Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode, a posthumous episode of Waiting to Be Signed. We are here today with a very special interview. We've reconvened, we've got Zancan on the show. fx hash legend, generative art legend. You know him, you love him. We've been following him since the beginning. Trinity's here. We're rocking on a Friday morning. How's it going, everyone?

Speaker B: Yeah, doing great. Hello everyone. Finally on the show.

Speaker C: It's only taken 2+ years, 2 and a half years, but we're here. We made it.

Speaker B: You kept trying and trying, and I was always like, nah, I have too much to do. Not now, maybe talk about it in a few months. But the thing was, I was probably too stressed about doing an episode with you.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, we're heavy hitters, you know, it's a big deal to be on Waiting to Be Signed and everyone gets a little scared, I think, when they're about to come on, but you're here now. And have you actually done— I know you've done some Spaces and stuff, but have you been in any other podcasts?

Speaker B: Not so often, but I remember very well the first time I was speaking about generative art, it was on a Twitter Space. And that was Danielle who convinced me to try it, and it was a horrible experience for me. That was terrible. And I was terrible. I could never listen to what I said that day. Usually I can never listen to my interviews or podcasts or anything.

Speaker A: Well, it's okay. Everyone else will listen.

Speaker C: Exactly. This is for the people. I don't listen back either. It's a little cringe sometimes to hear what questions we ask, but glad that you are here today. You have a list of questions you theoretically prepared. You know, you've also been preparing for this for 2 years. Let's be honest. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: This is not your first rodeo.

Speaker A: So yeah, let's kick it off then.

Speaker B: Let's go.

Speaker A: With the usual question, tell us a bit about your background in art and coding. I'm sure you've given this answer across some of those Long-lost Twitter Spaces now, but official canonical waiting to be signed answer. What's your history in practice in art? How did you get into coding and how'd you come to create generative art?

Speaker B: My background in art, it's hard to say because I haven't been to any art school or anything, no proper teaching. So I'm basically a self-taught person about anything and everything. Same for coding, by the way. My history starts very young because I started at the age of 8 to code and never stopped since then. So it's been basically 40 years of coding, and I went through so many languages and computers and stuff along the years. And here I am doing generative art now in JavaScript. I had to relearn JavaScript because the one we use now is not the same that we were using back in 2000 or something like that. I graduated an engineer in electronics for some reason, but I wanted to do an art school. My parents told me, well, as long as we pay for your studies, you finish them and then you'll be free to do whatever you want. So I graduated an engineer, but I didn't learn any coding actually there because I knew it already. I've been an engineer for 1 year. It was in the year 2000. I was expatriated in the US, in Texas for 1 year working at Texas Instruments, of course. And then I quit to become a painter and I've been self-teaching painting, oil paint. It took me almost a year to finish my first painting. So this is when I understood that I was not going to make a living out of my painting, but also programming was too important for me. So I went back to programming at the very same time and I kept doing both for the years to come. And then fast forward, I created my own development studio with a friend. It's been running for 20 years and we've been programming mostly interactive stuff. Ended up doing works like touch tables or video projections for museums, always with real-time graphics and interactivity. So it was technically in terms of programming was quite big, quite technical. People would ask us for projects that were innovative or special with a time limit that was short and they needed technicality. So it felt like we were doing some mercenary stuff most of the time. So yes, I've been working a lot with interactive stuff and animations, real-time animations, which is the reason why I decided to not do that. With generative art, only still images.

Speaker C: I think that's an amazing story about how you got into art and generative art and just the exploration space. And it sounds like to a certain extent, your parents were right. Finish your engineering degree and then let's see. Although if you'd gone to art school, who knows what could have happened?

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I've talked to many people back then when I wanted to have art education and everybody was telling me, well, art school is not something for you because it's gonna teach you The type of art that is very formatting. And back then it was also very conceptual, the type of art that you would learn in art school, whereas my inspirations were more figurative and portrait and like classic painting. This is what triggered me the most. And talking with people, they really discouraged me to go into an art school. So I followed my own path and obviously I didn't fit the art world because I didn't have some formal teaching and I didn't have that validation from an art school. I've been creating what I liked, but I knew that it was not going to be something that I could sell. I was not legit for the art world anyway.

Speaker A: I mean, it did eventually become something that you could sell. So can you catch us up on that side of it then? Like, how did you come to find the blockchain and NFTs as a way to start releasing your generative artwork? Because if I remember right, you were before that doing stuff with plotters, right? Am I right in remembering that, that you got into plotters prior to NFTs?

