Spot an error? Highlight the words or lines you want to fix — an “edit” button appears, and the panel opens with your selection ready to edit.
Will: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode. We're sitting today with Kjetil Golid — that's my best attempt at the pronunciation, and I'm always on the hook to try to get other people's names right on the show. We're here to talk about his upcoming release on Verse called Monument. Of course we're also going to get into your history — I think we'll talk about Archetype, that's unavoidable. Trinity's here as well. Trinity, how's it going?
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Trinity: Hey there, so good to have you on for this conversation.
Kjetil Golid: Hi, thanks for having me.
Will: Kjetil, can you help us out with the pronunciation for the listeners? Everyone tends to say your name differently.
Kjetil Golid: Sure. My name is Kjetil Golid — it's a very Norwegian name, not very common outside of Norway.
Will: Great, now it's on the record, everyone knows, no excuses moving forward.
Trinity: At least a few hundred people know.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Will: We're really excited to have you on. You're an artist who's been around for a long time prior to NFTs, making work open source, and you're super well known for being an early Art Blocks curated artist with Archetype. We're excited for your upcoming Verse release, but before we get into all of that, can you introduce yourself to our audience — your background in art and coding, and how you came to discover the blockchain and use NFTs to release your work?
Kjetil Golid: I actually started my education in graphic design. After high school, I went to Singapore to study it for a year, and Processing was recommended to me at that point — this was back in 2011. It didn't really click with me then, since this was before I knew how to code, but I really enjoyed the aesthetic of many artists using Processing — Casey Reas is an obvious one there. After that year I started studying cognitive science in Norway, which later evolved into computer science for me. Processing was still in the back of my mind, and when I took my first courses in Java at university, it became a great learning tool for me: when I learned a concept in class, I could use it in Processing and make something visual out of it to understand it better. If I were learning about for loops, I could make something that created a whole bunch of particles, which was very helpful.
From there it was a short road to more fun stuff — introducing randomness, introducing weird things that broke the original algorithm but still made for a complex expression. I usually say I've done generative art for as long as I've done coding, because the two have gone hand in hand for me — mostly as a hobby, though, until about two years ago when I started doing this full-time. But that's jumping ahead a bit. That's roughly the start of how I got into art and programming.
Will: I'll steal an old question Trinity used to ask: were you artistic as a kid? Does the generative art stem from an art practice you had when you were younger, or something you pursued in parallel at university?
Kjetil Golid: I don't know about "art," but I was creative. I liked to draw — I filled all my notebooks with drawings, and I enjoyed design and using Photoshop. After high school it was always clear to me I wanted to do something design-related, though I quickly turned around on that. But yeah, I've always had a creative part of me.
Trinity: Good, we'll put that clearly on the record — you were interested in art as a kid. I wasn't big into drawing or coloring or Photoshop myself, and I think many artists assume that's the standard background, since it's such a core, lived experience. Annika Meyer recently posted on Twitter that it seems like all generative artists — everybody in this space — used to have books upon books of sketches. It really does seem to be a common thread.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Kjetil Golid: We have a common origin story.
Will: How did you end up discovering the blockchain and NFTs? A lot of the work you released prior, that's up on your website, was open source tools — open algorithms for people to explore. So what brought you to crypto and NFTs, and how did you start releasing your work that way?
Kjetil Golid: It's not entirely clear to me how it all started, but I began posting my work on Twitter and Instagram pretty early and got a small following quickly. At some point someone approached me and pitched the idea of NFTs, and I didn't really make much of it then. I got sent some links about contract types, tried to buy a CryptoKitty — this was probably 2017. I also got offers to supply code for some of these generative pieces so they could be framed and turned into NFTs on a platform — that was actually a precursor to the Paper Armada algorithm. I don't think the platform ever became anything.
Paper Armada — Kjetil Golid
I think I'd also misunderstood the concept a bit, because I knew that algorithm could technically produce duplicates, and I thought it would be a big problem if two different hashes produced the same output. So I didn't want to hand that algorithm over without fixing that first. Nothing came of it, but it planted NFTs in my mind.
A bit later, at the end of 2018, I got approached by the people at KnownOrigin, who asked if I wanted to mint some NFTs on their platform. I thought, why not — I wasn't doing anything commercial at that point, just some posters I'd given to friends that a few people wanted to buy. So I put up some 1-of-1s and some 5-of-5 editions. I think Artnome was the only buyer at that point, but that was enough — he bought all my stuff, and I felt good about that. I only released sporadically after that, uploading a bit more to KnownOrigin and later Super Rare.
Then Kate Vass — really, Jason Bailey of Artnome, on behalf of Kate Vass — approached me about an exhibition she was hosting on cellular automata. I used my algorithm Crosshatch Automata and minted some new NFTs on Super Rare, which got quite a bit of attention. So I had something of a name within NFTs at that point, but it wasn't until Art Blocks and the Archetype algorithm that really made my name.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Trinity: I'd love to discuss the evolution of your style. The first works you put on KnownOrigin, if I'm seeing this right, were the Curvescape series —
Kjetil Golid: Yeah.
Trinity: — which is very different from where your style has evolved since. Could you talk about Curvescape and that earlier work, and how you moved toward this bold, geometric style you've carried ever since?
Will: The cuboids.
Kjetil Golid: At the time I was minting my first NFTs, I was doing a bit of everything within generative art — exploring a different algorithm every time, making L-systems, trying reaction-diffusion, particle systems, whatever. It was an exploratory phase for sure. Curvescape was probably the piece I was happiest with — it stood the test of looking great even if you didn't know the story behind it, which mattered a lot to me. You shouldn't need to know a piece was generated by a computer to find it fascinating and intriguing. So that's the piece I went for initially.
Alongside that, I had these rule-based systems with very simple visualizations — basically only triangles or squares placed using simple rules in a grid. These were two extremes: the very organic Curvescape, where you don't even see lines until you zoom in and see the particles, and on the other side, these very simple, structured pieces. That polarization has stayed with me, even though I've made much more work in the cuboid vein in recent years. I still have on my bucket list to explore other avenues — but what I'm most interested in exploring has more to do with the structure behind a piece than the visualization itself.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Will: In your 2021 interview with Artnome, around when Archetype came out, you talked about creating tools and building a code library that you then explore through parameters. Is that what you mean — that conceptually, it's more about expressing the system than the output? Or, put another way: do you feel like the output is the art, or the code is the art? It sounds like you're very systems- and code-oriented, even though the outputs are obviously great.
Kjetil Golid: It's a good question, and I don't fully know — it's partly a definitional question. But I have this loose philosophy: I try to create structural complexity through visual clarity. I spend a lot of time building complex structures, and then my goal in the visualization is to convey that structure in the best possible way. That usually doesn't call for a very complex visualization, because complexity there tends to clutter the structure I want to show. That's why I've landed on this style of flat colors and hard lines, without a lot of distortion or particle effects — those things tend to hide what I actually want to show, which goes back to the structure.
But to answer directly: I still feel like the piece itself is the art. It would be nothing without the visualization. My focus is on the structure, and all the focus on the display is about showing that structure as clearly as possible.
Will: Let's get into Archetype, probably the piece you're best known for -- an early Art Blocks curated release. We're coming up on the third anniversary pretty soon; it came out in March or April 2021. I'm not sure if we do anniversaries for generative art, but it's a big accomplishment that the piece still runs through the sales feed multiple times a week. People are still crazy about collecting that series. Can you give us the story of how it first came to be, how it ended up at Art Blocks as a curated release, and then how it was followed almost immediately by Paper Armada -- I think only a month or six weeks later? What was the thinking at the time, in those early days of Art Blocks, when I feel like now they'd never let an artist release two projects so close together? And that series was something like 3,000 pieces, right?
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Kjetil Golid: Yeah, 3,000.
Will: Can you give us the backstory of that whole process with Art Blocks and how those projects came out?
Kjetil Golid:Archetype is based on a partitioning algorithm I made way back, which quickly turned into a lot of other projects exploring these cuboid-based structures I've worked with ever since. It was my latest iteration of that algorithm at the time, and I was really happy with it -- I'd made tweaks to an earlier piece called Stock that was on SuperRare, refining how the colors and shadows worked. I spent more time with the more repetitive versions of the code and felt like that was a really striking visual, so I posted a set of those on Twitter.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
I think it was Jeff Davis, co-founder of Art Blocks, who commented and said, "Have you checked out Art Blocks? Give us a call and I'll put you on the queue for curated." I checked it out and spent some time trying to understand what was going on, because it was very novel at the time. But I really clicked with the structure of it -- you buy a piece, and it mints and generates in real time, revealing a new, unexplored part of the code. I really enjoyed clicking around and playing with that. So I wanted to join, quickly edited my code to fit the whole Art Blocks NFT setup, and pretty soon after I became curated on Art Blocks. It went amazing -- I never imagined it would go as crazy as it did, with all the secondary sales happening immediately. It was absurd to see, especially since all my prior NFT experience was one-by-one -- not 600 pieces suddenly on the market and available to everyone.
