Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a very special interview episode, a multi-guest interview episode. We've got Trinity with us live from Canada. We've got John Gerard on the line and Whitney Hart from Feral File. It's a mega episode. We're here to talk about John's latest release, Crystalline Work, which is up on Feral File. How's it going everyone? So glad to have you all here.

Speaker B: Good.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker D: Thank you for having us.

Speaker C: It's been a minute since we've had multiple people on the show, so always love hearing the conversations that are really enabled through this. So super glad to have you both on.

Speaker A: Welcome, welcome. And, you know, I think we should get right into it here. You know, usually the beginning is to ask everyone to introduce themselves. I've actually, since John has such an illustrious career, I've done a little bit of an intro for him, and then we're gonna ask him to take it from there. John Gerard received a BFA from Oxford University in 1997 and an MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. He's represented by Pace Gallery globally. He's widely regarded as a key figure in the development of simulation within contemporary art. Deceptively looking like film or video, his works are virtual worlds made using real-time computer graphics, a technology developed by the military and now used extensively in the gaming industry. Listeners might know him best for his more recent works, which have been tokenized as NFTs in the blockchain, such as Petro National and World Flag, released in partnership with Art Blocks. All right, John, take it away. Give us some of your background in art. tech, coding, everything. Please embellish upon that.

Speaker B: Okay, so I'd say, you know, heading back to the mid-'90s, '94, like 3 important things. You know, '94 was the year that Netscape Navigator was released. So, you know, we got on the internet, I was 20, we got on. And, you know, as an art student in a big university like Oxford, you know, one had a university card and art schools had no computers. And 1994, you know, it just really didn't happen. So get into a computer science lab, get on the web. That happened in '94 for me. So that's number one. Second thing was I very quickly discovered 3D scanning and really began to think about this idea of the data object or the photo sculpture, you know, which is kind of realized by the 3D scan in like 1995 for me. The final thing that happened was mid-'90s, you had house music coming from America, coming from Detroit, coming from Chicago, hitting the UK. And me and my friends used to drive to Manchester, go to the house. And I remember very vividly standing beside the dancer on the Hacienda, '95, saying, if technology is doing this to music, what's it going to do to art? So I made a commitment right there and then to computing as my primary medium as such. And I've been chasing it ever since. So jump forward, MFA Chicago was what it was, but MSc Computer Science was very interesting coming from a background in art. Because I met programmers for the first time, you know, year 2000, met a bunch of programmers and they were just these kind of alien creatures. I mean, you know, we just didn't have them before. I never met them. They had this new language called, you know, coding, which was fascinating for me, which I engaged with through my MSc, but did not become like a, you know, super programmer. But I learned how to talk to these guys in a way. But they started talking to me because I was fascinated by 3D scans. And they said, bring your scans into the game engine, Which, you know, I had no idea what that was. So augmenting, Will, your history, I then picked up my 3D scan, literally the same 3D scan, and went to a place called Ars Electronica in Austria. And I spent like 3 years as an artist in residence in the Ars Electronica Future Lab working with game engines. And I would say '05 made my first grown-up art piece using a game engine.

Speaker A: And are those like early versions of Unreal or what kind of game engine were you using at the time? What do you use now?

Speaker B: Yeah, good question. So I'm going to go backwards in time. So funnily enough, we've just been commissioned to make a new work, which we'll preview in a beautiful triennale in the UK, summer 2025. And we're doing our first Unreal work. So that is where we are right now. Unreal Engine. For the last 10 years, we've worked in an incredibly powerful engine called Unigine, U-N-I-G-I-N-E, Unigine. Which is a kind of, I guess, military-grade engine that we were very lucky to get a license for. Before that, we worked in, I think it is Quest 3D was the name, which was an architectural visualization engine, which we used probably '05, '06, '07. We didn't move into Unigine until a big piece called Solar Reserve that was commissioned by Public Art Fund and ended up in New York, actually ended up in the MoMA collection. Um, we didn't jump across to Unigine until '10. So I think Quest 3D was about the first 5 years.

Speaker A: Always curious. I actually work in gaming sort of, and we can talk about that offline, but don't want to derail the conversation. We got to get Whitney her introduction. Whitney, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and your role at Feral File?

Speaker D: Yeah, you got it. Hi, it's a pleasure to meet everyone and thank you so much for having me today. Um, my name is Whitney and I'm the Director of Exhibitions and Head of Growth at Feral File. I joined the organization in January of this year to steward our exhibitions programming and company growth. So within that, my role, I work with artists and curators on realizing their most ambitious blockchain-based creative visions, with cultural institutions on advancing their Web3 strategies, and with collectors and consumers on building the tools and technology needed to enjoy digital art in their day-to-day life. Prior to joining Feral File, I was at Trillitech. I was the Chief Marketing Officer there. Trillitech, for those of you who don't know, I know many people from Trillitech are frequently guests on your show. Trillitech is the London R&D hub for the Tezos ecosystem and the Tezos blockchain. And I was responsible for marketing for the Tezos brand. And I joined Trillitech coming off a 15-year career in Web2 marketing technology, where I worked with global brands on technological adoption and adaptation to meet their business goals. And outside of my role at Feral File, I am a software art collector and cultural advisor specializing in emerging technology. I support Wack Labs as a co-host of Wack Weekly. I'm on the International Selectors Committee for the 2024 Lumen Prize, and I sit on the advisory board of the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas, which is where I'm based.

Speaker A: Awesome. So yeah, again, great to have you all on. And yeah, Yeah, Trinity, where do you, where should we go from here?

Speaker C: I mean, I think that there are 2 different directions that we could take. We could start talking more about Crystalline specifically, or we can maybe talk a little bit more about your past even more, John, and talking about some of the other works that have been tokenized and digitized. Well, I guess everything's already natively digital, so less digitization. What is more interesting to you?

