How was your show “Unsolicited Airdrop” last November during NFT.NYC 2021, the crypto-conference?

I’ve been unsure of how much I want to associate with that particular NFT scene because of scam-related projects and bad actors, but I was getting hit up by people who were active in crypto who were genuinely interested in good work. So I said sure, let’s get twelve proper 4K screens, let's get some nice projectors, and let’s set up an authentic gallery show. We’ll piggyback off the NFT.NYC event by bringing in some people who are more crypto-native alongside some people who are more digital art-native. It’ll be a convergence of artistic types.

We had all this art up from both established and rising artists in these spaces. We had Jonathan Zawada, Ondrej Zunka, and Erik Ferguson, who have done projects for huge artists and companies. And then we had more experimental artists like Theo Triantafyllidis, who has a very fine arts approach to mixed media and game concept art.

So it was a confluence of different types of digital artists, both in and out of the NFT community?

Yes, exactly. We brought in Elizabeth Stark and Jimmy Wales as speaker hosts. Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and Elizabeth Stark is the founder of Lightning Labs. They very much set the tone as a combination of crypto and new media. 

Jimmy Wales was entering the Internet age when everything was kind of an experiment. Wikipedia asked the question: How can the Internet make education free? How does it free people? The idea of an encyclopedia that's free from funding and free from outside influence is the same energy we want happening with NFTs. 

This older guy, probably in his seventies, showed up and said the show reminded him of CBGB. He said it felt grungy and authentic, but that he had no fucking idea what the blockchain was. There was no way he was about to buy a piece of art because he was so used to the old system. Wallets and seed phrases all sounded like alien concepts. But it still felt promising that he was totally into the scene itself.

It’s like the concept of headless brands, that the community drives the narrative behind the brand because there’s no centralized authority defining it for us. The assurance that NFTs live in a decentralized zone means that we get to define this newfound currency for ourselves. It sounds utopian, but do you think there could be drawbacks?

Those projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoKitties are exactly what we were trying to differentiate ourselves from. It’s not talked about enough that those things are a gamification of community. “If you buy into this project, you're part of the community.” Anyone can look at that scene and recognize patterns going on that are unethical. It has become more about money than concept.

I’m trying to differentiate that NFTs are a tool, and they can be applied to different things. We're currently experiencing this huge NFT gold rush fueled by people who are already in crypto, and there's a lot of people that are going to try to rush in who will lose a lot of money. That's where I think it gets worrisome. While the price might increase in the next six months, those projects won’t stand the test of time.

I know there are a lot of artists who are really hesitant to get involved with NFTs at all. Artists we hit up to do the show responded, “If it has to do with NFTs, I want nothing to do with it.” It's environmentally unfriendly. It's being traded as a commodity that could potentially hurt people down the line. And it's not a mature enough space. So much money is flowing in and out because self-proclaimed NFT artists hype up their projects sooner than they can define it by concept. It reminds me of when Damien Hirst sold all of his work at Sotheby’s in 2008, and the hype became more about the dollar amount at auction than the concept behind the works themselves. It was sad to see that happen with an incredible artist like Damien Hirst, but an event like that in the art world made such behavior acceptable a decade later in the NFT space. We’re seeing commodification of art by people who have no real interest in it.

There are pros and cons to people putting digital art in their homes. That’s obviously sick for anyone doing video or digital art because we're finally getting our moment. But it also means we have to adapt to the fine art business model of building narratives and marketing strategies around our works. We’ve seen what happens to other arts industries that take this route. Due to Spotify and Instagram, musicians don’t get the gig if they don’t avidly promote themselves on social media. And now it’s more lucrative and marketable to hire a TikToker over a professionally-trained actor. I can see how the art market’s hype for NFTs will place digital artists into the same system. 

There’s currently an echo chamber of toxic positivity, where everyone’s project is deemed amazing or unique or special. Everyone’s afraid of criticizing each other’s work because there’s fear of being shunned by the community or even shut out.

We need media archaeologists and experts who can pierce through the cacophony and signal which conceptual projects are worth investing in. Artists who ignore all the noise will be the ones who last more than five to ten years. DAO-style communities will become their own brands, and vice-versa, brands and musicians will continue to launch DAOs and Discord servers for their fans. Even musicians like Kanye, Kid Cudi, Kendrick Lamar, or Tyler the Creator who have always had very strong fan bases will need to keep feeding the beast to get people’s attention, and they’ll do that through online communities that have first access to engaging with the artists on new levels. DJ Khaled Hot Wings NFTs.

Like you’re saying, usually when people think of NFTS, they think of screens and monkeys. And now we’re gearing up to DM the McDonalds DAO Discord for an order of large fries. But for your NFTs, you've taken the installation aspect of traditional art and applied it to digital work. In your installation piece Rise and Fall, the NFT attached to it is part of the installation itself, right?

