Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode. We're joined today by Bre Pettis, a collector that we met through TENDER, the kind of art collective slash curatorial platform slash now gallerist and collaborative art releasing platform. It's, it's a lot of different things. Trinity is here as well. How's it going, everyone? Good morning.

Speaker B: Good morning.

Speaker C: Good morning, everybody. Bre, thank you so much for joining. We're excited to talk to you.

Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, I feel like a little longtime listener, first-time caller kind of jam.

Speaker A: You know the flow of the show. You've been listening for a minute now. Like I said, we met through TENDER. You had a pass, but I think it took you a minute to join the Discord. And when you jumped in a few months ago and gave your introduction, it was like, you know, we knew you from the sales feed. We knew you from what you bought and were collecting. But then when you kind of started giving your bio to everyone, it was like, oh, this guy might know a thing or two about generative art. So yeah, why don't you go ahead and give everyone here a bit of an introduction to yourself and just who you are and your background in art and like the fact that you were involved in co-founding MakerBot, or I'm not even actually sure the whole deal, but let us— let it go, like let it rip. Let's hear it.

Speaker B: Sure. So I've got just this, you know, wandering professional life where I tend to say yes to things. And then sort of suffer the consequences and go on those kinds of adventures. So my first job, I said yes to a job as a floor runner in the film industry. And it turned out that job was in Prague working on Pinocchio with Martin Landau and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. And I showed up and worked on a British crew and I would, and among other things, basically making them tea. And they were like, this is horrible. We're in a foreign country. We have an American making us tea. How could it be worse? But, um, I made really good friends with the folks that I was working with on that second unit in Prague and ended up working in puppeteering and puppetry making and animatronics at Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Burnt out on, after a couple years on film industry, because it's just, it's brutal. And, uh, moved back to Seattle and started doing puppetry, made my own theater, worked at the Northwest Puppet Theater, did a couple other things in sort of puppetry. And then, um, after a few years of making like $6,000 a year from doing like school gigs. I was like, okay, I got to figure out a way to support myself properly here. So I became a school teacher, which at the time Washington State was the 49th least paid state.

Speaker A: Oh, sorry.

Speaker B: I'm right next to the train, so you'll hear that occasionally. I couldn't really afford a car and I wanted to have a family, so I started using art as a side hustle to try and make money. Which didn't really work. And after some different iteration, I got into video art and nobody would represent me or buy my art DVD. So I went ahead and published it to the internet in 2004. And then within about a month, like 30,000 people had looked at this video. And I was like, okay, I may not be making money from this, but people are watching it. So I'll do more of this. And then I started making videos for my students, how-to videos, because if I video record it and they watch me on video, I got 100% read rate. Whereas if I said it out loud in person, I had to repeat myself like 3 times. So I started publishing those videos to the internet as well and ended up joining a community of about 20 people who were doing internet in 2004, 2005, who were doing internet video. This is pre-YouTube. We're getting DreamHost domains because they have an infinite bandwidth program that they don't realize is a total disaster for them, but great for us. And ended up getting a job at Make magazine and switching over to that from teaching, making a video every week on how to make things. And then did the same kind of thing at Etsy for a year. I moved from Seattle to New York and in Seattle everybody's got a garage, but in New York people have like a closet, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, uh, started a thing called NYC Resistor with some friends, basically set up a honeypot for all the hardware hackers in New York. And we created a clubhouse that now, 16, 17 years later is still going in our space in Brooklyn. And then out of that, we wanted a 3D printer, but at the time they were like $60 grand at the low end. And me and the other co-founders at MakerBot, had basically figured out how to make one for under $1,000 in parts, and we were like, maybe we should start a business, maybe there's a few other people who want this, and we really thought it was going to be a side hustle that we would do while we were doing other things, and then we basically sold out instantly and were in trouble, and we're basically in that state of trying to keep up for like 3 and a half years. I rode the whole ride as CEO of MakerBot from 3 guys, a laser cutter, and a dream to 600 employees and selling to a public company, getting named in an SEC lawsuit and just the whole rollercoaster ride from the garage to corporate, right? Did a couple things after that and then settled into this company, Bantam Tools, that I have now that makes desktop CNCs for world changers and skill builders. We sell to innovators who need aluminum parts and impatient engineers who can't wait for machinists. And then educators who are training up the next generation to make things. And then for the last year, we've been working on art machines. So we're getting ready. I've got a pretty exciting show coming up at the Whitney Art Museum in the city where one of my favorite generative artists, Harold Cohen, created a program, AI, and starting in the— he started learning in the '60s, and by the '70s, he had a program that could make art. that he named Aaron, and he was part of, I believe, the Stanford AI research group. And then by the '80s, it was making really beautiful abstract drawings, and by the '90s, it was drawing portraits. He died in 2016, and for the last 30 years of his life, he would joke that he was going to be the first artist to have a posthumous show of new work. So his AI Aaron would create the artwork for a show of new work, but after he's dead, which is a very nerdy thing to do. And I've been working with him, not with him because he's dead, but with his assistant Tom and his son Paul and the curator Christiane at the Whitney to resuscitate Aaron. And we're going to have a show, opens February 3rd, with Bantam Tools pen plotters running at historical speeds, making new artworks by Harold Cohen's program.

Speaker C: That is bonkers. We could— let's talk about this for hours. Let's just shift the script. Damn, that's exciting.

Speaker B: It's so rad.

Speaker A: That's crazy. I mean, I— we didn't know that detail going into this, right? Like, we had— we were like, oh, let's have him on for a collector interview. And to hear that you're going to be bringing generative art to the Whitney, and I guess it's— what's it going to be? These plotters going to be just like live streaming new pieces as the AI spits them out?

