2023

Let’s Get Digital

I am an art collector. This is a confession and a point of pride. I love art, I love seeing art and experiencing art and being surrounded by art. It’s inspiring and makes the world a better place. Here are some observations I’ve had recently that, while unrelated, somehow fit together…

One: I have been collecting art for over 30 years. When my family and I moved to Tokyo from Los Angeles, we put it all in storage with the intent to have it crated up and shipped up once we got settled long term. Visa struggles and what not, that didn’t end up happening so we never shipped the art. Then we moved to Canada and thought we’d get it then – but COVID and border closures threw a wrench into those plans. Now we’re not sure how long we’re staying in Canada so the thought of spending a bunch of time and effort to move art here seems perhaps ill advised. The result of all this, is that the vast majority of our physical art collection is sitting in storage in another country, and we haven’t seen any of it in almost 7 years.

Two: Being an admitted art collector, over that time I’ve continued buying art from artists I love. Many of these pieces were shipped to me rolled up and as any art collector knows you do not want to keep flat art rolled up for too long. In the old days, when I co-owned an art gallery, I had flat files as a safe and secure place to keep unframed art. I no longer have flat files and have committed to framing work so that I can hang it and enjoy it. I recently took about 10 pieces to a local framer and while the results look amazing the multi-thousand dollar bill was a reminder that everything about collecting art isn’t always fun or easy. This print by Sean Higgins looks amazing though.

Three: Once I got those pieces back I had to find room to hang them. In some cases that meant moving other pieces around. This is fun, but also not fun. It’s hard to explain but if you have made a habit out of hanging and rehanging and rearranging art, you know what I mean. If you have any kind of ADHD then you really know what I mean.

Four: When art collectors get together a very common topic is “how do you find new artists?” and earlier this month while I was in Tokyo hanging out at Bright Moments this topic came up a lot. The answer to that question, time and time again, was Deca. I’ve had an account there for a while now but I confess to not really understanding it. After that trip I spent some time exploring and playing with the galleries that you can create, curating collections and art into many different easily browsable pages and I easily made some little galleries showing off some of the photography and generative work I’ve collected, as well as separate galleries for artists like Derech, Piv and Crashblossom from whom I have many works, among others. It’s also incredibly easy to browse around and see what work other people are putting into galleries and quickly find curators or groups you want to follow because you have similar tastes. I’ve really enjoyed looking through the genart group for example. It became very clear to me why collectors are spending time here.

Five: Deca isn’t the only way to show off digital work, I’ve long had a gallery space in Voxels and have enjoyed looking through galleries others have created in OnCyber. I have some OnCyber galleries myself but haven’t had the chance to update them recently. There are at least a dozen other gallery platforms people are using as well. Point being, people are spending a lot of time building ways to curate blockchain based digital art, and collectors are dedicating just as much time to showing off what they have.

Then it hit me.

If I’m out, anywhere in the world, it’s very easy for me to pull up an online gallery and show off artwork that I love. It’s very difficult for me to show off physical work that is hanging in my house (or worse, in storage). If I move (as I’m known to do) it’s very easy (and free) for me to bring my digital collection with me. It’s very hard (and expensive) for me to bring my physical collection with me. Worse if it’s international.

Six: Another thing that became apparent to me in Tokyo while visiting several galleries is how quickly the “digital canvas” products are improving. Currently Whim and Grail and other digital art displays are quite pricey, but Infinite Objects frames are super reasonable and satisfy the object lust thing quite well. And truthfully when you consider professional framing can cost $400 for a single piece, a digital canvas that shows your entire collection being $4000 isn’t insane, it’s steep for sure, but that price will come down over time as well. And as we more museums exploring ways to show off digital artists like Refik Anadol people will continue to get more comfortable with this idea of real art on screens.

Just to argue against myself for a moment, for more than 20 years now I’ve had friends telling me the wonders of dumping their CDs, DVDs, Books etc in favor of digital libraries & streaming. I’ve largely resisted, and while I’ve mostly transitioned to a digital movie library to be honest it’s not the same. I miss scanning the spines of DVDs and being reminded of a favorite film I want to watch again. This is why I still have all my books and vinyl, I can’t imagine not browsing or holding the objects in my hands. But yes, this comes with a cost – both in space around the house and a monetary one if/when I move. Not to mention the stress. But it’s worth it, because if I don’t see these items, if I’m not accidentally surrounded by them, I don’t experience (and enjoy them) the same way.

