the pandemic achieved was a total flattening of all forms of artistic display, and importantly sale, across online platforms. On the one hand, this merging of apparently discrete image economies revealed the lie of contemporary art’s separateness from wider culture. On the other, it catalysed the growth of NFT marketplaces in which a new wave of ‘elite’ images could leverage the blockchain for verifiable digital scarcity. With the playing field levelled at last, it remains to be seen how the relationship between different art markets as well as their accompanying discourses plays out. Our aim has been to point a way beyond the present situation, in which speculation appears to be as much a driver of art’s value as the works themselves. 

In our view, it is time to untether crypto art from the logic of the derivative that has so fuelled contemporary art in recent years, and replace it with a new arsenal of critical strategies. Perhaps with this in mind, Kanon is currently collaborating with SuperRare on a project that uses smart contracts to reimagine artists’ resale rights in the spirit of Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky’s original vision. Whether crypto art is ultimately defined by its nuance as a financial instrument rather than the aesthetics of a digital artifact remains to be determined. What is clear is that these two components exist in a dialectical tension which threatens to further tighten the deadly embrace between art and money.

In his book Digital Aesthetics (1998), Sean Cubitt identified the drift of aesthetics away from ethics toward the neoliberal imperatives of transnational finance capital. For him, ‘the social production of the future as a field of possibility is the enterprise of digital aesthetics.’ We contend that it is exactly at the moment of art and money’s closest proximity that new forms of social practice might be forged. As crypto art increasingly cross-fertilizes with the critical strategies of contemporary art it has the chance to become a site for the critique of crypto-colonialism. Likewise, it will be in the contribution of new media artists, game engine designers and their kin that a new aesthetics will shape a new ethics of art’s production.

Highest Sold “scifi” NFT at 130.0Ξ ($251,916): Mr. Misang, #09. Company entrance, 2021

One noticeable trait of the crypto art released so far is its tendency to cross-breed traditional genres and retro styles with the hype machine surrounding digital trends. Whether the resulting chimaeras offer a pathway forward or simply a perpetual return to commodity fetish is as yet unclear. What is evident is the distinction between artists who use SuperRare to repackage works in NFT form and those whose work is purposely designed – indeed could only work – as an NFT. Mr. Misang’s recently released #09. Company entrance (see above) captures this tension perfectly as an animated version of a work from an earlier series of illustrations, titled ‘Modern Life is Rubbish.’ 

Isolating the specific qualities of NFT Art, its ‘medium-specificity’ to take a modernist trope, can be instructive in establishing its long-term trajectory as an art form, beyond simply a novel asset class. Of course, it may be that crypto art’s very multiplicity comes to define it in much the same way as art after modernism. However, it is hard not to see such a situation simply producing new forms of pastiche, rather than the kind of vital dissonance that decentralization potentially affords. Endless variety should not be confused with cultural vitality; it merely entrenches a state of neoliberal numbness in which aesthetics and ethics remain permanently uncoupled. One of crypto art’s most important achievements so far has been to puncture the illusion of contemporary art as a space of ‘high’ culture. It must not fall victim to the same hubris.

Alex Estorick is Contributing Editor for Art and Technology at Flash Art. He founded the magazine’s digital column, “The Uncanny Valley”, specializing in the relationship between AI and contemporary art.

Kyle Waters is a data scientist working at the intersection of art, tech, and machine learning. He has been contributing to Artnome since 2018. His recent work focuses on the social dimension of NFT collecting.  

Chloe Diamond is a writer and curator specializing in blockchain, data and art. At the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art (MoCDA) she works to document and advance the position of digital art through curatorial insight and education.

Hic Et Nunc Brings True Spirit Of Web Art To The Here And Now

I am pretty busy these days as an unofficial spokesperson during NFT mania's rise, so I don't get to write as often as I'd like to. I see my role as pointing people to cool new developments at the intersection of art and tech and making sure we celebrate those people too often overlooked in the development of its history. So I felt compelled to write a short article here that I hope does both.

There is an exciting new platform for NFTs called Hic et Nunc created by Rafael Lima that you should check out. It makes progress in solving a lot of the concerns I hear about NFTs. 

• Based on PoS, so it all but eliminates the ecological concerns.

• The transaction costs are measured in dollars and cents, making it financially accessible to a broader number of artists

• It is fully decentralized in that anyone can participate (no curation)

• For now, you don't even see the name of the artist, which helps slow the replication of the traditional art star system.

• It has attracted amazing generative artists like Mario Klingemann, who has led the way in bringing on many others. (it's been my dream since I first wrote about NFTs in 2017 that my favorite generative artists would find their way to the format).

Micol from Vertical Crypto Art hosted a video chat yesterday that captures the spirit of this new platform.

Video Chat hosted by Micol of VerticalCryptoArt

I see a lot of the unbridled experimentation that was present in the early Rare Pepe Wallet days re-emerging in Hic et Nunc. Code-based artists are writing shaders and developing interactive NFTs, including drawing programs and video games. 

Jumpy Dot, Mr. Doob - 2021

When I recently picked up Mr. Doobs' "Jumpy Dot" game NFT on Hic et Nunc, I couldn't help but think of John Villarz brilliant "PEPEBALT," a 2017 Rare Pepe (the original NFTs) where you play a micro-video game by tapping the spacebar to jump over spikes.

PEPEBALT, John Villarz - 2017

Villarz played an essential role in developing Joe Looney's Rare Pepe Wallet, the first NFT platform for artists. 

According to Joe Looney:

John's big contributions in rare pepe were behind the scenes; he streamlined the whole process of submitting new pepes by building the telegram bots that basically connected everything. John connected the Telegram group to rarepepedirectory and back to Rare Pepe Wallet.

I also considered him a mentor of sorts when it came to development; he was a much more experienced dev, so I was able to bounce ideas off him, and he suggested various ways to improve Rare Pepe Wallet. He will be missed.

Sadly, John recently passed away, a massive loss to the Rare Pepe and NFT communities. Making sure people understand that John's contributions were critical to what has become a worldwide phenomenon of NFTs compelled me to write this short blog post. A big reason I like NFTs is that they help us preserve digital culture, our culture. Hitherto we have not done a great job of preserving our digital culture (think Flash). 

Ball Droppings, JT Nimoy - 2004

Mr. Doobs "Jumpy Dot" also reminded me of another digital art pioneer that we lost too early. JT Nimoy, the brilliant creative technologist behind "Ball Droppings," still one of the most delightful things to ever happen on the web.

Nimoy passed away in 2020 after "several years of health issues and homelessness," according to a tweet from her friend generative art pioneer, Golan Levin. Many regretted not stepping in to assist while they still could have. Let's learn from this and support the brilliant artists and technologists within our community.

Though I did not know JT or John personally, they had a huge influence over me, the evolution of digital art, the best parts of what NFTs are becoming, and many artists I love. And I am humbled and honored to play any role, no matter how small, in amplifying their achievements and contributions and promoting their legacies. 

Dedicated to John Villarz and JT Nimoy

Who Is In Your SuperRare Network?

It’s weird to see the whole world going crazy over NFTs four years after I announced the blockchain art market is here. It feels like someone crawled into my head, recorded my dreams, and they are now being broadcast out on every mainstream media channel.

One cool way to try to make sense of this explosion in popularity is to use data and data visualization to understand just what happened and who is connected to who. Artnome data scientist Kyle Waters did just that by creating an interactive version of what is known colloquially as an “ego graph” showing who is connected to who on the popular NFT platform SuperRare.

The tool is super easy (pun intended) to use though you need to be patient as it can take a few seconds to load. Anyone can type in the name of an artist or collector as it appears on SuperRare and see who is in that artist or collector’s network.

Interestingly, some of the top artists by total sales have the smallest networks. This suggests a small number of whales (collectors with a lot of money) have become market makers for them. This is a common practice in the traditional art market, as well, with power collectors like the Mugrabi family who are said to own 1,000 works by Andy Warhol.

Pak’s SuperRare Social Graph

Another practice that comes over from the traditional art world is a desire by whales to retain privacy and anonymity. Artist Pak leads all artists on SuperRare for total dollar value in sales at $1,055,075, and has an ASP on the secondary market of $84K. His collectors’ desire for privacy can be seen in the mysterious names in Pak’s network, like N/A or Anonymous, Not in use, or other usernames such as evault, motokovault, thevault, and randaartvault that imply the works are being stored in something like a digital freeport. It makes sense that the relatively small number of collectors supporting him would prefer to remain anonymous to avoid being hacked.

Missalsimpson’s SuperRare Social Graph

By comparison, other more-prolific artists have built an incredibly broad and decentralized following by offering a larger number of works at a more affordable price. For example, the artist behind the username Miss al Simpson has created 275 works and is well connected to a large number of collectors. While she may not have a small number of wealthy collectors in control of her market, the sheer number of collectors means there is a true market for her work with many people already invested and interested in adding to their existing collections.

Eyeball Kid AKA Jonathan Perkins, Cofounder and Chief Product Officer of SuperRare

Another fun thing to look at is the social graphs for the SuperRare team, who are also all collectors. Eyeball Kid (Johnathan Perkins) is the co-founder and chief product officer. We can see from Jonathan’s graph that he has been rather selective and generally has a preference for the artists that were early to the platform.

Zach Yanger (Roses)

By comparison, Zach Yanger, chief marketing officer for SuperRare, has really spread the love and has one of the most complex social graphs I came across. Part of that may also be because he has been active as an artist in addition to collecting.

I wanted to learn more about this ego graph, so I asked Kyle Waters what compelled him to visualize the data in this way and to build this innovative tool.

When you buy a work from an artist you are building a connection between yourself and that artist. Traditionally this has been an opaque network without a structured social layer. In this opaque network, it’s difficult to discover other collectors who support the artists you do. It’s difficult to show others the curated network of artist-collector connections you’ve formed through your interests, likes, and personality. 

The SuperRare CryptoArt marketplace is a social network self-described as “Instagram meets Christie’s”. Why is this a good thing for the future of the art market and the artist-collector relationship? Because Metcalfe’s Law tells us that the more people in a network, the more useful it becomes.

Kyle also dug into my personal ego graph on SuperRare.

Artnome’s SuperRare Social Graph

Although I was the first collector, I was mostly active in the early days, and my graph reflects that. However, Kyle points out that if you step out just 6 degrees, my network encompasses just about everyone, which makes sense given how early I started.

Six Degrees of Artnome

We hope you enjoy playing around with the graph. As always, if you have suggestions or feedback, leave them in the comments or email me at jason@artnome.com and I will pass them along to Kyle. Cheers and get working on expanding your network so you can build a more interesting ego graph ;-)

Shepard Fairey Announces NFT Drop on SuperRare

Verisart and SuperRare Bridge Contemporary Art World with NFTs’  Accessibility and Authenticity in Watershed Auction Series 

10x10 NFT auction spans original NFT works from ten artists over ten weeks, including  Shepard Fairey, Random International, Rob Pruitt, Neïl Beloufa, Petra Cortright, and more 

London, UK and New York, NY. March 1, 2021-- The contemporary art world today displays its  embrace of the NFT (non-fungible tokens) marketplace with the news of 10x10 auctions (drops),  whereby ten major contemporary artists will show inaugural, solo NFT artworks over a ten  consecutive week period in an exclusive partnership with Verisart, the pioneering blockchain  certification platform, and SuperRare, the leading NFT art marketplace. While NFTs have become  popular and transformative mostly with digital and emerging artists, this auction signals a  broadening of reach and market maturity in both the participation of established, contemporary  artists and in terms of the mechanisms for authentication, licensing and provenance via both  Verisart and SuperRare.  

In 10x10, each week a leading artist will drop an original, Verisart certified NFT work on  SuperRare beginning on Monday March 1st for a ten-week period. Artists include Shepard Fairey,  Random International, Neïl Beloufa, Petra Cortright, Jonathan Yeo, Universal Everything, AES+F,  Mark Titchner, Michael Joo and Rob Pruitt. 

“The opportunity that NFTs bring to the entire value chain in the art world fundamentally changes  the market as we know it. The explosive growth we’ve witnessed with NFTs over the last month  has been nothing short of phenomenal,” Robert Norton, CEO and co-founder of Verisart, stated.  “As with any new market, trust, transparency and guard rails are absolutely critical. Verisart is  ahead of the challenge that many contemporary artists face selling works online with our  blockchain approach to authenticity and dynamic certification.” 

The 10x10 auction shows the opportunity for range and inclusivity in the NFT space, with  participating artists coming from mediums including painting, sculpture, video, installation and  street art. Represented by galleries such as Pace, Kamel Mennour and 303 Gallery, their works  have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Venice Biennale, MoMA, LACMA, Centre  Pompidou among many others. 

Shepard Fairey, whose acclaimed body of art includes the 2008 "Hope" portrait of Barack Obama  found at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, states: “Art has power. I'm interested in using  art to raise awareness for the important political and social issues of our time. Power has many  forms and is embraced or feared depending on who that power benefits, who it oppresses, who  it uplifts, and who wields it.” 

The first work to come to auction on Monday, March 1 is by French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa.  Historically, Beloufa’s NFT marks the first time an NFT has been displayed and incorporated into  a major museum, whereby the NFT is a part of the physical art at his new solo show, “Digital  Mourning,” at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan. NFTs provided a way for Beloufa to connect to  the physical and digital realms.  

“The three artworks in this exhibition, the ‘hosts’ of my show, give the visitors advice about what  they should watch. By defining them as NFTs, it affirms their existence on the internet on an  immaterial level and characterizes them and the subjects of the exhibition in an interesting way,” explained Beloufa.  

Artists and collectors alike are seeking out NFTs for their benefits, whereby Verisart authenticates  identity and uses blockchain technology for dynamic authentication and overcomes challenges in  the physical art market, including licensing, royalties, provenance and authentication. 

“In the past year, SuperRare has experienced record growth and revenue volume, with over 10  million dollars earned by both artists and collectors,” said John Crain, CEO and co-founder of  SuperRare. “It’s great to collaborate with Verisart and the various artists on the platform we built  to break down barriers to access for digital art, all while bringing a collaborative, creative social  network for art and expression in which individuals earn money, build an engaged following, and  have proof of ownership and authenticity of digital artworks.”  

Each Monday at 6 p.m. GMT/ 1 p.m. EST over 10 weeks, a Verisart certified NFT by one of the  participating artists will be available for bidding on SuperRare. Each auction will run for 72 hours,  closing on Thursdays at 6 p.m. GMT/ 1 p.m. EST. The first auction will start on March 1, with Neïl  Beloufa’s work. 

Several artists in 10x10 will use Verisart’s Fair Trade Art certificate, which provides greater  transparency and verification for artists as they donate a portion of the proceeds of the artwork  sale to charitable causes.  

About Verisart 

Verisart is an award-winning certification service enabling artists, galleries and collectors to  create certificates of authenticity securely registered on the blockchain. Founded in 2015 as the  first company to apply blockchain to certification in the art and collectibles market, Verisart has  pioneered a new patent-pending global standard for certification. Over 20,000 artworks have  been certified on the platform by more than 5000 artists including Shepard Fairey, Ai Weiwei,  Jules De Balincourt, Penny Slinger and Derek Boshier. 

Verisart was founded by Robert Norton (CEO) former CEO of Sedition, Saatchi Online, Managing  Director of King.com North America, and Head of e-commerce at AOL Europe. Verisart’s mission  is to treasure creativity by facilitating trusted transactions and empowering artists and creators to  establish their careers and legacies. 

About SuperRare 

SuperRare is a social marketplace to collect and trade unique, single-edition digital artworks.  Each artwork is authentically created by an artist in the network, and tokenized as a verified digital  item that you can own, display and trade. Since launching in 2018, SuperRare has become one  of the leading NFT platforms enabling digital artists from around the world to earn over $10 million  selling their works in the marketplace. 

Media Enquiries 

Consort Partners for Verisart 

verisart@consortpartners.com

I Made $300 Selling Tweets As Art

I made over $300 this week selling my tweets as art on the new platform Valuables. I love anything new and weird in art and tech because new trends are always set at the fringes in my experience. I also know that earning income as an artist or a writer can be difficult, so I figured I would share my experience selling my tweets as art.

It started when I noticed several creatives in my Twitter feed were talking about selling their tweets over the weekend. I initially thought it was a joke. But it also intuitively made a lot of sense to me. Many important historic communications have occurred on Twitter since 2006. If you believe in digital property (I do), why wouldn’t somebody want to own the first tweet ever, or the first tweet from space? In fact, I believe ownership of culturally relevant digital communications is actually pretty important.

When society decides something is collectible or that it has value, we typically ascribe to it a significance or importance that leads to better preservation. Too often, digital culture is poorly preserved precisely because it lacks a collector or steward to take ownership and make sure it survives the never-ending changes in technological standards. For example, Flash defined a decade of our online culture from ads and animations to games and art and, Adobe recently announced it will not be supported after 2020.

With this mindset, I decided that buying and selling tweets was both ridiculous and smart, and I dove in and bid on some historically significant CryptoArt tweets. After using Twitter’s advanced search tool, I located the tweets I wanted and simply cut and past their URLs into a field on the Valuables website.

