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 Erik Swahn, fx# legend, Verse legend, the man who made Farbteiler, which we collected instead of Garden Monoliths, which we can talk about. Trinity, of course, is here as well. There's no way she was going to miss this one. Trinity, Erik, how's it going, everyone?

Speaker B: Good. It's an honor to be on. I've listened to a lot of episodes, so I'm really happy to be part of it.

Speaker A: Any in particular that is your favorite?

Speaker B: I mean, I've listened to quite a few, maybe half or so. So, I mean, it's really interesting to get context on through interviews and just chitchat around.

Speaker C: We'll have to learn if anything that you heard influenced your decision-making on any of your releases. Hopefully we're very influential.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course, of course.

Speaker C: But also we just discussed that this is your first podcast/media recording ever of all time. This is the first chance to tell the Erik Swahn story, which is very exciting for us. We didn't know that ahead of time.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm starting to feel the pressure now. There's no pressure.

Speaker C: We're very nice people.

Speaker A: There's no pressure. That's not the intention at all. The easiest way to get comfortable, I think, is just to ask you the first question, which we always do, which is to invite you to share your background in art and coding with us and how you first came to discover NFTs as a way to distribute your work.

Speaker B: I think it's kind of a long story. I haven't really moved in a straight path, but I am, you know, I grew up with computers. We had a Commodore 64 when I was around 7, and I think I've seen kind of a pattern. I think there's an overrepresentation of people from that generation, perhaps within the generative art space. I've heard lots of people growing up around that time. The Commodore 64, it had like a very nice blue and light blue startup screen, and it told you how much memory you had free, and it said ready, and there was a blinking cursor. And then, so you were literally prompted to enter commands from the get-go. So, and if you entered line numbers before the commands, then you'd already started writing programs. So at the age of around 7, I think I Started programming, not very well, of course, but it's been a sort of influential, I think, on my way of thinking about lots of things. And I remember thinking like, oh, you could do anything with this. You can take any problem and come up with a solution and break it down into smaller steps. And it was kind of an exhilarating feeling that sort of shaped my way of thinking about tasks in all sorts of fields. So whenever I became interested in different things later in life, I had that sense that programming was this universal tool that could be used for whatever I worked on. So in my teens, I became more deeply interested in different forms of art, but at that time it was mostly music and literature. So I made music and I studied university. I studied computational linguistics and I became interested in ways of generating music and text through coding. I became interested in computational creativity in a very broad sense, in different ways of using computers to do things that wouldn't have been possible without computers. And I think I was also influenced a lot by electronic music at that time. So warp artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin and people who were sort of introducing qualities of computation within their art, as I saw it. But I didn't really do any visual art until in my 20s, and I hadn't really drawn or painted since I was a kid, but suddenly I just became interested in visual composition and blurring the lines between music and text and image and different ways of working. The first generative visual art that I did would have been around maybe 2002. I started using Markov chains, these very simple statistical models to generate text on a computer. And then I would like, Scribble it on large canvases by hand and paint it over and do it again. And so that was essentially my first foray into generative visual art, but it was semi-manual and semi-computational. So later in life, after having worked as a programmer and translator for lots of years, I went back to university and started studying architecture. Originally, I didn't have any plans on using coding as a creative method or technique, but after a while I got more into computational design or algorithmic design or generative design, which is basically about applying computational methods in design processes. So applied generative art thinking. I know there's a lot of other people from that field that are active within the gen art scene as well. I think there's a lot of overlap in, in them. And then I started using AI in an architectural context around 2018. And I came to Twitter to see what other people were doing in the sort of creative machine learning space, people like Robbie Barrett and Gene Coogan and Mario Klingemann, Helen Nassarin, Nemo Afton. And around that time, I saw people Talking about NFT releases, but I I didn't really grasp at all how it worked. I didn't know much about blockchains, and I I remember Murray Klingman writing something on Twitter about gas prices and how the gas prices were high, and I just couldn't understand. I thought, oh, I guess it's a cold winter in Germany. Maybe gas prices are up. But then I found out about Hicatnunk in. 2021, I suppose. I don't think I would've been that interested if it hadn't been as sort of secretive and esoteric as it was, perhaps. And I followed some tutorial on how to sort of, you hit the sync button and you enter micro tests. It has to be millions of tests and you sync and mint and sync. And I sort of liked the whole peculiar process of it. It really was like coming to a place, like a sort of a city in the desert or something. Because the things I'd been doing, I mean, I'd been doing generative student projects and stuff at university, but I haven't really shared much with people. I started sharing a few AI architecture things on Twitter, but with Hic Et Nunc, you sort of, It gave a mechanism to release things, which I think is really important, like an important contribution of NFTs. Because when you work digitally, or, and especially with generative art, you sort of generate lots of files in folders on a hard drive, but there's like no endpoint to it almost. It's, it can just go on forever. But with the minting, you sort of, you got a—