Speaker B: Yeah, so my mates with whom I created the studio, so we shared an office and I was basically going there to work every day and he was doing plotters. He had been doing plotter art for about 2 years before I started myself. And during the lockdown, we developed an idea for a project. We received some funding for it and it involved driving some robots to draw things. So I started to develop a software to drive robots and plotters and ultimately a big CNC machine that we had that we wanted to convert into a plotting device. So I started to work on the software to drive the plotters. And in the beginning, I was using my friend's generative art as a sample. Oh, okay. To try my software, but he wasn't so much okay about it, me plotting his own works. And also for my samples, I started to generate myself some SVG files just to try, and I got hooked by it and I enjoyed it so much that very quickly it became a passion. I was practicing every day and every night I was making generative art to try on the plotter. So I've developed both the art on one side and the plotter software in the meantime. And ultimately, while the plotter software didn't serve for the project we had with the company, which was abandoned by the way, but I kept using it for all my plots. This is that software that nowadays is doing also other things like embroidery. We'll talk about it later, but it's been my tool for making my plots. I'm not using any other software. And yeah, the blockchain. I heard about the blockchain and NFTs the day when Beeple made his sale about $5,000 every day. It was in the news. I was not on Twitter back then. I was really not following anything, but I learned it in the office that day. And that very same day, I thought, this is interesting. And I documented myself about it and I discovered something that completely fascinated me. And from that day on, I was every night trying to absorb all I could about this world that seems so new and so full of promises, but really I didn't know anything about it. I had no notion whatsoever about finance or cryptocurrency, so I was starting really from scratch and developing the Plotter software. Obviously I wanted to make an NFT at some point. But I kind of forgot about it. I was into plotting, so I forgot about NFTs, and I've tried to think about building a store to sell my plots. And I sold 3, by the way, 3 plots to 1 collector before the store was there. And I thought it was a signal for me to launch, but in fact, I launched NFTs instead, the digital counterpart of my plots. It took me about 6 months of developing that project. The one that you call, or that I called Grass.js, took me about 6 months before I started to create NFTs and images with it. And then fxhash came, I think, 2 months or 3 months after my first NFT. So really shortly after.

Speaker C: And fxhash really changed the landscape for the most part because it was really very accessible long-form generative art. When you were first developing Grass.js and doing some of your early plots and selling some of your early pieces, was long form your intention or were you looking to kind of create more closely scoped one-of-ones or smaller series?

Speaker B: Not at all. Not at all. I didn't know what long form was and it wasn't my intention at all. I had heard about Art Blocks from my mate in the very beginning when he showed me Art Blocks. It was around March 2021 and I think That was a Subscape from Matt Delaurier that was minting at the time. And I was like, yeah, sounds cool, but I forgot about it as well. Didn't buy, obviously. I didn't have any cryptocurrency and it seemed so expensive to me back then. Before I started to actually sell my NFTs, I was a little bit in doubt. I was not going to invest some of my own money into cryptocurrency to buy art. Back then. But then after launching my first NFTs and selling them so well, it really changed my mind and my capacity of collecting, of course. But yeah, long form, no, it wasn't my intention. I was working more like I was doing when I was painting. I had an image in mind and I was working my code to reach that goal, that image that I had in mind. That was my way, my process. So I want to do a landscape with this kind of plant, so I'm going to develop everything it needs to become that very landscape. So there was almost no use of randomness, a little bit of it for sure, but the idea of releasing like hundreds of images from the same algorithm wasn't at all in my mind. But then I had some of my collectors of my works on Foundation and on Tezos who became very early completely crazy about FXHash when it launched. So that was this new platform and I looked at it and I thought, yeah, that's interesting, looks cheap. I mean, aesthetically and the way it was done, it looked cheap to me. So I was looking at it from the sidelines. I thought it was fun though. But yeah, one of my collectors with whom I was speaking very often was completely crazy about it. He was an Ethereum collector and finding this incredible source of generative art, so affordable, like 1 $tex was nothing compared to whatever he had to pay to buy any work on Ethereum. So he was absolutely going bonkers with fxhash, buying every project multiple times. So this is when I started to think, yeah, it would be fun to please my collector to make a project on fxhash. And then one day I heard an interview with Ciphrd explaining the platform, what it was. It was gaining a lot of traction. And I heard that interview while I was making a very important plot that I called Monolith 000. And while I was making this plot, I was hearing Ciphrd speak and I was imagining using FXHash to distribute my plot, the one that I was doing. Like chop it in pieces and make a project that could enable me to distribute a little piece of that plot to many people. That was my idea. And then I contacted CypherD asking if there was a way to know the edition number of the outputs, and that was known, and there was no plan to have this anytime soon. So the platform could not be used to distribute a finite number of elements. to the collectors. Every iteration is alone, doesn't know anything about the outside world. So I had to change my idea and thankfully didn't chop that plot into pieces and I made Garden Monoliths instead. And then, you know, the story. And I think 2 weeks after releasing Garden Monoliths, with the success it had, I sold the plot in auction and it went.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker B: Really over the ceiling. It was one crazy moment for me.

Speaker A: I want to talk more about the aftermath, obviously, of Garden Monoliths. But first, like, can you say who that collector was? And are they someone who's still actively collecting?