I then had the option to click a button letting the owners of the tweets know that I had made them an offer. Knowing I really wanted these two tweets, I offered $100 each assuming that that would be more than any other sane person would spend on a tweet. I was wrong.

Within minutes, other collectors saw the tweets I carefully dug up (Valuables highlights them on their leaderboard) and a bidding war ensued. I am perhaps more bullish on digital property than most folks, so I bid as high as $419. The bidding soon passed $500 and I jumped out of the race. As of this writing it is at $955.

To recap, a platform that only became active last Friday already has active bidding wars to buy tweets that are now going into the thousands of dollars. According to Valuables’ cofounder Matthew, they have:

• $70K in bids made

• $20K in tweets sold

• 500 active users

…all in just the first few days of activity.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get more bizarre, people started bidding on old tweets of mine.

I wrote some of the early blog posts about the blockchain art market and specifically about CryptoArt, and a few folks decided they were worth collecting.

Then for fun, some of us started buying random tweets from each other just to be silly. I even took a poll which surprisingly showed that 20% of my followers would not only buy tweets, but they would buy the tweet containing the poll (I know, super meta right?).

Several of the tweets I was bidding on contained images and videos. That’s when I realized Twitter + Valuables may be the ideal format for artists looking to sell digital art on the blockchain.

There are a dozen or so platforms that let artists sign up and mint/tokenize their digital artwork and then show it off in a digital marketplace to attract collectors. But Valuables has several features that I think make it a really nice alternative/addition to existing options.

• Many digital artists already have a following on Twitter

• Unlike other platforms, the costs of minting/tokenizing work on Valuables are paid by the collector, not by the artist/tweeter

• Only work that people want to own gets minted/tokenized

• Unlike other platforms that verify creators’ identity manually, only the owner of the Twitter account can accept an offer for a tweet, so identification/validation is baked in

The way most CryptoArt marketplaces work today, artists tokenize their work first, then collectors see it in the marketplace and decide if they want to buy it. This leads to a lot of unsold work that costs the artists money to mint/tokenize (not to mention the power consumption is horrible for the environment).

In contrast, tweets are only minted on Valuables when a collector asks to buy the tweet and the owner of the tweet accepts. Using Valuables as a platform for selling digital art would, in theory, cut down dramatically on the number of works that need to be tokenized and would save artists a bundle.

Twitter also has an enormous community of digital artists and collectors that far outnumbers any other fledgling CryptoArt platform. So instead of bringing the audience to the tokenizing/minting platform, they turn it on its head and bring the minting platform to the audience.

Lastly, several CryptoArt platforms have gone out of business in the last few years making it near-impossible for collectors to find the work they bought. Having the work on Twitter (which I theorize will be around for a while) gives some additional convenience and reassurance that you can easily find the tweet/image should anything happen to Valuables.

I like the bleeding edge and I had been working on an art project called Infinite Abundance over the last few months that I was not sure how I wanted to deploy. Basically, I wrote code to produce a never-ending stream of mandala-inspired imagery using images from the public domain.

My goal was to make enough digital artworks to be able to sell them to anyone who wanted one at whatever price they could afford. However, minting on the blockchain is traditionally not a great system for producing an infinite number of works as there is a cost associated with each work. I believe that how much money you have is not a reflection of your desire to collect art, so I wanted to literally make enough for everyone, regardless of how much they had to spend.

Valuables was the perfect platform for my project. So I made a second Twitter account, ArtnomeNFTs, and announced that anyone could offer whatever they wanted and could own their unique mandala tweet from the Infinite Abundance series.

I sold 23 mandalas in the first day for a total of ~$250, or an average of $11 each. The price paid per mandala ranged from $1 to $52. To keep the abundance going, I made $200 in loans through Kiva, a service that makes loans to women, low-income entrepreneurs, students, and refugees around the world.

The mandalas continue to sell. If you are interested in testing out Valuables and buying a tweet, feel free to offer as little (or as much) as you like for a generative mandala and I will make sure there is enough supply from my end to go around.

In closing, I think my experiment of using a new platform designed for selling tweets to sell digital art was a success. I’m excited to see how other folks use the platform, as I think combining the social accountability of Twitter with the decentralization of the blockchain could actually yield many different “off-label” use cases. I had a call with Valuables co-founder Matthew and he tended to agree. I also asked him how the project came about and he shared that:

With the end of the year racing towards us, we had to keep it simple. [My co-founder] Cam came up with the idea to mint NFT tweets. I made sure it'd appeal to folks in cryptoart. The team loved it and went into grind mode going from idea to live product in a month.

If you like living on the fringe/bleeding edge of art and tech (like I do) with all the good things (and the bad things) that it can bring, give Valuables a shot. If you come up with some cool use cases, let me know. Maybe I will add them to this article. As always, thanks for reading!

Artists Rally to Support #EndSARS

Artnome has made the world a much smaller place for me. I now have friendships with many talented artists from around the world. One of those artists is my dear friend from Nigeria, Prince Jacon Osinachi.

Osinachi is a self-taught artist who developed his own unique style out of necessity. Lacking access to expensive graphics software, Osinachi persevered, inventing ways to use Microsoft Word (a word processor) as a tool for creating sophisticated visual art. His work highlights the everyday life of people in Nigeria struggling to be accepted by their own society and government. Members of the LGBTQ+ community, single mothers, and young artists and poets can all be found in Osinachi’s artworks navigating a world that does not accept them for who they are. Regular Artnome readers may recall that I featured Osinachi’s work in my 2020 art market predictions article earlier this year - a testament to the high regard I have for him as an up-and-coming artist.

When Osinachi shared with me that peaceful unarmed protestors were being slaughtered in Nigeria for standing up against police brutality and government corruption, I knew I needed to do something to help. One of the great things about Artnome is that it gives me a platform to amply my voice and the voices of others. This article briefly explains the key points around the #EndSARS protests and outlines several ways you can help (including participating in several rapidly expanding charity art auctions).

First, some background on the situation in Nigeria and the #EndSARS movement.

Why Nigerian Youth Are Protesting Against SARS

• The Nigerian judicial system is notoriously broken. Three quarters of Nigeria’s prison population are being held without sentencing.
  

• The SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) police division has a history of corruption and violence. The SARS forces target young Nigerian men with laptops and smartphones, arresting them on trumped-up fraud charges, and then demand exorbitant bail money under threats of violence.
  

• Nigerian youth have taken to the streets in a decentralized protest against SARS. According to Amnesty International, at least twelve peaceful unarmed protestors were killed at Alausa and Lekki Toll Gate Lagos, and hundreds more were injured. 

How You Can Help #EndSARS

The first step is to get the word out. This protest is being fought not only on the streets of Nigeria, but globally through social media. Consider sharing this or other articles that explain what the #EndSARS protests are about. Make liberal use of the hashtag #EndSARS to make others in your social networks aware. This costs us nothing and draws needed pressure and attention on the Nigerian government to stop abusing human rights.

Second, I am collaborating with the blockchain art market SuperRare to auction off several artworks, with 100% of the proceeds going to charity.

Take a Seat, Prince Jacon Osinachi

In tribute to Osinachi, I am offering one of my favorite pieces by him from my personal collection, Take a Seat. Take a Seat highlights the need for people to work across various differences and to celebrate diversity. In typical Osinachi style, the work is a colorful but quiet visual protest. The work features two men of different backgrounds coming together and sharing time at the same table, a simple but powerful statement.

Osinachi’s recent self-portrait “A Portrait of the Artist at 29” just sold a few days ago for $7,439. I am optimistic that Take a Seat, a defining work in Osinachi’s oeuvre, will do well at auction and help to raise funds for this important cause.

A Portrait of the Artist at 29, Prince Jacon Osinachi

When I announced that I wanted to help to raise funds and to draw attention to the #EndSARS protests, other artists on SuperRare offered their support, as well. I was particularly touched that Argentinian artist Lucas Aguirre was the first to step up and reach out. Aguirre is among my favorite digital artists that I have discovered in 2020. His work makes extremely creative use of photogrammetry (3D scanning) combined with painting. This technique frees his 3D art from the shiny, plastic, kitschy look common to so much 3D art and brings it into a warmer, richer aesthetic.

Aguirre has generously donated his work Untitled which already has a standing bid of 3 Eth (about $1,234.65). It’s an excellent example of Aguirre’s painterly 3D aesthetic and will make an great addition to any serious digital art collection.

Untitled, Lucas Aguirre

That Aguirre was the first artist to reach out was especially meaningful to me. Argentina is dealing with its own issues including extreme inflation and COVID spikes, making life difficult for most Argentinians. Perhaps I should not have been so surprised, as it is often those who are suffering who are most sensitive to the pain of others.

The good folks at SuperRare will be putting up a dedicated page featuring the works being sold for charity in the next few days. I am already seeing other SuperRare artists making generous donations including Lady In Love by Yosnier Miranda.

Lady in Love, Yosnier Miranda

Yosnier shares that his work is inspired by the absence of love and presence of loneliness. He has developed a lot of great relationships with friends from Africa and sympathizes deeply with them. When he saw his friends getting anxious about their family members back in Africa, he wanted to help, but was not sure what he could do other than share petitions. He is hopeful that his donation will help raise attention and funds for the cause, “even if just a little.”

I’d love to see more artists with work on SuperRare contributing to help Osinachi and the #EndSARS protestors. If you are an artist on SuperRare and are interested in participating, please reach out to me about donating a piece to the cause.

There are, of course, lots of great digital artists who are not yet on SuperRare. For those artists, my friend Danil Pan is also organizing a live auction on Telegram (an encrypted instant messaging platform) to raise funds for the cause. As of this writing, Danil currently has 43 artworks donated from 27 artists!

For Danil’s auction, artists can donate work minted on any Ethereum-based platform. If you have no idea what Ethereum or blockchain are but you want to help, DM (direct message) Danil on Twitter and follow his account for more details on the auction.

If you are an artist and you enjoy reading the free content on Artnome, please consider donating work to one of these auctions. If you are a collector, please consider participating in the auctions by bidding on the work generously being donated. If you would like to simply make a direct donation of money, you can find a list of charities supporting #EndSARS here.

When Osinachi saw how the arts community came together to help support him, he was overwhelmed with gratitude. He asked me to share the statement below with Artnome readers:

#EndSARS is the first time young people in Nigeria have come together with one voice to demand that institutions in the country are held accountable. It has gone beyond ending police brutality to asking for good governance where leaders aren't in sync with the needs of the people, and it must be sustained for a better world for us all.

This battle is as much about getting information out about the #EndSARS movement as it is about raising funds. It is critical that we let the Nigerian government know that we are all watching to make it as difficult as possible for them to abuse human rights. If you cannot afford to participate in the auction or make a donation directly, please consider sharing this article and/or the #EndSARS hashtag. Because as the great Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently stated, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Interview with Generative Artist Kjetil Golid

All communities have identities built around core principles. I’ve learned over the last few years that the traditional art world tends to value, promote, and embrace scarcity, and as a result, often finds that there are not enough resources to go around. It is noteworthy to me that communities that promote abundance, sharing, and generosity, such as the generative art community, often find that they have all of the resources and support that they need and more.

Kjetil Golid embodies the generative art ethos. Golid open sources all of his code for other artists to learn from. Further, he has built an amazing set of free tools on his website that makes it easy and fun for anyone to manipulate his algorithms, producing brilliant visuals and opening the door to generative art.

One of the things I really enjoy about Golid is how down to earth he is. He mostly creates art for fun, and the joy of creation comes through in his work. It was a pleasure to interview him for “The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art” exhibition currently running online at the Kate Vass Galerie. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did.

INTERVIEW

JB:   It’s great to meet you, Kjetil. I’ve been following your work for a long time and I’m a big fan, and I appreciate you taking the time to chat.

KG:  Yeah, great. Thank you.

JB:   Where are you located? 

KG:  I’m located in Trondheim in Norway. It is a city in the middle of Norway.

JB:   Born and raised there, your whole life?

KG:  No, I actually come from a small village in the south of Norway. I moved here after I finished studying at the university.

JB:   Did you study computer science? Was that your academic background?

KG:  Yes. I actually took a bachelor’s in cognitive science, and I specialized in computer science afterward for my master’s degree.

JB:   I’m always interested when I talk to folks that operate at the intersection of art and technology to understand their background in terms of which came first, programming or art, or if they kind of progress at the same time. How would describe your progression in terms of your interests?

KG:  I would say it’s from the math side. Actually, I started a bachelor’s degree in graphic design first. It was there where I got introduced to Processing, the programming language. But I didn’t really make a lot of it. I quit the design school and I started cognitive science. Later on, I studied computer science where I developed a fascination for structures and systems, like Turing machines and the regular languages, deduction systems and everything, which was also what I wrote my thesis about. I used programming as sort of a tool to visualize and understand these different concepts.

From there, I found out that introducing things like randomness and different kind of data sets would make some interesting results.

Cross Hatch Automata - 2020, Kjetil Golid

JB:   That’s fascinating. Around what year did you first use Processing?

KG:  I took graphic design in 2011, but I didn’t know anything about programming back then. It wasn’t until maybe a couple of years later that I started actually doing some notable works in Processing. But I was also just messing around and experimented doing things in order to learn various programmatical and mathematical concepts.

JB:   Wow. I look at your work and I’m always blown away. I don’t consider myself a very strong coder, but even my brother, who is a developer, has a lot of respect for the work that you produce from a technical standpoint. I obviously look at it more from the art side, although I have some programming background.

Was it through school that you learned the Processing programming language or were you largely self-taught? Was it through other artists’ code? Perhaps a combination?

KG:  It was mostly from school. I learned Java in university. Processing is Java-based, so it’s basically a simpler version of Java. So mostly from there. 

Then I learned some more of these visual techniques and methodologies from Daniel Shiffman.

JB:  Oh, yeah. Dan’s great!

KG:  And various other people that have made a lot of visual work.

JB:  You seem -- in the best way possible -- very generous with your code. I love how you produce interfaces that people can play around with. A lot of artists just produce the work, and sometimes even actively try to hide how they are making it. It seems like you are compelled to share your code and how your how artwork is created. Does that come from having benefited from other people? How do you think about open-sourcing code and sharing?

Hatch Automata Rotate - 2018, Kjetil Golid. Go play with it! It’s a ton of fun!

KG:  I think I kind of owe it to the world since my own progression has been so dependent on the generosity of others, so I feel like it’s only natural that I open source my work. It leads to some weird cases where what I sell to people is actually open-source. Not even just to download for free, but to actually generate the work themselves, to generate however many examples they would like. Even then, I think it’s great to see people downloading the code and continuing the work, making their own reimaginations of things. I think that’s really great to see.

JB:  That’s great to hear. The only reason I was able to learn programming is because I learned from examples by folks like Casey Reas and Jared Tarbell in the early 2000s. So many of my friends that, like me, come from traditional art backgrounds would never have learned any programming at all if it weren’t for their generosity.

Now that the art market seems to be taking an interest in generative art, I worry that some artists are getting more protective of their code than they used to be. There was no opportunity to make money before, so there was no reason to hide your code. But now that it’s opening up, I feel like there’s a trend towards people protecting their code instead of sharing it.

Why would you think someone would buy it if they could download the code and produce it for free?

KG:  Well, the closest comparison would be to download music and movies and whatnot. You can always do that, and it's obviously free. But maybe the art world would need to see this change, also, that buying work is not about obtaining just the visual stuff. Of course, you can download the Mona Lisa. But that is not the same as buying it. Especially on the CryptoArt scene. Getting the actual token is kind of like my signature on the work and it would be a completely different thing if you just downloaded it for free.

Invade 1 - 2020, Kjetil Golid

JB:   I agree. Hopefully there’s a new breed of collectors that will come along that are less obsessed with owning the physical object and having something that no one else can own and want to collect to help support the creation of more work, too. That would be the ideal. Maybe we’re slowly moving in that direction.

Not a lot of the generative artists that I’ve spoken to or am friends with have necessarily embraced the crypto or blockchain art world just yet -- although, I’ve personally been very interested in that space for a while. What’s your experience been like? I know you’ve been on KnownOrigin for a while, and now SuperRare, as well.

KG:  It’s kind of random that I ended up on KnownOrigin. I hadn’t really looked into it much until I got approached with an offer to join. I didn’t really think a lot about it. I just added some of my stuff there. I find it to be an interesting concept now with all the -- maybe this can be the way we actually distribute digital art. I really don’t condemn other people for not joining here, and as I said, it’s really just by chance that I ended up there myself. I don’t really take my artwork -- it’s not this very serious thing for me, really, so I think it’s just kind of fun.

Curvescape 1 - 2018, Kjetil Golid

JB:   It sounds like you produce your art for the joy of producing your artwork. You’re not necessarily trying to become a world-famous artist or something like that. Would that be fair that it’s really about the making process and the ability to share with others that drives you?

