Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed. It's a special interview episode today and we are joined by Remnynt. Or Jimmy, as I've come to know him, who just released the Architectonica project, which I was lucky enough to get a couple curated seeds out of. And it was just a very interesting experiment. So we thought, let's have Jimmy on. And of course, you might know him from his work on Art Blocks with Proscenium, which was released towards the end of 2024, and some projects from before that even, which I'm sure we'll get into. But yeah, Jimmy, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Awesome to be here.

Speaker A: It's awesome to have you on. It's awesome to have something kind of like positive, interesting to talk about these days in the world of generative art on the blockchain. It's kind of a difficult time, which I think we'll also talk about later on. But before we jump into all of that, can you introduce yourself to everyone by telling us about your background in art and coding?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So I've always kind of been like a creative type, like starting in elementary school, I got really into writing stories. I started making comics, and as I grew up, I started writing like poetry and then coding and making games. I taught myself to code in middle school. I was going to math competitions, and we had just gotten TI-83 calculators, and I was completely obsessed with them. And so we would make little math helpers, like little programs to take with us to do these math tests. And I remember This kind of ties interestingly to generative art for me. One of the first things we tried to do was measure how random the random number generator was. You can imagine how 7th graders were trying to do that, but just kind of became obsessed with it and learned to program there, and then eventually learned QBasic and started making little games on my PC. That led into computer science in high school, and then I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a BS in computer science. And that was also where I built my first generative system. You know, I was a big gamer growing up, and I loved the kind of generative systems you'd see in games like Diablo 2, like the random level generator, or SimCity-type games where you have this random map generated. So when I was studying computer graphics, my final project was a generative— a random terrain generator. It was super hard, okay, you know, college kid, but, um, it was a work of passion, something I truly loved. And that was my introduction to generative systems.

Speaker A: Nice. I think I might have been in a similar math league type of thing like back in middle school as well, where the, the main thing I remember from those was learning how to do— um, they would have these questions where they would invent an operator. So they would give you something in the form of like 7 star 4 plus 3 star 9, and then they would say star a star b equals a plus b squared times b, you know, something like that, right? And then you'd have to know to like extrapolate it back in, which was pretty novel, you know, at the middle school level to be doing stuff like that. Was that, is that the same experience?

Speaker B: 100%, like Math Olympiad and different, yeah, state competitions. Super fun.

Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't transition it into coding unfortunately, but I really enjoyed that stuff. So you got into coding, you got into algorithms. But what about blockchain and NFTs and like actually releasing Longform art? Like, what was your journey into doing that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I kind of started as a trader. I was still working in the games industry. I guess I'd been there for about a decade when COVID hit, and I had started thinking about, you know, what should I be doing with my savings, which was only about $60 grand at the time. And it felt like a lot to me and I wanted to invest it, but I had stumbled onto something called WallStreetBets. on Reddit, which was a blessing and a curse. And I sort of believed the pandemic was going to be a big deal. So I bought a bunch of puts and that $60 grand became $800 grand very quickly. I did not sell any of it. And that E-Trade account is now worth $2.48. So I lost my entire life savings. And I kind of just realized like, I need to learn how to better manage my finances at that point. Instead of just playing with it. Huge mistake. I stumbled on Bitcoin somehow. I think it was maybe like Anthony Pompliano or one of those podcasters. I just thought it was really cool. It introduced me to cryptography. It introduced me to the idea of trustlessness. I really got into Bitcoin and just like, okay, you should probably have some of this and hold it for a long time. Around that time, my game jam buddy, this was my best friend, he was an art director at the games company I worked at, and we had spent all this time just jamming. He called me up and said, I met this guy and he says I need to buy this NFT release. It's the Ethereums and all this stuff. I was like, what the heck? What is Ethereum? What are NFTs? Of course, it didn't do much, but it got me into Ethereum. At first, I was super skeptical because I just viewed everything as this derivative of Bitcoin, and I didn't want to trust anything. But I saw Art Blocks, I saw things like Terraforms by Math Castles, I started getting introduced to the— that people were making generative art here, which was super interesting. The fact that you could meaningfully preserve digital work trustlessly on-chain was fascinating to me. I became ETH-pilled. I was willing to take that step, and then started trading and just really got I guess NFT pilled too and just fell in love with the whole scene.

Speaker A: It's a pretty common story, I think. Like, same, same for myself and my often co-host on the show. Like, we both got into crypto through COVID, you know, just like no real— like nothing to do than sit around and look at, you know, YouTube and stuff all day, right, in between meetings. And that led us into art, right? Although we came in through Tezos, which I think is really unusual. And, you know, I've got my fx hash shirt on here. So I don't, don't know if you ever looked at fx hash or Tezos. I know a lot of people kind of ignored it and stuck to ETH, but it was a pretty interesting scene and, you know, spawned the entire show, which we've been doing now for like almost 5 years. Like, it's pretty crazy.

Speaker B: I should have. I regret not having done so, but I was kind of coming from that like very skeptical of everything. And by the time I found out about it and the, you know, it was kind of too late. In a sense that like that scene had already grown up and I missed it.

Speaker A: Yeah. There's still a little bit there, but it's obviously very different than it was back in 2021. But yeah, let's jump into some of then your work. Like the project I actually want to ask you the most about from your early NFT stuff is the Reliquary, because I saw in your writing that it was connected to the Loot project. So that was like an NFT that I became aware of really early on through some friends of mine that were really into like Ethereum development and stuff like that. I remember back in the day too, like a big use case of NFTs was gaming and the metadata associated with them and that you'd be able to like, now you coming from the gaming world probably know how unlikely this is, but the pitch was, oh, I'll be able to take my NFT into any game and it'll like work and do something there. I also work in games, by the way. So it's like, I heard that. Oh, no way. Yeah. So I heard that. I was like, that's absolutely not going to happen. But the whole loot thing was super interesting. So like, How did you become aware of that? And like, what— I looked at the Reliquary and I couldn't really figure out what the connection was to Loot. And like, do they actually— does it read the metadata off of Loot? And like, maybe you can just talk a little bit about that.

