Latest / TezTalks Radio - Tezos Ecosystem Podcast / 95: AI, Blockchain & the Future of Digital Art with Rodell Warner

Transcript

95: AI, Blockchain & the Future of Digital Art with Rodell Warner · TezTalks Radio - Tezos Ecosystem Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Tez Talks Radio.
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: I am your host, marissa True, and on today's episode I am joined by Rodel Warner, a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Rodel Warner emerged on the Tezos NFT scene through its partnership with the Serpentine Gallery back in 2023, and he was most recently featured as a finalist in the Museum of the Moving Image and the Tezos Foundation's Community Curation, which was shaped entirely by public vote.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: So, hi, riddell, Welcome to the show.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: How are you today?
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Hi, marista, thanks for having me.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: I'm really good.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: So first off, as a customer in the show, I'd love to dig into your background, specifically as an artist.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Can you tell me the story of what originally inspired you to pursue art as a career?
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: tell me the story of what originally inspired you to pursue art as a career?
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Um, I always, uh, made things that I need and, um, I, you know, I used to make music.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: I used to, um, do lots of different kinds of things.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Um, and maybe when I was in my very late 20s, um, I realized that I couldn't do all the things that I want to do.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: I couldn't make all the things that I want to do.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: I couldn't make all the things that I want to make.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: I used to play in a band and I used to do all of our kind of like graphics for our like shows and things like that.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: I used to make clothes and, having sort of been overwhelmed by the attention, like demand for attention from all these different projects, I sort of realized what I want to do the most and what I feel most fulfilled by and what I'm sort of most motivated to pursue.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: Also, I was drawn by the ability to like totally control the entire sort of, um narrative and sphere of activity, like in in a band.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: It's very much a sort of more collective project.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so when I was around like 23, I remember just deciding very sort of being very deliberate about pursuing art and kind of not pursuing or not putting energy into sort of other projects and other sort of activities, things I was working on.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: And yeah, so I devoted my time to my sort of illustration practice that I had at the time, learning digital tools.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: I got a job at a local printery where I worked in the art department and sort of got to sharpen my skills and move into advertising from there and worked in a studio with a bunch of older artists who became my sort of mentors for three to five years into freelance, started having shows, started traveling, um.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: And yeah, since that moment where I decided that I was going to focus on art, it sort of like steadily sort of snowballed and um, and people taught me how to make a carrero to bit so there's sort of two different streams.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: One is kind of honing in on the artistic style I guess you were chasing after wanting to refine but also the themes and sort of the artistic voice that you wanted to refine.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: So how did you shape E?
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: that had a lot to do with, um, the people that I was around.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: So when I started working in advertising, when I was around 22, 23, um the ad agency that I worked at, the studio that I worked in, I was one of maybe 20 artists and I was maybe, if not the youngest person there.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: I was one of the two or three youngest people there.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: Um, the people who were sort of directing the space, the creative director, the head of writing, of copywriting.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: These people were like Richard Rollins, who was an artist, a physical artist.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: He was a creative director.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: Another sort of mentor of mine, dave Williams, was a choreographer and writer and they were in their early 40s at the time and were in community with artists and people who were even older.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: A lot of the that during that period I was making the music.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: I was making like the band that was in what was a big part of my life.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: We were making like post hardcore rock and we were very focused on sort of the us music scene and culturally I was very outward focused and the group of people I and culturally I was very outward focused and the group of people I was spending time with was very outward focused and sort of like in some way, like I don't know, resentful or I don't know what the right way I think the word isn't coming to me right now but we didn't love the place that we were in and so, moving from this space that I was in before I started working at that agency, which had a lot to do with looking outwards and sort of not yeah, I can't find the right ways but like not loving the space that we were in, I moved into a community where these people absolutely loved the place that they were in and, seeing my view of it, became aware that I had missed so much.
