Dive bars, night stars, and DMT: A weekend with Coldie

Dive bars, night stars, and DMT: A weekend with Coldie

Aug 6, 2021 Artist Profiles

Placer Community Theater

Dive bars, night stars, and DMT: A weekend with Coldie

Whyte Luke
3 years ago

Friday

Late on the night of June 11th, I flew to Sacramento, shoehorned myself into a rented Chevy Spark next to SuperRare’s Head of Content Production, Nathan Beer, and drove east toward the small city of Auburn in the Sierra Nevada foothills – ground zero for the 1848 California Gold Rush.

Pistol Petes, Auburn, CA
Photo: Nathan Beer

Our destination was a sports bar named Pistol Pete’s in a faded blue strip mall next to a liquor store and a pizza joint. Our intention was to profile one of SuperRare’s earliest successful and most supportive artists: Ryan Colditz, aka Coldie. Leading up to the trip, I’d pictured drawing parallels between Auburn’s gold rush past and the crypto boom of today. But, as the Chevy Spark squeezed into Pistol Pete’s parking lot between giant pickup trucks tattooed in American flags and eagles, I quickly became more interested in Auburn’s present. Particularly, why would one of CryptoArt’s most notable artists choose to live here?

Pistol Pete’s is packed. Dudes order IPAs against a long L-shaped bar, girls sip vodka from dishwasher-scratched rocks glasses and a significant percentage of Trucker cap-wearing men look like snowboarders that wandered down from Lake Tahoe four years ago and traded their ski passes for meth.

From the din, tall and dressed in flannel, Coldie emerges. He’s got a warm smile. We order drinks and head to the porch.

“So, why Auburn?” I ask.

He discusses growing up here, how he feels a connection to the hills and the history. Later, he’ll call Auburn the “menopausal art capital of the world” and point out the abundance of galleries downtown that cater to what I’ll call the “Live, Laugh, Love” crowd, known to disappear into sauvignon blanc and wake up unclear how their Audi got back to the B&B parking lot.

“Back in the day I would do these coffee shop art shows and art walks,” he says. “So you’ve got lots of old ladies coming through who fucking hated my shit. They’re like, ‘I don’t like what you are making, I’m leaving.’ They would come up to me and tell me that. And I would say, ‘thank you so much for saying that.’ Seriously, that’s the best thing, because when I make art, I want people to feel something.”

Zhüsh Modern, Auburn, CA
Photo: Nathan Beer

A young stranger in a baseball cap wanders over. Just home from service with the Marines, he sways and grins from inside a Polo shirt before sharing unprompted stories about recent sexual experiences.

“A girl ever put a finger in your butt?” He asks.

Saturday

In the morning, we drove just outside of Auburn to the ghost town Coloma where, in 1848, James W. Marshall sifted nuggets from the sand and kicked off the Gold Rush. We cross the deep blues of the American River. The vibrant greens of the Ponderosa Pines contrast against the scorched yellow grasses of the rain-deprived hills. It boggles the mind to imagine prospectors crossing the snowy-peaked backdrop in wagons to sift precious metals from the river.

Coldie driving to Coloma, CA
Photo: Nathan Beer

In 1989, at the age of seven, Coldie moved to Auburn from the city of Garden Grove, 34 miles south of Los Angeles. Foreshadowing his three-dimensional, stereoscopic work, he soon discovered an interest in 3D View-Masters and Magic Eye posters.

“[Magic Eye] was, to me, one of the first ways that you could see an image have depth on a flat plane,” he said. “And that was the elusive thing: When I was in high school, I wanted to create depth on paper.”

Through graphic design and computing classes, he discovered collage.

“I’m not a drawer. I don’t physically know how to do perspective drawing or realism. My brain just doesn’t get down with diminishing lines,” he said. But with collage, “I was like, ‘Holy fuck, I can take all these pictures and make art out of that.’”

After high school, he followed a girl to Los Angeles and studied graphic design. He worked as an environmental designer for IKEA before landing an editorial design job with LA Weekly, where he worked for three years before returning to Auburn.

