Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode, a rare 2-guest interview. Today we've got Artrie Handz and artist Frank Manzano on to talk about an upcoming release on Verse. How's it going, everybody?

Speaker B: Very well.

Speaker C: Nice to meet you, Will. Doing well.

Speaker A: Yeah, Artrie, it was really great to hear from you and get introduced via Jamie from Verse. We're always looking for opportunities to talk to more and different kinds of artists, and for us, we broadly consider AI to be generative. And so Frank, you're a perfect guest for us to continue branching out into AI. stuff. So let's actually start with Artrie and get an introduction from you. Like, what is your background in art and collecting, and how did you come to start the Artrie Handz Gallery?

Speaker C: Yeah, I'm Artrie Handz, pseudo-anonymous digital art collector. I've been doing it for just about 3 years here. I think I'm about 2 weeks away from my 3-year anniversary of my first NFT Someone told me about Top Shot. It was like the day after Christmas 2020, and it took me a few weeks to figure out the website and get on and start digging into this rabbit hole of NFTs. But yeah, I've been collecting for just about 3 years. I try to be somewhat of a lone wolf collector and collect what I actually like instead of following the masses. And after pushing 3 years of just retweeting the art that I like, This past October, Jamie, the CEO at Verse, reached out to me and wondered if I wanted to do some curation for them. My background is a lawyer and I've been an employee for too long and I didn't really want to be an employee per se, but they were opening up the platform to kind of curated galleries and we thought it would be a good fit to possibly do something for them through that initiative that they had done. And so we kind of decided together, okay, you should make a gallery and we'll put it on Verse. And so Artrie Handz Gallery was born. And within a couple weeks, I was trying to figure out— I wanted to do a single artist show first for logistical reasons of not having to get so many people together and stuff. But I was thinking about people or artists who would be interested in working with me, and I kept coming back to Frank's work as it just being super interesting and really deep and involved in it. His work says what I want to say as a gallery, you know, that not everything is beautiful. We need to tackle the challenges of the day and things like that. So it's been an amazing experience working with Frank, and I'm really honored that he chose me to— at the time, I guess, before his first solo show, I guess he kind of had a bit of a semi-solo show there with—

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: fellowship. But yeah, that's kind of a bit of the background and how we got to where we are today.

Speaker A: Top Shot is such a common entry point for a lot of like the first generation of NFT collectors. I tried to get into it, but by the time I got in, it was already like you had to own a certain number of cards to be on the allow list to mint a pack, and that's where I stopped. So I missed out for sure. So Frank, a similar question to you here for introduction. What is your background in art and film, and how did you discover and begin to incorporate AI into your work?

Speaker B: So my whole life I'd been creating art, painting, photography. In college, I studied film and photography as well. About 3 or 4 years ago, I actually picked up Procreate, and it was really just because I, um, I wanted something to work out ideas for painting. It was more of like a tool, and I found something there with digital art. I saw that there was like a language there, and it was something that I wanted to explore more. And I downloaded Blender, and then I started working more digitally. I started doing a little bit of animation, and then about two and a half years into that, two years into that, is when I started to dabble with using AI, incorporating that into it. And then since then, it's kind of been. the way that I work predominantly at this point. When I first started working with it, it was really just because I was trying to find some ways to save time in the animating process. That's really what it was for, and I ended up finding something, something else there. So that's kind of how that emerged.

Speaker A: And what about NFTs and crypto in general? Like, how did you make the decision to bridge over into crypto, which I feel like is often a controversial choice for artists?

Speaker B: Well, so I had been in the crypto for about 5 years. The crypto was before the art. I had never really considered doing anything on the blockchain. And then when Alex from Fellowship reached out to me and I had the show with them, when I started to actually start minting work on the blockchain, that's kind of how that started. That's pretty new for me as well. I had not considered it prior just because The digital work that I was doing, I had minted a couple pieces of non-AI work on OpenSea maybe 2 or 3 years ago as well. And I hadn't developed my own language in it enough to where I felt like, okay, I'm ready to start just selling it. And analog traditional work to me didn't really seem to fit on there. There's kind of like no looking back now. I can't see any other way of doing it so much. Yeah.

Speaker A: Well, you've got this scheduled programming exhibition coming up on the 11th or 12th?