It's funny you mention how soon Paper Armada followed, because it sounds so absurd now -- you'd get a lot of questions today for doing something similar. But at that point, once you became curated, you could, in theory, create as many "playground" projects as you wanted. That track wasn't curated, and it got restricted pretty soon after, but at the time, that's what people were doing.
Will: It was called Playground at the time, but they've rebranded everything on the site since.
Kjetil Golid: Right. So that's what people were doing -- generative artists didn't really have another outlet. They had a lot of projects they wanted to turn into NFTs, so why not get them out there? I had this Paper Armada set, and it was almost a coincidence that Archetype ended up being the curated one and not Paper Armada -- I was working on both in parallel and had great ideas for that set too. But it ended up being Archetype, and I released Paper Armada right after. Who knew, right? We didn't have any of the standards or unspoken rules yet about size, price, or intervals between drops. So why not try a higher number?
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
I kind of wanted it to become something like Snowfro's Chromie Squiggle -- something that didn't need to mint out immediately. It could just sit there, and I could gift pieces to people, or it could just be something people had available to mint. Same philosophy as the Squiggles at the time. And that's roughly what happened: when I released it, one or two months after Archetype, the market had dipped slightly, so it didn't mint out immediately -- it minted pretty slowly. But then a community moment happened: one collector really wanted a specific Paper Armada with certain traits and promised to trade a Fidenza to anyone who minted one with that trait.
Will: Wow.
Kjetil Golid: That skyrocketed the minting -- it sold out almost overnight. That's the story of Paper Armada.
Paper Armada — Kjetil Golid
Trinity: That's a crazy story. Three thousand minting out relatively overnight is so fast -- even in full bull-market mode that seems fast. Were these Art Blocks series your first real foray into what we now call, thanks to Tyler Hobbs, traditional long-form generative art, where you need an algorithm that can support a thousand or three thousand random outputs? What was it like transitioning from more of a curated-release pattern to a generator?
Kjetil Golid: It wasn't that foreign to me. Although I'd only released one-of-ones or small editions before, I'd already made generators that lived on my website where you could click a button and generate a new piece. So I was already in the mindset of creating algorithms that would always produce something interesting rather than 90% duds. The harder part is making it into more of a structural challenge, where you want every piece to be at least okay, hopefully good. That wasn't really the hard part with a set like Archetype -- I did some cheats in the code to avoid the most basic patterns. But as it turned out, the most basic pieces are the most loved by some collectors. So maybe just let there be complex pieces and simple pieces -- there'll be something for everyone anyway.
Will: I have to ask -- do you know if that Fidenza trade was ever actually made?
Kjetil Golid: It was, actually, and quite early, so I figured it would slow the craze down, but it didn't. I think it was already a bandwagon at that point -- a train that wasn't going to stop anyway.
Will: Thinking about long-form generative work -- between Archetype and the Decagon piece you made for DECA, which isn't quite long-form, more like an open edition since anyone who joins DECA gets one -- how do you think about traits, rarity, and scarcity in your long-form pieces? It sounds like you lean toward a bell curve, a little of everything. But do you get intentional when designing traits? With Archetype, the rare ones that show the full cube feel like such outliers -- they almost don't feel part of the same collection, until you read the description and realize every Archetype is that, just with or without the full cube visible. Can you talk about designing a piece from an artistic standpoint versus how collectors will see, understand, and interact with the features?
Decagon — Kjetil Golid
Kjetil Golid: I've changed my philosophy on traits a bit. The Decagons don't really have traits at all -- barely any internal or hidden traits I'm not showing. It's much more uniform, and that was the idea: it was meant as a kind of membership card for deca.art, so I didn't want rare or common ones. Everyone should have one that's just as good as everyone else's. But emergence happens anyway -- people find their own traits, symmetric patterns, colors they like. That happened organically. When it came to Archetype, it was a world where we didn't have any rules. We didn't know what traits were supposed to be, and we still probably don't. But I wanted to create some variance in the set. You might say that creating the cubes and the corners was a very drastic, artificial way of doing it, because it's more of a scene change—the traits are actually called scenes. But it's a very effective thing for the NFT market. If you want to make something rare, you need a trait that's very rare, but you also need that trait to be very visible so everyone knows the piece has it. If it's hidden—something like the direction of a shadow, which you don't really notice unless you study it—it would never become a successful rare trait. It needed to be visually discernible.
I think it was a good decision. The cubes are an interesting piece in themselves—maybe they should have been their own set, since visually they're so different. But I enjoy that there ended up being 10 of them, and they've taken on a life of their own since minting. There's a duality to it: would I have done that if this were a huge set made for a gallery? But why not have some rare outliers even in that context?
Where I find traits and rarity really useful is in balancing variety. Some traits don't deserve a lot of pieces because they don't offer as much variety as others. A good example: if you have a color palette that's only black and white, you probably don't want too many pieces in it, because it doesn't offer the same range as a six-color palette would. So you make that trait rarer—not to make it more sought-after or expensive, but simply because you don't want too many pieces with that color.
A more interesting example from Archetype is the order/chaos trait, which shows a very unique aspect of generative art. There were chaotic pieces, order pieces, and balanced pieces in between—and most pieces ended up balanced, with fewer order and chaos pieces. Interestingly, they're less common for two completely different reasons. Order pieces are less varied because they're simple patterns, so you exhaust the possibilities more quickly. Chaotic pieces, on the other hand, become visually uniform very fast. Technically they're all unique—there's so much going on that no two are ever identical—but zoom out and you'll struggle to tell two very chaotic pieces apart, like comparing two patches of noise: never truly equal, but indistinguishable to the eye. That's why balance was the trait I actually wanted the most of—it holds up better as a category.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Trinity: When you're looking at many of them together, the balanced ones become the most interesting—more so than a thousand ordered ones in a row. Speaking of traits, you mentioned colors already, and that's something you're really well known for: these striking color palettes you've developed and shared with people. How do you develop your colors? You've talked before about how we're in this weird, early ecosystem where nobody quite knows how to size things, price things, or make "business decisions." How do you decide what to share versus keep to yourself? And why commit to publishing your palettes and code the way you have?
Kjetil Golid: I've always had this philosophy of making my code public. When I first started, I relied a lot on existing code other people had put out—downloading it, experimenting with it, seeing where it took me, just to learn the ropes. I felt the least I could do was give back the same way and open-source my own work.
The Chromatome library started with me sampling colors from illustrations, posters, and design pieces just to have colors on hand, so I didn't need to reinvent the wheel every time I made a generative piece. It evolved into something more complex, with a structure of colors, backgrounds, stroke colors, and so on. But it's become harder for me to use it the way I used to, which I think reflects how differently I use color now. It's no longer as simple as inserting a palette into my work, because I want to integrate color more tightly with the structure itself—a flat palette becomes harder to work with. I want certain colors connected to each other and other colors connected separately, and together they form the palette. As the structure of my work gets more complex, the structure of the colors I use follows suit—maybe I don't want this border color with that fill color, or I never want a certain color used as a background. Lots of rules like that.
That's also why Chromatome is open-source but rarely updated anymore—partly laziness, but mostly that I've outgrown the current version. I should probably spend a few days restructuring it to make it flexible enough to use as a tool again. As it stands, I put so much more thought into color now that it's not much of a time-saver—I'd still end up tweaking anything from Chromatome to fit the work anyway.
Will: Your upcoming release on Verse, Monument, uses—as you've written—a very restrictive palette, essentially one set of colors for the whole piece. Can you talk about that decision, and how it plays into the piece's influences? We've seen references to high-rise buildings, brutalist architecture. Can you give us the story of conceiving this piece and arriving at this version of the algorithm and these compositions?
