Speaker A: All right. Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode. We're joined today by Kevin Esherick, Kevin Esh Online, as you might know him. We have Kevin on today to talk about primarily his recent writing talking about generative art, a really great critique he wrote called Generative Anesthetic. Unfortunately, Trinity is not here today. She's out on work assignment, but we've got Kevin. We're super hyped to have you on. We dedicated a good 30 minutes or so in our last episode talking all about what you wrote, but before we get into all of that, we should learn about you and, uh, Yeah, how's it going, Kevin? Thanks for coming.

Speaker B: Good. Yeah, thanks for having me. Uh, we'll talk about it more later, but the post-essay period has been fairly busy with chattering about that. So, uh, this will be my first podcast getting on and discussing it after hearing it talked about by others a decent bit. So happy to speak my piece on it here, hopefully today.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's great to have you. And, uh, Let's get you introduced to the audience by asking you to tell us a bit about your background in art and coding and how you came to find the blockchain NFTs.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. I have no formal background in either art or coding, which I feel is the most blockchain artist type of background. Maybe it's like a very DIY grassroots type community. That exists outside a lot of the traditional institutions. I started coding right after I graduated college, so I didn't study computer science or anything like that. I studied philosophy and psychology. Those weren't aimed at a job or anything. I always wanted to start my own company and I was just interested in those 2 things. So I studied them and went on to work with company ideas. that thematically were related to those. And now I work on art that's related to those. But I, right off the bat, was like, I'm gonna start a company. Built a wellbeing and mental health company. It was an iPhone app that was like a daily personal trainer for your wellbeing and mental health. This was back in 2017. So that space was a little bit different at the time. And I had no engineering background, no co-founder, no footing in the startup world. So no idea how to raise money or hire or anything like that. And I was just kind of like doing this solo dolo, making no money, living at my parents' house. And yeah, that meant I needed to teach myself to code in order to make it happen. And I was very motivated to make it happen. So I just worked 12-hour days for years on this startup trying to build it. And ended up picking up coding in the process, which was super valuable. The startup didn't work out. 3 and a half years of work on that amounted to financially and corporationally nothing. But it was incredibly valuable experience. Like learned so much picking up coding and that was mostly like a JavaScript stack of React, React Native. Some backend things here and there, but yeah, I think like the big thing with picking up coding is taking on a first language and really learning it in depth. And then you kind of become comfortable with navigating just that digital environment, knowing how to use the command line, knowing how to work in VS Code and work with packages and GitHub and shit like that. And so it made me just far more comfortable in that ecosystem. So after the company ended up not working out, I spent some intermediary time like doing writing freelance stuff for mostly tech companies, founders, VCs, stuff like that. Some ghostwriting here and there. And through that process was introduced to NFTs actually, because this was 2021 and around the time that everything just kind of started to pop off. I was doing writing for people whose names I can't say, but it involved learning about crypto and NFTs and putting together like some research briefs on the Beeple sales and some of the things that were happening in music NFTs at the time. So I started to learn about that. And at the same time, like my creative itch was beginning to burn following the shutting down of the company, cuz the company really was like a creative endeavor for me in many ways. I did all of the UX/UI stuff for it, which I really enjoyed and found myself to have a knack for some mode of visual art, which was exciting to me cuz I'd always had a deep interest in art for all of my life, but never formally engaged with it. I grew up in Maryland, outside of DC. And so free museums were always at my disposal. Not that I was like a regular attendee or anything, but my older brother was a big inspiration on the arts front, always engaging with music and fine art and literature and stuff. So I was just passionate about those things from an early age, took AP Art History in high school. school and really liked that as a way of approaching history through the lens of mostly visual ideas. I thought that was pretty fascinating and far more engaging than just reading like a textbook on Civil War history or something like that. So doing freelance writing, I'm learning about crypto in the process. I've got the coding skillset under my belt and I'm doing a little freelance work And I feel like this creative urge to start making shit again. So I started a project during this time called Material that involves a pair of jeans that I wear that I thrifted and then like custom tailored and bleach dyed in my parents' bathtub and shit. The idea with them was that when I had special, memorable, compelling moments, experiences, connections with people while wearing those jeans, I would invite them to add their own work of art so that it's this collaborative canvas that serves as like a tapestry of my identity in a way that's more complex than any brand label will signify.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: My brother, I think around that time, was releasing a line of clothing that he had started. And so fashion was on my mind some, and I was thinking about like how these very outward signals that we choose to inform others on our identities can kind of like be pioneered into new directions and go beyond just the Gucci label on your shirt or whatever the hell it's going to be and say more about you beyond just like affiliation with A corporation that the garment is made by and say something like truly idiosyncratic, personal to you. I thought this was a fun, expressive way to do that. And it was also coinciding and I think partially prompted by like COVID sort of receding or some of the restrictions receding and people stepping back out into the world. And I was like thrilled at the prospect of like going out and engaging with people and like having experiences for the first time in a year plus. I mean, obviously you can have other kinds of experiences that don't involve that sort of thing, but like going back out into the urban world of like rich human interaction. And as I was working on those jeans, the crypto stuff was percolating in my head and pieces begun to be added to them. And I would like get compliments on them wherever I went because people were like, oh, sick jeans. Like, That's cool art you have on them. The idea being, by the way, to like bring art into as close of contact with life as possible.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: So this is kind of like a, a core nugget in my aesthetic theory that I want art to like change our relationship to our own lives. And there's this function of distance that can be mediated where you get closer to or further from life through art. I probably shouldn't go into that in too much detail right now, but maybe another day or at the end of the podcast or something. But it's going to get digressive. But yeah, these jeans were intended to like create the most like present in the moment representation of a part of my life as possible, rather than, you know, someone going back to a studio and painting something from memory or from a sketch or whatever.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: This was like the moment is kind of inscribed into the artwork. There was, there was kind of a metaphysical inquiry going on there. Like, can the jeans be like imbued with these moments by having these rituals around them where like the moment is noticed and then harnessed and then imprinted onto the jeans? And that was, yeah, that was a very like post-COVID kind of thinking for me. Anyways, the jeans, yeah, they were going well. Like several people had added artworks to them and I thought they were beautiful, other people thought they were beautiful. And none of the artists who had contributed to them ever really got to be on the receiving end of any of this, even though this was a collaborative project. And of course, like, I had put in the bulk of the effort. There were other people who helped make the jeans what they were, and I wanted to find some way of rewarding them for that, distributing that value. And I was learning about NFTs.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And I was like, oh, these could be a really interesting way of distributing the feeling of ownership potentially like some financial stake in the project, even though till then it was unfinancialized. But a way of distributing value of this centralized thing that without technology could only be in this one place at one time. So I ended up making a video of the jeans. It's like a studio shot video of the jeans rotating 360. They came out looking pretty sweet, I think. probably like won't make sense and will sound super jank looking to people hearing the description. But if you want to check it out, it's called Material. You can find it through my Twitter or whatever. And every time a new piece is added to the jeans, I create a video for that. I mint it as an NFT. And then over time, I sell these to collectors and the proceeds are then distributed back to all of the people who've added work to the jeans. I'm also working on private copies of those NFTs for the artists who've added to them. So they still have that feeling of ownership because that was the original idea behind making the NFTs was like to give these NFTs to the artists until they were going to be sold. And then they like get the sales split from them, but it ended up just not making much sense to do this like wallet back and forth.