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: mechanism to turn something like a work in progress into a definitive work of art, which I think was quite important. I think you can't, you can't like overstate how important places like that is perhaps, because without places like that, all those things wouldn't have been created. And it was like a really nice, um, I mean, art worlds are always social networks in some kind, but it becomes really clear with places like Hic Et Nunc. Yeah, so that's pretty much how I got into releasing things. And I don't know what happened. It just, it all went so fast.

Speaker C: Obviously, HEN was huge. I think to everybody we've talked to. I feel like I missed out because I was a little bit late. It had already kind of fallen apart by the time I came in. But then what about fx hash? How did you discover fx hash and really like that joy of long-form generative art and just some of the first early releases? I mean, you were one of the first people on the platform having 2 releases in November, which is insane.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think it was because on Hic Et Nunc, I'd mainly released like curated pieces. Mostly based on machine learning and architecture. I did one JavaScript-based project. It kind of, you kind of gradually got the possibility to mint JavaScript projects because of the community efforts. But I've been sort of raring to go into more interactive or sort of live type of projects that would generate things on the spot. And I, I mean, I had looked at what people were doing on Art Blocks, of course, but at least at that time, I wasn't that attracted to the sort of ETH scene. It seemed sort of foreign to me at the time, at least. This was also at this, in the proof-of-work days. So when fxhash came about, I was very excited to sort of try and release something pretty quickly. I think the first thing I saw was Frederik van Hout, WBLUT, releasing something. And, and I mean, I had all these projects on my computer that I just wanted to get out there. So I was sort of maybe a bit overactive in the first, first few months of the release, but I mean, it was really, um, it was such a fun thing. And the whole Tezos experience was very low stakes from the beginning. And the same with fx hash. I just created some projects and, uh, you know, sold them for 1 $TEX or 2 $TEX or something. And people were really excited and, and I was very excited to see these. I mean, it's like mini communities almost forming around different series and. I felt that there was a much stronger reaction and interaction and a more active experiencing of the generative projects on fx hash. So then I just kept going, basically.

Speaker A: I feel like we hear that from so many artists that they had a bunch of projects that could have been long form, but the only way to release them really at the time, I think that most people knew, was like curated platforms like Art Blocks. So fx hash hits and all of a sudden, like, you see all these artists doing 2, 3, 4 projects back to back to back because they just had them, right? So was that the case with Retrograde, Disegnatori, and Farbteiler? Like, you just had those working in the background and then boom, upload them and see if people collect?

Speaker B: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I still have a pretty long list of the things I want to try. I'm very sort of curiosity-driven in what I do. I get ideas and I write them down and I sort of try to come back to them. And sometimes I forget about it, but sometimes I do it. And some of these were sort of things that I had maybe thought about in student projects or just old experiments that I went back to. Since then, I've slowed down a bit in the sort of releasing pace, but Not really because I'm running out of ideas, but it's almost like the more time you have to spend on projects, the longer it takes.

Speaker C: I know that we want to spend quite a bit of time talking about your newer stuff and some of the styles that you've been progressing over the last few years, but is there anything that we should know about Retrogrades and Disegnatori? I think that they're both kind of like the unsung underground pieces of your work. That are so different, but also just very delightful. I love them both.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think maybe my main tracks or my main themes that I've been interested is colors on the one hand and form or form finding on the other. And with the retrogrades, that was almost like pure form finding, having a very simple algorithm and then try to generate these different simple but distinctive shapes. And even though I was into generative thinking and had been for quite some time, generative series was kind of new to me. I mean, what should it be? What does it mean? How should the different pieces tie together? And with Retrogrades, I wanted to make these individual pieces that somehow went together. And I felt like using that very simple way of— it's almost like throwing dice and then letting the dice determine the direction of the shapes. I thought it was a very sort of simple way to make these individual faces. And with the Disegnatori, it was— I mean, that was a bit more academically grounded, perhaps. It was actually based on Markov chains, like the old work I had done 20 years before that. So just taking shapes from maps and then converting them into sequences and then using that sort of generative power to design these map-like structures. I saw someone post a really nice one today or yesterday, and I sort of became interested in maybe going back to that track as well. It's hard to find the time to do everything you want. Those, I was a bit hesitant about using color, so it was kind of muted and not very many colors. But in Disegnatori, there was like a— maybe I had like 6 colors at the same time, but then I became more brave after that.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, a good chunk of your work since then has been devoted to color. It feels like Starting with Farbteiler, which Trinity, I know at one point, were you the biggest single holder of them or in the running for it? I think so.