Kjetil Golid: Taking the colors first—this is a continuation of what I was saying about traits. When I create a set now, I want something with a more uniform, cohesive expression. Where did the idea even come from that a set needs a bunch of different color palettes? Color is so important to the work, and giving a set many different palettes definitely creates variety, but it also makes it harder to read the set as a whole, because palettes don't always mix well together—seen all together, it can be a messy experience. That approach works great for some projects, but for this one I wanted to go simpler: find one palette I liked and vary the amount of color usage instead. Some pieces are entirely colorless, and there's a gradient across the set of how much color, how many blocks, get colorized. I thought that was a better alternative to ten different palettes.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
The piece itself is based on the same underlying algorithm as Archetype, though this is a new version—a rework I'd wanted to do for a long time. I wanted to rewrite the whole Archetype code so it would work better in three dimensions, to the point where we could potentially even produce 3D models. The original Archetype algorithm was built specifically to look good from one angle; this one is much more rooted in 3D space, with a lot more possibility and flexibility.
My work has this iterative quality—I like building on earlier pieces and evolving them. I'm not trying to hide that many of my sets are based on the same underlying algorithm; they just present new ideas and applications, iterations on what came before.
As for the brutalist architecture—that was actually the initial inspiration for the Archetype algorithm in the first place. I wanted to make these tall, high-rise buildings with a lot of repetitive elements that were subtly flawed, the way real brutalist buildings are never perfectly repetitive because they're lived in by people—you'll see curtains in the windows, air conditioners, things that break the monotony. I found that really interesting and tried to recreate it here through color, which is the one part of the piece that's placed randomly. Like Archetype, Monument has some very orderly pieces where the repetition is clear—probably the ones closest to actual brutalist buildings—and more chaotic ones that read more clearly as generative pieces.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Trinity: I'll pop this into our Discord chat—my old view from where I used to live. I lived across the street from a crazy brutalist hospital building, mixed in with a nineteenth-century church and some terrible '90s brick construction—a mishmashed, ugly campus, but the brutalist part was pretty cool. Anyway, I love brutalism.
I'd love to talk about some of the other evolutions here too, because you're not just moving further into 3D space—there are other big differences in Monument. Specifically the line work: it's no longer clean, straight lines running continuously from one end of the block to the other. You're starting to see line breaks, lines that aren't always black, sometimes broken up white sections. That seems like a big evolution of the algorithm. Is there a reason behind these less clean elements—though they're still clean, just less straightforward?
Kjetil Golid: It certainly breaks up some of the monotony, and that was part of the reason. Another source of inspiration for me is the ligne claire style of comics—Hergé and the other great comic book artists and drafters. This is a bit of a nod to that: broken-up lines to indicate something. I use these breaks internally within the shape—the outline of the box itself is always whole, but the lines inside the block can be broken up. And as you said, some boxes have no outline at all, which is part of that same breaking-up—it felt almost like the color was overflowing the box, which I liked aesthetically.
You could say this goes against what I said earlier about making the structure very clear visually, but I think some variety is important too. That's the graphic design part of it, I think.
Will: I know the release details haven't been announced yet other than the date, but have you coalesced around a format? Is this going to be long form? Artist curated? Collector curated? Verse offers so many different ways to release a project like this. Without holding you to anything—we've had guests come on, say they're going to release something one way, and then change it—so this isn't a matter of record, just an open discussion. Did you consider any and all of those? What do you think are the pros and cons of releasing a project like this as long form versus curated? And if you're leaning one way, I'd love to hear it.
Kjetil Golid: It will probably be long form. I miss doing a long form piece. My latest project was curated, which is good in itself—I like generating hundreds of pieces, flipping through them, finding the things I like, and releasing those in a focused set. But this one was made with long form in mind the whole time, and that changes things. It makes it more restrictive in what you dare to do. If this were a curated piece, I'd probably use more color palettes, each emphasizing the structure of that exact piece. But here I know there will be hundreds of pieces—300, probably—that people will look at together. That's a real concern: you want enough variety that it doesn't feel like 300 identical pieces, but enough consistency that the work functions as a set and as an individual piece. That balance is hard to strike, because it's hard to make pieces look good in a set. If yours is the simplest piece, it looks even simpler next to all the complex pieces around it, and vice versa. Being part of a set intensifies whatever trait you have.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Will: Looking forward to that. I think both of us have come to embrace curated releases, which have become more of the meta during this bear market. But our roots are in long form—you get what you get, you mint, and you trust the algorithm to deliver something you like.
Trinity: It's like opening Christmas presents, or jelly beans. What flavor is this? No idea, but I'm excited.
Will: We talked a lot about Archetype, and you've obviously had a lot of success since then—you've been a full-time artist for the last two years, I think you said. A lot of your work has been iterative, continuing to play with things you're well known for: the cuboids, the color palettes you've developed. What's been the secret to staying successful in web3 for so long? Two years in web3 is a really long time, in life and in an art career. How much intentionality do you put behind thinking about your career—deciding, yes, it's the right time to do a one-of-one project, yes, it's the right time to do a long form? What advice might you have for artists out there struggling with how to keep it going for themselves?
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Kjetil Golid: I'm probably not the right person to ask—I've spent very little time worrying about that, honestly. Maybe I should have, maybe I'd have been even more successful. I was blessed with being early in the market, being at the right place at the right time, which gave me a lot of things for free. I think it's about staying relevant, engaging with your community. You could take that to the extreme, especially in web3 communities—creating rewards, whitelists, airdrops, all of that. But when I started doing this full-time, I wanted to focus on my art, to have my whole head in that space, and not really create an online persona. I find that exhausting, even though it's probably the thing that works best. Each to their own, but for me, I've tried to keep my headspace around the art completely, and hopefully that will be enough. I hope people don't feel betrayed—like they invested in me as an artist and didn't get anything back.
Will: Fair enough. Natural follow-up: do you have people around you that you outsource some of that worry to? Do you work with any gallerists, or anyone doing that emerging "manager" role for artists? And how do you think about different platforms to release on, or even different chains? I don't know how closely you follow the discussion, but with Ethereum, the marketplace has become more difficult, and a lot of artists are starting to look at Solana, at Bitcoin. Does any of that appeal to you—experimenting with an open platform like fx(hash), or something totally different like Bitcoin? Or are you focused solely on finishing a piece and then putting it wherever seems best at that time?
Kjetil Golid: I follow the discourse just to see what's out there and to catch technological aspects that might benefit me or slot well into ideas I already have. Other than that, it usually feels like chasing the next big thing, and I don't want to jump on a bandwagon just because it's new. I'd need good reasons to change my way of distributing my art. It's always interesting to see what pops up, but I'm getting older and more skeptical about these things—it's been two years now and suddenly I'm the old guy who only publishes on one chain. In principle I'm open to new chains and platforms, and I'd love to see what they offer. But I recognize this is a market where being early is usually enough to be considered valuable, and I don't want to live in a world where that's the only thing that matters. So I try to stay put until there's a good reason to switch.
Trinity: You're in that early group that really established the forefront of this modern phase of generative art.
Will: You mentioned earlier that with your early Art Blocks drops, royalties were enforced back then, and now they're not. So even though Archetype might still show up in the sales feed, you're not necessarily benefiting from that anymore. How do you feel about that erosion of royalties on Ethereum? Has it made you think about other chains, or has it just changed how you think about releasing work now—like, that's it, I'll take whatever I can get on primary, and if I get some royalties, great, but I won't plan on it?
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Kjetil Golid: It was disheartening at first, realizing it wasn't royalties anymore—more like the market treating it as a donation, which in practice turned it into nothing for us. But with some distance now, I think it was something that quickly appeared and quickly disappeared, so let's not dwell on it. It could motivate me to go to another chain if royalties were more enforced there. But it's really a question about community and culture—something about enforcing it too strictly feels wrong to me. It should be something people do because they love the work, almost like buying the artist a coffee. Flippers maybe wouldn't need to pay, because they don't have that same relationship with the artist. But it is what it is—I won't be at the forefront of fighting to bring it back in some forced way.
Trinity: You seem to sit in that middle ground between the traditional, slow-moving art world and the hyper-fast world of web3. You're clearly part of the web3 world, but what's your take on the speed at which things move, and constantly changing ecosystems and culture—bear market to bull market and everything in between? Do you consider yourself a blockchain artist, a digital artist, a code-based artist? Where do you place yourself in relation to the web3 ecosystem?
Kjetil Golid: I call myself a generative artist. I don't call myself a crypto artist or an NFT artist because I don't make use of the chain as much as many others do, so those labels wouldn't make sense for me—not because I want to hide that information, but "generative art" is simply more descriptive of what I do. Then I can mention in the next sentence that my work is available as NFTs. "Generative" has suddenly become associated with AI too, so now I probably have to say "generative artist, not AI" or something like that. As for the speed of everything, it's a stress factor—the market is constantly changing, technically and otherwise, and with the bears and bulls it's hard to keep track if you're not actively engaged. But it's also exciting to be part of and at the center of. It always presents possibilities you can choose to go after or ignore, and in that way it's much more entertaining than being in a more traditional art market.
