Speaker A: All right. Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode. We're joined today by Zach Lieberman, who has an upcoming show of Ursolo's exhibition that we're really excited to talk to him about. Trinity, of course, is here as well. And, uh, yeah, this is the first time we've recorded in like 3 weeks or so while we've been on hiatus. Trinity, it's good to be back on the mic. How's it going, everyone?

Speaker B: It's going great. Very happy to have Zach here and chatting again. I don't know if people know, but we had an unrecorded conversation last year, which was fun. But now you're on officially, so we've made it.

Speaker C: Yeah, super happy to be here.

Speaker A: Zach, you know, you've got a really long career in art. You're kind of one of those, like, what we would call people who came into generative art in the NFT sense, we kind of consider you an OG, you know, not that you came from the '60s, but you have been making computer art and generative art for a really long time. But for those of us who might not know you so well, can you give everyone a brief introduction of your background in art and coding and how you came to start releasing work on the blockchain?

Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So I'm an artist based in New York. And right now I divide my time in thirds, one-third teaching, one-third making artwork, one-third doing commercial work. And I'm happy to talk about any of those things, but you know, that's what I do. In terms of my background, I come from fine arts. I studied painting and printmaking, and I had to get a job, and everybody was talking about web design and Y2K, and the world's going to end in the year 2000. And I completely bluffed my way into a design job. I didn't have any design background at all. I had slides of my paintings. I was going to all these meetings, all these interviews. And what I discovered is you could just go to the bookstore and buy, you know, you could buy books about Photoshop and Illustrator. And I started learning these tools and I fell in love with a tool called Flash, which is, some folks might be too young to know.

Speaker B: We know Flash.

Speaker C: You know Flash? All right.

Speaker A: In particular.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Flash games. I mean, to me that was this amazing community. And so I would say I really came up through that era of, I guess, kind of early 2000s Flash, you know, Joshua Davis, K10K, Amit Pataru, the sort of like practitioners of generative art through Flash. You know, I was quite excited about that and then. Sort of fell in love with the medium of computational animation, making motion through code.

Speaker A: So you started getting into learning the computer side of stuff because of web design, but it seems like you, you must've picked up some like more hardcore coding skills at a certain point, right? Like, didn't you do a lot of your earlier work in C++? Yeah.

Speaker C: So actually a million years ago when I was like a child, I took a Logo class, you know, and I learned BASIC and I learned some like early coding, but I, I had totally forgotten about that and I, you know, I was really not sort of a heavy computer user at that time when I was studying fine arts. What happened is the economy crashed. I was working at this kind of startup and it was like early Web 1.0. And I thought, okay, maybe I should just go to graduate school. And I applied to all these design programs, but of course I didn't have a design portfolio. So the programs that I got into were design technology programs. And I went to Parsons for graduate school. The professors there were using Director. So I learned Lingo, I learned Java. I was learning all these different programming languages. And it was one of my professors at Parsons, a person named Golan Levin. He's now a professor at Carnegie Mellon, but he came from MIT Media Lab. He invited me to come and work with him after I graduated. And, and, uh, that first summer he just gave me this giant C— I will never forget this giant book of C++. And, you know, we started, I learned it that summer and we were using it for our projects. And, um, yeah, so I kind of learned languages as I went.

Speaker B: Did you ever imagine that you would be where you are now, like using this as your primary medium rather than like more of your fine arts background? That story in transition just seems fantastical to me, you know, because there's a divide between the arts and the sciences, which maybe is false, but you know, it exists in our culture.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I didn't know what I would be doing for a career. I just know when I went to graduate school, there were 2 types of classes. There were sort of fake work classes where you're building things for your portfolio. And then there were extremely weird experimental classes, and I hated the fake work classes. Whenever I was in a class that was like a fake work class, I thought, I have my whole life to be working. Like, I do not need to be in school making Coca-Cola advertisements. But the experimental classes were just weird. They were about exploring the intersection of design and technology and art and I just loved every minute of it. I didn't know you could do this for a career. And I have to say it was really Golan who, you know, when I graduated that summer, I went from graduate school to Ars Electronica and we were making projects and I kind of learned about media art from working with him. And he had already had a career at that point. So it was kind of meeting somebody a little bit older than me that introduced me to a world that I didn't totally know existed. And so I started making projects with Golan, working on my own, and fell into, I guess, the field you would say is media art. A lot of things were happening in Europe and Asia, and so I found myself sort of living in America but doing a lot of work overseas, different festivals, projects, workshops, et cetera.