Speaker B: I think let's ramp up to Crystalline, starting with the earlier digital works. And I say that for a number of different reasons. First of all, I am deeply, deeply committed to public art. I have been for a very, very long time. So, you know, if you come across one of my simulations, as I might call them, they will often be installed on the street on an LED wall, you know, whenever I can. Now that is a big lift. I mean, that's big, like you need big partners to do that kind of thing. But it is really worthwhile because, you know, I did a beautiful project in 2019 in Desert X in California outside Palm Springs. Springs, where on the highway between Palm Springs and LA, you just found this big LED in the desert, you know, showing Western Flag, which is probably the best known of my works, which was originally commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK. And it really acknowledges what is called the carbon legacy, the carbon dioxide legacy, which is the legacy of the 20th century in carbon dioxide, which is with us now in the air sitting above us. So it's a black smoke flag, which sits on the site of the first major oil strike in world history, which happened in Texas in Spindletop in 1902. So you're driving from Palm Springs, which is kind of like a big kind of modern 20th century kind of place to LA, which is the same. And in between you have the desert with this kind of ghost in it in a way. And what was incredible for me was that like, you know, families would just pull in off the highway. Clamber out of their cars, walk across the desert to see this piece. And so there's an accessibility to simulations in the world, which I really celebrate, number one. So that would be one entry point to Crystalline. A second entry point would be about time. And I think I would start off by saying I'm an artist who is really interested in data, and I'm an artist who believes data is one of the most crucial of contemporary art. First of all, conditions, like in the sense of social conditions. And then secondly, languages, you know, data is a kind of a language which is changing our world so fast. And, you know, I've been deeply interested in data, you know, as I've described since the mid-'90s, you know, when I realized that like an image could be constructed purely from data, you know, not in that history of the media. And just to be very explicit here, we have, I think, 2 histories which are kind of like at the moment absolutely alongside and mixed up in a strange sort of way. One history is a history of the 3-dimensional world thrown onto a 2-dimensional surface to become an image. And that image becomes cinema, you know, in a sense. And when I look at, let's just say Instagram or TikTok, It is really a cinema space as such, you know, it is a stream space of media. Then you have another history, which is, I think, as you mentioned, Will, on the way in, a wargaming space, which is a data space. It's a world-building space. And that is a data space, which then in my case, I connect with through the game engine. I think these are very different spaces, media space, data space.

Speaker D: So I wanted to ask John, you know, when you talk about how Western Flag was in Desert X and in Palm Springs and you would drive down the highway and you see this huge LED screen in the desert that was tokenized and subsequently donated to LACMA and was the first NFT that LACMA ever acquired into their permanent collection, they had to figure out how to open a wallet to accept your donation. How Did that change for you? What was the evolution of taking it off of that screen and bringing it into the blockchain? How did you think about that? What drove those decisions in your mind?

Speaker B: That's pretty straightforward. I mean, I would say number one, the work that went to LACMA, which is called Western Flag , was and is the only video I've ever made in my whole life. It is a 30-second perfectly looping extract from the middle of Western Flag, which is a piece of software that is a 365-day piece of software. So Western Flag is an annual solo simulation which you acquire. It unfolds over a year. Now, 2021, I can't remember the exact date, like March, I think, you know, the whole Beeple bomb blew, like, you know, went off. And I was a bit like, what is this? Like, this is digital art? Like, this everyday is digital art? This like JPEG is I was appalled in many senses. And also I was a bit like, and this whole thing is about the transaction. The scale of the transaction was a bit offensive for me. I was like, can we talk about digital art using another framework here? So Grumpy John released the NFT as a kind of protest in a way. I sort of tokenized a little video extract of this piece to be like, Guys, there are other histories here. Let's kind of remember these other histories. And then eventually that made its way to LACMA, which is a beautiful place for it, a good place for it. But funnily enough, that was not my first tokenized artwork. And that is actually quite interesting because Casey Reas, who is amazing, founder of Feral File, but also very famous for founding Processing, which is the incredible tool for teaching artists how to code going back 2 decades. I'd met Casey in Ars Electronica when I was like a young one. And so Casey had reached out to me in '19 and he'd said, we're doing this beautiful project called A2P, Artist to Peer. Asked me would I submit a work. I submitted a little, a little image, a JPEG of a drip of gasoline on water. And it was a swap project between a bunch of incredible artists like Leah, Kim Asendorf, like a bunch of artists. And if you Google Casey A2P, you'll find it. Those works were all tokenized on the Bitmark chain in '19. And, you know, that's a very interesting history right there, you know, kind of 2 years before people did its thing and probably simultaneously to artists who I actually really admire, like XCOPY, who I really think did interesting things, is doing interesting things. They were active at that time, but I just was disconnected. You know, I just wasn't aware of what they were doing, but even people like PAC was doing some amazing stuff at that time. I just wasn't in my world. I was deeply embedded in contemporary art world, making simulations, but the whole tokenization thing hadn't hit me. So fundamentally, Whitney, I was a bit like, I'm going to do this, did the video, stopped for a year, didn't do anything for a year. And the next tokenized project was Art Blocks.

Speaker A: I think it's so interesting because a lot of your work, maybe even all of your work, seems to have themes of environmentalism. You seem to be very conscious of the world as it's changing, using oil, using emissions. I think even Crystalline Project speaks to this in its own way. But for the longest time, Ethereum was proof of work and all of your works include a carbon offset, or the past ones when it was proof of work had carbon offsets, and they all kind of include donations to environmental causes.

Speaker D: Hmm.

Speaker A: But what was that conversation like to start tokenizing? Because I feel like it's a big barrier for a lot of people, even if you're not even aware of the emissions thing. Like, crypto has such a bad rep across the world. So what was that? What was that like to make that decision?