Will: Definitely entertaining. We've been chronicling it for two years now, and every week we're entertained. Let's move into rapid fire and wrap up the episode. Worth noting—this is the third anniversary of Archetype, three-dimensional monuments, so maybe this release is kind of a celebration of that. For rapid fire, we ask some quick questions to get to know you better. One we always ask: who would you like to hear us interview on the show?
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Kjetil Golid: In the generative art scene?
Will: Could be—that would be easiest for us, since we could probably find them.
Kjetil Golid: I don't have a complete overview of who you've interviewed, but I have to shout out some of the big ones, like Marius Watz, and Norwegian artists like Anders Hoff—@inconvergent on Twitter. He was a great inspiration for me early on when I started doing generative art. He has some amazing pieces that released on fx(hash) a couple of years ago. Great artist.
Will: He stopped putting stuff on fx(hash) because he started working in a different language that wasn't web-compatible. I remember asking him about it on Twitter.
Kjetil Golid: Yeah.
Will: He'd show all these amazing works-in-progress on Twitter that never materialized into anything—he's really just making it for the fun of making it.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Kjetil Golid: Definitely. A lot of people say that about what they do, but he actually means it, because he makes it in a language that's impossible to get onto any platform.
Will: He'd be a really interesting one to talk to. Maybe we could convince him to come back to long form.
Trinity: Slumming it in JavaScript.
Will: Exactly.
Kjetil Golid: I'll definitely give you some headline comments.
Will: That's great, we always love those spicy interviews. Trinity, want to throw out another rapid fire?
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Trinity: Who are some of your favorite generative artists? Whose work do you absolutely love?
Kjetil Golid: There are a lot of names, and the biggest ones are probably also the most well-known. As I mentioned earlier, Casey Reas is really the person who got me into generative art at all. The next layer would be Tyler Hobbs and Matt DesLauriers, who have always been great at creating tutorials and tools, and have just been a great inspiration for the community, long before Art Blocks existed.
Will: Who else?
Kjetil Golid: They also tend to have names that are hard to pronounce.
Will: That's our specialty.
Kjetil Golid: I should probably not say anything about that, though.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Trinity: You can send them to us offline.
Will: So, one last one. We know Monument is coming up on Verse — let's get the date out there: February 20th, so everyone should be on the lookout for that. But what else do you have coming up this year? You mentioned there are other things you're working on, maybe outside the cuboid realm — or do you think you'll stick with that theme a little longer? Is there anything you can preview for us, get us excited about?
Kjetil Golid: I can't say much specifically. I always have a lot of things in the works — most of them don't really turn into anything — but I feel like I'm in a good place right now, creating cool things. I'll probably try to depart a bit from the cuboid scene. For years it's been an almost bottomless source of inspiration for me, but I'm drawing inspiration from a lot of other things right now — emergent behavior from elements in the world, that kind of thing. I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in creating generative behavior in new ways that aren't always just visual. I don't know where it will end up, but I have a lot of ideas, so we'll see.
Will: We'll just have to follow you on Twitter and look out for works in progress as the year progresses. Trinity, you feel good? Are we wrapped?
Trinity: I feel great. This has been another wonderful episode of Waiting to Be Signed. Thank you, Kjetil, and thank you, Will. Looking forward to everything that's coming out with Monument and everything else you might do.
Will: All right. Bye, everyone.
Archetype — Kjetil Golid
Kjetil Golid: Thanks. Bye.
Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode. We're sitting today with Kjetil Golid. That's my best attempt. I always— I'm always on the hook to try to pronounce other people's names on the show. I think I did an okay job. Uh, we're here to talk about his upcoming release on Verse called Monument. It's a verse solos, but of course we're going to get into a lot of your history with art. I think we're going to talk about Archetype. I think that's unavoidable. And Trinity's here as well. Trinity, how's it going?
Speaker B: Hey there, so good to have you on and to have this conversation.
Speaker C: Yeah, hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker A: Kjetil, can you help us out on the pronunciation here for the listeners too? Because like we were talking about before, everyone tends to say your name differently. It's got some nuance to it, and then we'll do our best for the rest of the episode.
Speaker C: Sure, yeah. So my name is Kjetil Golid. Yeah, it's a very Norwegian name, not very common outside of Norway.
Speaker A: It's great. And now it's on the record, everyone knows, there's no excuses moving forward.
Speaker B: At least a few hundred people know.
Speaker A: Yes, at least a few hundred people will know. We're really excited to have you on. You know, you're an artist who's been around for a long time prior to NFTs, making stuff open source, and obviously you're super well known for being an early Art Blocks curated artist with Archetype. We're excited for your upcoming Verse release, but before we get into all of that, can you please help to introduce yourself to our audience by telling us your background in art and coding? And how you came to discover the blockchain and use NFTs to release your work?
Speaker C: I started my education in graphic design, actually. After high school, I went to Singapore to study graphic design. I only went there for a year, but I managed to get Processing recommended to me at that point already. This was back in 2011, I think. Yeah, it didn't really click with me then because this was before I knew how to code. But I really enjoyed the aesthetic of many artists using Processing, like Casey Reas is one obvious artist there. And as I said, I only went there for a year and then I started with cognitive science in Norway that later evolved into computer science for me. And at that point, I kind of still had Processing in the back of my mind, which is Java-based. And I did my first courses in Java, the programming language, when I was University of Norway. It was a great tool for me to use as a learning tool, really. So when I learned some concepts in class, I could use those concepts in Processing and make something visual out of it to kind of understand it better. If I were to learn about for loops, I could make something that created a whole bunch of particles, for instance, and use that in a more visual way, which was very helpful for me. The road from there to creating more fun stuff was short for me. Introducing randomness, introducing weird things that kind of broke the original algorithm, but still made for a complex expression. I usually say that I have done generative art for as long as I have done coding, really, because it has gone hand in hand for me. Mostly as a hobby, though, not until 2 years ago when I actually started doing this full-time, but that is kind of jumping over some steps, I guess. But yeah, that is kind of the start of how I got into art and programming.
Speaker A: Yeah. I'm going to steal an old question that Trinity used to ask, but were you really— were you artistic as a kid? You said that ever since you started coding, you were making art, making generative art. Does that stem from like an art practice that you had when you were younger or something that you pursued in parallel in university?
Speaker C: Well, I don't know art, but I was creative. I like to draw. I have filled all my notebooks with drawings and stuff like that, and I enjoyed doing design and using Photoshop to do things. At that point, it was always clear to me that I would— I wanted to do something design-related after high school, but I quickly turned around on that though. But yeah, I had always had this kind creative part of me, I think.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker B: We'll put that clearly in, you were interested in art as a kid. I was not big into drawing or coloring or Photoshop. So, you know, I think that many artists assume that that's kind of the standard or the go-to, 'cause it's such like a core and lived experience. And I think Annika Meyer recently put on Twitter that it seems to be something that all generative artists or everybody in this space used to have like books upon books of just sketches. And so that seems to be a really strong background.
Speaker C: We have a common origin story.
Speaker A: Well, how did you end up discovering the blockchain then and NFTs? And I know a lot of the work that you released that's up on your website prior to doing NFTs, just kind of like open source tools and things for, you know, for open algorithms for people to explore. So what brought you over to crypto and NFTs and how'd you come to start releasing your work that way?