As someone who has been buying and collecting physical art since the mid 90’s, and loves looking at the texture and process in physical work, I assumed my position would forever be the same here too. I’m not saying it’s changed, but I’m more open to it than I might have been before. I was never opposed to digital art, don’t get me wrong, but I see a much larger use case and adoption potential now than I did say even 5 years ago. Consider these bits of conversations I’ve had recently:

“I never cared about art until 2 years ago when someone gave me an NFT, now it’s all I think about and I’m buying new art almost every week.” – An accountant

“I used to spent money on 5 digit wine, now I buy jpgs.” – A lawyer

“A water pipe broke and flooded my basement, at least 10 large canvas pieces were ruined” – A collector

“I used to go crazy when I was away from the studio, I had ideas and no way to move on them. Opening myself up to working remotely with my iPad, I can’t imagine ever being so locked down again.” – An artist

That last comment piqued my curiosity and it didn’t take long to find out that Procreate, the most popular professional iPad illustration app is primarily used by “younger artists” with official recommendations that it can be used by kids as young as 8, and unofficially as young as 4. While artists today might have a hard time learning new tools (and honestly, they don’t need to), looking ahead 20 years from now, artists who grow up with them aren’t going to think twice about it. They will be making natively digital art already. Qubibi is an artist I learned about in Tokyo and immediately bought a piece from, this is work that couldn’t exist physically.

The problem with digital art has always been provenance – if all copies are the same then where is the motivation to collect an original, of course NFTs and blockchains solve this (as well as many other problems artists have had like attribution, royalties, etc) and again this next generation of younger artists are growing up with this knowledge inherent. While the old people, the “thought leaders and influencers” argue and fret about it, the young people are embracing it and moving forward. The old people will die and the young people will take over, just as always.

And to be clear I’m not arguing for a move from physical art to digital art, I’m just observing that I think the adoption of digital art is going to be massive. As an art collector I’m always excited to walk into someones house (or office) and see an original piece of art and I think in the very near future people will have displays showing off their bad ass 1 of 1 (or small edition) digital art collections. And to people who might worry about the new wave of digital artists putting the physical artists out of work – that’s nonsense. First of all many artists who have successful careers making physical art have easily integrated digital into their world, just as they did prints or any number of other things before. I think the world is big enough for all kinds of art in various formats, and I think the ease and access that digital art provides is going to introduce way more people to art than we could have ever anticipated. I’m also so excited about new opportunities for artists and collectors – for example I’ve been lusting after the hardware customizations by tachyons+ for over a decade and their work inspired a lot of what I did with CMHHTD, recently I learned they were not only making hardware but also now selling digital art produced with their own devices and I was able to buy this piece. I love it, and might have to get an Infinite Objects frame for it.

I’ll always have physical art, I’m not going to pretend otherwise, but if I’m honest, I think it would be pretty amazing to be able to swap out all the art in my house with with a different “exhibition” from my collection with a single click. Lets see where the future takes us.

Connections

As editions of the first piece from my new “Connections” series have started to find homes, I thought I’d take a moment to talk a little bit about what I’m doing with this series, where it’s coming from and why.

I was a designer before I was a photographer and the initial motivation to pick up a camera stemmed from needing to fill a design element, so my initial look through the lens was purely aesthetic. Obviously I moved into storytelling later, but I never stopped thinking of composition. One could argue that street photography is also an experiment in abstracting the subject, but that might be a bit of a bleak take. Camera in hand, I intentionally tried to look at things a little differently than what I saw from others around me, and this lead to trying out different angles and perspectives. Often I found myself looking up.

Right away I was attracted to the similarities, stark feeling and contrast of both power lines and leafless tree branches in winter. Especially in black and white, which is my default. I started taking pictures of these right away, again with a “layout” approach and if you followed my early flickr, instagram and various other “moblogs” you might remembers these as recurring themes. The overhead rat’s nest power lines of Tokyo only exacerbated this fascination so once I started spending time there my collection of these images started multiplying.

In the past 2 decades I’ve amassed hundred of these photos, always feeling that there was something to them that I just couldn’t put my finger on, and if I just kept scratching at it sooner or later the connection would reveal itself to me. In the meantime I kept looking up and kept collecting photographs of settings that struck me. One thing I started thinking about a while ago was how both tree branches and power lines (or telephone wires in some cases) were means for transmission. Information being sent back and forth. And of course the duality that finds its way into all my work was present here as well, bouncing between the natural and the manmade. Intentional vs accidental, or maybe questioning how much intent is actually in the natural.