Speaker B: Okay, so it was hard. It was really hard. A couple of things happened simultaneously to me. You know, my brain— yeah, I've got a fairly good brain. You know, I was like, oh my God. I was like, here is this mechanism. That value is a digital thing. A, that's the first thing. B, here is this audience that I was completely unaware of that really, really are interested in this thing called digital art. And C, this thing is global. You know, I was very geographic. I mean, I showed work in museums, galleries, and biennales for decades before this big bang moment, you know, like the people moment. But there was absolutely no market, and that's a word I hate to use, you know, there was no market for putting your work in the browser. It was kind of like, okay, I'm a professor and I put my work in the browser, or, you know, but I had sort of crafted this alternative universe where I was making contemporary art and installing it in biennales, and I had representation and people were acquiring my software, which was editions, you know, small editions, editions of 4. And I've been doing that successfully for like 20 years. So A bit like taking sort of the video editioning model a little bit, but maybe refining it a little bit. I thrived, not even survived, but actually thrived and achieved some really big projects. But in a funny way, in terms of mental health, like literally mental health, the Beeple thing was so big in its implications for me. I just went kind of wild, you know? And then like I released Western Flags so quickly.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: that NFT at such a scale that it was kind of bad for me in terms of my mental health. And I kind of took a fright and stepped back and took time off, you know. Actually, I've forgotten, there was a slightly weird little project in the middle where, which didn't really work out. But then the next thing was to come in to Art Blocks and do it in a much more orderly way with a piece called Petronational. And that's where the thing that we're now talking about, Crystalline, began. But Will, with the very, very first NFT, which was Western Flag, I, in a very short period of time, developed a kind of like a little miniature ecological fund, which was called regenerate.farm, which would take a percentage of this sale and empower regenerative farming, which is something I really believe in. The work went a different path and was donated to the museum. So that didn't happen. But Art Blocks really did substantial work to empower this particular entity called Hometree to get trees in the ground. But by the time Art Blocks happened, I felt I could do 195 works because of the shift in, in the mechanism, you know, the proof of work, proof of stake. I cannot work, you know, in the Bitcoin context because they will not and have not done that. The last thing I'll say before I open it back up to you guys is, you know, if I was to nominate one subject for my work consistently over 20 years, it would be the subject of power. And by that, I mean that complicated full sense of that word. You know, because power is both energy, as in what makes things move and happen and change, but also power, you know, political power, violence to a degree. You know, like there's these kind of threads through the work which all center on these subjects of power. And dealing with technology, you're also dealing with power. And remember, I'm working in a game engine which comes out of wargaming. This is like multiple relationships with different forms of power and in a sense violence. So it's a very rich environment to be operating in. I couldn't work in any other way. I mean, you couldn't, I could not make a film, for instance, just not really possible. So I'm stuck here forever.

Speaker C: That's such a cool thing to think about. And, you know, speaking of power in a way, introducing blockchain technology just through how security is maintained through proof of work or proof of stake, You know, you're maintaining the security of the chain through how much power can you generate or how much supply do you control in order to continue to like validate each block. So that's another really interesting layer.

Speaker B: Yeah. And not only that, but World Flag, which was the last Art Blocks project, which emerged from my attending multiple UN climate change conferences, asks the question, you know, if we continue to gather in this national framework? Is this an effective framework to tackle climate change? Or, I mean, where are we now? Right here, right now, this conversation, where is it actually happening? You know, what do these forums do to geography? What can blockchain achieve? What can cryptocurrencies achieve in relationship to climate change? And I'm soft launching an endeavor for next summer, which is called Art.farm. Which is really addressing these things where it's trying to talk about these subjects. Whitney, I have to talk about crystalline work. I'm getting completely off subject here.

Speaker A: We'll get there. I swear we're going to go soon. Don't worry.

Speaker C: There's so many interesting things to go down.

Speaker B: But like literally art.farm is about farm, place, art. I call it a poem place or a little haiku, which is like, it is a little domain name that I own, which I'm very proud of, art.farm. By the way, I want to announce formally for the first time, publicly that I also own hot.earth. So if anybody wants to publish that magazine, talk to me. But art.farm is like a beautiful little poem which we lay on the landscape and we gather around it next summer and we talk about like, can blockchain actually do something luminous to address climate change? You know, I really want to ask those questions.

Speaker A: It's a great question to ask. And I think Before we jump into Chris, I want to throw to Whitney real quick to ask her too, as someone who's worked in blockchain, in digital art, has a passion for both. I assume that you've probably talked to a lot of artists who have come from the traditional space who have not crossed over to blockchain yet. Obviously John was able to be convinced and he's found his way to do it. What are some of the barriers that you've experienced with artists? 'Cause I think this is a big question a lot of us on the sidelines here as collectors and fans are always wondering is like, Is there the potential for this technology to become kind of a standardized way? Like, will all art eventually be tokenized? You know, so John's shaking his head no, but Whitney, what are some of the things that you've encountered in those conversations with artists that have been challenging?

Speaker D: It's a great question. I think I hear kind of two sides of the spectrum. The first side is from artists as well as traditional art collectors that are maybe trying to look at acquiring acquiring NFTs or tokenized work for the first time, which is this question around the hype and what is a scam, what are rugs, how do we help assess who are artists that are going to have their work endure for centuries versus, you know, which of these artists are not using this in the most scrupulous fashion. And that's a really big challenge. A lot of people struggle to wrap their brains around. And I think that part of that problem also comes to the fact that one of the largest ways we communicate in this space is through Twitter and X, as it's now called. And X content is so ephemeral. It's so hard to find content to use that as any kind of archive of resources is a fool's errand. And so I think that this question around legitimacy, the hype cycle that drove so much liquidity in 2021, in that moment around Beeple that John's talking about, in the long term has had this negative effect of, you know, what are good prices and value for this type of work? A lot of doubt and skepticism is wrapped up in there. And so that is something that's, it takes a while to talk people through. And then the flip side to that, which is the other side of the coin, is that the technology itself is really hard to get artists to understand. You know, for example, last summer I had the pleasure of going to Athens and to Hydra and spending a lot of time with some traditional artists, and one traditional artist who's on the— who's represented by Hauser Wirth specifically came up and we had probably a 30-minute conversation about his practice and potential explorations of the blockchain. And in the end, he said to me that the real fundamental problem is that he doesn't understand the technology, and his practice is really probing very specific themes, usually using performance in the physical body. And, you know, he was saying that if I could find a good creative coder who could help work with me to understand how I can take my creative ideas and bring them together with this technology, I would be happy to use the blockchain as a medium and expand my practice in this way. But without that person who can act as partner and translator, he just feels that the educational curve for him as an individual is way too steep. And so I do think that there's the potential for tokenized work, for using the blockchain as both medium and material, has a lot of potential for traditional artists. But there is a really large kind of reputational issue that I think we need to overcome. I think time heals all wounds. I think that part of it is that over time, some of that reputational issue will soften and will come into context and it will be less of a barrier. But then there still is this really challenging element around technology and the education itself and bringing together artists with coders. You know, I will say something like Rhizome 7x7. Has been working for decades to try to bring these 2 camps together. I think more efforts in that arena would be undoubtedly helpful, you know, and John also has found an amazing group of programmers who can help support him in this way. And that's through his own work and effort of going back to do his MSc at Trinity College in Dublin and then moving on to the Ars Electronica in Linz and bringing together this group to help him bring his creative visions to life and work so closely with them over the course of 3 decades.