Speaker C: Yeah, it's not entirely clear to me how this all started for me, but I started quite early to post my work on Twitter and Instagram and got a small following pretty quickly. At some point, I think someone approached me and kind of introduced or pitched to me the idea of NFTs, and I didn't really make that much out of it at that point. I got sent some links where I kind of read something about the contract types and I tried to buy a CryptoKitty and stuff like that. It was at this point, probably 2017, I think. And I also actually got some offers to create some of these generative pieces where I could supply the code and they would kind of frame it and port it into an NFT generating thing that could Yeah, it was actually a precursor to the Paper Armada algorithm that they were interested in making as part of their platform. I don't think the platform became to anything. And I also, I think I had misunderstood the concept a bit, because I knew that this algorithm, technically speaking, could produce duplicates. And I thought that would be a very big problem if that would come to be that these 2 different hashes would create the same. So I didn't really want to give that algorithm away from me at that point without fixing that problem. So it never came to be anything, but that kind of made NFTs part of my mind. And yeah, a bit later at the end of 2018, I think I got approached again by the people at KnownOrigin. And they asked if I wanted to upload and mint some NFTs for them. on their platform. So yeah, I tried that. I was thinking, why not? I didn't really do anything commercial at that point. I had made some posters, given to some friends, and some people were interested in buying them, but that was kind of the level at that point. And so I thought, sure, let's put up some 1-of-1s and some 5-of-5s, I think was the edition size on the first ones. I think at that point it was only Artnome that was buying anything. I think he was the only buyer at that point, but that was enough. He was buying all my stuff and I felt good. about that. I don't think I released that much afterwards. I only like sporadically, I uploaded some more to KnownOrigin and later SuperRare. But then Kate Vass approached me a bit later, or really Artnome, Jason Bailey for Kate Vass, and then asked if I wanted to be part of an exhibition that she was hosting about cellular automatas. So I used my algorithm called Crosshatch Automata and made some new NFTs. And minted them on Super Rare. And this got quite some attention at that point. So I guess at that point I had sort of a name within NFTs, but it wasn't really until Art Blocks and the Archetype algo that really made my name, I guess.
Speaker B: I would love to just to take a moment to just kind of discuss the evolution of your style. I assume that the first works that you put up on KnownOrigin, if I'm looking at this correctly, were The Curvescape series.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker B: Which is definitely a lot more, it's very different. Let's just put it that way from what you've put elsewhere and kind of where your style has evolved. So perhaps it would be great to kind of talk about Curvescape, some of that earlier work that you were doing, and then how you stylistically evolved to have this really bold, very geometric style that you've kind of carried with you ever since.
Speaker A: The cuboids.
Speaker C: Yeah. So at the time when I was releasing or minting my first NFTs, I was doing anything, everything within generative art. I felt like I was exploring different algorithms every time and making Lindermeier systems and trying diffusion reaction and particle systems and whatnot. So it was an exploratory phase for me for sure. But yeah, I'd made everything and I was really at that point, the Curvescape was probably one of the pieces I was most happy with. And I felt like did kind of stand the test that it would look great even if you didn't really know the story behind it, because that was quite important for me that you shouldn't really need to know that this is generated by the computer in order to find it fascinating and to find it interesting and to be intrigued by the visuals. So that was kind of the pieces I went for initially to release. And the other part, so these 2 things stood out in a way. It was 2 extremities in a way. It was the very organic curvescape where you don't even see any lines until you zoom out and you zoom in and you see particles. And then on the way other side, I had these rule-based systems that had a very simple visualization, basically only triangles or only squares that were placed.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: using very simple rules in a grid system. So this polarization almost has stayed with me really, although I have made much more work within the, as you said, the cuboid part of the landscape in the last couple of years. But I still have on my bucket list to explore different venues and to do different things. It's— we can come back to this later, but what I am most interested in exploring has more to do with the structure behind and not the visualization itself necessarily.
Speaker A: Going back to like the 2021 interview that you did with Artnome, which I think was probably just before Archetype came out or just around it, a lot of the way you work, you are creating tools and experimenting with tools and just building kind of like a code library, right? That then you can explore parameters. So is that kind of what you're getting at there? Like conceptually, it's more about expressing the system of the code, or maybe, maybe this is a really roundabout way of asking, like, do you feel like the output is the art or the code is the art? The system is the art, right? When it comes to generative art. It sounds like you're very systems and like code-oriented, even though the outputs are obviously great.
Speaker C: It's a good question. I don't really know. I guess it's kind of a definition question, but I have this loose philosophy in that I try to make structural complexity through visual clarity. So I spend a lot of time making these complex structures and then My goal when I when I do the actual visualization part of it is to convey this structure in the best possible way, and that usually doesn't call for a very complex visualization because I feel that that is more that clutters the structure that I want to show or to get through to people. So that is why I have landed on this style probably of very flat colors and hard lines, and not really a lot of distortion or particle effects or of all of this. Things because I feel like those are really hiding the stuff I want to show. And the things I want to show goes all the way back to the structure. But when you ask what is the art, is it the code or is it the piece itself? I still feel like the piece itself is the art. It would have been nothing without the visualization, but it's kind of where I put my focus is on the structure. And all the focus on the displaying part is about showing the structure in the clearest and best possible way.
Speaker A: Let's maybe get into, since we're talking about structure, why don't we get into Archetype, which is probably the piece that you're best known for, it being an early Art Blocks curated release. I think we're coming up on the 3rd anniversary of that pretty soon. It came out in like March or April 2021. So I don't know if you have anything special planned. Do we do anniversaries for generative art? I'm not sure, but that's a pretty big accomplishment to see that that piece still goes through the sales feed, you know, multiple times a week. People are still crazy about collecting that series. I'm wondering if you can give us some of the story of like how that project first came to be. How did it end up at Art Blocks as a curated release? And then also it was like really quickly followed by Paper Armada, right? I think Paper Armada only came out like a week or— or not a week, like a month or 6 weeks later. So What was the thinking at the time back then in those early days of Art Blocks where I feel like now they would never have an artist release like so close together? And also that series was like 2,000-something pieces, right? The Paper Armada. So like the—
Speaker C: Yeah, 3,000.
Speaker A: The quantity there. Yeah, 3,000. So can you give us a little bit of a backstory of that, just that whole process with Art Blocks and how those projects came out?
Speaker C: Yeah. So Archetypes is based on a partitioning algorithm that I made way back, and I had some motivation for doing that, but it quickly turned into a lot of other projects which explored these cuboid-based structures that I have done ever since. I think it was my latest iteration at that time of the archetypes, that algorithm that I was really happy with. I had made some tweaks to my earlier piece that I called Stock that was on SuperRare, made some tweaks to how the colors and how the shadows worked, and I felt really happy about it. And I spent more time with the more repetitive patterns, repetitive versions of the code. And I felt like that was a really striking visual. So I posted a set of those on Twitter at that point. And I think it was Jeff Davis, the co-creator of Art Blocks, or co-founder of Art Blocks, that just commented there and just, hey, have you checked out Art Blocks? Give us a call and I will put you on the queue for curated. And I checked it out and I spent some time trying to understand what was going on there because this was very novel at the time. But I really, really clicked with the structure of it all, where you buy a piece and the piece will mint or will generate at real time, and you will see a new and unexplored part of the code generated. Something I really, really enjoyed clicking around and playing with there. So I wanted to join, and I quickly really edited my code so that it would fit the Art Blocks, the whole NFT ordeal. And pretty soon after, I don't remember exactly the timings here, but pretty soon after I became curated on Art Blocks and it went amazing. I had never really imagined that it would go as crazy as it would. And with all the secondary sales that happened immediately after, it was a very, a very absurd experience to see this, especially since all my experience with NFTs Earlier than that was very— it was one by one, right? So it wasn't 600 pieces at once suddenly being on the market and available for everyone. So very unique. So after that, yeah, it's funny when you mention it because it sounds so absurd now, right, that you would release a project so soon after the first one. And yeah, it would probably have gotten a lot of questions today if you did something similar. And But at that point, it was, the thing was that you became curated and you could have a drop. And as soon as you became curated, you were able to, I think in theory, you could create as many what was called playground projects as you basically wanted. So it wasn't curated, but it was this other track that you could freely, and this was getting restricted pretty soon after. But what people were doing at that point was really to, well, make a playground set at that point. Now I'm unsure if it's called Playground. I think it was called Playground.
Speaker A: It was at the time, but they've— yeah, it's no longer—
Speaker C: Yeah, they renamed it.
Speaker A: Yeah, everything's been rebranded on the site now.
Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So that was really what people were doing. And at that point, generative artists really didn't have this outlet, right? So they had, had a lot of projects that they really wanted to make NFTs out of. So why not just do it again, you know, and get it out there and I had this paper Armada set that it was almost a coincidence that it became the archetypes being curated and not the paper Armadas because I really had that project. I was working on that in parallel really, and I had a lot of great ideas for that set as well. But yeah, it became archetypes and then I released paper Armadas right after. And who knew, right? Like we didn't have all of these standards or these unspoken rules about what size or what price or what kind of intervals. So, so yeah, why not? I'll try with a higher number. I kind of wanted it to become something similar to Snowfro's Chromie Squiggles, which didn't really need to immediately mint out. It could just be there and I could gift them to someone if I wanted, or it could just be there so people had something to mint in a way. Sort of the same philosophy as with the Chromie Squiggles at the time. And that was kind of the case because when I released it, which was Yeah, 1 or 2 months after Archetypes, it was sort of a small dip in the market. So it didn't really mint out immediately. It was minting out pretty slowly, really. But then there was this community thing where, where one user really wanted a very certain Paper Armada with some certain traits. He was promising a Fidenza, I think, for anyone that minted Paper Armada of that, with that trait.