Despite a full time job, it was then, while paying $300/month to rent a studio with his friend Nic, that he really began experimenting with the styles that would come to define his art.

Alan Turing – Decentral Eyes – Variant 01

“We were living in that flow state,” he said, a subject he refers to often – that state of mind where, through experimentation, you break into a creative space and the art just pours out. It’s something to be cultivated and respected, like a baker with a sourdough starter.

His work increasingly experimented with new perspectives, with twisting depths of field and stereoscopics. He’d smoke weed, stay up late and blast music to shift his own line of sight. And it was then that he explored the world of fractals and experimented with the psychedelic DMT.

ATH Depression – Choose Your Own Adventure – 2/4

“You get this buzzing and then you go bam! You fucking snap. You’re gone,” he said. “You get transported into new worlds. You can talk to your shadow self. It’s therapeutic if you let it be – the understanding that this, right now, is impermanent.”

On weekends he’d drive two hours to San Francisco to shoot concert photos using two point-and-shoot cameras he’d hacked together to create a 3D effect.

“There’s at least a 40% fail rate if they’re not at the same millisecond,” he said. “A lot of shots are lost.”

But if they’re not lost, they can be amazing:

Flaming Lips – Wayne Coyne

We wandered down to the river in Coloma and tried panning for gold. A group of high schoolers behind us blasted Lynyrd Skynyrd and sucked back White Claws.

I asked Coldie about the market for digital-first artists prior to the blockchain and digital provenance and he said it was a struggle.

“I would share my concert photos but, back then, you had to watermark them, you had to crop them differently, in order to not get ‘right-click saved,’” he said. “It became a hindrance to even share your stuff.”

Coldie panning for gold, Coloma, CA
Photo: Nathan Beer

By the latter half of the last decade, his son had been born.

“I was working full time, 9 to 5,” he said. “Put the kid to bed and try and create from 8PM to midnight before getting up again at seven in the morning. Every day. When you start creating late at night like that, it is almost like a delirium. It helps at times, but it is a strained energy.”

Then, in 2018, SuperRare was born and, slowly at first, the NFT market started to emerge.

Proof of Work – Genesis

“I realized that, once I tokenized an artwork, suddenly the Instagram picture became marketing,” he said. “I want everyone to have this JPEG. If everyone ‘right-click saved,’ you become the fucking Mona Lisa.”

He wasn’t alone. There was a tight-knit group of artists investing in the dream, taking the risk.

In the middle of 2019, Coldie came up with what would soon be known as “The Coldie Method,” solving the issue caused by time zone discrepancies between collectors during reserve auctions. Prior to this, bidders in a given auction had to pay attention around the clock but, with the new method – first run by Coldie himself on Twitter and later implemented on SuperRare  – each new bid would extend the auction for another 24 hours, letting all parties involved catch up.

In November of 2019, this method led to a frenzy of bidding on his piece Edward Snowden – Variant 02 – Decentral Eyes, resulting in a then-unprecedented $1,000 sale.

Edward Snowden – Variant 02 – Decentral Eyes

“Everyone on Telegram was like, ‘I can’t believe you sold that fucking thing for one thousand bucks,’” he said. “And I couldn’t believe it either.”

Soon though, one thousand grew into ten thousand and the market started accelerating, faster and faster.

“I would tell my mom when I started getting big sales, ‘Hey mom, I gotta tell you, my art dream is kinda coming true!’” he said, but  his family was still very skeptical.

Then the multi-thousand dollar sales started to multiply. He started investing back in other artists, nurturing the community, embracing the flow state, until, just a week before we found ourselves panning for gold, he quit his job and turned to art full time.

A New Age is Here – Convergence Series

Sunday

In the north end of town, Coldie recently rented an art studio above a printing shop. When we visit, it’s still full of moving boxes, which he digs through to show us old photographs and a wooden stereograph photo viewer from the turn of the 20th century. 

Coldie and the NFT Gold Rush
Credit: Nathan Beer, Rowan While, Kenzie McMillan, Luke Whyte, Robert Martin, Phil Murphy

“So what comes next?” I ask.