Speaker B: No. So I guess I was super interested in exploring generative art around this time, and I asked for some time off for my birthday because I wanted to go start making generative art. The CEO refused, and I just quit right there on the spot. It was kind of a crazy thing to do. But I had been introduced to Loot and Dom Hoffman's work. I might have stumbled on a Terraforms Twitter Space or something and just heard 113 speak and just fell in love with him as an artist. And you kind of start getting pulled into that on-chain scene and learned about Loot. And I think also just the speculative boom, I think Loot was one of the ones that really popped off. And so because Loot was fully on-chain, I used it as sort of like a hello world to Solidity. And I started doing like a gradient study that ended up becoming Vibes. And I wanted to store that on-chain. And so Loot was kind of my big crash course into making that happen. And Reliquary kind of built on top of that because I realized, okay, you know, I jumped in the deep end and I needed to try and find a way to correct mistakes I had made in, in the way that I released Vibes. Like, the supply was too big, the price was too high, things like that. Again, I was in love with 113 and Terraforms, and I had started like drawing on Terraforms and collecting them, and I wanted more canvas space. And so Reliquary in part is like a slightly bigger canvas you can draw on. But I also— I mentioned I was kind of into like writing and poetry early on, and I wanted to try and do something different. And so I treated the Reliquary contract as sort of like a work of literature, but also like a game mechanic. So there's kind of this like dungeon puzzle to solve. You know, in some sense I was just copying things like what 113 did with Mathcastles directly because I thought it was awesome, but I was also trying to find my own lane. And part of what Reliquary did was burn vibes, give discounts to vibe holders, and tried to create on-chain mechanics that interacted with that previous work.

Speaker A: Did you collect any loot? Like, what was your kind of a— coming from games, like, did you think it was actually a vision for NFTs that was feasible, or were you also skeptical of this whole—

Speaker B: I was very skeptical, and I never, I never got loot-pilled in terms of like how that could fit into games. I was willing to give it a benefit of the doubt, and like I would listen to people talk about it sometimes, but when you look at from the inside how the games industry works. It's so much about, are you getting the click-through rate on your ads? Are you getting— I mean, I was working in mobile games, and so like it was all about marketing, it was about the click-through rate, and it was about retention, and like all about the analytics. And are you getting people to play the game? How often are they coming back? And like the idea that like, oh, you need to go integrate a blockchain, like get a wallet, and like it just, it gets so complicated. I just see it like crashing all of those metrics that A lot of game devs, for better or worse, are forced to optimize around. So yeah, I didn't see that, but I did get kind of addicted to Clone X for a bit. I got into anime on Adult Swim.

Speaker A: Of course.

Speaker B: And I started— yeah, so I started watching anime and Clone X just had that anime aesthetic. And yeah, I gave that a shot and it was very crazy. Murakami bought a clone from me that I had listed at a crazy price because I was like, I don't actually want to sell this clone. I'm just gonna like go put it up. And so I was trading, but just not Loot. It was a lot of fun. Cool.

Speaker A: I'm not sure if you had any releases really between those and Proscenium. Like, I know it was a goal of yours for a while to get into Art Blocks, right? Once you kind of found out about it. So it looks like there was almost like 2-ish years, right? Kind of between the Reliquary and Proscenium. So did you spend all that time just, you know, under the hood, like working on Proscenium and like trying to apply or? have you been doing other stuff on the side?

Speaker B: I might have to consider that now. I have been full in on, I guess, NFTs trading and making the art has been my full focus. The trading was mainly in those early days and Reliquary was kind of a slow burn. It didn't immediately mint out, but then folks were spending time with the contract and thought it was cool and that suddenly minted out one day and it was just Amazing. That gave me the runway to build Proscenium. So the whole time I was unemployed, this was my full-time focus, making art and sort of being here in the space. And Proscenium, it was about 500 days. I wanted to build like a custom WebGL engine that I could put fully on-chain. So that took a long time. Looking back, it feels like it was a crazy gamble.

Speaker A: But yeah, if I remember right, it did pretty well at a time when Art Blocks was kind of like slowing down. You know, they hadn't announced it yet, but they were kind of, I'm sure, percolating this idea of like the Art Blocks 500 thing, which, you know, we now know from 2025 that they've just kind of shut down the whole curated program or whatever that previous iteration of it was. So you were, you were one of the last ones in there that I can recall that like really made a big splash as far as minting out and secondary action. I mean, it must've been a great experience, right? It must've been a great feeling to like have that. And like, what, what was it like, you know, with the application? I mean, was, did you get a lot of interesting feedback or any, any part of the process that was like especially worth talking about, you think?

Speaker B: I remember getting some feedback. I remember talking to Art Blocks folks about it. My ability to recall like kind of spontaneously is kind of weak because I've been experiencing some Some seizures, some epilepsy for about 10 months now. And so it's just to be completely honest with you, I am like, I've been sort of grieving my past self a little bit. I don't know how else to say it. I'm like a meticulous, precise person. I want to be honest about whether or not I know something. I'm not even able to pull up the word. Like, I want to be precise about my confidence level and thing. I want to be, you know, computer scientist stuff.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: But my ability to recall has been kind of blasted, and I've lost my ability to form new long-term memories. Just a quick example, after 15 days, I thought that like an HVAC repairman had visited me 5 months ago.

Speaker A: Hmm.