Speaker B: They're planning another project that needs, like, absolutely must work streaming, and so it's likely that the Whitney is going to be streaming the plotters as they're going, as sort of a test run for this other performance piece that they have coming up. We've got 2 different types of artwork. One is called Mazes, and it draws line artwork from a program that was originally from 1972. That program was on tapes, The drive was tape, and we sent that out to a place that recovers data off tapes, and there was nothing on them. So Tom found the notebooks. I believe it was Tom who found the notebooks from the early '70s, and Paul reconstructed Aaron from the notebooks to make Mazes. So that'll be running on one plotter, and then the other plotter will be doing these portraits from a project he did. called Kcat, which was a screensaver that he developed. It's interesting, it's like every 15 seconds the screensaver does a new, essentially, painting of usually a couple people in a gallery, sometimes with an artwork behind them, and often with a potted plant in the scene. And, you know, he did this in the '90s, and his aesthetic, you know, he was a very successful pre-computer artist in the '60s, And so I think that's kind of where his style was set. I mean, I don't know for sure, but the characters that Aaron draws have fantastic mustaches, like jaunty, very jaunty sort of fashionable poses and very cool hair. And so the other machine will draw those drawings. So we generated 5,400 versions of each because we reckon there's about 1,000 hours of plotting in this show, or maximum, like that's how long the show's open. I'm not sure if we'll plot the whole time. So we made a lot of, but nobody will have seen them until they're plotted. That's the other thing. So it'll just be like, when it's drawn, that's the first time that art has been seen.

Speaker C: So I have to ask, is there going to be an NFT component to this at all? It seems like there's such a potential synergy as things emerge, getting minted to the blockchain.

Speaker B: I think if he was alive, there would be a conversation about that, probably. And I think a lot of artists who do generative work get asked every day, can we make money on your art? It's totally a long-form generative artwork from the 1970s and the 1990s, right? But it wasn't called that at the time. In fact, it had to sort of fight to be called art, all this early generative art. I'm in my workshop, I'm looking at my— Behind me is some art, and then in front of me I've got my collection. And when I sold MakerBot, I was like, okay, what I want to do is collect some art. And I had spent 10 years when I was a teacher in Seattle going to every art opening and every museum show from like, I'd say like '96 to 2006, I think is probably about the time frame. And one of the cool things is that it allowed me to develop my taste, because when you look at things on a regular basis, you look at a lot of art and you have And you make decisions in that moment. Do I like this? Do I not like this? You know, it starts out and you're like, yeah, I like Monet and I like Cézanne, and these are all these validated artists, right? But when you look at enough art, you can look at art that you don't know who did it and you can go, do I like this? Do I not like this? Does it fit some of my criteria for what's my jam or does it not? And I'm not sure how long that takes. I think it's sort of accelerated actually with NFTs, 'cause you can just look at so much art on your screen. You don't have to wait for the end of the month.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: to go to the art openings and see like 100 pieces of art. Like, you could— I could be looking at thousands of pieces of art a day. And so I think sort of one of the beauties of digital art is the ability to develop your style much faster than in an in-person type of art sort of world. But the style that I developed for myself, because I was making a go of being an artist while looking at all this art and being inspired by other people, was really procedural. So I was really interested in artists that would set up Like rules. And sort of the, probably the best example of this is like Sol LeWitt, who's like, the rules are the art. You know, he's like, go to a wall, make drawings, and, you know, like this with your arm out, and then move 2 steps to the right and do it again. And you can implement the art anywhere because the artwork is the instructions. I really fell in love with art where the artist had an intention but not a post-visualization, where they would have a way of beginning and engaging but didn't know where they were going. And I can tell looking at an artwork now, like whether the artist saw it in their head and was just making, trying to make the thing that was in their head. That's totally different from like, you know, seeing a person or a still life and trying to document that. Like, you don't know how you're going to do that when you start, but you know, you want to get there. So this sort of idea around trying intentionality and procedureness, like that's my jam. So Generative art, as it's called now, computer art, as it was called until like a couple of years ago, has that sort of, okay, I'm going to make a program and it's going to have an output. And if I do it right, I don't know what the output's going to be. And it's exciting. I got a chance to meet Vera Molnar in '95. I've got a lot of her work and I'm really sad about her passing because she's such an amazing person. You know, she started in the '60s and then nobody really bought her work until the early 2000s. And so she spent like 35 years making art with nobody buying it. And for the most part, nobody even accepting it as art in the greater art community. And you can see her notebooks are just, every day she is engaged with this idea of delighting herself through procedural generative art, right? And it's, her work has a heartness to it. I love her work. So, so I got into that, this sort of computer art, then now generative art in 2013 and started collecting it obsessively. At the time, there's like 3 other people who have a collection who were similarly obsessed. So it was like 4 of us, right? So when Manfred Mohr would go home to his family, decided to sell his childhood home, and he went home and he found all his early work in the attic that he'd forgotten about, it's like me and a couple other people being like, oh, I would really love to get my hands on that, right? That's really different from where generative art is now, where So many more people have been initiated into the cult of generative art and see the value and excitement in these experimental artworks where the artist is initiating an idea and we get to decide if we're delighted by that or not. And I think for a lot of these things, it's very delightful. So I could go on and on, but I, I love generative art. I love prochromatic art. I love And I love plotters. So that's the other thing. So I am in the cult of the physical object for sure. And I'm in the cult of plotters and that, you know, I bought an HP plotter in like 2007, 2008, you know, off eBay. And I lent it to Marius Watz at the time. He didn't use it. He returned it. One of my pandemic projects was to take all these scans that I had made of my friends and then use Blender to Position and then light them, and then find all the creases in them and outlines, and then do these artworks that are portraiture from 3D scans, but executed in 2D on pen plotters, multicolor pen plotters. So I dug way into the HP 7550, and I just fell in love with this machine. It's so well built. I ended up calling— I ended up getting ahold of the design and development team from HP in the '70s who are all retired.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: to talk to them about how they developed this machine because I love it so much. And then I've been working on a modern version of that because I can't help it.