Speaker A: Well, what about crossing over into blockchain NFTs? I mean, I would guess that your background being so experimental, it maybe didn't seem like such a leap for you, but obviously it's a really contentious thing in the art world right now, especially the traditional art world. And as an educator too, I imagine you must encounter students, or maybe you don't because of the nature of what you teach, but I would guess that a lot of the students that you have also have pretty negative feelings about it. So what was that journey like to like getting comfortable with NFTs and do you ever encounter any friction? Professionally because of it.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's super interesting. I mean, I post a lot online. I'm out, I guess at some point we'll probably talk about daily sketching and the work that I do, kind of, but, you know, posting on Twitter and Instagram and whatnot. And I remember getting messages probably really early from folks like, oh, you should do NFT stuff. And to me, it just, I just was not sure what the culture was. Like I was totally not understanding it. If you work publicly, you get a lot of random DMs that just don't make any sense. But I remember I got this message from a curator that I really admire named Lindsay Howard. At the time, she was a curator at a place called Foundation, which was, or still is, just an amazing venue for NFT art. And she invited me to be part of Foundation right from the beginning. I think this was Foundation 1.0. They were using DAI and not Ethereum. I didn't totally understand what it was, but I remember I had this moment many years before, maybe 5, 10 years before. I had this experience with the head of Ars Electronica. We were at an event in Japan. I think we were doing something in Japan and we were drinking in the hotel lobby. And I'll never forget this. It was such an insane moment. We were drinking and he said something which was like, you All of your work is going to disappear. You're living like before the moment we have history, you know, that at some point we'll find a way to archive media art and we'll find a way to store it and preserve it. But like the work is dying. And I kind of knew this in my heart. Like if you go to Ars Electronica, there's like a basement with all of these old machines, with all of these just iconic media art projects from the '70s and '80s and '90s, like all these old machines that just don't boot up anymore. And And I was drinking with this guy, and this guy's older than me, and I was kind of like, oh, what is this guy talking about? But then when I went to mint my first work on Foundation, it was this really interesting moment because it was actually a moment of saying, I want this to be preserved. I care so much about this that I want this to be preserved. I want it to be frozen. And I remember just this kind of trepidation of hitting the mint button, you know, and just being like, what all the mechanics around it. And, and I'll never forget that conversation. And to me, that was an exciting moment. This, this moment of saying, this work is so important to me that I want to preserve it. I want to put it on a blockchain. I want to work in this way. And yeah, it sort of fell into it through that. I think the transparency was really interesting. I had always been kind of suspicious of the art world and not really understanding kind of how the art world works. And here was this world, which was very transparent in some way. And then from Foundation, found out about Tezos and Hic Et Nunc. And, you know, those days were really fun and really wild. And I would say it was Lindsay Howard and Foundation that really got me into this.

Speaker B: Wow. That's such an interesting story, you know, and I think from what you're saying, it sounds like the blockchain and having worked on the blockchain has actually been really legitimizing for you. You know, it hasn't been experimental. It's been like full of intention. in a way. And, you know, especially if you're talking about the work that you did previously, some of which can be preserved, some of which can't. Is there a way that you differentiate that more old-style work, or I guess traditional work versus the NFT work? Because it sounds like you're actually putting more emphasis on what you value from the NFT space, even though it's much more ephemeral in many respects.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's finding these, there are these just these different vehicles to publish work. I think it relates to the daily sketching, but for me, it's always been trying to find the right place to share work. And for me, the NFT work is a chance to say, this work is so important to me that I want to put it out in the world. I want it to be permanent and I want people to be able to own it. That it's a chance to really reflect on something and say, I care about this. so much that I wanted to find a home. And I do the same thing, I print work, and to me, there's no greater feeling than holding an image in your hand, because I come from printmaking and you do all this work and in the end, you're just holding an image in your hand. And when I print, I'm so happy. I hold it in my hand and then I wrap it up and I put it in a mailbox for somebody to live with. And to me, it's just, I think that it's really important, this moment of work finding a home. Of course there's speculation, there's trading, there's all kinds of things happening, but to me at the essence, it's about finding a home.

Speaker A: I mean, do you share so many images of those prints on your social media along with PNGs of whatever you're working on at the time as part of that daily sketch process? Well, I'm sure some of those, those prints are for your own purposes of testing, right? So you must have massive like archival storage, right? To keep all of these prints, or do you just kind of like cycle them through your workspace and your home? Like what are you doing with all of these test prints?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I have flat files, which is certainly helpful for storing. Um, and then usually like once a year I'll have like a huge pile of things that I, I don't know, maybe I could sell them as like B-grade material. I'll usually have to clear out like once a year the old stuff, but we just moved studios and I put up Homasote, which is like a pinboard material in the room that I print in. And so it's just filling up with the stuff that I'm studying and, uh, And I think it's important to live with images if you're making images the same way. Like if you're a writer, you print out the thing you're writing on and you'll see the spelling mistakes. You'll see the grammar mistakes. You'll, you can take a pen, you, you know, cross out a line. You can rewrite it. You know, you can engage with your words in a different way than on screen. And I think it's the same thing if you're making images that nothing reveals more than living with it, putting it on your wall, seeing it on a daily basis. You know, flipping it upside down, holding it in your hands, you'll see kind of what it feels like. And I find that I oftentimes don't understand images until I print them out.