Speaker A: Wow.
Speaker C: So that really skyrocketed the minting suddenly, and it got minted all overnight, I think. So that was the story of the paper models at the time.
Speaker B: That is a crazy story. And also 3,000 or close to 3,000 minting out relatively overnight is so fast. Like, even in, I think, full bull market mode, that seems so fast. It's crazy. But were these series that you did with Art Blocks, was it your first real foray into to what we call now, thank you Tyler Hobbs, traditional long form, where you needed to be able to support an algorithm that could be 1,000 random outputs or 3,000 random outputs. What was it like kind of transitioning from your more of a curated release pattern to a generator?
Speaker C: It wasn't that foreign to me because although I had only released one-of-ones earlier, or just small editions. I had still made these generators that lived on my website where you could click a button and it would generate a new piece. So I was already kind of in the mindset of creating algorithms that would always generate something interesting and not have 90% duds in a way. So it wasn't that foreign to me, but this really makes it into more of a structure thing where you really want all the pieces to be okay at least, or hopefully good. That is the main challenge, I think. That wasn't the hard part, I felt like, with sets like the Archetype. I did some cheats in a way in the code to kind of avoid the most basic patterns. But seeing as how everything went, the most basic pieces are the most loved ones for some people. So, so maybe just let there be complex pieces, let there be simple pieces. And I think people There will be something for everyone anyway.
Speaker A: I have to follow up and ask, do you know if that trade was ever made for Fidenza? Did that—
Speaker C: It was, it was. Actually, it happened quite early, so I imagined that that would kind of stop the craze, but it still happened. I think it was kind of a bandwagon at that point, so it was a train that wasn't going to stop anyways. Yeah.
Speaker A: Talking about Making long-form generative. I'm actually trying to think between Archetype and I know you made the Decagon piece for DECA, which didn't really have— I mean, that's kind of like an open edition almost, right? Because anyone who joins DECA gets one of those. But for your long-form pieces that you made then and up till now, how do you think about traits? How do you think about rarity and scarcity? Like, it kind of sounds like you feel like everything should be On a, like a bell curve, the way that you described it, like let there be a little bit of everything. But do you get really intentional with that when you go in and design the Traiton things? Because I'm thinking like to archetype, right, there were some of the rare ones that showed the full cube and they feel like such outliers, right? They actually don't— to me, they actually don't even feel like they're part of that same collection though. When you read the description, understand it's actually like, yeah, that's what every archetype is, just whether or not you're seeing the full cube. Or not. So yeah, I don't know if you can kind of talk about designing a piece from an artistic standpoint versus designing a piece from a, like, how collectors will see it and understand it and like interact with the features.
Speaker C: I think I have changed my philosophy a bit with traits. You mentioned Decas, they, or Decagons, they don't have really traits at all. They don't even have very many internal or hidden traits that I just don't show. It's much more uniform and That was the idea with that. It is a special piece though, because it's— the idea initially there was that this was sort of a membership card almost to deca.art. So that was why I didn't really want that to be— I didn't want there to be rare ones or common ones, because this is a membership card and everyone should have one that is just as good as all the other ones. But then obviously some emergence happens there too. So people find their traits in a way, they find stuff that looks symmetric or they find some colors they like. So this kind of happened organically almost.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: Again, when it came to archetypes, it was in a world where we didn't, we didn't have any rules. We didn't have— we didn't know what traits were supposed to be, and we still probably don't. But I wanted to create some variance to the set. You might say that creating the cubes and the corners was a very drastic way of creating variance, in a way, a very artificial way of doing it, because it's, it's more of a scene change. And the traits are also called the scenes. But it's a very effective thing for the NFT market. Because if you want to make something very rare in the NFT market, you need to make something, a trait very rare, but you also need to make that trait very visible so that everyone knows that this thing has its trait. If it's a very hidden one, if it's sort of another trait where the direction of the shadow or something like that, which you don't really see unless you study it, it wouldn't have become a very successful rare trait, you know, so. It needed to be something visually discernible. I think it was good though. The cubes are a very interesting piece in itself. It should have maybe been a set in itself because it, as you say, it's a very different visual. But I enjoy that it became 10 cubes and they really have gotten a life of their own after they got minted. So yeah, I enjoy the decision now. But as you say, it's this duality almost like, would I have done that if this was a huge set created for a gallery or something like that. But yeah, I think why not, right? Why not have some rare pieces in a way, or some outliers when you create a large piece for a gallery? The way I really find traits to be very useful, and also rarity to be very useful, is that some traits don't really deserve a lot of pieces because it doesn't create the variety some other traits might. So that is a way of kind of balancing this because it's— so a good example is probably if you have a color palette which is only black and white, well, maybe you don't want that many pieces that are black and white because it doesn't really offer the same variety that a palette of 6 colors would. So then you make this trait rarer, not because you want that trait to be rare and to be sought after and higher priced, but just because you don't really want there to be many pieces with that color. And a more interesting example for the archetypes is the order/chaos trait, which is really, I think, shows a very unique aspect of generative art. And that is that, so I had, it was the chaotic pieces, it was the order pieces, and then there was this balanced pieces that was in the middle. And there are mostly balanced pieces and not as many order and chaos. And it is really 2 different reasons why the 2 are less common. And that is because order pieces is obviously also less variety in because they are very simple patterns. So you would more quickly exhaust all the, all the small and simple patterns than you would more complex things. But on the other hand, you have the chaotic pieces and those become very uniform very quickly. So They are technically very unique. You won't find 2 that are similar because there's so much going on. But if you zoom out a bit, you will struggle to see the difference between 2 very chaotic pieces, almost like looking at noise. 2 pieces of noise are almost never equal, but you will never be able to discern one from the other. So that is why the balance was the actual trait that I wanted the most of, because this balances that trait better.
Speaker B: When you're looking at many of them, it becomes the most interesting versus looking at like 1,000 ordered ones in a row. You know, talking about traits and you mentioned colors already, one of the things that you're really well known for are these striking color palettes. It's something that you've really developed and have shared with people out there. You know, I think there's a lot to explore there. You know, one, How do you develop your colors? To, you've mentioned before that we are in this kind of weird beginning ecosystem of, you know, how do you size things? How do you price things? How do you make quote unquote business decisions? How do you figure out like what you're going to put out there to share versus, you know, kind of keep to yourself? Can you talk about the generation of those palettes and why, like, you're just committing to them and like making them more like I've always had this philosophy to make my code public.
Speaker C: And that is because when I, when I first started this myself, I relied a lot on existing code that people had put out, downloading their code and trying to do my own things with it and see where it gets me just to really learn the ropes. And I thought the least I could do was to give back in that way and to open source it myself. When it comes to the Chromatome library, it started probably with me just sampling colors from illustrations and posters and design pieces just to have some colors to use, just so I didn't need to reinvent the wheel every time I made a generative piece. I just had this library that I could import into my project and just to have something, you know, and it evolved into something a bit more complex where I had this structure of colors and backgrounds and stroke colors and things like that. And it's become harder and harder for me to use this palette the way I used to use it. And that, I think, that is a testament to me using colors in a different way now. It is not as easy for me now just to insert colors or insert a palette into my work because I want to integrate it more tightly to the structure itself, which makes just a flat palette harder to work with. So I usually want to connect some colors together and some other colors together, and then they would all together become a palette in a way. And sort of like how the structure itself is complex, the structure of the colors I use also become a bit more complex. Maybe I don't want to use this border color with this fill color, and I never want to use this color if this is the background or something like that. So A lot of rules and stuff like that, which I tend to use. Which is also why this Chromatome palette is open source but rarely updated a lot anymore, is that I'm lazy. And the long answer was the stuff I gave here, that it's— I've kind of outgrown the current version of it. I should probably have taken a week or taken a couple of days at least to restructure it and make it more flexible so that I could actually use it as a tool again. But As of now, I have— I put more thought into the colors, so it's not that much of a time saver for me anymore because I would still tweak the colors from the chroma tone palette in order for it to fit my work anyway.