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: And, like you know, they were talking about when they were young in the 80s, and like there were like trade protections that meant that there was a really vibrant fashion industry in Trinidad and Tobago, or like a lot of different creative people were making a living and there was a lot more community and Carnival.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: They they really introduced me to like the uh, art of Carnival.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: You know, being curious about what they were so excited about.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: I started looking for this stuff online.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: I started trying to find archival material to sort of get an image of what they were talking about.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: Also at that agency.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: It's the first time that I had like in my life that I had unlimited access to the internet.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: You know, in Trinidad and Tobago during that time internet was really expensive At home.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: You know, I had like a 50-hour a week or 50-hour a month kind of plan, but at work I had like a 50 hour a week or 50 hour a month kind of plan, but at work I had like unlimited internet.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: I suddenly was in a situation where I was interested in researching the space that I was in and kind of kind of trying to understand where I fit into that and trying to really see it for what it is.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: You know, outside of just the time span that I knew it in and that kind of.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: That kind of began my interest in archives and archival images and working with those images and also my interest in looking around and seeing what's immediately around me and how I fit into it.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: And yeah, I learned so much from those people about just how to be in the world and I think, yeah, the sort of ethos of their practices and the ways that they are in the world.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: You know this is the first set they are in the world.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: You know this is the first set of artists that I really you know, a set of musicians that I spent time with.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: That I really was sort of living with you know, I was at work way more than I was at home.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: So, you know, coming out of that I mean even when I, even when I'm even in 2021, when I'm even in 2021, when I started interacting more with you know, suddenly interacting with so many digital artists online during the NFT boom, like the beginning of it, you know, my, because of that awareness that I got from that moment when I started working at the agency in Trinidad, that's what allowed me to kind of locate myself and have the awareness to kind of think of, you know, recognize that I'm in a moment where I'm joining a new community and, like you know, thinking about what's the history of this community, what's my position in it, what am I doing in it, who else is here?
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: And like kind of looking in that way, looking at it in that way and thinking from that place and still with an interest in like collections and archives, which is also like sort of an inherent facet of web3 blockchain.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: Um, so, yeah, thematically, just I don't know, maybe it has to do with identity in some big way, my sort of influence, the influence of my mentors, um, and then did we talk?
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: What was the other facet that you were talking about?
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: Was it aesthetically that we were thinking about?
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: it was both about sort of honing in around your artistic voice but also how you sort of chose your craft or your medium.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: So what I've understood so far, based on what you've shared, is that there was a lot of early exploration about your environment and how you identified within your environment and sort of seeking out places where you would resonate better.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: And a part of that was due through, you know, different kinds or different forms of mentorship, whether it was at your place of work or whether it was people who were willing to offer their perspective, which I think is very fascinating, because I think it takes a lot of introspection to be able to understand yourself in that broader equation and then seeing how you then extrapolate that outward into, I guess, an artwork that people can relate to or can can understand is is not necessarily that straightforward.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: So, like, how did you identify the mediums or the forms that you wanted your expression to take so that people could connect with it the same way you wanted them to?
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: right, all right, um so, um.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: So if when we're thinking about like mediums, I I feel like that sort of there was a kind of path that I followed, that sort of unfolded on its own out of necessity.