Speaker B: Well, can I just say one thing in response to what Whitney's saying? It's a very, very, very big, big subject. So I'm going to try and kind of be really kind of precise about it. I just have this hunch that art schools kind of came into technology some time ago and were a bit like, oh my God, everything's moving so fast. It's so hard to teach. And a bit like, left again, you know, like art schools in a way. Number one. Number 2, the art fair is a big driver of, let's say, the consciousness of the art world for better or for worse, whatever you may think. The Basels, the Miamis, the Freezes, blah, blah, blah. Those environments, they have committees and those committees are made up of galleries and those galleries, I would say the vast majority of them, digital art is a bit like, ew, we don't even know where to do or what to do with that, you know? So it's only visionaries, you know, who kind of like really picked up on digital art in the last 10, 15 years. So, you know, people in the last 10 years say to me like, the collectors, we don't have the technology collectors. You know, they kept saying that to me, like, we just don't have them. And I was like, okay, you know, this is in San Francisco, you know, where are they? And I think there was nothing for them in the booth actually, you know, they weren't necessarily interested in the drawings or the sculptures or whatever. And actually, funny enough, tonight in New York, the artist Kim Asendorf is launching with the DAO, xxdao.xyz. He's launching his mint, which is X0X, which is a kind of graphical identity for xxdao. It is so beautiful. I mean, if you look up xxdao.xyz, it's the most beautiful thing. Edition of 600 or maybe 1,000 sold out. 1,000 people have got these. You know, I just think like, honestly, the traditional art world, which you're describing, I mean, I've just given up, you know, in a funny sort of way. But I put my faith in people who are just out there doing it, who've been out there doing it, who are out there doing it, who are coming. The kids are coming. You know, it's going to be an amazing time. And that time is brewing, I would say, as we speak.

Speaker C: You mentioned at the start of this Pace Gallery as well. And if we're talking about the intersection of NFTs and galleries and digital art and generative art and the blockchain, in order to have like, not necessarily a blockchain-centered future, but a future that is inclusive of art that is on the blockchain, what needs to happen within like that conversation between artists and traditional galleries and the new types of social experiences, you know, through word of mouth, Discord, Twitter?

Speaker D: Mm-hmm.

Speaker C: what have you, in order to really enable that future? And what have you kind of seen with that so far?

Speaker B: I'd say that's going to be both a Whitney and a John answer. I would start by saying, you know, there's this interesting article in the Art News or Art Newspaper, I think, from Basel this year, which is like the digital deluge, like the digital flood. It's like at the gate of Art Basel. And what are you going to do? And this was like about the Digital Art Mile, which is, you know, really early days, you know. But the Digital Art Mile in Basel is a young entity, you know, founded by Jorrit Back, and it's kind of like running a mile from the fair down Basel. And honestly, what I would say is it's not representing contemporary conditions. It is contemporary conditions. It is like, here are the kids working in AI. Here's the kids working in coding. Here's the kids making contemporary art. And actually, if you want to, here's somebody showing historic, like, computer art going back to the '50s. There's all these histories here you may not have been aware of. And I think in a weird way, Trinity, I would turn it completely around. And I would say to the fair, they better pay attention because the future is banging on their door. And if they don't pay attention, they will be in trouble soon.

Speaker C: What about you, Whitney? What are your thoughts around, you know, how galleries and artists in the art world needs to really shift in order to be inclusive of this?

Speaker D: Where do the art fairs need to shift? I think that the art fair landscape in general has a bit of a reckoning to do. There are so many fairs all over the world now, both global fairs of really high caliber, as well as then local fairs that are themed very specifically around supporting their local ecosystems that do an amazing job of surfacing up-and-coming artists. And I do think that the fairs themselves help guide and direct what should be a part of what work should be in them. But I think that also the galleries are bringing the work that they think is going to be commercialized and sell well, given current market conditions. And so I do think that there's this push and pull between how do we help artists use this medium in their practice? How do we then help these artists communicate that to the traditional gallery world so that the galleries are bringing this in? Part of it also, I think, has to do with display. How do we improve the actual screens and the display technology ability? Because without that, galleries are not going to want to bring it to an art fair and put it on the walls at a booth, right? So how do we help address the display side? And then how do we help educate the collectors so that there is the demand and galleries feel they can have a successful viewing at these fairs, you know, financially successful viewing at these fairs, which are really large financial undertakings for these galleries to do. So I do think that there is an opportunity from all sides to contribute to the fair becoming a more prominent place for this type of work in the future.

Speaker B: I would also say that we have to be careful not to focus too much on those environments. You know, there's also biennales, which I mentioned earlier. There are museums, which I mentioned earlier, you know, that are all doing different sorts of things. And if I was to be really radical about it, really kind of like push the button here, I would ask the question like, what is this thing? What is this thing? If we get away from the stream as the defining cultural form of the last decade, the stream is the Instagram, Facebook kind of stream. And if I open up the Feral File app here where I'm just like, just love that my work lives.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: In the Feral File app, you know, this is a kind of like album of digital art here. Actually, when I look at it, all my works are in there. And actually, even my earlier works are in here. So I'm sitting with someone and, you know, here is, here's my collection, you know, there it is. And if I have like a, like a world flag here, here's Brazil running in here. And I show it to somebody like, Like, as you can see here, sorry, we're on a podcast, so you can't see anything, but this is the Brazilian flag as a smoke flag on this app. What is the cultural impact of that moment? I mean, am I holding a museum in my hand? Am I holding a gallery in my hand? Honestly, I would say yes, I think I am. And that is going to ruffle quite a few feathers, honestly. And, but genuinely for me, That's where I live. That's where I've gone. There was 2 reasons why tokenization like caused me to have a nervous breakdown in 2021. One was because I was like, oh my God, this is all these people that everybody was looking for. Like, these are all the technology collectors that were missing. Here they are. They just didn't have like a way in, number one. But number two, and Whitney and I have talked about this, in relationship to artists like Pak, tokenization does allow you to think in global scale in a completely different way as an artist. New, new, new, new. I would say tokenization allows you to just think in a different scale, just full stop, you know, for better or for worse. And like, you know, the chaotic qualities that Whitney has pointed to are an illustration of the radical revolutionary power of what that means. And now we have to talk about Crystalline. Now we have to talk about it.

