Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a very special interview episode. We're joined today by Jan Robert Leegte. And of course, Trinity is here for this amazing interview. We're talking to an early net art legend, Jan. Trinity, how's it going?

Speaker B: Good. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker C: Thanks for joining. It's always intimidating a little bit when we have people who have been practicing art, like, in a very serious way for, I guess, longer than the last 3 to 6 years on the show.

Speaker A: Yeah. It makes you a lot harder to research, that's for sure, because we actually have to get into the archives and see what you've done in the past versus just—

Speaker C: We're not calling you old.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: For the record, we're just calling you experienced. Thanks so much.

Speaker B: I just turned 50, so I do feel a little old, but got a couple of years to go.

Speaker C: Congratulations.

Speaker B: Thank you. It's a special age. I think Will reached out to you, and because with Artnome, your recording of Artnome, and he was like, specifically saying you should engage with artists, I was like— you were like, whoa, we don't know. And I was like, oh yes, because I think, no, it really is a good idea and you do well.

Speaker A: So, um, yeah, we just get scared from time to time, that's all. But you know, here, here you are, you're not scary, and hopefully, um, we can let everyone learn a little bit more about you. But the place that we always start, of course, is to ask you to introduce yourself. And let us know about your background in art and coding.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a brief bio I share with people. I started doing architecture in the early '90s and enjoyed it, but it wasn't for my brain. You need to handle very complex issues being an architect. It's a very complex, layered profession, and I'm just not that type. Also, I had a more philosophical interest in life in general, and so it was too complex and too applied for me. But I loved the aspect of dealing with space and sort of the social aspects or the body and to be able to sort of design that. It sounds— it's very interesting. But then, of course, I shifted to a more experimental corner and Yeah, couldn't hold on, so I moved to art school, a logical move. And of course, you end up in the sculpture department, which is sort of mini architecture, and started making installations and performing in them. And they became like these sort of condensed studies of sort of autonomous architecture in a way. Had a great time, but they felt a bit like repeating history because a lot of that had been done in the '60s and '70s and the They were like these giants I really admired, and I was looking for my own edge. And I'd always been interested in computers. I grew up with a Commodore, and my dad brought home— I remember an old Hewlett-Packard, which was my first game I ever played on the teeny little screen. And I was touched by the magic of them and had my first PC as a student, but never really engaged with it. profoundly or whatever, just playful and Word docs and a bit of gaming and stuff like that. I was very lucky to go to an art school which was in Rotterdam. This is '95, that is, who had heavily invested in computers and had a lot of Silicon Graphics computers. I don't know if anybody knows what they are, but they were like these teeny little supercomputers, probably as fast as a cheap phone now. And they were used to do 3D rendering in the early days, and nobody used them. They had a whole workshop full of them, nobody used them. But there were also classes in interaction design, working with Director and Flash next, and we had lessons in web even. So we would learn how to make web pages and stuff like that. So I did all of those being a sculptor because I was Very interested in learning that. And it was through the interaction design teacher who actually miraculously knew about net art. So we're talking '96, which is crazy to find a teacher. I've never met a teacher like that after that, in the decades after that. So he was really quite unique. And he pointed me out, he showed me like Jody, stuff from Jody. I don't know if you're familiar with Jody's work, jody.org. And there are couple which have been pioneering digital art, web-based art, net art, as one of the first. So from early '90s, they actually have a big installation in the MoMA in the permanent collection. So they've done really well. I'm always surprised that even in any context, people don't know them. It's like, they're up in the MoMA. But very impressive work. And So I got shown that. I was like, wow, this is mind-blowing, and other stuff. But I still didn't really get into it until I personally sort of engaged and got my own web hosting package. And it was at the moment I uploaded my first experiment and put it on the server. And it's become a mythical moment, that pressing the button and seeing the file go to the web server and then visiting in your browser, that just blew everything. I remember that was the moment I said, wait a minute, this is a complete new field. And it was only then, it's probably that public aspect of it, the realness of it being out there, people can see it, it's the different localization, it's not on your computer anymore, it's elsewhere, it's out there. And it becomes public software in a way. People can click on it and it really resembled architecture. It was like, this is physical stuff that you can make. So I instantly saw it as installations. These are installations of scrollbars and buttons and spaces and frames and color fields and never really looked back. So that was when I sort of, oh wait, this is where I have to go. And also there was just this vast field unexplored and And it never really changed. So for a lot of— that's sort of 25 years ago, but it's such a fascinating field because you— it always is vast and unexplored because it just, it moves forward faster than you can even keep up. And it relatively is a small group of people still sort of exploring it. So that's my history.

Speaker C: When you're talking about, you know, using it as like a form of installation, I don't know, have— I assume that you've seen the movie Hackers?

Speaker B: I think I have. Which one is, is it an old one?

Speaker C: That's the one with like Angelina Jolie.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. The old one. Yeah. Cool.

Speaker C: There's just like the visualization of like, as they're hacking, it's kind of like moving through like almost like a cityscape, finding all of the different like files and all the different servers. And it's kind of like an installation in a way where, you know, you can see it. You just need to know where you're going. In order to kind of like happen upon it or be directed there, similar to how we might use like Google Maps or something to be like, oh yes, there's this public installation at this corner. Like I can go.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, totally. And I was a big fan of Snow Crash. It's sort of a similar sort of vibe.

Speaker C: The best book in my opinion.

Speaker B: The best book ever. It's the best book. Yeah. It's, uh, one of my top, top, top ones.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: As you said, this installation feel, I think it's And that sort of wood corner my work is a very material feel for the screen and the software specifically. And I remember talking about Google Maps as you brought it up, and I was like, what is it? What is this stuff? And then it's like trying to sort of analyze it as a layering of classic map and an interactive layer and a database. And it has— and it's like this composite of different media. And that is what software is. You can just stack stuff and stick it together and add all these different layers. And that becomes a whole new material. And it really feels very sculptural to me. It's like really making stuff, although it's on the screen.