Speaker C: Beginning the 11th, 24-hour auction style.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've been loving just going through and checking out all of the videos up there in your collection and really does something different for me. Even some of the animated AI stuff that I've seen in the past from artists like Ivona Tau, it has that unsettling kind of like dreamlike quality to it, but I think it's not doing it in an intentional way, which I kind of get from your work sometimes. And we're definitely going to discuss that more. But Artie, how did you first discover Frank's work? And, you know, you already said like he was the first artist that came to mind for you for this solo exhibit. So can you talk a little bit more about your relationship with his work and what drew you to him for this release?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think it was this past summer when Frank started releasing some dailies on Fellowship. I'd say probably a little over a year ago, maybe October of '22. I kind of started falling into the AI art rabbit hole. Probably my first year here, I was just sort of, I had no plan. I was just kind of buying whatever I kind of liked and saw. And then I think the second year here, I really focused a little more on generative art, fx hash being one of the obvious, and Art Blocks, and kind of building that aspect of the collection. And then as I saw AI art evolving and the tools becoming so powerful, I quickly realized regardless of whatever other people think or whatever, maybe the popular cultural idea of what AI and AI art is, I don't really care about because it's coming and it's going to be here and it's not going to be stopped. And I found myself wanting to be interested in that and interested in new mediums and techniques and trying new things. So I was just kind of really interested in that from the get-go. So I, about, yeah, October of '22, kind of really started digging into it and learning more about the history and players and who's doing it now and following more people. And the network just kind of grows with time, you know. They started doing the Fellowship AI and doing a lot of the post-photographic work. And I love that, you know, like you said, that kind of uncanny valley feeling that the post-photography does. And bought a Liwa. I didn't mint one, but I bought one like immediately afterwards, the Life in West America by Rupe. I think that kind of set the tone for what people think of in terms of what it should look like. I'm using air quotes here. But like you said, I think that that style that kind of came from that time era that we're still kind of in is sort of built into the AI, into the models. And, you know, we're eventually headed toward this perfection, which, you know, I think artists will have to figure out how to break that perfection because perfection isn't really interesting. But Frank, like, it's really exactly like you said, you hit the nail on the head, was there's this unsettling nature of the AI work, but Frank is leaning into it and he's saying, yeah, this is— it looks unsettling, but let's make it more unsettling by starting with unsettling topics and unsettling prompts and unsettling things. And Frank, I'm trying not to step on anything, but he's told me he's taken things out of videos because they're like, this is too unsettling. I don't want people to think that I'm putting this in there, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: He's just exposing things for what they are instead of sugarcoating and saying, here's this nice, beautiful thing. And I think a lot of people in Web3 are looking for, one, to make money, and two, some nice, pretty things. And so I think that art like this challenges both of those assumptions, that it doesn't have to be about financial gain and it doesn't have to be, or it shouldn't be about just pretty art. Like I said, I've just been thrilled with the series. They're so, so cool. I just posted all 30 of them on my new Arty gallery and posted them all on Twitter. So they're all up there and available to be seen by anyone at this point.

Speaker A: Well, maybe since we've already opened up the subject, Frank, can we talk a little bit more about the themes of your work? I mean, I've seen some others commenting or describing it as dystopic. We already used the word unsettling. I mean, I see a lot of commentary personally on social media and things like TikTok and YouTube, like not just in the subject matter but the editing style where you're getting these like quick cuts. You know, if you look at something like MrBeast videos that do a billion views on YouTube, they're Cutting every 3 seconds to something new, right? And you're kind of following a similar cadence of what you're doing here. First, in your own words, what can you tell us about the work? And then I'll have a follow-up for you.

Speaker B: So as far as themes, I mean, I approach the work pretty like open. Like, I don't have any themes in mind. Normally I start with a reference, something that I've made either digitally or a found image or a photograph I've taken. And I'll start to kind of just play around with prompts and see what I can get from the image. And as I'm kind of working through the generating process is when— and I don't want to call it a narrative because it's a very loose narrative, so— but something starts to emerge. And what I'm going to select is going to be based on whatever ideas are kind of going on in my head at the time or just in general. And that's kind of when I start to choose a little bit more of a focused direction of what I want to kind of— what type of images I want to pull. But up until probably the last maybe hour of the process, I'm still kind of in the open. One of the things I like about AI is that there is— there's spontaneity where you could get something out of it that you didn't expect. And then it's a matter of trying to like replicate the unexpected outcomes. That's kind of the way that I go from there. The editing then is, um, because it's being posted on social media, I do like to keep that kind of editing style. And I do find that editing style, because I do experiments with the timing of the clips, and, uh, I think we're kind of conditioned to see things in a way that's much faster than maybe, let's say, 10 years ago even. It's what keeps our attention. If something is moving too slow time-wise, if the clips aren't moving enough, it seems to be stagnant, even if it's not, you know. So one of the things I've been playing around with is trying to keep the— slow the pace down, but doing variances of movement within the pieces.

Speaker A: That spontaneity thing that you referenced is something, a really common theme we hear with a lot of the code-based artists that we interview, because, you know, they're creating generative art with a lot of noise functions and built-in randomness. They hit run and they might get something that they never expected because there could have been a bug, a misplaced decimal point or something in their code. But then all of a sudden they like love it and then they find it and they find a way to like lean into it and drill down on it. And that's when they take that left turn in the project. And it's really interesting kind of hearing that mirroring in your process as well. So the other thing that came up in reading some notes on your work is So where do you find hope in some of these subjects? You know, I think for a lot of us it's pretty elusive. So do you agree with some of those comments that there's hope to be found in, you know, hyper-consumerism and social media?

Speaker B: I think some people would get the impression that I'm very cynical, or— I'm not. By no means am I cynical. And don't— we really can't control what's going on in the world. We can barely control ourselves, I think, for the most part. But, um, but I think we could always sit back and kind of think. I mean, that's kind of the hope. is that we can take ourselves out of situations and try to use our minds the best we can to move forward. So I guess that would be the hope. The work, it's an exaggeration. It's satire, but there's also— I mean, I work kind of in like an expressionistic fashion where there's— I hope that people get more out of the work than just something topical, because really my intent is, and I think this is the case for most people who make art, There's always something that's internal that's driving it. It's not just what's going on in the world. There's something internally that drives you to want to make art or whatever it is that a person does. Maybe they don't make art. Maybe they work on their car or whatever the case is. There's just something that drives us. And I think, well, there's boredom, which is, I think, could be a good thing. Boredom is one of those things where you're kind of alone in a way. You're preoccupied, you know, and you kind of find a way to kind of escape that temporarily. And I think that's whatever is going on within a person. Little by little, if you continue at it, you could maybe get to something or not. But I mean, that's kind of the idea, is that you just kind of keep at it and maybe you'll stumble across something. And that's with all art, I think, not just working with AI. I think that's just art in general.

Speaker A: Artie, jumping back to you real quick, what was your reaction when you first saw these works? And Can you describe a little bit more like the process of yourself as a curator? Were there others that maybe were created that didn't make it into the show? Were you helping select? Were you providing any input along the way, or were you just like fully trusting Frank to bring his best stuff?