Speaker B: But he had been there 15 days ago, and he had said, you need to like clean this thing out once a month. And I thought it had been 5 months, so I was freaking out. I was telling my wife, I have to go do this, and she was like, Jimmy, he was here 2 weeks ago. What are you talking about? And then after 2 months, I remember things if I get sort of like taken there directly. Like if you tell me the thing that happened, I'll say, oh yeah, I do remember that. But getting there on my own is almost impossible. It's, it's really strange. Good news is I'm on meds. They seem to be helping. So all this to say is I can't quite remember every step of the way, and I wish I could answer that more clearly. I can tell you that it was a dream come true.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: Working with Art Blocks was amazing. In terms of how things were going, like, more broadly in the market, I remember feeling that way too, that things were kind of like winding down. The first little indicator to me was I was the first project that had a 30% cut going to the platform. So it was kind of like a tell that like, hey, you know, we need to make this a little more sustainable for us. And, you know, that makes sense. I was just happy to be a part of it. When the auction happened, my dad was watching and called me crying on the phone. And it was, I don't know, something you always want to make your dad proud, right? And that was just a moment where I genuinely felt that. And he's kind of an outdoorsy guy. He's a fisherman, a hunter, and I'm like a computer science art nerd. So I always kind of felt like I don't know how I'm going to get there with him because I'm not as good at catching fish or— catching a football or whatever, but he was so proud and that was really incredible. Afterwards, I kind of struggled with what to do next. My wife kept saying that I was the dog that caught the car. You know, you're chasing this thing that you really want and then like to actually get there was like kind of mind-boggling. And like you said, seeing the platform shift. So I started like releasing small doodles on Rodeo.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah.

Speaker B: But then it shut down. Art Blocks Curated shut down. Now Foundation, now so many of them. And I think that's part of why I started thinking about, should I go back to releasing on my own?

Speaker A: I think that's a good segue into Architectonica, which just came out like a couple weeks ago. But before we jump to that, I mean, I'm really curious. So probably a lot of the time that you were working on that release, you were going through this issue with the seizures. So how was it like working on, you know, I'm not a coder. I experimented really briefly also like learning a little bit of p5. And for myself, just coming back to a project after a month because I just got busy and I look at it and like, I can't make any sense of the code anymore and I can't figure it out.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so like, if you're having memory issues, like, are you just leaving yourself crazy annotation and like within there so you know exactly? Where you're at? Or like, that must have been a really different process from your previous releases.

Speaker B: If I'm hitting something every day, then that piece like sticks with me pretty well. So like short-term memory is still pretty strong, but definitely that happened a few times. The biggest hit for me felt like the kind of story I wanted to tell as an artist. I started this project before I had epilepsy, and I remember I was working on a noise study You see the kind of work by Zach Lieberman. I just love how he plays with noise, and noise was also something I used as a tool a lot in game development. And so I wanted to sort of just really get into that as something I could physically craft, or I guess digitally craft, right? But get my hands on it. And in the process of that, I tried projecting it isometrically, and it created this contrast between the chaos of the noise.

Speaker A: Hmm.

Speaker B: And the structure of that projection. And it started reminding me of all the games I'd played, like Diablo and StarCraft and SimCity and all of these isometric projection games. And it was this way to bring in structure to that chaos. And that's kind of how that project was born. But then all of those months after starting it, once I started getting hit by the epilepsy, it was hard to carry that thread of storytelling or what was I feeling In terms of the story I wanted to tell, or why was I making these decisions. I should say one of the things that I'm dealing with is stress and anxiety. I'm working from home and we're homeschooling, and we've got a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old, and a 1-year-old. And so you can imagine it gets pretty loud. And, uh, I love them, and this is not their fault at all.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: This is— it's just like finding a way to Navigate that and to strategize about like how to protect myself. The seizures started a week after my third was born. And so that whole 10 months has been like a blur to me. And so I start to think like, I gotta support this family. And I can't even remember how long I've been working on this.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And how long am I gonna take? And it just, it was, it became this like sort of almost like crushing anxiety because I'd need to step in and help around the house. I'd need to, um, babysit, or like some other thing would come up and it became harder and harder to focus. And I was putting more and more pressure on myself to finish it, and it just got to the point where I need to get this out. I need to like finish this and just let it go to just get that stress off my plate. And this is what my neurologist is saying, is like, you need to find ways to reduce your anxiety, reduce your stress, because it's going to be very hard.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: to get seizure control if you can't do that. And that just, that felt like, you know, one of the biggest things I needed to just finish.

Speaker A: So was self-releasing then just a, like, a necessity for expedience? Like, okay, I want to get this out, I don't want to spend all this time shopping it, because there's, there's still some curated options out there. Like, there's obviously Verse, there's some galleries now, right, that will do like support for online releases, or, you know, or you could have had the, you know, potentially sold prints as well, right? Which I know you're planning to do, but that could mean like, oh, well, we can slot you in in October, you know, because we have— they have to plan really far out. So was it kind of like just like, oh, I want to get it out, like I literally need to earn off of this, I can't afford to sit on it?

Speaker B: It was more the feeling of it being unfinished was unbearable. I don't know how else to say it. It was just this crushing thing to me, and I don't know why it became that. And hindsight being 20/20, like, I really wish that I had talked to folks about it, or I had relaxed and found that patience to sort of get through and release it more thoughtfully. I think the work deserved that. I put a lot of work into this thing. Maybe I panicked. The stage of this epilepsy thing is we're still trying to get the seizures under control. The first medication didn't work. I'm titrating up on a second.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And I think it's working now, but at the time that I released it, it was unclear. And I wanted to like get as much stress off my plate as possible to sort of like help figure out what I'm dealing with. Things look good. And I have to remind myself of that. Like, I got a spinal tap and they took the fluid out of my back and they showed it to me. Like, look, it's clear like water. Like, okay, you have a needle in my back. Like, I don't know if I want to look at that right now.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But it's not autoimmune. The first MRI makes it look like there's maybe nothing there. All signs point to like some— this is something we can figure out and probably get under control. And I just wanted to like to do that. And I honestly, I should have talked to Verse. I should have talked to these other galleries and just taken it more slowly. And I do wish I had, but at the same time, I don't know if I could have handled it, if that makes sense.

Speaker A: Hmm. I'll say, like, I thought the way that you released it was really interesting and pretty thoughtful. I mean, I think you could probably argue, and I bet you have a lot of opinions now post-release on things that you could have done differently and tuned the numbers on. But we talk a lot about collector curated, or we have talked a lot on the show about collector curated and the pros and cons of that way of releasing. And in particular, like, my biggest critique of it in the past has been artists who can demand like more and more money per mint, they have been trending towards smaller and smaller collection sizes so that way you're trying to get like an ETH or more per mint. And then when you allow collectors to curate, you're basically saying only the richest people get to pick what's the final canonical like set.