KG:  Yeah, definitely. As I said, I started this to learn concepts in the first place and mess around with different structures and learn different algorithms. At some point, I figured that you could make these things quite beautiful and really emphasize the interesting parts of the algorithms by using colors and shapes. I really didn't think that this would end up as something I can print and put on a wall and stuff like that. But then it did end up going that direction. I don’t think my motivations have changed.

JB:   That seems like a healthy way to look at it, especially if it keeps you producing work.

Maybe you haven't thought about this side as much, but another question that changes, it seems like, from artist to artist is whether or not they consider the code itself to be the artwork or the output of the code. Given that generative art can produce so many variations and versions on a similar theme, do you see the individual images or the code that produces them as the art? In the old days, you made a painting and there was one painting or a print and there were a limited number of those prints, and the physical output was the thing you would purchase and hang on your wall. But I think more and more, it seems like some of these generative artists are thinking, well, the code is the artwork, and I built the system and the system is the artwork more so than the output. Have you thought about that much? Where would you land on that?

KG:  I definitely won’t consider my code the artwork. That is not art by any means. [laughs]

JB:   [laughs]

KG:  Yeah, I think I would consider the system the artwork, if anything, because, as you know, I post a lot of my stuff on Twitter and Instagram. I rarely post a single instance of something I created. I post several because I feel like part of the expression is the variation in between those instances, and posting or releasing or publishing only one of those instances, something would be missing from that. So maybe the generator itself or the system, as you said.

JB:   I really appreciate that you show the variations because I feel like it gives me a window into your process when you can see multiple variations on each work. I think some artists artificially limit how much work they put out there because they’re worried about trying to make it scarce or rare so that they can drive up the value of it. But as an artist myself, I know that the process is arguably the most important part. And as an art appreciator, being able to go on that journey with someone enriches the experience. I really enjoy that you’re as open as you are and show the different variations.

Sometimes people who don’t know how to program think that since a program can run the same way every single time and because it is an explicit set of instructions, there must be no accidents in the creative process of creating generative art. But almost everyone I’ve talked to has said that their creative process for making generative art is loaded with accidents and surprises. 

I wonder for your process, do you have something in your mind ahead of time, and then you go and code it and try to make what is in your head a reality? Or is it really more of an exploration where you’re continually surprised by what you’re producing? How does that work for you?

Stock 3 - 2020, Kjetil Golid

KG:  I think I would say that both of these approaches are familiar to me. Sometimes I have a very clear idea, not necessarily on the finished visuals, but on the system that I want to create, and then later on, you can decide on the details, which are shapes and colors. 

But a lot of times, I think of maybe a process or some sort of way of doing things, and I don’t really manage to imagine how it will look, and those are the most interesting cases, I think, where you actually have to program it in order to see what it will look like. The only downside there is that most of the time it will look quite boring and uninteresting, but sometimes it actually makes something really, really intriguing to me. And then it is easy to add on things, but then the next part there is to actually visualize this in the way that actually emphasizes these intriguing structures. 

So back to what you asked with whether or not this is an accident. I think it’s partly that, because I don’t really know how it will look, but I never sit down and just let the accidents take control, because then it will usually not be very effective because you will only change things and you will kind of see what happens, and you won’t really progress much. To me, it’s important to have some sort of direction when you program, and maybe you make an accident yourself because of the randomness here, it turns out in a way you didn’t expect. But then I usually try to either understand how it turned out that way or just try to keep on my plan so that I don’t lose control in a way.

Dual - 2020, Kjetil Golid

JB:   I think that makes sense, and it almost dovetails into one of the works that I wanted to talk about, one of your more recent works, dual, which features almost a battle between noise versus cellular automata. The theme of the Game of Life… show is loosely around cellular automata, and I know you have a work where there’s a structured cellular automata part to it and then noise, which I at least think of as randomness, and it almost seems as though there’s a tension between the two that sort reflects the process you just described. There’s some amount of control and some amount of almost chaos. Maybe talk a little bit about your inspiration for that piece or how you approached that piece.

KG:  So, as you said, it’s cellular automata, so it’s a really small and strict set of rules which makes the basis of that piece. The noise part is actually part of another piece I made — not really a work, it’s more like a tool to distort any image, actually, that you bring. But the automata part is based on this traditional variant where pixels can be alive or dead and in a 2D grid. You scan each row, and based on some very small set of rules, you make each pixel white or black. I thought, what if you changed those, you don’t really change the rules, but you change the visualization. Instead of using black and white pixels, you can use lines that go in different directions based on the state above or the lines above. And then you use a similar set of rules to actually colorize the spaces between those lines. It turned into this quite nice hexagonal pattern. And the nice thing about this thing, in particular, is that you have total control over what it makes, so it may seem random, but it is actually based on some quite strict rules. The only seed for this randomness is the number you give it. So whenever you give it the number 120, every time you give it 120, you will get exactly the same output. But it seems so random because it turns so complex so fast.

Rules - 2020, Kjetil Golid. [H200-V129–D33–A227], [H244–V60–D84–A121], [H61–V225–D209–A161], [H45–V147–D195–A228], [H247–V149–D176–A21] and [H15–V43–D30–A85]

JB:   When I first was told about John Horton Conway and the Game of Life and cellular automata, those were new concepts for me in 2007, 2008. I was just starting to really learn about emergence in generative art and it was changing my world view. I think it’s easy to look at the complexity of the things all around us in the world and think, oh, wow, some higher power or something that we could never understand must have produced these things because of the level of detail and complexity they contain. But then once I realized that you can get such dynamic and complex output from such elegant and short input and code, it really shifted the way I think about things. I wonder how much your work been influenced by folks like Conway? Also, have they shaped the way you think about the complexity in the world beyond art?

KG:  Yes. I think the first time I heard about Conway was through one of Stephen Hawking’s books, actually, where he made a similar point that you make here where he introduced the rules of the Game of Life and talked about how the only concepts you have in those rules are dead cells, live cells, and the concept of something they bring something else, and out of it, you get things like movement and spinners and gliders and generators, all kinds of things, which you can then start to talk about and make rules about. But in reality, that is not a concept at all from the maker. And similarly, he made the comparison to physics and laws we have about movement and gravity or electricity, but maybe there’s actually some even simpler rules behind that that we just haven’t explored, and then going further onto string theory and everything. But I really like that comparison. Maybe that was something that sparked my joy for these mathematical systems that lay the ground for these emergent structures, emergent systems.

Hatch Ruleset - 2020, Kjetil Golid

JB:   Sometimes I think maybe I’m stretching it too far, but I think one of the really important things about generative art that maybe people don’t fully understand is that it is a shift away from the traditional mode artists work in. For thousands of years, we painted what we saw. We tried to mimic or give the illusion of the outside appearance of our world through portraits and landscapes and things like that, and I think one of the shifts that, to me, feels like something that we’re doing really for the first time in the last 50 years or so is that instead of just replicating the outward appearance of things, we’re actually trying to understand the systems that create them. And as artists, we’re creating our own systems that either emulate or simulate those algorithms or systems that we see around us. Does that make sense or hold water, this idea that artists may be moving towards building realities and making systems that can create rather than just trying to copy what they see that’s nature’s output of a system?

KG:  I don’t know if it’s a conscious decision artists make, but I find it to be a nice thought that we moved from mimicking the visuals over to mimicking the logic in the processes. One of the things that I’ve played around a lot with is Lindenmayer systems, which have exactly that motivation, where Aristid Lindenmayer wanted to mimic the growth of plant cells and made this super simple and super beautiful Lindenmayer system, which is sort of a fractal, but which can make beautiful treelike structures and many other things, also, depending on how you visualize it afterward. I think that’s the beauty of a lot of these things — coming back to your question about what is the actual artwork here — and sometimes I think that it's this back end here, the generator, and sometimes it almost doesn’t matter how you present it because the structure behind it is so intricate itself, and it’s not about finding clever ways, you don’t need to be as clever to represent it visually because the clever part is already coded in there, so you just have to find a good way of representing it to just emphasize the structure.

Lindenmayer - 2017, Kjetil Golid. Visit his site to generate your own variations.

JB:   There’s the emphasis of the structure, and in some cases, these are already algorithms that exist that artists like yourself are playing with or expanding in new directions. But I also wouldn’t undersell your abilities in what I would call traditional artistic skills — so composition, color, rhythm and things like that. I think about the 1980s — I’m fairly older, I guess — and in the ‘80s, a lot of the fractal work that was coming out were these sort of garish, ugly colors, and no real thought to composition. They were more like purely mathematical exercises, but there wasn’t a lot of sensitivity, for lack of a better word, or artistic training or background in it. But when I see your work, for example, to me, it feels like there’s a lot of thought into things like composition and color and balance. And those things go beyond just adding to the beauty of the system. I think they add sort of an emotive layer. We respond emotionally when we see colors or shapes or forms put together in certain ways. So I think you do have quite a significant role beyond just the system in making visual choices, which are also programmed. Do you know what I mean?

Fractal Squares - 2017, Kjetil Golid

KG:  Yeah. You may be right there. There’s a lot of ugly fractals out there. [laughs]

JB:   Right. Because a lot of people, I think, that maybe don’t understand this stuff think, well, one programmer’s program is just as artistic as another’s. I think that’s wrong on multiple levels. There are people that write beautiful code and people that write ugly code on the system side, and there are people that write code that can produce faithfully an algorithm, but it’s not necessarily aesthetically or emotionally engaging, and there are others who really have a skill and talent for that. And I’d kind of put you in the latter.

One of the things that I think is interesting, as we were talking about how some of these processes are sort of reflected in the natural world around us, is the recent conversation in the last two years around generative art and AI art, ML art, GANs (generative adversarial networks). More and more in the news, people are talking about, are these artificial intelligence going to replace artists, which I find kind of silly, but I guess some folks who I respect believe that it’s a real threat and there’s potential that things could go that way. 

When I’ve seen GANs produce work on their own, and people try to promote it as art or sell it as art uncurated, I’m usually not very impressed. It just looks like a bunch of mush. Of course, in my opinion, there are some artists that are doing great work with AI and ML, but it’s usually the human intervention that makes it interesting.

Some of your tools are the closest thing I’ve seen to automating actually really interesting art. I’ve used some of your tools, and I drag a few different sliders and pick from different preset color schemes, and I’ve been very happy and pleased with the outputs to the point where I thought, ah, I should print this one out and hang it on my wall — and as an art collector, I’ve got limited wall space.

Image I generated using Kjetil’s Marching Squares (2019) algorithm tool

JB: There are a few questions packed up in there. What are your thoughts in terms of the potential threat of replacing artists versus maybe it’s just an augmentation of artists using some of these automation tools like AI and ML, or even traditional generative art or programming, in general, like yours? Should artists worry or think about the fact that what they do could be automated and replaced, or do you see these technological advances more as the opportunity to give artists a new tool? They’ll never replace the artists, they’re just a new tool that can extend their creativity?

KG:   Right. I certainly don’t see this as a threat in any way. I guess in the most extreme case we would end up at a place where — maybe we're already there —where we can’t really distinguish AI art from human art. In that case, I still don’t see this as a bad outcome, because then we’ll just have more artists, and it wouldn’t stop humans from making art. And I also think, well, if computers make better art than us, then I think we have a bigger problem than a computer making art.

But I think what might be more interesting to see is what you talk about, this collaboration thing where we traditionally had the direction of someone having some sort of intention that they wanted to express or some meaning that they express through their art, and then people soak that in. But now we are in a state where computers make art devoid of any meaning, devoid of any tension, but maybe we are the ones that can implant it with intentions. So, for instance, you see in GANs, artists have started generating music and generating lyrics for their music, and even though that may be a bit gimmicky or something, it’s still a nice thought that, yes, they make lyrics that are void of any meaning, but it’s easy for us, we are really good at that, to actually implant this with meaning afterward. So I think that’s kind of an interesting idea, to turn that intention to expression and turn that around so that you only have computers making a lot of expressions, and then we are giving it meaning afterward.

JB:   That’s a fascinating insight. It makes a lot of sense that the production of images is one thing, but the making of meaning is another, and it feels, at least to me right now, that making of meaning — whether it’s the artist, the curator, the art appreciator, or some new role that evolves — it’s the humans, at least for now, that really excel at making the meaning.

KG:  And I never said that my art has had a lot of meaning. I’ve been quite open that it’s only experimentation for me to visualize structure and systems and intriguing visuals. So I am fully open [to] that kind of art where you have a completely computer-generated thing, as long as that is not the interesting part. I don’t want my art to be interesting because it’s made with a computer or because it’s made automatically. Usually, people don’t care about looking at mediocre art or listen to mediocre music just because it was made in some unconventional way.

Ash Dragon - 2020, Kjetil Golid

JB:  How do you want people to look at your work? What experience or what do you want people to take away from your work? How do you want them to benefit from it? Or do you think more about, this is just something you enjoy and share it without so much of a concern about how people receive it?

KG: It simply started that way, that I made this mostly for myself, and I know I made something cool when I played with it for hours, just tweaking variables and different perimeters. Usually, when I find it funny and I find it intriguing to look at, a lot of other people experience it in the same way. I haven’t really thought about it a lot more than that. I have not started making art for my crowd. I usually make new things when I have either read about some new process or some new algorithm that I haven’t heard about before.

JB:  My experience, for what it’s worth, is that artists that make work for themselves are the ones that most successfully engage other people. Maybe it’s a little bit Zen, but the harder you try to please a crowd or make something that you think people will like, the less honest or sincere it can feel sometimes. I think part of what we’re addicted to as art appreciators is getting a window into someone’s sincere exploration into a new direction. So, for what it’s worth, I would encourage you to continue to work in the same direction.

Generative patterns - 2020, Kjetil Golid

JB: All of your work has some really interesting color palettes that I associate with you — and I’m pretty sure you’ve done some work with sort of auto-generating color palettes. It’d be nice to know a little bit more about that. But then some of my favorite work of yours might be the curve-scapes, the curved landscapes, which I think have no color at all. Maybe if you could talk a little bit about some of the work you’ve done with the auto-generating the color palettes, and I might bug you to talk a bit about the curve-scapes after that.

KG:  Most of my earlier work has been mostly monochromatic because I didn’t feel like I needed color. So, for instance, when I talk about with the Linenmayer systems, you can grow beautiful, random trees. I felt there that the colors only added noise because the structure was there, so clear. But then later on, I think maybe it was cellular automata, one piece where I started seriously introducing some color palettes, and I found that it’s really added to that work. And after that, I don’t try to push these palettes into all my work. But when I feel like it actually pushes the work further and it makes the structure clearer, I experiment with some color. The palettes are not auto-generated, most of them, but they are kind of curated by me. I spend a lot of my time just roaming the Internet for nice photography, illustrations, videos and everything, and whenever I see a nice frame with some good colors, I try to extract the palette from it. And I’ve collected this into my library that I call “chromatome”. First it was just a personal tool just to simplify the use of colors in my work, but then later I just open-sourced it so that more people can use it. It starts becoming quite a large collection of color palettes. It’s almost hard to handle the amount of palettes.

Generative patterns - 2020, Kjetil Golid

JB:  I find them phenomenal. And knowing that you curated them by hand is even more impressive. I think when I see a work that has one of your palettes, the color is one of the first things that hits me or helps me understand that I’m looking at one of your works. And then in using your tools, you turn rapid application of color palettes into a tool where you can try out different things. And it’s amazing how much quickly going through different sets of color palettes dramatically changes the feel and response to the images.

KG:  Yes. It’s also fascinating to me how one color palette works so well in one piece and it totally misses in another piece. So there’s a lot of theory behind there which I haven’t really delved into, but I would really like to explore further, how the connection between shapes and rules you have are different shapes and how the collection of colors can emphasize that.

JB:  I can imagine you could spend an entire lifetime delving just into that. You think about color theorists like Johannes Itten or Josef Albers, or Munsell is another one. You know, Albers with just his squares, he just created nested squares over and over and over again. People thought, well, that’s boring, but he was trying to hold something constant so that he could drill closer in on the variability of color and impact on us. I really enjoy that aspect of your work.

Who are some other artists that you look to for inspiration? It doesn’t have to be generative artists, although that would be interesting, too. Are you an art lover, art appreciator, or do you pull your influence from nature and other sources?

KG:  Outside of generative art, I don’t have a lot of knowledge about traditional art or any other kind of digital art, really. I have, as a natural consequence of this, seen a lot of generative artists in the last couple of years. I really love people like Tyler Hobbs and Matt DesLauriers, for instance, are the two big ones for me, and also Manolo from Argentina, who I really like, putting out such a great volume of amazing generative content all the time. It’s just mind-boggling to me.

JB:  Yeah, I didn’t think Manolo was a real human until I interviewed him. [laughs]

KG:  [laughs]

JB:  I didn’t understand how anyone could produce that much work and reinvent themselves every single day that way. But he is a real person. He is a very sweet and nice person. 