Speaker C: I'm also a football fan. I don't know if you've ever heard, uh, this used to be the term for Russell Wilson in Seattle, let Russ cook. And I just let Frank cook. I'd say we were in pretty consistent contact and he kept shooting over initial ones and pieces, and as they were coming You could just feel it was like one of those snowballs running down the hill. It just kept getting bigger and bigger and more powerful. And you could see that, I mean, even the pieces, I think the last 10 are the best, not the best 10, but like, you know, the average of the, if I was grading them all on a 0 to 10 scale, the average of the last 10 would be the best. You know, it was, you could see the just more, more interesting work and he was layering because they're all previously done all squared aspect ratio and these are all 16 by 9. And so He kind of used a bit of an extra space to bring your eye into different portions at a time and kind of separate it out and tell multiple stories in one at certain points. So really, really interesting stuff. But yeah, I just let him cook. I've been pretty upfront with him from the very first message. Like, this is my first show gallery. I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm going to do my best and work hard for you to promote it, but I want the work to be you. I'm obviously happy to help or answer questions, or if someone wants to bounce off, I I've served in those capacities, you know, unofficially to artists many times in the past before, and I enjoy doing that. I enjoy having a small part of the work, but when someone has it and you can see it, you just let them run with it, you know. You don't want to be like a TV show and then there's 40 different people writing comments and you're losing that center, that, you know, that real soul of the thing by too many cooks in the kitchen. So I just let Frank cook. and try to do as much as I can for him behind the scenes. And from the very beginning, I started contacting his previous collectors and asked them for quotes on the work to help not only me kind of contextualize some of the stuff, but I think that what the space is missing is contextualizing the work and hearing other people talk about works. And the kind of quotes that I got from people are things I wish that people would tweet about, you know, like, I bought this piece and this is how it makes me feel. But not that many people are that open and vulnerable on their Twitter X accounts. But when they're just writing a little paragraph because they want to, they want— people want to talk about their feelings and the art. They're just like afraid to in a more public situation or a place where a big tweet and you have 20,000 followers, someone's going to be like, well, that's stupid, you know. But in a safe space where it's sent to me and I'm putting it in a PDF and tweeting it out without whatever, it's not, not as big of a deal. So it was very clear that his collectors were very passionate about the work, you know, that type of thing where you're cold DMing people, hey, I'm planning on doing this thing, will you write a thoughtful paragraph for me that will take you a little bit of time? I've got like over 80% response rate, you know, and even the people that didn't do it, like they said they want to, but I just can't at the moment, or, you know. So that kind of shows you the passion that people have for the work. And again, it was kind of that snowball effect where I took these quotes and wrote them all down and thought more about it. And as the works came in, I wrote this exhibition statement, and it's been a very natural process, you know, like Frank said, and the way that he, he makes it was just, okay, here we create this thing and just see how it goes and continuously look at it so it doesn't go sideways in some manner, you know. It's not that it's unplanned. thing, but it's just kind of letting it ride and see how it goes and trim and edit as it is.

Speaker A: I mean, communication and promotion, right, or for lack of a better term, marketing is like really challenging. But like you said, it is something that, especially in the last year or so of bear market, like artists need and I think want. And like you said, if you tweet how you feel about something, at worst, you look stupid or cringe. At best, you're accused of bag pumping or shilling, right? So it is a little bit of a lose-lose proposition especially the bigger megaphone you have. And, you know, compared to us, you've got quite a big one already. So, you know, I can, first of all, like applaud you for pushing, right, and then taking that risk. But also, it's interesting to hear the way that you approached it through DMing, you know, individual outreach to known collectors. I mean, something that I think we've tracked a lot in the last year too has been a turn towards like what you might consider like the methods of the more traditional art world. Even though Web3 is supposed to be open and decentralized and accessible to everyone. I think because of this consolidation, it's become increasingly more like that's the model that you need for success. So I guess kind of an open-ended question of like, have you observed similar? Like, what do you think about that? And also, Frank, feel free to jump in too, as someone who's probably played on both sides of the pond, NFTs and non.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think, you know, there's 2 sides of the equation, the artist side and the collector side. And you have this abyss in the middle that's going to get filled in the traditional space that is filled with galleries, curators, et cetera. And here, in the absence of that, it's filled by flippers, right? Here's a sale, then flippers will trade it until it finds some type of equilibrium price, right? And that isn't a bad thing per se. And the gallery model itself isn't a bad thing per se, but both of them are, I think, lacking in certain degrees. Like the decentralized, there's nothing there, direct artist-to-collector model, is really interesting. The amount of time that you can get with artists in direct contact is, you know, undeniably better here versus traditional art world, which makes it much more interesting and deeply engaging. But, you know, the flipping stuff is kind of awful, but it does serve a purpose as well. So I think it's more about kind of marrying the two, you know, using the advantages of open, decentralized, non-gatekept work while also adding some of the elements of traditional art world of curation and placement, but trying to do so without it being such an incredibly gatekept, you're the only person who deserves my artwork. I feel that very intensely. I lived in New York 2010 to 2015 and would stroll into Pace or some of the other high-end galleries with my cowboy boots and cowboy hat on. I'm a 5th generation rancher. When I'm in a big city, I like to lean into the ranch aspect of it, you know, just kind of playing around a little bit. And I would honest to God get like, we don't think this work should go to you. Like basically like, go along, you can't sit here, seat's taken, that type of deal, right? Forrest Gump reference, super topical. Um, but yeah, just saying like, you're not welcome here and that's not the kind of space and things we want. But I think we can kind of marry those 2 ideals. One's a little bit too far to the left, one's a little too far at the right. If we kind of marry that in the center, maybe we got something there. Just talking art, not politics, but maybe that would work too.