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: So when I've, you know, when I, when I was first making images, I used to draw a lot and I was transferring a lot of my illustrations onto t-shirts.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: So in order to edit the images, I started using my computer.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: A friend of mine illustrations onto t-shirts.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: So in order to edit the images, I started using my computer.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: A friend of mine that I used to make music with put Photoshop on my computer one day when he was putting like Fruity Loops and a bunch of other music programs on there.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: That's how I got into editing images.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: Like a friend just randomly put Photoshop on my family's computer and so, because I'm using Photoshop, I could edit pictures like photographs, and so I started buying stock images so that I could edit my designs and make new things to put on t-shirts.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: Because I wanted to spend less money on stock photos, I bought a camera so that I could take pictures of the things that I wanted to put on my shirts instead of buying pictures, and I sort of inadvertently, fell in love with photography.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: I really got into lenses, really got into, like you know, perspectives and, like anybody who falls in love with photography knows of that moment where, like, you just discover the tool, the camera, as a tool in you and you're just exploring what it can do.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: When I started working at the agency that I worked at, the creative director that I worked with had been a photographer for decades and so and there were others, other people there there, too, who were really into photography and, like you know, it's an ad agency, so photos were like a huge part of what we did.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: There were photo shoots all the time, so photography became a huge part of my life.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: When I started looking at archival images online that's photography, too, that I'm looking at online I also found web artists, like.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: I also met ria mcnamara, who's an artist and writer, um, who's based in toronto, um, who also has trinidadian heritage, and we met online because I kept a tumblr in which I like catalogued all of those archival images from trinidad and tobago that I would find online, and it just so happened that rio was making a series of exhibitions and she was studying niches and subcultures, and one of the subcultures she was studying is web art, like net art, and she introduced me to Lorna Mills and this is like in I don't know 2009-2010, and Lorna was the curator for one of the segments of one of Ria's exhibition series.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: I meet Lorna as this like sort of artist curator who's like wrangling this really ragtag group of net artists to make work for this IRL exhibition that's happening in Toronto, and so online I also this is where I get exposed to Frances Gamma, roland Leonard, chiara Passer so many artists that were doing amazing, interesting things with images that were not photography.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: Um, and this is where this is where I kind of veered away from my photography practice and when I became a little frustrated with my mentors for sort of what I considered like over-directing my trajectory.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: You know, I'm like in my early twenties, what I considered like over directing my trajectory, and you know, I'm like in my early 20s.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: I'm like, you know, as a sort of rebellious move, I kind of ditch photography and I'm like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm working with abstract, just digitalia right now.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: I'm just, I'm just messing with images.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: You don't know anything about this, you can't tell me about this, and and that caused me to kind of, you know, I'm making animated gifs, I'm trying to see what I can do with them, and that put me in a different direction.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: And then, you know, over time, I've just, like you know, picked up tools, um watched tutorials and learned different things.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: In 2017, I was really inspired by an artist called josephine I'm gonna remember the name in a minute and and she also, uh, meant on tezos, but she makes 3d models and I was so inspired by her work that I felt so motivated to learn 3d modeling myself, and it was really difficult to learn blender, but that's how I got into 3d modeling.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: That's how I got into blender.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I guess that's you know, more and more things keep happening, but I see it as a process of like being inspired, finding necessity and like sort of just moving from step to step, trying to like learn the things that I feel I need to learn in order to produce types of images that I want to um produce.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: And also there's a sort of running into like encountering other artists who are really inspiring and who are doing things that I see that I'm really excited by, and I want to learn how to do what they're doing, and so that drives me forward in terms of technique and tools and things like that too.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: And then in some way in me there is a sort of merging of, like you know, my interests as an artist and what I'm trying to do with the images that I'm making, and then also, you know, whatever the newest sort of like technical skills or like techniques that I'm interested in or methods that I'm interested in, um, and yeah, those things come together so it sounds like you never really I guess, committed to just one artistic medium, but it was all this.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: It was almost this iterative process where, whenever you would encounter experience something novel, you would attempt or you would experiment, or you would see how it might fit into your own practice.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: Which naturally begs the question of when you first encountered NFTs and blockchain-based art, what was your initial impression and what was it that actually drew you into spaces like Tezos to not only distribute your work, but to use that as a kind of a medium in and of itself?
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: What was really exciting about the NFT boom was the possibility of earning a living as an artist in a totally new way, and what was really changed my mind.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: I also experienced it as something that had a learning curve that seemed steep.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: I wasn't sure about it at first, I didn't understand it very well and I had done some reading and like, done some like, watched some tutorials and things like that, and still wasn't really.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: You know, when a friend of mine texted me and was, like, have you started making money with this yet?