Speaker C: I minted 13 of them, just like ongoing, hit the mint button, hit the mint button. I don't know if you remember, Will, when that, when it was first released, it was like, this, this is the one. It's going to be huge. Like people are excited about all projects, but this is the project that people should be very excited about. Because I think I saw some of your works in progress on Twitter, if you were releasing WIPs on Twitter at that point. And I was just very excited because they're so good and so cool.

Speaker A: And had the, uh, fortunate or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it, alignment with Zancan's release that day. And I think that was one of the, one of the reasons you were able to get so many was everyone was, you know, back then there was no feed of like upcoming projects, right? It was just like It would hit and you had to mint from the back end of the contract or whatever we all did 2 years ago on fxhash to try to beat the bots and everyone else minting. And Trinity is just sitting there minting away, minting away. And, you know, the project is still, I think, really revered by so many. Like it inspired, you know, Monk— I'm sure you saw Monk Antony wrote the piece for Tender about it, which then kind of got him basically his role.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: At Le Random eventually, like that original piece of writing he did. So it was such an important project in the history of FXHash, but I want to know more about the story of it from your side. Like there's no features on that project, but it's a color study. So how do the palettes work? Like what was your approach to even coming up with this in the beginning? Are there defined palettes or is it really just kind of like algorithmically generated to kind of see, mix and match and see what looks good?

Speaker B: With the Farbteiler, there are just 12 different colors. It started actually originally as a project to where I wanted to make like a type of musical notation so that my oldest son could learn to play the piano. There had been lots of people working on stuff like that, like sort of synesthetic systems, like I think Goethe did it and Scriabin and different people. So basically it was the sort of 12 tones of the chromatic scale. So I paired that with a color wheel from the Bauhaus era by Johannes Itten. So basically primary colors and secondary and tertiary. And then a bit like Retrogrades, it's sort of a random walk. But with a few of those colors. So in my mind, it became sort of like a type of sheet music or like almost like a harmonic chord type of notation. And I didn't really state it at the time. I just wanted people to see it for what it was. So the idea was very simple, but when I was developing it, I was sort of struck by how intense different combinations could be. And it really was like harmonics in, in music. You sort of get the interaction between different colors. And I was really happy when I found that. And as you say, the release was very intense. I had no idea about the Zancan release. And now with the Verse releases, of course, I talk to people in this planning, but at that time I was just No, I think it's ready and sort of sitting at home and minting it. And it was such a frenzy. That was a very intense experience.

Speaker C: Those were definitely different days, but how did it feel actually having released it? Because I think it was at that point in December that fxhash was really taking off and just, how did it feel seeing like so many minted out? It was what, 500?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: We went pretty fast.

Speaker B: Yeah. I was really surprised because In the beginning with Hic Et Nunc, I'd released a few things and just selling one piece was super exciting. So, I mean, it was like a total overload kind of experience. And it was also kind of, well, a bit perplexing sort of to see people care that much about something that you did. I mean, it's very flattering, but it is sort of a transition going from just doing things from your, for your own amusement almost on your computer and then releasing it and Seeing it sort of get a life of its own. Yeah, it's been super exciting and totally unexpected.

Speaker A: Not only to see a project sell out, but then also over time the secondary volume and the floor prices go up and then to be able to carry that forward. It's a success story that is too infrequent. You know, I think there's a lot of artists who never quite cross over. Are you like full-time art now, by the way?

Speaker B: Yes. Now I'm Pretty much full-time art.

Speaker A: That's awesome. You had some other projects, but to kind of continue on the— this style, this kind of progression that you've done since Farbteiler and carrying into like Punktwelt and Fields, how would you kind of describe these projects in general as they've evolved? Like, aside from color, are there core things that you're trying to like achieve or understand with, with them as you keep pushing it forward? And like, also, is there a story kind of behind the mark itself? The— it looks like a dot from far away, but when you zoom in, a lot of them are more like crescents. You know, they're kind of these little half dots, they're not quite regular. So the whole way that things are composed, like, how would you describe the pieces themselves?