And yeah, I like Matt’s work a lot, as well. I don’t think I know Tyler Hobbs’ work as well, so I’ll have to check that out. But I know Matt also does a lot with sharing his code and teaching. There are many reasons to love generative art, but one of them when I started in 2002, 2003 was just how generous and open the community is with sharing code and helping each other learn, and I think that makes it really unique and fun. It’s sort of the opposite of the art world which is super competitive and can be kind of petty sometimes. Hopefully that spirit stays.

So two questions. For the average person these days, should some level of programming literacy be mandatory as part of a common core education that people have, or it doesn’t really matter and leave it to the engineers? Second, do you think people need to have some level of understanding of code to truly appreciate your work?

Studio apartments - 2019, Kjetil Golid

KG:  I don’t think that all people should learn programming, but I think more and more jobs would be centered around some sort of programming. So I definitely think that it should be introduced earlier than it is today, but as sort of general knowledge, I don’t think it’s necessary to bring that pain upon themselves. [laughs]

JB:  [laughs] Yeah, learning to program can be painful for sure. For me, it was either recursion or — I think it was actually pointers. Before that, I was cruising along and was like, I could be an engineer, I understand this. And then I got to pointers and I was like, okay, this is my wall. I’m done. [laughs]

KG:  [laughs] Right. I don’t think people should need to have any sort of programming background to appreciate my work. At least, I hope I have some followers don’t know programming. I don’t know. But as I said earlier, I hope people don’t find this interesting because it’s computer made or because there’s code behind it. Of course, it’s very nice when people say they find the code also interesting and used it for several things. But I hope it’s not necessary. I hope it stands as a visually intriguing work on its own, and if people think that I made it by hand or in Photoshop, that’s totally fine by me.

JB:  That’s fascinating. Such a wide spectrum from people that think, well, the output doesn’t matter at all, it’s my code that I built that matters, to — I think you’re a bit more on the other side of the spectrum where it’s almost as if they focus too much on the tool, then it’s almost like the novelty of the tool takes away from the output, which is what, in this case, maybe matters the most.

KG:  I am very open to people asking me how I made things, and I think it’s nice to see that people are curious about the process. I’m also very open about the process. But I think it’s a bit weird sometimes, that you probably wouldn’t — the first thing you wanted to ask a painter about would probably not be what kind of paint he uses. But somehow a lot of people find the process very interesting whenever it’s computer-generated. Maybe it’s because for some people, more approachable; for some people, definitely not more approachable. But I guess the people that actually are more interested in this have some sort of background in computer science or something similar.

JB: I really appreciate your time, and I love your work and I'm glad we had the opportunity to dive into it a bit deeper. 

I like at the end of an interview, I like to make sure that I ask if there’s anything you’d like to share that I haven’t touched on, any new work that you’re building that you think people should know about, anybody whose work you think we should check out, anything that we didn’t cover that you think we should go over?

KG:  If you haven’t checked out Tyler Hobbs, check him out.

JB: Will Do! Thanks again for your time!

Interview With Generative Artist Jared Tarbell

At its best, art is transcendent and sublime. However, few artists can regularly create works that evoke feelings of awe and wonder on that level in its viewers. Even fewer artists have managed to do this by writing code on a computer, a tool which many consider to be at odds with natural beauty, and sometimes even nature itself.

Among generative artists, Jared Tarbell is singular in his ability to continuously create works that rival nature in both their complexity and grace. He has been doing so for decades. Tarbell’s work is beyond timeless. The images he created in the early 2000s still feel like they are light years ahead of where we are with generative art today.

It was Tarbell’s work that turned me from a bratty young studio art major who dismissed all digital art into a lifelong advocate for generative art. I have written about Jared’s work for years. I’ve also included his pieces in exhibitions that I’ve curated around the world. However, I never had the opportunity to speak with Jared personally until now.

It turns out Jared does not do very many interviews, which made this an especially great honor for me. Early in the interview, I discovered that, like myself, Jared was raised Mormon and has since left the faith. While I left that out of the interview, it gave me important insight. I see Jared’s work as the reconciliation of the intrinsic spirituality of the church and the inherent logic of computer science. This is a childhood experience that I personally know very well. I believe that through his art — and particularly, his embrace of emergence — Jared seeks to find harmony between the seemingly oppositional forces of the spiritual and the rational.

Our interview comes in the context of the show “The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art,” currently running online at the Kate Vass Galerie. The show explores the concept that very simple systems or sets of rules can explain much of the complex behavior we see in the world around us. This idea of ‘complexity evolving from simplicity’ is core to Jared’s work.

I am thrilled to contribute to the relatively small amount of literature on this incredibly important but private artist. Enjoy!

Interview

Jason Bailey: Jared, I consider myself the president of your unofficial fan club.  I’ve looked for recent interviews on you and your work for years and not much has come up.

Jared Tarbell: Let me tell you, I really admire you. I think I’ve read most of everything you’ve written. And, you know, I don’t do interviews, and I’ve got a lot of requests. Most people want to talk about Etsy and how to create a billion-dollar startup. [Interviewer’s note: Tarbell co-founded the online retailer Etsy in 2005.] So doing this interview is a rare thing, and I’m really happy that I get to talk to you.

That’s maybe why there isn’t too much history or too many recent interviews on me, because I’ve realized with a little bit of public attention that I don’t enjoy it. I really do like being kind of private with my life and my work, because I don’t really don’t take myself that seriously. It’s really your perspective and your insights that’s compelled me to do this interview.

Jason Bailey: Wow, thanks, that really means a lot to me.

I’d like to start by asking a question I ask a lot of generative artists. Did you come from math to art or from art to math? Or were they parallel interests that kind of drove each other?

Jared Tarbell, Bubble Chamber, 2003, Processing sketch

Jared: Great question. I was encouraged to make art in the home by my mother quite a bit. But my background in college was mathematics and computer science, so I really viewed the world that way. I also wasn’t afraid to try to express myself or try to find beauty in computation. I tend to view the world computationally — the idea that this world is a very complex system and that it’s hard to try to identify the rules that are driving it. It’s just some kind of natural phenomenon that we don’t understand. 

But in reality, you can break the world down into these very simple rules that interact on orders of magnitude beyond what we’re capable of imagining. It’s a result of this phenomenon, this emergent phenomenon. I don’t know if it describes everything. In fact, I kind of don’t believe it does. I think there still are some very spiritual, mysterious elements to the universe. But certainly, thinking about problems computationally, you can get pretty far in understanding what’s actually happening.

Jason: That’s really insightful. So did your interests in programming start in college?

Jared: I was programming at the age of 14. My dad brought home a computer from the labs. It was, like, a Sanyo 8088. And more importantly, he taught me how to program in BASIC really simple little things such as number guessing games, like the game Battleship where you pick a number and it’s higher or lower. I eventually moved on to Pascal and created a two-player version of Tetris. You can actually still find it online. I think it’s called Atomic Tetris.

Jared Tarbell, Atomic Tetris, 1991

So I was really into computers, and I knew that I wanted to study computers in college. In fact, I sold one of my first games — that Atomic Tetris — to a software bundler. They sold software bundled with new computers. It was Packard Bell at Montgomery Ward. You would get this collection of games. It paid me a few thousand dollars, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but at the time, it was huge. That’s like a few thousand dollars before college. It helped me pay for my tuition the first couple of years.

I studied computer science right away, eventually learned all the languages they force you to learn in college — C, Pascal, and Miranda and COBAL. But there was no web work. 

I really wasn’t working as an artist. I was interested in making video games. That’s what the gateway question was for me. How do I create video games? Because they were just so fun at the time!

Then getting out of college, I realized the web was really coming up, and I really wanted to make a web page. Just something, but I didn’t understand what it was yet. And I really wasn’t creating these algorithms — like, these drawing machines that I think I’ve become well known for — until later when I discovered Edward Tufte.

I was a computer programmer like most computer programmers, making just the ugliest websites you can really imagine. Functionally perfect, working and taking your data, but just really hard to use and ugly. And one of my early employers sent me to an Edward Tufte conference and said, “Jared, just go spend the day listening to this guy.” You’re familiar with him?

Jason: Yes! I never thought about it, but I can see how your color palette may have been influenced by Tufte?

Jared: Yes. Absolutely. And so many of my design aesthetics came from him. He breaks down design with visual rules. My very analytical mind at first says, well, okay, if I’m making a grid, I don’t need to draw the grid. I just need to draw the elements. And instantly, it was like, wow, that actually looks really good.

Jared Tarbell, Sand Dollar, 2004, Processing sketch

Jared: Another particularly powerful lesson I learned from Tufte was small multiples, which applies to generative systems. You can build this machine that generates an infinite number of forms, but all very similar forms. But how do you show what the machine is doing to people? The way to do that is by just laying small multiples right next to each other. When the outputs of the machine are all next to each other, you get an idea that this is a system — this isn’t a single image. I think it was after I applied Tufte’s rules and I started writing these programs that were actually creating beautiful output, that’s when I thought, well, maybe there’s room for art here.

Also, I was really harsh on artists. I thought, oh, look at these guys, these artists are so selfish. They’re just doing what they want to do and expressing their view of the world, and really not contributing to the world at large. I thought, what good is this? These artists are just indulging themselves. So I really stayed away from the realm of art, and I never wanted to be called an artist for a long time because I had a more functional view on how I wanted to contribute. I wanted to build a tower or a spacecraft or something of this nature. I didn’t want to inspire or ask questions about the nature of the universe. Which, of course, is all I do now. 

Jason: [laughs] So what changed you from your artist-hating younger self?

Jared: I think seeing the impact that art can have on a person, or even have on a field. I applied some of these artistic concepts to some of my early work on Etsy. We needed a tool to shop, and I thought, well, let’s apply some of these artistic values to this tool. And seeing just how powerful that was — you know, it helps sell items, one very real thing. So I thought maybe it’s okay, because here’s actually some function that comes from it.

Also, finding artists and being influenced by artists myself. I realized that reading or enjoying music or looking at paintings changed my life. I saw the power. I thought, okay, maybe this isn’t meaningless. Maybe this isn’t just selfish work. Maybe I actually can contribute in this way.

Jason: Did that change happen to you in like the early 2000s?

Levitated.net 2000-2004, open source examples of drawing machines by Jared Tarbell done in Flash

Jared: So levitated.net was 2000 to 2004, maybe, where I was coming up with daily Flash sketches.

And then after that was Complexification.net, where I started to get into complexity theory. I would say that transition happened in 2004. That’s when I started working as an artist, and even selling my work.

I would create prints of my work and sell them, so certainly I was trying to make a living as an artist, which we all know is really difficult. I wrote my own shopping cart, which took three months of grueling work that I didn’t enjoy, but I knew I needed to do it because it’s work I needed to do to sell my work. And it was, in fact, through that experience that I attracted or met my company-founder at Etsy, Rob Kalin. He found my work through Complexification and invited me to work on Etsy with him. So 2004 would be the transition.

Complexification.net, 2004-2005, open source examples of drawing machines by Jared Tarbell done in Processing

Jason: Were you able to find time to make art in the startup days of Etsy?

Jared: No. It went away almost completely. Etsy was definitely a super-full-time gig. Wake up, before I even got dressed I would check some of the site’s stats, respond to people in the forums, and basically work on the site throughout the entire day. In the beginning, I remember sometimes I would have conflicts with some of the other engineers or my other co-founders, Haim Schoppik and Chris Maguire. We’d get into arguments about the best practice or best way forward, and I would also fall back on my Alexa page ranking of Complexification. It was ranked higher than Etsy at that point. So I was thinking, I’ve got this art website that’s outperforming Etsy. I could just go back to this. You guys better get in line. [laughs]

Jason: [laughs] 

Jared: But, you know, we all worked together really well. Very quickly, after about the second year, Etsy eclipsed Complexification in terms of the number of people that were interacting with it, the number of people we were reaching, and the amount of time I was spending on it. Complexification just kind of dies around 2005. There’s actually a sketch called Colony that I was working on and didn’t quite finish, and I put this little tag on it that said “soon.” And that’s still there to this day. I’ve never actually returned to that site to finish some of those sketches. It wasn’t until I left Etsy in 2011 that I was really able to return to my art.

Jason: Then, in 2011, when you come back to your art, is that when you build out the Levitated workshop? I think there was sort of a like a laser cutter time period? 

Example of work created at the Levitated Toy Factory in Albequerque, New Mexico

Jared: I moved back to Albequerque. I was living in the country, pretty remote. I bought this old building and renovated it. I was really interested in this laser cutter that I bought at the time. It’s part of my trying to get my work off of the screen and into some more tangible, physical form. I thought I’d wrap a company around it, like Lego, where we would create some kind of a building system that was open-ended and used a lot of these algorithmic techniques.

I called that site Levitated.guru, so I used the new top-level domain “dot guru.” It just kind of froze — that’s what I tend to do. I just freeze the sites that I’ve worked on in the past. So Levitated.net today looks a lot like it did back in 2000. Same with Complexification.

And the Levitated Toy Factory lasted a couple of years, about 18 months. I don’t know if you want to get into that. But running a company is really difficult. I found that what I was doing every day was just managing the books and the people, and I really didn’t have any time to do any of the creative work that I would like. So with the birth of my second daughter, I used that as a great excuse to just close the door to the Toy Factory and devote myself really to my family at first, and then slowly, as the babies grow and you have a little more time to yourself, that’s when I’ve started to get back into the artwork.

Jared Tarbell, Wilson Maze, 2019, Baltic birch, acrylic paint

Jason: You have a new site that I recently discovered. I was pretty psyched. It was like stumbling onto a goldmine. I was like, woah, Jared’s making work again! I should know the URL, but the new site is —

Jared: — infinite.center.

Jason: How are you looking at that site or your work now that you’re kind of going back to code-based work after all the experiences you’ve had with the Toy Company and Etsy? Being back with your new life experiences, how has it been?

Jared Tarbell, Penrose Substitution. 2020, Processing sketch

Jared: It’s been great. I’ve realized that I’m in this position where I can do almost anything I want to do. But what I really want to do is just write code and share it with people. So that’s what I’m doing. The sketches that are on infinite.center are mostly drawing machines. And I haven’t really found a way to incorporate some of the laser cutting work that I’ve done. It’s hard to share those projects. I almost want to keep it pure code versus code and assembly, you know, which is the laser work. And I haven’t figured out a way to share that work.

So this is how I spend my day. I think of an algorithm and I spend a couple of days working on it and try to get it to a point aesthetically where I’m relatively happy with it, and I post that. I’ve also committed myself to open-sourcing every project henceforth until my death, I hope. Which is difficult to do. It’s actually really easy to write a program and share some images or video of it, but to actually go and open the source code, you know, it’s a little terrifying to do that because you’re not secure — I’m not secure, necessarily, with everything I write. I’m not the best programmer. And it’s also a lot of technical work to get everything just right, upload it to GitHub, or even to find the platform that’s necessary to share the work. That’s what I’m trying to do now.

Jason: I want to ask you follow-up questions on your process. I think Casey Reas and a few other artists have mentioned that the algorithm or the core structure of what they make actually goes relatively quickly. However, it’s the tinkering, tweaking, and the adjustments that can take days, weeks, or months. I wonder is that true for you? 

Jared: Yeah. I love that. Casey’s one of my mentors. I really admire him. I’m so thankful to him and Ben Fry for creating the Processing language, which is primarily what I work with now.

Jared Tarbell, Vesica Piscis: You, Me, We, 2020, Processing sketch

Jared: I would agree with what Casey said. The core functionality of an algorithm comes together really quickly if you’re lucky, within a matter of days, usually. But then finding the expression or what you want to present with that algorithm to kind of explain the process, that takes a lot more time.

Part of the problem is, there are so many choices — because you’ve built this parameterized system which is multivariate there’s anywhere from three to a hundred different variables that you can tweak to affect the output of this program. And so one program really can express itself in a dozen or more different ways, each with something that is aesthetically unique. So finding the right one or finding the particular parameter set that you want to display or share with the world, that takes a long time. It’s hard because sometimes you have to abandon a pretty cool idea or a pretty cool expression to move into what you think might be even more interesting. That’s difficult.

I would actually really enjoy hearing Casey talk about that.

Jason: Do you think people need to have a certain level of programming literacy to fully appreciate generative art?

Jared Tarbell, Buddhabrot, originally written in 2004 (took six days to render).
This render was created in 2020 in 15 minutes.

Jared: Programming, you can break it down into two categories. There’s the semantics of the program — what are you actually trying to do logically — and then the syntax of the program — how are the characters arranged, how does everything flow together.

Syntax I don’t think is very important for anyone to understand, unless they want to have a career in computer programming or if they want to do it themselves. But the semantics, understanding the logic, I think that’s important because it gives a person a lot of insight into what’s going on around them.

So let’s look at the algorithm Substrate. You can understand the semantics of that program very easily. Like, this is the rule, it’s what’s happening. There’s a line that goes straight until it hits another line or the edge of the screen, and then new lines form at right angles to existing lines. That’s all you need to know. There are just two rules. And then watching the whole system unfold, I think it gives you an idea of the potential depth. It’s just this really simple thing that’s operating, but look at the complexity of the results that are being generated.

The best algorithms that I’ve created are the ones where the semantics are easily understood or described. Then you have a deeper appreciation for the results of the algorithm, the resulting image.