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: Like, and told me what a friend of his that had started making money with it, I was like, okay, maybe I need to pay more attention to this.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: And, you know, reached out to my community of like net artists sort of like people that I know online and somebody Nicholas Sassoon sent me an invitation to a foundation and I mentioned my first works on the Ethereum blockchain and they sat there and it was very disappointing and I didn't know who to talk to or like.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: I didn't know how to create, I didn't know what needed to happen to change that.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: But I was paying attention to other people online who were doing it, including Nicholas Sassoon, and I saw on Twitter that Nicholas was doing something on this other blockchain and it seemed really strange and the platform was really obscure.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: But I saw that there were people paying attention and talking about it and it felt very different than my experience on Ethereum or trying to mint on Foundation, because that just felt like for me there was just nobody there.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: But the thing that was really obvious on Tezos was that there were a lot of people who were really excited about what was happening.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: So, even though it looked like not the place to like make a ton of money, it did seem like the place to be in community with people, and that's that's also something I didn't affect, that I really really wanted and and that was the reason I started minting on Tezos.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: And you know, one challenging thing when I started doing that was figuring out what to mint.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: And you know, I have a lot of sort of experiments that I've worked with, you know, and I have a hard drive that has, like you know, I have all my work organized by year since like the year 2013.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: And I have all of these sort of digital experiments, things that are, you know, that I could possibly mint, and I've started like trying out different things, things that I could possibly mint and I started trying out different things and I feel like the first month or so was really just a research period where I was checking out what people were interested in, seeing what seemed to work and didn't work.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: But I think something clicked when I realized that I had joined a new community and that I really wanted to find a way to share something in this group that had resonance with this group.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: And you know, like one thing that I think about a lot is like like nicknames, like whenever I get a new nickname it's because I've joined a new group and, like you know somebody who loves me in that group, like wants to be affectionate, in a way that they don't know how to be and they find some kind of sweet thing to call you.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: When you join a new group, it really matters that you um sort of speak the language of that group or like some language emerges or some like culture emerges, like ways to do things emerge that are specific to that group, and so I feel like my first month or so paying attention to tesla's was really trying to figure out what I wanted to do in the group and also what the culture and what the interests of the group were when I started minting my works that were animated 3D models of plants, which is not something that I had done before.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: It was something I'd kind of been experimenting with but hadn't shared publicly.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: People responded to it really well and people were getting excited about it and I thought, okay, I found something that matters to this new group of what felt like friends that I have online and I just went from there was there.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: I think many artists enter the web3 space or at least back in, you know, 2020, 2021 with this prospect of being able to better financialize their work, and there was a lot of, I guess, a incentive to participate because it was a new means of making an income and making a living, but the same time, there was almost this direct necessity of gaining favor from this community, or like being liked by the audience, which kind of sometimes can run contrary to the integrity of the work.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: There's the art for the art's sake, and then there's the art to be sold.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Was that something that you had to grapple with at all, or did you sort of have it clear in your mind of what was, I guess, more voice and what was more sellable?
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: I think it was definitely something I was thinking about I'm not sure that it occurred to me as a challenge or something to grapple with because I realized really early on that I wasn't interested in making anything that I wouldn't be making otherwise, or that I wasn't interested in doing just for his own sake or for my own sake because I did.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: I was able to articulate a long time ago that what I do, what I do that that's the thing that I call art is I'm making things that I need, um, and then if I make things that I need and share them publicly that other people appreciate, is because that thing that I made that I need also has some meaning to other people.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: So it was very important to me right away to to not deviate from that.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: There was a moment, I think early on, where I might have I think it was the first and only time I minted something that I meant to, something that I maybe felt wasn't finished or wasn't resolved enough, or that I should have spent more time with, and sort of what felt like the permanence of it, the fact that it existed there on my, like you know, in my wallet, on my profile, as like a thing that I made.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: That didn't feel like something that I had put 100 into.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: It was such a terrible feeling that, yeah, any sort of like wiggle room that that existed in me for you know, possibly minting something that didn't feel, that I wasn't able to like stand behind 100, that it went right out the window with all the wiggle room, went right out the window with that realization that, like, I don't want to have to feel compromised in any way, but that's also like a an ongoing and like active conversation in in blockchain and, I guess, with any in any situation where artwork is being sold.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I kind of was able to figure out early on that I didn't.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was kind of clear to me the possibility for sort of that type of compromise and I was careful, sort of not to fall into it.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: So if we take the beginning of your journey and then fast forward to the end of last year, slash early this year, where you were featured as part of the Tezos and museum of the moving image exhibition, can you tell us a little bit more about that and how the collaboration came about and sort of what were the themes and the concepts that you wanted to explore in the works that you exhibited?