Speaker B: Well, it's kind of, I think, been a process of trying to find a language, like a visual language of my own. And I think the main themes are color and form, but I mean, those are very general themes. So in Punktwelt, I became more interested in placing some kind of object in a place, but it was super minimal, of course. It was pretty much a horizon and sort of maybe something that could be interpreted as sky and ground, and then these shapes. I think it has a lot to do with my architectural training and maybe a reaction to my architectural training, because you do drawings, it's all exact lines and surfaces and no colors, basically. I think I've become interested in these sort of dissolved forms and using colors instead of just black lines and using that to describe shapes and objects. And gradually I've become more interested in Configuration of objects and place, which is pretty much what I'm exploring in the new series, Autoscope. But there's also the theme of perception. Like, if you sort of dissolve shapes somewhat, how do you perceive those shapes? And when you put different colors together, how do you interpret that? You know, color is something that I'm I'm very interested in it, but I am interested in it because I don't really understand it. So I have a pretty strong experiential thing, but it's very hard for me to define what I'm actually doing with colors. But from the outside, I can observe how I'm interested in these very strong, saturated primary colors a lot. Yeah. I think it might have a lot to do with sort of going back to my early days, sort of looking at these CRT screens of 8-bit computers. And I remember turning up the saturation on the monitor to the max just to sort of get this sensory overload from the colors. And I might just be trying to replicate that to some extent.

Speaker C: I think that's really cool. And, you know, even something that you said earlier about just like the weird kind of slightly esoteric process of uploading things and to Hic Et Nunc, you know, it kind of is like a throwback to maybe some of your experiences on a Commodore 64 and just needing to like know what to put into the command line in order to make anything work.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: There must be something about the blockchain that, you know, really just throws people back into those days where it's like a technical marvel.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. Because I mean, this was long before the internet, of course. So I mean, you made pirate copies via sort of tapes and discs. And then when I was making music, there was like a sort of DIY lo-fi cassette scene that there was also like sort of, you shared cassettes with people and sent music around. And I liked that sort of underground Feeling like, uh, yeah, sharing art just for the fun of it.

Speaker C: I think that's something that still feels special about fxhash to a certain extent, and just all these like online communities where there's so much enthusiasm and just so much sharing. It's awesome. But before we were talking about like CRT monitors, we were also talking about color, and you said that you don't really understand it. I'm curious cuz I'm, I have a Punktwelt open right now. And in some ways, Punktwelt, it helps people understand color just in the way that like all of the shapes are kind of overlaid. Can you talk about some of the process for how these different shapes and colors merge together and some of the process behind the creation of it? Because you can just see all the dots just interpolated together. It's, it's kind of wild.

Speaker B: The sort of form generation of it is kind of simple. It's pretty much boxes and then with a few boxes subtracted. So these Boolean operations. It was a while since I did it, so I can't remember exactly all the details of it, but it was pretty much starting just with a block and then subtracting different blocks. But then I think the interesting thing happened when I started, because then you end up with all these sort of subfaces of the volume. But then when I tried changing the drawing order of it, it became more interesting. So some of the faces of the shape is seemingly in the front, but they should be in the back if it was drawn more correctly. And the different faces have different colors. So it's sort of a— becomes kind of a mind game when you try to sort of decipher the colors and the shapes and the depth of the different faces. And I think that's kind of become the way I work with projects most of the time now. I sort of build something like a machine that does something, and then I start breaking it kind of, and the mistakes or the malfunction becomes a sort of aesthetic quality.

Speaker A: I had a quick question on Punktwelt and even the works that have come after it. I think with Punktwelt it was the first one where you included the export SVG option. Have you ever plotted any of them, or do you know anyone who's plotted one?

Speaker B: I have plotted a few, but it's, it's kind of difficult to do it in the same way, so you will end up with something different because of How the dots are overlaid. I've tried a few. I'm searching in my room here if I find one. But of course, the difference is that on the JavaScript HTML canvas, you can put colors directly on top of another, and it doesn't turn out the same way if you use pens on paper, of course. But I mean, you could perhaps do with these Posca pens that sort of totally opaque. But I have tried it, but it's like a— well, the result is a different thing. It's exciting and kind of becomes another project, I think, because of the logic of the paper and ink.

Speaker A: Makes sense. Yeah, I was just curious because it actually came up on an interview we did months back now with Bre Pettis, who does a lot of plotting and he owns a bunch of your stuff. And I think he said that he was having trouble kind of figuring it out. So I was curious to ask you. But I think continuing on, PUNKT was your last drop with fx hash. Since then, you've, as far as I think we know, you've only been releasing with Verse.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And you were one of the first artists to take on or embrace the collector curated function that they added in early 2023 with Fields. So was that project designed with collector curated in mind? Were you hesitant at all to do it? Like, and do you think that collectors hit the mark with the outputs that they made?