Speaker A: So for Cone Gradient Studies, right, which you've been sharing a lot of over the last year on social media, and yeah, it's also going to be a part of the Verse Solos exhibition coming up, what were the things you were looking for as you were evaluating those images that helped you tweak and tune the algorithm that came up with these final images that are going to be in the show?

Speaker C: For me, the cone gradient study is about seeing light move across a piece of paper. And there are some qualities that I really look for. Like one is this, I don't know the right, even the right term for it, but there are these moments in the image which are the colors and the shading are very, very ambiguous. So in some of the cone gradients where you have kind of very solid colors meeting and hitting in the center, they're all, all of the cones are focused towards the center. You wind up with a kind of color that is very It's like a fog or a liquid. You know, it's like hard to understand what it is. And to me, that ambiguity is so interesting. I try to find images where I just, I don't understand them. Like maybe visually they're appealing, but my brain is kind of like, what is going on? Let me try to read it. Let me try to process it. And I like that. I don't know how to articulate, but it's almost this kind of starting with your eye, but then going to your brain and then back to your eye, this pathway of seeing something and then having to think more intensely about what it is or what it means, and then that kind of affects your eye. So to me, it's— I try to look for images that activate that pathway. Some of the cone gradients are like pretty wild. Oftentimes I like to take the same algorithm and just like turn the volume knob up to 11 and just see like, how can I break it? How can I break it? How can I add too much color, too much noise, too much texture? And so with the wild ones, I'm oftentimes looking for what remains, like seeing if you just keep kind of pushing and pushing and pushing, is there some essential truth to the image that pops through? And those are maybe some of the qualities that I look for when I'm evaluating the work.

Speaker B: Okay. So when we're looking at Cone Gradient, um, you know, both what you've posted on Twitter and, you know, what we're seeing upcoming in Verse, those outputs, they are all a range of you twisting these dials. It's not necessarily a single algorithm, so to speak, as what we might think for long form, but it's you manipulating it to like kind of get those outputs that just like kind of scream at you in the most wonderful way.

Speaker C: It's similar to a long form where you might have different traits, you know, and some of the traits like push the colors in different directions. You know, some of the cone gradients like start with black and white and move to color. Some of the cone gradients have almost like a diffraction pattern or interference patterns. You could think about those as kind of like traits that you would have in a long form work. They're almost like different flavors that the underlying algorithm is still the same. The underlying algorithm is very, very simple, but it's those kind of seeing how these different things interact that lead to really interesting results. So it's kind of like a long-form work in that way that you could think of these things as traits. It's all code-based, so it's, you know, it's all algorithmically manipulated, but I'm sitting there and You know, I'm refreshing and refreshing and refreshing, and then I see an image that like tingles my brain in some way, and then I export it, you know? So I might look at 20 images or 100 images and find one that I like. And then those ones that I like, I wind up selecting from those. You can think about those as almost as like a contact sheet. And then you might go through and say like, from the contact sheet of these images, what are the images that are just like even better? You know, so there's a bit of a kind of curating process.

Speaker A: Well, let's talk about your Verse solo exhibition. Let's more, uh, formally introduce it. So let's, let's see if I can get this pronunciation on the first go. I'm gonna go with Lichtrequisite: Studies in Color, Light, and Geometry. How close was I?

Speaker C: I think that's correct. I'm not, I'm not an expert, but yeah.

Speaker A: I know it's a reference, um, to another artist's work, right, from reading the description on Verse. Can you give us the story of this solo exhibition And how it came to be on Verse in the first place?

Speaker C: Last year I did some work with Verse. I was part of a group exhibition. I think the title was Chromatics, but I'm not, I don't have it in front of me. I had done some light studies with them and it was great. They were really great to work with. I enjoyed so much the curatorial sensibilities and just the way they were presenting the work. And, and I have been following Verse for a long time. I guess in the NFT time scale, you would say a long time. I've been following all the things that they've been doing and have just been really excited to see the kind of energy that they're putting out into the space. And I was approached by Mimi, who's a curator or director there, and Mimi asked me to do a show about light in the summertime. And I have been doing these light studies, which I'm really proud of and happy to talk about, that are more like what I did for Verse. last year. And I told Mimi that I was kind of not tired of them, but I just wanted to do something different. And I had this algorithm, this approach with these cone gradients that I was quite excited about, and I wanted to explore them. The original intention of the exhibition, which is where the Lich Requisite name comes from, is to create work in response to another artist. So Mimi had suggested Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, where the name comes from. And I was throwing out other artists that I was interested in. So Gottfried Jaeger, who does generative photography. And then there's another artist whose name escapes me now, but I will pull it up in a second, who does these really beautiful light paintings. And so I was throwing those artists out as suggestions for artists I could respond to. And in the end, as we started to get into it, it It seemed easier to frame it as a solo exhibition, specifically around color, light, and geometry, which were these forms that I, every day, what I think of. So I think the original intention was to create work in response to another artist, and then we transitioned the show to be more around specifically these 2 bodies of work, which I'm happy about.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the other artist is James Turrell, right?