Speaker A: You mentioned, yeah, the installation quality of uploading your own website. And just, I think I came across In an interview, you were kind of speaking about the internet broadly as like a public space to perform in. And I'm curious, you know, someone who's been there for so long, like, I think Trinity and I remember, we're not as old as you, but we're pretty old for crypto still. And we remember the early AOL disc days where you would go to the grocery store and you could do that. So we were right on the edge, but not experimenting, I think, in the same way you were. So what have you observed now as someone who's been active in creating and kind of documenting this space for coming up on 30 years? Like, what's changed about it and how is that reflected in your work?

Speaker B: Well, that's such a big one. To categorize it, I see all the big movements are reflected sort of from Web 1, 2, and 3. Web 2 was never really my medium because my work is so material and not social per se. So there's wonderful artists who really cornered that issue of the web, the social aspect. But in a sort of art historical step that they call that the post-internet phase. So you have a lot of net art, '90s post-internet, and I would say sort of blockchain art now, 3 big movements in internet art. And the second one, definitely a key point was a lot of bridging to the gallery space. That was something which was very defining of the post-internet movement. And that was something I was doing since early, well, 2000, 2002. I did my first sort of translational piece, sort of putting scrollbars into the gallery space as projections on wood. And I've never changed that. So it's this game of physical works, all kinds of media, but they're all centered around the network computer as a subject. And they're all adding to this sort of research or narrative or sort of trying to dissect what this machine is and what it is artistically or even as a phenomenon in life. So I hop quite easily from media to media. And that's, of course, easier for me coming from art, adding the internet, having to deal with the art world and the internet, because working with early internet was like zero audience. I mean, it was like just a few of my buddies doing it as well, and then 3 curators, and that was it. So it was like a teeny little world which slowly would get added a few more people, but remained very underground. So to have a life, you would also have to operate in the art world, and you wanted to, you wanted the recognition of the art world, but they were not very interested. So that was a very hard uphill battle. So it sort of forced you to sort of also translate into languages of other communities, sort of traditions like sculpture or installation and performance, which I've loved. I think it's great to sort of make these connections of media. And then Web3 came, and that sort of I would say a first sort of real emancipation of net art. So suddenly it has a base and it has a societal value, although people disagree with that, but there's a massive community supporting it and getting it and understanding it and wanting to learn. So it became like a circle movement for me, like really coming back to making net-based work as a sort of core project. Plus, of course, all the quirks of each movement. So of course blockchain comes with all its peculiarities, which And the specific technologies which you, of course, have to engage with and which makes it exciting. So for me, that is just seeing that history unfold, which is amazing. I think that's the great thing of working with internet is that it constantly surprises you. Who thought this was coming? I mean, Web3, this just 5 years ago or something, nobody had a clue. Just blew us all away. And AI is the next. It's just gonna—

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: changed everything. And Web2 and social media changed everything. And you just ask like 5 years before, nobody really sees it coming. I find that always fascinating. It's a very, it has a mind of its own, this internet, and we just have to go with it.

Speaker C: I think maybe one of the differences between, you know, net art and AI is that you have all these people such as yourself who have been practicing net art for years and years and years. And then all of a sudden it's like, Here's this gigantic and very hungry community of people who want to, like, to support the movement. Whereas like AI, I think it's a much smaller niche of people who are like computational geniuses who may have been dabbling in the past, but it's more about like the proliferation and the accessibility of AI. What was it like for you coming into the, the world of Web3 and blockchain? Was it like coming home? Like, what was that transition like?

Speaker B: Yeah, I wasn't that early, so I, I, my first drop was in November 2021. So that was just after that crazy summer, uh, which I missed, which, uh, was just before, uh, I engaged. I was trying to survive before that. I have 2 young kids, like 10 jobs, uh, you know the drill, uh, it's, it's hard and trying to maintain being an artist sort of full-time, I didn't have the space to look into this. So I just saw it superficially, as many did, and just saw these square images, and I just didn't see the point. And wasn't anti per se, but just didn't see the innovational part of it. And yeah, that's something for the pure Web3 community, hard to understand, but the amount of innovation done before that is just immaculate. So what digital art has sort of done in history is, is in a way way further than Web3. is doing currently. But when I just saw a square image, I was like, oh, it's not even started. But I was missing the nice pieces. So it was a tough time. I was just going into a nervous breakdown. I had to quit all my jobs. I had to just completely drop everything. So it was this panic. And it was in that weird time that Harm van den Dorpel, you probably know as well from Mutant Garden Seeder and other drops. He is a good friend of mine, and he came over, and he had just dropped Mutant Garden Seeder to a huge success. And he came over and he brought a crate of beer, and he just kept talking into me till— and just sort of giving me the pep talk, you have to join, this is so fitting to what you're doing. And then he left me, and I was like highly confused. And but I used my last strength then to sort of It also felt for me, it was sort of therapeutic to just spend 1 or 2 hours a day looking into this new field playfully without any obligations. And then I just did that for a couple of months, I think, about 2 months. And yeah, many times gave up. I tried and learned Solidity and gave up horribly. And then I tried to find a way in, trying to connect with Art Blocks. Nothing happened. And then I was connecting with Folia. Nothing happened. I just didn't really know what to do. It can be very daunting when you're fresh there. It's like, whoa, how to start? It's really— yeah, you could just mint something on OpenSea, but that of course won't do anything. So it is kind of— and the big thing is Harm, how he convinced me that evening was he told me about the fact that the blockchain is actually bits of software running on the ledger. He said it's software, it's decentralized software. You can do whatever you like and you can make generative art or whatever. So I was like, oh, wait a minute, now, now we're talking. And that was what I spent those months just reading and looking into, a lot of on-chain stuff. I really was immediately fascinated by on-chain stuff. So that's sort of the first corner I landed in. And, and then in the end, somebody from Folia proposed a programmer. He said, you want to do a drop? I know a programmer, he would like to work with you. And I said, well, That'd be wonderful. And he took me by the hand and explained to me how the world worked. And that was a great time, just sort of developing Ornament together. And then a certain day he said, well, it's ready, your time to drop. I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's, of course, when it really started. That was it. And then you're in this world you know nothing about, and you sold out this collection, and you're like, oh my God, what's going to happen? And then Shortly after that, my contacts with Art Blocks were fruitful. They, I mean, you contact them and then 2, 3 months later they're like, okay, we want to do something. And okay, okay, well, so that's when Window came out. And then, and then so you get to know the world, of course. And it's now 3 years later nearly, isn't it? And now I'm sort of getting to know how it works a bit. But it, yeah, it is fascinating, completely fascinating. And it swallowed up all my time since then.