Speaker B: Well, in the end, it became created with that in mind. It didn't start that way, you know, because I had worked on fx hash before. There was only one mechanism at that time with the random mints. But when we started talking about Collector Curated, I became quite interested in sort of what that meant for a series. And with, especially with the fields, I mean, it's extremely abstract. It's just fields of dots. So for me, it already was kind of like a Rorschach test almost. It was meant for people to see things in the outputs. What drew me to working generatively in the first place was this sort of endless and ephemeral nature of it. Because when you work on a project, you just click a button and it generates a new one and a new one. And for me, that's, that's the experience of a work in a way. You build a machine and then you pull the lever and you see all these things appear. For me, that's a very central part of what the works actually are. And with the Collector Curated, I realized that to me, that was closer to that experience that I had in the creation of it. There's a conflict of control, of course. You don't know what people will choose. And it isn't really like a popularity context— the contest, you know, like Which images are the prettiest. That's not like what it's about, of course, for me. But on the other hand, working generatively is also about sort of giving up control to some extent, because you, instead of just drawing or painting, you sort of take the process, put it up on the table, and you dissect it, and you sort of externalize it from yourself, and you typically introduce randomness. And to me, that's a way of, well, getting out of yourself in a way of sort of freeing yourself from your taste or intuition. And you create a process that generates things that you wouldn't have done yourself otherwise. So in that way, I've been very sort of happy with how it's turned out in that People have spent so much time at the generator and looking at outputs, and then of course like sharing it and telling what they see in the outputs and why that meant something to them. And sometimes we talk about like a classical, the random mint as a sort of classical gen art mechanism. But I mean, it's only been around for not very long, so it's not really like. The classical thing in my view. But then the risk perhaps is that if people are after sort of rare outputs, that there's a risk that people don't choose maybe the sort of aesthetically strong outputs, but maybe sort of gravitate more towards weird or unusual. And I mean, that's fine, of course, because—

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: The fun of giving up control in that sense is, it's also about being surprised by what happens.

Speaker C: Were there any surprises with kind of the final outputs of fields and what people gravitated towards versus what you personally found aesthetically pleasing?

Speaker B: Well, I mean, naturally I think lots of people chose things that I wouldn't have chosen, but that's kind of what I mean with the sort of getting out of your own tastes, because I mean, it is a fair image of the algorithm anyway, because that's the work and that's what happened. I wasn't really surprised by how they looked maybe, because at least at the end of a project, you sort of, you see thousands and thousands of outputs. So it almost becomes like a sort of fatigue, fatigue syndrome. You sort of get overwhelmed by the mass of it.

Speaker C: I wonder if the, um, how many fields are there? Are there 700-ish?

Speaker B: 800.

Speaker C: 800. Out of the 800 fields, was the average output of you running thousands and thousands of outputs from the algorithm yourself better or worse than the final 800 that are listed today?

Speaker B: No, I mean, uh, no, the, the sort of the final curated outputs, I think it's, um, much better than, um, If it had been a random mint, because people spent so much time on it. And at the time we had a, um, I can't remember the mechanism exactly, but I never expected all 800 to mint out. I think we had, I think, 24 hours or something, and I may have expected for 500 to be minted or so, but in the end they were all minted and, uh, That was also very intense.

Speaker A: You know, that project and Cosmic Rays by Melissa, I think the mechanism is still very appealing, but the novelty of it then too, everyone was just going so deep and like you'd have 20, 30, in some cases, some people I'm sure had hundreds of seeds that they really, really wanted to mint. And when your original intention is, I'm just gonna get 1 or 2, and now you see all the ones that you can have, it's like scales very quickly into 3 or 4 or 5 that you end up minting. So, you know, I know I got Several. And they look great on the Samsung Frame, by the way. I have, uh, have them up on the TV. Since Fields into Funktor and into your upcoming Autoscope, you're still kind of using that same base of colorful dots that started all the way back with Farb.

Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

Speaker A: But with every single piece, you've been able to push it in a different direction and maintain that same visual style. Like, I think anyone who looks at and who's familiar with the scene would look at the new project and go, oh, that's Eric. Right. Like they'd instantly know. What do you think has been key to keeping this consistent visual style, but constantly making it like feel fresh enough that collectors don't go like, ah, it's just like the same thing? Because I think we've heard that with other artists sometimes, or, you know, maybe not like out loud, but sometimes whispered, but never with your work. It feels like you've always found a thing, including like with Autoscope, you know, now we're going to see.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: animation, right? I think for the first time in your work.