Speaker A: So your upcoming release on Verse called Monument, in some of the writing that you've done about that, you mentioned that you're using a very restrictive palette or just one palette, right? One set of colors on this piece. Can you talk a little bit about First of all, that decision and where does it kind of play into the influences that piece, you know, we've seen references to high-rise buildings, brutalist architecture. I guess in general, can you just kind of give us the story of like the concepting of this piece and how you arrived at these, this version of the algorithm and these compositions?
Speaker C: Taking the colors first, I think this is a continuation of what I spoke about, about the traits that when I create a set now, I want to create something that is has a more uniform and cohesive expression. Because where did that come from initially, right? The idea that when we release a set, it has to have a bunch of different color palettes. Color is so important to our work, right? So when, when you give it a bunch of different color palettes, you, you are creating something that is very varied, definitely. But it's also harder to see the set as a whole because usually color palettes don't really mix that well together. So when you see all the pieces together, it will be a very messy experience. So in some works it works great, but for this one I felt like I would go the simpler route and find a palette I liked and instead vary the amount of usage. So some pieces will be entirely colorless, and there's almost like this gradient or the spectrum of how much color or how many blocks will be colorized. And I thought that was a good alternative to having 10 palettes. The piece itself really has its base in the archetype, the same algorithm as the archetypes, although this is a new algorithm, but it was kind of a rework. I've wanted that for a long time, to really rewrite the whole archetype code for it to work better in 3 dimensions so that we can potentially even make 3D models of these, which is possible now. So the archetype algorithm was much more— it was made exactly for the purpose of it for looking good at that angle. This one is much more based in a 3D space. So it, yeah, it's a lot more possibilities and a lot more flexibility. So you have seen how many times I can use the same or I use the base algorithm. I feel like my work has really had this iterative quality to it that I I really try to iterate on my earlier pieces and I try to evolve. And I'm not really trying to hide that a lot of my different sets are based on the same algorithm, but they present new ideas and new applications. So in that way, an iteration of earlier pieces. And with the brutalist architecture and things like that, this was really the initial inspiration for me to create the Archetype algorithm. It was, it was this that was what I was trying to make initially. I wanted to make these tall-rise buildings with a lot of repetitive elements that were flawed in a way, much like you can see images of brutalist buildings now, which are never perfectly repetitive because they are structures that are lived in by people. So there might be variations because of that. Like you can see curtains in the windows or air conditioners and things like that. And It kind of breaks the monotony in a way that I found very interesting. So I tried to kind of recreate this in this piece with color, which is the only part of the piece that is very, very random, randomly placed. And yeah, I think it has some of the same qualities as the archetype, that it has some pieces that are very orderly where you see very clearly the repetition going, which is probably the pieces that are most similar to these brutalist architectural buildings. And then you have more chaotic ones that are clearly more recognizable as generative pieces.
Speaker B: I'm going to pop into our Discord chat, just my old view from where I used to live. I lived across the street from a crazy brutalist hospital building, which just took '60s brutalism, 19th century church. And then there was also like a terrible '90s, you know, new construction, like brick building. Kind of all mishmashed into one, like really ugly campus. I'll put the brutalist part. It's pretty cool. That's neither here nor there. I just love brutalism.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker B: I would love to also kind of talk about some of the other types of evolution, 'cause you're not just moving further into like the 3D space and the complexities of that space. Even though you can see some of like the roots in archetype, there are a lot of other really big differences that kind of come out within Monument itself. And I'm thinking specifically around like the line work. You know, it's no longer clean, straight lines that move continuously from one, one end of the block to the other end of the block. You're starting to see these line breaks. You're starting to see lines that might not just be black, but sometimes in other parts there'll be a broken up white and that sort of thing. That seems like a large extension or a large evolution of the algorithm as well. Is there any reason behind including some of these less— I don't wanna call it clean elements, cuz I mean, they're still clean, straight lines.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker B: But they're just less straightforward, perhaps is a better way to put it.
Speaker C: It certainly breaks up some of the monotony, and that was part of the reason. One other source of inspiration for me is the line clear style of comics and, well, especially in comics with Hergé and all of these great comic book authors or drawers. So this is kind of a nod to that where you have these broken up lines to indicate something that is not a clear I use these broken up lines internally on the shape. So the line outside the box is always full or whole, and the lines internally on the block can be broken up. Additionally, as you said, some boxes don't have outlines at all, and that is more of the breaking up, I think. I thought it almost felt like it was the colors kind of overflowing the box, which I thought was a good aesthetic. And I liked that. So that was kind of the reasoning behind it. And you might say that it kind of goes against the thing I said earlier to make it very clear, the structure very clear through the visuals. But I think it is also important to have some sort of variety in there. That is kind of the graphic design part of it, I feel like.
Speaker A: And I know that the release details have not been announced yet other than the date, but Have you coalesced around, is this gonna be long form? Is this going to be artist curated? Is this gonna be collector curated? I mean, Verse offers so many different ways to release a project like this. You know, without holding you to anything, because, you know, there's a couple times we've had people come on and then they say they're gonna release it one way and then they change it. So this is not gonna be a matter of record, but more of an open-ended discussion of, did you consider any and all of those? And what do you think are kind of the pros and cons of Say, releasing a project like this as long form versus releasing it as, you know, some form of curated? And if you do have a, you know, a way that you're leaning, I'd love to hear it.
Speaker C: It will probably be long form. I miss doing a long form piece. My latest project has been curated, which is good in itself. I like that too. I like to generate hundreds of pieces and flipping through them and finding the things I like about them and and releasing those in a very focused set. But this was made with long form in mind the whole time, and that makes it into something else. That makes it a bit more restrictive in what you dare to do. If this was a curated piece, I would probably have more color palettes and kind of make those color palettes emphasize the structure that you were looking at, at that exact piece. But here I know that this will be hundreds of pieces, 300 probably, that you will be able to look at together. And that is also a concern, you know, so you want it to be varied enough so that you don't feel like you are looking at 300 identical pieces, but you want there to be some sort of consistency so that the art piece works as a set and as an individual piece. That is a hard balance to strike sometimes. I think, because it's hard to make pieces look good in a set, really. If you are the simplest piece, you will be— you will look even simpler together with all your complex pieces around you and vice versa. So it kind of intensifies your trait in a way.
Speaker A: Looking forward to that. I love— I mean, both of us, I think we've come to embrace curated, which has kind of become more of the meta. during this bear market slump. But our roots are in the long form. Just, you get what you get, you mint, and you just got to trust that the algorithm is going to deliver something that you like. So.
Speaker B: It's like opening Christmas presents or jelly beans. What flavor is this? No idea, but I'm excited.
Speaker A: Very excited. Okay, so we talked a lot about Archetype. You've obviously had a lot of success since then. You're now a full-time artist for the last 2 years, I think you said, right? So considering that you, a lot of your work has been iterative and you're continuing to play with the things that you're really well known for, the cuboids, the color palettes that you've developed, what do you think has been kind of the secret to staying successful in Web3 for so long? And you know, so long, 2 years in Web3 is a really long time in life and in an art career. It's not right. But how much intentionality, I guess, do you have kind of behind thinking about your career, thinking about which things you're going to do? Yes, it's the right time to do some one-of-one projects. Like, yes, it's the right time to do a long form. Kind of just riff on that, I think. I think, what advice might you have for other artists who maybe are out there kind of struggling and thinking about how do I keep this going for myself?
Speaker C: Yeah, I'm probably not a good person to ask really. I, uh, I have spent I spent very little time worrying about that, to be honest. I should have probably worried more about it. Maybe I would have been even more successful then. But no, I was blessed with being early in the market, I think, being at the right place at the right time, which has given me a lot of things for free. But no, I think it's about staying relevant, about engaging with your community. You could always take this to the extreme, right? Especially in the Web3 communities of creating rewards and creating whitelists and airdrops and all of these things. But when I started doing this full-time, I really wanted to focus on my art and to have my whole head within that space and not really creating this online persona. I found that— I find that very exhausting. And but it's probably the thing that works the best. But, uh, yeah, each to their own, absolutely. But, uh, for me, I have been trying to keep my headspace around the art completely, and, uh, hopefully that will be, be enough in a way. I hope people don't feel betrayed that they have invested in me as an artist and then they feel like they haven't gotten things back.