Speaker C: The new proverbial upload to website, release this on the blockchain scenario.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. Deploy contract and then there it goes. Yeah.

Speaker A: I'm curious though, you know, so since so much of your early on work, especially in those early web days where it was just, yeah, you're running your server, you're uploading a project as a website, and moving to NFTs, coming from early web days where you're basically publishing stuff for free, you know, interactive exploratory things. Did you personally feel any tension with the idea of like adding ownership to the internet? I think that is kind of something that doesn't really get talked about that much. And obviously I think for a lot of reasons, like you just said, right? I think for a lot of artists, it's great that they can now actually sell their work, but there is like another side to this coin. You know, there are some people whose like vision for crypto is basically just to make everything ownable and like, do we want everything ownable, or do you feel like a way about that?

Speaker B: It's a specificity of the medium, so it's something that works with some works better than others. It's not a one-size-fits-all thing, and a lot of net-based art or digital art is not translatable to NFTs. If you would take it like a Venn diagram, you would have digital art Big pool and a small little island, that art, and then a smaller, which is NFTs, because it's more specific. I can make browser-based art as a collectible series, but if I don't have to make it as a collectible series, I have much more freedom to make a browser-based piece. And if I don't even have to use a browser, I can make even more crazy things. So it's limited. And I think that's something people forget in the craziness. It's like, oh, this is everything and this is perfect, but it's—

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: It is limited. So it has its pros and cons. It's really fantastic to engage with an audience and to have this support, but also one of the most powerful things is to have an audience around the work, which could be utilized more, I think. Would that be— I think a future thing, I think, where it would be great, and I'm certainly going to help push that, to see more medium specificity and more experimentation that way. Because there is a lot of conservatism as well. I mean, I found the most enjoyable one was, of course, the goose of the Ringers, which became one of the most celebrated icons of the NFT generative art movement, is a resemblance of a goose framed on a paper on a wall, which is, of course, like centuries back. Sort of, that is not the progression we're talking about. So that sort of emphasizes how the audience is generally conservative, which is normal, which is in the art world as well. I mean, that's, of course, the art is usually on the edge, but a lot of art as well is quite conservative. It's very formal and very not per se medium-specific, could have been done in other ways, could have been printed, or could have been— A lot of different expressions and you feel there's so much more possible. So if you see like stuff like Mitchell Chan with his sort of Boys of Summer and/or Jonas Lund, or there's 2 wild projects actually, which is kind of coincidental. Jonas Lund with his topping of stacks, which is related to him at home. When he drops something, he'll sort of change an NFT. All very playful and early, but there is so much more possibilities there, but they always are restricted to this format of this blockchain contract, which is very limited in code possibilities. It's not a very dynamic language or platform per se. So you soon have to mix it with different media. So I have server-based talking or game engines talking, or so it becomes a hybrid form. I think one might see more of that. Because for the Puritan sort of on-chain art, it's limited. Yeah, we can keep making, and I will, because it's great, but it doesn't show you the full scope of what digital can do, of course. So I think that is— I have no idea why I'm talking about this, but this is sort of your question. Oh yeah, before the— so there, yeah, that's the double edge of the double side of the coin here. It's— I'm intensely grateful for finding my audience, which gets my work. Which is really refreshing after 20 years of not really meeting them, I mean, in a very small group. I mean, the art world has, in my experience, supported me, but more out of a historical sort of acceptance than actually conceptually really getting it, because they just don't have the reference points in their curriculum. A lot of art world is very humanities-based and has doesn't have the technical know-how or computer historical know-how to sort of get all those sort of references, understand the materiality and why it's special to do it this way. In Web3, everybody gets it. And that's been the biggest surprise. Like, I just put in really subtle things into my descriptions or into the parts of the project, and people instantly just pick them out. Oh yeah, that's that, that's that, that's that. So that is very cool. And financial, of course, that's great because, yep, before that would be in a way, and I'm very curious to see how that will unroll in the future. It had, of course, more, maybe more like a HEN feel. We were just speaking about HEN a minute ago, more experimental and not aimed at profit per se. But that was what net art was. Nobody thought about money because it was just not on the horizon. So it was very much purely the art. It would be interesting to see if there's corners where that can flourish again, but I think with the cooling down of the market, we could see more of that.