Speaker B: I think it's maybe because, I mean, after each project, I naturally want to go in a new direction because you're, you just become kind of exhausted when you've sort of looked at 10,000 images from the same family. So I try to move in new directions, but then eventually Somehow I'm typically like pulled back into the things that I realized that, oh, I'm actually quite interested in keeping pursuing some theme just because I, um, they're just relevant to me somehow. I'm not really sure why I do the things I do. It's sort of, it doesn't start with an intention or anything. It just starts with the, with the doing. I sort of try to make things that resonate maximally with me and hopefully with others. But, but, you know, I'm the first person there, so I try to make things that resonate with me. And these themes just seem to be hard to shake, kind of. In a way, it's about your personal limitations, and I think that's typically the case of for people doing art that you sort of, you have your own understanding of things and it might be kind of idiosyncratic, but you have a way of understanding composition or color or shapes or whatever. And from the outside, I can see the theme, but it's not like planned strategy or anything. I just keep coming back to a few core themes, I think.

Speaker C: I think it's really fascinating to hear you say like even just the words maximalism, because when you say that, it really puts into context kind of the trajectory of the work. Like even though it's following into some of the similar themes with color exploration, dot exploration, I don't wanna say you're becoming more unhinged because you're not. You're just, you kind of are taking off those restraints in some ways.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker C: Like, you know, um, like Farbteiler was very minimalist in comparison to Punktwelt. And then Fields is taking it to like that full colorway even more so. And then obviously with Funkdor and Autoscope, like it's just more.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Do you feel like you're really coming into your own self as an artist? Or like, is this representative of your inner workings and your inner feelings and your thoughts and desires and hopes?

Speaker B: I hope I'm sort of finding more and more of that kind of visual language that I was talking about that is my own. And the word Autoscope, it literally means like self-viewer. So that's kind of how I see it. It's a reflection perhaps of my way of seeing things. And in the previous project, it was mostly about sort of, in one way, dryly described objects in the center of the image. But with Autoscope, I wanted to move more into place and sort of groups of objects and movement. And in one way, more sort of experiential. That, I think, is how I sort of ended up with both the animation and the sort of visual distortions of Autoscope. Things aren't very clearly described. It's more like a sort of a recollection perhaps, or a a memory or a limited vision of a place.

Speaker A: Had you experimented with adding motion? I mean, other of your works, you can see the drawing of it, and that's kind of where the animation stops. But this one, it really feels more focused on the actual— yeah, the animation, the distortion, some things that we haven't seen in your work previously. So had you explored that with other projects and it just never came together, or did you just feel compelled to like really introduce that for this one?

Speaker B: There was a project called Kinetograms with these primitive shapes like circles and rectangles, and then they're kind of animated and they fall. It's like toy pieces or something in a box, and you shake the box and they fall into place somehow, and they leave these traces of color. So that's animated to some extent, but then they just stay in place. You can actually shake it by pressing keys that I don't remember. So there was a bit of animation in that. And also in the— there was a project called Muur with these sort of ruin-like shapes. It was actually kind of animated behind the scenes, but it's just, you see the starting condition and then they fall and there's a bit of a physical simulation and all these bricks fall into the— But with the Autoscope, I mean, this type of animation is more cinematic than those previous projects. It's more— I guess I'm more trying to sort of suggest a being there, sort of pulling the viewer into the scene somehow.

Speaker A: We should say this project is coming out on Verse April 19th, which is only going to be a couple of days away if you're listening. I don't think there's been anything announced yet publicly at the time of this recording, but is there anything you can tell us? Like, will this be collector curated? Is there pricing? You know, we won't hold you to it because I know things can change, but just kind of where are your thoughts at with how the project is going to end up?

Speaker B: The details aren't 100% sure, and I've thought a lot of it. In this case, it's going to be collector curated as well. I have been very tempted to curate the pieces myself, but it kind of feels like to me, then I wouldn't be sort of letting viewers or collectors in on the experience. Because in a way, it's kind of about finding these places within a world or an artwork as a place or sort of a refuge that you sort of— if I think about how I use art, I sort of I look at images and I project myself into them, or I sort of disappear into them somehow. And I just think that experience is stronger if you experience the process of sort of looking at a place, going to the next place and another one, and then you find something that speaks to you or resonates with you. So it will be collector curated. More than that, it's, uh, I can't really. say much more about the details.

Speaker C: That's probably good because Will doesn't want to sign up for hordes of after-the-fact editing as the details completely change and then we're just wrong.

Speaker A: It's good to hear the thought process and like the vibe, you know, you don't have to commit to it. It'll be exactly $200 and exactly this many, but understanding, yeah, that, I mean, I think it's interesting to hear that tension between collector curated versus artist curated.

Speaker C: Versus long form.

Speaker A: Yeah, versus long form.