Speaker B: Oh yeah, collector was— he went by the name of Akius.

Speaker A: Akius.

Speaker B: I don't know if I know the name. But I haven't seen him in a long time. I haven't talked to him in a long time.

Speaker C: Akius, right? I believe.

Speaker B: He's based in Australia, I think.

Speaker C: Oh, wow.

Speaker B: Yeah, pretty sure he's in Australia. I sent him some plots back then. Yeah, I'm not sure that he survived the crypto crash that we experienced in 2022, I think. Well, he was a long-time crypto user. He went through a very bad crypto crash back in 2008, I think. Well, he told me all those stories. We were chatting a lot back then. Yeah.

Speaker A: Let's talk about then the immediate aftermath because, so Garden Monoliths comes out December 9th, 2021. It's only 18 $TEZ per piece. It mints out really quickly and over the next couple weeks, the floor steadily rising and rising and the buzz building around it and collectors jumping into Discord. Back when we had #price-discussion on fxhash Discord, talking about the features and the rarity and I'm building sets and just the bullishness, as we would say, around the project and around you as an artist was I think kind of unparalleled to a lot of other stories in fx hash. So what was that like, you know, for you? It kind of sounds like you just put this out here because this one guy thought it would be fun. So like, what were your expectations and like, how did it— I mean, it must have changed everything for you. So what was that like?

Speaker B: There was no expectation actually. I was doing it for fun. It was not so hard for me to do because I was already using these algorithms to make my standalone art. On Hic Et Nunc and Object. And I was pretty sure that releasing a long form besides with code that was public for the first time, I was pretty sure that it would kill my algorithm, that I would not be able to use it after that. That was the only pressure that I put on myself about this, but I had no expectations. The price, 18 TES, well, it was about, I think, $70 or something.

Speaker C: $70 or $100. Somewhere around there.

Speaker B: Yeah, around there. So it was not cheap for fxhash project back then. It wasn't that cheap. But yeah, it sold out very quickly. I had the possibility to mint my piece still, but in less than a minute it sold out. So I was lucky to be able to mint a Garden Monolith, but the next day, it's funny because a collector who missed out asked me, can you sell me your piece? And I was like, yeah, sure, 18 test. So for, uh, for a long time I didn't own a Garden Monolith. It was also very interesting because you remember that obviously back then the reveal took a long, long time, like many hours. So I minted the project, it was the day before, and in the morning I was taking my kid to school and on the Discord the project started to reveal. But the entire night it wasn't revealed. At all. It's only in the morning that I could see what happened with the sale and resale, and I saw that people were buying the project without knowing the output on secondary market. So obviously some people flipping for not enough before the reveal. So that was interesting. And yes, then it went very progressively. Over the days. I remember that.

Speaker A: I remember it too. It wasn't just like an up immediately. It was just very steady. Like, now it's 100 Tez, now it's 200 Tez, then the floor. It was maybe the healthiest growth we've ever seen in a project like that because, you know, the market was really hot around then and you would see projects go up and then go back down after flippers. But this one just kind of very slowly until we got to what, 10,000, 15,000?

Speaker B: I think many, many Ethereum collectors came to FX hash and on Tezos thanks to that project.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: Because all of a sudden we passed the moment when the prices of the project were not something that we had seen on Tezos before, but it was totally fine for the Ethereum collectors. All the whales came to Tezos and started to collect there. So that was something I could be proud of, I guess. to have been a trigger for those people to come to Tezos and start collecting there. And also in terms of sales, I understood how important it was for the artist to have the royalties because, well, the amount I made thanks to the royalties on the Garden Monoliths went quickly above what I had made on the primary market. So it started to change the perspectives for me.

Speaker C: And it still maintains the highest volume of any project on fxhash with hitting nearly $1 million in USD in secondary sales, which is amazing.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, maybe this is a good place to kind of talk about— it must have been somewhere mid-year 2022, right? So I think it was after Kindergarten Monuments, the collab you did with Yazid, that came out in like April, May of '22. And then It was probably around the end of 2022 that you started tweeting about issues with your bank and taxes, right? And so it's been a bit of a mixed blessing, I guess. Like, obviously the success of the project led to, I'm sure, like a million DMs and every curated platform coming to you and trying to figure out if they can do something with you. And you've done auctions and you've done so many live events. And I think the perception all the while is like, wow, this guy's crushing it, he's making All this money, like amazing for Zancan, but then like a lot of artists we've talked to, right, when crypto goes down and you have all these tax issues that occur, like maybe you can kind of explain a little bit what happened.