Speaker C: I think that's such an interesting topic, and it's something that, you know, we've talked about quite a bit on the show as we've gone into this extended cooled market, as you said. How does it feel, or how do you think it feels as an artist to go from You know, you're coming from the '90s where it was just release it, it's consumed for free. Like the concept of ownership, you know, it's very loosey-goosey thinking about how it can be like obtained by some institution. Like we were talking about MoMA earlier. And now you kind of have this set of people who are, you know, maybe have been coming into the art world as artists in the last 2 or 3 years. They're used to like Gen art summer back in 2020, '21, when there's this expectation that you can sell this type of digital work for hundreds or thousands of dollars per piece. And now we're kind of entering back into this pooled market where things might not sell out if they're priced up. They might not sell any if they're priced like that. You might only be able to release this for free or for dollars or tens of dollars. I don't know where I'm going with this question, but there's something in the realm of does art need to be financialized? How should we approach expectations, or how do you think artists should approach expectations for the financialization of their work?

Speaker B: It's sad, but probably you have to let it go. I think when we'll reach equilibrium, it'll be a massive gain on how it was, because I think to be able to be in contact with a new generation on an international market in real time is a massive upgrade from being dependent on galleries and very local and slow and high costs and everything, and a very specific audience of collectors and everything. So it is a big gain, but it of course will be decimised, and you'll have to find your own audience like always, and you'll have to work way harder to do that. So it becomes very much as it was in the art world, but then online. But that is probably the normal situation. What we, of course, saw was crazy and abnormal. And the speculative aspect will remain. It will always be there because it was in the art world as well, but it's just on steroids. So that is amplification like the internet does with everything. So yeah, of course, I think everybody is a bit worried, especially if you're dependent on it and You stepped in in 2021, you have a very weird view on the world because that's just not how it works. And it was clearly a wave of cropped up potential just exploding, which is a once in a lifetime event. We might see other ones, but not that one. But it is definitely fantastic to have this market available now. And I'm really finding my audience, as I said. Well, they might stop collecting. I wouldn't blame them. It's an expensive hobby. But they'll be interested and new people will come and they're so much more approachable. So I'm quite optimistic about that.

Speaker A: To kind of shift gears a little bit and ask you about some of your specific projects. In your introduction, you mentioned kind of hand in hand with Web3, AI. Being something that you're really excited about, something that we're not really sure what the impact will be. And I'm not sure if it was your first project to use AI, but the one that I found recently was Mountains and Drop Shadows that you released on Verse, which is kind of a reimagination of a web-based version of that project you had done years before that would serve people random images of mountains, I guess, probably sourced from like a search engine and then imprint those drop shadows on them, like in a browser. But here you decided to make these mountains now using AI. So kind of like updating it with these new tools. So I guess like first, you know, what kind of inspired you to revisit that? And then what kind of brought you to use AI and what was that experience like for you? What surprised you about it? And also what concerned you about it? Because I think we've seen some artists in particular, like really vocally skeptical or fearful of what these tools are going to do to the perception of art, not just the perception of art, but like the perception of skill and talent and, for lack of a better term, hard work, right? So, you know, you've embraced it. I'm sure you're pretty thoughtful about this, so I'll just kind of let you riff on an answer here.

Speaker B: Yeah, I can give it a shot because I'm not— I'm definitely not an expert there. There's artists who are way better at that. You have to engage with it. It's, it's just part of your culture in a way. So there's no way around it. And it's good to keep track. I used it first time was with Web. That was a recent drop. That was in September, I believe. That idea I already had before Web3. So that was what it went in before the before life. That was my response to AI then. So that was in 2020 or something. When the first GPTs came out and I saw the potential of it generating code and also, of course, imagery. It was like, wait a minute, if it can create code, then why couldn't the system create its own network of web pages? That was just the first idea. And it got shelved for years and it just, it never really came out again. And then Web3 happened and blah, blah, blah. And then it was, I think, Fingerprints last year, they approached me, or last 2 years ago, probably approached me to do a project. And I said, well, I got this idea of an AI-generated network of web pages. And they were like, whoa, pretty cool. Yeah, that will suit us. So I said, okay, let's do that with you then. And yeah, it was purely a conceptual idea. So that's First of all, the way I approach AI is very conceptual. That's very much how I work a lot. I'm not a tooly person. I don't really use software to make stuff, make images. It's really— I'm making work about the software. So it really starts with observation and sort of conceptual and narrative and just, yeah, simple way, just observing. So again, with AI, I was like, okay, well, that makes sense as I see it writing code. And HTML is such ubiquitous code out there, so it should be really good at it. So let's, let's see what it can do. I really like the idea. Well, speaking of classic science fiction and everything, but I really love the idea of the internet filling its own gaps and starting to populate the web, which we've sort of left behind. Sort of Web 1 is past and we're all living on 6 URLs nowadays. So it's this vast empty space and then the web would start populating itself, which would be a logical step seeing what AI is doing because it is basically one big database of the web. It's just sucked itself up and is now sort of reproducing itself. So it made total sense that do it that way. Plus, I thought it'd be really exciting and alienating to sort of stumble into this sort of machine-created web. So it took off and started working with AI, and it really didn't work. It just tried and tried and tried. And so it was good to get to know what AI does. And if you're working with text and code specifically, code is so structured and formalized that it really is not good at creative coding. It just doesn't do that. So you get to learn what AI does. So that's very helpful. So I was far less sort of frightened of AI by engaging with it. It's like, oh, it's such a normalizing tool. That's what it does. It can't— it just always thinks in the middle. And it can't go to the edges and the fringes because it just hasn't got that capacity. It doesn't have the data. So it couldn't make freaky websites. It just couldn't. It just really, really dull layouts all the time. So then I started stacking stuff and sort of, that's what you do. You sort of hack your way around it by adding layers of AI on top of each other and analyzing images and trying to generate text from that and then generate HTML from that. And then it became a dinosaur and it really still wasn't that interesting what it was doing. So what it generated in the end, They started to push it to something a bit wild. It was like, I can way easier just write that generatively in a good old human-written code. And that was sort of coincided with the choice to move it on-chain, which was in the end way more elegant and exciting to have like a whole network of web pages. So it's like a big bang just popping out of one contract. So it moved that way, and I'm very happy with the result and learned a lot. And I think for Mountains and Drop Shadows, it was a way easier move because I wanted to make another iteration, and that is sort of a commentary on online images. And the first one was as well. It was— the work was very much about just querying databases for images tagged as mountains and stacking them together with a drop shadow, sort of. mimicking this sort of desktop environment and commenting on what is a landscape image in the context of a desktop image. And so what is the position of that image? This anonymous, a-localized, beautiful but very sad mountain residing on your desktop. And how does it engage within this material on top of it, the drop shadows and everything? And it became a sculptural sort of statement. And then I was like, oh yeah, but I have to do that in AI because the databases are passé. They're gone. We're never going to look back. Why go to a stock bank anymore? And they're all dumped in this AI. You can just prompt them on demand. So I did again the same. I just prompted mountains and there they came, the beautiful, wonderful mountains and hardly that much different from the original ones. Of course, less quirky again, normalized. You don't have some naked person running through them suddenly. Well, you would have to prompt that, of course, but it's more style, more sort of cleaner and everything. But that fitted. And it was like, became an iteration in sort of progress of technology. But that was a very easy one. It was just prompt mountain, get it back. So it's more like I spend a lot of time thinking about it. And then the skill is very, very, very small.