“What I know is that when I’m in the flow state, things happen quickly,” he says. “I have to create an ecosystem for myself where I can pick and choose my times to be completely off my rocker in the creative zone, experimenting.”

Later that evening, we’re sitting on the porch out front of Coldie’s apartment. My flight is at midnight but it’s a beautiful summer night and we lose track of time.

Placer Community Theater, Auburn, CA
Photo: Nathan Beer

Suddenly aware of the hour, Nathan and I pop up and run toward the car. We’re 30 minutes out from the airport and just over an hour from the gate shutting on my flight, so I whiteknuckle the wheel and get that little Chevy Spark hammering a full thirty miles over the speed limit, shaking its way down the Sierra foothills.

Nathan plugs in his phone, turns on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and maxes out the volume. We roll down the windows. The air is hot, the sky clear. We’re singing shamelessly into the wind, trusting, flowing. I don’t care if I miss my flight: I’ll just go back to Pistol Pete’s.

15

Luke Whyte

Luke Whyte is SuperRare's Editorial Director.

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Confessions of a Crypto Scammer: How one man stole thousands from artists

Confessions of a Crypto Scammer: How one man stole thousands from artists

Jul 16, 2021 Cover Stories

Nathan Beer

Confessions of a Crypto Scammer: How one man stole thousands from artists

Whyte Luke
3 years ago

On the morning of June 11th, NFT artist Natasha Smith – whose name we changed because she fears retaliation  – came across an email from a Danish company seeking to purchase her work.

At first glance, it seemed legitimate. There was a company logo, examples of their previous work, and even a blurb about donating 10% of proceeds to a charity.

“I get a bunch of these emails so I wasn’t really thinking about it,” Smith said. “It didn’t trigger any ‘Oh, this is sketchy’ feelings, so I clicked it and it brought me to a Google Slides [presentation] that was attached to the email.”

A portion of the email presentation Smith received

Inside the presentation was a link: “Click here to view the terms.” This led to a .RAR file, which unzipped to what looked like a Microsoft Word file. Except, it wasn’t a Word file. It was a screensaver file (.SCR) that had been compromised by a hacker.

“I clicked on it and nothing happened,” Smith said. “Immediately, the alarms went off in my head: ‘Oh shit, this is a Trojan.’ I Googled it and, sure enough.”

Her first thought was, ‘transfer everything out of Metamask’. What she didn’t realize, however, was that the virus had loaded a keylogger onto her computer. Now hackers could see everything she typed, including her Metamask password. A Supermarket Sweeps-style race ensued inside her wallet with hackers stealing one of her artworks and a few hundred dollars worth of ETH before she cleared the rest out.

3,000 miles away on the same day, artist Fvckrender opened a similar file following a similar request.

“For many years, I’ve been working with people sending me files and mockups for their projects,” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”The hackers wiped out his Metamask completely, every token, and swiped  40,000 AXS (worth over $200,000 at the time and roughly a million today).

Three days prior in Indonesia, artist Suryanto Sur fell victim to a similar scam and, a month before him, artist Liquido Densidad was conned by a social engineering campaign attacking hundreds.

The wolves are circling

It seems that as the NFT market for artists and collectors has grown, the market for hacking their wallets has grown with it. Bolster Inc, a company that detects phishing sites, reported a nearly 300% increase in suspicious-looking domain registrations with the names of NFT stores in March alone. In June, ZDNet reported that Russian underground forums were launching competitions for NFT hacks and, though it’s impossible to measure the exact number of compromised wallets, today Twitter is alive with artists and collectors discussing attacks.

“I don’t have a great handle on how widespread the scamming is,” said Caff, an NFT art enthusiast who’s been watching the trend carefully and raising awareness on Twitter. “I think there are a number of small organized scammer groups and then a number of individuals that seem to be more opportunistic.”

“Definitely over 100” wallets have been hacked, he said, but “probably under 1,000.”