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Jared Tarbell, Substrate, 2003, Processing sketch

Jason: I’m glad you mentioned Substrate. It’s one of my favorites. It reminds me of the cracks in the desert. Was that your inspiration? 

Jared: Substrate is one of my most popular algorithms. I was sitting in a coffee shop in Santa Fe and there was a sticker in the window blasted by the sun. It separated into these cracks. I saw the algorithm there and then and wrote it in that coffee shop. The desert sun is brutal and did that.

Jason: Wow, I love that story! I’ll never look at Substrate the same. 

Given that you look at the world sort of computationally and that you have, I think, a strong understanding of what we’re calling the “semantics,” are there a fair amount of surprises as you’re creating your work when you execute your code? Do you have a blueprint in your head that you are executing on or is it more non-linear and improvisational than that?

Jared: That’s a great question. I actually look for the surprises because I’ve been programming the computer for so long, it can get really boring. Like the number-sorting algorithm. There’s an algorithm that’s going to sort numbers. There are a hundred algorithms that sort numbers. But in the end, the numbers are always just in order. That’s not very exciting. 

And so when I discovered emergence and some of these generative algorithms that produce surprising results, that got me really excited. Finally I was using this incredible machine with these ideas, and I don’t exactly know what the outcome’s going to be. I have an idea, but it’s not until you run the program, and then it unfolds before you. It’s like, wow, this is really interesting. So I search out the surprises.

I’ve found some particular classes of algorithms that generate those surprises quite easily. They’re usually systems that involve many simple elements that are allowed to somehow interact with each other. And then you just let the system unfold. You always have an idea of what you’re trying to do, but it isn’t until you run the program and see it unfold that you see the results.

Jared Tarbell, Spiritual Noise Machine, 2019, Processing sketch

Jason: I’m going to have to wind down in a little bit, thank you for being so generous with your time!

I always like to ask, are there some things that I haven’t asked about that maybe you would want to share or that you think folks would find interesting that maybe people don’t know about you?

Jared: Well, not so much about me, but a lot of people ask me, “How do you become a good programmer and create meaningful work?” My advice is always this. Just program something every day, even if it’s something simple. You can just do a little bit every day, even just 15 minutes. You’d be surprised how good of a programmer you are by the end of the first month of doing something like that.

Jason: That’s great advice. I think I need to take it. I got pretty good in grad school at Processing, and I thought, well, it’ll be like a bicycle. I’ll get back on it and it’ll be completely where I was 12, 13 years ago. But it’s not a bicycle [laughs].

Jared: [laughs] Don’t give up.

Jason: I won’t. You’re my inspiration. Now that you’re making work again, I know that I have to make work again. I just won’t compare myself to you because then I’ll feel bad. [laughs]

Jared: [laughs] Thanks, Jason. I would be happy to talk to you anytime and in any context. I hope we get to meet someday in person after this whole virus thing is over.

Jason: Yeah, I’d love to get out your way and see New Mexico again. My wife and I love it. And if you’re ever in the area, it would be awesome to hang out. Who knows? I think both of us are a little bit more on the introverted side. But if a cool enough opportunity comes up to do a panel somewhere, maybe we'll sneak out and do the panel and then get the hell out of there and have a fun adventure somewhere.

Thanks for your time, Jared. It was really exciting.

Learn more about Jared’s work and the exhibition “The Game of Life -Emergence In Generative Art” at the Kate Vass Galerie Website.

The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art

This essay is for the exhibition The Game of Life - Emergence in Generatiive Art, online at Kate Vass Gallery and is, in part, a tribute to the work of mathematician John Horton Conway, who passed away on April 11th, 2020, from COVID-19.
- Jason Bailey

For many people, it is hard to see the elegant connection that exists between art, math, and nature. Growing up, I loved studying art. I frequently sketched and painted from nature. However, I developed a math phobia early on and never saw what, for many, is the obvious thread between the worlds of art, math, and nature.

That changed when I started to write code in graduate school and learned about three new topics within a few weeks of each other:

• Generative art

• John Horton Conway’s Game of Life

• Cellular automata and emergence

These three interrelated discoveries completely changed my world view by showing me that much of the complexity we find in nature can be simulated and emulated using relatively basic algorithms.

This exhibition explores the idea of creating great complexity from deceptively simple algorithms or rule sets through the art of four generative artists: Alexander Reben, Manolo Gamboa Naon, Kjetil Golid, and Jared Tarbell. But before we jump into their art, let’s first define generative art, emergence, cellular automata, and the Game of Life.

Generative art is art that leverages a non-human, autonomous system which can help generate features in the artwork that would otherwise be left up to the artist to decide. In this exhibition, we are talking specifically about generative art written in computer code that includes elements of emergence or emergent behavior.

Emergence happens when two or more things come together to form something larger that has different properties than would be expected from the sum of the parts. Think of an ant colony. Each ant is pretty dumb, defenseless, and guided by very basic rules. But when combined with the many other ants in the colony, a new intelligence emerges at the colony level that allows them to adapt, defend themselves, and find food. The sophisticated emergent behavior of the colony cannot be predicted by understanding the limited capabilities of the individual ants. Flocks of birds and schools of fish operate in a similar manner, following a set of simple rules locally that result in complex behaviors globally. Emergence is not limited to our animal friends. Humans are a byproduct of emergent behavior, as is our economy, the weather, and traffic.

Artists, mathematicians, and computer scientists often generate their own complex emergent “ant colony-like” systems using a large grid of simple black and white squares called cellular automata. One of the most famous models of cellular automation is John Horton Conway’s Game of Life.

John Conway playing the Game of Life in 1974.

First published in the October, 1970 edition of Scientific American, the game is comprised of a grid of cells that, based on a few simple rules, either die or multiply, forming complex patterns. The rules are as follows:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused by underpopulation.

2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.

3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.

4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Through emergence, these very basic rules trigger surprisingly complex behaviors that can make a small set of black and white squares on a grid appear to "come to life."

Below is a example of the Game of Life I quickly programmed in Processing based on a tutorial by Daniel Shiffman.

After playing with the Game of Life, I and many others get a feeling that everything, no matter how complicated and mysterious it appears to be on the surface, may also be reducible to a basic set of algorithms. For artists, cellular automata like Game of Life can inspire them to improvise on these systems or to model emergent systems of their own, rivaling nature in their complexity, beauty, and surprise.

In his work puritan_communion, artist Alexander Reben plays with the rules of the Game of Life, cleverly programing in new rules that change the colors of the squares over time instead of using the traditional black and white color scheme. He explains:

In regular Game of Life, a cell can be either "alive" or "dead." In the case of the code, that means black or white. In this version, the colors are created by storing a history of the "world" wherein a new cell becomes yellow when "alive," and when that cell "dies," it changes color over time, eventually becoming black again.

The results remind me visually of a mix between a stop-motion video of flowers blooming in a garden and an intergalactic shootout between alien spaceships. Press the play button located underneath the image below to see the work unfold.

▸

puritan_communion

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You might think a work like puritan_communion would take a massive set of instructions since there are so many moving parts that go on for such a long time without ever repeating. That is the power of emergent behavior. The few short lines of code above actually capture all of the instructions needed to produce the entire animation. Try it yourself - simply copy the code above and paste it into your browser.

Boxie, Alexander Reben

Reben's background is in applied math and robotics, and his work is about the relationship between humanity and technology -- specifically, psychology and engineering. Reben's thesis at the MIT Media Lab focused on a robot he developed called Boxie. Boxie could only perform simple actions, but when you put all of those actions together, the robot appeared to be alive and intelligent. Boxie relates to Conway's Game of Life in that the actual programming and sensors required to make it appear alive were quite simple.

Obviously, neither Boxie nor the Game of Life are actually alive. However, there is something in our psychology that makes us think that they could be. As Reben explains:

Conway's Game of Life is more like half psychology and half math. We, as humans, are interpreting the actions of these pixels as having agency of some sort. We are picturing them as alive. Algorithms are only part of it. It is a human algorithm because it is our interpretation of what it is doing. I think that also plugs into viewing art. A lot of art is about how we interpret it in our own context. I bet a dog would interpret Conway's Game of Life differently than we do.

We will dive much deeper into Reben's fascinating work and share our full interview with the artist in the coming months. Let's take a look at how a second generative artist interprets Conway's Game of Life. 

Argentine artist Manolo Gamboa Naon, better known as “Manolo,” is one of my favorite generative artists working today. He is a masterful colorist and a seemingly bottomless well of brilliant and engaging generative art. For his three interpretations of the Game of Life, Manolo layered several versions of the game playing out simultaneously, giving the illusion of depth and increasing its visual intricacy and dynamism. As Manolo explains: 

I love when simple rules become really complex ... I feel that they even explain the world in a very reduced way. The videos that I made are several layers of Game of Life with different sizes. At first, I wanted to explore the patterns that remain static, live for a while, and reach a point where they do not mutate anymore ... and disappear with time, and new ones appear.

I made this work as a video because it seems that time is an essential element in the Game of Life. Initially, I thought to use Game of Life to find interesting images (there are aspects that remind me of a lot of pixel art -- I can't stop seeing characters from Space Invaders). But ultimately, I think "life" appears with movement/evolution/time. So I liked the idea of having two moments. First, they evolve and come alive, and then they die and disappear, and in time others are born, on and on like this forever.

The Game of Life is only one particular model of cellular automata. It is unique in that it is two dimensional and unfolds frame by frame over time, producing what looks like an animation. Unlike the Game of Life, one-dimensional (or elementary) cellular automata are designed based on rows. 

In elementary cellular automata, each cell still changes based on the "on/off" state of its neighbors. However, instead of eight neighbors, the cell changes based on just three cells: The cell to its upper left, the cell directly above, and the cell to its top right. The row below is then created based on whether those neighbors are on or off. This sequence repeats over and over again, row by row, quickly creating highly complex patterns from just those few rules. The animation below helps explain the rules and how the process unfolds.

An animation of the way the rules of a 1D cellular automaton determine the next generation.
- Cormullion CC BY-SA 4.0

There are a total of 256 possible rule combinations to create elementary cellular automata. Each rule has its own corresponding pattern (you can see all of them here) and a Wolfram number (named after mathematician Stephen Wolfram). Some automata are more famous than others for the beauty and complexity they produce when they are executed consecutively across a large number of rows, such as Rule #30. 

Rule #30 Cellular Automation

Despite evolving from a basic formula, the markings produced by Rule #30 generate an intricate and labyrinthine non-repeating pattern. In this sense, it is similar to patterns we might find in nature. In fact, Rule #30 strongly resembles the patterns found on the shell of the venomous sea snail Conus textile. 

A Textile Cone Snail (Conus textile) 2005. Photographer: Richard Ling richard@research.canon.com.au

I hope art lovers reading this who may have had less exposure to cellular automata, emergent systems, and generative art can start to see the connection between computational algorithms and the natural world. Computers, algorithms, and new technologies are not a threat to the natural beauty and humanity found in art (as I often hear from the traditional art world). In the skilled hands of generative artists, these tools actually strengthen our connection to the natural world and the systems that underpin it. 

Complex One, Kjetil Golid

Kjetil Golid, a generative artist from Norway, has been developing a series of artworks inspired by one-dimensional cellular automata and noise fields. His process results in bold works with basket weave-like patterns that resemble graphic pixelated flags or banners. These works recall computing origins in the Jacquard loom, a device that employed punch cards to simplify the intricate weaving process of eighteenth-century textiles. Golid explains his process:

It's based on this traditional variant where pixels can be alive or dead on a 2D grid. I thought, ‘What if you don't change the rules, but instead, you change the visualization?’ Instead of using black and white pixels, I use lines that can go in different directions. While a 'standard' one-dimensional cellular automaton gets a pixel value from its three northern neighbors, this one is a hexagonal grid with lines in three directions. The existence of a specific line is dependent on the existence of its three 'preceding' lines. The lines split up the whole area into separate spaces, and I proceed to fill these spaces with colors. The colors are selected using a one-dimensional cellular automaton, with the color of each space being based on the left and upper neighboring spaces. 

It turned out quite nice. It seems so random, but it is actually based on strict rules. The only seed for this randomness is the number you give it. So whenever you give it the number 120, you get exactly the same output. But it seems so random because it turns so complex so fast. The noise part comes from another piece I made, more of a tool really, that can distort any image. 

Duel, Kjetil Golid

In graduate school, Golid developed a fascination for structures and systems such as Turing machines, regular language, and deduction systems, all of which were the focus of his thesis. He found himself using programming to help himself understand and visualize these systems. However, it was actually at design school where he first started learning to program using the Processing programming language. 

Not all generative art is inspired directly by cellular automata. Artists often develop their own emergent systems from scratch. Generative artist Jared Tarbell produced one of the better-known examples of this with his famous work Substrate in the early 2000s.

Substrate, Jared Tarbell

In a recent interview I conducted with Tarbell, he shared the inspiration behind this iconic and much-beloved work:

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Sante Fe, and there was this sticker in the window that was just blasted by the sun every day. It started to separate into these cracks, and I just saw the whole algorithm right there. Okay, there that first crack formed and got wider, and then another crack came off of it. I wrote the algorithm right there in the coffee shop. The desert sun is pretty brutal.

Tarbell was encouraged by his mother to make art in the home he grew in up quite a bit. However, his college studies focused on mathematics and computer science. He shared that while he viewed the world in a computational way, he wasn't afraid to express himself or try to find beauty in the computation. 

Trying to understand and position ourselves within nature by understanding its algorithms and producing our own systems through the making of art can be a profoundly spiritual experience. I see Tarbell as a type of generative shaman unlocking new connections between us and the natural world around us -- and those connections are not always purely logical or fully explainable.

Shipibo Pattern , Jared Tarbell

One of Tarbell's recent works, Shipibo Pattern, is inspired by the patterns seen by Shipibo people, an indigenous tribe that lives in the Amazon rainforest in Peru. The Shipibo believe that there are distinctive patterns that act as healing forces (or destructive forces). As Tarbell explains:

During ceremony, a particular pattern is seen and heard by these people as a description of the reality of nature. I have seen it, too. The visual pattern is not what is actually witnessed, but an attempt to represent it in two dimensions. The patterns are composed of reflection, fractal self-similarity, and recursive motifs. Many of these constructions are native phenomena of computation. The Shipibo believe that the patterns are healing on emotional, physical, and spiritual levels. My personal experience with this vision leads me to believe it is an objective reality, one that can be modeled and explored. 

Shipibo Pattern, Jared Tarbell

Tarbell shares the process he used to model this reality:

The background fuzz was generated with the common self-substituting Hilbert curve. Network connecting nodes were periodically added to points on the curve to allow more complexity.

The foreground object is fundamentally a maze of connected minos, reflected about both axes. Minos are adjacent collections of blocks. Two blocks can be called a domino, three blocks a trimino, four blocks a tetramino, and so on. This algorithm allows mino blocks up to 11.

A glow effect is achieved by placing multiple high alpha boxes of varying rotation and scale around each object. As with everything in generative art, the effect intensity is parameterized.

For me, emergence is evidence of a decentralized alternative to the more prevalent, centralized creation myth that dictates a sole divine architect created the world from some kind of rational blueprint. Instead, emergence and decentralization point towards an unlimited number of simpler entities following basic rules which come together to yield spectacular results. However, understanding the power of emergence and being spiritual are not mutually exclusive. As Tarbell shared in our interview:

I don't know if emergence describes everything. In fact, I kind of don't believe it does. I think there still are some very spiritual, mysterious elements to the universe. But certainly, thinking about problems computationally, you can get pretty far in understanding what's actually happening.

Magnifying and Exploring the Heart of the Buddhabrot, Jared Tarbell

Tarbell, like myself, grew up in the Mormon faith. We are both no longer active members of the church. However, we both grew up deeply invested in trying to live a spiritual life, and we both ultimately struggled to reconcile math, science, and logic with our religious upbringing. In some ways, I think this struggle has made us both seekers, ultimately leading us to the world of generative art. That strong desire to understand our place in the world and the connectivity between all that there is does not just go away when you stop going to church. For us, creating generative art and exploring emergence offers a spiritual path towards better understanding the “game of life” in which we all participate.

Some Final Thoughts

It's been a difficult year for people all around the world. Most of us have had to isolate ourselves from our friends and families to help prevent the spread of the COVID-19. Art can seem trivial in times like this, but I believe this is when we need art more than ever. I chose to create this exhibition with the hope that it can play a small role in helping us better understand the healing patterns hidden in nature, which some artists (like those in this exhibition) regularly unlock to unite us all at a time when we really need it.

Sincere thanks to the Kate Vass Galerie for sponsoring the curation of this exhibition. To inquire about the artists in this exhibition and to see more of their works, visit Kate Vass Galerie. I am sincerely grateful to the artists who trusted me to write about their work and share it with the world.