Speaker A: It's so fascinating to hear your collecting experience and like that you kind of caught on to this whole, what is now, right, a wave within at least NFT collectors with generative art. I have to assume that you found NFTs and crypto because of your passion for generative art and seeing maybe like early Art Blocks Or maybe even some of the projects that happened before Art Blocks. I'm not sure. It's like, what was the journey to crypto and NFTs and kind of accepting that? Because I know it can be a friction point for a lot of people who come from the traditional art world. How does like your experience collecting this work kind of inform and impact like your collecting behavior with NFTs, like a lot of which don't come with physical components?

Speaker B: You know, NFTs, I was very interested, you know, in like 2020 when the hype started, and I'm sort of in I don't know if I'm in, but I'm orthogonal to sort of the digital art crew of New York. I was in 7 on 7, which is one of the Rhizome things at the New Museum back in the day. And so, you know, I saw it coming in 2020. I didn't really get it. My friend Sean Bonner went really deep into it. I had this character from my puppetry days named Pink Bunny and then Boo Boo Kitty and characters that were puppets and then child— and then childlike drawings. So I used bueno.art to do a project where I had these kittens and bunnies, and they had wore like different clothes and had balloons or different, and then I made them a bus so you could organize your collection in a London bus. And it was very satisfying to do, you know, this sort of, and I love SVGs, so it was really easy for me to make, okay, let's set up the basic idea and have all these different layers of Types of clothing that they can wear. Bueno, but art is a nice NFT platform where it just you say go and it's like how many do you want? You make like 300 of them and they're all different, right? And then you can you can publish them as NFTs and sell them. So I went through that process and enjoyed that as a creative process and made a bunch of screw-ups along the way and had to redo it and da da da da da, which I think is pretty normal for NFT creators. And then I got invited by my friend Scott Beale into NFT NYC, which is his. Group. It was one of these groups that's a combination of creatives and speculators, and this whole thing of like, hey, this thing is coming out, I got us so that we can get early ones, let's all jump on this thing and pump this thing up and get excited about it. And so I did a bunch of collecting there, but it didn't really match up with my passion for computer art and generative art and intentional art, the whole PFP kind of side of things. I think I sort of cut my teeth there trying to participate. And the first time I got into NFTs, I went to a party at NFT NYC. Scott Beal's thing is non-fungible social clubs. So I saw my friends obsessing over things and getting really excited about stuff on their phones, on Discord, right? And I was like, you know what? Okay. I didn't get NFTs before, but I see my friends happy and having a great time and communicating a lot with friends that they've made in this space. And I was like, Okay, I love a community. I like nerding out about stuff. I'm going to sort of jump into this thing. And then I didn't really feel like it was my space until I found fxhash. And then I was like, oh yeah, this is my jam. Yes. And so I basically spent maybe 2 months going through every single project on fxhash, looking for the ones that attracted me and specifically focusing on the ones where there were physical components, or they output an SVG that I could then manifest on my own plotters. I wish I could go back in time and do that all over again, right?

Speaker C: I think we all remember our early fxhash days as just something of pure beauty and also magic. That's the, I think, the official catchphrase. Interesting that it was fxhash. I don't mean to deviate, but was that your first exposure to like generative art on the blockchain versus In Art Blocks, for example?

Speaker B: I love Art Blocks now. And I, you know, I went to Marfa, Texas and hung out with that whole crew. And Snowfro is such a gentle, you know, generous, thoughtful, considerate human. But for me, I can go out and buy an amazing physical piece of artwork from a pioneer in generative art for single-digit thousands of dollars. I'm not going to drop like digits of ETH onto a digital artwork. I'm not going to spend more than I can spend on one of the greats in the entire universe on a brand new artist on Art Blocks. Bless their cotton socks that they can do it, right? But it's not my— I can't make that leap to there. Now, I've bought a couple things on Art Blocks. When I was in Marfa, I was like, I should really— it's on my to-do list, actually. I like, I want to buy one of the, um, there's a whole series of generative artworks based on this plant that's out around Marfa, Texas. That's on my to-do list to buy. But for the most part, if I don't have a relationship to it, I feel like so much of this artwork is still in the garage, in the early stages. I can't really get to the prices that I see in Art Blocks, you know, but I think it's great that the artists get that. But I'm, there's other stuff that I can prioritize to buy for my collection that is Physical. So it makes it hard for me to get there. Whereas fx hash, I bought some cryptocurrency back in the day. And so I had some and it had grown. So I was like, great. This thing has been sitting here for a decade. I'm transitioning to Tezos. You know, I don't like Ethereum at all. I love Tezos. Tezos is the art currency. And so I was like, screw this Ethereum stuff. I'm committing to Tezos, throw it all in there because I believe Tezos is the best way to support emerging artists. And to support them as they explore and try out new things and experiment and grow. By the time you're at one of these other platforms that are like a real gallery or selling at museum or auction house prices, your ability to experiment is very limited at that point when you're selling things for that money. But when you're on fx hash, and even those, and you can see like in a lot of your interviews with artists, they're like, I can't wait to get back to fx hash and really explore and experiment and do fresh stuff. And that's sort of like, I love fxhash because it's the garage of the art world, right? It lets people experiment, try new stuff without having to worry about pleasing somebody who's buying your thing for like $10,000 worth of ETH, right?

Speaker A: Well, how do you feel about the fxhash 2.0, now Ethereum integration and just the whole ecosystem as a whole, right? Like you said, we have some platforms like Verse and Tonic that come into mind that are doing more of that gallery model. complete most of the time with physicals, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Has that changed your mind at all? Like, have you looked at that Tonic stuff and said like, oh, it comes with a really great print, or it comes with a chair in some cases? You know, you've been collecting now for what, probably almost 2 years? fxhash is about 2 years old. What's your read on the ETH integration and just the whole ecosystem?

Speaker B: You know, I'm conflicted because I hate it.

Speaker A: That doesn't sound conflicted.