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: yeah, um, you know the the beginning of my journey on tezos and the most recent, this most recent activity with mumomi are very, very connected.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: I would say that the works that I've shared that were most resonant in this space is my Terraria series, these animated 3D models of plants that I started making around 2020 and minting in 2021.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: The person so the the Momi Tezos Community Curation Project starts off, where I think a dozen, or maybe it's 10, advocates are asked to nominate artists, and I was nominated by Chris Coleman, and Chris Coleman is one of four collectors one of four people.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: And Chris Coleman is also an artist, but he's also an avid collector and is one of four people.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: And chris coleman is also an artist, but he's also an avid collector and is one of four people that have collected all of my terrariums.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: Um the first series that I made of 30 terrariums.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: He collected every one of them, even like spending a long time tracking the second terrarium, which had sold out and which nobody was on secondary for the longest time, and he finally collected one and since then has collected, I think, without exception, every terrarium that I've minted.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: And this is the person that nominated me um for this project and the work that I'm sharing because I'm interested in it being something that has meaning in this community a lot of the, so the, with a lot of what?
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: A lot of what I've included in this sort of like archive that I've, that I've exhibited, that I am exhibiting at mumi.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: It includes a lot of these, uh, terrariums.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: But you know, this project is happening at the museum of the moving image.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: I am thinking of the history of this organization, like the fact that it has so much to do with, you know, not just current moving image work and artists and practices, but like going back decades.
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: When I visited MoMA for the first time in November to test the work and to test the projectors, you know I saw there were these really old projectors that were in the space that I was working in.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: Somebody was working there told me that they you know they were expecting a historian, somebody who's like the preeminent, like sort of historian on projectors in the entire world, was coming to view these like I don't know how old, possibly like a hundred years, I don't know how old these projectors were and at the same time, you know, the big show at the museum was Aurea Harvey's sort of like time.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: You know, the big show at the museum was aurea harvey's sort of like career survey show that was going on, which and you know, aurea is to me just the most spectacular artist and so like to be able to see her works there, which to me is, like you know, the cutting edge, like just in on all levels, representing something that's so new in a way, but also her own personal history, like it's they will expand her entire career.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: And then also in this building that is devoted to um, moving image history, like technically in terms of the uh materials that are used and the tools that are used, in terms of the artists that have worked in the in this field, and I'm being invited to produce a work that exists on a 50-foot wall in the lobby of this museum.
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: And so I'm thinking about my own history and the history of my own moving image practice, and I'm thinking about my own archival practice and I'm thinking about my hard drive, on which I have all of my moving image experiments, cataloged by year that I can go through and like sort of the energy of the space I feel has so much to do with like history and the meaning of history in the present that the work that I've produced was my own sort of personal vision of that.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: So it's a lot of my own moving image experiments, including the terrariums that I produced, um over the last four years or so, that I shared on on tessus, and I'm sort of presenting that, that archive.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: I wrote a program that serves images I think I think there were over 200 images, moving images, animated gifs that I rendered them in such a way that they can overlap with each other, um, and you can see through them, the transparent uh gifs and yeah, um, and the same conversation about like who is this for?
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: What has meaning in this space?
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: You know it's in queens, new york like what, what's the history of this space?
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: Like, I just felt like, yeah, what, the same things I was thinking about at the beginning of my journey on tezos is exactly, it's all the same concerns in this most recent project it was kind of like everything that was coming full circle as you, as you alluded to.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: If it was your archive, it was almost like a snapshot of your evolution as an artist, as, at least as it related to the digital mediums in particular.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: But also something we were discussing earlier is that this notion of the archive and history and technology seems to be this ongoing theme within your work, and I know one of your current projects is titled Artificial Archives, so it sort of encapsulates all of those themes together.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Can you explain sort of the concept behind that and the inspiration behind it and the role that technology actually plays in that project behind it and the role that technology actually plays in that project, and whether there is this intersection of technologies like blockchain that you look throughout the process?