Speaker A: I'm just about to try to segue us there. I mean, I think a lot of what you're talking about actually applies to Crystalline work. And for everyone who's listening, Casey did a great interview with you talking all about this that I think went up earlier last week, really in-depth there. In that interview, you noted that this is probably your most generative project yet. You know, this is a generative art podcast for the most part. The origins of this project go back to a web-based snowflake algorithm, and your team, you kind of resurrected this and expanded it to create what you're calling archetypes, right? As the arm moves the crystals, it forms like various masks and trees and all sorts of different forms. So can you talk to us a bit about the process of like introducing randomness? Because there's going to be 8,700 of these.

Speaker C: Wait, can you give us an overview of the piece first?

Speaker B: Okay, Will, I will get to that. Okay, so Crystalline Work, first of all, it is an experiment. That's the first thing I want to say. And that, that's a big, big deal for me. And it's an experiment which has been supported in a really kind of radical way by Feral File, where Feral File have stepped up and they have hosted a robot, virtual robot, which will run upon their platform for 12 solar months from the solar solstice 2024 through to the solar solstice 2025, and the performance will end. And each day the work performs 24 artworks. It makes 24 artworks. Now that isn't 24 works, 24 hours, because some works are more complicated than others. So it is 24 works. Some might take 20 minutes and others might take 3 hours. So What is going on? I would say we have a platform, a sort of ambiguous platform, which is sited on a virtual North Pole, on the Arctic North Pole. That's first of all. Second of all, you have an industrial robot, which I call a prismatic robot. And I call it a prismatic robot because the color of the robot is shifting every millisecond of the day across the visible prism. So The first day of the year after the summer solstice, it's red. And then all the way the other side, it is blue. So it travels across the prism in real time. So my operating term for that is it's an unstable state. The prismatic robot is an unstable state, which in a sense intersects with the world flag, which is also an unstable color state in a way. So the robot has this stock of crystals, which are kind of like virtual crystal bars, which it uses to build what will, as you described, are archetypes. Now, the ingredients of those patterns begins with a snowflake. It originally was a snowflake. That's where it started in like, let's say 2005, like 20 years ago. And snowflakes are interesting because you have rays like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you know, through like 12 rays. Like you never have a 1 ray. Actually, maybe you have a 1 ray.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Snowflake, but like they're very rare. So like a ray is like a bar and then you have branching and then you get this form. So in our work, we have 1 through 12 rays and the 1 rays are all trees, are what we call mycelium forms. 2 rays are mostly double trees. 3 rays, it opens up and you get these beautiful honeycombs and these beautiful different forms. And then as you go down the evens, those are the odds as you go up to So the evens, you get different forms, like you get like stars and different kinds of forms emerge kind of. So we name them, we give them names. Fundamentally, the work makes 24 pieces a day, 670 per week, I think. And then across each year, it's 8,760 works, which are dropped into a gallery and can be collected. And 25% of the proceeds go to plant trees, which is the dance in a way.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because I was very interested that you would support a robot making fictitious ice simultaneously planting a tree, which might make real ice. So it's the dance between the virtual and the real.

Speaker C: So for the archetypes, you kind of talked about how the snowflakes can be emergent in certain ways. Was there any other like thought behind why these archetypes, or do they represent anything else?

Speaker B: The archetypes came on their own. Like we identified them afterwards. I mean, we had a core rule set, which was like, okay, 1 branch, 2 branch, 3 branch, you know, so you get the branches. And originally they looked really like snowflakes, all of them. And then we began to mess a little bit with the angle and the number of branches that were, let's say, permitted. And then suddenly we got these beautiful like honeycombs, you know. And then we did something else and we got these incredible trees, you know. And if you look through the APs, you can see all these.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Things coming out. So we started to name them, like we kind of identified the broad categories where they emerged from and we started to name them. So we gave these broad, let's say, algorithmic conditions titles. And if we couldn't quite work out what they were, we called them hybrids. So, you know, sometimes it's a hybrid. So actually it was chicken egg as opposed to egg chicken. You know, it was like we named the objects after they were made.

Speaker A: They're emergent. That's a key part of generative art, right? Like these emergent forms and being surprised, which makes me kind of wanna ask like, what were some of the most surprising things you encountered? I, I mean, once you start introducing randomness, it just kind of tends to pile up upon itself. Like, were there things that you guys had to exclude or that became like happy inclusions? It sounds like you did discover a lot of things.

Speaker B: Yeah, one of the things that I think we had to exclude very carefully were swastikas. They started coming up left, right, and center because like we have these beautiful mandalas. Like beautiful mandalas which come up, which we love. But like the swastika is actually an ancient, ancient, ancient symbol, you know, which like goes back to, you know, Indian belief systems and it emerges from our logic. And we were like, we don't want them. Not because like they're not beautiful, but because they're just, we can't have them here. You know, it's just like, but like I would say the most surprising ones were these wheels, these almost perfect wheels started Like literally the mandalas are one kind of thing. Occasionally it would just make a perfect wheel, like literally like a sun wheel. The earliest forms, which were like learning forms for me, conceptually kind of lead forms were the honeycombs. They came quite early and the honeycombs led to a lot of other things, you know, like when they emerged. So, and on the, on the, you know, the masks were quite surprising. They're a little bit like—

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: gliders from the Tree of Life, you know, the kind of God, God, what are they called? The gliders.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, you know, you can see if you look across the, you know, across the APs, you can see all these languages, which I personally love them.

Speaker A: Whitney, like, what was it like on the Feral File side? Like, how did you guys encounter this project? Were there huge technical barriers to implementing it? And this whole idea of like, we're going to sell 8,760 of these things. over a year, like how as an organization did you wrap yourself around this experiment? And, you know, I think it's cool. So to me it would've been a no-brainer, but I don't have to like make it. So.