Speaker C: Uh, yeah, James Turrell is a big inspiration, but the artist that I'm thinking of is, um, oh God, it's gonna kill me. Give me one second.

Speaker A: I remember reading that about, uh, them being an influence on you in an interview somewhere, and I was like, oh, I just saw the installation he has up at MASS MoCA last week, and I see the connection like 100%.

Speaker C: Yeah, the MASS MoCA stuff's amazing. I mean, that— those works are amazing.

Speaker B: So we've talked quite a bit about like cone gradient study You know, and how wonderful that is. Let's talk about Colorblind Study because I see that there's studies number 1 through 5. Are they all going to be one-of-ones or will they be editioned pieces?

Speaker C: They're going to be one-of-ones. The Colorblind Studies are based on, it's actually the same code there. It's a very similar code to what's creating the Coin Gradient Studies. But there was a process that I sort of fell in love with, which was kind of horizontally or vertically altering the image in some way, in some periodic way. The results were, for me, just like really interesting. Like, sometimes you do something and it opens up a whole new world. And here is this simple kind of algorithmic thing where you say, like, I'm just going to cut the image In strips, and I'm going to make something happen across a strip. And maybe the colors are brighter at the bottom and they're darker at the top, or I'm going to listen to the point that's emitting red. It's going to be a bit stronger over here. And you wind up with this thing where images that may have felt kind of flat or gradienty, they become very dimensional. And your brain, it's a bit like the Venetian blinds. When you see a light moving behind the blinds, you wind up with these like really beautiful. patterns. I remember as a kid I had those blinds in my bedroom, and when cars would turn the corner, you would see this kind of like really interesting glow or this really interesting movement. And this kind of work, like, it really requires movement to, to appreciate it. It's so important that they're moving, that they're changing. And a lot of my interest in this work is in memory, where you're sort of staring at an image and the colors are moving, but They change so much that it's almost like you're seeing what you see now, but the energy is in the differences in kind of comparing it to what you just saw. I'm struggling to articulate it, but to me, there's some kind of charged energy in how the images change and how your brain sort of latches onto something. And it's like the color of the shading suggests something. And then as those colors change, even the meaning or things that felt sort of pushing in one direction feel like they're pushing in another. To me, that energy is really exciting. So the work is about kind of exploring that energy of slicing an image horizontally or vertically and seeing the kind of distortions that emerge.

Speaker B: And also kind of like chasing that emotion or like what was invoked in you at a particular moment of time. And you know how that's always in flux and always changing.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: I can definitely see that coming through in this piece.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I love that idea of like change and just seeing something that just, you can never understand what it is. You always have to kind of be in the moment with it because it's always pushing. And I also start to use it with some of them. I'm using language of sun and sunsets and sun's rising, you know, because to me, that's also the same, this notion of like, you can never really freeze a sunset. So some of the pieces like really refer to that or those colors and some of them are more Wilder colors that I'm excited about.

Speaker A: Very cool. And those are going to be run as auctions, is that correct?

Speaker C: Yeah, those are going to be auctions.

Speaker A: All right, that's going to be exciting to watch. 25 one-of-one pieces.

Speaker B: Simultaneous auctions.

Speaker A: That's going to be crazy. To jump back to Congradient Studies, those are going to be distributed through mint passes, right? So that's going to be— there's like 50 curated pieces.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And people will be able to redeem them up to a limit of 5 per image in the series.

Speaker C: Yeah, they're going to be up to a limit of 5, and there's going to be an opportunity to redeem a print. For me, printing was really important. And one of the things when Mimi reached out and we were discussing the show early on, I really wanted to print work for the exhibition, and I wanted printing to be a part of the possibility of collecting. And so for this work, we wanted to offer prints for collectors. So it's going to be 50 works with a max. Yeah, exactly as you describe it. There's going to be mint passes. There's going to be 50 works and a maximum of 5 collectors per work. You're going to be able to see who's collected what work. So that's the mechanic that we thought would work the best for this.

Speaker A: There's the potential for some of them to end up being one-of-ones, some of the individual pieces, because there's only going to be 150 mint passes for 250 total. Edition throughout the series, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. 150 for a, like a maximum possibility of 250. So there will be, I think there will be ones that maybe only have one collector, which is really exciting. And that's an exciting part of creating work where you, you know, you have a larger count is that actually some of them are really unique and really different and really might speak to a specific individual or capture somebody's attention or imagination. They'll be like crowd pleasers, you know, but also it's those oddballs that are truly exciting. To me, that's gonna be really interesting to watch.

Speaker A: The exhibition's going up on Verse probably around the time this episode's coming out, maybe a little bit after. But before we move on to some other questions, like, can you talk a little bit about more about that process? Like, so were these pieces fully baked before you kind of coalesce them into this solo exhibit with Verse, or was there some kind of like process back and forth? Did they play any role with you in helping like curate the pieces, or, and like, were there any like issues that came up during this whole process where there were like any big pivots or any, any like cool tidbits like that to talk about before we move on?