Speaker A: I got it. What do you think, Frank?

Speaker B: I don't really have a problem with that structure at all, just because, um, speaking for myself, even working full-time in art, there's just not that time to do that. I mean, you're busy working, so that you can't— it's difficult to develop the social media part because it takes time as well. So it takes time away from what you're doing. And I have to say, especially with the digital work, there's a lot of non-creative components to it that are taking up your time as well. So I have a decent following with social media, but my work gets out there when, you know, somebody with some type of following or a gallery is promoting it. So I think that to me is the better way to do it. You know, if somebody's a collector, they're focused on collecting, they have a community of people that they are in communication with. So I just, I think that that's critical. And I think, I mean, I've spoken to many artists on this and many of them agree too that it's just, it's much easier. It takes a lot of work off of you that you might not even necessarily have the knack for. I mean, it's, I think it's hard for a lot of people to promote themselves. Speaking for myself and other people, it's kind of hard to sell yourself or it can be uncomfortable, I think, for some artists, I think, just to kind of promote themselves often. So that's what the galleries, they do that.

Speaker C: What Frank said is exactly tying what I'm trying to say, at least, of what's best is that you have this option, right? Like some of the artists are promotional wizards and their art is somewhat secondary to their persona and their social media, right? And other people would rather die than tweet 20 times a day, you know? So there needs to be both. If someone is great and has created such a persona or has had the amount of success they deserve to be able to sell their work with very little off the top, right? You know, because they don't need it. But other people do need a gallery thing. And what the NFT space has made is now there's a possibility of doing it without a gallery. There are different manners of doing it, and it's not a here's 50% or what else are you going to do, right? Here there's a more sliding scale because of there's less overhead and all of that, but you can go from a I'm launching on my own contract and I'm marketing it myself on Twitter and I'm paying maybe 2% off the top or something to Manifold and FX or whatever, 2% to 10% off a platform versus another curation layer that could add another 10%, 15%, 20%. But you're still compared to like a traditional gallery coming out way, way ahead than a 50%. So the ability to have different models here is what's really nice.

Speaker B: On another note too, I also think that galleries are good because For example, if you are somebody who's into, like, like an academic, if they're writing journals and papers and whatnot, they have their peers review it, right? And it kind of validates what they're saying. Having your work come from a gallery, I think it validates the work a bit more because you have a group of curators who are tuned into everything that's going on, and they kind of are examining the work a little bit more critically before it gets to the public, and they're determining what— not what should be sold, but they're kind of steering that a little bit. So, so I think that's good because I think if you're just kind of putting out whatever you have and you're not really going through it— I mean, because that— there is an art to curating. There is something to, to have another set of eyes or multiple sets of eyes on the work, and making sense of it is, I think, beneficial.

Speaker A: For sure. I mean, we've seen so much of that in the last year too with platforms like Verse and Tonic. And, um, you know, I'm a part of this group called TENDER where we release like these curated collaborative projects and work with artists and stuff. So it's, it's been a really interesting trend to follow. So just, I wanted to jump back to your process and how you work with AI and film and, and whatever other resources, like, you know, Blender, like you mentioned. When you do make these videos, like, are you starting from a point of like found footage, footage that you've done yourself? What models are you using? Are you training your own models like through Stable Diffusion? I'm trying to get a sense of like how much of this is AI versus how much of this is your stuff with AI layered on top of it, because I think to many of us it's such a mystery. Most of us don't know AI beyond Midjourney and prompting.

Speaker B: I was using Midjourney for a while, so I always use a reference, which are my own references. The thing I like about references is I could kind of set the composition up there, I could set up my colors there, I could set up depth of field. A lot of the aesthetic qualities can be set in your reference, and then it's your prompt that kind of will take it to another place. I was using footage for a while of stuff, but I was using Gen 1 for a little bit with Runway. It wasn't really as effective as I wanted it to be. It has this thing where it kind of— it doesn't really keep true to the colors, so I kind of dismissed it. And to be honest, lately I've been using Stable Diffusion a lot more to generate images. I still use Wombo quite often. The one thing about it is that you could just plug in your reference. And one thing I like to do also is after I generate some images from the reference, I like to kind of zoom in what I've generated and start generating based off what it's generated for me as a reference.

Speaker A: Hmm.

Speaker B: A lot of times I'm building out pieces strictly for references, like not to be their own piece, right? And there's enough in them when the resolution's high enough where you can kind of move the piece around. Like, I've used the same 10 pieces for probably the last 15 pieces that I've done, just different pieces of it where I can kind of zoom in and out. And so yeah, that's the prompting is kind of, I would say, for me at least, prompting I think comes secondary. I mean, I've done a series of work where I just use all prompts, and that's fine too, but I kind of like to have some control because a big part of working with this kind of work is that You're relinquishing control to a large degree. And I think sometimes it could kind of go in directions that you don't want it. And I just find that references are— I'd like to at some point do another series of work where I'm totally just going prompt-based. But yeah, references are a big part.

Speaker A: For clarity, and if you don't want to share too many secrets, by the way, don't worry. Or Artie, if you're like, hey, don't say this stuff, you know, just give Frank a wink or something and say don't expose any secrets.

Speaker B: No, no, no, no, I don't have any secrets. I'm willing to share anything.