FitArt - Fitness Art Club

Have you always dreamed of having an artist’s physique? Gyms are closed and public beaches may be swimming in COVID right now, but you can still flex that hot bod in front of all your pets and Zoom friends. I know what you are thinking: “Jason, I can’t find the motivation to work out alone!” Fear not, Damjanski and friends are here to help!

You may remember Damjanski as the creator of Bye Bye Camera, the post-human app that removed all your loved ones from your photographs. He’s back with an even more useful app called FitArt! 

This time Damjanski is teaming up with Nina Roehrs of The Roehrs & Boetsch gallery to tap into the ancient secrets of one of the most physically fit sub-cultures in the wold: Contemporary digital artists. You didn’t think it could happen, but it did — and now you will wonder how you ever lived without it.

Go download the FitArt app and start getting buff now, or read the bios first for each of the personal trainers below (along with description of their routine).

Petra Cortright – 911 king (2011)

Petra Cortright – 911 king (2011)

30 seconds video | sound

This in-app presented video is a shortened and square cut from the original 2011 work.

Petra Cortright (1986, US) is a contemporary artist whose multifaceted artistic practice stems from creating and manipulating digital files. Cortright's digitally-conceived artworks physically exist in many forms - printed onto archival surfaces, projected onto existing architecture, or mechanically carved from stone. A notable member of what became known as the 'Post Internet' art movement of the mid-to-late-2000s with her YouTube videos and online exhibitions, Cortright later began to laboriously craft digital paintings by creating layer upon layer of manipulated images in Photoshop which she then rendered onto materials such as aluminum, linen, paper, and acrylic sheets. In addition to her 2D work, in 2018 Cortright premiered a new body of sculptural work in marble. As with her paintings, Cortright's sculptures are intended to capture and represent a digital moment - in this case a digital brush stroke - that is translated into a three-dimensional object via industrial fabrication techniques. Cortright's role as an artist is an amalgam of painter, graphic designer, editor, and producer; culminating in a singular artistic reflection of contemporary visual culture that can exist on a smartphone screen, a Times Square billboard, and anything in between.

https://www.petracortright.com

@petra_cortright

Jeremy Bailey – Tassel Twirl (2020)

Jeremy Bailey – Tassel Twirl (2020)

30 seconds video | no sound

Cardio is more than just running on a treadmill! This exercise proves you can get your heart rate up by learning to twirl Augmented Reality tassels. It's very simple to learn, you just need to bounce and let your software tassels spin. Inspired by workout videos that often incorporate gendered dance moves and Augmented Reality technologies modify our bodies with software, this video playfully engages themes of identity, control and the queer body.

Throughout his career, Jeremy Bailey (1979, CAN) has explored software in a performative context. As Rhizome author Morgan Quaintance puts it, ‘Since the early noughties Bailey has ploughed a compelling, and often hilarious, road through the various developments of digital communications technologies.’ Specifically, Bailey's works consists of all manner of performances that exist as videos, software, websites, inventions, institutions and ephemera all created and presented by his alter ego, Famous New Media Artist Jeremy Bailey. Bailey believes that technology done right empowers us all to be famous.

https://www.jeremybailey.net

@JeremyBailey

Olia Lialina – Animated GIF Model – Hula Hoop (2005)

Olia Lialina – Animated GIF Model – Hula Hoop (2005)

30 seconds GIF-based video | no sound

Join Animated GIF Model Olia Lialina in swinging the hula-hoop ring. During the early days of the Internet, animated GIFs were a very popular way to personalize a website. In context of the increasing professionalization in the dotcom boom, they slowly disappeared – a fact that inspired Lialina to document this expression of early web culture in her work. Using herself as a model, Lialina makes an attempt at immortality, depicting herself forever hula-hooping on websites. In the 2010s, Animated GIFs resurfaced and now again constitute an important element of online culture.

Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene - an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century, her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, ‘net.language’ and vernacular web - in both artistic and publishing projects - has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Lialina has, for the past two decades, produced many influential works of network-based art. Lialina is also known for using herself as a GIF model, and is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.

http://art.teleportacia.org

Damjanski – Present Memories 00110010 (2017/2020)

Damjanski – Present Memories 00110010 (2017/2020)

30 seconds GIF-based video | sound

Present Memories 00110010 is a self portrait of Damjanski. The exercise is an adaptation of net.art piece ‘https://present-memories.com (2017)’. For the artist, surfing the web feels like constantly eating your own cum thanks to filter bubbles and the sisyphean attempt to escape the manufactured normalcy.

Damjanski (1987, Yugoslavia) is a New York based artist living in a browser. He is the co-founder of the artist collective Do Something Good, which aims on realizing interactive experiences at the cross section of art and technology. In 2018, Do Something Good launched the MoMAR art project, a gallery concept aimed at democratizing physical exhibition spaces, art institutions and curatorial processes within New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His interactive installations, browser-based art, and web-based applications deploy solutionism to unveil screen structures of the present. 

http://damjanski.com

@d.a.m.j.a.n.s.k.i

Sebastian Schmieg – Speed Reading (30s training) (2020)

Sebastian Schmieg – Speed Reading (30s training) (2020)

30 seconds video | no sound

Speed Reading (30s training) is a training session which brings together speed reading and eye movement exercises so that the viewer can consume the artwork as fast as possible while optimizing themselves. The text played back during the exercise was written as fast as possible, too, in an attempt to accelerate and synchronize the speed of production and consumption. Will you be able to keep up? Speed Reading (30s training) is based on Speed Reading (2018), a 16-channel installation produced in collaboration with Anna-Luise Lorenz for Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart.

Sebastian Schmieg examines the algorithmic circulation of images, texts and bodies. At the center of his practice are playful interventions into found systems that explore the hidden – and often absurd – realities behind the glossy interfaces of our networked society. There the boundaries between human and software, individual and crowd, as well as labor and leisure are blurring. Schmieg works in a wide range of media such as video, website, installation, artist book, custom software and lecture performance. He lives and works in Berlin and Dresden.

http://sebastianschmieg.com

@sebastianschmieg

Jillian Mayer – Basic Calisthenics for Surveillance Training (2020)

Jillian Mayer – Basic Calisthenics for Surveillance Training (2020)

30 seconds video | sound

Basic Calisthenics for Surveillance Training gets you in shape with the fundamentals to never be caught off guard. You NEED to know what is going on around you at all times, near and far. ALWAYS BE WATCHING friends. #AlwaysBeWatching

Jillian Mayer (1984, US) is an artist and filmmaker living in Miami, FL. Through videos, sculptures, online experiences, photography, performances, and installations, Mayer explores how technology affects our lives, bodies, and identities by processing how our physical world and bodies are impacted and reshaped by our participation in a digital landscape. Mayer investigates the points of tension between our online and physical worlds and makes work that attempts to inhabit the increasingly porous boundary between the two. Mayer's artwork has a consistent thread of modeling how to subvert capital-driven modes of technological innovation.

https://www.jillianmayer.net

@jillianmayer

Molly Soda – Tap to Change (2020)

Molly Soda – Tap to Change (2020)

30 seconds video | no sound

Tap the screen to change your appearance. Each filter tried on is a variation of the same face, shared among influencers, celebrities and people on your Instagram explore feed. It's an endless loop of before and after transformations, each face improving upon the other until you forget where you started.

Molly Soda (1989, US) is a visual artist working in video, installation, interactive art, performance and print media. Her work is often hosted online, specifically on social media platforms, allowing the work to evolve and interact with the platforms themselves. Soda engages with questions of revisiting one's own virtual legacy, how we present ourselves and perform for imagined others online and how the ever shifting nature of our digital space affects our memories and self concept.

https://mollysoda.exposed

@bloatedandalone4evr1993

Constant Dullaart – Human Saver (DVD guy) (2009)

Constant Dullaart – Human Saver (DVD guy) (2009)

webcam performance | 30 seconds video | sound

Human Saver (DVD guy) – a webcam performance – bridges the gap between two different forms of media, the Internet and the DVD. Since its publication in 2009 on You Tube, the reaction of the public has culminated in the creation of popular internet meme ‘this DVD guy’. This in-app presented video is a shortened and square cut from the original 2009 work.

Constant Dullaart's often conceptual work manifests itself both online and offline. Within his practice, Dullaart reflects on the broad cultural and social effects of communication and image processing technologies while critically engaging the power structures of mega corporations that dramatically influence our worldview through the internet. Dullaart examines the boundaries of manipulating Google, Facebook and Instagram and started his own tech company Dulltech™ with Kickstarter. Dullaart (1979, NL) is a former resident of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and lives and works in Berlin.

https://dull.life

@constantdullaart

Elisa Giardina Papa – Labor of Sleep (2017/2020)

Elisa Giardina Papa – Labor of Sleep (2017/2020)

30 seconds video | sound

The video is an impossible sleeping exercise and an excerpt from the video piece ‘Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? (2017)’. The original video work – commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art (Sunrise/Sunset Commission) – examines the status of sleep within the tempo of present-day capitalism and critically engages with the rhetoric of technologically supported self-optimization.

Elisa Giardina Papa (1979, IT) is an Italian artist whose work investigates gender, sexuality, and labor in relation to neoliberal capitalism and the Global South. In her recent body of work, she documents the ways in which affective and care labor are being outsourced via internet platforms. In her current project she extends this exploration to the invisible and underpaid human infrastructure that sustains artificial intelligence (A.I.). 

http://www.elisagiardinapapa.org

@elisagiardinapapa

Evan Roth – Dances For Mobile Phones: Paraguay (Excerpts) (2015/2020)

Evan Roth – Dances For Mobile Phones: Paraguay (Excerpts) (2015/2020)

30 seconds infrared video | sound

Dances for Mobile Phones presents the surface of a screen as our most immediate access point into the Internet's physicality. Our mobile touchscreens are perhaps our most intimate connection to the Internet, rarely leaving our sides. Here, two videos placed side by side, show everyday people performing everyday tasks on their mobile devices. Shot with an infrared camera, pixels ordinarily visible to the human eye become invisible, and those signals normally invisible are made visible. In obscuring the digital interface, the new and unnatural movements we have adopted become all the more apparent. By contrast, the only illumination visible from the phones is the ordinarily invisible infrared beam, emitted from LEDs in the top section of the phone near the earpiece and used primarily for facial recognition. This illumination is controlled not by the user, but by the device, and displayed together these works prompt the question of who or what is controlling our gestures as well. This in-app presented video is based on excerpts from ‘Dances For Mobile Phones: Paraguay (2015)’.

Based in Berlin, Evan Roth's (1978, US) practice visualizes and archives typically unseen aspects of rapidly changing communication technologies. Through a range of media from sculpture to websites, the work addresses the personal and cultural effects surrounding these changes and the role of individual agency within the media landscape.

www.evan-roth.com

@evanroth_

Lauren Huret – Cosmic Blending (2020)

Lauren Huret – Cosmic Blending (2020)

30 seconds video | sound

Cosmic Blending is a dance that invites you to merge with the cosmos, to take in its energy and to escape facial recognition systems. An exercise in disappearing from body and identity surveillance and control systems. A way to merge the body with alien space, to consider thoughts as matter and to put on the cosmos as an identity. Cosmic Blending stems from the video-triptych installation ‘Body Exodus, Cosmos Rave (2020)’.

Lauren Huret's (1984, FR) works deal extensively with the impact of media technologies on the individual as well as society. Working in a wide range of media such as video, digital collage, performance and artist books, she deals with questions of identity and beliefs in an increasingly technological world. The emotional attachment and physical dependency shown towards our means of communication are as much part of her work as the reflections on the history of new media or issues around technological developments.

http://www.laurenhuret.com

@_office_fetish

Sam Lavigne – Proper Behavior (2019/2020)

30 seconds video | sound

Proper Behavior is based on videos excerpted from Training Poses (2019), wherein subjects attempt to mirror human poses sampled from the COCO (Common Objects in Context) image dataset, a key machine learning resource for computer vision. The work explores how machines see bodies. 

Sam Lavigne (1981, US) is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. His work often takes the form of online interventions that surface the frequently opaque political and economic conditions that shape computational technologies. He has exhibited work at Lincoln Center, SFMOMA, Pioneer Works, DIS, Ars Electronica, the New Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

https://lav.io

@samlavigne

JODI – ZYX (2012/2020)

JODI – ZYX (2012/2020)

30 seconds GIF-based video | no sound

ZYX, a program that utilizes the iPhone sensors and camera function"to choreog2aph the viewers moveme~ts/ By requiring the user t? enact a series /f gestures< such as twrnang tje ph/ne teN times to the Rig`t and0searchinw for peception with an outstretcxgd arm. ZYX combines elelents of the(virtucl and the 0hysicql uo crga}e a nes form odpublic per&nrmcnc?. _orm`tha? merEly q game, ith J]\!JODI$is commanting`oz uh% oftgn ?ircing dicsonanke bm4wgej otr`ph{sjccl? real entirknments(a.l kur$acti>itie? that )ncreaSingly oc#?r i~ the$diuital Zealm. Like"iych gf$theip$prevh/usdwork, this arp is` medi4atimn on the effecd /f"techno\ogy in kqr?$a)|i l?w?s? ZYX adaptation of ZYX app.

JODI, or jodi.org, - pioneered net.art in 1995. Based in The Netherlands, JODI were among the firwt artists to investigate and subvert conventions of the Internet, computer progrAms, and video and comptter Gam%s. Radiba,li DiSrupting th% very0languAge of"these"system?, includinG viSual`aesvhetics, interFacd elemEnts, commands, e?rmrs anl sode. JODI staeis dxtreme digIt`l?iNterventions th)t eectabilize(the r%lauionship bet?een co}ruter technology and itsqcdrs?fy0subvdpTing our d~pectati?Ns a`Out the funstionblities and cgnvdntions of0the py?uemr thet ue1`%pendupol erery dcx>`T`ekr sork 5ses thEwideut qossible vaRifty`Of }EDiaane |ech~iquaq$ frol ?nstalmationc- qoftw?reand {?b?ites to pmrfrm?nc?? and(ex?ibi?ions.

http://jodi.org/

exonemo – Higher Self (2020)

exonemo – Higher Self (2020)

30 seconds video | sound

Higher Self questions how our emotions are affected by interfaces. The work invites you to concentrate and connect to your higher self for 30 seconds every day. Whereby, a strong connection is rewarded with many viewers, comments and likes. Higher Self is based on Live Streams (2018).

The Japanese artist unit ‘exonemo’ (by SEMBO Kensuke and AKAIWA Yae) was formed in 1996 on the Internet. Their experimental projects are typically humorous and innovative explorations of the paradoxes of digital and analog computer networked and actual environments in our lives. Their work ‘The Road Movie’ won the Golden Nica for Net Vision category at Prix Ars Electronica 2006. They have been organizing the IDPW gatherings and ‘Internet Yami-Ichi’ since 2012. They live and work in New York since 2015.

http://exonemo.com

@exonemo

How To Become A Successful Artist

Lately I have seen a slew of ads for expensive classes promising to “help you become a successful artist.” These are marketing classes, not classes in art instruction. Preying on financially strapped artists during a pandemic seemed like a new low, but clearly there must be a demand for this type of advice. So I decided to boil everything I have learned as an artist, curator, researcher, and marketer about obtaining success in the art world down into a single piece of free advice. If you want to succeed as an artist, make as much work as possible. That is the secret sauce. Regardless of whether you are after commercial success or simply want to improve in your craft, the answer is the same, make more work. If you want to know why I believe making more work improves your chances of success, read the rest of this post.

There are few sins in my book worse than encouraging artists to produce less work. It’s like telling a fish not to swim or a bird not to fly. Yet this advice is often given by dealers and gallerists with good intentions who are trying to help artists “manage” their career and avoid “flooding their own market.” We’ll never know the amount of art that was not produced as a result of this bad advice. What a crime to rob humanity of more art simply to try and artificially inflate the market value of an artist’s work. In this post, I will argue there is no evidence that producing a high volume of work in any way damages an artists’ market. If anything, producing more work likely improves their chances at success.

To study the effect of producing “too much work” on an artist’s market, we first need to establish “how much is too much?” The truth is that nobody knows the answer to this question. Five years ago, I went in search of a single database listing the total number of works created by our best-known artists. I reached out to a handful of Ivy league libraries as well as the Smithsonian, the Getty Institute, and other respected institutions asking for this database. They all came back to me with the same reply: “sadly no such resource exists.” So this leaves us all wondering, ‘How many artworks do successful artists create in a lifetime? A few dozen artworks? A few hundred artworks? A few thousand artworks? Low tens of thousands of artworks?’ The truth is, nobody knows because the resource to gauge this has never existed. 

So I decided to start the Artnome database and get my own numbers by scanning through printed catalogues raisonne (books containing the official count of works for each individual artist). The chart below shows the total number of works created by 32 well-known artists to give us a general idea of what a normal amount of work is for an artist to produce in their lifetime.