Speaker B: So I wasn't really prepared to have that much income coming from cryptocurrency. I thought it was going to be something on the side, but it became too much to be considered like a hobby. In terms of revenue. So it became my main source of revenue. And you have to declare it accordingly. So it's professional revenue, so you need a structure and you need to fit in tax scheme, like a tax plan. You need to have a legal structure to do that. And it turned out nothing was ready. To declare this kind of income, and when I started using cryptocurrency, I had heard and had also some confirmations about the fact that it was going to be taxed on the flat tax, 30% on everything that you change to fiat. So that was pretty simple. But then I heard from other sources that it was probably not going to be the case. So I had an interview with a lawyer who was specialized in cryptocurrencies. It was William. And he pretty much scared me a lot telling me that the way I was going to be taxed, I would lose everything because VAT would apply, 20% VAT at the price the day of the sales. And since the value of the cryptocurrency crashed down quite a lot, so the value I had after a while was less than the tax I would have to pay. So I was going to be bankrupt. So it was not a solution that was pleasant to hear, but he told me, you need to create a company and send all your wallets to the company, give away your wallets to the company, and then you can make things in a way that you are at least taking into account the loss of the cryptocurrency's value. So I started to try and create a company, but then needed a bank for the company. To open a company, you need a bank account, professional. But no bank would want me to create a company that was related to cryptocurrency or art or both. So I've tried, I think, 7 or 8 banks. Some of them, I saw that it was going to be running smoothly, but all of a sudden they shut down my account. So it became such a mess just to create a company. And later on, I finally managed to create my company. It's called Zancan Garden and I have a bank for it. But it turns out that I could not use that company for the sales that I made before. So I have this company that I have to take care about, like declare stuff on a monthly basis, but I basically cannot do anything with it. It kind of sucks. And I have also my artist status, and I'm supposed to declare things, but I had an accountant who dumped me, had another accountant who dumped me as well. And every time you spend a lot of time to try to find a person, try to teach them what your situation is about, even though they know about crypto, they will need some numbers. So you need to create those documents with all the numbers. But where do you get the numbers from the blockchain? Easier to say than done. So I've been writing countless codes and pieces of software to come up with something that was usable by an accountant from the blockchain values. So I spent a lot of time, a lot of time, months and months and months doing this to characterize what were my sales and how could they be declared in a French way and taxed. But I still didn't know how much I had and how much tax I would have to pay. So it's been pure chaos and also it's been so time-consuming and exhausting and never could I have a clarity of what was going to happen to me. I either could be super rich or have nothing, and I never knew for certain how much I could consider of this crypto money to be mine. And it's still the case. There are many things that I didn't declare, and I'm going to use my ability to make errors. It's in the French law. You have the right to make errors, to correct your previous year declaration. So for instance, in 2022, I haven't declared my cryptocurrency at all. This is something I still have to do. But spending so much time doing this administrative stuff, it was so— I mean, it was so boring and also so scary.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: It's been accompanying me all this time for those years. So as you say, yeah, every other platform was asking me for a new project and stuff, and I was engaging in some projects, but the more and more time passed and the closest I was to crashing actually, because I was doing everything in an emergency. Every art project, every release was done in an emergency. Until that one day where I was engaged in a project for charity and the day I was supposed to release my signed document with a number of information about my project, like name of the project and number of editions and stuff, I had absolutely nothing and I canceled. I canceled that day where I was supposed to submit my work. And it was something very hard for me to do because I was trying to be a professional all this time, to be somebody reliable. And at some point I just could not. So it was hard to face the reality of my situation that I was doing too much. And even though I was so enthused about everything I did in generative art, about the space, about the travels and the exhibitions and friends and collectors, I just could not sustain this pace. And I don't think that I burned out, but I was dangerously overwhelmed, I would say. We are like end of 2022 when I had released Landscape with Carbon Capture with Verse and going to Miami at the same time. And the Verse project is going Absolutely crazy. It's like an open faucet. It was going for 2 weeks, and for 2 weeks I get notifications like every minute that an edition was sold and sold and sold. It was an open edition, long form, and it went really crazy. And that was too much, too much to take. I didn't do that to make a lot of money because money equals more problems for me. Plus my collectors, or some of the collectors, were starting to argue that an edition I was going to crash my market, which it did in a way, and there was no way I could stop it. There was no way I could control that, but I was still responsible for placing some gambling elements into that code, but it wasn't planned at all. And yeah, that was overwhelming. And also Miami that time, I was concerned about the environment and carbon emissions and stuff. And I go to Miami, this place with air conditioning going full throttle all the time and people partying 24/7 and no one cares about anything. And I was there with my environmentally oriented project, making heaps of money and losing completely the intent and the pitch of my art. So at some point I wasn't really going to the place I wanted to go. I never made a project in the intent to sell a lot and make a lot of money. That was never my intent. But that money came to me and it doesn't make my life easier. It doesn't make my life better. Clearly it didn't help. Maybe it's outrageous to say that money doesn't solve your problems. I don't need money because so many people are really struggling. with the financial side of their work. Obviously, you need to pay your bills, you need to, uh, to pay for your lifestyle, but past a certain point, it's just more problems than anything. And I've passed that point, clearly.