Speaker B: Mm.

Speaker A: Verse and other platforms have never done this 2-stage system like you've designed. And for anyone who didn't see the release, so Collectors were allowed to play with the algorithm through your website, curate seeds, and then for a pretty small amount, ended up being about $15, it was 0.007 ETH, submit seeds anonymously, which then you would look at. And from those, again, anonymous, you would pick the final 250. And anyone who submitted one that got picked would then get it minted to their wallet for free. So the collectors are taking some risk upfront by potentially putting in seeds that won't get picked. But then that obviously acts as a great filter because you don't want people spamming thousands of seeds in just in the hopes that they'll get free pieces and automating it. So I thought it was pretty elegantly done. I could see the gaming when you told me that you have a history in gaming, right? I could see it there. Tell us a little bit more about like how you came up with that. Like, did you socialize this with any artists or collectors, like this idea? And what were some of your concerns about going into it? Other than obviously it sounds like you were under— feeling a lot of just internal pressure, right, to get it out and done.

Speaker B: Yeah. No, that part was designed before I sort of reached this boiling point. I had originally called it the Curation Game, and that felt more appealing towards the gambling, the degen side of things. And I wanted to lean more on the art side of things. And so presenting the algorithm name rather than that mechanism name. The idea was inspired by QQL. Hobbs was probably the first person to do Collector Curated, if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker A: That I can think of, yeah. I don't know of one before that, but you never know because they're, they're always finding someone who did something technically first, right? Like, so yeah, but probably the first notable one.

Speaker B: I think it's awesome that they did that. That was an inspiration. And the thing that kind of stuck with me was it's still going, like it's not complete. That itself is, I guess, a facet of that artwork, and that's super cool, but kind of the idea that I wanted to spin on and build on was, what if it did complete and how would you do that? So that release mechanism was take the collector curated and find a way to complete it. What you mentioned, like the $15 price, it feels more accessible, especially when the market is down so bad. The one flaw that really sticks out to me still is you have to trust me to curate fairly. You have to trust that I'm not going to go look at wallets and think, oh, I should give this person that, and things like that. So that is, you know, the cypherpunk in me makes me think like, okay, that's a flaw. But overall, I like how it worked.

Speaker A: Well, you know, you published your criteria for picking. It was like 30% based on this and 30% based on that. And, you know, I think there's pros to that, right? The transparency of like, this is how you know it's going to be fair because I'm going to consider the novelty of the piece. I'm going to consider how it fits into the collection as a whole and making sure that all aspects of the algorithm are kind of represented in the canonical 250, right? I think you did a really, really good job there. The downside is then it kind of becomes a little bit gameable. Like for me in particular, Mm-hmm. the one that you actually just tweeted the other day that I, I submitted and got picked. I liked that one obviously enough to curate it and submit it, but I knew if I was going to get any picked, that was going to be the one because looking at the palettes, I figured based on the palettes alone, it being like a really good version of that palette that I thought people were going to gravitate towards just like 2 or 3 palettes. And you even see it in the final outcome. Like there is still skew based on what was submitted. So like—

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Someone who really wanted to be super gamey about it could have only submitted like what they thought were gonna be the least popular palettes, right? And could have like tried to optimize around that. And so that's, that's interesting. That's like an emergent behavior or an emergent possibility coming out of it. But like, did you think about that at all? Or do you, do you dislike that I'm even saying that?

Speaker B: Like— No, no, that's totally fine. In publishing the criteria, like, I'm trying to communicate a vibe. I didn't actually go type out a score for each of those, but I'm trying to communicate, this is how I'm thinking about it, this is how I'm generally weighting it. The reality was when I was trying to refine the algorithm, and this gets into how long form is designed versus how collector curated is designed, which I think is a fascinating separation, but I did a little long formy refinement on the algorithm for a bit. What I would do is I'd generate a batch of 1,000, And then I would curate it down to my favorite, however many. I had a script that would say like what percentage of each palette was getting picked, what percentage of each trait was getting picked, and that would give me a sense of like, oh, I actually don't like this palette.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And then I'd know I need to go work on it or I need to cut it. And I did that for like 50-ish days, 1,000 a day, 1,000 a day, bam, bam, bam. And so when I was finally curating, I had that habit where I would just go through and be like, oh, this one, this one, this one. And in terms of design, like long form, you kind of have to feel that like every random thing that comes out has to be perfect. You have to get it so tight. The possibility space has to close down so tightly, which in and of itself is a challenge and a craft that's worth pursuing. But I feel like I was exploring the opposite with this, was like, let's see what can emerge from these layers of systems that surprised me, that I never saw coming. And what I would have loved to see if more of these seeds were submitted is what else would we have found instead of pushing to this tight little ball of like very similar traits and outputs. Find all the edge cases all the way out on the edges of the algorithm. And I think that's a really exciting place to explore.

Speaker A: Yeah, it for sure is the biggest advantage of Collector Curated. And, you know, there's been some really great Larger-sized releases on Verse, but they're, you know, they don't really do that stuff that much anymore. They've kind of like shifted their focus more as a platform, it feels, away from generative stuff into more AI. But going back, like some projects that had like 800 or 1,000, you know, editions that were collector curated, and you can just see like that the algorithm was just allowed to go wild, right? Because, you know, at the end of the day, people get to pick, so no one's going to be unhappy.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: The only person who stands to be unhappy is the artist when they look at what the community picked without their input. So that's, I guess, the downside. But what are some of the stats? Can you share how many people interacted and were there any wallets that outperformed or was there anyone who got nothing?

Speaker B: There were, and that made me sad. There were 631 seeds submitted, 250 in the final supply of tokens curated. There's been a little bit of secondary Right.