I kept finding new ways that these images and their subjects were similar and for a while I considered doing an exhibition that just juxtaposed the two sets, allowing the viewer to make the visual connection on their own but something about that wasn’t quite working for me. It felt unfinished. Around this time I started playing with AI. While I loved the idea of text prompt generated imagery, I was immediately fascinated by the idea of feeding my own work into the machine and seeing what it spit back at me. I loved the distorted abstraction and a kind of return to shapes and light and a step away from the literal subject that had been the focus of my original photos and in a way pushed me to look at my work a little differently again.

(Above: A crow in Tokyo by me, Below: Dall-E reimagining my crow)

As I continued to play with these new tools I thought again of the images of trees and wires that I’d been amassing and I began seeing what AI might make of them. The first attempts were admittedly uninspired though I didn’t really have a clear idea what I was looking for. Just kind of poking around to see if I stumbled across something interesting. Telephone poles that look like trees? No. Tree branches that look like power lines? No. The further I got away from my work the less interesting I found it, and in that realization I hit on something. What if I returned to my work very intentionally? What If I seeded the AI with several images and asked it to combine them – not in a “give me one photo of trees and powerlines” kind of way, but in a “here’s a bunch of images of the same thing, combine them” kind of way. What I got back was brilliant.

Without the projected human context of “this is this kind of thing, that is that kind of thing – and they are different things” the AI just looked at the shapes and structures and tried to imagine what it would look like for them all to fit together. This was the missing piece I’d been looking for – it wasn’t a question of how do these two distinct bodies of work fit together, but how could I combine them into a singular thing that continued to work with the narrative I’d been building.

These new images did exactly that – this collaboration being a direct synthesis of the human and synthetic, a merger of the natural and the manmade. Suddenly the relationships get more confusing and more less straight forward. The clear lines between one and the other fall apart. The black and white (both color and theme) becomes endless shades and interpretations of grey. Thinking back on the notion of communication, it’s less clear what kind of information is being sent, and where, and by whom. I’m always attracted to art that makes me ask questions and that’s hard to do with my own work because I usually have the answer to begin with, but this brought some of the that uncertainty into play. These outputs, unquestionably grown from my own imagery, had become their own thing leaving the viewer with much more room for their own individual assessment.

I decided to create 2 different distinct collections – editions and 1/1s. To differentiate them the editions will be a 1:1 square format and the 1/1s will be more traditional 4:3 landscape aspect ratio. There will also be a series of physical prints, and potentially a book collecting them all at some point in the future. Because of how deeply invested in this process I’ve become I decided that the actual distribution of these pieces should also be part of the project and fit into the concept of connections and relationships. To that end, I’ve begun gifting the first piece in the editions collection to people that I meet in person. This piece is effectively an open editions, until I decide to close it and while it may end up on the secondary market at some point minting will only ever be available from me, directly, in person. I’m not selling this piece, it’s a free gift from me to the recipient which further contributes to the concept of relationships and connections. Each future piece in the editions collection will be available to different groups of people under different circumstances. These will be announced as they are released.

I’m still deciding how and when to release the 1/1 collection and if I’ll do it on my own or through a curated platform. I’m still fine tuning which pieces will make up that collection, and how large it will be. A lot of potential directions here and decisions I’ll make as I get to them. In the meantime the focus is on the editions, and I’m very happy that so far the people I’ve given one to have resonated with the project and appreciated how it’s coming together. I’ve set up an Instagram account for this project specifically and will be posting art there as I make it public. Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this look behind the curtain.

Update: The 2nd piece in the Editions collection is available now, it’s only available as a burn to redeem. You’ll need 9 NFTs from my previous “cats” collection to exchange. (current floor is 0.0023 on OpenSea, 0.0001 on Blur)

V1 Cryptopunks: Artistic Intention Vs Public Reception, or What Happens When Art Takes On A Life Of Its Own

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When we talk about Cryptopunks and the controversy surrounding the V1 contract, there’s always the question of respecting the artist’s wishes. In general I agree that an artist gets to decide what their art is and isn’t as long as they are working on it, but once they release that work to the public it’s out of their hands. Public reception to a piece of art and the artists intention are two wholly separate things. With Cryptopunks this gets a even muddier because we aren’t just talking about a difference between intention and reception, we’re talking about hindsight and ongoing revisions to a narrative. The artist’s intention when the work was released and how they feel about the work several years after the fact may not be the same thing and shouldn’t be conflated. Add to this a healthy dose of misinformation and misunderstanding, even from supposedly authoritative sources, and you have widespread audience confusion. I hope to help clarify some of that a bit with this article.