Speaker B: It's a, it's a major loss for the garage and experiment and Tezos, frankly, because Tezos is such a better platform for art. ETH is the platform of scam artists and ultra-privileged people, and Tezos is the platform for emerging artists. I mean, I love being able to buy something and my transaction fees are like 17 cents. A lot of times now, if I buy something in ETH, I'm paying some massive double-digit percentage of the value of the artwork in just gas fees, which is just a complete waste of money. And I've been scammed a couple of times on ETH. Somebody tweeted, hey, get on the early adoption list for this famous artist, the reserve list, right? And I clicked on it. It didn't work. And I clicked on it again and I clicked on it again. And it turns out I wasn't getting an early reserve list. I was giving them access to pull out my Gee's Bend quilts, giving them ability to pull out my Stevie dollar that was, that I really miss and pulling out my really random rock. So sort of fuck ETH. I'm down to be the one to say it. Like, I think everybody should just fuck ETH. Tezos is such a better platform for art. I'm just going to be the person who says it. I think Tezos on fxhash is still going to be a great place for emerging artists. I'm not really interested in all the ETH stuff because I think it's like the punk rock kid being like, okay, I'm going to sign with Warner Brothers kind of thing. And I'd rather they stay independent, right? In that metaphor. So I'm probably the only one who feels this way. And I think that for the artists, they want to make more money and they should make more money, especially if they can get it. And there's sort of this idea that ETH is more like, may last longer or something like that. I just, it is the land of scammers, deceit, and shit. So like, sorry, I guess I have a strong opinion on this, but I'm sorry that fxhash is moving to ETH, and I'm looking forward to the new garage because this is what happens in sort of all mediums is the garage turns into the gallery. The work that's in the galleries goes to auction houses and that's the way it goes. So I would say if you're an emerging artist, I would still recommend cutting your teeth on the Tezos platform and seeing if you can make that work.

Speaker A: Have you looked at other chains too, like Solana? I mean, one of the big narratives right now is like Solana is going to be next up for art, and it is low fee, right? I don't know all the details about like how centralized versus decentralized it is. I only know like kind of what I've heard, but it kind of seems like that stuff doesn't matter to a lot of people who collect. So like, have you looked at that at all, or are you just kind of like Tezos? I mean, I just want to collect long-form gen art here.

Speaker B: I will say like, I'm not there yet, but I think with FX 2.0, I'm looking for where the next Garage is, right? Like, My favorite place to buy artwork is out of what I'm calling like the metaphorical garage, which is like where people can experiment and have high-risk exploratory experiences in creating art as well as collecting art. I'll be curious to see if the Tezos branch of fxhash stays as the garage, and if it doesn't, I guess I'll be looking— I don't really want to look for another garage because, except for recently, my experience, like fxhash keeps bumping me off. I have to keep re-signing in. I try and do something and it just freezes up. They just fixed that today. Oh, good.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: But the last week I've kind of been like, this thing that is the best thing on the internet for generative art, why are they abandoning this and moving to something mainstream? Like, I'm bummed about it.

Speaker C: My take is that it's a business decision first and foremost. You know, they're hiring a team, they got funding, they have promises to keep in terms of marketplace fees collected. So I think it makes sense for like the long-term growth and trajectory of fx hash. I think that we'll see a lot of bifurcation around like what is a Tez drop and what is an ETH drop. Maybe some artists will hold the line. It's hard to really predict that type of thing, but—

Speaker A: Yeah, I think some artists are going to have to burn some nice projects because they're going to try to list it at under 0.05 ETH and gas is going to be 0.03 and no one's going to want to pay 20, 30, 60% of the price of the art in gas to collect it, even if it is nice. So I think this first couple weeks, months, they're going to get really badly burned and we're going to see projects not mint out and it's going to be sad. Like, I'm— that's my biggest concern with the launch, which is tomorrow, by the way, as we're recording this. So we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll be proven wrong and there'll be so much hype that people will be willing to swallow the gas.

Speaker C: Or it just gets more eyes over to the Tezos. Right, you know, if people are excited about ETH drops and we're getting more people from the ETH scam network looking at Tezos and ETH side by side, who knows?

Speaker B: I mean, Tezos is like just a— it's made for art, it's made for artist transactions, it is the best platform for art. ETH is like the transactional network, right? It is not made for art. You can do so many things with contracts on ETH, but a lot of those are just scams, so You know, I love going to fx hash. I've never gotten scammed out of a Tezos. I've never had these kind of ETH problems on Tezos. And part of that is just because fx hash is such a great garden. I can't think of another platform where I've spent months going through every single drop to explore the frontier. Verse and a couple of the other platforms, they've clearly got really smart people who are figuring out the social engineering of how to make a platform play. When the people I love and respect are on those platforms, I'm like, okay, I'll buy one because I want one if there's a physical and to support them. But yeah.

Speaker C: So we talked about fxhash 2.0, the ETH integration. I think we figured out that you have strong feelings there. You know, one of the other new features that are— that's coming out with fxhash 2.0 is the ability for artists to curate pieces to post for sale and essentially having collectors get one of those at random. How do you feel about that sort of release mechanism versus long-form generative? Or also, as you just talked about Verse, the introduction of collector curated?