Speaker A: So it's a little hard to know now.

Speaker B: But I think it's not enough that it matters. So like roughly 3 curations per submitter, like a little over that. One thing that surprised me is some of the largest submitters really had a good hit rate. I need to go back and look at that. But like the largest holder is, I think his name is Will Peester. He's awesome. I've just sort of known him as a person on Ethereum. I think he's works with Bankless, but he submitted a ton, which was awesome to get that kind of support. And then like in the end, he got a ton of tokens because he just did such a good job connecting with me and finding stuff that I wanted to get into that final bunch.

Speaker A: What did you learn then overall? Like, did you, you said earlier that after this release, now you might be trying to find a way to go back to work, like in some capacity. So did it underperform your expectations as far as like participation? 'Cause like, I'll say for myself, like, I don't think I even saw anything about this until 3 days before it closed. I didn't realize it was a multi-week submission process that you were— had opened it up to. So what were you hoping for? And like, do you think that there were things that you could have changed about the way it was released that would have optimized more to get it closer to like what you expected financially? Or do you just think it's like the market is just the way it is? Like what?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What are your takeaways?

Speaker B: Frankly, I totally screwed up. I super screwed up. And it's okay. I had essentially gone offline. Like, I, you know, was occasionally posting. And I have the Twitter Premium, so I can kind of go look at like impressions per day or whatever. And I was like flatlined for like a month or two there because I'm just dealing with this health thing and trying to get control of it. It's exactly what you said. I wasn't Making it known. You have to do work on Twitter or whatever platforms you're using to let people know, hey, this is coming. You have to get your work in front of people. And I think the algorithm, specifically X, like, you have to kind of work on that impressions per day and you can kind of build it up. And I went from flatline to suddenly releasing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I announced it 2 or 3 days Before the week started. And if I had like been a little more patient and just like given a little more time, I mean, I could have even extended the submission window. So the upper bound, if all the seeds sold out, it was 10,000 seeds was the max and about $15 each. It would have been about $150K, which is like kind of low-end game dev salary for a year. And I spent 16 months on this.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And so I was like, that feels like a reasonable upper bound, and it also makes it accessible. My expectation was that I'd actually hit like 10% of that, like around 15, and it sold for about $10,000.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And so it vastly underperformed, I guess, okay, 33% my expectation, but less than 10% of the upper bound. And it's really clear to me that I wasn't marketing myself, getting my social media presence there, And really giving people time to digest the work. And I was very genuinely panicked because I wanted to get this stress off my plate. I regret that now. Like literally, I was— the week I got my spinal tap lumbar puncture was in the middle of the— this thing releasing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And you get these lab tests back. And it's like multiple sclerosis test. And I'm like, what? I didn't know I was even being tested for that.

Speaker A: I don't even want to look at the answer.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, like open this gotcha, open this treasure chest up and see what's inside. So it was, uh, it's not fun. But, you know, overall I got this and I'm just trying to like be positive, be optimistic. And I know that's true, like this is not that big a deal. I think I'm just like sort of mourning where I thought I was, which was healthy, eating well, exercising. I'm so grateful for my kids. They're healthy. I taught my son to read. That was such an amazing experience. Things are going really well, and I kind of just need to get back there and like accept that this is okay. It's like, I don't know, it's, uh, low-key maybe a midlife crisis or something.

Speaker A: When I saw the outcome and I was like, okay, well, the nature of the filter— and I'm— I know I, I Well, I should say, I know anecdotally, like seeing some people reply, there was definitely some fear from collectors. Like, I don't want to submit seeds if I'm not going to get something. So you probably lost some number of people to that, but I don't know if that would have been the delta between expectation and result. But in my head, I was like, oh, well, the upside is everyone who got one was someone who was like really interested and interested enough to risk money. So now your conversion rate on an upsell into a print or something Has gotta be pretty good, hopefully. Like, I would assume, you know, it's gonna come down to like size and pricing and, you know, lots of other things. But like, where are you in the process of planning that out? Like, are you trying to get that out relatively soon? I hate to say the upsell, by the way, in art, but it's like, you know, it's, we're kind of talking about a really novel, like, way of releasing this and it just feels like, you know, just a business term, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. No, 100%. I don't think about prints to NFT holders to be like a big source of income. Like, if I look at Proscenium, I have so many of these right here because I went and bought them on secondary. It's like a stretched canvas over a wood frame, and it's trying to highlight like the, the texture of the paint, and it's on a sort of like a canvas itself.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: I wanted to do a special print for this project. And I did not sell very many of these. And this was like working with a local print shop, working closely with them, doing signed prints. And I don't regret doing that, but it wasn't meaningful. I think it was meaningful to collectors that got them, and I want to do that because these are people who are supporting my practice and getting a physical object in their hands that represents not only that support, but the piece that they collected. Being able to live with that, I think, is really awesome. And so I want to continue doing that. And the other thing I'll say, like, we talked about how much this raised, around $10,000. Again, I was talking to my dad after doing this, and he said, you sold an artwork for $10,000. Do you know how many artists would kill for that? Who's it, Van Gogh? That died with having never sold anything.

Speaker A: Yeah, right.

Speaker B: Yeah. And so I think perspective matters a ton when thinking about this. This was actually a print from that same shop that did my Proscenium release, and this was kind of like maybe a halfway point in the algorithm for Architectonica prints. So this gets into one of the things I'm thinking about, given where we're at with the market, with NFTs in general, with crypto in general, and kind of how the people that are still here, they're here because they love it. I think they're here for the long term. I think they like the idea that we can put something on a blockchain and trust that it's going to be there essentially forever. It's like cave painting of the digital age, and that's cool. But at this point in time, we don't have that kind of broad adoption. Maybe we'll see another exciting step up. Maybe we won't. Maybe it'll be 100 years before we see that again, and people will be treating it like cave paintings, but I think the point that I'm getting to is that if I want to keep doing this as a generative artist, have that be my focus, then I need to reach the internet. I need to reach the scale of the internet, not just our scene. I want to both be able to reach our scene and to reach the internet. And maybe the way to reach everyone is by making really awesome prints. And so I'm kind of exploring that idea.