It would be impossible to address every rumor, however there are two core themes I hear time and time again; Firstly that V1 Cryptopunks were never intended to be released (this takes on various forms: I’ve heard claims that they were a beta release, only a prototype, or as I’ve just heard recently that they were an unreleased experiment, stolen years later by hackers straight from the artists hard drive) and secondly that the “artists wishes” are the end-all-be-all when it comes to art appreciation.

So let’s unpack this. As a refresher Cryptopunks were released to the public on June 9th 2017 as a free claim. They were fully claimed by June 18th which was also when a bug was discovered in the contract, a new contract was published on June 23rd. The “new” Cryptopunks were airdropped to people who had claimed the “old” cryptopunks and with minor exception until 2022 anytime anyone talked about Cryptopunks they were referring to the “new” contract. The primary problem with all iterations of the “they were never intended to be released” story is that it erases everything that happened between June 9th and June 23rd.

On June 16th Mashable published an article about Cryptopunks and both Matt Hall and John Watkinson (collectively Larva Labs) are quoted in it. It’s very clear from the article that they are talking about a project that has already been released, not a project they are planning to release in the future. A quick read of this thread by Matt Hall in the r/ethereum board on Reddit posted on June 9th, 2017 should remove any question that the project was released, Matt even explains how to claim a punk in the comments. It’s entirely safe to say that had a bug not been discovered this would have been the single Cryptopunks collection. Just as a revised or expanded edition of a book doesn’t magically undo the release of the earlier version, the new Cryptopunks contract published on June 23rd doesn’t change the fact that separate contract was released to the public 2 weeks earlier.

I feel like I need to be exceptionally clear here – I’m not arguing about which contract is “the real one” or challenging the fact that the V2 contract is unquestionably the official version, but the often repeated claim that the V1 contract was never intended to be released is entirely false. What is true is that when Larva Labs released the V2 contract they assumed because of the bug in the V1 contract which prevented sales, people would simply lose interest and forget about it. And for a while that is what happened, but the thing about code and bugs is that people often find ways to patch them, and the thing about history is people like the stories. So while it’s fair to say that after the release of the V2 contract the artists did not expect the V1 contact to be traded, it’s incorrect to say that at no point did they intend to release the V1 contract.

Skip ahead a few years to 2022 when people started trading V1 Cryptopunks (thanks to a newly released wrapper that patched the bug), there’s no question at all that the artists did not want this to happen and they stated as much publicly. Surely the artists position on their own art is important, right? Well, kind of… but on some level this is like a parent raising a child, they have hopes and dreams for their children but at some point their children grow up and move out and have their own lives independent of their parents wishes. When an artist puts work into the public, what happens after that is not really something the artist gets to control.

It’s clear from statements Matt & John made in 2017 that they were intentionally publishing something onto the blockchain in a way that was immutable and out of their hands, and part of the “experiment” as they called it was to see what people would do with it. I think there’s a very good argument to be made that the artists intention – part of the art in fact – was very much for the work to have a life of it’s own. The friction arises because the path that work eventually took wasn’t what they’d initially imagined.

Go! Be free! Wait, no! Not like that!!

But let’s abstract this argument a bit and look for other examples in art and culture where a creator made something, released it to the public, and then changed their mind. This happens all the time in fact, but I picked 3 well known examples to illustrate a variety of outcomes and interpretations, and asked my Twitter followers about them.

Blade Runner. In Philip K Dick’s book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” the main character Rick Deckard is unquestionably human. For the movie adaptation screenwriter David Peoples made that much more questionable, and in the film itself which famously has several revisions of its own, director Ridley Scott is quite forcefully painting Deckard as a replicant. Public opinion has largely accepted that position, even though it’s distinctly not what the artist intended. Now you could argue that the movie and the book are different in many ways, and given that they were made by different people one is more accurately a derivative, or inspired by the other, rather than being a direct reflection of it and I’d probably agree with you, but I think it’s an important example none the less as it shows that most people aren’t even aware of how the character was originally written.