Speaker C: How many mountains did you pull from all these different databases?

Speaker B: Originally? With the first or second work?

Speaker C: The second work.

Speaker B: The second one. The series was 80 in the end.

Speaker C: How many mountains went into the model?

Speaker B: Oh, I just, I used the public one. I didn't put anything up. Yeah, no, I wanted to keep it.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: That's like, it's like the first one was querying Flickr and stuff, so I didn't want to add any content to the net. There's enough out there. So I really wanted to see, see what, what has the internet to say themselves about what an Alpine mountain looks like. And it's pretty— they're pretty impressive. I used actually, I used Adobe in the end, which was a very surprising twist because I of course tried DALL-E and Midjourney and all that stuff, but I wasn't that happy and I So hey, I have the full suite Adobe on my computer. Hey, they have an AI tool. Let's give it a run. And it was super good. Could change the aspect ratio and everything and a lot of tweaks. So I was quite— this is a plug. Sorry about that. But I was quite happy with it. I hadn't expected that. Of course, of course, a company like that should be good at it, but they were a bit behind. But that's where they came from in the end.

Speaker C: I haven't tried Firefly that much for anything outside of upscaling once or twice, but—

Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, stuff like that.

Speaker C: The possibilities can definitely be endless. I mean, maybe this is where we also transition into like that combination of the work and the concept, but also you have this constant theme throughout like most of your work. I'm not going to say all because I don't have the expertise. You're the expert on your own work of like Traditional web components, both past and present, like the drop shadow, for example.

Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

Speaker C: It's just, you know, some classic, you know, it's a classic CSS class that you see everywhere. It's maybe a little bit of out of like style right now. Um, but there have been times in our internet history where everything had a drop shadow. And then we see like the same thing across buttons, JPEG. Window, all of these different pieces that just have something that is so classically online. Why? From whence does this come?

Speaker B: Yeah, as I frame it myself, it's this phenomenological interest in the software. So I'm really— and if you take that to translate that into human language, it starts simply with doodling With a button or just sort of dragging a scrollbar up and down when you're 16 or something, or just feeling stuff with your mouse, the edge of a window or stuff like that, sort of a very tactile or sort of material interest in software and resizing it and seeing how it changes and just feeling it and playing around with it. So that's, I think, where this sort of sculptural interest started, why I chose that way instead of working in a 3D program and making, I don't know, big 3D rendered sculptures. I chose for the interface as my sculptural focal point because I think that's really where the magic happens. I think after 25 years, there's stacks of personalized theory to sort of fill that in, but it's this magical fleece, the interface, which is actually all we have. There's nothing but the interface, and behind that is completely inaccessible. It's something I wrote for an earlier show I did, this famous shift when in the '60s, I think, they coined the term transparency for methodology in programming. Transparency meant to hide all the inner workings and only show sort of the general lines, which is a paradoxical term. So transparency means obfuscating, hiding. And it was that sort of programming concept which launched Steve Jobs' mission in Apple and has become sort of the pinnacle of Apple. So it's like making it easy and accessible at the cost of hiding all the inner workings. And that I found so fascinating. And of course, that has just grown. I mean, we can access code and everything, that's not a problem, but I often go back to Charles Babbage in the 1900s and his big sort of difference engine. You can see, if you would be observant, you could see how a computer works. You could see it calculate. You could just follow the assembly line in a way. And of course, now we have to— nobody can understand how the voltages work in real time. I think that's the big— Yeah. Difference. And I think as a sort of phenomenology of the software, it's not dealing in how it conceptually works or technically works, it's engaging with it real time. Only recently I've started engaging with meditation practices, and I was always fascinated by John Cage in the '60s, this sort of Zen artist, very much sort of dealing with observation. And that has all to do with So what is this in the now? And the great difference between sort of writing code and running code is they're 2 different worlds. So you have this text, and as soon as it runs, you have no idea what's happening behind this fleece of the interface until it crashes and you'll see text again or something. So it's just these 2— it's this magical world of running software. And what is that? So I'm passionate about that, and that means I'm very much in my work Yeah, I'm sort of seeing, so what is this stuff which this software produces? So what are these images like JPEGs? What are they? And what makes them? And how are they constructed? And what are the aesthetics of them? And yeah, how does that relate to history or art history or aesthetics in history? And I keep just running about that way. It's become my sort of core. It's a really, as you said, Trinity, it's very meta. So it's very, But that is it. I'm observing. It's about the work itself. I make my work is about the network computer, about software. And yeah, that would sort of set me apart a little. There's more artists who do that, but there's not that many. Most people see the computer as a tool to make art. Now I make art about the tool.