Speaker A: Not making people use a wallet, right? The same issue with gaming. I am really curious to see how more and more artists, especially with the struggle of Twitter, where crypto kind of still lives and has dug in for better or worse, versus like Instagram being a platform that's more natively visual, that's not going to downvote you for sharing images. And yeah, and if you get 100,000 followers on Instagram, you don't have to worry That, oh, well, this 10,000 only does Tezos, and this 20,000 only does ETH, and this guy only does Cardano for some reason, you know, like, so you don't have to worry about how your fan base, your followers are already like in their own silos, and how they collect and how they operate. But you also just don't get— you won't get that like rush of like watching an auction, right? Like that Art Blocks thing that— and you won't get that speculative. The thing that's so unique to crypto is like the immediacy of like the speculative action, or at least what you would that used to be, right?

Speaker B: Well, I think you can still separate it. And like with Architectonica specifically, like, I don't even have to be specific about this. It's like, I actually don't know if people have done this, but have they printed out of bounds? I mean, I have to imagine they have printed from their algorithm out of the NFT tokens. The NFT still represents ownership in the artwork. The print is a print. And so I guess you can sort of design tiers where you have the most accessible tier. It's basically the most affordable. It has to have some reasonable baseline of archival quality or whatever you deem appropriate for your practice, but then you have step-ups where it's like, okay, I'm going to go work with this special shop locally. I'm going to ensure quality myself. I'm going to put my time and effort into being there for this print, and I'm going to sign it so that you know I was there.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And like maybe you do things like if you have an NFT, the only person that will ever have a print of that is you.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Because you own that token. But there's also this exploration you could do where the artist can curate a set of outputs that would make great prints. And then for folks who are really jiving with that style, like show them the generator, let them go make their own print. Maybe there's something to be done there. And maybe they only want to spend $30, $40 and they want that accessible tier.

Speaker A: So I have seen some artists do, I don't know if they would technically call them like out of bounds, but they'd be prints of pieces that are from an algorithm or from like a, maybe an earlier version of an algorithm or an alternate version of the one that they're kind of highlighting and selling like one-of-one signed prints with an NFT off of. And then they would offer at a much lower price point, like a collector curated experience. Where you get an unsigned, unnumbered print with no NFT. For me personally, that doesn't really appeal, right? So, but, but there might be someone who does. And like, I could see in a situation like what you did, for anyone who's really afraid of submitting a lot of seeds, right, that don't get picked, like if you can do some, some artists do— hold on, let me pick one, show you this.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So this is something I just got in the mail recently. From a plotter artist named Marcel Schwittlick. And he just did a plot and he went on Twitter and he was like, anyone who wants me to send you a postcard, let me know. And he's been on the show and I've collected this big piece back here is from him. So I was like, oh, like, hey, you know, here's, here's my new address because I moved last year, but I would love to get one. And then it came and somehow it's like, it's relatively, it's not creased. It arrived pretty good. And Shipping something with a postcard stamp in the US is pretty cheap. So, I mean, there could have been something to do there where it's like everyone who submits a seed at least gets a postcard and you just have to, you know, if that costs you $5, then you just have to up the price of submitting by $5 to bake that in. And then you get this moment too, like the aftereffect on Twitter or Instagram where everyone's like, look what I got in the mail, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Like something like that. I think there's so much advantage to having, as much as it's not crypto digital, so much advantage to having physical stuff because then people talk about it. more than just a day after. You get a lot of talk the day that people get their NFTs, but you don't always get talk a month later or 2 months later. But like when prints arrive and people, or people get stuff framed and hung, then you start to see that stuff like percolate up again. And so I don't know, it's just kind of like, yeah, it's a hard time, man. I feel for you. It's like, it's such a tough time. But I mean, would you release like this again? Like all things being equal, if you could have given it the attention that you needed, like did you overall like this mechanism? Like—

Speaker B: Oh yeah. And I want to give seed claimers, I feel like they deserve the same level of print that a token holder gets. And maybe people would disagree, but they essentially supported me in the same way. And I feel like they should have access to that and have their seed protected. It's there on-chain. The whole script is on-chain, so you can plug in that seed and get the artwork, which one of my favorite parts about generative art is being able to do that and not having to like pin anything or pay money over time to like make sure it stays there. It's there, it's done. Well, the other thing, like, why not try this? We're at such an interesting time with AI agents making everything easier to do. Like, the code is not maybe as elegant as it would used to be. You're not gonna find as many like, okay, this Solidity smart contract is also a work of literature anymore, unless you really get your agents spiced up on that. But, um, it's— I guess my wife called it a calculator. She's like the Calculators are amazing if you know math. And so you're going to have a lot easier time building something reasonable with AI if you know what a reasonable thing looks like. Right. So I don't know. I think building a print shop, doing that justice and experimenting with— you're reaching more of an internet audience while also catering to the folks who have made this whole practice possible and making those prints available for purchase to token holders, seed claimers, so on and so forth. Why not give it a shot?

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I, I know I'll be looking at it for sure, like when it's available. So, but it also depends on what my wife thinks, what gets hung up sometimes.

Speaker B: 100%.

Speaker A: Well, I've got some non-project questions. You know, you work in gaming, you grew up a gamer, but between teaching your kids to read and coding art full-time, do you still have time to game? Like, are you playing anything these days?

Speaker B: Yes and no. I played Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom. Visions of Mana. Like, I think I played the FF7 remake, all kinds of JRPGs. But since, like, over the past year, it's just been zero. Somehow we, we're just at capacity with 3. Like, it's just, it's been so overwhelming. We're gonna make it, but like, my goodness, it's a lot. I used to play games with my— he's now 5, but when he was 3 and 4, we would play some. I love those kind of RPG games most recently. Yeah. Oh my God, I played way too much World of Warcraft. Oh yeah, I spent, I spent a year of my life in that game or more.