Speaker B: I mean, I think that that's a mechanic that allows the end user to have a higher likelihood of having something that is, when it's curated, the likelihood that it's going to be curated by somebody hopefully that has some good taste. I mean, it's like literally curated, right? You know, it's interesting when I was in Marfa, Texas for the Art Blocks crew, and I, for all my ranting on ETH, I really enjoyed spending time with that crew. The people in the space are like artists, collectors, infrastructure builders, and speculators. And sort of one of the beautiful things of being in a down market is the speculators have no agency. A lot of times they'll like buy something and as soon as it's done minting out, the value of it goes down, right? Like that's kryptonite for speculators and sort of the benefit of speculators is that they buy stuff up and then sell it. That's one of the differences between NFT art and physical historical in-person art is if I miss out on a drop, I love that I can go into the secondary market and still get one. I was like, I don't know, what is this thing about buying the sort of grails on fx hash? So I sort of saved up and bought a dragon and I just did an offer. I didn't care which dragon I got and I was excited to get sort of the delight of whoever would accept my offer. So there's definitely a— I think that there's a beauty to the sort of randomness and a fuel for the sort of mix of churning of the artwork a little bit so that it falls into the right hands. That works really well when you don't have curated. I think curation will sort of decrease that. I've heard Will say, oh, I'm going to buy 3 and be ready to sell them to get the one I want. Right. And I love the sort of Easter egg experience of buying something that I don't know what I'm going to get. That's in my category of good intentionality, unknown outcome. So curated, okay. In some cases, I think that will create more high-quality outputs. I don't have strong feelings about it. I still really like the randomness of the unexpected, both on the artist side and on the collector side. So, you know, all the stuff on fxhash, they put it up and the artist doesn't know what's coming next for the most part, as far as I can tell.

Speaker A: Hell yeah. So, you know, you've talked a lot about your collecting over the years, and one question that we always kind of ask collectors— I think we have a good sense of what you like and what your philosophy around collecting is, But do you actually view this in any way as investment? Do you have a strategy for selling or taking profits? I mean, I don't think I ever see anything of yours go in the sales feed that you're selling. I think it's always things that you're buying. So how do you view it long-term?

Speaker B: I'm not a speculator, and I think that definitely makes me an outlier in the NFT space, right? So I buy for 2 reasons. One is either I want to— I see potential in the artists and I want to support them. as they emerge. And like, I want to be an early supporter of artists in general and specifically artists who do generative work. And that's probably 80 or 90% of my collection. And then the other 10% is stuff that either comes with a physical or has an output that's an SVG. So like, to all the artists listening, if you make your artwork output an SVG, I will buy it. Like, I just love, I will just love you for making something that allows me to manifest it in the physical world. That makes me really happy, and I love living with artwork. So I'm, you know, probably one of these hoarders who's gonna hoard and keep collecting. If things kind of go on track where I think they're going with generative art, you know, by the time I'm near death— I'm probably 50 years away from that, and I'm only 10 years into collecting— so I'll have a pretty epic collection to either start a museum or donate to a museum or something like that. That's probably where I think it's That's huge. Yeah, that's beautiful.

Speaker C: Can't wait for, uh, our museums to, uh, to appear out of the ether.

Speaker A: This would be a good opportunity then, since you've talked a lot about— well, first of all, note to us, the next time we do a Waiting to Be Signed collab, we should make sure that it outputs an SVG for sure. Actually, actually, the next one might be a good candidate for that, or the next 2.

Speaker B: Oh, great.

Speaker A: But why don't you shout out— I mean, if you'd like to take an opportunity, like, I've noticed— first of all, I noticed you collecting some stuff I don't think that outputs as an SVG. I saw you buying recently a lot of pixel-filled stuff, which I was like, ooh, that set off alarm to me because that's an artist I've been talking about—

Speaker C: That's the AI side.

Speaker A: Over a year. Yeah, but why don't you shout some people out, like especially anyone who you think is kind of underappreciated or undersung in the back catalog of fxhash?

Speaker B: One of the things that's hard about NFTs is talking with your friends about it, right? So one of my favorite activities to do with my artist friends, I say, okay, You don't get it yet, and that's fine. Here's the experiment we're going to do. You're going to go on to the App Store and you're going to download the Temple wallet. You're going to write down on paper your 12 phrases, which for people who haven't done that before, they don't understand that. They're like, I'll just remember the password, which is just that password on the device. And if you change phones, you lose access to your wallet, right? So get them to write down their passphrases. And then I send them 5 Tezos. Inspired by that 5 Tezos challenge from earlier in the year. And I send them a couple articles about people who made their 5 Tezos collection and say, your job now is to go spend 5 Tezos. Earlier this year when I did this, it was like Tezos was like 60 cents. So it was like $3 for me to do this experiment. I think it's like a dollar now or something, right? So it's like $5. But you can go through the sort of history, the archaeology, or you can search for things. And then they find stuff and they have to decide if they like it or not. And there's very little other sort of data for them to find out if they like it or not, because they don't know the artist, they're not in the space. Outside of the NFT world, most of the folks who are creating stuff are not super well-known, so they just have to do this experiment of, what do I like? It makes me really happy to do this. For me, if somebody had done this to me, I would have been like, kabam, off to the moon, right? But I haven't had anybody go nearly as deep as I have, but it does help people understand sort of like how this world works a little bit. In terms of artists that I like, I'm going to have to pull up my collection. In general, if I like the aesthetics of something, then I will support it. And if it has a physical, then yes. So I went back into history and bought a bunch of earlier Shawn Kemp stuff. And then when he did his drop with the, the FX 2.0 part of Tezos did go live. And so his Luminous Echoes project went live and the previous one, which was called, let me pull it up, was called Mini Dahlias. Oh, this is such a great set. And then his Luminous Echoes are in the same jam. He does these artworks that then when you redeem them, they're stacks of like card and paper of different colors that have, that are like this amazing layered 3D. experience that he laser cuts and then assembles. It's clearly a labor of love because the value of these things is like 100 times what you can buy them for from him. And so I just got my mini dahlias and then got a bunch of luminous echoes. They're the only thing I've ever seen like this. It's so cool. I still go through and get excited about old stuff on fxhash, which I'm— so PixelFiller, got a bunch of those. Yeah, I was like, this is an artist whose The outputs that they're getting from what they're doing are truly delightful and clearly programmed and have the element of randomness while still being beautiful. Like every single one of them is beautiful. So that's Pixelfiller that you mentioned. I like this artist Vector Zero. They just did this one called The Machine. It basically looks like a TARDIS in space with an asteroid and a black hole. And I wish it was an SVG because it should be an SVG because it's totally vector line art, but they didn't have that ability. I sort of wish I was a programmer so I could go in there and be like, SVG output button, press V. I can keep going if you like.