Speaker D: Actually, it was John and Casey had emailed about doing a project together and having John host a solo show on our platform. And that discussion dates back to last year prior to my arrival. And in mid-February, I got a forward from Casey saying, let's discuss. And underneath the email was from John. And it was the early ideas for this entire project. And so Casey and I had a conversation where we both wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agreed we needed to find a way to make this work. We both agreed that it was a really important piece, not only for John's career, but also for generative art and the discourse around generative art. We were really enthusiastic about supporting Hometree and the ecological support that comes from the exhibition as well. And we thought it was really, really beautiful. So we then had a conversation with John in late March. And mid-March and then late March, the conversation continued. And quite literally, I think 18 weeks later, 16 weeks later, we launched Crystalline Work on Feral File. So it was an extremely fast turnaround and it was really challenging. It's a completely custom exhibition for us. We had to, we developed an entirely new layout, an entirely new interface. We also had to find a way to make it work for the robot to perform for an entire year and to sell the NFTs for an entire year. So these were all like very technological changes and updates that had to happen on our platform side and working really closely hand in hand with John's producers on the artwork itself, on making sure that the WebGL would run effectively on our platform, making sure that the WebGL would also run effectively across devices. So device testing and particularly mobile testing became a really large focus for us. And we had to change a lot of the page layouts and the gallery designs to be able to accommodate the WebGL and the code itself. So it's been a wonderful project to work on. It's been a very challenging project that has pushed the entire team, and it really has required the support of the entire Feral File organization to bring it to life. But it's been hugely rewarding, and we think it's, it's beautiful. The work is beautiful, and it's a really important contribution to Long form generative art in its entirety. And I can't wait to see what forms are gonna come out next as we enter into the autumn.

Speaker C: Sounds like it's well worth the effort. And I think that just based off of all of the work that went into creating this, it makes me feel promised that there will be more works of this scale being deployed to Feral File, just because now you have more of the infrastructure set up. So really excited to see that. You know, one of the questions that I did have earlier, well, I didn't ask it earlier. I wanted to wait for now because I think it's a really important part of like the performance of Crystalline, not just from a 365-degree point of view, but also the performance of the robots in order to create these structures over the course of an hour, maybe a little bit less depending on which, what you're, what's being created. The world of blockchain and NFT and digital art and people who are consuming it.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: At least within most of the people who probably listen to this podcast, it's something that happens. A block is 6 seconds, it's 15 seconds, it's 30 seconds. And so combined with TikTok, social media, you swipe through things so quickly. Uh, our attention span is scientifically now less than that of a goldfish. How do you kind of reconcile having these longer form performances being consumed by people who might only be able to sit there for 10 seconds? Or is that part of the work itself?

Speaker B: So can I just point to the sound element?

Speaker C: Yeah, let's talk about the sound element too.

Speaker B: It's in answer to your question, using Tone.js, which is a generative sound library, let's say. I've been working with this amazing composer called Jonas Hamre, and, you know, we listen to film scores. We listen to like a lot of, you know, the film score for like Gladiator from Hans Zimmer and the film score from like Brokeback Mountain, this amazing Spanish guitar, like, you know, this thing. And he modeled like vibrations in a way, you know, using Tone.js to kind of get this certain kind of quavering sound bath kind of emotion, let's just say, you know, across time. So if you click the bottom left-hand corner, bottom right-hand corner of the work, the NFT, not the, not the generator, not the performer, but the NFT. Bottom left-hand corner will switch on the sound and you'll get like in the summer, quite a high-pitched sound, which is an energetic sound, a bit almost like, like the high summer, high summer sound. In the winter, it's much, much lower. Like, and if you let it settle in, it kind of begins to oscillate a little bit across time. And the influence for the whole endeavor was sound bath, like was actually like Tibetan kind of sound bath in a way. That's one thing. The second thing is the robot itself is what I would describe as pure flow. Like it doesn't stop. It's like a dance, you know, it just keeps flowing and dancing. And its color is shifting. It's just shifting very, very slowly, you know, across the year. I mean, if you had a different kind of perception, you would see that it was changing, but it, you know, we don't. So the whole of the piece is a play on time and change. And solar conditions, I would say energetic conditions would intersect with the solar. And yeah, I mean, it is what it is. It's like an artwork, you know, and somebody comes in and they've, you know, they've got like a 15-second blockchain block going down and a TikTok going down and, you know, whatever going down. And then they're like, what is this? You know, I often say this to students and to people when I'm talking about my work, like my greatest ambition as an artist is to move the public in any way, in any small way. And the idea that somebody might just be like, what is this weird thing? Would be an achievement and in opposition to some of these fast-paced energies in a way.

Speaker A: The whole thing, as I was learning about the project and watching them, really evokes for me also, for whatever reason, I associate it almost with the monks who make those sand drawings.

Speaker D: Oh yeah.

Speaker A: Over many days and then allow them to blow away.

Speaker B: Oh yeah.

Speaker A: And how that practice predates film. So they would do that, enjoy the image momentarily, and then let it scatter. But now we can actually capture that whole process on film and like people can actually see, you know, document it. Here you can almost imagine a very similar thing that this robot just kind of acts perpetually, but only now we're like able to see these performances and capture them through tokens.

Speaker B: But you know, we have to talk about the date. The dating system, because that's very relevant. The naming system is very relevant. Whitney, help me here because I always trip up on this. Okay, it's my work. I know I should know, and I do know. Okay, so crystalline work, open bracket, Arctic, close bracket. The first number you see is the work. Each day you have one to twenty-four. That's the first number. The second number you see is the ray. The number of reis. So it's 1 through 12. And basically 1 is June, 3 is July, 5 is August. It goes down the odds and then it comes up the evens. Okay. In case you were trying to map it. Then the next of the numbers. So you've got like, basically the first one is the work number. Then you have the rei number. Then you have the day number of the year, 1 through 365. And the final number is the year number. And this is the important one for me only, just to say. So this is not like me becoming like a weirdo, but all my works to date have been dated in like Christian time. You know, it's like Western Flag 2017, you know, Flare 2022, whatever it may be. And with this piece, this kind of like radical performance blockchain prismatic piece, I decided I wanted my own calendar.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: My own private personal John calendar. So that's what it is. And it begins for me with year 1. And I kind of want to make this proposal, which is that I'm going to say your generation, Trinity and Will, like not my generation, but your generation. I hit the web like age 20. That was like 30 years ago. I'm like 49. But yeah, you were in the web the whole time. I mean, you were never out of the web, you know?