Speaker A: Did you play WoW Classic when that came out?

Speaker B: Oh yeah, 2004, day one.

Speaker A: No, but I mean when they remade WoW Classic in like 2019 or whenever it was.

Speaker B: I might have logged on, I don't remember. I might have logged on just to say hey to somebody.

Speaker A: It was a huge moment. Yeah, I was also a big Diablo 2 player back in the day, and I've still dabbled because like, you know, if you've been pretty off offline about it, but they were— they just released a new class in Diablo 2 this year. Did you know that?

Speaker B: What?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker A: This year they released a new class. What did they call it? They called it a— I'd have to open it up and look at it now. It's based off like the Diablo 3 one that's not the Necromancer, but it's like the Necromancer.

Speaker B: Witch Hunter or something?

Speaker A: They call it the Warlock. That's what they called it. So it's like—

Speaker B: Oh, okay.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So they kind of went like modern game design philosophy on it where you kind of can't make a bad build. Every one of the 3 disciplines has a viable build where it's like, that was not Diablo 2. Diablo 2 is like, no, you're going to, you have to be like all in on this or your build's not going to be able to do anything. Yeah. Or the, you know, the ice orb sorceress or something, right? Like, so people are like, yeah, it's really overpowered. It's like very casual friendly. But anyways, I thought I'd put that on your radar for when things settle down, you know, you can jump back in.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, do you collect? Like, I know you said you traded a lot throughout your kind of crypto career, but is there anything that you, on the art side, like, what do you kind of gravitate towards collecting? Like, what are you actually holding in the vault, you know? Or have you ordered prints or plots of anything that you have up around the house from artists?

Speaker B: I have some stuff from Marfa 2024. I have a lot of my prints and I have a good bit of NFTs I've collected that are really special to me. I think the biggest one is probably Terraforms. Some are sort of in their like native state and some of them I've drawn my childhood heroes on. So I've got a Terraform that's like A Link to the Past Link holding his sword up. I've got Ness from EarthBound. Oh, and I collect— so when I was working in games, I lived in Tokyo for about a year, just bouncing back and forth.

Speaker A: Oh, wow.

Speaker B: And they had a store there called Super Potato where you could buy a lot of old old retro games. So I started collecting like Super Boy. So it's like a Super Nintendo handheld version.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And I have a lot of those cartridges and kind of the— this is only released in Japan.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: And some of my favorites, Autoscope by Erik Swahn. I like Cycles by Material Protocol Arts, like Matto and those guys. Let's see, I have an Andreas Geissen, James Merrill, Jan Robert Leegte, Eric Tadjuli. A couple pieces that just resonated with me. I collected and held on to those. I had to sell my forever Clonex to Tax Loss Harvest.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah. Unfortunately.

Speaker A: We've interviewed a fair number of the folks that you just listed, so you can go back and listen to some of those episodes if it strikes your curiosity.

Speaker B: Oh, that's awesome.

Speaker A: A lot of those are some of our favorites as well.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: Well, let me ask you this then, because I'm telling you, I'm on a big music kick right now. I know a lot of people listen to music and stuff while they code. So like, what, is there anything that you listen to that you wanna shout out or recommend to us on the music side? Or are you, are you a quiet coder? Do you need like complete silence?

Speaker B: Oh man, no, I, um, in the early days in the games industry, there's this website called Turntable FM.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So I got really into like EDM and dubstep, and sometimes we would go in, uh, in the big public rooms and just try to like play the newest remix and we'd be coding, you know, Long hours and game jamming and stuff like that. And then sometimes we'd have our little private rooms. So that was super fun.

Speaker A: Turntable is where you got to like take turns being the DJ and people would vote you up or vote you down if you got too many downvotes.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: So do you know who— I don't know if he was like directly founded it, but you know who was like a big part of that project was— shoot, I'm— I gotta— it was a couple years ago that we, we interviewed him, the guy who started Bright Moments.

Speaker B: No way.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm blanking on his name now because Bright Moments is obviously kind of been done for like about 2 years. But, um, he was always, you know, all over the world at the time hosting these things. And when we talked to him on the show, he was like, yeah, I did this like thing called Turntable FM. And we were like, you did Turntable FM? Like, because he's like a serial entrepreneur type guy, you know, serial founder type guy. So yeah, it's such an interesting connection between that platform and now NFTs.

Speaker B: It was so sick. It was such a moment. Yeah, so much fun. That— I mean, gosh, when I was a kid, like, I was into like punk and Into screamo a little bit, like any band that ended with day.

Speaker A: Okay, yeah.

Speaker B: Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, Saves the Day, all that stuff. I got really into Radiohead in college, especially In Rainbows. That's like a really awesome album to me. More recently, I've been getting back into like classic rock, '70s stuff. So stuff like Yes is like a happy place right now. Beatles, America, Elton John. We were listening to Jimmy Buffett the other day. Just anything that's like really upbeat, that like our parents would have played. It kind of helps when you're with the kid chaos, just like get some good vibes going. So that's been cool. But Yes, Yes is my current happy place right now.

Speaker A: What's the Yes album I like? Oceanic Topologies, or what is it called?

Speaker B: The—

Speaker A: I got really big into collecting records in the last couple years.

Speaker B: Oh, cool.

Speaker A: Because of my child, because I wanted like a physical way for her to interact with music that wasn't just like Spotify, right? Like So it's like, here's the record, and it's like a curated collection. So I picked up some of that, like, you know, some of those. I— that might be it right down there. Let me see if I can grab— yeah, Tales from Topographic Oceans. That's what it is. That's what it's called. We're actually about to go to Japan in July, and so on my list is to look for like Japanese pressings of a lot of this classic rock stuff just to have as like a novelty in the collection, you know.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: This one's pretty good. I like this one. And I know like Close to the Edge is the one that I think probably everyone knows, right?

Speaker B: Yes, yes. Okay, Close to the Edge. That album's great. We've been jamming on that. And You and I in there, man.

Speaker A: Yeah, I want to look for like, you know, Crosby, Stills, Nash Young and like—

Speaker B: Oh yeah.