Speaker A: So from my experiences with Midjourney was just using it in Discord and prompting, get a still image back. But then your final product is obviously these videos that can be minutes long. And so are, are these things where you are using a second process on top of the prompting that then is like knitting these things together to make those like animations? And then are you getting like a series of 3-second animations that you're then editing together to make the final video? Like, I guess I'm just curious cuz I've never seen You know, I've seen shorter GIF-like animations generated by AI, but I haven't seen stuff like yours, which is why I'm curious.

Speaker B: So for example, when I use Midjourney, Midjourney, I strictly, I never did much prompting in Midjourney. I would always blend. So I would blend different images together. I then take those images and then I move them into, you know, either Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. And then I convert them into either 2-second or 4-second videos depending on which one I'm using. I have all my images first that I've generated. I have an idea of where we're going now with— I'll kind of storyboard them out a little bit. I'll lay them out kind of how I— and a lot of it is just kind of— I like to kind of keep like, um, kind of like a stream, just kind of the way that I'm thinking of things. That's kind of how I want things to appear in the clips. After I generate the video, then I go to editing, and I use Final Cut for editing. Yeah, and then at that point they come together, and then there's the After that, that's when I'll make the audio, which is not generative, which I don't have experience with really. Is the sound that I've been doing is actually a new something that I've just gotten into in the last couple months.

Speaker A: So, well, that was where I was going to follow up, which is how do you create those soundscapes? Are you composing or are they found sound things? Or I was going to ask if they're AI, but you're saying that they're not. So how do you come up with them?

Speaker B: So I have a drum machine on, uh, my tablet that I use. And I also will take like, uh, it has like the function to use it as a keyboard as well, and I'll make various sounds. And I use Jenny for the voice. Anytime there's voice, it's always AI voices. And then I'll take like a movie or a song or something, and I'll slow it down to the point where it's no longer that song anymore, and I'll just start picking out like little tiny pieces. Like I said, I don't have much experience with sound. I was doing a little bit of research on it. I just kind of started to utilize pitch a little bit more. And then I'll kind of just go in and start to edit that in Final Cut, and I just kind of build from there. And then I have this other app called, uh, Flues, which is kind of like a synthesizer of sorts where you can kind of create like ambient sounds. And I just kind of layer those in to— everything is normally like, I guess, 3 or 4 tracks. It's normally like a voice track, some type of ambient track, and then Sometimes a drum, a beat of some sort, and then whatever sounds that I kind of have accumulated, and I try to find a pattern for it. And then once I find a pattern that, that I like, I kind of just replicate it. I like a little bit of repetition in the sound for me. I find that it goes with the piece. I don't want the sound to have it like to be in too many directions, so I just kind of like it to kind of almost like a hypnosis of sorts, you know what I mean? Like that type of thing.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Does that clarify things a little bit more?

Speaker A: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: No, no. I mean, it's just curious because, you know, compared to an artist who does a lot of work with code, it's like really hard to ask people questions about like, how do you code something, you know, without getting super technical. But for someone who's working with film, it's, I think, easier to like conceptualize and understand like, oh, you're taking this and you're building this clip and then you're importing it and then you're like editing it. So you know what I mean? Like, I just feel like process-wise, it's easier to grok for a non-artist. What you're doing versus like, yeah, someone who codes, they could tell me I use this function, that, and I have no conceptualization of it in my head. And so it's just really cool to hear how you do it. And now of course I can copy it since you've been so— Oh, absolutely.

Speaker B: No, I, I've actually been thinking about like, cuz a lot of people do ask me, people will DM me like that wanna get into it. And I've actually thought about like putting something together where I just kind of show the process. I think it's kind of better to approach it. Not really knowing much because then you're free to do whatever you want. Once you kind of have an idea, it's like, well, now you're just going to make—

Speaker C: You've already placed yourself in a box a little bit.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker C: Defined, defined the endgame before you've even started a little bit.

Speaker B: Yeah. That's kind of how I feel about it. I don't think it's good to think too much. It's better just to kind of start moving things along and see what starts to come out. I think if you overanalyze it or you think too much or you look at it, I think it doesn't, at least for me, it That doesn't produce anything for me. I find that just kind of a bunch of very simple things, and then it's the decisions that you make afterwards that kind of makes it. When I paint, I approach it the same way as well. One kind of mark at a time, and it kind of goes from there. If you think before too much about it, you're not gonna get what you, you know, it's better just to kind of approach it like, well, okay, it's very simple, the act. I'm just gonna make marks and see where it goes.

Speaker A: You know, you've already talked about your history with AI and like first using it as a tool for expediency and now using it as a tool for discovery. But is there anything else that you kind of feel like AI brings into the process that you couldn't achieve necessarily through, you know, becoming a special effects wizard or something like that? And I think actually this would be a good question for both of you, cuz already I gather you've probably looked at a lot of AI art and have like a broad understanding of what it can bring aesthetically. So like, what are some of the other things that you feel like are, are really additive and beneficial? in your work and just beyond when it comes to using AI?

Speaker B: I think, and this is a big thing for me, and I've had this discussion with other artists on this too, which is, for example, just take painting. Like, you could paint for days and never actually find a groove. At the end of like 10 hours, you don't really have anything there that you're happy with. When you're working with AI, like, you have the same type of blockages and you have the same type of spinning, But there's always something. You always have something that you could work with from that. There's always a move. There's always something that you can do with what you have or build off of it somehow. And I think a lot of that is owed to, well, you're collaborating. You have something that's vastly more intelligent than you and can put things together quicker than you. So it's always going to kind of, whatever you give it, I mean, it's going to give you something. It's not going to not deliver. So, you know, when you're working in traditional means, it's just yourself. You're not collaborating with anything. So I think that's the advantage to working with AI. And I imagine people who are working in generative art as well, that's kind of the same thing where you're collaborating with this machine. I think it's a great way to make art. I mean, I think in 100 years from now, I don't— I think we will be at that point where this is how I see it. We will have some type of apparatus in our head. And that's just how people do things in 100 years, you know what I mean? And it's not thought of as like, oh, like you're cheating something. It's like, no, that's— why would you not? I think it frees up your mind for more creativity in a way, because it's like you're outsourcing some of the extra movement and you kind of have more room for conceptualizing things. And that's the way I see it, because I mean, without you, it's not really going to produce anything. In a sense, you're curating what comes out of it as well. So it's kind of a two-way street.