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: yeah, and as you just reminded me of something, actually, when you mentioned the evolution of technology, and you know, at at mummy, you know they're the space is also just littered with, like if you're walking through the museum, they were always just like exhibits of, of old tech, just all kinds of old cameras, projectors and things like that.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: In this X installation that's up right now and it's up until February 2nd, there is the use of in my installation, a 3D fan projector.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you've ever seen one of these things, but it's amazing that it's like a fan.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: It has these two fins, these two like it looks like an X with like strips of light, like LED strips on it and as it spins, these LED lights are synchronized to produce colors in such a way that when they spin they produce an image that looks like it's floating in the air, and I've seen some saw these things at like supermarkets in jamaica and they're mostly used in marketing.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: But it was really important to me to include this in this exhibition at the museum of the moving image because it also occurs to me as a brand new form of projector that's in a new installation in this building that's housing all of these historical tools and then, like Artificial Archive, is a project that maybe the first project of mine in which the use of text-to-image generators or AI-generated images or computational images is a real feature or is like a sort of integral part of the work.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: And I haven't I haven't haven't minted any of my artificial archive works, and the reason is that artificial archive is what I've created, a sort of like fabulated, a sort of speculative photographic archive from the Caribbean.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: It's all of these sort of AI generated images that never existed in real life.
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: When photography was new, the people that lived in the Caribbean did not have access to photography, and so when we see the first images of people from the Caribbean that exist that were made from maybe like the late 1840s to like the early 1900s, it's never from the perspective of the people themselves.
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: They are really very often shot, um, by sort of colonial settlers, um, and often the people are recorded as part of some kind of colonial project.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: You know they're, they're documented as laborers mostly, but we know from writing and other forms of documentation that their lives were very rich, but that doesn't occur in the photographic archive.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: So we don't know what they looked like when they were at rest.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: We don't know what they looked like at home.
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: We don't know, if they had cameras, who they would have photographed and what they would have photographed.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: If they had cameras, who they would have photographed and what they would have photographed.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: And so this artificial archive is me, using text-to-image tools to imagine what those images might have looked like.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: The community that I belong to, that these pictures have meaning, have the most meaning in, is the community of, like Caribbean people that pay attention to what I do, and that's a very distinct community compared to the people that I share things with on Tezos, who are interested in other things.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: Those are not people from the Caribbean.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: Those are people from all over the world who might find interest from what I've learned or from what I expect from my experience in this space.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: These are people who might find interest in this sort of like technical aspects of how this work is created, but might not feel invested in what it is trying to do, necessarily not in the same way that the people from the caribbean do, who might observe these images as something that they are personally connected to, and it's really and the work is really intended to affect their imaginations.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: It's really intended to use the sort of authoritative power of photographic images to work against the way that the existing actual photographic archive works, the way the actual photographic archive of the Caribbean early photographic archive of the Caribbean works and works on the minds of Caribbean people, is to suggest that the people that existed during that time only existed in the ways that they appear in that archive.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: What my project is intending to do is to put new pictures into the minds of the people who that archive is working on so that it can work against the original archive.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: And that's a whole concern that I don't think most of the people who are paying attention to what I do on Tezos are interested in or would relate to really.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: And yeah, like I also think that you know, during that early period on Tezos where I was kind of trying to figure out and trying to learn and sort of doing informal research on what has resonance in the space, which has to do with, like, not just what I can sell but like what has what has meaning, what matters to these people in this community of which I'm a part, you know, it's also paying attention to what I care about seeing from other people in the community and seeing how different approaches in terms of what the origin of the work is, how that, how that translates in the space, in terms of what it means to the viewer, but artificial archive.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: In terms of the technology that's used um, using text image, and I'm using machine learning, I'm using blender.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: A lot of my images are viewed through lenses that I make in blender, um, so there is an aspect of 3d modeling and viewing an image through a sort of virtual lens.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: That's a part of the project as well.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's kind of how all of that comes together, yeah.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: It's a bit like, it's almost like retroactive archaeology, in that you're trying to resurface a history that was never really documented.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: So it's, how can we, I guess, use or embrace our own perspectives as particularly yourself as identifying with a lot of elements of this particular culture and saying, based on practices we've seen evolve today, how can we sort of reverse engineer that and try to put ourselves in the position of what it would have looked like through our own lens at that point in time, as opposed to, I guess, a Western observation of a culture that just didn't belong to them?