Speaker C: That was a very prolific year for you, not just with the partnerships with platforms, but you're also just releasing edition projects as well, like Experimenting with things like Versum, like 8BitDo while fxhash was down. What was your mentality in like creating and releasing some of these non-partnered works or less obviously so partnered works during that time? Was it at all relaxing or like, did you get—

Speaker B: Yeah, I really loved it. I was completely hooked on the space almost 24/7. I felt really connected with the space. Back then, and I was sensing it. I was breathing it and feeling it. So once when the moment was right, I could come up with a project overnight, like the Abidu thing, because I had that vision that was very clear, which I don't have nowadays. So it's probably because I'm not connected that much. I'm not on social media that much. So I guess some people who are more connected than me feel the space better and are more aware of what's going on, all the trends and stuff. But back then I felt that way. It felt right. And yeah, during the Abidu release, Abidu was trendy. I mean, that was ridiculous doing 8-bit Garden Monoliths. That was absolutely nuts to do that. It didn't make sense at all. But it was fun, so I did it, and I did not expect it to sell, especially because the price and edition number was generative, so totally random. So you could have a 1-on-1 that cost 2 Tezos and 32 editions that was 64 Tezos each. So it didn't make sense at all, but I don't know, people liked it. That was this kind of crazy energy. happening back then.

Speaker A: Throughout all these years now, like Trinity mentioned, you did work on with Versum, which RIP, you know, that platform's now gone. You've done with Verse, you've done Bright Moments, you've basically done everything except Art Blocks, which up until recently you wouldn't have been able to do because of the on-chain thing, right? Because I'm sure the library that you use is just too big to put on-chain, right? I mean, maybe now with their new studio they're allowing people to use, I think, IPFS, and maybe that would be an option. But where I'm going with this is throughout all these projects and everything you've done, it feels like the core of the work has always been deriving from that library that you've built, finding new ways to push it, new ways to change it and keep it feeling fresh. And so I guess like the 2 questions I have would be like, one, why? You know, like, did you ever feel like just making a new wallet, making a new name and going in a totally different direction and abandoning it? Because of maybe how much pressure you felt to stick with this style or because it had become kind of like the thing that you were known for and wanting to get rid of that almost burden of being, you know, the guy who has Grass.js? Or is it something that you just love so much that you've never wanted to stray from it?

Speaker B: Yeah, so Grass.js, actually after Garden Monoliths, I didn't use that file so much. Occasionally I did, but I started immediately after to rewrite everything in a more modular way. So it's not just a file or what we call an algorithm, it's more like a framework. And yes, you mentioned Art Blocks. So very early, Art Blocks asked me if I would be interested to release the work, and there was a problem with the file size. So I started to think in terms of optimizing my code size. It took me a long, long time to rewrite the code that did something similar but with a smaller code size. And anything I was developing from that moment on, I had this in mind. I put that pressure on myself, not writing some code that uses a lot of space. And it turned out it was giving me boundaries to my ideas. I felt constrained. It was so much harder to develop my ideas with that size problem in mind. So why would I have to go to a platform on Ethereum that needs me to optimize my code size while I could simply release something on FXHash? But there was a demand for that. There was a demand from collectors to release something. Actually, I did with Bright Moments project with the Tokyo collection. It was using Art Blocks Studio on Ethereum and my code was really big. I optimized it a lot, but still for that project, I'm not going to get into details, but I paid in gas $16,000 to mint the project. That was really crazy because it was at that very moment the Pepe coin was going bonkers and clogging the blockchain and the gas was absolutely crazy. So this is when I minted that project, which I did By the way, just to close the story, I ended up on the very last moment writing a self-extracting archive as my generative code. And when you launch that project, Kumono Shingo, it actually self-extracts a big chunk of data, and that's the generative code, which is absolutely nuts because I like my code to be seen by people who like to see code, to read code. I would like people to see what I've written. There is so much art in the code, I think, in the code itself. But this way, completely obfuscating the chunk of data is not the generative art I want to make, you know. So what was the question before? Oh yes, Grass.js. Yeah, if you ask me this, to ask, are you still going to work around plants and nature?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: The answer is yes. So are you still going to use the algorithm that's in the original file, Grass.js? Probably not. It evolved a lot, and even though there are parts of it that are still in my framework and I still reuse, it's so modular now, so I can use any block. It's like I've made a sort of Photoshop for generative art and for making plant-based projects. And depending on what I want to do, I can use this block or this block. And there are in my framework a lot of entry points and I can branch some new code. And this is what I always do. I branch some new code and write something specific every time I want to make new graphics. I never wanted to keep using the same code and doing the same type of art over and over. If you look closely, you will see every new release, has something that is really new, really different from the previous. And sometimes I rewrote the code entirely to make this release. I heard that sometimes, Zancan is doing always the same thing, it's always the same. I just cannot do low-effort work. It's just not in my genes. I cannot do low effort. It's always a lot of work.