Speaker A: Artie, anything to add?

Speaker C: There's a lot of things I think, you know, similar to phone in your hand with the camera thing. It gives you the ability to create if you can't, right? Like, I can't even do stick figures very well. Like, I— there's something between my brain and my hand that just— I cannot create drawing in any manner, right? But I can prompt, I can use these tools. So I think it's interesting in terms of opening up a new audience of potential artists that couldn't do it before without years and years of training, or in some cases just couldn't do it because of just hand-eye coordination or, you know, et cetera. So there's that. I think also in terms of creativity, you can iterate things so quickly, do trial and error a million times faster than before. So it opens up new avenues and you can think through things more quickly. It can create more efficiency. And then the final thing I thought of, and something that Frank and I have talked about a little bit, is especially in the kind of the post-photographic world, AI can go places that you can't go. Kevin Abosch has a cool series of Riot called Riots or something like that, and it's created these riots and things. And it's like, yeah, you're probably not taking a camera and finding riots, you know, like creating this thing that you're going to this place you couldn't safely go, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Or so I saw someone do like a super deep Depths of Underwater series of super crazy monsters underwater. I'm like, yeah, you couldn't really go there without a lot of money or you're James Cameron or something. And in Frank's case, we've talked about this a little bit and I used some of this terminology in the exhibition statement, but he's using these photographs of areas of— and Frank, stop me if I'm saying something I shouldn't, but using these photos of areas of his native West Chicago that are don't-go zones. This is dangerous, but then there's that extra layer of like, you can't go there and expect to be okay, right? So like, how do you photograph? How do you tell the story of what's happening in there in this no-go zone? The, like, in the thing I call it like a black hole, and there's the event horizon. What's happening in the black hole? I don't know, but AI can go there, right?

Speaker B: Photographers, they want to capture moments, and they want to, you know, those moments are producing some type of emotion or some type of feeling. It's more than just like a conceptual idea. And I think sometimes you could photograph something and now bring it into AI and pull more out of it and actually capture more of the subconscious emotional part of an environment or a person or something without actually having just like this only a representation of it, you know. And, um, I often will accumulate photos I will walk around like and just kind of photograph places and things. And people have taken photographs of the area and that's been done. But there's like vortexes in places everywhere. You know, there's like these kind of energy and emotional fields of places. And I think the machine itself, what it's plugged into is essentially like a collective consciousness. It's a collection of images and the sum of everything is kind of there. And you're kind of just going in and you can kind of pull out something out of it. And a lot of times we say it's like this uncanny space, but I think it's actually maybe more of a representation of what is out there. It's actually maybe a mirror of sorts, not giving us like an exact replication of, you know, but it's some other type of truth, I guess, in a way. That's kind of what it shows us. And it does seem maybe uncanny or unsettling, but I think it's There's something there, and I think we're probably a hundred years away, two hundred years away from even understanding what all this means. In like what this uncanny space even is, I don't think that we're ready to really understand it. I think we could just kind of unearth it, examine it, do what we can with it. But we're not gonna maybe in our lifetime have a full context of what all this meant. I think what we're doing today in two hundred years from now will be the equivalent of. It's just kind of this really crude, primitive, but it will mean something, but I don't know if it will— whatever. I think things will change exponentially fast in 200 years, and it'll be a completely different world. And I still think that there'll be something to everything that we're doing now.

Speaker A: I mean, hearing both of you talk about it, it makes me think that we're in this age of like, just like very nascent archaeology of the collective emotion of the internet, you know, like all these models are trained off of Instagram and Wikipedia and, you know, random blog posts and whatever. So we're in this era of just starting to unearth this stuff and look at it, and we're first of all interpreting it through the eyes of the machine and not our own. And so we— it's almost like having someone look at your dreams and try to do a Jungian analysis of it, but we're doing it for the whole world. But I think it also begs the question, and I don't know what kind of lawyer you were, Artie, but like, obviously there's like lawsuits going on right now over all this stuff. The one I can think of is ChatGPT being sued by the New York Times. Obviously things like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, even when you're incorporating your own elements into it like Frank does, you're still calling upon all of that information that's been scraped. So I'm curious how you feel like as you know, someone who's art adjacent, especially like a collector, and you're getting into this stuff, like, to me, I feel like there's the potential that there could kind of be like a permanent mark on some of this stuff, because who knows how these lawsuits will play out, what the remedies will be. So open-ended question while Frank's gone, like, what do you think about all of that?