Speaker A: I remember hearing about those jeans from Matt, I think our mutual friend.

Speaker B: Oh yeah. No way.

Speaker A: Did he contribute to them as well?

Speaker B: He has.

Speaker A: Yes. I think I remember hearing about it from him.

Speaker B: And he also owns one of them. Yeah, Matt Condon, everyone. Good friend and major helper for me early on in the process of bringing this work to life. He brought me on Digitally Rare a couple of years ago to talk about it. And then also like a year and a half ago to talk about it some more. He's contributed to the conceptualization of it and like just helping me navigate the NFT world when I had no footing there. He was like the first real NFT person I talked to and contributing to the jeans themselves and then collecting a piece and acting in the DAO that now exists. So every collector enters a DAO based on that token ownership. Every artist who adds a piece and every collector is in this DAO that votes on real decisions.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: decisions in my life, including for me to move to New York. So I moved here in 2022 because they voted for me to do so as a way of like, so they not only have this financial stake in the Genes, but they also have an actual directive ownership stake that makes decisions and can, yeah, guide the outcome of the project that they have this collaborative ownership in. So that's a super long answer to your question. Yeah.

Speaker A: That's okay.

Speaker B: But that is how I ended up getting involved in art and NFTs. And from that project, it just kind of became this like creative floodgate opening. And I was so interested by like the possibilities of art on the blockchain, digital art, art in general. So here I am.

Speaker A: I had totally forgotten that you were the person who had done the jeans. So what a coincidence. You're describing like that you were doing this research and learning about NFTs through your professional life. Obviously you knew Matt, who was a really, you know, early, you know, active, like, ETH developer participant, even some of the early token standards that we use now, right? Like he's—

Speaker B: Yeah, he contributed to 721s and 1155s for them to— those who don't know. And I believe started the first NFT podcast in 2019. Probably. Digitally Rare, he and Jonathan Mann run or were running for a while. I'm not sure when the last episode came out. But yeah, Matt's an OG and an NFT artist in his own right. He's the dude who has an NFC chip in his hand, if anyone has heard about that, which you can scan to collect NFT stickers of him.

Speaker A: Well, what was the journey like for you? I mean, I think I feel like a lot of people, and also given the time that you were kind of starting research, there was so much crypto and NFT skepticism out there. And it was kind of like, pick your angle, right? It's all a casino. It's all Ponzi scheme. It's burning up the environment. I mean, it was pretty hard, I think, for the average layperson to get past all of that stuff and actually like take an honest look at the technology and some of the more like well-intended stuff going on here. So like, what was that? Was it like Matt and coming up with this idea and saying and thinking like, wow, 'cause like, 'cause you could have done that without the blockchain, right? You could have just had like a boilerplate contract ownership thing like existed.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. What made you think or want to like use this technology or like what kind of brought you around to it in a way to think positively?

Speaker B: I like have just a pretty thorough disposition toward techno optimism. I've loved tech since I was a kid. Like the future has always interested me and that's my default response to new technologies is just like wonder and excitement and wanting to know how it works and what we can do with it. So yeah, there wasn't really like any initial knee-jerk balking at the prospect of it or anything. It was like, okay, what can this do? Let's run with it, see what happens. And I think like the unique feeling of ownership conferred by NFTs like really did feel like something that, I don't know, just like a COA or something like that, like doesn't quite capture. And then the networked nature of it was like fascinating to me that like, These tokens, the material NFTs, because they derive from the same contract on this blockchain, they have like this inherent tie to one another, like they are siblings of sorts. And then the like baked-in royalty splits, it was like I could have an auction for these things. And the money would by default split to the wallets for the artists who've contributed. Permissionlessly. I could do nothing about it. And it just felt like incredibly elegant to me. And I thought I was doing something like pretty new and interesting with it. And yeah, in case my writing or my art hasn't showed this so far, new ideas are a big draw of intrigue for me and something I really enjoy exploring. So there was never really any skepticism. Like I was aware of the climate critiques and stuff and my take then and my take now was, one, I think we'll figure it out and we'll make it not so bad for the environment. 2, it's probably still a net good. That isn't my take with all technology. I'm not just like a tech is good, period. I'm basically like a tech is neutral, period type person and think it's about the ends we put it toward and how we balance out any secondary effects it might have or anything like that. And in some sense, I'm actually like a deep techno pessimist in that I believe it's like a hedonic treadmill. And ultimately, like, if we aren't going within and doing internal development, then we're just like— it's more that I'm like a material pessimist in that I don't really believe material improvement of our lives is actually going to better them that significantly in the end, because we always find new wants and new desires to have. And if we're not going to the root of that problem, like in a Buddhist sense, and wrangling with our own predisposition towards suffering and desire and lack of contentment, then I think the circus is gonna carry on and there's gonna be this buffet of ever-increasing desires and we'll always have new problems to to solve. There's a Sisyphean optimism and pessimism there. And it's like, maybe Sisyphus is having a good time rolling the ball up the hill. But yeah, I think like it would be better if Sisyphus realized he didn't need to roll the ball up the hill and was able to like sit down and get in a deep meditative state and become free of suffering. And then maybe get back to it and just have that baseline happiness and enjoy rolling the ball up the hill on top. that for what it is.

Speaker A: Solving the fundamental problem of contentedness through the blockchain is not something that I thought we'd be driving towards here. And I—

Speaker B: And I don't think it's gonna do it for us.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think a lot of the critique that you point out in your writing that kind of blew up and got a lot of attention within the generative art community and NFT art community more broadly, generative anesthetic— let's dive into that because I think we're kind of navigating towards it anyways.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally.

Speaker A: And you know, we met a couple weeks ago. I actually had not read your piece the night that we met, but, um, it's long. Read the next day.

Speaker B: Yeah, I hadn't heard longer than most are used to reading online.

