As an artist, I'd never contemplated doing a self-portrait. Despite the number of outlets through which I've worked, music, AI, curation and so on, in the crypto space especially, and perhaps beyond it, one of my countless self-indulgent polymath experiments happened to become historic {Realiti}, so I'm an AI artist. If a self-portrait was ever going to happen, it would have to arrive like this: by stochastic miracle, and uncalled for.
In an AI context, a seed is not a prompt in the general sense. It is a number that determines the initial state of randomness from which a model begins generating. Seed 666 was simply the coordinate for one particular patch of noise inside vqgan_imagenet_f16_16384. VQGAN+CLIP works by argument: the generator proposes an image, CLIP judges how closely it corresponds to the text, and gradient descent pushes the latent representation a little further along.
Satan turns up memetically across my work, self-declared Prince of This World. "Prince of this world" is what the Gospel of John calls the devil, the ruler of everything you can point at. It started as a joke about the seed and then quietly stopped being one. A crypto boy in a cap, standing in a burning field whose edges he can't see, sovereign of a world made entirely of numbers. Which is a description of the devil, and, on a bad day, of me.
And yet there he is, low and to the left, hunched and half-turned away, dark against the wash and wearing a cap. Everything else in the frame is weather: a Rothko-ish sky coming apart at its edges. He is the only thing in the picture holding a shape.
I remember looking at it and thinking, shit, that's me lmao. And it's all a simulation.
Made in 2026 during the ./spiral experiments, returning to a 2021 tool.
Minted for myself, as a personal sketch. A page from the notebook, scribbled onto the chain.