Speaker C: Yeah. Um, I don't know if there's any like cool pivots, but so these are algorithms that I've been working on and off with for years and years. Like the cone gradients is something that I probably made a first cone gradient work in 2017. And so it's this thing that has been a kind of a classic for me. I keep coming back to it. I oftentimes think creativity is about these known spaces and unknown spaces, and you're navigating between them. And to me, the cone gradients is this kind of known space that I feel really familiar with and really excited about, but also I love coming back to it with new eyes and new ideas. So in terms of curation, I exported thousands of images and then I think I picked about 150. The first sort of curatorial job is to figure out what are we going to print for the show. And so we had lots of back and forth about that where I created a deck and I categorized them and I helped sort of explain the different styles, the different approaches and so on. And then the folks from Verse came back and you know, made some suggestions and we've been kind of going back and forth about it and then picked out 4 candidates that we were printing for the exhibition. So those will be up. And we're still settling on the 50 for the drop that we're kind of still making decisions about. But yeah, there were no pivots. It just was a lot of like, you know, I think the challenge is that when you create a lot of work that you're really excited about, it's kind of hard to edit.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: You know, and then to figure out kind of how do you tell a story with, how do you create a cohesive body of work and figure out kind of how much, you know, how much of this approach, how much of this approach. And a lot of that is kind of, that's the art.

Speaker B: That seems actually like a really, not just with having so much work that you love, but, you know, having a theme or a study like the cone gradients that you've loved for so long and how does it let you tell stories? now and into the future, and how can you kind of create completely different bodies of work using like that similar theme of sorts? It's actually quite interesting from like the viewer's perspective and from a curatorial perspective. Do you foresee yourself using like a similar study in something in the future, but like being able to take it in a completely different direction and evoking totally different feelings?

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I mean, to me, those are, those things are like your style as an artist, right? I think of style almost like, I don't know if you see those, they're called desire paths, but they're basically like, sometimes you'll see like a corner where like 2 paths of a sidewalk hit, but then people just like take a shortcut and they'll like walk through the grass to get, you know, they won't walk the long way. They'll walk the short way. What it means when you're making art is you are always coming up with these shortcuts. And to me, the cone gradients is a form of shortcut, which is, it's a way of making an image where you just pick some points and you pick some angles and pick some colors and you sort of see what emerges. And it's one of these things that I just will come back to time and time again because it just feels like such a beautiful way to make an image. And I always learn something new. There's a joy in coming back to older approaches with new eyes, with, you know, new knowledge and seeing kind of what they, um, what they will bring. So it's I can certainly imagine doing other things with this in the future.

Speaker B: So I think that actually kind of speaks to that idea that we talked a little bit about last year and something that often comes up within context to your work. The conversation around curated versus long form.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: There's that, like, Zach doesn't do long form with the exception of like the collaboration on FX Hash last year. And, you know, maybe some other more specific pieces.

Speaker C: Well, I did the Bright Moments, the Yeah, of course.

Speaker B: But like, it seems like you have a really strong preference for doing more curated pieces. And I think that this conversation is really kind of bringing to light why and how.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: To add to that, I mean, you know, listening to you talk about the Congradians, it's like, yeah, you generated like thousands and you narrowed it down. And now there's like all this discussion about which 50, because clearly there's more than 50 that could go into it, right? The algorithm is capable of producing so many novel images that people might want. So was there ever like a consideration at all of doing it as long form? And like also, you know, with Trinity's question, can you kind of speak on like how you view the 2 different release structures for generative work?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think long form is really interesting in that you are ceding some element of control. So much of the art to me is about curation. There's so many— there's so much stuff on my hard drive that I'm making, and I'm making so many images and videos as I'm sketching and And then I pick what I share, right? To me, it feels like I'm like a wildlife photographer. And if I see some really interesting moment, I try to capture it. If I think it explains the idea, I share it. I learn through sharing. I learn through making things and figuring out what I want to post and put out into the world or what I want to print. And this element of curation, I think, is important, right? It's an aspect of making the art. I think long form is another super valid way to work, and it's one that I personally find find kind of intimidating because you are ceding some element of control. But I think long form is also more about studying the algorithm. And I think a lot of the excitement about long form work is being able to look through lots of outputs and being able to talk about the different traits and then the different ideas that are expressed through the fact that the work is not curated is a really interesting component of it. Because you get to talk about all the different kind of eccentricities and kind of interesting moments that happen within a certain system. And yeah, I think there's lots of probably space in between, you know, things like fx. There's lots of things that I think are super interesting. Even the Vera Molnar, Martin Grasser drop recently was curated. It was a long-form work, but it was curated.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: There are probably like spaces in between, um, a kind of curated collection and a long-form collection that are really interesting to explore.

Speaker A: Yeah. I was not actually sure when they labeled that collection as long-form and curated what they were trying to accomplish. It kind of, it actually kind of sounds like they did similar to what you're doing, which is creating a lot of outputs and then picking, which doesn't really seem like it fits, you know, what we would think of as long-form from like an fx hash or some of these other sites that have popped up.