As is always the case, these scammers hide behind the internet’s anonymity and, publicly, none have been identified. Or, at least, none had been identified until, on June 3rd, one engaged with Nathan Beer, SuperRare’s Head of Content. This scammer’s technique was to impersonate a collector and use social engineering, not the .SCR virus, to steal from artists through an egregious breach of trust.

Nathan Beer

“I was on my flight to Bitcoin Miami,” Beer said. “He tried to threaten me (via Twitter) for calling him out and I was like, ‘Fuck this guy, I’m going to find out who he is.’ And so I spent a couple hours and I found him.”

Beer scrolled to the bottom of the scammer’s Twitter account where he found a link to a YouTube video featuring his real name: Mike Pinto Okebe. This led to an Instagram account and, within the hour, Beer slid into Okebe’s DMs.

The two began a dialogue that, though at first antagonistic, soon became inquisitive and, over the next 15 days, dozens of messages were exchanged. Finally, on June 18th, Beer convinced him to sit down for a video chat and over the course of an hour, the full story of Okebe and his motivations took shape.

Nathan Beer talking with Mike Pinto Okebe

Confessions of a crypto scammer

Born in Kenya in September of 1997, 23-year-old Okebe lives in the port city of Kismu on the edge of Lake Victoria near the borders with Uganda and Tanzania, and across the lake from Rwanda.

He claims to have watched both of his parents die – his father when he was a child and his mother quite recently – but we can’t prove this statement. What we can prove is that in October of 2019, he opened a Twitter account with the handle  YellowStorm and immediately took an interest in NFT art.

A year later on October 28th, 2020, his girlfriend gave birth to their first child, but the boy was jaundiced, according to medical records shown to SuperRare. Expenses quickly began adding up.

“So why don’t you get a legitimate job?” Beer asked.

“(In Kismu), either you know someone that knows someone or you have the best degree,” Okebe replied, “but even then it is a 50:50 percent chance for you to get a job.”

Okebe, who says he never graduated high school, instead asked the NFT community for donations on Twitter. Small amounts trickled in but, according to him, it was far from enough to cover basic needs and medical bills for him and his child. In March, he began minting his own work on OpenSea, but no one seemed interested, at least not fast enough.

“When I started my artist account nothing was ever selling,” Okebe said. “So I thought that impersonating a collector would be… uhhh… would be easier.”

Okebe began opening (or, in some cases, it appears, purchasing) Twitter accounts. The primary two being @MohammadBorhann, an alleged NFT collector from the United Arab Emirates, and @BullishBape, an account he’s since closed. Through these accounts, he orchestrated a manipulative social engineering scam to steal ETH from the hands of artists.

The scam

“He approaches artists through Twitter and tells them he’s a crypto trader and he has a Binance account,” Beer said. Okebe then points to a piece of their art, often something that’s been sitting unsold for some time, and then tells the artist, “I’ve got this open position on Binance. It’s where all my money is,” Beer said.

Okebe tells the artist, ‘if you can give me a little money to cover the gas (transaction) fees, I can close this open position and then buy your art.’

“So he uses social engineering to get artists to send him 0.1 to 0.3 ETH ($200-$600 at time of publication),” Beer said,” but then he never bids on their work.”

According to SuperRare’s analysis of Etherscan data and the estimates of Caff and Beer, Okebe reached out to over a hundred artists between March and early July, leading to anywhere from 15 to 40 successful scams and resulting in the theft of over $13,000 in Ethereum.

In a place like Kismu, where the average cost of rent and utilities for a family of four is $295/month, this is no small amount of money. And, despite claims that the money would be used to help his family and pay medical bills, dozens of photos and videos posted to Instagram at the time appear to show Okebe posing with cash, expensive bottles of alcohol, and new sneakers.

Shots from Okebe’s Instagram during the peak of his scamming

Video from Okebe’s Instagram during the peak of his scamming

And, when NFT artist community members started highlighting his tactics, Okebe retaliated by threatening them. He justified his actions by claiming the artists he hacked didn’t appreciate what life had given them and were undeserving of the sales they’d made.