Speaker A: I'll say it's a lot quicker the second time you read it. It goes a lot.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot on the reread. We chatted a little bit after the fact and you said that you started writing this in 2022.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Which makes a lot of sense, right? Because that was kind of when we still had a lot of the residual effects of like that hype of 2021, in particular, like the Art Blocks hype and the early fx hash hype and the rampant speculation. And I guess, you know, for whatever reason, you kind of put it to the side, found time to come back to it. And now here we are halfway through 2024, it's out. You know, the market's changed a lot since then. So, you know, I guess first of all, like what made you decide to publish that piece?

Speaker B: Now, good question. And I appreciate, yeah, having the opportunity to like explain why and, and when and what the timeline was, because basically writing is hard. I started it in 2022. I started taking notes on it then, and that ballooned to 40 pages of notes eventually, and a lot of reading and research and stuff like that. And just like exploring the generative art world, I wanted to feel like I was truly immersed in it. It also meant me releasing 3 generative projects of my own in the meantime. Maybe people who read it don't realize, but I've released 3 generative projects. So I'm not just like critiquing this space from the outside. I mean, my projects are like definitely not the traditional gen art projects you're used to seeing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But they are generative nonetheless. And so I've become pretty well acquainted with that paradigm. But yeah, I started on Notes at that time because this is what I saw. I was getting involved in the space. I was largely just, yeah, like frustrated. Like, I don't get what I'm not getting here. Like, why is everyone so obsessed with this? It seemed pretty insane to me, the extent of the monomania on it. And that's also part of what I want to emphasize. is that it was just as much about like the fixation on this one thing as it was about the one thing. I'd have been fine like leaving the genre be if it didn't make up such a broad scope of the projects that people were paying attention to in the crypto art world. But it felt like really dominant to me. And I was like, guys, there's other cool stuff out there. Let's check it out. But so yeah, I started taking notes. And I just right now am not doing writing full-time. I'm making art full-time and really trying to establish my career on that front. That only started in 2021 and I'm getting my footing and it's really hard to make a living as an artist. And that's the only job I have right now. And so I just kind of like grind my face off trying to make that happen. And writing is something that is Really difficult. It's something that I love and like find myself doing naturally, but if you don't put in consistent time for it, it's sort of like a muscle that like atrophies. And when you put it down for a while, like the first couple days getting back into it are grueling. Like, at least for me, like I have like a really hard time just like writing freely. I feel like I need to like know the structure of things and like see the next paragraph unfolding before me rather than just kind of like writing word by word, and that's kind of grueling. There was never a good financial reason for me to get back into writing this, ironically. And I also was just kind of scared. People like have strong feelings about generative art, and like I have really dear friends who love generative art, and I love pockets of generative art, to clarify. But I didn't want to piss people off. I don't see myself as like some firebrand, like, who's out here trying to start a ruckus online or anything like that. Like, discourse is important to me, but like thoughtful and tempered discourse. And people online can be loud and mean. And yeah, I think actually releasing it when I did was kind of helpful because I came to know many more people in the space. And so they like know me personally and understand that I like wasn't trying to be a dick about this. But yeah, I started really writing on it after I had collected these 40 pages of notes like way earlier this year. And even then it was always on my mind and I just, I kind of kept saying to myself like, damn it, like this is getting away from me. Like this is gonna be too late. Even by the end of last year, I was like, fuck, this is like, the market's no longer what it once was. This is losing its relevance. And I was, I had 2 partner generative art projects planned that were supposed to be like released alongside this essay, Catalog and DVD Screensaver, which are generative projects that critique the generative art paradigm in some way. And so I wanted to release this with them and like have it be kind of this triad that helps make sense of my body of thought on this front. I was able to finish those 2 projects. I wasn't able to finish the essay. And so those came out in— 2023. Catalog December of last year, DVD screensaver March of this year. And then I had an opportunity come up where I had this show with Expanded in Berlin at their physical gallery. They're releasing my collection in utero. And so just like opportunities were starting to come to me that just continued to crowd out working on this essay. Even on the writing front, I worked with Lily Iloh on an essay talking about her collection Plans for Future Forms. And so like that was kind of taking up my writing bandwidth for a time there. Prior to that, I decided to write that MangleCore essay, which took up some of my bandwidth. And yeah, finally In Utero opened in Berlin. I came home and I like had some time to write on this. And so I finally just made the space to like sit down and bang out the essay drawn from all of those notes. And I almost like, I really sat down and looked at it and was like, I don't know if I want to release this anymore. I'm almost like embarrassed. Yeah, it just feels so late. But I had put all of this work into the essay and was kind of like, whatever, send it out there. If people like it, cool. Maybe they'll say you're super slow on this, blah, blah, blah. I'll add a note saying that this is kind of what went down. And I'm glad I put it out. It was very close to not being released, but I didn't want all that work to be for naught. And I thought that there might be still some people who like felt the way that I felt and needed to like find this expression to their ideas. And yeah, it seems to have resonated. A lot of people have felt like it was articulating a thing that they hadn't previously been able to put words to.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it came out in some ways at a very good time because the community And the collector base has shrunk so much. Like the only people left are the ones who do, are open to talking about things like this and thinking about it and not just like, you know, pumping their bags. Right. Like there are still a few people, I guess, who are pretty heavily invested, but even then I think that they are a lot more thoughtful about like what they collect and thinking more long-term about it. And I guess that's a good way to ask you like, well, what's the reaction been like? I mean, Yeah. Looking on Twitter, like from what I saw, it seemed like the people who replied were engaging with you, I think, in a pretty levelheaded and constructive way.

Speaker B: Totally.