Speaker C: You're very literal about net art. It is art about the net that Heavily features parts of the net.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: It's very enjoyable. I think for somebody who, anybody who's experiencing or looking at net art for the first time, it might just confuse them about the entire genre. It's like, oh, okay, this is work about commentary on the internet, but not necessarily. And obviously, you know, as we expand past Web1, we're past Web2, we're into Web3. And really talking about the blockchain, not just as, it's almost kind of like an interfaceless type of entity. It's much more around what is happening in the background. You know, maybe this, we can talk a little bit about Broken Images. It kind of feels like that commentary on Web3 specifically. Like, what can you tell us about that particular project for listeners who might not be as familiar?

Speaker B: That's a nice one. Broken Images is when Harm van den Dorpel came to me on a September night in 2021, convincing my little cracked brain to join this party. My first idea was this, actually, was Broken Images. And I remember telling him, I would love to mint a broken image. And he was like, no, you can't do that. That is not Web3. You can't do that. It has to— that is, that's breaking it. That's linking it to Web1, but that's something different. And he was very against that project, which was very funny. But that was, of course, very— I also didn't know what it was yet. So I was like, okay, okay, well, I'll shelve that. And so only this year really it came into fruition, but that was when I knew the technology a lot better.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: understood what I wanted to say with it. And I thought, oh, well, no, it actually does make sense. Because of course, one part of the story is the commentary on Web3, sort of basically 99% of all NFTs are links to something else. So it is a very vulnerable ecology. And if a link breaks, you'll see a broken image or something like that, or 404 or whatever. But as I'm always very interested in, as a broken image for me isn't something that doesn't work, it's actually something else. And actually something very native to the browser. I thought I'd love to make a series using that as material. I'll make these NFTs on-chain. I love the sort of energy of having something completely on-chain, which is sort of unbreakable and immutable, but it's been pre-broken so that the images are already broken by design. So you will have these compositions of broken image placeholders in the browser stored on-chain and then sort of thrown out in the world. And what I found interesting about that is then you get— so on one side it comments on NFTs which can break. In this case, they've been pre-broken so they can never break anymore, any more than they already are. And the other one is that then the image is defaulted back to the placeholder, which is something which is in flux. As you would see it on a different browser or see it in the future, you will— it will change. So it's something which mutates and will reflect the technology in time. And that is something I've done more in my work. There's a piece called scrollbarcomposition.com, which was a web-based, really early work. I mean, it was one year after my academy, and it's simple HTML JavaScript of Sort of modernist composition of hyperlink blue and grays and whites, and it has these scroll bars which are sort of triggered by JavaScript to sort of move. That piece is from 2000, and so that piece has been educating me for the last 24 years now in what it really is, and that is that it's this transformative mutating entity. It's shape-shifting all the time, and it's I've seen it in all kinds of wonderful expressions of Aqua Apple style and Windows XP and in Linux and on the phone. And it's constantly changing. It's also something very important in my work always. It's— they're always responsive. So of course, it even changes with the type of screen you watch and the resolution you have. And that I find is such a key property of browser-based art or even digital art. That sort of fluidity and sort of morphing quality of a work, I find it essential. So that work is changing and it will change into the future. And you mentioned how UX will change in the future. So I'm super curious to see how that work will fizzle out or change or become static or scrollbars might disappear in the future and it'll just, it might just go static as a composition. And that's fine. And by that time, of course, everything is emulated. So you can go back and watch it in all different time phases and everything. So I find that absolutely beautiful about working with the computer that it has that aspect and Broken Images will be the same. Already saw it in parallel browsers, sort of in the gallery, it was hanging in the browser I like, but people watching on Linux or Safari would have a different icon and Good old Web3 collectors instantly dig that. They really love that. So that's really cool.

Speaker A: It's so interesting. We've had this come up on a couple of these interviews, kind of talking with artists about the idea of preservation and longevity when it comes to NFTs and the issues of, right, like you said, like, is the image being stored somewhere or the code being stored somewhere on a private server that could be shut off that would cause the NFT to brick, or could the blockchain die, right? Like, which people are always fearful of. Or will web browsers 100 years from now just not run JavaScript? Maybe that will be deprecated and now all these things won't work. So, you know, I completely missed it this year somehow, but when Web released, I just didn't hear anything about it. But I saw it so much on a lot of people's like best of the year lists when it comes to generative art. And so in prep for this, I started to explore it and First of all, it's like, it feels like it's the culmination of so many things of what you've talked about in this episode so far. And for me in particular, just evoking the early days of being on the internet and looking for things like hidden links, right? Like selecting the entire webpage to see if someone like made a single letter or a period, like a hyperlink that would then take you to a secret part of the— like there's all of this kind of, you know, it's a treasure hunt, each one that you've interact with. And then I love the way you can like jump out and see the map of all the ones that you've explored and just hugely nostalgic for me. I love the project, but in reading your description also, you've been really thoughtful about the preservation of it and making sure that it can work moving forward. And that if something happened, like people would still be able to rescue it and like resurrect it in like whatever kind of future technology. So yeah, I guess I'm just—

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Interested to hear your thoughts on preservation in Web3 or in net art in particular, and where it intersects with like your choices around on-chain versus not, which blockchains you commit to. Like, I think you've only done ETH, if that's right.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So do you kind of discount other blockchains for this or that reason? Like, how do you kind of think about all of it as someone who's trying to make their work last 50, 100 years or more?