“I am your karma,” Okebe said. That was, of course, until Beer caught him.

“I just had a couple of issues, that’s why I’m doing this shit,” he apologetically told Beer during their video call. “I’m not even proud of it. I was trying to impress a lot of friends. I just ended up blowing all the cash and there was nothing useful coming from it.”

During the call, Okebe can be seen sitting on the floor of a room he rented in a Kismu apartment using money he confessed was stolen from artists. It is not a glamorous living situation, just a mattress on the floor, clothes strewn around it’s base. His tone is desperate and Beer, wanting to remedy the situation, extends an olive branch.

Okebe showing Beer his mattress/room during their call

“I said, look, if you can get yourself a camera, I will help you sell photos you take of your life in Kenya. Let’s make a story. You can pay back the community,” Beer said he told Okebe. “But he just kept asking for ETH.”

So I told him I’d send him a camera,” Beer said, “and he said, just send ETH.”

Within two days, Okebe was pawning jewelry for cash and, within a week, he’d started a new Twitter account, @PerpetualColli, which he was using to again con artists with his social engineering scheme.

In the month since, Okebe has continued to scam artists but, thanks to the collaborative efforts of the NFT community on Twitter, he’s become well recognized as an untrustworthy actor, culminating in the release of an awareness video partially inspired by his actions:

Through all this, the conversation with Beer has continued.

“I don’t believe for one second that you want to change,” Beer wrote to Okebe at the beginning of July. “I have given you multiple opportunities to stop stealing from people and yet you continue to steal, lie, and cheat.”

“Because I have to,” Okebe replied. “I’m not proud, I swear, and everything I have been telling you is not a lie: I have to pay rent. I have to send money to my baby mama. I have to pay for a business and I don’t have a job nor do I have a high school certificate… I’m fucking desperate.”

Finally, on July 14th, at Beer’s request Okebe confessed to everything publically on Twitter.

“I’m really sorry to everyone I hurt,” he wrote, “They literally gave me their trust and I let them down. I can’t even sleep at night.”

Okebe explained that he has a plan to turn things around. He just needs a few donations to get started.

Caution: Falling rocks

Early in 2018, journalists Bob Sullivan and Alia Tavakolian released the first season of a podcast titled, ‘Breach’, which sought to investigate history’s most notorious data security breaches. At the series’ heart was a message about the perils of data management in a Web2 world – a world where a small group of tech companies control an exorbitant amount of our personal data: Companies are going to be hacked, our data is going to be stolen and, as it stands, there is nothing we can do about it.

“Okay, so you’re on the highway going 65 miles an hour on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and you see a sign that says ‘caution falling rocks.’  What are you supposed to do?” Sullivan asks in the podcast’s first episode. “Do you hit the brakes? Do you get off on an exit?  It’s literally the worst advice you can give and yet almost every single piece of advice we give people in (the data security) realm is essentially ‘caution falling rocks.’”

Part of the promise of Web3 and decentralized blockchain networks is a step away from this problem. No longer, advocates say, do we need centralized banks, art galleries or social networks to hold and manage our data. We can do it ourselves. We can give power back to the people and give all parties a seat at the table.

Yet such liberty is always equal parts freedom and risk. Correspondingly, in a world of sovereign individuals, everyone must assume the risk and reward of becoming their own bank, their own advocate, and their own security.

So, as the Web3 ecosystem grows, how do we manage this reality? Do we slowly give into risk aversion and recreate (or renegotiate with) the centralized systems we’ve aimed to abate? Or can sovereign individuals come together to foster a system of collaboration similar to that for which a scholar like Noam Chomsky might advocate?

And how, in this system would we manage actors like Okebe? Do they also get a seat at the table? Do we curtail their freedoms, their sovereignty? And if so, where do we draw that line?

“I believe in his life story,” said Caff when I asked about Okebe’s motivations, “but I also don’t believe for a moment that he is actually going to stop scamming.”

I mentioned Caff’s sentiment to Beer and said that I tend to agree.