Speaker C: I think it makes sense as you look through your fxhash collection, and it actually goes back to some of the conversations that we've been having in Specifically the TENDER Discord. It kind of came up with our Kim Asendorf interview a couple of weeks ago. And that is this dichotomy between like skeuomorphic generative art. So the creation of brushstrokes, things that look like landscapes, that sort of thing, versus art that is lines, pixels, you know, something that is more generatively native, I would say.

Speaker B: Hmm.

Speaker C: Do you find yourself drawn to more of one than the other outside of SVGs, of course. Where do you land in that whole argument, especially as you look through your collection?

Speaker B: I like things to be what they're supposed to be. So like, I won't buy furniture that has like veneer on it, right? That's like MDF with veneer. It's just, I don't want pretend wood. And similarly with art, I don't, I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibilities, but I'm not that interested in art that pretends to be made with brushstrokes. There's a caveat to that because any artist could use brushstrokes in an exciting way that is like a digital way that would completely make me disagree with myself right now. But when I'm looking through everything, almost everything is either native digital or the vectors are vectors. They're lines and they're not pretend lines or they're not brushstroke lines for the most part. But I would eat my hat on that if I, if there, if an artist did something that was clever.

Speaker A: You also have a bunch of Erik Swahn stuff. Have you tried plotting any of that?

Speaker B: Yeah. And unfortunately his color data on that is in the fill, not in the line color. So, so far the ones that I've tried plotting all are, are these beautiful color pieces that when you plot them, all the colors are black. Because the line color is black. And I've thought about going through, but it would take me like a day in Inkscape to replace all the line colors with the fill colors. And somebody who is more a better, an actual programmer could probably come up with a script to do that. I love that work, but I haven't been able to plot it respectfully to the artist in the way it was intended. Now, one of my favorite artists is Piter Pasma. And that's because Piter has done a lot of work that is both configurable after you've bought it and plottable. So my favorite series is Yip and Yap's Imaginary Playground, 38 out of 100 are minted. It is a 200 Tezos purchase, and I've probably bought 8 of these. And I love these things because you can, when you run them in your browser, You can go up and you can add the sign plus the letters LW for line width equals— by default it's like 0.7 or 0.4, and you can make it like 0.1, which means that the lines are going to be, instead of being 0.4 millimeters, they'll be 0.1 millimeters, and it will fill up the space with 4 times as many lines, which means the drawing that he essentially intended to be a postcard-sized plot—

Speaker A: Oh, wow.

Speaker B: You can plot to 24 by 36 inches and, you know, it takes about 2 G2 pens to actually use and all the ink in both of those pens to execute that plot. And it's a huge Yip and Yap drawing. Um, I really want other people to buy this because I want to see the other 62 in the series because I get so much enjoyment out of the first 38.

Speaker A: I'll speak for myself here as also a Peter Pasma fan. I think it's my least favorite.

Speaker C: Really?

Speaker A: I don't know, something about it just— I couldn't connect to what he was trying to do with it compared to like some of the other stuff he did, like Industrial Devolution, right? Where like— oh yeah, so that was where I was just kind of like, what, what are these little guys doing here? Like, I just couldn't figure that out when I was looking at the piece.

Speaker B: The other piece I love of his is Geomorphism. I've got a bunch of those. I've got one of the Nano Panoramas. I've got one Industrial Devolution. And then his Universal Ray Hatcher. I have a lot of these too, even Yeah, I, even though you can't really do the same sort of scale, you can mess with the parameters on these ones, but it destroys the composition, original composition. You know, this is a project that he did for those who haven't played with this, where Piter Pasma made a project that was basically access to his Universal Ray Hatcher. And in the parameters, there's a place where you can put a bunch of math essentially that makes a 3D model. And then his Ray Hatcher applies light and shadow to it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And lines. And it's just, uh, yeah, go down the rabbit hole on Universal Ray Hatcher. And yeah, it is like the freaking champions of generative art and fx hash and the current, like, current artists. He just gave the tickets out to people and was like, play with it.

Speaker A: One of the best uses of params for sure.

Speaker B: Oh, 100% agree.

Speaker A: A great Easter egg too is like, if you go back and listen to our episode with Peter, which at this point is probably a year and a half old. We talked to him about his plotted stuff and how he had never done a long-form generative, and he was like kind of hesitant that he'd be able to implement it in a way that would work for long form. And like, I don't know if it was that conversation that inspired him to go back to it or if it was just something he'd been working on along the way, but it was probably what, 6 or 8 months after that episode that he finally released Industrial Devolution. It was like, whoa, he figured it out. And like now, and then the dam broke open, right? And he's had all these amazing projects.

Speaker B: Yeah. Awesome.

Speaker A: Trinity dropped off here, but that's okay. Let's start moving to wrap it up, 'cause it's been almost an hour. We'll do a couple wrap-up questions. Obviously you're building a company or you're part of a company that's like helping contribute to the space with Bantam. So like as a collector and builder in the space, what are you most hopeful for as we move into 2024 in this NFT generative art thing that we're doing?

Speaker B: You know, I think we're, we've got a trend here in the NFT space where I think we're moving away from actually even using the phrase NFT. Because I think we're moving towards just art. NFTs are art, not necessarily its own thing. At the beginning of NFTs, people were like, Bitcoin, you know, I could have bought Bitcoin for a dollar and then sold them for, you know, $50,000 each and had 50,000x growth. That sort of hype infected NFTs at the beginning where people were like, I'm just going to buy anything because I think it'll go up. And I think for the most part, We've shed a lot of those, just the people who were only speculators, but not artists, not collectors, not infrastructure builders. They're not those folks. We've shed a lot of those folks from the community. And as we do that, you're also seeing a trend where more and more artists are leaning on physicals to continue to add value to their work. So I think we're moving in a place where it's more and more important. And I mean, this is why I'm committing to making art machines for the— I've been working on, you know, I've been developing art machines for the last year. And so we're gonna have a really exciting year starting with the Whitney show. And then I've got 4 art machines in development right now. Where I'm really excited to create opportunities for artists and infrastructure building for artists to be able to take their digital artworks and send them through the portal of one of Bantam Tools machines to manifest them in the physical and enter the cult of the physical object in addition to the cult of the digital object, right? I'm just committed to giving artists more infrastructure for manifesting their work. That's my year, this next year and beyond.