Speaker C: Yeah, no, I've definitely thought about it because, you know, part of me has been like, I don't think that this is the outcome, but, you know, what if they say, yeah, you can't train models on anything that's not your own proprietary information, right? Like, and that more or less killed AI art as we knew it. My thought would be, well, cool, I have a cool collection of AI art while it existed, you know? I don't think that that's going to be the case. I was not a patent or copyright attorney. I do have some friends who are, but I haven't actually talked to them about this stuff that much. Most people just glaze over as soon as you start talking about NFTs or stuff, you know, it's like, well, dead. And, um, It's difficult because, yeah, here's a machine that's infinitely— smarter is not the right word, but more— the computing power of the machine is so much greater than us that it's like, I don't take my thing. I don't want something so powerful to have my outputs and learn from it, and I get nothing from it, right? But then is it learning any differently than how we learn? Like, yes, it learns it much faster and processes it much faster, but like— You didn't base your most recent work off of your favorite Picasso and Monet or whatever, right? You learned from things that are in the public as well. You didn't come up with everything that you come up with, right? It's a result of your experience and all the things that you trained yourself on. So it's a difficult thing because you want to keep things open. Yeah. And be able to continue to build upon human knowledge, yet also have some type of protection so that, you know, for example, I, after being a lawyer, I worked in the shipping industry and we were building this large-scale machine that would attach to these cranes and help boats unload faster. And we went to partner with a company called ZPMC, which is a Chinese national-owned company. And we didn't have enough money to get a full level of patent protection across the different stuff we needed to do. So we kind of had to trust them and they just took it all. So it is like, hey, when you're creating something that you want to monetize and if someone can take it from you before you're able to monetize, there's problems with that as well.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker C: It makes you disincentivized to create, right? So it's this inherent balance of your incentive to create versus learning from other people and stuff too. So it's not an easily answerable question. It'll just be interesting to see how it turns out.

Speaker A: I am still struggling with my own opinion on it.

Speaker C: Yeah, mine changes all the time too. You know, it's such a like, oh, you hear someone talk something and say something and put it in a slightly different box and it really, you can think about it a lot more, you know.

Speaker A: I think also, I mean, philosophically, the potential closed-loop nature of it, the more that we grow reliant and accustomed to using AI in day-to-day creation. And then as the models continue to train themselves year over year, they're increasingly training themselves on data that was originated from the model. And is there a certain point where it stops getting smarter?

Speaker C: It's a caricature of itself, right? Like, yeah, yeah. And on top of that, like, it's training off of— for the large part, right, it's training off of social media. And is that Is that a true reflection of humanity? Like, the person everyone is on social media is not really a very accurate reflection of who they actually are, you know what I mean? So if it's training on— I wouldn't say the worst part of us, but, you know, on the soft underbelly of people, and then it's over time kind of caricaturing itself, it does get a little scary in terms of what that could look like.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I mean, maybe it looks like Frank's art. I hesitate to say this because it's such a, like, I don't know the right word for it, but like his art has this like People of Walmart quality. Have you ever seen that?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: That booking website, you know, where it's like, what in the hell is that? Why is someone wearing that outfit to this place? And like, it's always whenever I saw one of these, you know, 10 years ago or so when they came out, and I was like, what commands this person to do that? And always thought about like, why, how did the civilization and world develop to get these people to decide to be that, right? And I think that's what ultimately like Frank's art is kind of all about. It's how we're seeing ourselves in the reflection of modern society and taking a look at, is this a choice or are we just, are we just at a concert and we're standing there and the crowd moves and you're just kind of in the motion, you know? Free will or not, basically, you boil down to it, right?

Speaker A: You've kind of described yourself in the beginning as just someone who collects what they like and you kind of go your own way on it. But when you're looking at AI art, of which there's an abundance and an ever-growing amount, what kind of rubric do you run through as a collector? Is there anything that you look for beyond just like, does this hit, does it not, that inspires you to go deeper and consider buying something?

Speaker C: You know, with AI art especially, There's so much of it and so easy to create. It has that similar aspect to photography, right? Like there's so much and so many viewpoints. Like how do you find the needle in the haystack, if you will? Over time, I've— you harness the people that you follow and kind of get that, and where you kind of have a good base of kind of artists that you follow. And so you already feel like you've curated into like a good level of artistry, so you're getting kind of high-quality stuff instead of random crap or, hey, look, here's a spiral and there's different stuff in it, and those types of things. Usually with AI stuff, I try to look at it multiple times. I find that stuff can hit for me pretty often. These post-photographic video art pieces have just really been hitting for me at this time and moment. I think once they get a little more perfect and it looks more real, I'll be less interested, but I think they're kind of at a sweet spot right now. So But they do tend to kind of look all the same. This person's and that person's, like, can you tell who that is immediately without having a set style or anything? There's not that many artists that you're like, I know who that is, right? Not that that's a necessary thing either. Plenty of artists go all over the place. But I think in AI art especially, it's good to have an aesthetic that is yours that somehow stands out because the aesthetic is kind of the same. So I try to look at them multiple times over time so I can kind of suss out deeper aspects of them. It's just a little bit harder. I think AI for me is probably the hardest to curate for myself. I find other mediums to be quite a bit easier. But when you do find someone that really hits for you, it's really fun because the stuff that's coming out of AI is just crazy.

Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

Speaker C: I enjoy people pushing the limits from a technological perspective, but also from a like, hey, what can you handle perspective? The weirder the better, in my opinion. So Frank's work is certainly weird from a purely aesthetic viewpoint. But yeah, no, it's been like a real incredible journey curating and trying to project not what I think about it, but what other people think about it or what I want to help other people think about, you know.

Speaker A: Were there any pieces in the series that at first you weren't like— you were like, this is, this is cool, but I wouldn't want to own it. And then after you heard someone give a line about it, you were like, oh, that actually— now I want to collect that one. Were there any that you turned around on because of that exercise?

Speaker C: The one that I actually wasn't in love with initially was Pseudo-Psychodynamics. Unlike the other ones, the only one that has like a bar on the bottom of kind of like a news bar, you know, like, here, this is happening next, blah, blah, blah. And that one was the most kind of hit you over the head, like, hey, this is the news, right? Or, you know, that kind of media aspect of it. Then I was talking to Clown Vamp, the collector, about it.