Speaker A: Each person maybe had their own little nit to pick, but no one seemed to be condemning it as a whole. And I hope it's been like a positive experience for you, but let us know, what was it like?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it has. The discourse has been like really overwhelmingly positive, I'd say. Pretty thoughtful. And that's really nice. I tried to like set a good tone to it, I think, and like be even-handed and took pains to like show that I'm acting in good faith here and not that I just like have this itch that I wanna scratch and like just kind of have this cantankerous disposition sort of thing that I need to vent about. It wasn't like that. It was like trying to think through something and what's causing things that I think like aren't good for the space and how we can improve on those. And it felt like people picked up on that and have like responded in kind. And there's been like, even where people disagree, it's been like mostly polite and thoughtful across the board. Like, on the whole, can't complain. A couple people who've like said mean things here and there.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: But even privately, like, it's a lot of people DMing me and being like, Hey, this was like really gratifying to read. And coming from generative artists, generative art collectors, people who work at generative art platforms all across the board. And yeah, pretty often there is like that nit to pick. It seems like a lot of times it's like, great essay, really loved reading this. Don't agree with everything, but it's worth reading. And yeah, that's super cool. Like, I feel like you don't get that every day where like you write something that a lot of people are gonna disagree with in a pretty strong way, at least in some regard, and still say like, yeah, this was good shit, you should read it. So that's been nice. And yeah, the back and forth has been good and valuable. And that's like really what I wanted is to just get people to reflect on it some more, like put these ideas out there. Ideas to me are— I don't really hold like firm beliefs. on most things, definitely not like these things. And when I say that, like, I'm not saying I'm just like floating in the wind, but my beliefs are like kind of probability assignments. I'm like, okay, there's like a 70% chance that this particular financial mechanism within NFTs is bad. And like, here's some evidence for it. And here's what it's doing. But that 70% is like liable to being changed. And I like hold the other 30% in a kind of counter position as well. I'm like, Well, there are these other reasons that, that isn't so bad. Like, we'll probably talk about this later, but like things like the scale of production in generative art, I think is one of those things where like, I have some critiques of it. I think it also does some really cool stuff and where I fall exactly. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out. So like, none of this is like set in stone, ossified in my mind. It's less about like, Yeah. me and sharing my opinion and just like hoping to get these ideas out into the world and prompt people to reflect on them for their own sake and hopefully like come away better for it.

Speaker A: Yeah, it definitely spoke to a lot of things that we've talked about on the show. And we did our brief breakdown of it in the previous episode. One of the things that we had kind of touched on in that analysis was like, it feels like in a lot of ways, this is also a critique of collectors and not so much of the art form, though I don't really think that collectors were named so, so much in there. They were kind of just lumped into like these, like the market forces kind of aspect of it.

Speaker B: Yeah, which I maybe should have drilled in on, I should say, because I think a lot of people have like, in the wake of this, have like been wary about speaking of like, quote unquote, the market as like this big bad monster thing. The idea with that was like not to deflect blame from any party in particular, but But to actually point to everyone as being complicit. I was trying to say the market, like, everyone's a part of that rather than no one's a part of that. And I think there's this thing that happens where markets serve as what I'm calling like blame deferral devices, where everyone is complicit but can deny their complicity by just saying, no, like, these are the rules of the game. This is how you play. A lot of the backlash at me, to the extent that exists, has been people saying like, artists are just trying to make their bag, like, blame the collectors. But you can equally say like, collectors are just trying to make their bag. They have families too. They need to put bread on the table. Like, if they're flipping, that's their prerogative. And they all just exist within like the formal structures of this game that we've created. And they're playing their rational part in that game. That's why I'm trying to like call into question the structure as a whole and like the way its rules cause the parts to interrelate. When I say the market, I'm talking about the collectors, I'm talking about the artists, I'm talking about the platforms, I'm talking about the spectators, the podcasters, the think piece writers, and how we all contribute to that cycle and where we can step in. I can maybe say more on this later, but like, I don't believe in a fatalism that's just like, oh, that's the way the system is. Like, what are we supposed to do about it?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Let's buck back. Put some new ideas out there, make shit happen.

Speaker A: I would ask like, well, what are your hopes then? Because I think from our side looking, it seems like with the market slowing, we did see like a moment of like artists who kind of scrambled and they just were like, jumped to this chain and that chain and this new platform and that new platform. And I'm gonna go try this. And like, it kind of did feel like there were some who decided I'm not going to like work harder. I'm just gonna try to like chase the money as the money rotates around, which, you know, like the most recently into Ordinals and Bitcoin stuff, or like cleaving off and going, you know what, I don't do code anymore. I do AI because this AI stuff is like selling like crazy.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that's just like, it might be easier for me to make a name or reputation that way. I feel like there definitely was a subset who almost just like let the market dictate entirely like what their practice was going to be and, and weren't being very intentional about it. But then there are some who have like went the other direction and said like, okay, the market sucks. I have to be more precious about what I do. I'll take this time to really sharpen my coding skills or work on more like bigger picture, you know, like you said, like why not both? Like trying to make projects that can be generative but also have meaning to them. Not just putting out something that's pretty.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean, in these last 2 years, like, have you found a little more hope? for the space that maybe wasn't expressed in the essay?

Speaker B: I think so. Yeah. I mean, I have like a default critical brain, I think, especially when it comes to like fine art. I mean, really art in general, but like fine art is a medium where I think it's hard to like make something that really hits people. If 25% of like art pieces connect with me, like maybe 40% of songs do or something like that. Like, I feel like, like music is kind of like a more accessible medium than fine art in a certain sense. So there's always going to be like a proportion of the work that's being shared that like, I just don't really fuck with. That being said, one, I think that proportion within our space probably has gotten higher. I certainly haven't run like an analysis on that or anything. But, well, I also wanted to say that like, I don't necessarily think that the buckling down and working on one's practice and taking the like chill time to think about how to improve the art, and then the thread of people pursuing the money on Ordinals or whatever are necessarily incongruent with one another and incompatible. Like, I'm less concerned with what chain people are releasing on or anything like that. Like, if there was a blockchain that had zero financial traffic on it, and one that had a ton, and you could create the same project on either and make zero money or a ton of money, then yeah, go for the one that's going to make you money. Where I begin to take issue with it is when it actually changes the nature of the work. And That's like what I felt has happened to some extent with generative art, or it has led to like the cheapening of certain kinds of work. But I think, yeah, we're maturing. It's, it's an early space. And there's an extent to which both the collectors and the artists in this realm, myself included, are a little bit ahistorical. Like we don't come in here with MFAs and shit, which is super cool because it means like, I don't know, we don't have this haughty art world vibe and like we can think through new ideas and really come from like a new perspective. But at the same time, like that has ended up with a lot of retreads of shit. Like having that exposure to art history does help you like build an intuition for like the trajectory of art history. And that will also help you better understand like what's going to be important years from now. Like, you develop taste through studying art history, or a better, like, connection with your own intuitions and a better ability to execute on those intuitions. And I think we're largely still developing that. I learn art history as much as I can. I spend a lot of time reading books around that stuff and studying old projects, but like, I didn't go to art school. I don't have an MFA. Like, Yeah. I'm working on it and everyone else is too. And so I think that will come with time, hopefully. Yeah, we're better now there than we were 2 years ago. But I do think, yeah, a lot of the stuff that was getting put out was like p5.js tutorial level or like things that have just been going on in like the generative art Instagram scene for the last 10 years or something. And now money could be made off of it, or it was reminiscent of '60s, '70s computer art, or like '30s and '40s geometric abstraction shit. There was a good bit of ground that was retread on account of like not really understanding the history that was there, or only like having like a slight knowledge of it and thinking that what you were doing hadn't been beaten to death or something like that.