Speaker C: I'll follow up with the next one then, which is, you've already talked about physical pieces to a massive extent. 2-part question. What is your favorite plotted piece in your fx hash collection? And then what is your favorite physical piece out of your entire generative art collection?

Speaker B: Oh my goodness. I think my current favorite plotted fx hash art, really I have a set of them, is Joanie Lemercier's Nuages Possibles. I've previously collected Joanie's work. I have an ocean and I have mountains. And then he did the clouds and I was like, okay, I'm on the train. And one of the things I really like about Joanie Lemercier is besides making beautiful artwork, if you follow him on social media, he's also in the, like, I don't know if it's Earth First or the— he's in the anti-extinction group and he does aggressive work around confronting environmental polluters, which just adds this whole other layer to his natural artwork.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: He's also done stuff where he's like gone out into the desert and flown a drone to do landscape scanning and then run a plotter on battery in the middle of the desert. So my favorite current plotted one is that I just got one in the mail this morning. I just got an Antigoon, which was, uh, somebody on the Tender Discord was like, hey, I'm letting go of these artworks.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: from Antagoon, and I was able to get one of them. And so I just opened it up this morning. So I'm looking at that now.

Speaker A: Must have been Clown Vamp, right?

Speaker B: Yes, Clown Vamp.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know what? That little interaction made me really happy because it's another avenue for manifesting a digital artwork into my physical world, which is that other people are buying physical artworks. And so the way I bought it was I actually bought the NFT from him and he shipped me the physical artwork. Which people, I've heard people talk about this, this idea of like, if you sell it, you have to ship it. And I did it and it worked. And probably primarily worked because I'm in a Discord community with him, so there's some social currency. I can't buy the digital artwork and he can't forget necessarily to send it. But that made me happy just because it's a different way of interacting both with community and artwork to acquire physical You can trade without fear in Tender for sure.

Speaker A: People are pretty good about making sure they fulfill, which I guess is like another aspect of the— it's a wide-ranging club, I guess, is the best way to describe it, right?

Speaker B: And I think that that is something that gets overlooked in this community is most people see the digital artworks, they sit at home in their underwear and interact with the NFT space just through the computer. That's not actually very descriptive. The people who are into this regularly meet up. Even though this is a podcast, we're getting to look at each other over video, and it's great to see. Now I'm going to recognize you when we're in person. And being in these Discords and the physical events means that there's actually a sense of community that has a sense of accountability and connection and building friendship, which is— that's what got me into NFTs, is when I realized that there was community and friendship that was building to support artists. And I think that that's the thing that will persevere.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That will make sure that this digital platform for artworks and this transaction, you know, transacting with cryptocurrency continues to go forward, is that there's an underlayer of community and actual, like, as close as you can get to IRL relationships in it as well.

Speaker A: I don't know if that's like particular or owned by Tezos, but I feel like it is definitely emphasized and like more common on Tezos. I just can just think of the number of times even before Tender just in the fx# Discord, Someone fat fingering and accidentally selling a piece they intended to sell for thousands of dollars and doing it for 1 Tez. And then someone goes in and buys it before a flipper gets it and returns it to them.

Speaker C: Oh.

Speaker A: Or like, hey, can you mint me this and I'll pay you back later? And people are just like, yeah, sure, I'll go, I'll get one for you. And just willing to, you know, even when Tezos was like $4, $5, like willing to spend $100 on a mint just on faith that that person's gonna, right, like honor it. And I can't think of a single, like, real story of someone being like, that person burned me, you know?

Speaker B: Right, on the Tezos network.

Speaker A: On Tezos, yeah. I'm sure on— I don't know, I can't speak. I wasn't in Art Block Talk or any of the other, like, Discords back then to know, but I feel like just the camaraderie here was what got a lot of us to, like, stick around, got people like us to start a show, right, and start talking about it.

Speaker B: So I went to Marfa, Texas for the Art Blocks thing, and I think that Art Blocks as itself, not necessarily as an ETH community, but as community. Like, if I were to mess with ETH, that's the community I would, I would want to spend time, more time with, because I enjoyed that. So I think the community thing is just really important for people to understand if they're getting into it, that it's important to, to listen to the podcast, to get to know the cast of characters, and then when there's a party, show up.

Speaker A: Speaking of parties, you mentioned prior to the show that you are a Magic: The Gathering enthusiast. But we don't know to what degree. So it's rare that we actually have someone on who's confirmed a Magic: The Gathering fan. So go ahead, Bre, tell us, do you still play? Are you a past pro that we forgot about? What's your story with Magic?

Speaker C: Can you get to Brooklyn?

Speaker A: Yeah. Can you come play with us?