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Will is like—

Speaker A: I'm 39, so I'm only 10 years younger than you. But yes, I remember the AOL discs and all that stuff and getting online when I was like—

Speaker B: Trinity, you've been in the whole time.

Speaker C: I'm only 2 years younger than Will. I also hoarded AOL discs, like—

Speaker A: But we get it, we get it.

Speaker B: Fundamentally, there's a bunch of kids who have come up on this network. And, you know, I've been fascinated in the last months with this idea of data being transmitted through fiber optic cables as light. And, you know, I looked into it and it transpired that data is encoded in the ultraviolet and the infrared parts of the spectrum, and then it is transported in these mysterious ways through fiber optic cables as light. And I have this like slightly terrifying thought that like if all these Californian dudes like really managed to like get like, you know, if they managed to just create like artificial intelligence, the whole meat body thing, it's over. They're just going to blast consciousness through space as light. And that's how we'll populate the rest of the universe. It's like, it's not going to be meat bodies. It's just going to be light consciousness. Because like, if data can be light and consciousness can be data, then like, hello. So anyway, that's my like late at night terrifying myself thought.

Speaker D: Like, Yeah.

Speaker B: Elon Musk, like blasting consciousness to the other end of like, you know.

Speaker C: It's also how we save the planet.

Speaker B: Yeah, maybe.

Speaker C: Transforming our own bodies into light.

Speaker B: Yeah. But it's funny because like, you know, I have these times where I feel a little bit more liminal and I have these thoughts, you know, these slightly weird kind of thoughts. But one of these weird thoughts was that like this generation, I call this generation of kids who've come up on the network, the data light network as prismatic. Okay, and prismatic fundamentally, I feel, means that it is kind of borderless. You know, like if you look at the world flag, it's like hard, hard borders. Like, you know, the British flag is all like, you know, like the Union Jack and blue and red and white and all these borders. American flag is, you know, stripes and all the stuff. But the prism is just flow. It's just kind of transition. You know, it's so beautiful and there's no, you know, it's just color. It's like this beautiful prismatic thing. So in a funny way, like the robot is this sort of like almost a freedom flag, you know, like a sort of hippie flag in a way where it's just unstable. It's just always drifting. And I wanted to kind of position it for me in my own personal universe as a line where I say, I'm not going to work in this Christian time anymore, like this patriarchal time, this kind of, you know, and I link to that like toxic time where it's kind of like toxic material cultures of oil and plastics. And I mean, my next big project is called Spirits and it's about plastics. And I'm really deeply troubled about plastics right now, like viscerally troubled. I'm dedicating my energies to fighting plastic going forward, but anyway, putting that aside. But anyway, yeah. So like in this crystalline work is definitely the sense that like it is a new calendar for me, for me personally, that's what it is.

Speaker D: And I do think also to interject that it goes back to solar calendars. So in a way it's, it's John's calendar, but it also hearkens back to these histories and legacies that are eons old, you know, thinking about Stonehenge, for example. And you were talking about these perfect circular works. I know, John, you have an old site in Ireland that you really like to talk about and that you feel it's very relevant.

Speaker B: It's called Newgrange. It's a winter solstice passage grave where the light travels to the back of the grave on one day of the year, on the winter solstice. It's like unbelievable. Google Newgrange, N-E-W-G-R-A-N-G.

Speaker C: It's incredible.

Speaker D: And so I think that there's this interesting thing that John's doing where he is taking and manipulating time within the artwork and creating this new calendar structure and dating structure that feels really new, but also has elements that are really old and prehistoric in a way. And bringing those things together and then combining that with blockchain, which has its own way of telling time, which is like, how quickly can you churn out the blocks? Is it 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds? And so there is this underlying current of what does time mean and time's manipulation that carries through so many different threads through this project.

Speaker B: Yeah. And let's not forget, like, it's a mystery, but people from all over the world, all over Europe, you know, mostly Europe, but the people who were buried in Newgrange, like the bones in Newgrange, were Anatolian. Basically, they weren't even Irish. You know, they were like, whatever Irish means, but they were like from far away from that place. They were like 3,000 miles away. But Ireland definitely existed as a sort of like within a set of solar networks, which stretched right across Europe. And people came to Ireland to these very important solar sites, Neolithic, Paleolithic, and earlier solar sites for reasons unknown. You know, and, you know, blockchain is a new type of network. I mean, I do have this sense that, you know, the world is doing so badly on climate change. Let's say like fiat currencies are doing so badly on climate change, oil-backed currencies are doing so badly, like maybe we have to look at alternatives in a funny way. But what that means, how that plays out on the ground is another question.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: But I think the idea of the blockchain as a network with a lot of potential is huge. And it's actually almost the opposite than the media narrative. You know, it's almost like literally the mirror to the media narrative, which is that it is a destructive force, you know, because it's used by things like pirates. Pirates are fascinating. Like pirates have always been fascinating and they've always been Very, very ambiguous. You know, pirates are ambiguous always. So the fact that pirates are like literally kidnapping oil tankers and demanding ransom in cryptocurrencies, I find fascinating. And let's not forget, we romanticize pirates like all the time now. You know, we just don't romanticize contemporary pirates, but they are much more interesting.

Speaker A: Well, you know, we're getting a little close to when we have to stop here. Normally we do rapid fires, but I think We're not gonna have time to do that because we haven't even gotten to like half of our list. But I wanted to ask, you know, this performance is set virtually in the Arctic, the North Pole, but where else might a crystalline work be performed? And do you imagine ever performing this again in a different place?

Speaker B: There's only one other place in the great diptych of life, and that is in the Antarctic. So If we were to do the great double, you know, the sort of the second half of the piece, which would be like the celestial twin of the work, it would be in the Antarctic. And that would begin on the summer solstice, which is December 20th. And so the 2 interlocking performances, which are literally like the Ouroboros, the snake biting its own tail, that would begin on December 20th.