Speaker A: Hmm.

Speaker B: But I think we're growing and improving on that front. And the hope with the essay partially is that like people are I don't want to say like I'm trying to scare people, but I do want there to feel like there's kind of this bar that's being held for people. Like, I want people to be able to create freely and share that freely, but I also think it will be better for all of us in the end if the stuff that we are rewarding financially, and that's like what we're legitimizing, what we're communicating with the rest of the world, is important to the space, is like the really high quality stuff that is going to last. Because there are things in art that like are more quality than others and are going to hold up better to the test of time. And I hope that like the essay can help kind of catalyze people to feel held to a standard in rewarding those sorts of things.

Speaker A: You know, listening to that, right, like, and maybe to make the music analogy, you know, I think we're about the same age. Like, there's a lot of bands that like we grew up with and probably really liked, and then when you start digging back into older stuff like '60s, '70s, '80s, and you're like, oh wow. Like, like to do an example, like—

Speaker B: Yeah, give me one.

Speaker A: LCD Soundsystem, you know, right? Like a huge band, you know, whether you like them or not, like undeniably like a big band for people who matured in the 2000s.

Speaker B: Yeah, I never grew up on them somehow, despite like a pretty thorough rock education. They're like a handful of their songs that I like, and I think one of the members has like a bunch of bars near my apartment or something Oh, maybe. Sorry, carry on.

Speaker A: For example, like, oh, like it was what, maybe like 8 or so years ago. And I somehow came onto a band called The Fall and I was like, oh, this is like so much of the song structure and the way he's delivering. And in one way it's like, it takes away from the specialness of that thing that you like. 'Cause you're like, oh, is this like, is this like an homage or is this like ripping it off? Or is this just like a really, really great influence that has now been updated with like electronics and a new way of performing and a new audience? And so now I'd like to turn that into a a question for you and kind of your critique, like, for your own self. How do you differentiate, you know, since you do have— for many of us collectors don't have this art history background, which is why I think we were so easily taken in by things that just looked like great abstract geometry. And maybe taken in is not the right word, right? Because I— there is some, like, abstract stuff that I'm sure you do like.

Speaker B: Totally. Let me clarify that briefly because this was misconstrued by some. I love a lot of abstract shit. The geometric abstraction with Like certain stuff just like really stood out as similar to things that came before. And, and so wanted to talk on that, but like, I think abstraction can move us in ways that figurative stuff cannot and that it's important and cool. And I've said Yves Klein is one of my favorite artists and his maybe most famous works are just walls of blue.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: Basically they're, they're these canvases just painted in this shade of blue that he patented. But like, what he was doing with them was trying to create a spiritual object that absorbs the viewer. And he had this kind of ironic bent, but I also think he meant it. And he's a really fascinating figure for anyone who isn't familiar with him. Like, I'd look him up and do a little digging. He like died super young. He predicted his own death. He really did have like this spiritual element going on there. And He's like funny and witty, but reverent and yeah, worth a check. But that's some abstraction that I love. I'm working on abstract work right now myself with AI. Sorry. Anyways, back to your question. I just wanted to—

Speaker A: I want to just ask for people, 'cause I, you know, there's collectors who listen who, and again, not, not for you to prescribe anything, but for your own personal taste, how do you discern then? And like, when you see something that has obvious, like historical reference points, I guess, how do you decide like, yeah, this is original even though it is not new? Do you know what I mean?

Speaker B: Like— Yeah, totally. I read the description first. Hopefully like the work says something to me before I read the description. I think another point where people are misreading me or I'm miscommunicating is me saying that like I want super heavy conceptual works that like don't just move you or make you feel something. And it's like, quite the opposite. This is like a counter-Duchamp gambit where he— and I, I may have just left this in a footnote, and a lot of people don't read the footnotes. I want everyone to know I write my footnotes to like be read, and like to me, in some sense, the essay isn't complete without the footnotes. I understand that the nature of a footnote begs to differ, but they're down there because they don't fit within the flow of the essay, but they're like almost equally as informative to the point I'm trying to make. Duchamp talked about like the retinal versus the conceptual, and he felt that in his time, the art had erred too far toward the retinal, i.e., like visual art that merely like visually delights people and doesn't have real meaning behind it. And so he went to this like polar opposite realm where he did like the most abstractly conceptual stuff possible. He called a urinal a work of art and he changed like 20th century art largely on account of that. I think his intention actually was to like try and get the world to land somewhere in the middle. I'm not sure he realized just how big of an impact those gestures would make, at least in, in early points of his life from my reading. Like he wanted to find a balance between the two and I want to find like this what I call consummate art that like marries those 2 things, the retinal and the conceptual, and like hits you in the face when you see it is beautiful. So like back to answering your question, yeah, I look at the work to start. I try to keep an open mind and be curious about it. I try to keep like, I don't know, for lack of a better word, like an open heart, like allowing myself to be receptive to like the emotional impact of a work or whatever it's trying to say from the get-go. And when I say say, I don't I don't mean like purely in a linguistic sense, but just like, what is it trying to do to me? I then read the description and you mention references to art history. I think I can usually tell when people are like referencing other artists because those were like inspirational threads that contributed here, but that like those threads are weaving together in a novel pattern that's creating something truly new versus either just following the same thread and not really contributing anything of their own. Or I think this is like common enough in art also, just like in argument, but I call it like persuasion by reference, where you try and like make people think either your argument is good or your artwork is good by saying like, calling in the big names basically.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And saying like, oh, this is like in the style of Mondrian with a touch of Kandinsky. Or something like that. And, you know, that kind of like wows people to the ahistorical of our bunch, like people who don't know the history as well, to like see references to that history. Like that helps them feel like they're getting on the inside with that when it may just totally be a shallow reference to that history. I think people similarly, like from my philosophy background, like I really came to detest this, like people invoking Descartes to make their argument Or invoking Kant or whatever, or Wittgenstein if they really wanna sound smart. And it's like, no, just make your argument like from the principles. Like, don't talk about what this dude a few hundred years ago said about it. It's so often used as a crutch and a way of like trying to talk others out of the room to show that you have all of these references and you can speak to your reading of the primary text and shit like that. And yeah, I think it's generally just like a weakness of the argument itself, where it lacks like a grounding in first principles and they're instead just like building off of someone else. And I value philosophy for the exercise in working from foundations upward and building a cogent system from there. And I think similarly in art, like you should have an idea that is like valuable in and of itself. And again, when I say idea, like that may just mean like an emotional impression or something like that. I'm using that fairly liberally here, but I don't have a rubric or anything like that. Yeah, I mean, I, I used references in my latest, the AI performance thing that I have ongoing right now called The Artist Is Absent. The title right there at the face of it is a reference to Marina Abramović, who, who has a performance piece called The Artist Is Present.