Speaker A: Stuff like that too, because we really like listening to that and getting a cool Japanese pressing. Would that be—

Speaker B: yeah. Sick. I was the same way with the retro games.

Speaker A: I feel like everyone who's in NFTs has some collector in them, like if it's— whether it's like Pokémon cards Or vintage this or that. Although surprisingly few people do Magic: The Gathering, which is how myself and my co-host know each other.

Speaker B: Oh, wow.

Speaker A: Well, we went to school together, but we bonded over being Magic: The Gathering players. I'm like, oh, this is like so many quantitative people play that game. And you would think on the crypto side, you would see that like overrepresented and it's just not here for whatever reason.

Speaker B: Well, I was going to tell you, I did, I did play.

Speaker A: Okay, cool.

Speaker B: So I had baseball cards, Pokémon, and Magic: The Gathering, but I really got into Magic the most When we started playing locally, I was out in like Mountain View for a bit, the kind of Silicon Valley for the games industry stuff. And, uh, we just started doing it in person. And then some, some of the folks turned me on to Magic Online. That became really addicting. But yeah, I went through a phase. I was playing a little too much Magic.

Speaker A: The original NFTs, you know?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Magic Online digital objects.

Speaker B: You could sell the digital, the cards on, uh, on the online version. That was wild.

Speaker A: Yeah, but it was this old bulletin board system where you had to like write a post of what you had and how much, you know, they wouldn't let you transact for dollars. You had to use tickets, right? Like event tickets. And so you'd— and then there were places that you can cash out the event ticket. It was a— my understanding of it is that it was all because of what we now understand to be like AML, right? It's anti-money laundering. They didn't want people washing dollars through their platform.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: People still were, but probably not to as big of a degree as they Would have, but yeah, that was like, honestly kind of like the original. I'm trying to think of, I mean, Diablo 2 had its own kind of out-of-game economy, people trading stuff on bulletin boards.

Speaker B: You think MetaMask is hard?

Speaker A: Back in my day, you had to actually trust a website, you know, like in the hope that someone met you in game to deliver stuff to you.

Speaker B: Yeah. You would see those, uh, what were they? There was like mules and like transfers. And so you'd get in public game and someone has just thrown all these items on the ground.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Wild.

Speaker A: Such a crazy time. Well, before we finish up, dude, like, so what, what do you think is next? Like, obviously you just released this project. You're probably taking a little bit of a break, but like, do you already have an idea for something new? Like, would you self-release again like this, or would you wanna shop it around a little bit more? What's coming up? Like, what do you wanna plug?

Speaker B: You know? Yeah. Well, I'm gonna give this print thing a shot. I think I can do it justice and I wanna see what that looks like. Mm-hmm. I've also got the WebGL engine that I started with Prasenium. This was built on the same engine. It's called Snowball. I keep rolling that snowball bigger and I'd like to keep making within that if I can. I generally start to sketch just to like start rolling something and I don't have that idea yet. So I'm going to have to get my hands dirty again and start seeing what comes out of it. I absolutely want to shop around next time.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And if I do have an idea for like a new release mechanic or want to use this one again, I think a lot of platforms would be open to that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, especially if you kind of wrote the contract and stuff for it already, right? Like, and you have it all figured out, so you're bringing that to the table at least. Cool, man. Well, yeah, looking forward to the prints and checking those out. I'm certainly interested, and I would bet a fair number of people are gonna at least look hard at it because I just think the way that you did it, it feels like more of a thing, right, to get picked, and like you kind of want to honor that in a way.

Speaker B: So yeah, I should say thank you Will, for supporting me, and to everyone else who took part in this experiment. We all are awesome and I really appreciate it.

Speaker A: I love to gamble, you know, and I trusted, I trusted my taste. I thought I was gonna get 3 picked and I got 2, so I was a little under expectation there, but—

Speaker B: It was really tough. It was really tough. I had to do a number of like layers of like, okay, I saved like half of them. Okay, that's too many. Do another pass.

Speaker A: Were you curating them along the way, by the way, or did you like Wait until everything was done and then you just looked at them in one big pile.

Speaker B: Everything was done, one big pile.

Speaker A: And you were just so experienced with like looking at them from your own exercise of doing it that you were able to just like— because you got it done within like 2 days, it felt like it was like pretty quick.

Speaker B: I put a lot of pressure on myself to do that because I felt like people have given me money, where's my NFT?

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Like there's a little, there's a little bit of that like in my head. It's hard for me not to like to feel that and also to have it looming over like The OpenSea is not there. Like, make sure every I is dotted, T is crossed kind of thing. But yeah, I had so much practice curating. It was 100% that. Yeah.

Speaker A: Well, thanks, Jimmy, for coming on. It was awesome to get to know you a little bit better and to, you know, we don't record the show that much anymore, so it's always nice to have an occasion to talk to someone. And again, like, I thought what you did was really cool. Like, we're always interested in someone taking a risk like this. And also the art was very good. I, you know, I, in retrospect, I know we didn't talk probably enough about it, but I'm just like so interested in how you really released it. But also I thought it was definitely my favorite of your work so far. So, you know, kudos on that as well. So yeah, I thought it was a really fun algorithm to play with and it got me to, yeah, to risk a few seeds, right? So that's, that's a, I think that's a sign of something that was pretty well done. So.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Honored to be here. Sorry to miss Trinity. Send my love.

Speaker A: Will do.

Speaker B: Thank you again, Will.

Speaker A: All right, everyone, that was Remnynt. I hope you all enjoyed. You know, if you won some seeds, be on the lookout for instructions to claim a print if that appeals to you. And check out his website, vibes.art. It's an amazing website, actually. It made exploring your back work very pleasurable. I'll try to put as much stuff into the show notes for everyone to cross-reference. Diablo 2 new class, you know, all the important stuff we talked about. Thanks again to Jimmy. Hope you all enjoyed, and we'll be back again. Bye. Soon-ish. Bye everyone.