Speaker B: One of the things I like about your show is your commitment to your personal, uh, you're yourselves on this show. And one of the ways you do that is you ask everybody about Magic: The Gathering. And so far you haven't had a lot of hits. And I was like, okay, at least I have a story. So in 1997, I was living in Seattle and me and my friend Clay Martin, we were both puppeteers, professional puppeteers. Like that's how we were making our money. And he's actually a true master. Like he is the best I know on the planet right now at puppeteering. He will put characters on his hands and Within seconds, you've forgotten they're puppets and you're enchanted. Me and Clay Martin did this thing where we found a theater in Seattle that would let us have their theater for almost nothing, as long as we used it after 10:00 PM. And so we started this show, which we would do once a month on the first Friday, called Night of the Puppet Master. And if you've ever gotten together with puppeteers, I mean, puppeteers are a very interesting group. They create an entire world. And then they expect you to believe it, and they control the whole thing. So they're control fiends, they're obsessive, they want to control the whole narrative as well. They're really interesting characters, and for the most part, they're stuck talking to children. Every puppeteer has shows that are not for children, that are adult, or if not adult, engaging in other types of messaging that is not like Three Little Pigs, right? So we did this thing and there were about a dozen puppeteers in Seattle at this time, which is a lot for any one place. 'Cause I don't know, it's one of those communities where there's like dozens of people around the world in it. And you're in an elite club as soon as you become a puppeteer by just making a bunch of puppets and having a show. So we would do this show and our primary audience were employees of Magic: The Gathering, because Magic: The Gathering I don't know if they're still in Seattle, but they were in Seattle at that time. I think every audience member was an employee of Magic: The Gathering, and they would show up and they were just such an awesome audience. If they weren't high or drunk, they were acting like it, right? What a delightful group. And we would perform for them and they would just howl. They were the best possible audience. And we got to be, we became sort of like, I wouldn't say friends, but like friendly acquaintances with the Magic: The Gathering employees. And when you talk about Magic: The Gathering, I get such a warm place in my heart for the people who create Magic: The Gathering in the '90s. I, and I just have to assume they were so passionate. I bet every single one of them is still kicking butt at Magic: The Gathering now.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's my story about Magic: The Gathering.

Speaker A: Any names you can remember? I'm trying to think if like Mark Rosewater or Aaron Forsythe would've been there in '97, Trinity. I don't know if they started that early cuz Magic started in '92, '93.

Speaker C: I'm trying to find the list of people who used to be a part of that team.

Speaker B: I think it was only like 25 people and I think they all came.

Speaker C: I think Mark Rosewater, I think he joined in like '94.

Speaker A: Fresh off of his gig writing for Roseanne. became lead designer of Magic: The Gathering. So you probably knew a lot of those folks who are legends. Um, yeah, and probably a lot of people whose names aren't known because they weren't directly involved in designing the game, but in like the logistics of getting it printed and shipped and stuff. So that's cool. I like that.

Speaker B: Their offices were in this dungeon in Seattle on University Ave where you literally went down these stairs that were like 30 feet at like a high rake It was, they had made it like a dungeon basically, that's what their offices were. That's my one connection to Magic: The Gathering. I'm not a hardcore player. I get it. I've dug into it, but I love it.

Speaker A: You know, you've got your Vera Molnars, we've got our Magic cards. You know, time will tell who picked wisely in that situation. But, uh, yeah. Trinity, anything else? Should we start? Should we finish up? You want to do one more?

Speaker C: I guess just one more. We've talked a lot about the artists in your collection and the art that you love. Anybody that you would like to shout out for just being somebody that people should look more closely at? Who's doing cool shit that people should be paying more attention to?

Speaker A: Yeah, even if it's not an artist or anything, just someone that we should go check out.

Speaker B: So I come from the world of infrastructure builders, right? I started out trying to be an artist and sort of like, you know, instead of going to California to dig gold, I ended up selling shovels, right? With MakerBot, we made 3D printers for people to use. At Bantam Tools, we make CNC machines and in 2024, art machines that people will use to manifest art. And as a teacher, I empowered students to unlock their creativity, to give them the tools to unlock art. Other people that I have a deep respect for in the like infrastructure building space, which is not the NFT space, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I'd point people to Adafruit, which is a New York company with PT and Limor, and they have a large employee base. They run a chip, uh, not a chip fab, like an electronics fabrication facility on like the 10th floor on a building in SoHo, right? Like it's completely absurd. And then I would shout out Evil Mad Science in California. They make the, uh, designers and manufacturers of the AxiDraw. I would shout out PocketNC. These are these folks in Montana who make a 5-axis CNC, which is the best 5-axis CNC if you want to get started in manifesting like 3D sculptures and materials other than plastic. Those are the folks I would, from like my infrastructure manifestation of physical objects folks that I'm happy to shout from the rooftops.

Speaker A: Physicals is one of our called big themes for 2023 and sounds like it's going to continue to be a theme in '24. So I wouldn't be surprised if We'll have occasion to talk to some more folks on that side of it, right? I can start to explore that and learn more about it. So those are great shoutouts.

Speaker B: I think you called it, like, just like, you know, people on the audio can't see it, but just like I can see the books behind you and the artwork behind you, I think that living with art, like I have 800-some-odd pieces on fx hash in my collection, but I really know the pieces that are hanging on my wall and I feel like a really strong relationship to them. So I think you're on target for physicals and I think the trend has started in 2023. I think we're going to see it really go in 2024.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, Bree, this was great. It was really cool to have you on. You've had so much more than just, I like to collect this and I'm going to sell at this price to offer it to us. I think it was delightfully unexpected in a lot of ways to chat with you and you're not that far away. So You know, maybe someday we'll have occasion to drop by your studio and say hi and check out some of your Vera Molnars and stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm happy to have you up. And then, uh, when I'm— you know, when we open up the Harold Cohen show in February at the Whitney, I'm gonna be there a lot making sure the machines are happy. Maybe we can set up a little get-together and I can do a sort of like, uh, insider edition tour, and we can have— and then we can go up to VAR and have a little Party.

Speaker A: That would be sick. Yeah, let's trade a year in, right?

Speaker C: That is my birthday weekend, so yes.

Speaker B: Yes, let's celebrate your birthday.

Speaker C: Yes, let's celebrate my birthday. At the Whitney. Awesome. Yes, at the Whitney.

Speaker B: Win, win.

Speaker A: That'd be great. Let's put a pin in that. That's something to look forward to in 2024. All right, that was Bri Pettis, everyone. Check out the upcoming exhibit at the Whitney. Check out his collection on fxhash if you want to see some more cool plottable stuff. That's it for this one. Hope you all enjoyed. We'll be back again soon with another episode. Bye, everybody.

Speaker B: Always. We're waiting to be signed.