Speaker B: If that's the question, my bet would be Ether, Ethereum, because historically, team-wise, decentralization, market capitalization, everything. I know people who work at the foundation, and that one's pretty much gonna run for a long time. And the smaller ones, of course, have more risk of not being supported anymore. So yeah, I think you want to choose something, I think, Ethereum is a good choice. I've looked at Tezos a lot, many times. I got a tez.tez, leegte.tez really early, just never really used it actively. A lot of buddies there, I mean, many, many hands stretched out, sort of come in, come in, but I just didn't have the time. Probably it's done a lot of projects, I've been pretty busy with that. And now it seems a little quiet there, so I don't know if it's the right moment to do that anymore. And a lot of people have come the other way, come to Ether. So I'm happy with that. I kind of got used to it now. I kind of like the bruteness of the solidity and sort of you can really, really define it as deep as you like. And it's also a reason I didn't go into Ordinals because it doesn't have that much technical options. You could, of course, just upload a whole script into Bitcoin. And but yeah, I didn't really see the technological value of that for myself, and conceptually I didn't find one as well, so didn't engage with that. So Ethereum is— it's for now. It might just be that. I have no idea where the rest is going. I mean, Solana is growing, but I don't know. I really don't. And I don't know much people doing stuff there either, so It takes a lot of energy to sort of get into a whole new chain and everything. I dabbled with layer 2 with Coin. I released Coin this summer, which was a crazy performative piece. 10,000 coins over 4 different layers, 4 different chains. So that was fun, but I don't know about engagement. It becomes a bit messy in a way, sort of. You need a bit of focus in this world. It's already so crazy. So that's probably why I'm on the Ethereum. What were you asking again about the— oh, about web?

Speaker A: Yeah, other like best practices, I guess, for, you know, it seems like you're very committed to on-chain, for example. I mean, anything else that you can speak to about like what you do to really maximize the long-term viability of your projects?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the safest way for me is, and I do that for one-on-ones, I don't have that many, but Broken Images is a good example, they're all handcrafted individual pieces of my own contract. And what I do is I have a mutable contract and I do put them on IPFS or on-chain, but I have a mute— they're completely mutable, which is sort of against the ethos, but I find that sort of better option for the collector. So that means if it breaks, I can fix it. I can just update the code. That means I can also do IPFS because I can just switch it. I can just add a new repository somewhere and I think that's better. So if they're really special one-on-one unique pieces or even go into museum collections, you couldn't even sell it to a museum if you didn't offer that option because they were like, yeah, what the hell are we going to do with something which is unrestorable? They can't access it. It doesn't make any sense for a museum. So that would be my best practice, actually have mutable contracts. But yeah, you have to trust me. But I think in the art world, people are sort of serious artists, they will not fool around with that. So it's probably more in temporary commercial massive PFP projects you wouldn't want that to be mutable. But I think if you're dealing with singular artists, that is a better way of working. That means you can even— if I pass away and I can hand over that control to some estate or a gallery and they could maintain, or a conservator in the future. So I think that is best practice. But for a lot of on-chain projects, if they're locked, it's just— well, they become part of the fluid language of the net, and they'll just mutate with the net. That goes for a lot of pieces. I'm really curious to see how a lot of the generative art will pull through, because everybody has been making them. And so people from zero skill to very high skills and very complex pieces, like full 3D gaming generative shader stuff. And it's like, wow, stuff like that, you wouldn't even consider selling that before Web3 to a collector because they would like, no way I'm gonna buy this because I would need a maintenance contract and blah blah blah. I mean, it's so funny how that shifted overnight. It was like unsellable stuff, suddenly everybody just goes nuts about it, whereas like I don't know, you don't really know what you're buying. They could break really soon, especially with these highly complex pieces. But the stuff I make is very brutally simple, and as I said, I have a piece from 2000 running still beautifully, and a lot of this, uh, this is very elementary. I have good experience with the internet. I think it's very backward compatible. Stuff from the '90s still works pretty well if you work in HTML and JavaScript.

Speaker C: Hopefully you didn't release anything in Flash.

Speaker B: Don't do Flash. No, don't do third-party stuff. But it's, it's, um, we didn't expect that in the '90s to have JavaScript stuff running that long when nobody expected that. But it seemed to become a standard practice that, you know, I just include these old libraries in the browser. They don't take any space and just keep them downward compatible. It's easier than publicly saying we're not supporting that era anymore. And it's sort of It's, yeah, it's pretty amazing how stable it is. I often say like web art is turning out to be the most stable medium I've ever encountered. It's way better than video or painting or photography, a lot of stuff which degrades pretty badly. And this just keeps running and running. And if it isn't Flash, we'll keep— don't forget Flash. We lost so much with Flash. But GIFs, JPEGs, Yeah, they're going to be there for a long, long time.

Speaker A: We're counting on it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Trinity, do you want to ask one more? Do you have one or should we start? We should start doing rapid fire soon.

Speaker C: Yeah, I have like a kind of a related question to what we were just talking about. You know, maybe you have a specific point of view on this, maybe you don't, but there's been such conversation, especially as we talk about IPFS versus on-chain versus somebody like William Mapan doing Sketchbook A partially tokenized, partially non-tokenized. And when we're thinking about NFTs, do you see the token as the art and/or as the certificate of authenticity for the art?