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: So it's very fascinating.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: But what really struck me was the notion that you know, as diverse as the art world is within the nft space, there is still this sense of boundary as to what is for this audience, or where these audiences sit, versus what they may not necessarily be.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: As receptive to, sort of understanding where that line is for you as an artist, particularly as you do engage with all these different technical mediums that are quite popular online.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: So you know, as you sort of reflect back on your time in the blockchain space and how it's evolved your practice and how it's influenced your practice and, hopefully, how you have influenced the medium itself.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: What sort of insight or advice would you give artists who are potentially exploring it for the first time now or have yet to really dip their toes into this space, but know that they want to tap into these audiences the way that you have?
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: I think that the thing that I do say to people is that it has so much to do with community and at this point maybe, and maybe always, it has mostly to do with community.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: It has, like, I think, at the beginning, especially when, when even the conversation of like, what are we doing?
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: What is this that's happening was being sort of taking, it was kind of taking shape, there was a lot of conversation about, like, what is a token?
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: Why does it have value?
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: Why does this one have value and this one not have value?
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: And you know, people were like well, you know also, the 10 of us that are thinking about this, nine of us think that this one over here has greater artistic value than this one over here.
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: Why is the one with lesser artistic value more more valuable in this situation?
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: And questions, you know, questions that, questions like that that point to what I, what I say to people, things, things that we've learned and things that I feel I've learned, that, um, which is where this, I guess, advice, is coming from.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: And so the thing is that the thing that creates value in the space is the community.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: The thing that matters is who is paying attention to your work, because the only thing that creates value, in my opinion, from what I've learned in this space, is a sort of collective agreement that the thing that you're doing is valuable.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: And the way that an artist goes about airing the value of their work with the community, trying to get people to see what's valuable about it or to determine that it is valuable, that's up to the artist.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: There are varied methods, but the important thing I think to keep in mind is that what's actually happening is that a group of people who collect these things, are trying to, are determining, are in an ongoing process of determining together which ones have value and which ones do not, and that value is really very much based on the conversation around that work that those people are having and that may that may be true for, like all art, but it's like if we're talking about these tokens that we're minting, it becomes especially valuable, especially important if you're thinking about trading tokens, because you know the thing is that you can make you works in whatever medium and share them in whatever way you want to, and, for example, my artificial archive works that I do not mint, that I don't share on tesos necessarily um, I still share them occasionally on my twitter.
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: I share them mostly on my Twitter.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: I share them mostly on my Instagram.
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: There is some overlap.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: People who are interested, people who know me from Tesla, who are interested in these works, maybe for the technical aspect, maybe for the way that it has an intention to like refute a cultural phenomenon, maybe they're interested in culture and how that works.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: Those people can find the work elsewhere and they do, but I'm not interested in trading tokens related to those works because I don't think that those tokens have particular value in the community at large.
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: I don't think there's a conversation in the community that will value those works.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sort of what?
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: Because the blockchain is so much about the tokens and then because the tokens are about trading value and, like desire, uh, demand is sort of also an inherent quality of works that we share on the blockchain.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so what I tell people is it's about the conversation that you create around the work and whether or not, um, a community of people are going to gather around that work and that conversation and find it valuable.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: So there's a distinction between your ability to monetize off of your artwork, having the conversation around the value of that artwork, and they are not actually the same thing, and so, as you rightfully pointed out, it's about the conversation that takes place within the community, it's about the notion of social consensus around the value of a given work and it's about, I guess, ultimately, what it stands for in the statement that it makes, but that is entirely separate from the collector or the economic dynamics that seem to take place on blockchain.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: As you rightfully pointed out, it's been fascinating to learn all of your perspectives and to understand how your artistic practices evolved over so many years, and it's very exciting to watch artists like you jump into the space of blockchain, nfts and Tezos in particular.
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: So thank you so much for your time and looking forward to see what other works you create and mint on Tezos.
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: Thank you, marissa, thanks for having me.
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: I really appreciated talking to you.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: It's a pleasure.