Speaker A: Fair enough. Yeah, I know that's a tough question, but I think a natural follow-up then Would be to ask, like, so do you have people around you that you outsource some of that worry to? I don't know if you work with any gallerists or if you work with kind of any— there's been this emergence of people who like do a manager kind of role for artists. And if not, I mean, then how do you think about different platforms to release on? How do you think about even chains? I don't know if you follow a lot of the discussion that's been going on lately, but with Ethereum, it seems like the marketplace has become a little bit more difficult. And so a lot of artists are starting to look at things like Solana, look at things like Bitcoin. Do you regard any of that at all? Do you ever get like interested in the idea of experimenting and going to an open platform like fx hash or trying out something totally wild like Bitcoin? Like, does any of that appeal to you as an artist, or are you really just focused solely on getting a piece done and then putting it wherever it seems best at that point in time?
Speaker C: I try to follow the discourse Just to see what is out there currently and to be able to catch some technological aspects that will benefit me or that will kind of slot well into some ideas that I have personally. Other than that, though, I don't really— I feel like it's usually kind of following the next big thing in a way, and I don't think I would want to jump on a bandwagon just because it's the new thing in a way. So I would need some more good reasons for changing my, my way of distributing my art, so to say. It's always interesting though to see what new things pop up, but I am getting older and I'm getting more skeptical about these things. It's been 2 years now and suddenly I'm an old guy that will only publish on one chain. No, in principle, I am open to new chains, to new platforms. and everything. And I would love to see what they have to offer. But I also recognize that this is a market where it is usually enough to be early in order to be the kind of the valuable. But I also kind of want to not be in that world where that is the only thing that is needed. So I try to kind of stay put until there is a good reason for me to switch.
Speaker B: And I think you're, as you said, in that early group really kind of establishing at the forefront of this most modern phase of generative art.
Speaker A: You were mentioning earlier that with your early drops in Art Blocks and a lot of the volume, obviously back then, like royalties were enforced and now royalties are not a thing. So even though we might still see Archetypes going through the sales feed, you're not necessarily benefiting from that anymore. So how do you kind of feel about that erosion of royalties that have taken place primarily on ETH? Right. And has that ever caused you to think about another chain, or has it just changed the way that you think about releasing work now where, you know what, like, that's it, I'm just gonna take whatever primary I can get, and if I get a few royalties, great, but I'm not gonna plan on it?
Speaker C: It was obviously a bit disheartening at the start when we really realized that suddenly it was not anymore royalties, it was more of a market as a donation. Sorts, which in practice turned it into nothing for us. But I think now that I've gotten a bit more on a distance, I think it was something that quickly appeared and then quickly disappeared. So let's not dwell on that, I guess. It is certainly something that could motivate me to go on another chain if that makes it more enforced. This is more of a question about the community and the culture. I feel like there is something about me that— or something about it that feels wrong about enforcing it too. It should be something that people do because they love the work and almost like buying the artist a coffee if they liked it. And yeah, maybe the flippers wouldn't need to pay this sum because they don't have this same relation to the artist. But yeah, it is what it is. I will not be in the forefront of fighting for it to get back in some forced way.
Speaker B: It seems like you're in that middle ground between the traditional or legacy art world that moves slowly and then the hyper-fast world of Web3. Obviously, you're very much in the Web3 world. But do you have any thoughts around kind of like that speed and evolution at which things move. You've already said that you don't necessarily need to be at the forefront, but what is your take on the constantly changing ecosystems, the constantly changing culture, you know, where we go from bear market to bull market and within like the context of really this art world? And do you really consider yourself a blockchain artist or like a digital artist or a code-based artist? Like, where would you put yourself in relation to the Web3 ecosystem?
Speaker C: I tend to call myself a generative artist. And the reason I don't call myself a crypto artist or an NFT artist is I think I am not the kind of artist that really makes use of the chain as much as many others do. So it wouldn't make sense for me to identify using those names. Not because I wouldn't want to give out that information, but it's just that generative art for me is more descriptive of what I do. And then I can say in the next sentence that my work is available as NFTs. Generative is a word that has suddenly become associated with AI, obviously also. So now I think I have to call myself like generative artist, not AI, or something like that. And yeah, with the speed of everything, it's both a stress factor for me, because it's a market that is constantly changing. And with both technically and both, and also, as you say, with the bears and the bulls, it's hard to kind of keep track of if you don't actively engage with it. On the other side, it's an exciting thing to be a part of and to be in the center of. It always presents itself with possibilities that you could choose to go after or choose to ignore. And, uh, I think in that way it's much more entertaining than being in a more traditional art market.
Speaker A: It's definitely entertaining, that's for sure. Yeah, we've been chronicling it for 2 years now, and every week we're entertained. I think we should start moving into rapid fire, wrap up the episode here. I wanted to point out, by the way, 3rd anniversary of Archetype, 3-dimensional monuments. So maybe this is kind of like the celebration of the, the 3rd anniversary of the project. Yeah, in the rapid fires, we just want to ask you some really quick questions to get to know you better and then end the episode. So one that we often ask, or we always ask at this point, is who would you like to hear us interview on the show? Who would be an interesting guest?
Speaker C: In the generative art scene?
Speaker A: Could be. That would be easiest for us because we can probably find them.
Speaker C: Right, right. I don't have a complete overview of who you have interviewed though, but I guess I have to spend this moment to shout out some of the big ones like Matt Lorier and Norwegian ones like Anders Hoff. He's a great— @inconvergent on Twitter. He was a great inspiration for me earlier. When I started doing generative art, and he has some amazing pieces that released on fxhash actually a couple of years ago, I think. Great artist.
Speaker A: Yeah, but he stopped putting stuff on fxhash because he started working with like a different language that wasn't web compatible. I remember asking him about it on Twitter.
Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A: And he would just show all these amazing WIPs on his Twitter and then they would never materialize into any— he's really just making it for the fun of making it.
Speaker C: Definitely. Yeah. And a lot of people are saying that about what they do, but he actually means it because he makes it in a language that is impossible to get onto anywhere. So, yeah.
Speaker A: He would be a really interesting one to talk to. And maybe we could convince him to come back to doing it long form again.
Speaker B: Yeah, slumming it in JavaScript.
Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker C: I will definitely give you some of these headline comments. Oh, okay.
Speaker A: That's great. We always love those spicy interviews. All right, Trinity, do you want to throw out another rapid fire there?
Speaker B: The question that I was going to ask, hopefully it's not just the same response as before, but who are some of your favorite generative artists? Whose work do you absolutely love?
Speaker C: There's a lot of, a lot of names. I think the biggest ones are the, are also the most well-known to people. I think the people that has been most formative for me As I mentioned earlier, Casey Reas, which really is probably the person that got me into generative art at all. And then like the next layer would be Tyler Hobbs and Matt Delaurier, I think, which are— have always been great on creating tutorials and creating tools and just being great inspiration for the community, long way before Art Blocks and everything. So those are definitely 2.
Speaker A: Who else?
Speaker C: They also usually have very— have names that are hard to pronounce.
Speaker A: That's our specialty.
Speaker C: I should probably not say anything about that though.
Speaker B: You can send them to us offline.
Speaker A: Yeah, that's okay.
Speaker C: Yeah, sure.
Speaker A: So one last one then. We obviously know that Monument is coming up on Verse and let's get the date out there real quick. It is February 20th. So everyone should be on the lookout for that. But what else do you think you have coming up this year? You know, you mentioned earlier that there's some other things that you're working on, maybe not necessarily in the cuboid realm, or do you think you're going to stick with that theme a little bit longer? Like, is there anything that you can kind of preview for us, get us excited about? What might we expect from you?
Speaker C: Yeah, I cannot say a lot of specifics. Probably I have a lot of things in work always. Most of them don't really turn into anything, but I feel like I have— I am in a good place right now. Creating cool things. So I will probably try to depart a bit from the cuboid scene right now. I felt like for years now that it has been almost this bottomless source of inspiration for me. But there's also a lot of other things and I draw a lot of inspiration from different things right now. So like emergent behavior from elements in the world and everything. I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential, trying to create generative behavior in new ways that aren't always just visual. And, uh, yeah, I don't know where it will, will end up, but I have a lot of ideas around that, so we will see.
Speaker A: All right, well, I guess we'll just have to follow you on Twitter and look out for works in progress and stuff like that as the year progresses.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker A: Trinity, you feel good? Are we wrapped?
Speaker B: I feel great. This has been another, another wonderful interview episode of Waiting to Be Signed. Thank you, Kjetil, and thank you, Will.
Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
Speaker B: Looking forward to everything that's coming out with Monument and everything else that you might do.
Speaker A: All right. Bye everyone.
Speaker C: Thanks. Bye. To be free.
Change log
—Initial transcript — auto-transcribed (AssemblyAI) and readability-edited.