Speaker A: The idea.

Speaker B: In the first place had nothing to do with Marina. It had nothing to do with Tehching Hsieh, and it had nothing to do with Yves Klein. But those are all people who I like felt it had some resonance with. And so I kind of wanted to pay homage to them. Like it's a 1-year-long durational performance and Tehching Hsieh did a lot of that throughout his performance.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He did the punch cards. He lived in a cage for a year. He, at some point, stopped making art altogether for 13 years and like called that a 13-year art performance. Yeah, I can talk more about the nature of that work later if we want, but it has like something of a spiritual dimension to it and like a humor and a bombastic nature. And so there, the Klein reference. And that's— yeah, I was almost referencing those. I don't reference them in the work itself. I referenced it in like the tweet. Obviously Marina is referenced in the work, but— I just thought a really great cheeky pun there that I couldn't resist. But I partially, yeah, referenced those things in the tweet because it's like, these are artists who I really love and I'd love to see more people in our realm discover them. And they're not like artists who we typically tend to draw on in the digital art world so much. So I just wanted those names to be put out there.

Speaker A: We'll do your upcoming work towards the end, but I wanted to ask you one more thing before we get there. You know, also on your Substack, you recently wrote a piece about MangleCore, and I thought it was almost kind of like— I'm like not really big into AI art at all.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: In particular, the MangleCore stuff. Well, no, I— it's not so much that. Um, the reason I'm bringing it up is because I felt like a lot of what you said in your piece about generative art could just as easily be applied to MangleCore right now. It's like the AI du jour. Like, a lot of people are making it. It's selling far better than any generative art right now.

Speaker B: Which is still way, way less than it was in 2021. Still way low.

Speaker A: Like, yeah, like, if this is its 2021 moment, then that's nowhere near what it was, right? I just want to, like, invite you to talk a little bit about, do you feel like AI art or this particular genre is, like, more insulated from some of those issues that you've pointed out here? Of— because, like, From my perspective, it's like, okay, we've got MangleCore on the beach, we've got MangleCore in the town, we got MangleCore in the car. And I'm just like, I— there's nothing to me. And I, and I know this will like offend a lot of people, but like, to me it does kind of feel kind of empty in a lot of ways.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Because it's just like the machine made it look weird, and then a lot of people are prescribing value to it because it's like there's an extra finger or there's an extra eye and Like, okay, so what? So what? Tell me, Kevin, like, what, what are you liking about it? And what, what do you feel is so promising about it? And are you afraid of it kind of becoming overdone? So like, because it can be infinitely made just like generative art, right? It is a discipline of generative art, I guess, in some ways.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Depending on how we're scoping that term, which for the sake of the essay, I drilled in on a very specific meaning of long-form algorithmic generative crypto art. But yeah, that term is kind of a contentious matter that people are wrestling with as we speak. Okay, so first, just like for those who don't know, MangleCore is a term I've used to talk about this genre of art within AI that is, at least in its history, like a byproduct of the shortcomings of AI models and the way they toss out all of Especially early on with like DALL-E 2 and early versions of Stable Diffusion, like when they're doing human figures or like animal figures, they produce things that have these really distorted forms. As you said, extra fingers, toes, fucked up faces. Like there's this mangled, distorted look to the human figure. I wrote this essay about it back in February. I would say even since then, yes, like the market has kind of changed substantially, I think. March through May, we saw a lot of projects released under this umbrella. As with most art forms, I still don't like most of it. Also, yeah, not, not all AI art is Manglecore, and AI art more broadly is kind of having a moment that, that holds true for some Manglecore stuff as well. But like, I don't know, my favorite, what I would call Manglecore piece released this year was Thomas Noya's Total Recall, which you guys mentioned. Yes, in the last episode.

Speaker A: And we've mentioned it a lot. I mean, because that one has a great story to it, and that's one where I saw it and I guess just with my own, um, and you know, we've done a project with Thomas, like he's a friend of the show and he's been on the show. But yeah, like that one, I could see what he's trying to do with it and the things he was trying to comment on with it. Whereas for some others, it just feels like it's just being weird for the sake of being weird, and people are really like losing their minds over it.

Speaker B: Yeah. What do you get from Thomas's piece? What do you like about it?

Speaker A: From Thomas's piece, I really thought that he captured the voyeurism that comes with celebrity and being the subject of like your images constantly being captured. I think it was also interesting that he used, you know, the fact that probably this model has so many images of this particular celebrity like Tom Cruise in it that he was able to create something that was like so accurate and yeah, But also like the models are really not supposed to let you do that. Right. And so like that kind of is like testing the boundaries of the models to an extent and pushing them to do things they're not supposed to do. But in this case, it was like getting that almost like one-to-one pristine resemblance of him.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And also like just the choice to like go nude or near nude with it, I thought was really interesting.

Speaker B: I think it's also just like a funny project.

Speaker A: Like, well, it was also very funny.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think he, I think it started that way, but it's also like interesting on a lot of levels that even though it's not as like, um, maybe as like on its face beautiful as some of the other stuff that has been made. Well, I mean, I guess in like the wider AI landscape too, to me, I just like immediately hit on a couple things where I was like, okay, I see what he's trying to do here.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And I can see intention to it. Whereas like for some other things, I don't see as much intention or it's not as evident to me.