Speaker A: Friend of the show.

Speaker C: It's my absolutely, absolutely my favorite one. And it's like, it's perfect. Sometimes you need to be hit over the head with the fast motion and everything. You can watch these 100 times and see something different if you're focusing on a different part of the screen or in a different mood. That's one of my favorite things about Frank's work. It's hard to watch them repeatedly. Like, you watch— like, I, as curating them, have watched all 30 of them in a row a couple times, you know, and you're like, oh man, like I just had like an exorcism or something when you're watching it that many times. But if you like say you picked up a piece, it's something you want to come back to a lot. I have 4 or 5 of his one-of-ones that he put out through fellowship and stuff before, and I find myself coming back to them more often than a lot of other work that I have. You know, there's just so much going on.

Speaker A: So to wrap it up, we usually do some rapid-fire questions. First one here for both of you is just to ask for any music or media recommendations. Frank, is there music that you listen to while you work that kind of helps you get in the zone? Artie, same thing. Anything you want to recommend to listeners?

Speaker B: It's not new music, but, uh, I like Tangerine Dream and, uh, Klaus Schulze. That's kind of, uh, what I listen to pretty often. I like, um, early '80s, like, Italian disco.

Speaker C: Talo Disco.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I listen to that. Um, yeah, normally when I'm editing, I'm listening to that. Yeah, I would say that those would be probably music-wise what I would recommend.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker C: I listen to Talo Disco too. I listen to a lot of dance music and like folk rock. Um, recently I've been— I've taken over, uh, cooking dinners and I've, I've been doing dancing while cooking basically by myself as like a stress release from the day. I've been doing a lot of like Rufus Till Soul and, uh, there's this song—

Speaker B: Oh yeah.

Speaker C: There's a Soulwax remix of this Charlotte Gainsbourg song that I just like sometimes I'll just put on repeat. It's like a 9-minute long one and just put on repeat while I cook. Yeah, stuff like that.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: Awesome. Another one that we like to ask people who've come on the show is, who would you like to hear us interview? Could be artists, could be other collectors, it could be people who aren't involved in NFTs at all that you might think would make sense for a show like this. So any ideas just off the cuff?

Speaker B: Trying to think who I came across that is interesting on— there's like 5,000 people I know that I don't know, you know what I mean? So I'm trying to think. Who have I not heard speak though? That's the other thing too. I'm thinking of people, but I'm like, no, I've heard them on this.

Speaker C: He's not, not a generative artist, but I, I know him and have talked to him, but I don't think he's ever done any media is Joe Peas.

Speaker B: Yes, there we go. Joe Peas for sure. Yeah.

Speaker A: He's got a verse coming up soon, I think. Maybe we can get Jamie to make the connection. That would be cool.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Do you know, does he use AI as well? I can't quite tell when I look at his stuff sometimes if he's just doing video editing or Incorporating AI elements?

Speaker B: I don't know if he uses AI like as a primary tool. He might use it. I mean, from the work I've seen, it doesn't appear that he's using it. I think he's just primarily using editing. I don't really know much about his process. I just know the work.

Speaker C: As far as I know, it's, it's purely video editing.

Speaker A: Okay, Joe Pease. Anyone else you want to throw out?

Speaker B: KingKhan2K. I don't know if you— he's an AI artist that I really like. He's kind of like Joe Pease, where there's never really any interviews, or he's kind of ambiguous in a lot of ways. But he's really, really interesting work. He doesn't use AI-generated images in the— I know that he uses like images that he pulls from a lot of stuff from the period of like '98 to 2003, maybe a lot of like some of that imagery. And he just kind of brings that into the AI video environments and Plays with it there, but he's got really great sound on his videos and really interesting stuff.

Speaker A: All right, one for us to look up.

Speaker C: The other one I thought of, but I'm— I don't think he speaks English, so it might be a little tough, would be, uh, Juan Rodriguez Garcia.

Speaker A: He has had a really cool project in fxhash.

Speaker C: Yeah, Formae.

Speaker A: Ordn.

Speaker C: Yeah, that one is great. And yeah, it's all really good. I have— yeah, that one. I have a Reflejos, and I have, um, what's the name of The one that was given to people at Marfa. Got a bunch of those. He's, he's great.

Speaker A: Yeah, I heard him on a Spaces recently and he was very brief with his English, so I got the same sense that maybe he's not super confident in it, even if he could speak, which is, you know, fair enough if you don't have confidence. But awesome. So those are some good ones. I know we are at time, so let's just plug the Verse release again. It is coming up on the 11th. Scheduled programming, and will it be ranked auction, or how's it going to be sold, Artie?

Speaker C: There'll be individual auctions. So there's 30 total pieces, and they're starting, uh, yeah, on January 11th at 1 PM Eastern. And then, uh, 15 of them will, will go online at 1 PM, and then 15 will go online at 2 PM. So there's a staggered ending just because there's so many pieces, and I think people want specific ones to give them a little bit of, a little bit of room to breathe there. Um, yeah, so they'll be ending on the 12th, either 1 or 2 PM 5-minute extensions, kind of typical stuff. But yeah, we wanted to do individual auctions because the pieces are very unique and didn't want to just, here's, here's some random piece you get, you know.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, thank you both so much for coming on. It's really been great to get to know you. And Frank, thank you for being so candid about the process so we can all copy your work. I mean, it's gonna be amazing. It's gonna be a great 2024 for me now. So yeah, that's it for this one, everyone. Hope you all enjoyed. Thanks again to Frank and Artie. Check out the Verse release, and we'll be back again soon with another episode. Bye.

Speaker B: Bye-bye. Always. We're waiting to be tried.