Speaker C: Otherwise, I'm not satisfied with I think to me, the main 2 projects that kind of deviate a little bit from the Grass.js, I mean, other than obviously ApeBadoo, um, I think A Bugged Forest really comes to mind as something that was intentionally glitched. I'm curious to know if any elements of A Bugged Forest are in Grass.js as separate functions.

Speaker B: Yeah, a part of it. Basically, in the beginning when I was experimenting with generative art and plotters, I had 2 main algorithms. One was Grass.js and the other was Tree.js or something like that. So one for to make trees and one to make this landscape with plants. And at some point, the core of my framework was extracted from there and both algorithms are on top of the same core functions, which is everything that needs to create a generative project and making it plottable. Everything is at the core of my libraries. But at some point, Grass and Tree kind of blended together so I could use trees in my grassy sceneries. Yeah, there's a bit of the original Grass.js algorithm in my Bug forests for sure. It's all mixed up at some point. I think that's the very power of my framework is the ability to reuse previous parts. I think that's a very strong thing to consider when you want to make progress in your generative art is to be able to reuse things, not reinventing the wheel every time. It depends, different schools, different approaches. Some artists prefer to trim down their visual to some very simple algorithm or a property of an algorithm and make it the core idea of the generative project. My approach is quite different. I still have this idea in mind, this idea of a visual, and it's also most of the time figurative. You cannot just adjust values and turn buttons and see what happens. You need to have a strong conception of where you want to go to make this kind of art.

Speaker A: I'm going to change the topic slightly. So something that you were really early onto, at least as far as the space goes, was producing prints and plots. And I think we got some of the backstory earlier where you were kind of at this decision point of like, am I going to set up a website to sell prints and plots or am I going to do NFTs? And so the NFTs happened first, but then And very early on you were offering prints to collectors and then releasing projects like A Long Thread and Generative Springtime that were kind of meant to be collected and plotted by you. So I guess the question here would be like, well, what do you feel is the connection between these works that you create digitally through code, but then are trying to get into the world physically? And what's pushed you to experiment? You know, like we saw you, what, now 18 months ago in Brooklyn when you came out for Artmatr. working with them with their really interesting plotting machines that used chalk and different types of paints and other mediums. And you've even shown now recently on your Twitter like embroidery. So yeah, what's— what for you is the connection to physicals and like, and what is going on with the embroidery? Let us know.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, I come from a painting background and not just painting, I'm a maker. I like to make things. I need to make things. For instance, before going back to art and experiment with plotters, I spent many years making my house and studio. That's what's important for me, to make things with my hands. And I need to have made something physical in a day to call it a day, to feel satisfied with it. So it doesn't matter if I'm building a wall or making some plumbing or a piece of art. I feel good only when I put something physical into the world. So if I'm so attached to physical, it's for myself first. I think also some collectors relate more to a piece of art that's being made Physically, it's different, prints, because there is no actual engagement of the artist into making that type of physical. Plotting is quite different. It's more craft and you have a real, like, quote, real drawing with real pen and real paper and real ink compared to a print, which is, all right, that's a physical piece, but well, it's a printer. It's quite different. And, uh, yeah, embroidery. You know, I released Alios this year. That was the only project that I accepted to do. It was brought by Seth from Bright Moments with Coinbase. He told me, we have this project, and I was already committed to not do any new project or long form or anything, but he kind of convinced me to do it. And for him, I would do anything anyway. So I made this project Aux Arbes, and the pitch was, it was for the launch of Coinbase France that would be official, and it needed to be something very French. And I thought about it and I came up with this idea, what's, what's so French? And I thought about textile. And so that project was made around the idea of having something that felt visually like embroidered. So I worked at the code and the graphic side to look like something embroidered. And in Paris, launching that project, I met with Spongenuity, who had done experiments with embroidery and told me, he told me, oh, that would look awesome embroidered. I said, yeah. And he told me, I do have an embroidery machine. I was like, really? Yeah, we could do some samples. Okay, let's do that. But then time passed. We're now end of July. I went to north of New York to Bantam Tools, which is the company who bought the AxiDraw recently.