Speaker B: Well, I think the nudity and the choice of Tom Cruise both feed into, for me, this sense of like vainglory and fame. And Tom Cruise just feels like the apotheosis of like the self-indulgent, vain celebrity to me in many ways. And yet there's like also this thing about like the way like his face and his body are like ever-present and there's this voyeurism. And like nothing is hidden to us, the audience. I thought Thomas like captured that perfectly. And I'd say like, he's some of my favorite, if not my favorite among like this body of work. And that's because where I think Manglecore escapes a lot of the trappings of the critique I made of generative art, not that it's not having like its own market moment and that people aren't like buying stuff that's overproduced and dumb, it has the convenience starting point that I think the formal constraints of what I mean by this genre are already saying something human that like matters to us. Like we see our bodies re-represented in this distorted and striking way. And that like right off the bat kind of says something to us. It speaks to feelings of alienation and surreality and the strangeness of contemporary life, I think, in a very like natural way where that is like the immediate just tone of a Manglecore work. I think those are things that are just like very appropriate to this moment. Like the world just feels so fucking weird right now.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: We live in this hypermedia environment where like disparate bits of information are colliding on our timelines and everything is like coming together and yet apart at the same time. And like none of it makes sense, yet it's all like one thing. And I feel like the distortion of the human form is a good way to approach that kind of subject matter. But it's also, yeah, like more of a niche than generative art, I would say. Like after a certain number of projects, like the genre is dried up. Only so many projects can do that distorted human body as a result of AI model error, I think, is like a narrower genre than is like algorithmically created art. And so I think there's just like less leeway until the well has dried up. And so that's maybe started to happen in some pockets, but I think there's work that still has yet to be done that's good. Not really going to be my place to create this work, but I think stuff focusing on— And I think I saw collection recently that did this, but like minority experience and like people of different sexualities and things like that, and the way they feel like representation of like the realities of trans life and things like that, and, and the way that like people feel alienated from the rest of our society, I think can be very naturally represented through this art form. And I'd like to see that. But a lot of the stuff that's just like throwing it on there because it like makes shit look cool and hardcore, like I think is a waste of what the genre can naturally do. So there's that. It has this kind of like natural propensity to say something meaningful about this moment in particular, I think. And that's a product of its specificity. So the specificity here is like both a strength and a weakness in that like there's only so much that can be done with it, but it like says something more specific and pointed from the get-go, I think. It can't be created in quite the same way that algorithmic art can. With algorithmic art, like, you create your algorithm and yes, you're working to create that such that it can produce a diversity of works. But once the algorithm is created, like, you can press render ad infinitum and just make infinitely many works.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: It doesn't quite work out the same way with AI works, even though it has a similar, this generative nature where like you can click to create. All of these works from Thomas's collection, and basically any collection you're going to see, were handcrafted and require a lot of work to be done, like beyond the prompt, beyond whatever control nets they're introducing to structure the work, anything like that. Like, this is still very much a hand-created piece, and with some literacy in how these works are made, you can feel that. And, you know, that shows in the collection sizes. We're for the most part, not having anything that like touches the sizes of the 1,000, 10,000, anything like that. We have seen some that have maybe pushed a little too high up, and I think they should be maybe more wary of that. But yeah, a lot of the stuff out there is like wasting— that I've seen, I think since I wrote the article, has like wasted some of the natural capacities of it and doesn't really like use the unique characteristics of the genre to like actually do something cool and meaningful, or it's just kind of like, oh yeah, like distorted forms look cool. And what you said, like MangleCore cars, MangleCore streets, like, yeah, I think that's like kind of a trope that we've seen with it. So in some ways I think it encounters many of the same risks. In others, like, I think it escapes those. It's a different thing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I certainly didn't mean to like write on it and expect it to be like a thing with like a multi-year lifespan. I think generative art does have a multi-year, multi-decade lifespan. Like, I think we're going to see good generative art made for decades to come from here. I think MangleCore is like much more of this moment. It like won't really make sense, I don't think, to make 10 years from now. It has its natural roots in technological shortcomings circa 2022.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And even though, you know, like Thomas's work isn't so much the product of like, you know, he could make perfect Tom Cruises if he wanted to. This is a deliberate decision, but the idea began there. And I think, yeah, it has probably like a few years to build off of those ideas and work with those themes. But 10 years from now, like if a lot of this stuff's being made, I don't know why we'd really be paying attention to it at that point. It just doesn't seem tie reasonably to its historical roots. Feelings of alienation and dehumanization probably aren't going anywhere anytime soon, but we'll probably have like an expanded visual vocabulary to express those themes. I'm sure like this distorted figure thing like isn't going to disappear altogether and like can be used impactfully. I think there's like a very natural emotional response to seeing that. But I think it as like an ascendant genre will not be the case in several years or something like that.

Speaker A: Well, what are you going to do if your artist LLM just starts cranking out Manglecore because you talked about it on this podcast or it's because of your, you know, your Substack? So let's talk about a little, let's talk a little bit about this. Like, so you announced this project, which we already mentioned, the artist is absent. You just put a very nice typed letter JPEG up on Twitter. You're training an LLM on your writing and concepts of your art pieces. And once the model can credibly produce in a manner that is virtually indistinguishable of your own voice and vision, you're gonna hand over all production of your work to the model for a year. Yeah. So how do you even start doing this?

Speaker B: I mean, it starts with the idea, and I don't want to say too, too much about where I'm at with the process or anything like I sort of, because I'm, I'm considering the idea of not telling anyone when the period is taking place.

Speaker A: Have we already started? Is the letter mark the beginning?