Speaker C: It doesn't, but I mean, I don't know. I forgot how many outputs, if it was like 400 or 500 outputs, there's still something. kind of amazing about seeing the range of the system. To me, it was really nice to know that Vera was involved in selecting the work.

Speaker A: Definitely. I'm just more just nitpicking on like the verbiage they chose to use there because I feel like they wanted to be able to say it, but then they had to also own the fact that it was actually curated. So it just felt like it was like a little bit of doublespeak from the auction house, you know, from the platform.

Speaker C: Yeah, I could see that.

Speaker A: But anyways, that's, that's for Friday's recording, Trinity, when we do our weekly episode.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, but I'm like, I think there's all different ways to work. And I think the long-form stuff is exciting. I think curated stuff is exciting. I think it's, you know, there are a lot of different ways to make work.

Speaker A: Uh, so no, there was never any consideration with Co-Ingradients to release this long-form. Again, I just kind of feel like when I was hearing you talk about it, it felt like maybe you could have done like 250 or 300. And like, I'm just curious to know, like when you're working on a project, What kind of makes you consider doing long form, if at all? And like, what makes you pull back from it?

Speaker C: Yeah, I would say like long form is the sort of thing where it's like mentally so taxing that it kind of, to me, it feels like the sort of thing you can do like once a year. I find I'm like, I can't sleep. I'm like thinking too much. It puts a lot of pressure on you as an artist. And so I think there are moments where it makes sense or certain approaches or things that you're working on where you really feel like this is the way to do it. But I mean, I see a lot of people who use long form in a really playful way and they do things which are really lightweight and they are doing collections that are experimenting. And I think that's great. And I think it's awesome when people can work that way. I personally feel like I can only do it like once a year or something. So, and this work is work that has always been so curatorial to me. Like, I've, you know, I love printing this work and I love thinking about it and kind of like really noodling over every image and just being like in the weeds. And it, to me, it's this kind of work works really well for this approach to presenting it.

Speaker A: This is kind of like moving off of the solos exhibit stuff more formally. I'm curious to dig into a little bit your— you said a third of your work is also corporate work, which I imagine is some kind of like work for hire where there might be a brief to do something for a space. And I want to kind of connect it to NFTs in a way of like, you know, we've been in this bear market now for a year about, you know, you don't release work on like a weekly or even monthly basis. So probably for your purposes, it hasn't really felt super different, or maybe it has, and you can tell us like your experience in it. But has that kind of leeched into the corporate side too? I mean, or is this bear market like a uniquely NFT thing when it comes to art?

Speaker C: I haven't felt a bear market in terms of corporate work. I do find the work changes. So over, you know, I've been working professionally for 20 years and I find, you know, there'll be periods of time where I'm just doing like events, you know, I'm doing installations at events and touring around and I'm in convention centers and so on. And sometimes I'm doing motion graphics work or package design or generative design. And I find it, the work changes based on what people are excited about and Recently I've been doing a lot of work kind of based on the things that I do on through daily sketching. So I'll give you an example right now. I'm working on some animations for Hermès for their social media, where I'm taking elements of the brand and identity and able to kind of use my artistic voice, but also express something for a client. I've done similar kind of work for Google and Apple and other companies. I haven't seen a kind of bear market for commercial work. I've seen a lot of grumbling about NFT bear market, but I haven't seen it really firsthand. Maybe because I have been, again, I don't drop work that often. I used to drop a lot of work on Hic Et Nunc and then OBJKT, like on Tezos, sort of maybe once a week or once every 2 weeks. And I, I liked that rhythm and that rhythm worked really well for the time. But now I've been doing sort of small projects throughout the year, like this project with Verse. I did something with Nifty Gateway and doing a lot of kind of commissions.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: for collectors. So sort of one-on-one commissions. So I haven't had too much kind of interaction with the marketplace to see what it feels like.

Speaker A: You're lucky then. You know, we obviously talk to a lot of artists like on the show and offline, and there's a lot of people who kind of came into generative art through fxhash in particular, like as a hobby, and then started making like close to a salary level type of money that has really just evaporated. Right. And so you start to make plans around Well, I made this much in, you know, these last 6 months.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And all of a sudden it all dries up because everyone's like more picky. Also like tastes I think have grown and changed too. So it's just been a very challenging time for a lot of the like every other week type of release artists, I think.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I think that's one reason why I like having, you know, I am a professor. I have a steady paycheck from that. I do this commercial work. I like doing artwork. I love selling prints and I generally feel like it's good to have a balance. To me, they seem like almost like 3 legs of a stool and they lead to a kind of balanced career where it's like, oh, okay, maybe commercial work is drying up a little bit so I can like try, I can teach some more or do some more educational work. Or maybe like, I feel like I'm teaching too much. Let me put some love into the art practice. And to me, it's always been trying to find that right balance in terms of time. And I think Yeah. If there's one kind of advice I would give for folks is to find good balance that leads to a holistic career.