“Yeah, but he blew up his own account so I don’t know,” Beer said. “I mean, if nothing changes for him of course he’s going to keep scamming. He’s not going to starve and watch his kid die.”

15

Luke Whyte

Luke Whyte is SuperRare's Editorial Director.

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Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

SuperRare Labs digital editor Shutong Liu interviews Emily Xie about how her Art History and Engineering background informed her work, her past year as a full-time artist, and the generative art landscape. 

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Curated Conversations: socmplxd

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What I say when people ask if I am worried about the death of NFTs

What I say when people ask if I am worried about the death of NFTs

Jul 2, 2021 Tech

Thobey Campion

What I say when people ask if I am worried about the death of NFTs

Whyte Luke
3 years ago

When people ask me if I’m worried about the death of NFTs, I tell them about a short science fiction story by Terry Bison I’m fond of titled, They’re Made Out of Meat. 

The story centers around two intelligent beings capable of traveling faster than light discussing one’s recent discovery of a solar system containing sentient, purely carbon-based lifeforms “made up entirely of meat” (i.e., us). It’s a hard concept for the second character to grasp: 

“No brain?”
“Oh, there is a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat!”
“So… what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?”
“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”

Disgusted, the two characters agree to “erase the records and forget the whole thing”, marking our solar system “unoccupied”. Thus damning humans to live out our existence alone, capable only of traveling short distances through space in our “special meat containers”.

An interpretation of Terry Bison’s They’re Made Out of Meat by director Stephen O’Regan

Worrying about the death of NFTs is, in my opinion, typical of thinking meat in the meatspace. It’s carbon chauvinism, to quote Carl Sagan. 

Life relies on growth. Growth relies on expansion and, if we’re honest, the heyday of meatspace expansion is likely behind us. We’ve been to all our planet’s corners, we’ve put them on the derivatives market and we’ve covered them in concrete.

So where will we grow from here? Some say we turn outward. They suggest we get in our “special meat containers” for seven months and build Tupperware on Mars. Ok, sure, but others ask, what if we journey inward? What if we transcend the meat? What if we augment its reality, expand its universe and journey toward a post-carbon digital frontier of near infinite possibilities from inside our living rooms? This is the promise of the metaverse.

When people ask me if I’m worried about the death of NFTs, I tell them about Krista Kim’s Mars House, the first NFT digital house (no Tupperware required), which was sold as an .mp4 on SuperRare for more than twice my mortgage.

Mars House, Krista Kim

“Mars House and the project I created was really a sneak peak into the future of NFTs,” Kim told SuperRare, “the next generation, which will become 3D, digital, programmable assets in augmented reality.”

I then tell them about Thobey Campion’s The Gateway, the “first 4th-dimensional NFT”, just minted this week and featuring a lossless zoom functionality – a first step toward NFTs that represent multi-layered, explorable worlds.

A partially-exploded view of The Gateway.
Graphic: Thobey Campion.

When people ask me if I’m worried about the death of NFTs, I tell them about the 12M people that attended last year’s Travis Scott concert in Fortnite. And then I tell them about Big Time Studios, a new company that has raised $21M to make NFTs a mainstay of the gaming industry.

“We’ve built some cool tech to make NFTs accessible and are eating our own dog food by creating a first-party game: Big Time, an action RPG where players battle throughout history to save the universe from the company that owns time,” says Ari Meilich, co-founder of Big Time and Decentraland.

Players will collect and trade artifacts on the platform that can be exchanged for fiat or crypto and, though initially Big Time Studio’s team of industry veterans will build the game’s virtual universe, in the future, users will have the capacity to create their own spaces.

“We see NFTs as a vital new component that finally unlocks the ability for players to claim ownership over their virtual goods,” says Meilich. “We are just at the beginning of this new frontier and expect to see new formats, protocols, and standards emerge in the coming years.”

When people ask me if I’m worried about the death of NFTs, I tell them about Virtuix’s Omni, the omni-directional treadmill that lets players walk and run in 360 degrees inside video games and other virtual worlds.