Speaker B: That's, yeah, that's, I don't know. That's the question, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Was Generative Anesthetics written by my personal LLM? I don't know. I, I do know, but I'm going to abide in that mystery for the time being and we'll maybe say more on it. So the process, yeah, like just in terms of technical matters, it involves fine-tuning LLMs on my writing, which is a difficult task. It involves fine-tuning them on my concepts. I have a just fat document of art ideas in my iPhone Notes app that is just like thousands of ideas I've had for pieces, collections, performances, whatever. And training it on how to produce those ideas. So the initial declaration of this thing was like really just that. I was just kind of trying to let the world know, like, I'm setting out on this endeavor and sort of wanted to mark the conceptual territory and like spark thinking and discussion on that front. Because the reason I'm doing this is we are in the next several years going to be reckoning with the loss of a lot of what feels like is special to us on account of AI. There's going to be jobs lost. People's passions are going to be surpassed by AI, like things that you do for fun, like AI will be able to do better things that you do in your personal life that are laborious chores. AI will be able to do better a lot of the things that we thought were uniquely and creatively us, because that's what it started to whittle down to. Like at first we thought, you know, oh, AI could never beat us in chess. Well, that happened in the '90s. AI could never beat us in Jeopardy. That was like 2011 or something like that. Then like, okay, like it can't paint. Well, bad news. These diffusion models can generate images. We both know the people at Matter Labs, I believe, who have machines that can paint oil on canvas. Like, Yeah. It's starting to do damn near everything we can do, and it's getting pretty close to being able to not exactly think for us, but think in place of us. And that's really scary and gonna be really, really hard for some, for many. And I want to try and confront that reality before we're out there adrift in it so that we have some chance to prepare and consider how to cope with it. I've already met people who have lost their jobs to ChatGPT, GPT-4. I mean, a lot of the resistance to AI art is just that people feel there's a lack of craft around it, and that's understandable. But a lot of people are like threatened by it and graphic designers are threatened by it and they're like, no, we need protective laws in place to keep this from coming for our jobs. Like there's unrest and angst over this and I want to like have myself serve as like the vanguard of us approaching the matter and try and like confront it. And my writing really matters to me. My art really matters to me. And so turning over those things to AI is a real loss to me. And a year like that terrifies me. It remains publicly to be seen whether I will be able to do that, but Yeah, I think they're themes that we need to confront. There's this idea that I've been thinking about a bit recently of conspicuous absence. I tweeted about this piggybacking off of The Artist Is Absent, but Lily Iloh's collection earlier this year, Plans for Future Forms, like the one that I wrote about, renders absence as a kind of presence. She takes these AI-generated images of figures in chairs, human figures in chairs, And then also with AI, erases them from the image. And we're left behind with this like somewhat uncannily distorted figure of a chair where like you can kind of see the imprint of the thing that was there. And some of them you can see the shadow of the figure that once sat in the chair. And that itself, you know, her collection is meditating on what we're losing to AI, as well as some, the prospect of some personal losses in her life as her father, who himself was an artist and architect, as he ages. And then similarly, the work of this painter Titus Kaphar, who has done some paintings that have— like, one of my favorites from him is like these Black mothers braiding their daughter's hair, and then like one of the daughters is just excised from the painting and there's just like a white space left behind.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And that was just like really poignant to me. And so these 2 pieces are like this conspicuous absence as a mirror to Marina Abramović's conspicuous presence of the artist, where like the artwork was her presence. She just sat with these people at the MoMA. For those who haven't seen that, definitely worth looking up. There's one, a documentary about it, but 2, also a little YouTube video that's pretty touching because it involves her former lover of many years who she had like this insane insanely romantic yet tumultuous connection with, and who was her partner in art, Ulay. He showed up and yeah, it's pretty moving. I'd check it out.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: But yeah, anyways, the project was just trying to like sit with this theme of an absence that's really gonna make itself known to us in the years to come. And we're gonna need to figure out some way to like grapple with the significant changes that it's gonna make to our society. And I think for me, and I hope for a lot of other people, part of that is going to be learning to fall in love with certain elements of our lives per se. If AI is coming for the things that make us useful, we might need to like reconsider whether we need to feel useful to survive. Because right now, like, yeah, feeling useful and productive to society gives a lot of people meaning. It gives me a lot of meaning. Like, I feel— Yeah. Valuable and valued on account of like being able to contribute to others' lives. And that's true for so many. And AI is going to undermine a lot of it. Like what makes me useful if AI could do the same thing instantaneously, twice as good, and in my voice, no less. Like if an LLM can, can write what I want to write in my voice 10 times as fast as I can, then I'm cooked on a pragmatic front. And it will be increasingly important to figure out what we truly love and love doing for its own sake and figuring out how to like structure our lives around those things and, and become enmeshed with them and live with them. I think writing is one of those things for me where I like the feeling of, as much as I also hate it, I love the feeling of like wrestling with these things in my brain and figuring them out for myself. And so even if my LLM can write pieces better than I can write them. I think I'm still going to want to write the things that are on my mind for the exercise of doing so. And I think we're gonna be looking at how to like approach that question across our lives in many different ways in the next decade or so. And yeah, so that was just like an initial kind of flagpost for this endeavor. That's why it was just like this simple form of a letter. It has like, it's in a typewriter font. It has some like antiquated feel to it and has like this kind of old-timey human feel and yet is pointing to these like unknown futures. But there will be more public works to come spawning from that project. I'm not going to be talking about them yet, but I will be releasing things that are secondary or like building on the prospect of The Artist Is Absent. And I don't have a timeline yet on when I want to release those. I have some other stuff coming out, coming up, and that has nothing to do with that project.

Speaker A: Well, assuming you do pull it off and you have a year off from truly creating, you can join us in Hearthstone. We can make a gamer out of you, you know.

Speaker B: Are you a Hearthstone guy?

Speaker A: Oh yeah, we talk about it at the end of every episode these days.

Speaker B: Okay. I don't think I've ever played, but my cousin was into it a few years ago. He's a, he's a gamer guy, and so I've watched him play, and I remember some creature called like the something that reminded me like of the Stranger Things monster, like the— oh, the Demogorgon or whatever, something like that.

Speaker A: There's like some Cthulhu-looking stuff from one of the sets from a while ago.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So it's probably one of those.

Speaker B: Yeah, I— dude, honestly, yeah, I really miss video games. I was a big gamer as a kid.

Speaker A: Did you play Magic: The Gathering?

Speaker B: Uh, yes. Yeah, more so. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's been a minute. Yeah, I mean, I was like 7 when I was playing that, so I really don't like— I think my, my parents ended up like telling us to stop playing because it was like some heathen shit.

Speaker A: Satanic.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, I don't think they actually did stop us from playing, but they're like, uh, yo, that's kind of sus. And yeah, but I never like played it seriously or anything like that. I think my older brother maybe did a little more of that. But yeah, into some of that, like Pokémon as a kid, Yu-Gi-Oh for sure. But then like the video games, I had like a big COD era. I was a RuneScape kid for a little while. I, I like—

Speaker A: Awesome.

Speaker B: Wanted to play in Call of Duty tournaments, actually. I was like playing somewhat competitively, and I, I feel like I was always told like, okay, these are like wasted hours, like you're gonna regret doing that. I'm like, know, I cherish the days like summer 2011 that I would play Black Ops, or maybe that was 2012, for, you know, 3 hours a day. Like, uh, yeah, I like, I like look fondly upon those times, like being on game battles with friends and getting to spend more time with them. And like, there was a real feeling of, yeah, like craft and learning how to like develop a skill that I value from that. I don't know, I'm not sure I'll ever return to like a true video game era. I had like a, a brief return with Rocket League at some point, but I'll play some Hearthstone with you.

Speaker A: We'll see.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Yeah, we'll get, we'll get you on.

Speaker B: Try and suck me in.

Speaker A: We'll train you up and that's how we'll know that, that the LLM's fully taken over.

Speaker B: Yeah. When I say yes to that, that means I've, I've had some free time to go and pursue those things.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: It'll be my little signal to you.

Speaker A: All right. Well, Kevin, I think we should wrap it up. I know we're, we're at time here. Thank you again for coming on. Hope you had a good time. We'll link to all your stuff. you know, all your work and your writing below for anyone who wants to learn more about you and read some of this stuff and consider collecting. And, uh, thank you. Yeah, we look forward to seeing what you do next.

Speaker B: Appreciate it. Great chat. Yeah, the time kind of flew here.

Speaker A: It does, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, I appreciate all the questions allowing me to talk my talk, clarify where I felt I needed clarifying. Good chatting with you.

Speaker A: I'll see you soon.

Speaker B: All right, thanks, Kevin.

Speaker A: Bye.

Speaker B: All right, peace. We're waiting to be signed. Always listen. We're waiting to be signed. The random of the week. It be time.

Speaker A: We're waiting.

Speaker B: Always.