Speaker A: That's great. That's, and that's advice coming from someone who's been doing this for quite a while by NFT standards, at least. Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Zac, I know that, you know, you need to head out soon, so let's start wrapping it up with some rapid-fire questions if that's okay. These are kind of like lighter, lighter questions. Yeah, of course. One of the ones we always like to ask is, What do you listen to while you code and do you have any recommendations for us music-wise?

Speaker C: Oh, that's a good question. Let me pull out my phone. I love NTS Radio. So NTS Radio is always having kind of live streams and, you know, I always find kind of cool music that way. There are some DJs that I really love there, like Merlot, and I always go to NTS Radio. I love mixes. Like I just, I don't know why, but I like being on some sort of journey. And so I go to SoundCloud a lot, find a lot of DJs and mixes that I like there. The most recent one, I can't find my phone, so I can't tell you exactly, but Overmono has a really great mix that I've been listening to recently. And then I think in terms of musicians, I really like Beatrice Dillon. The mix that I've been really into is Cover Mix by Overmono. And then In terms of music, it's like, I don't know, Beatrice Dillon. I've gotten really into exploring like '90s techno, like LFO and some of this kind of music from England that I've been like super into recently. I don't know if that's, these are helpful.

Speaker A: Hey, all recommendations are helpful.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: Everyone always brings their own stuff. You know, some people listen to like a lot of like punk and hardcore. Some people listen to like improvisational jazz and yeah, we definitely hear a lot of electronic broadly in there too.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: My '90s techno is basically just like Orbital. Yeah. That was one of my favorites from back then.

Speaker C: I just like DJs. There's a series called Beats in Space that's been going for like 20 years. There's like a DJ there and he has other DJs come in and they do like an hour set. And I just find I like it a lot.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: The Lot Radio in Brooklyn has great DJs come on too.

Speaker C: Like, oh yeah.

Speaker A: Fortet did one recently and they do, they do a lot of great stuff. Trinity, if you're back, do you wanna hit us with another rapid fire? She said in the chat that she was back, but I guess she's not.

Speaker C: Still on.

Speaker A: I will hit us with another rapid fire. Another one that we like to do.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Who would you like to hear us interview in the future? Anyone in particular? Um, and this could be actually, I would, I would, I'm really interested to hear your recommendations because you might have some more like traditional art world or like not, you know, not just FX# artist type recommendations for us. So go nuts on this one.

Speaker C: Okay. Well, I don't know if she'd be up for it, but I would love to hear Vera Molnar. I think there's that generation. They're all— Vera Molnar is 99 years old. Ken Knowlton just passed away. Charles Azuri just passed away. I would love to hear more from that generation. I'm excited about how the NFT space has offered a lot of these artists a chance to share their work in different ways, but I feel like I want to hear their stories. Lillian Schwartz is a good example of somebody whose story— I love her work so much. I teach about her work. And, um, if there's more ways to hear stories about Bell Labs and her body of work, like, I think that would be amazing. I would say those are some artists that I'd be, uh, really excited about.

Speaker A: I'm sure you know Ira Greenberg. Yeah, he offered to connect us to Roman Varasco potentially, who's also still living and also very old. And it's like, um, it's honestly a little intimidating, you know, like so much of, you know, unlike you, we, we don't have that deep art background, you know, we're doing our best to read stuff like, yeah, and try to catch up.

Speaker C: I mean, sometimes it's literally just like showing up and turning on a camera or turning on a mic. Like I went to— I did a project with Ken Nolten and I went to his house and I just, I took out my cell phone and I was like, tell me what we're seeing, you know? And he just talked for 5 or 10 minutes and I put that video on Vimeo. It's what I share with students when I teach about his work. Like sometimes it doesn't even require research. Like it's literally just These people have stories to tell, so we should be giving them a microphone.

Speaker A: That's inspirational. And we'll get back to Ira on that because yeah, I mean, time is unfortunately a limiting factor with a lot of these folks. All right, let's do one more and then we'll let you go so you can make it to your meeting on time. All right. So one last rapid fire here. Any questions for us? And I guess us, it's just me right now.