I tell them about Haptx haptic gloves with 133 points of tactile feedback per hand or the 30,000 points on your face tracked using infrared sensors in new iPhones, then I show them the leaked commercial for Samsung’s augmented reality glasses.

I ask them what it will mean to sweat, jump and fly in virtual environments with all the senses invested. How much will a virtual asset be worth in there?

I point to the artists on SuperRare that will breathe life into these ecosystems through their creativity. I show them the world’s of Raphael Lacoste, Annibale Siconolfi and Friendly Robot and tell them how they’ll access them using sneakers and hoverboards designed by RTFKT Studios.

Red Land by Annibale Siconolfi (left), Steeples by Raphael Lacoste (center), The Pathfinder by Friendly Robot (right)

The Meta-Pigeon Boss, RTFKT Studios

And finally, if we’ve had a couple beers or happen to be located in a select 19 out of the 50 U.S. states, when someone asks me if I’m worried about the death of NFTs, I’ll talk to them about recursion. I’ll tell them about the idea of a function that calls itself, infinitely repeating, like a set of neverending Russian dolls, dividing and diverging, according to a set of rules. 

I’ll ask them if it is not entirely possible that we are no more than a couple of defrosted cryogenic brains propped up on sticks at a distant point in spacetime and plugged into metaverses, simulations, that may or may not have recreated themselves over and over again an infinite number of times as an infinite number of fractals expanding infinitely in infinite directions, rebuilding and redefining our world based upon a set of ever-evolving rules.

I look them in the eye and then I ask them, are they so sure their shoes aren’t already an NFT?

SURVIVE, Darius Puia
15

Luke Whyte

Luke Whyte is SuperRare's Editorial Director.

Hash Recipes

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

SuperRare Labs digital editor Shutong Liu interviews Emily Xie about how her Art History and Engineering background informed her work, her past year as a full-time artist, and the generative art landscape. 

Negative Space

Curated Conversations: socmplxd

Curated Conversations: socmplxd

SuperRare Labs Digital Editor Shutong Liu, alongside collectors Broke0x and EternalPepe, ask socmplxd about his practice, inspirations, and his plans for the future.

Weekly Top 10

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

SuperRare Labs digital editor Shutong Liu interviews Emily Xie about how her Art History and Engineering background informed her work, her past year as a full-time artist, and the generative art landscape. 

SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Sarah Zucker

SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Sarah Zucker

Jun 21, 2021 Uncategorized

Above: “data privacy” by stockcatalog licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Sarah Zucker

Luke Whyte
3 years ago

People often assign feelings of nostalgia to my work, and I like to think of that as a Trojan Horse: the nostalgia factor creates a sense of pleasure and ease which opens the viewer up to the ideas and feelings I’m conveying. I am also very much playing with the notion of mediation itself, intervening with the expected experience of the screen. I like to think of my work as evoking the Past as a means of glimpsing the Future, which leaves you very aware of sitting in the Now, the fulcrum between the two.

— SARAH ZUCKER
LEFT: SPACE LOAF (ON AUCTION @ BONHAMS)

By Luke Whyte, Editorial Director

Of the many things I appreciated during my conversation with Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist Sarah Zucker, I’ll admit my favorite was when she called Instagram the “abandoned shopping mall” of digital art.

To me, it’s a fitting statement from someone who not only grasped the value of NFT art so early, but whose work combines cutting-edge techniques with analog technologies to convey a sort of retro-futuristic expressionism. It’s like hearing an omnipotent message from the Metaverse while standing in the blacklight poster section of an empty Spencer Gifts.

Sarah has been a progressive artist since, in middle school, she was asked to choose digital art as a “major”, only to be reprimanded by her art teacher for spending too much time on the computer. We sat down to discuss her experience as an NFT pioneer, Space Loaf, her piece for the Bonhams x SuperRare auction, and her approach to creativity.

Click here to visit the Bonham’s CryptOGs auction page.

Most Everyone’s Mad Here

LW: You’ve mentioned Henri Matisse as an early influence, what was it about his work, or him as an artist, that inspired you?