Yeah. I’m more interested in minting NFTs as accompaniments to larger sculptural or installation works, not as full projects themselves. Right now, NFTs for me are like having posters at a concert — an add-on.

Rise and Fall is a video of two swimmers in an undulating current projected onto a massive piece of indigo-dyed cotton fabric that flows in the wind. In January 2021 when we first built this piece, we thought, If there was a way to reward people for coming, that would be so sick. And that’s when someone suggested, “Oh, you should look into NFTs.” And I realized I could give away video pieces as NFTs to anyone who came to the show and have them be valued, so that by taking away a piece of the work, people help fund it.

That’s not to say I don’t have an NFT series. I was exploring how to depict ephemeral memory in digital form and was interested in the subconscious and imagination of a machine intelligence to create memory and dream states. I had the idea for a project that would blend what you would see in a painting with the high quality resolution of 4K screens. This is how Painted Cities was born. I started by walking around cities like Rome, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles and taking both photos and videos of different locations, scenes, textures, and landscapes. Using an AI tool called neural style transfer, I project the photos onto the videos frame by frame, so that they fuse together in distorted ways. Sometimes I'll only style one frame, or 100 out of 1000 frames, and then I'll frame blend between them. And that's when you get a lot of interesting effects, like streaks that follow a skater as he moves through a skatepark, like a digital ghost that trails him.

You’ve likely seen the popular applications of style transfer that project paintings onto images. The AI will look for patterns in the painting, like curves and strokes or different objects that are similar to the input image, and map them onto it. So the lines of a house in a photo become the brushstrokes of an oil painting. I decided to add this extra layer to my Painted Cities series by using photographs of graffiti or indicating to the AI which painting styles to emulate. 

This technology is new, as it was only recently developed three or four years ago, but so many people research and update it that it’s evolving very fast. One day style transfer will be as ubiquitous as Photoshop and everyone will know how to use it, perhaps with just a click of a button on an app on your phone.

Considering this media archaeology perspective, how do you think we will continue to integrate digital art into our lives?

When you look back on facets of the Internet we grew up with, you realize how impactful and transformative they were, even if people disregarded them at the time. Vaporwave of the early 2000s was seriously ridiculed but now we understand it as a serious art movement. The Tumblr platform cultivated the GIF art movement and is the reason so many subcultures have survived and flourished. The art world literally told computer artists in the 80s and 90s to stay away, that they weren’t fine artists. It still doesn’t feel like Internet art has entered the fine art realm like sculpture or painting, but it’s definitely more influential.

The opportunity for display is at work. Because Instagram and Youtube are such big platforms, we see a bunch of art made for Instagram and Youtube, the same way people made GIFs to circulate on Tumblr. Screen displays have become the center of human expression. I can see in the near future a DIY movement to turn old TV and computer screens into displays for digital art because people will want their houses filled with devices that are both nostalgic and futuristic. By 2040, you’ll visit a flea market and it will feel normal to see digital art being sold in person. Next to oranges and crystals, vendors will sell video art on tiny screens. Projection bombing and 3D projection mapping will be the most popular forms of graffiti. College freshmen will adorn their dorm rooms with moving concert posters.

How do you think we start to see ourselves in different ways by creating and digesting AI art?

Computers are often used to solve problems — they’re used in design all the time. With the emergence of AI art, computers have joined artists in an attempt to try and describe something or offer questions or imagine new things. I think the question, “How do we use a computer to make art?” will evolve into “What is art by definition?”

Consider art made with StyleGAN, where the computer finds similarities amongst a data set of images, like flowers or grass or human faces, and generates a new image based on these reference points. This idea of using the computer as a tool to imagine new things feels very rooted in the human behind it who provides data and parameters. But the difference between a novice playing around on their computer and a standout media artist is how they approach the AI tools to communicate novel and complex ideas. For example, artists can use StyleGAN to record the evolution of effects a dig site has on a community by showing the destruction overtime of a nearby mountainside. And one day soon, we’ll be able to enter our family lineages into a data set and see what our ancestors looked like.

I’m impressed by these possibilities and conversations that AI art brings to the table. When I was an apprentice for Refik Anadol in 2018, he would write theories on how each of his particle simulation projects were also paintings, and that data is a painting. That year, the LA Philharmonic approached him for an installation piece to honor its 100th year anniversary. Our challenge was to project over ten terabytes of history, songs, photos, and videos onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It’s this huge, curved building, so there were a lot of things that could go wrong. But it turned out amazing. You saw the architecture of the building swell with this wave of 10 billions particles representing all the data from the Philharmonic’s history. That's why I think Refik is one of the most popular artists today — he’s able to add theory to concepts that immerse communities in ways never thought possible.

Do you think the idea behind a project is always the most important thing?

It should be the first thing you learn as an artist. What’s the idea here? I think everyone in the NFT space and digital media space is going to start developing a taste for what looks right, and that will be informed by ideas that move people. It's such a Wild West right now. But the same core values are there: what’s the idea?