Speaker C: I mean, I guess I would say like, I would love to hear, and I think maybe we talked about this when we talked last time, but like, how did you get into this? I would love to hear your, like, what is the origin story for this podcast? And when, you know, how did you get into this space? I think we talked about it last time.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think we, we must have discussed it a little bit as an icebreaker, but yeah, you know, both of us got in kind of as a COVID hobby, me before Trinity. And honestly, it was like, my wife was like, you're spending so much time gaming during COVID Why don't you, I do strategy gaming. She's like, why don't you try to do something that will make money? So I started going down the crypto rabbit hole, but I was kind of like smart about it, I guess, where I didn't just go nuts. Like I waited until I found a lot of resources that I liked, which is difficult in the crypto space to find like really solid resources to like learn and not just hype, especially at the time we got in.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Through that and like getting into Bitcoin and Ethereum, I found Hic Et Nunc. And, you know, Tezos wasn't that expensive. And so every time I had like a little bit of remainder money in an exchange, I would just convert it to Tezos and just like play around on Hic Et Nunc. Then HEN closed and fxhash opened. And that was when we kind of discovered like the community here and brought Trinity in really quickly because it was so exciting. And I was like, you have to see this. This is unlike anything else. And she got in really hard, really fast, just like I did. We were staying up all night on Discord waiting for drops because back then it wasn't so telegraphed, like when things would come out. So, yeah. And after a month of that, end of December, so only 6 weeks after, 6 or 7 weeks after fxhash had even been open as a platform, we were like, we should make a podcast about this.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And start chronicling what's going on every week. Because it just felt so special, like the community and just like, there was just like this electricity around every time a cool piece would come out. And there was so much good work dropping those first few months, especially that there was like this pent-up body of work that had no place to publish that all these artists had. So that was really exciting. And now the show has kind of expanded, right? Because a lot of those artists have migrated to other platforms and other blockchains. And so we're kind of like trying to cover more of the space. But yeah, that's kind of the short-ish version of the story.

Speaker C: Nice. It started with gaming.

Speaker A: Started with, started with gaming because, you know, when you think of it, and a lot of people do in the space, when you think of it as also an investment, like there's a gaming and like strategy aspect to it.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: And so, yeah, I think there's very few people who, and this is kind of a problem in the space, I think, is that there's very few people who are here with a strong art background, with intentions that are like, I wanna hold this for 30, 40 years. And you hear from some big people who put in a lot of money that they're holding long-term, but like, what's long-term? Is it 1 year or 5 years or 40?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So, you know, you can only take them at their word, but at the end of the day, like when you're putting in that, those amounts of money, it's like, they're probably expecting to see a return at some point.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I don't know what your view of it is, because like, we've talked to people like Jamie from Verse, right? Like, how do you grow this space to get more people who didn't originate in Web3, in crypto, collecting and interested? Because that's what's going to really, I think, provide longevity.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's a, that's an interesting question. I guess I don't even think about timeframes. It's just like, the idea of ownership is exciting. And if Somebody owns a work for 6 months or 6 years or 60 years. Like, that's exciting. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if I have a really good answer to that question. In general, I have found I love just sharing work. And so I find I kind of grow community through sharing and creating spaces around the things that I do. But yeah.

Speaker A: I think your intuition and your desire to create physicals has been really wise. Like, 'cause you've been doing it since before, you know, that's a big trend we've seen the last 6 months. But you were doing it before that. And, you know, from the few pieces that I have printed out or plotted, it really does create like a stronger feeling of like, well, now that I have this, like I'm probably never gonna sell it, you know, because I got this great plot from Zancan and it's signed, you know? So like, now how can I possibly sell that NFT?

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: It just kind of feels, they feel connected even though they technically aren't. Right. There's like this aura of connectedness.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. And it's about living with the work. Like that's the number one thing is like finding ways to live with the work, which is what I do. Through like printing and having the work on my walls. I did find the name of the artist that I couldn't, that I was like totally blanking on before. So I'd love to shout it out if I can.

Speaker A: Please do.

Speaker C: Yeah. So Abraham Palotnik, he's an artist from— he passed away recently. He's from Brazil and he's a kind of, I guess you'd say like kinetic chromatic artist. He does these things. I'm going to butcher this name, but they're called aparelho cromático, but there are these kinds of paintings that he makes with lights beneath a surface. So he has these light bulbs that are different colors, and he positions them in different ways, and he turns them on and off, and he makes a painting with light. And the result is not dissimilar to the cone gradients, because the cone gradients, like, the way the math works, it's very similar to a kind of lighting equation. And I just love this work. And it's that sort of thing that happens to me where I post this work, I'm sketching, I'm posting, and somebody says, like, you have to check out Abraham Polotnik's work, and I, I like absolutely fell in love. To me, it's so valuable when somebody says like, oh, check out this other artist, or, you know, see this other thing. And to me, that was like a giant unlock. So I would say if there's an artist that really inspired this exhibition, it would be Abraham Polotnik.

Speaker A: Awesome. Good shout out there. And I'm sure everyone will go look up some of those images on Google shortly after listening to this. All right, well, let's end it here. I know you have to go. And get on with your day. So thank you so much, Zach. I hope you had a good time coming on the show.

Speaker C: Yeah, thank you. It was really great. And I really appreciate all the things that you do for the space.

Speaker A: Oh, that's always nice to hear. Thanks. Well, that's it for this one, everyone. That was Zach Lieberman. Check out his upcoming Vercelos exhibition, Lichtrequisite: Studies in Color, Light, and Geometry, starting on August 8th. It's really great to have Zach on. Thank you so much. Hope you all enjoyed. That's it for this one, everyone. We'll talk to you all soon.

Speaker C: Later.

Speaker B: Bye.