Granted, this is not a perfect measure. For example Picasso’s Zervos catalogue contains 16,000 works but that number is actually low as there are many works that are not included. By some estimates Picasso left closer to 70,000 works behind. Also, some catalogues raisonne include all works and others focus on one area such as paintings -- acknowledging the lack of absolute precision, what should immediately stand out is that Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol produced more than 10x the average amount of art produced by the other artists on the list. In fact a conservative estimate for Picasso, who lived to be 91, would suggest he created nearly one work every two days across an 80-year career. When Warhol found he could not create fast enough, he famously turned his studio into a factory and employed others to make his work for him. If anyone would have damaged their market by over-producing, it must be Picasso and Warhol, right? Let’s take a look.

Picasso’s and Warhol’s annual rank for turnover at auction vs all other artists.

ArtPrice.com puts out a report every year of the top 500 top-selling artists ranked by turnover at auction. It turns out Picasso and Warhol on average land in the top five spots over the last five years. So two of the most prolific artists of all time not only avoided “flooding their market,” but also managed to consistently rank among the top selling artists of all time. Well, they must be outliers, right? Surely living artists need to be far more mindful of not over-producing?

Not so much. Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and KAWS all took Andy Warhol’s idea of hyper-production to the next level. While we don’t know the total number of works they will create in their lifetime, each of them has produced enough work to have sold over 100 works at auction in 2019 alone. Keep in mind, those numbers don’t include private sales, and I doubt the numbers include the thousands of pieces created through branding and mass-merchandising deals.

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles service plate

Takashi Murakami Louis Vuitton Handbag

KAWS Vinyl Toy

Perhaps the reason Picasso, Warhol, Koons, Hirst, Murakami, and KAWS all produced such a large number of artworks was simply to satisfy high levels of demand. Surely an artist whose work is not selling should not produce even more work, right?

Thankfully, nobody convinced Vincent van Gogh of this. Though he got a late start to his career and tragically died young, he produced a superhuman number of paintings in a short amount of time. As one of the world’s most valued, beloved, and inspiring artists, we are lucky that he ramped up his production despite having very limited commercial success in his lifetime.

Vincent van Gogh, The Red Vineyard - 1888. The only documented sale of a Van Gogh Painting during his lifetime.

The truth is, you can’t make too much work. At least, we have yet to see an artist who has. Collectors who follow the art market closely might point to Damien Hirst. Hirst is thought by many to have flooded his own market in 2008 when he famously auctioned off 223 new works at Sotheby’s for $200.75M in 24 hours. Many argue this put a chill on Hirst’s market, but he had $26M in turnover in 2019 across 369 lots. I don’t think Hirst is suffering much.

From Hirst’s 2018 solo auction Beautiful Inside my Head Forever at Sotheby’s which net $200.75M in 24 hours

Still not convinced? After all, these are all examples of artists who have already made it. Surely there is some selection bias going on here, right? What about artists who just started out and have no market? Or up-and-coming artists just starting to build an audience who haven’t earned millions of dollars yet? Should they also make as much work as possible without worrying about flooding their markets? To find out, I asked the blockchain art market SuperRare to share data on 276 artists selling digital art on their platform. Though there is an approval process on SuperRare for artists to participate, they target artists with a very wide variety of skill and experience. 

Hackatao, Bird in the Shell - 2018

SuperRare’s equivalent of Picasso and Warhol are the artists Hackatao and Xcopy. Both artists started selling on SuperRare fairly early on and have built up a devoted collector base. As a measure of their success, they rank first and second respectively for total sales turnover (turnover in this case includes primary + secondary sales). Interestingly, their work may be “super,” but it is not particularly “rare” as compared to their peers. Both artists rank in the top 20 out of 276 artists for total works produced. So again it appears being a top producer does not limit your success, and may indeed contribute to it. Note: For more of a deep dive into what I learned from the SuperRare analysis, check out my article SuperAbundance on their new editorial site.

Shepard Fairey, Obey Giant Offset Print

What about paintings vs. prints? We know that paintings are generally worth more than prints and other multiples because only one collector can claim to own a painting, whereas many can own editions of the same print. My guess is that you could indeed flood your own market by over-producing the same print over and over again. However, there are also plenty of examples of artists benefiting from repeating the same image or visual theme as a way to establish their signature or brand. Think of Shepard Fairey’s OBEY Giant image stenciled on buildings all over the world or even the instant familiarity of the concentric color squares of Josef Albers or the sliced canvases of Lucio Fontana. This combination of frequency and consistency is the core of how visual branding works in marketing, and there is no reason to believe art collectors are immune to it. However, my point in this article is not that you should make one artwork and reproduce it ad nauseum. Rather, I am suggesting you produce as many new/unique works as you like without concern that making more work will somehow damage your chances of becoming a successful artist. 

Josef Albers, Formulation Articulation I and II - 1972

Of course, success as an artist should not only be defined in terms of sales. Many artists are very successful and happy producing high quality work that they find fulfilling without ever giving much thought to selling at all. But if these artists are driven to improve at their craft over time, they too should seek to make as much work as possible. There is a famous and oft quoted passage in David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking which sums up the value of quantity over quality in artistic practice:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: The works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Sure, this is only one example, but it rings true for many creatives (myself included). Looking for more proof that practice makes perfect? Read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success which explores the habits of extremely creative and successful people. In the book, Gladwell spends a great deal of time on the “10,000-Hour Rule,” which posits expertise in any skill is a matter of focused practice for a great many hours combined with innate talent. 

Maybe you are thinking, ‘I’ve put in my 10,000 hours and mastered my craft, so why can’t I sell my work?’ Unfortunately, excellence at your craft is only part of what is required for being successful on the art market — and likely not even the most significant part. I recently wrote an article for the Harvard Data Science Review titled “Can Machine Learning Predict the Price of Art at Auction?” During my research, I was surprised to find that machine learning models designed specifically to look at the visual properties of art performed poorly in predicting value. Instead, the research suggests prestige, popularity, and access to the right network matter far more than any artistic skill or visual properties intrinsic to the artwork. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. 

Pei-Shen Qian painting in the style of Mark Rothko

Collectors regularly discover that a painting they thought to be by a famous artist -- say, Mark Rothko -- has turned out to be a forgery. When this happens, paintings once thought to be worth as much as tens of millions of dollars become virtually worthless overnight. Nothing has changed about the paint, the canvas, physical condition, color, content, composition, or general artistry behind the painting. The only difference is that the painting is no longer attributable to a popular and highly sought-after artist. This puts to rest the idea that the prices paid for bluechip art are driven by the skill of the artist and the virtues of the artwork alone. 

It may be depressing to realize that selling your art is largely a popularity contest. However, it can also be empowering once artists seeking to sell their work realize they have power and influence over their own success. In our digital world, artists are no longer as dependent on gatekeepers. They can and should play a role growing their own popularity and expanding their own network. Sure, you can try to accomplish this by schmoozing at all the important events, but when would you make art? Plus, a recent study suggests if you are not born with the right connections in close proximity to prestigious institutions, your chances of success are slim. The good news is, by consistently producing a high volume of work and sharing it with the world through your social channels, you can grow your own popularity, network, and collector base. Think of your art as the fuel that drives interest in you as an artist. Stop creating art and the interest will dry up; produce an abundance of work and interest will intensify.

Worried about bothering people by over-sharing your work through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Remind yourself that Christie’s and Sotheby’s spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure we see paintings like Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi and Hockney’s Self-Portrait as an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) as many times as possible leading up to their auction. They know we can’t afford to bid on paintings that sell for $100M or more. But by participating in the dialogue, we become complicit in their campaign to drive interest and value in the work. Why else would they promote these works so broadly when realistically, only a handful of collectors could afford to bid on them? The more people who see the works and the more often they see them, the more iconic and valued they become. 

David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist ( Pool with Two Figures) - 1972

Pay attention to how auction houses and top galleries advertise works by top-selling artists. Do they just say, “Hey buy these paintings”? No. They tell meaningful stories about the artist and their work to help engage art lovers in the details. Follow their lead. Don’t simply flood your social feeds asking people to buy your art. Instead, try to raise the discourse by sharing works in progress, opening up about your process, and sharing the ideas behind your work. Worried about sounding too self-centered? Share work by other artists who inspire you in your feeds as well. There is a good chance they will reciprocate (though I’d encourage you to let that happen naturally). 

How do I know all this works? Because I am a painfully average and introverted guy who managed to break into the art world without even trying. In the last three years, I have been invited to speak at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, commissioned to write the cover story for Art in America, and curated art exhibitions and spoken at events around the world from the US and Europe to China and the Middle East. All of these opportunities and more came from my blog. It didn’t happen right away. I wrote for six months or so before anyone cared. But consistently putting out posts led to an amazing world of opportunity and a large audience of thoughtful, culturally aware, and engaged readers. Each time I put out a new article, another door opens. My world expands, making my life much richer. If it worked for me, I’m more than certain the same can be true for you. Go make your work, don’t worry about over-producing, share it in meaningful ways, and enjoy the ride!

Lumen Prize For Art and Tech With Founder Carla Rapoport

Luminaries of the art world have embraced it. Collectors have embraced it. Auction houses have embraced it. So why is digital art still undervalued?

David Hockney, who started making still-life sketches on an iPad in the early 2010s that elicited mixed reactions, sells those prints for around $10,000 -- some more, some less -- compared to the cool $90.3 million that his Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) fetched at Christie’s in 2018. It was the highest price ever reached for a living artist (a record previously held by Jeff Koons). With this disparity between the two—the digital art being valued at approximately 0.01% of his master painting—it’s easy to surmise that digital art as a whole is valued less (financially, at least) than traditionally recognized forms of artwork.

David Hockney, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (iPad Drawing) - 2011

It shouldn’t be surprising: Photography, one of the newer mediums in art, is routinely valued at fractions of paintings and sculptures, though the prices are steadily climbing. In the late 1960s, The Museum of Modern Art purchased Eugene Atget’s photographic archive -- several thousand prints and many negatives -- for $80,000, which, at the time, was the highest price ever paid for a photographic collection. The current record for the highest amount paid for a photograph some 50 years later is $4.3 million. (Consider, again, Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist, which itself is dwarfed by the $450 million Leonardo da Vinci sold by Christie’s in 2018, the current record for the highest price ever paid for a work of art.) 

Eugène Atget - Pont Neuf, 1923

But it’s doubtful that it will take 50 years for digital art to get its due the same way photography has. In our new climate, where most galleries and museums are unclear on how and when they can reopen, digital art is proving itself to be a formidable avenue to fill the void that art-goers feel. 

Carla Rapoport, founder of the Lumen Prize, is helping bolster digital art in the contemporary art world. She created the prize in 2012 to support and encourage digital artists by giving them financial support (the prize fund is $11,500), as well as providing a network, helping to craft opportunities for these artists, linking them with museums, galleries, and brokering commissions. We spoke about the rise of digital art, how it’s collected, and what its future looks like in a world where smartphones are the new galleries. 

What prompted you to start the Lumen Prize in 2012, and what was the landscape like for digital art at that time?

I have a journalism background. I do not have an art background, which made me uniquely unqualified to launch an art prize [laughs]. However, it’s probably because I didn’t have any art qualifications that I was undaunted by the prospect of trying to shine a light on an aspect of art that I felt had been unfairly neglected at that time by the contemporary art world. I think it’s fair to say that now, it’s definitely been accepted, but back in 2012, it was only computer art. It was definitely niche. I went to see David Hockney’s show at the Royal Academy in 2012, “A Bigger Picture” -- I went four times. I kept being next to people saying, “How did he do this?” It was this incredible interest, and a really successful show. And I thought: ‘It couldn’t just be David Hockney who was doing this.’ And the more I looked into it, the more I discovered this goldmine of brilliant, creative, amazing art that wasn’t getting a fair shake at the contemporary art world. So I thought a prize would lift all boats. The first year we opened, we got amazing numbers of entries, and it’s just gone from there.

Do you remember any other artists you were seeing at that time, aside from Hockney, while researching that really stood out to you?

Yang Yongliang - From the New World (Detail)

Yes. There’s a Chinese artist called Yang Yongliang, who had a work collected by the British Museum. It was a stunning photo manipulation. His career has since gone skyrocketing. I was very intrigued with how contemporary Asian art was being affected; he had a huge influence on me other than David Hockney. And then when I went to the Tate, there were some moving image works and a lot of Bill Viola. He’s amazing, but there had to be more than Bill Viola. So I discovered people through the prize and then cottoned onto careers of amazing artists who’ve since qualified, and I’ve learned with the prize as it’s evolved.

With someone like Hockney making iPad art, I understand he could make prints. But when it comes to something like video art, what exactly does that look like for collectors?

It’s been a question since the very first Lumen. Because the contemporary art world is not going to buy in until there’s a market -- or even a secondary market, really -- there needs to be someone who will buy it from you once you buy it. There’s lots of talk about stamping, authenticity, Bitcoin, all of that. In photography, you can destroy the negative. In print, you can destroy the plate. But in video art and in digital art, you have to have a pact with the artist who wants the scarcity value of the edition, and who you trust to give you a gigabyte file so you can play it on any technology that comes along. I don't know what technology my grandchildren will use to play the works I've collected in the years ahead. But there will be this huge 60 GB master file available for them to use, and that’s what the artist gave me. He keeps one, too. That’s what’s happening in video. And when you get into VR and other kinds of work, it becomes like sculpture, a thing that you own. 

I always wondered with video art, what would happen if someone were to post it online? But I guess it’s mutually beneficial to keep it private.

It would destroy the value of it. Why would you pay £10,000 for something and then destroy its value by putting it on YouTube? The artist has the same wish to keep the value high, as well. There’s now a collector base that’s becoming comfortable with this. You’re also seeing interior designers working with screen companies to make beautiful spaces for these videos to be seen in the home and enjoyed in the home. 

With the Lumen Prize, there’s a cash prize, but it also seems like once you’re in this group, you’re in a support network as well.

So in 2018, I set up Lumen Art Projects, a non-profit agency, and that became a home to support artists who qualified for the prize -- longlist, shortlist, or winner -- so that includes 60 artists every year. They become part of this network, and then through understanding their practice, we build opportunities for them. We’ve done commissions with all kinds of interesting partners, including the Barbican Centre and Public Space Art. We now have a partner with a museum in Norway, and they’re planning to reopen in June, which will feature Refik Anadol, last year’s winner. It’s very exciting. [Ed. note: The Sørlandets Kunstmuseum re-opened in May 2020, and “Re. Memory: Refik Anadol + Sougwen Chung” opens June 18, 2020.]

I’m looking forward to this year’s prize. Will it still be held in October?

The call for entries is currently open. We’ve extended the deadline to the 12th of June, and we’ve also reduced the price of entry because of the COVID-19 situation. I hope anyone will consider entering if they make this kind of work or know people who make this kind of work. The awards ceremony will be the 22nd of October; we’re hoping that we’ll be able to hold it at the Barbican Center in London if events are happening again. If not, it will be held virtually, which will also be an exciting event.

How many entries do you get each year?

We get about 700 works from about 500 artists each year. It’s been pretty steady over the years. We felt it was very white, and very western, so we launched an award called the Global South Award for artists who either work in or are from Africa, Latin America, or the developing economies of Asia and the Middle East. And we had a very good response from that. We also have a Nordic prize this year for artists in Scandinavian countries. We also have a free-to-enter student prize.

That’s a really interesting point, that it’s primarily white people submitting. It makes sense thinking about people who would have access to technology and the know-how to be able to do this would, by default, already be in a more privileged position. 

Not necessarily! I don’t think that’s the barrier at all. Pretty much everyone has some sort of computer or tablet, or access to one. I don’t think getting access to the technology is hard at all. It’s gotten a lot cheaper. And they’re also growing a middle class in these countries, too, so the fact that we haven’t heard from any of them, I think, is really a lack of networks. That world isn’t really networked into the West as well as it could be. And we’d love to get kids from a disadvantaged situation entering -- young people, people in their 20s, who are in a very disadvantaged situation where we could have their voice on the table. The art world is pretty white; the contemporary art world is a pretty western, white world. I just want to diversify it as best I can, and broaden our networks.

What percentage of people submitting do you think are creating digital art for the first time?

I think with still and moving images, it’s often newcomers. But with the rest of the categories, with interactive, AI, XR -- those are categories that you’ve probably been in for a while. Having said that, the winner in 2016 was an Italian oil painter who decided he wanted a VR aspect to his work; he found someone he could partner with and they created this work that won the Lumen Prize. And he was a first timer! He found the right partner, he had the right concept in his head -- he wanted to go into his picture and look down. Just vertigo. And it was mind-blowing. 

Fabio Giampietro & Alessio De Vecchi, Hyperplanes of Simultaneity - 2016 Lumen Prize, Gold Award

It’s such a great entry point for people, if they win, to have that encouragement and go on continuing making art of that type.

Yes, and I think that the barriers to showing it and understanding it and enjoying it are falling all the time. As the new generation grows up with these devices, they’re comfortable with looking at art on them. And I think this current situation that we’re in at the moment should increase that comfort value of looking at art through our desktops and devices. I hope so.

Artists interested in entering the Lumen Prize this year can use this link to learn more.

Original Art Or Digital Copy? Can Your Brain Tell The Difference?