Speaker D: Wow.

Speaker B: I think, but nobody has committed to that. We need a little more community engagement before that happens. I tell you that for free.

Speaker A: You could put it on Tezos, you know, really go for the polar thing there. Trinity, any, any other questions that you want to ask before we wrap up? I mean, I know there's so much we didn't get to. What's, what's even conceivable in 10 minutes?

Speaker C: And we can keep talking about crystals because we're talking about ice crystals and snow crystals. But, you know, looking at it at first, if I just looked at it before I read anything about it, that was the first thing I did. You can also think about salt flats and salt crystals. You can think about the geological formation of the Earth in terms of quartz crystals as they start to emerge out of the magma. Is there a reason other than through climate change that ice and snow are so impactful to the project itself?

Speaker B: I mean, I would say it's sort of like at the heart of this thing is this idea of Different kinds of dances, different kinds of forms of dance in a way. In the most simplest of the dances, you have the unreal and the real, what you could call the virtual and the physical, who are dancing in these very, very complicated ways. And then you have kind of other ways to consider it, which in a funny way, like the robot has a sort of an instruction, almost like a genetic code, which it kind of Like, they are like, it produces these kind of children in a way that are sort of like, you know, emerge from this kind of code, which itself comes from the building blocks of life, like rays, branching, spacing, these kinds of things. So I would say there's nothing absolutely specific, you know, that I would like pinpoint. But I think the most important thing is if somebody acquires like a day, like 24 works, Which is, I think, a nice thing to do because you can string them together with the app and it will be performed across. You can then publish it, broadcast it from the app to like something in your home, like a screen, just you can have it on your, on the New Museum. If somebody acquires like a day, they get the virtual crystals, but there may be real crystals on the pole, you know, because of the trees pulling the temperature down, you know, even if it's only 33 trees.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Even if it's only 2 crystals. If that happens, you know, if we do actually place, you know, all the days, the 365 days, which I believe we will, that is what makes the work a success. It is like the union of the, of HomeTree, which is this beautiful entity planting trees in Ireland, and the art, you know, that is the work. It's not the work on its own. I mean, I ended an interview with Whitney and RightClickSave by saying, You know, really, this is not a time for objects. I don't think it's a time for things. I think it's a time for unions, you know, unions between different players and different actors, and for like luminous actions, you know, not for work which observes the world or reflects the world, and not even work that like throws like paint at the world or like smashes the world or anything like this. I mean, that's part of what people wish to do and everyone I just am very interested to create a work that, you know, is a work about unions and what I call luminous actions and networks fundamentally. So that's it.

Speaker D: I think that we also, when we, you asked earlier how the project came to be on Feral File and the conversations around supporting it, you know, I think that looking at the scale of the project producing 8,760 60 discrete collectible artworks over the course of an entire year with this really important message about climate change, we also saw as an amazing opportunity to reach new audiences, to speak to new audiences. And all the time on X, I see these tweets about, you know, what's the latest onboarding event or onboarding mechanism to bring people into the blockchain, to educate about the blockchain and to bridge gaps between these communities in really thoughtful ways. And we've always perceived that this project has the potential and will be an amazing onboarding event to bring new communities into blockchain, to speak really effectively to this new luminous generation, as John calls them, prismatic generation, and bring them into the blockchain and bring them into these real concerns about climate change, about global warming, and the different things that we can do as a global community to try to fight the impacts of this and help our planet.

Speaker B: And also taking ownership of their own cultural spaces. You know, I think that's very important too, but that's almost an entire new podcast.

Speaker A: I mean, I think we could do 3 or 4 podcasts just, you know, there's so much that I feel like I want to get into, you know, now talking to you more, John. Like, honestly, it would probably become more of a politics podcast than an art podcast, like a politics and action podcast.

Speaker B: But, um, Will, there is no difference. Never has been, never will be.

Speaker A: Exactly. Apolitics itself is a politics, right? And so, yeah, I mean, good, good art is always political.

Speaker B: Always.

Speaker A: But again, we could go with both of you easily for another 90 minutes, but unfortunately we have to wrap it up here. Thank you both, John, Whitney. It was great to have you on.

Speaker B: Thank you guys. Come to Art Farm next year. We're gonna have a dance.

Speaker A: You let us know the details.

Speaker B: Yeah, we invite you. Whitney's gonna come.

Speaker A: I'm gonna see Kim tonight, by the way, cuz we're New York based, so I'm going to that thing.

Speaker B: He's amazing.

Speaker A: Yeah, he's a friend of the show, so.

Speaker B: He's my friend. I am a big Kim collector. I've got amazing Kim.

Speaker C: His work is amazing. We've collected so much on Tezos specifically.

Speaker A: Oh, nice.

Speaker B: So did I. I got one of the Monogrids and yeah. Yeah. When you say we, Trinity, what do you mean? What do you mean we?

Speaker A: Us individually.

Speaker C: There's the two of us.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You collect together?

Speaker A: Well, separately, but like—

Speaker C: We've both collected a lot.

Speaker B: Are you together? Are you a couple?

Speaker C: No, just a podcasting couple.

Speaker A: Just a podcast couple.

Speaker C: Longtime friends.

Speaker B: You, your friends, and you collect simultaneously.

Speaker A: In parallel, but often synchronized, you know, because we tend to have similar tastes about things.

Speaker B: Okay. Trinity, I thought when you said us, I thought you meant like in a kind of a structure, like in a DAO.

Speaker C: No, no. But there is something interesting, Will, that you just said, due to the nature of the blockchain and the blocks, we, everybody is often acting in synchronicity. That's true.

Speaker A: That's true.

Speaker B: Yeah, I am— got some great, very great, great, great Kims on Tezos, and then I got some amazing ones on Ethereum as well. So we have to compare notes on our Kims.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: Check out our episode with him. He was a great guest too.

Speaker B: I'd love to do that. Okay, guys.

Speaker A: All right. That was John Gerard and Whitney Hart from Feral File. Go check out Crystalline Work. It's minting now. And yeah, thanks to both. We'll be back again soon with another episode. Bye everyone.

Speaker C: Bye.