Speaker A: We had Bree on the show last year, so—

Speaker B: Oh really? Bree was on the show?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So I heard about Bree this July. We met in Berlin. I didn't know him before. And so he invited me to this Plotterfest in New York. So I went there. That was Really, really good. And there I met with Matt, who is doing plottables.io, and he made a small presentation of his new project, which was about embroidery. And I was like, oh, embroidery again, interesting. And speaking with Matt, he told me, yeah, I have an embroidery machine and I'm developing this library. I could make a sample for you. And actually on my departure day, I made a stop by his place in New York City, and we just had 1 hour together, and he made a sample of one of my Aux Arbes outputs, and I really fell in love with the process. That was a time when I needed something like that to feel the excitement that I kind of had lost the past months, and I really became obsessed with it. So it became clear That I needed to make my work embroidered and to try it, I needed a machine and I considered various options and I went for a big one, industrial machine. Like this thing is half a ton in weight. It was a nightmare to put it in my studio. I had to make a crane to lift it and put it in my studio. That was— but really, I loved it. I was so passionate about making embroidery and I do embroidery almost every day. Yeah. I've been using Matt's library to generate the files to make embroidery and develop the technique, and I feel more and more satisfied with my results, but I don't have any plan. I have no idea what to release. Am I going to release anything? I just enjoy the process, enjoy the excitement of being able to create my work. with embroideries. It's like a plotter, but so much different. But I felt the same kind of excitement that I had in the beginning of using a plotter and experimenting with the AxiDraw. So yeah, that's my new hobby.

Speaker C: So kind of tangential to that, because I think that the embroidery and the physicals and having seen some of the stuff that you've been posting, they look like it's so different and just so like tactile. From a selling perspective, Especially as we look at the way that the market has shifting in the way that attention has been shifting away from NFTs. Do you see yourself potentially going back to non-blockchain related sales where it's like you're producing something, you're producing them small quantity and you're just selling them? I'm just curious to see how your attitude towards the blockchain, especially as you're coming off of a couple of years of high stress.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: high hype, and this is like a passion project for you. I'm just curious to see where your head is at.

Speaker B: I'm lucky enough to not have to rely on my sales to survive. Well, actually not having to sell anything, it removes so much pressure and so much stress. I feel very happy about it, about not selling. Of course, I'm happy when something sells on secondary market. Lately, I don't know where I released it. It was a stealth drop on Object and it sold out really quickly. I was so happy to see that. I didn't say anything about this project and still my collectors were there, loyal and appreciating my work and collecting it no matter what. I feel so grateful for that, but I don't need to sell anything. So if I have like this type of project embroidery, well, maybe at some point I will come up with an idea to make it accessible to the collectors by purchasing it one way or another. But for the moment, I have no plans, and I really need to, like, to feel it in my guts to release a project nowadays. As I told you, I made sure that I didn't have any commitment to any platform or gallery whatsoever. So whenever I feel this is the right moment to release something, I will Obviously use the blockchain. Probably not a long-form project in the near future. I have too much of them, especially on fxhash. There was a moment when all I could see on fxhash was my name and that was too much. I needed to leave that space for other people. That was too much of me. But anyway, there are too many editions of my stuff out there and there is no need to put out something new, especially long-form. But I will most certainly continue to use OBJKT or Tezos to release other editions in the Lush Temples collection, for instance, because there are so many of those landscapes that I can shape before my eyes, and I would like to see them as an artwork at some point. So I'm pretty sure that I will do such releases at some point, but Yeah, no calendar, no schedule, nothing. And I mean, that's absolute freedom, and that's the most important, isn't it?

Speaker A: Definitely. I would say, hopefully you won't take this the wrong way, but, you know, we've met you a couple times in person for dinners, and every time I left with the impression that you seemed like the most tired person I've ever met. So I feel really happy to hear that you have gotten to this place where you have the freedom to like take your time back and find some peace and do things that you enjoy. And yeah, whatever comes to you comes to you. I think that you deserve it, honestly. You've probably accumulated so many frequent flyer miles like the last couple years too, just constantly traveling and this release and that release. So I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying it.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I'm trying and I'm trying to find my pace. I'm also trying to figure out how to make my everyday life work because half of the time I'm a single dad of 2, and this is something that I didn't plan neither. And it's really difficult to, as we say, find that balance. There is still a lot of chaos in my life, and I wish I had more time to work on my Artsy projects. I'm happy to have been able to go back to my studio in my house because the past year it wasn't the case, and I'm happy to have some work to do on my house and build walls and work with the matter like this, doing some physical things that involve your body as well and not just sitting behind a computer. It feels so much better this way. So yeah, the intent is to try and find that. Inner peace and inner balance and make it work on an everyday basis and then continue to create anyway. I can't stop creating. It's not possible. But being up to date with whatever happens on the blockchain or on social media is not— it doesn't fit. It really doesn't. So instead of being constantly tired, trying to do more than you can physically, Support. Yeah.

Speaker C: You seem less tired and seem to have reached a higher level of serenity from this point of view.

Speaker B: If you say so. Thank you.

Speaker C: Maybe you're just less jet-lagged. I don't know.

Speaker B: Yeah, but it feels a little bit empty and dead sometimes because the fact that I dismissed every new project and collaboration, I made myself Free but lonely for sure. So it feels a little bit lonely and I miss those times of excitement and strong connection with the community, with everyone. But I think the space changed anyway. So there was a big part of me who changed probably, but also the space changed as well. Are you feeling yourself this much excitement about Where this is all going.