I've been lucky in that the COVID crisis has so far left my family and me unscathed. It did, however, make me realize I have two major addictions: art museums and Starbucks. Luckily, my neighborhood Starbucks just reopened, and my good friend Brendan Ciecko and his team at Cuseum are trying to give me my museums back, but with a twist.

Cuseum has announced the launch of a new app enabling art lovers to view works from their favorite museums on the walls of their homes using AR (augmented reality). I know what you are thinking: “It's just not the same as going to a real museum.” 

But new research by MIT professor Dr. Pawan Sinha indicates otherwise. Dr. Sinha's paper titled "Neurological Perceptions of Art through Augmented & Virtual Reality," published by Cuseum, suggests that "the human brain doesn't differentiate between digitally reproduced artworks and their originals." This immediately felt wrong to me, so I decided to read the paper to see if I could better understand the findings from their research.

According to the paper, their experiment included nine test participants. The participants were screened to find subjects with little to no background in art who had limited exposure to AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality). All testing was conducted at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts (my go-to museum). Participants were shown artworks through four different environments:

• Augmented reality (AR)

• Virtual reality (VR)

• Two-dimensional photographic reproduction

• Authentic original

Additionally, the participants were tested while staring at a blank wall of the museum to establish a baseline phase. 

The paper explains that the test uses EEG (electroencephalography) to evaluate the electrical activity in the brains of participants in an attempt at "measuring non-conscious engagement." You have likely seen images of people with electrodes on their scalp and a whole bunch of wires coming off of their heads on TV or in movies. EEG devices have come a long way in the last few years, and for this study, the team used a commercial EEG, the Muse 2 headset (which retails for less than $300).

Muse 2 Headset

The four electrodes on the Muse 2 headset make contact with a test participant’s scalp and record and analyze electrical impulses from their brain, sending signals back for further analysis. In this case, the EEG was used to try and detect "relaxation" and "concentration." As described in the paper: 

Together, alpha's indication of subdued relaxation in direct contrast to gamma's indication of high concentration, tell a well-rounded story of a participant’s experience in all four of the experimental environments.

After performing analysis, Sinha and team conclude in the paper that:

Our current EEG findings would suggest that aesthetic experience is not denigrated by a digital interface representation and, in fact, digital reproductions in the case of augmented reality are shown to improve the magnitude of brain activity compared to the viewing of original works of art.

Photo courtesy of Cuseum

In addition to the EEG testing, participants underwent qualitative testing. Between each testing phase, participants were asked to provide as many details as they could remember about the painting they had just seen in order to test their memory. They were also questioned again a week later to test their longer-term memory. The survey results showed that participants found the images from augmented reality to be the most memorable after a week’s time. 

While interesting, the study raises more questions for me than it answers. For starters, I don't sit perfectly still when looking at art in a museum. I love to walk around, shifting from side to side, to see how paintings change. I enjoy exploring the dimensionality of the brushstrokes while zooming in and out of the canvas. In the conclusion of the paper, Dr. Sinha acknowledges, "Movement would create a stronger facsimile of a true museum experience…" and could be included in future testing. 

I also wonder if the test results would have skewed towards a greater appreciation for the original paintings if, instead of screening for a lack of art experience, they instead screened to optimize for expertise in art. As an art historian, knowing I am standing in front of the same canvas labored upon by the artist is very meaningful to me and adds to the experience. For example, I grew up only seeing Rothko paintings reproduced in books. I thought his work was stupid and assumed people only claimed to like it due to peer pressure. Then I saw a great number of his paintings in person at a retrospective, and I had the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious experience. Being enveloped by those giant canvases one after the other was life changing -- an experience I refuse to believe could be reproduced on a tablet using AR and an experience that I know firsthand was not able to be reproduced in printed books.

As an artist, I know that we take great care in managing how and where people view the work we create down to the tiniest decisions over materials choices. We lose sleep over details like surface texture and lighting. 

As a curator, I have had hours-long conversations about what kind of tablet or screen an artist is willing to use, because even the smallest details alter the experience for the viewer. Every artist I’ve ever worked with would tell you they care deeply about whether their work is shown on canvas, a digital screen, or displayed using VR or AR. 

Photo courtesy of Cuseum

When I first discovered Starbucks was going to shut down for COVID, I bought a half-dozen bags of their beans, a grinder, and a French press to make coffee for myself at home. While the coffee tasted similar, it was immediately obvious that something important was missing. I'm not sure if it was the pilgrimage, the friendly baristas, or that their beans are optimized for their brewing equipment, but it was not the same. I still drank the coffee at home because it was the best I could get. Likewise, I truly respect and value the work that Brendan, Cuseum, and Dr. Sinha are doing to give us the best possible art experience at home. Their work is noble, meaningful, and valuable -- but I'm far from convinced that my brain "doesn't differentiate between digitally reproduced artworks and their originals." 

If quarantine has taught me anything, it is just how much I miss museums and seeing paintings and sculptures in person. I'll be running to the museums to get my fix as soon as they are back open. Given Brendan’s life’s work at Cuseum is admirably to help museums drive visitor, member, and donor engagement, I won’t be surprised if I bump into him admiring a thickly impastoed van Gogh or Monet during my visit. First cup of coffee is on me as thanks for the valuable research he is supporting, even if I still believe we have a long, long way to go. Hopefully there is a Starbucks nearby.

Can Machine Learning Predict the Price of Art at Auction?

Note: This article was originally published in the Harvard Data Science Review on April 30th, 2020.

In December of 2019 at the Art Basel Miami art fair, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, known for his satirical approach to art, stuck a banana to the wall with duct tape, titled the work Comedian, and swiftly sold three copies for $120,000 to $150,000 each (Pogrebin, 2019). By the standards of the $67.4B-a-year art market (McAndrew, 2019), this may have been a bargain.

In the last 3 years, the seemingly unpredictable world of blue chip art auctions has caught the attention of the public and the mainstream media. Upon selling for $1.4M at Sotheby's, Banksy's painting Girl With a Balloon proceeded to shred itself in the auction house through a mechanism hidden in its frame. The public naturally assumed the damage from the shredding made the painting worthless. On the contrary, several Banksy experts believe the notoriety from the stunt likely doubled its value and will raise the prices of all Banksy works (Calfas, 2018; Reyburn, 2018).

In 2019, Jeff Koons's stainless steel sculpture Rabbit, modeled after a cheap inflatable toy bunny, fetched $91M, setting a new record for most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction (Wamsley, 2019). And in 2017, the record for most expensive work by any artist was broken when a heavily restored painting thought to be by Leonardo Da Vinci sold for a whopping $450M. The very same painting had sold for $10,000 just twelve years earlier in 2005 (Greene, 2017).

These sales regularly make global headlines because the prices seem to defy human logic. But what about machine logic? Are there specific qualities consistent across artworks and artists that can be detected, broken down, and analyzed by human experts or machine learning models to predict the value of art at auction accurately? Or could the prices paid for art simply fall outside the realm of prediction?

Human Appraisal of Art   

On the surface, the art market, built on the fickle tastes of individual collectors, would appear to be particularly unpredictable. Impressionism may be in vogue today and out of style tomorrow. Entire markets can seemingly shift overnight based on the whims of a handful of influential collectors. Unlike fungible stocks that trade in high volume, each artwork is unique and different from the next, and works can go decades between sales, making it difficult to establish any logical pattern or change in value (Mei & Moses, 2002).  

In describing the art market, Plattner (1998) characterized it as having two unusual qualities. First, people spend enormous sums of money on objects that are nearly impossible to value. Second, given the limited number of potential buyers, it is difficult for artists to know if there will be any demand for the work they are creating. These challenges have led some economists to caution would-be art investors against fooling themselves into believing they could somehow turn a profit in a market where prices "float around aimlessly" with the randomness of a dice game (Baumol, 1986).

Regardless of what skeptics might think about the feasibility of price prediction, professional art appraisers must develop a presale price estimate for each artwork that goes to auction. Trained in particular genres and geographical markets, appraisers take into consideration many important factors, including the artist, country of origin, age of the artwork, dimensions, rarity, signature, materials, subject, and condition. The appraiser then looks for similar items recently sold at auction and considers the current market demand. Finally, they develop both a low estimate and a high estimate, creating a range of values within which they believe the work could reasonably sell.

Based on the past performance of art appraisers employed at the two largest auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, art prices would appear to be somewhat predictable. Actual prices fell between the appraiser’s high and low estimate for Christie's 41% of the time and within range for Sotheby's 37% of the time in a study by Bjerg (2018) looking at 195,479 sales from 2016 and 2017.

It would appear that art appraisal is a valuable skill that improves over time. For example, auction houses with more experience in selling work by a given artist not only produced more accurate presale estimates, but they also had a higher likelihood of completing a sale, according to Bruno et al. (2016). One reason for this might be that auction houses with experience selling works by a particular artist have developed personal relationships with the collectors of that artist's work and, therefore, better understand the demand in the market.

There is also strong evidence that appraisals act as anchors in influencing the price that collectors are willing to pay for a work at auction. Appraisers themselves are not immune to the effects of anchoring to past estimates when constructing new appraisals for works returning to market (Beggs & Graddy, 2009).

But is appraisal an art form, relying on a combination of human relationships, soft skills, insider industry knowledge, and human bias, or is it science with discrete steps that can be replicated and mastered by a machine learning model?

Machine Learning Appraisal of Art

One might assume that the sale price of artwork at auction would depend heavily on its visual features. After all, that is what we do with art—we look at it. So it makes sense that when trying to predict the value of art using machine learning, most data scientists start with visual analysis. Convolutional neural networks are specifically designed for this type of research and are a popular choice. But surprisingly, researchers have found convolutional neural networks do a poor job in predicting the price of art at auction on their own. Models based on numeric and textual data perform far better than those looking only at images (Aubrey et al., 2019; Ayub et al., 2017). The implication is that what art looks like is not as important as one might think in determining how much it will sell for at auction. At least not to machine learning. However, companies like Art Recognition have been using computer vision and machine learning to authenticate which artist created a given work of art.  This authentication can have enormous impact on its value at auction. 

How could it be that the visual properties of art are not that important in establishing its value at auction? After all, shouldn't the inherent qualities of an artwork—its craftsmanship, its aesthetics, and its ability to resonate with viewers—be primary drivers of its price? We know this is not the case. Artworks discovered to be forgeries or misattributed can drop in value from hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to almost worthless in a heartbeat despite nothing physically changing about the work. This rapid depreciation would imply that art’s value at auction derives almost entirely from the artist's reputation and has little to do with the artwork itself. One might then assume that an artist earns their notoriety based mostly on their artistic skills. Yet, new evidence suggests reputation may have much to do with early access to prestigious galleries and museums.    

To better understand how access to prestigious institutions impacts artists' reputation and valuation, Fraiberger et al. (2018) mapped out the careers of 496,354 artists, looking at their exhibitions and sales. They placed the artists in the study into two groups based on the prestige of the institutions where they held their first five exhibitions. The results suggest that access to prestigious institutions had an enormous effect on an artist's career trajectory and played a significant role in predicting the sale price of their work.

Artists with early access to high-prestige institutions had twice as many exhibitions as low-prestige artists. High-prestige artists' work was traded 4.7 times more often at auction and at a maximum price that was 5.2 times higher than for low-prestige artists. The team then collected 442,314 prices of artworks displayed in galleries and found the average maximum price for high-prestige artists was $193,064 versus $40,476 for low-prestige artists.

Disappointingly, the findings also suggested that artists born into countries without access to high-prestige institutions tended to stay low prestige throughout their careers. One might attribute this to selection bias, implying the most prestigious institutions selected the most talented artists. However, it is unlikely that one's artistic talent correlates with the country or region in which they are born. Yet artists born in countries with little or no access to high-prestige institutions consistently struggled, most often starting and finishing their careers as low-prestige artists.

Given these findings, it appears important to mine the textual data describing artists and artworks for signals of reputation and prestige in addition to performing a visual analysis of the art. Though not as accurate as human appraisals, a machine learning model performed well when trained on textual and numeric data, including artist, year of creation, materials, and size, by Aubry et al. (2019). Their machine learning model was significantly more accurate in predicting prices of art at auction than a hedonic regression model trained on the same data. This improvement is likely due to machine learning's strength in analyzing not only the training features but also the complex relationships between those features. For example, understanding the dynamics between artist, color, and dimensions, and their impact on pricing can be challenging to capture with hedonic regression.  The machine learning model was also resistant to a systematic bias found in human appraisers who failed to sufficiently reduce their estimates in response to negative information about decreasing sale prices in artists’ markets.

A second way to potentially automate the capturing of artists' reputation and prestige would be to perform text analysis on their biographies and evaluate their social media presence.  Powell et al. (2019) used text analysis to examine how artists sold their work through sites like Saatchiart.com and ArtFinder.com. The team analyzed descriptions of artworks and artists' biographical information using popular machine learning techniques including k-nearest neighbors, support vector machines, and random forest classifiers to see if word count was indicative of sale price. They selected the random forest model as the base for testing of additional features as it performed the best out of the initial group. In the testing, word count from the description of the artwork had an impact, but the best results came from a combination of artwork description word count and artist biography word count. They also tested to see if the presence of social media accounts impacted prices. Interestingly, links to social media accounts had no real impact on their own, but when combined with word count, they showed to have some influence on sale price.  One explanation for this is that social media could primarily be a measure of an artist’s marketing savvy, which may already be accounted for in the word count of their biography and artwork descriptions.   

Expanding the Art Market Through Automated Valuation

Manual appraisal of art is slow, expensive, and limited by the number of human experts available. While not as accurate, machine learning can dramatically increase the volume, speed, and frequency of appraisals. Instead of only estimating prices for art headed to auction, all artworks, on and off the market, could regularly undergo automated valuation using machine learning. This approach is already in use in the real estate market with companies like Zillow, Redfin, and Trulia. 

Public pricing estimates for all artwork and not just art headed to auction could help grow the art market. Economists generally agree that increased transparency leads to increased liquidity in markets (Lang & Maffett, 2011; Pagano & Röell, 1996). While some market participants may not want greater transparency because they benefit from an inefficient system, there is evidence that the lack of publicly available pricing is the number one deterrent to collectors buying more art (Artsy, 2019).

Various automated appraisal systems have been around for close to a decade, but have enjoyed limited success.  Currently, at least one major auction house, Sotheby's, is seeking to improve the use of machine learning for appraisal automation to help drive liquidity (A. Qamar & A. Shum, personal communication, October 24, 2019). Ahmed Qamar, VP director of machine learning, and Andrew Shum, VP director of product, lead Sotheby's machine learning team. According to Qamar and Shum, their team has two goals: making selling easier and driving business impact. Shum shared that Sotheby's sells over 50,000 lots annually, and each lot is currently getting a human-generated price estimate. Since the number of lots sold at Sotheby's is presently limited by how fast human experts can produce estimates, automating even a small piece of the manual process can drive up efficiency and have a significant impact on the business. To accomplish this, they are working on augmenting human appraisers' abilities to identify comparable works with machine vision and machine learning.

Shum explained that Sotheby's goal is not to replace human appraisers with machine learning, but instead to make them "super predictors." They hope to free appraisers from menial and repetitive tasks so they can focus more on the higher end of the market where the volume is lower and the accuracy of estimates becomes more critical due to higher dollar-value items.

For middle-market appraisals, Qamar wants to remove manual processes altogether and fully automate not only price estimation, but the entire end-to-end sales process. Qamar would also like to automatically generate up-to-date appraisals for every work that Sotheby's has ever sold. He hopes this might highlight works that offer surprisingly high returns, which Sotheby's can then take to the owners, encouraging them to sell at a profit. If the owners agree to sell, Sotheby's can also use their recommendation engine created by Shum and Qamar to automatically advertise those works to Sotheby's massive client database based on past buying patterns. The strategy is essentially to automate the construction of bidding wars to achieve the highest possible sale price for the seller.

As Shum explained it, in examining which features drive up the price of artworks at auction, the number of bidders was second only to the artist who created the work—and according to Shum, Sotheby's recommendation engine would enable them to influence the number of bidders heavily. With these machine learning–driven capabilities, not only could Sotheby's estimate prices—they could influence them, achieving optimal returns for their clients at auction. 

Conclusion

Many researchers have expressed beliefs that prices for art are perhaps unpredictable. Yet, there is a practical need to create presale estimates for all work sold at auction. Humans are currently more accurate than machines in crafting these estimates. However, machine learning models can potentially scale to appraise all art, not just the work going to auction at any given time. Automated pricing of all artworks on and off the market could drive up liquidity by providing additional information to buyers. To this end, Sotheby's has been exploring machine learning to price all past lots and to develop an automated end-to-end sales process.

Although economists might have advised against it, purchasing the duct tape banana may have been a good investment. The research suggests that extrinsic features like artists’ reputation and the number of bidders are more important than features unique to the artwork. Cattelan's stunt has no doubt increased his global reputation, which should drive up the value of the work. And if the current owners wait just a few more years before selling, Sotheby's automated sales process might even trigger a bananas bidding war to assure the best possible return.

References

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