Speaker B: Hmm, yeah, I would say it is the art. For me it is, but that's because I really invested in really getting to understand what the token itself is and really using that. Like Ornament, my first piece was already on-chain, and it really is a contract work partially. It's also partially web, and it's sort of a mutant in a way. And then Art Blocks, which is great, but it's out of your hands, which is really great fun to do it with your own contract. It really— as soon as you're building your own contract, you really can say The token is the artwork because you you can consider every aspect of it. That's really wonderful, but it's not for everyone. I mean, it is you need to work with a programmer or to be a really good programmer yourself. But it is it is a thin veil. I mean, as I said, like Broken Image we spoke for that is clearly a work made for the token. It exists only there. It's about the token, so it becomes a. Holistic little entity, as you would say, sort of really medium-specific work. But if you're basically just minting images, that's a whole different story. And that's probably what it was invented for. So that is actually the real utility of NFTs. But there's this weird subgenre which has created this weird on-chain generative medium-specific work. But for the vast majority, it's just a certificate. I wouldn't go so far as— I've thought about it because it was so cool and hype to sort of add certificates to my print work, for instance. But I never did it, and I'm probably happy I didn't because it does make stuff very messy as well. Then you have 2 things you have to take care of, and there's 2 things you can get lost or get broken. And then I can't imagine collectors very happy with that. So I don't know about that. It doesn't seem to take off that much. You think? I think the tokenization of art isn't a big thing, really. I don't see a lot of it. So it still is about NFTs. And I think that is the great fun part, the digital native browser-based stuff. I think that's where we should keep it for, keep it happening.

Speaker A: As a first rapid fire here, I'll ask kind of a related question. One of the themes that we identified for 2023 that really kind of came true in this bear market was the hybridization of like an NFT with a physical piece. There's platforms that basically do this for all their releases, like Tonic. You've obviously done some physical stuff in the past, taking elements of the net and making them physical. Do you ever imagine yourself kind of exploring something like that in the future, making a piece, a tokenized piece that has a physical component?

Speaker B: I think only consider it if it's a hybrid conceptual necessity. I'm looking into sort of more social interaction in the network of tokens, and I can imagine that having components outside of— outside maybe, then it really should make sense. And it has to sort of be transferable. That's the whole point. So if it's— if you just, you know, you sell your token and then there's this thing left behind in another house, your system breaks. So you have to think it through really well. There is still space to explore there, definitely.

Speaker C: So one trend that we've also been noticing is that often some of the best code-based artists, at least of this generation, are Dutch.

Speaker B: Oh, that's so weird.

Speaker C: Agree? Disagree?

Speaker B: And why? We have quite a lot of them.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: That's a very Freaky question, isn't it? Yeah, why is that? There's a lot hanging around. I think in Web 1, 2, and 3, we had a ton of pioneers like Jody I just mentioned, but there's a lot more. And then post-internet, we had a couple of really good people here as well. And there's a lot of people have thought about this. There's a lot of art historians who try to break their neck over it. I think it It has to do with— I hope it doesn't change now— we've always lived in a very progressive country. Recently we just, we had a shift, we had a sort of a more conservative shift in government, but traditionally we have a very progressive country. And it has to do with that it's a little delta, a very small delta in Europe, and very heavily based on trade in the history. So that usually creates a very sort of pragmatic, progressive people, and they have to adapt to a lot of flux and import and don't have time to be very nationalistic. And the conservatives, they have to adapt constantly. Also, we have to fight the water. So there's a very dynamic cultural history there. And I think we saw a very early adaptation of the internet. We had a lot of influential internet companies and a lot of, I don't know, nearly punk groups, sort of the hacker scene in the early '80s and the early '90s very quickly adopted it. I think one of the first internet providers was, I think, a hacker group who started that, was like come from a sort of alternative scene and was coming from a very different corner. And we have this heavily subsidized art culture which is, I think, quite unique in the planet. So there's a lot of space for experimentation. It's being supported by the country, and I think that has often sort of created this, yeah, focus in weird niches where nobody else would just have the support to do it. That is changing, but, uh, but yeah, we've had our share of luck there in our country. That's the only thing that people can come up with. For the rest, it's probably just maybe, yeah, if you have a few people, they influence each other. That's also how it works. So you get little cultures growing. It's great. I'm very happy to be among that because, yeah, they're all good friends of mine and it's been very inspiring to work like that.

Speaker A: All right, one more here and then we'll wrap it up, I think. Who would you like to hear us interview in the future?

Speaker B: Speaking of generative art in general, my friend who brought me into this, Harm van den Dorpel, you should definitely try him because he is— he was doing NFTs like 7 years ago or something. So he was like really, really early. He was doing them on Bitcoin. So he's really a pioneer there. But what I really like about his work is if you think about generative art, He studied AI 20 years ago or something, then he went to art school. So that's his background. And his work is always generative, but instead of making your project in p5.js, he would work from a Darwinistic sort of hereditary system, or he worked with Markov chain, or he will work with social media as a sort of randomized sort of generative system. He just takes all different systems computational systems and works from that. And I think that is super inspiring. So he really is really adding a lot to the history of generative art, really pushing the edges there. I don't know if you tried Raphael Rosendahl as well. I mean, he would be great fun. He has a podcast himself and he has very nice opinions on this.

Speaker A: I think Harm has a Verse show coming up.

Speaker B: Yeah, he does. Yeah, actually quite right now, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker C: Jan 30th.

Speaker A: It's the first Verse solos of the year. All right, add them to the list.

Speaker B: Yeah, you never know.

Speaker A: Cool. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap it up. Jan, anything that you want to shout out that we can expect from you in the future that we should be on the lookout for? Get, get your plugs in before we say goodbye.

Speaker B: No, I think I'll surprise people. Of course, I'm— there's a lot of projects I'm working on, uh, but, uh, Nothing concrete yet. I have some parties I would like to work with and we've been in contact. So there's Verse, we're going to do another project with them. So that'll probably be this year as well. So I'll surprise you guys.

Speaker A: Great. Well, thank you so much. It was awesome to sit down, finally get this recorded, and just get to meet you and really interrogate you on net art and web stuff. It's really been a pleasure. We hope everyone enjoyed. That's it for this one. Bye, everybody.

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