Speaker C: I think we're both happy to be taking a bit of a break, and I don't know where things are going. Will, I don't know if you have a better sense, but either things will come roaring back, they won't, maybe it'll look a little bit different. I mean, what do you hope for the future for this world of NFTs, the blockchain, fx hash, Tezos, what have you?

Speaker B: Well, I'm still excited about it. I hope I hope that at some point the original idea of why a blockchain and why NFTs is going to resurface. It's not going to be just all about money and it's going to be about the beauty of openness, accessibility, decentralization. These are some beautiful utopias. I really adhered to those values that were embedded in the idea of a art on the blockchain and kind of lost them. The fact that the royalties for artists, for instance, this is something that was so strong in that project of art on the blockchain. We know where we've been through about royalties and all of a sudden it was not a thing anymore. It was not a strong feature of the smart contracts anymore. So hopefully those core values that I was interested in in the first place, I hope they resurface and gain momentum again. But for sure, I will continue to use the blockchain because I still consider myself an NFT artist because thanks to NFTs, it's the first time that I fit in an art world. This is not the art world, the traditional one as we know it. It's an art world, an art market, and I definitely fit in. I feel like that's the right place for me. So I consider myself being an NFT artist, and I'm not going to stop anytime soon.

Speaker A: Amazing. Well, everyone's just going to have to look for stealth drops and unannounced things and stay tuned. You know, we've gone now for quite a bit, so I think we should work to wrap it up. And typically we would do rapid fires, but I think Instead, I want to just hit you with some gratitude because, you know, for everything that you've spoken to about loving the community and finding your place here, you've been a huge part of that. I think for a lot of the original core of us who all got started in this through FXHash, you know, not just because of the art that you made, but because of your willingness to collect. And, you know, the first Waiting to Be Signed token that we did had a palette called like Seltazancan in it, right? The green palette. You know, without that, right, it wouldn't have been as special without someone like you in there buying up the green stuff of every release that came out. And also personally for the show, right, in the first year, the donations that you made to us when we were still just getting started, the artwork, and in Tezos too, like, you know, there were not a lot of people giving us stuff then. And, uh, I think your acknowledgement of community in that way, it meant a lot to us.

Speaker B: I know.

Speaker A: Yeah. Personally, to like keep us motivated and going, that there were people out there that'd be willing to support us in that way.

Speaker C: So it's very validating.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. A huge thank you from both of us, and just so happy to have finally had you on. You know, even though this might be one of the last episodes ever, it's great that we got to have you and talk about all this. And, uh, I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. It went fast.

Speaker A: Yeah, I told you.

Speaker B: And yeah, thank you. And this is exactly what I felt. I was overwhelmed with that feeling of gratitude towards everyone participating in that movement that gave me so much energy and gave me the feeling that I was born again, excited and didn't need to even sleep anymore because it was so energizing. And people like you are building things or animating things. And it was all part of this movement that we felt that was going maybe to change the world. There's still time.

Speaker A: There's still time.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's still time. Well, we did change the world a little bit, but yeah, the world is going in a different direction now. Not what we hoped for. But so yeah, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and I wanted to thank everyone all the time because it felt so nice and so full of energy.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And it still is. The simple fact to think about those times just gives me a lot of energy. Sometimes I hear music that I was playing when I was developing this art, and it makes that feeling go through me again, and I get a glimpse of what it felt like in those moments hooked on the blockchain and on anything generative art. So, uh, yeah, thank you as well for those years and all the moments and hearing your, your podcast and mentioning my name very often as well. Had some little moments of pride along the way.

Speaker A: Right on. Trinity, anything else before we wrap?

Speaker C: I think that's it. And just again, thank you so much for You know, kind of driving the space to what it became and for all the energy and work you've put into it. And even from an environmental perspective, I think that that focus and that priority isn't lost either.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, okay.

Speaker A: And next time you're in the area for a plotter convention or whatever, you know, hit us up.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: We'll have a much lower pressure, serene dinner where we don't have to talk about drops.

Speaker B: Yes. And I will, I won't have any drops anyway.

Speaker C: Perfect.

Speaker B: That would be a great moment. So good luck with everything, with the last 2 episodes of the show and whatever you're going to do next without the show. Maybe it's going to be a difficult moment for you in the beginning, and then you will find a way to enjoy.

Speaker A: The toddlers will fill the time for sure. So, okay.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That's for sure. Okay, great. Thank you. Cool. Thank you.

Speaker A: All right, well, thanks so much. That was Zancan, the definitive interview, Waiting to Be Signed. Thanks so much for coming on. We hope you all enjoyed, and we'll be back again with at least one more episode. All right, bye everyone.

Speaker B: Always split. We're waiting to be 9 to 9. The rail of the wind.