Speaker C: It's been a while since we've seen some long form.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Well, in general, you've released these last 3 projects with Verse. So what has that relationship been like since the beginning? Like, how did you first get with them for Fields and what kept you coming back, you know, over and over again to release there versus like experimenting with something like Tonic or Art Blocks or fx hash with ETH now? Like, how do you think about platforms and these relationships and why has Verse been winning out for over a year now?

Speaker B: In general, I, I don't feel very tempted to sort of jump between blockchains and different platforms. I just want to concentrate on, on the work. I think I was originally contacted by Layla at Verse for the Imperfections exhibition that Fields was a part of. And then it's been quite a relief just to have people to talk to, sort of. I mean, because as I described earlier, sort of with Farbteiler and so the projects on FX Sasha, you just sit in your isolation with something for a long time and then you release it. And it's a very sort of isolated experience apart from the sort of reactions from collectors, of course. But it's just, it's really nice actually to have people to talk to and to collaborate with in different ways. And I mean, I'm not particularly good at promotion. I don't think that's sort of— think of that as the thing I do. I just want to make artworks basically. So I've been super happy with the sort of having that dialogue with them and a place to return to. I also think they've handled a lot of things in a very sort of professional and interesting way, being innovative with the collector curation and lots of other things. I mean, I think most platforms sort of pale in comparison when it comes to sort of being innovative and trying things constantly.

Speaker C: We're big fans of them in that regard. You know, they, I guess from a product perspective, work to fail fast, but rarely do I find that they truly fail. And I think we've heard a lot of your experiences echoed with some of the other artists who have released work there multiple times. It's not quite a gallery model in the traditional Web2 sense, or not even Web2, just trad art sense.

Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

Speaker C: But it's something that provides more of those layers of support and I think that we've seen a huge shift towards curation overall, and I'm sure that from an artist's perspective, you're able to get more work highlighted at higher prices and just kind of have this beautiful site to have things held in, I suppose. But it does represent a huge shift from what we were talking about at the start of this, where you were releasing on HEN or just uploading your project to fx hash, you know, if you get 3 tez for it and it sells out at 500 editions, that's a huge win. So how have you experienced kind of like the space changing and how you operate in this space?

Speaker B: It's been quite a process, of course. As I described earlier, it was extremely low stakes, like nothing to lose. It's like different phases. of a personal trajectory. And then also the spaces changed quite a lot, I think. I don't feel anymore that I'm sort of in the— at the start of my artistic journey, I suppose. It's quite a different thing, of course, if you have more eyes on you and more expectations and maybe more definitive expectations. You become forced, of course, to relate to that somehow. by defying expectations or following expectations or just not caring about it.

Speaker C: The pressure is there.

Speaker B: Yeah, it kind of is. And in an ideal world, you have lots of different healthy marketplaces where people can emerge and where people can continue. And you have these different levels of high stake low-stake levels of releasing things and so on. I mean, not a good sort of market analyst or anything, but I suppose that's kind of how it has to be in some way. I see an important role both in the open platforms and in the curated platforms. And of course, with something like Verse, you can have people who sort of work on Putting more context around different works. And that becomes impossible on the open platform, of course.

Speaker A: So far we haven't seen it yet.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: Well, you know, we've been going for over an hour now, and so we should start to wrap it up. We usually like to end the episode with some rapid-fire questions. So let's do some rapid-fire questions. Trinity, do you want to kick us off? I'll take Will's question.

Speaker C: Will, do you want to take your question? This is your question.

Speaker A: Okay, well, I thought it was your question.

Speaker C: I did write it down, but I wrote it down for you.

Speaker A: Wait, well, I hope I'm doing the right one now. But something that we've noticed a lot is that architects are really—

Speaker C: Oh, this is my question.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: The other question is your question.

Speaker A: Don't worry. No, you do your question.

Speaker C: Okay, so my question would be, We have noticed that architects make some of the, uh, the best artists in the space. Or, I mean, you know, that's personal preference. You know, we talked to Jacek a couple of weeks ago, and that was just, you know, chef's kiss amazing. Why do architects make such amazing artists within the generative art sphere?