But what about an artist changing their own work? George Lucas did exactly that with Star Wars. The 1997 “Special Edition” made a number of significant changes to his 1977 film, primarily in the way of visual effect but also to the story itself. The most famous of these is the Cantina scene where Han Solo kills Greedo. In the original film, Han shoots first which casts him in the role of aggressor. In the update, Greedo shoots first and Han dodges and returns fire in self defense. This is a drastic shift in narrative for a beloved character, and while the “official” version has Greedo shooting first, and Lucas, the artist, has disavowed the original storyline, it’s quite clear the public is not on board with that. Even though all currently available versions of the film have this update, (this is an important detail – you can not buy or rent a current day production of Star Wars with Han shooting first) fans still insist Han shooting first is more authentic.

I say fans intentionally here because I’m talking about people who love Star Wars, love the characters and love the universe. These are not haters or critics, they are fans. Fans who love a piece of work created by an artist, and simply disagree with something the artist later changed. This is important to note because I often see people who speak fondly of V1 cryptopunks being accused of hating or trying to fud the V2 or “official” Cryptopunks collection and I don’t believe the to be true. I think these are fans, people who love the art, and simply disagree with the artist’s current position.

Another film example is Steven Spielberg who, for the 20th anniversary of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial digitally altered some scenes where FBI agents with guns are chasing children. Spielberg said that in modern context that could be interpreted the wrong way, and he replaced the guns with walkie talkies. Again here fans of the work had their own opinions about this change, some welcomed it and others argued this changed the entire feel of the film. They remembered being children themselves and watching these scenes and being terrified for the young characters in the film, a feeling that was lost with the FBI agents suddenly being less threatening. Years of debate raged on and for the 30th anniversary Spielberg actually put the guns back into the film and stated that he was disappointed in himself for making the change in the first place. In my poll this has a less decisive public opinion with an almost even split about which way it happened, and I think this illustrates well the separation between artist and audience.

These are well known examples but history is full of this kind of thing. From J. D. Salinger pulling his writings from publications after the popularity of Catcher In The Rye to Kanye West continuing to change his album Donda after it was released. “Done” is a fairly flexible concept to many creatives.

To belabor the point, artists intentions change over time. And people may connect with one position and object to another, but artists can’t dictate what people will resonate with or how their work is received. They can, as is the case of Star Wars, say “This is the real version now, and this is the only version I like” but even Lucas doesn’t deny the earlier version exists, and Disney who now owns the Star Wars franchise offers officially licensed merchandise embracing the debate.

My argument here is twofold – I maintain that there is no rule fans must agree with an artist’s feelings about their art, and that’s OK. I think people can be dedicated fans and deeply love a work of art while disagreeing with how the artist themselves feel about it. This is not inherently disrespectful, and these differences often create a richer story and fandom.

I also think this history is important. To the timeline, but also to the people who played a role in the story. 

Speaking again about Cryptopunks, Matt & John have stated that these were not immediately embraced by the public (it took almost 12 hours for the first Cryptopunk to be claimed) and for several days they thought the experiment was a flop. While a few people had claimed some, by the time the Mashable article ran on June 16th, a week after release, there were still a significant number of punks that hasn’t yet been claimed. The article kicked off a claiming frenzy and a day later they were all spoken for – but this is also part of the story and being able to look at the on-chain history and see if a particular punk was claimed before or after the Mashable article is fascinating. For some of the people who were there and claimed their punks before that article ran, this is a point of pride. That history is lost if you only look at the V2 contract, which shows all 10,000 Cryptopunks were claimed on June 23rd.

Like any of the examples above, this is something that some people might not care about but others care about deeply. And it’s those stories and history which makes things special. The story of V1 Cryptopunks being released, being flawed, being forgotten, and being brought back to life by the fans is powerful and adds another rich layer of texture to what is already the incredible story. As a fan myself, I’m glad others recognize this and I love learning more and talking about it with friends who share my passion.

To end this with a call to action, one that is potentially more important than this footnote makes it out to be – Yuga Labs, who is now the owner of the Cryptopunks brand (they are the Disney to Lucas’s Star Wars) has undertaken the not-insignificant job of placing Cryptopunks into contemporary art museums, with the intention of ensuring punks are protected and regarded as the culturally important artifacts that they are. Sadly, thus far these donations have only included the V2 Cryptopunk even though Yuga Labs is in possession of the V1 punks as well. While I understand they need to maintain a position on what is “official” I’m disappointed by their denial of the “original” and I sincerely hope they will reconsider, as Spielberg did, and donate the matching V1 Cryptopunks to those museums as well. Even Larva Labs kept the V1 & V2 punks together in the same wallet for over 5 years before transferring them to Yuga. This history is important and should be preserved for the next generation of fans to enjoy.