Speaker B: I've thought a bit about it. And I think architecture school is quite good training for you. generative artists. You learn to sort of iterate endlessly and be self-critical, and you're forced to present your work to others and discuss it. And maybe most of all, you have to come up with generative strategies in a way. So even if you don't work with the programming, which most architects don't, you have to develop processes to take you through a project. And also there is that field of, you know, computational design, which I think is very close to generative art. And then I think perhaps that architecture school is an even better preparation for generative art than an art school would be. In all educations, you get socialized in different ways. You sort of learn the ideals and norms of a trade or profession. And I think as an architect, you're kind of free perhaps to use the languages of visual art, but you, maybe you haven't really been socialized into an artist role. So, which perhaps could make you more free from sort of the traditions of the artist's trade perhaps. I'm sort of speculating, but—

Speaker A: Perfect. This is a space for speculative answers for sure. All right, so another one that we ask a lot, and I think this is the one that Trinity thought was my question, is what do you listen to while you code? What kind of music do you want to just recommend to us all that you really enjoy? Obviously you mentioned Warp and Aphex Twin, Autotucker. Those are names that come up a lot on this show. I think that just Something about coders in particular really like that kind of IDM stuff. What else do you want to toss out there for us to go check out?

Speaker B: Personally, when I work, I can't really listen to music. I sort of, I just end up concentrating too much on listening to the music and not being able to work really. And I listened to music all the time as a teenager, like literally All the time. And I think I was sort of became totally filled up or inundated with so much music that I, it's almost hard for me to, to listen to more music. And also now that I have kids, sort of the kids unfortunately have taken over the Spotify accounts. So the recommendations are not in my tastes.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a problem.

Speaker B: Yeah. But I mean, I can listen to like extremely minimalist music, maybe like Philip Glass or Arvo Pärt in the background, perhaps while working. I mean, I did listen a lot to sort of electronic music and then sort of modern classical music or whatever you want to call it, like quite a bit of Japanese noise music, like Maybe Mertzbo can be a— or Mesona.

Speaker A: Cool, right on. You got another one, Trinity?

Speaker C: What type of art do you like to collect? Who are some of your favorites? What are some of your favorite artists, favorite projects?

Speaker B: Oh, I mean, there are so many great ones. It's, um, I'm not a very active collector, unfortunately. It was much easier in the sort of in the beginning of the Hic et nunc days when you sort of maybe had a few hundred releases to go through in a short period. And then, but I mean, now that when it's like in the tens of thousands, it's really hard to find stuff. I really like Andreas Kaisen's work or Earth.

Speaker C: Classic.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, in general, I like artists. that are onto something. They find something and they go with it. And it can be lots of different things, but I like that sort of feeling of tagging along some kind of journey that a person is on. I really like Mattelaurier. I haven't collected anything, but I wish I had.

Speaker C: Don't we all? Are you a Meridians fan or?

Speaker B: Yeah, that was, made a very big impression on me and sort of made me realize in a way what sort of generative art could be. I mean, it is generative art, but it sort of uses languages from outside of traditional computer art or whatever you want to call it.

Speaker A: Okay, so one last one here, and hopefully this will resonate since you've listened to a bunch of episodes. Who would you like to hear us interview?

Speaker B: You've spoken to quite a lot of people. I don't have the Complete list, but I think personally that now that there's a lot of talk about AI art, it would be sort of interesting perhaps to talk to more of the OGs of AI art that I was very impressed by when I sort of got into AI. So Alexander Mordvinsev, Mario Klingemann, Mike Taika, Mimo Acton. people like that who were sort of active in, I mean, I've honestly lost a bit of interest in AI art now that it's sort of, I mean, people are working with these ready-made tools to a large extent. And, but back then people were sort of making their own training sets. And, um, I think that was sort of in one way a more interesting era. I'm sure I'm offending a lot of people, but, uh, Yeah, it would be interesting perhaps to hear from people like that.

Speaker C: Add it to the list.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think Mario is definitely someone that we've been thinking about having on for a minute now, and I think we can probably find him, hopefully. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap it up.

Speaker C: Any last words?

Speaker A: Yeah, anything else you want to plug? What's coming up after this? Are we gonna see like another Evolution of the colorful dots, or do you think something different?

Speaker B: I have no idea, actually. You know, it's, I'm usually kind of exhausted after the release and sort of a bit lost in a good way, but I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Speaker A: Fair enough. So TBD, you know, maybe we see something else from you later this year, maybe not. Just depends on when you have time and mental energy to get going on something.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's quite possible. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker A: Well, thank you so much, Erik. It's been awesome to get to know you. And I feel like we did a pretty good job covering your history here. I know we missed a couple projects, but we only have so much time, so we can't do them all.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Speaker A: That's Erik Swahn, everyone. And be on the lookout again for Autoscope on April 19th. It'll be on Verse. Probably by the time this episode's out, there will be More info on things like quantity and pricing, and maybe you'll even be collecting some seeds by then too. So look forward to that one. And yeah, that's it. Bye everybody.

Speaker C: Bye.

Speaker B: Always lit. We're waiting to be signed. Grail of the week. To be signed. We're waiting, always. We're waiting to be signed.