SZ: I was introduced to Matisse through the papercut works he created in his later years. His eyesight was almost entirely gone, and unable to paint anymore, he shifted his technique so that he could continue to channel his singular vision into Art. I suppose that always resonated with me, because it shows that the potency of inner vision can transcend technical limitations. It inspired my desire to create my own techniques, or take existing techniques and do them “incorrectly” in service of inner vision above all else.

LW: And what role has photography played in your journey as an artist?

SZ: The work I do now is the organic evolution of my early work as a photographer. I shoot a lot of original footage, so really my photography practice has been folded into my current work. I worked primarily with film back in the day, often experimentally, playing with the inner workings of my cameras and incorporating digital elements. It’s very akin to what I do now intermixing analog and digital video techniques. I’ve never been a purist, in fact, I’m quite against puritanical thinking: I think everything is better when you harmonize disparate elements. I’d like to think this is what makes my work stand out, and why it’s hard to put into one box.

Mycelial Jazzercise

LW: Prior to the emergence of NFT communities, was there a place for the type of work you’ve done in recent years? More generally, how did you experience the landscape and marketplace for video and “new media” artists prior to NFTs?

SZ: Prior to NFTs, the place for screen-based art was either the populist approach of tumblr/social media, or the very exclusive and codified avenue of the contemporary art world. I always liked the open visibility of putting my work online, but social media is such a Sisyphean landscape for an artist. You basically have to keep creating new work, and then wait for emails offering you opportunities. In the past, new media and video art had to be translated to an object in order to be attractive to collectors, so the number of galleries catering to this type of work was limited. I found the best way to get my work seriously considered by the fine art world was to curate, which also allowed me to present the work of other incredible artists I had come across during my time in online art spaces. But, even with visibility, developing a collector base isn’t accessible if you don’t have a means to edition your work in a compelling way. It’s why I was waiting on NFT technology to emerge from the moment I first heard about it in 2014. It made sense to me, and I knew it would be a massive paradigm shift for artists like myself.

PixelPool

LW: How did you first hear about NFTs?

SZ: I first heard about their potential because of what Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash did at Rhizome in 2014. I was very tapped into what was going on in new media art at the time, and it truly blew my mind. I was pretty much waiting for someone to develop a more robust and accessible way for artists to tokenize their work as NFTs. Yura Miron was one of the artists I showcased at Prism Pipe, the visual music event I used to curate in Los Angeles, and I saw him posting about SuperRare in early 2019. When I first looked into SuperRare, I realized that the time had come: Art NFTs were here!

Trapped in A Box

LW: What did it feel like to realize you were arising as a leader in the NFT space, being seen as an OG and to see appreciation for your work accelerate? Exciting I’m sure, also a little intimidating? How do you handle being seen as a role model?

SZ: I don’t know that I realized it as much as I fought for it! My involvement with crypto art feels like one of those destined things in my lifetime, it’s such a perfect synthesis of so many of my interests and gifts. Getting in early is a matter of lucky timing, in some ways. But I’ve been passionate about sharing my journey from the start, because I recognized this was a rare opportunity to help define something that was newly forming. We could imbue this space with a set of principles for a new era of human consciousness, or we could allow it to be consumed by the same ills that already plague society. When the world suddenly turned to look at what we were all doing earlier this year, I was aware of the deluge of new voices, and I think it emboldened me to speak my passion louder than ever. I can’t say the heightened level of attention hasn’t been challenging at times, but I think I’m at my best when addressing a crowd. I can’t deny I’m a bit of a peacock, so I really shine when it’s my turn in the spotlight. As for being a role model, it’s an honor. I always strive to be worthy of that position, and do my best to elevate other voices that I think are putting good into the world, and genuinely care about our community.

Videornacia Forever and Ever

LW: Can we pivot to talk about fractals a little? Would you say that your above response reflects how one can lean into what I’m going to call the laws of fractals to achieve some manifestation of the life they desire or are destined for?

SZ: Oooh yes, let’s get metaphysical. Fractal thinking plays a huge role in my art, and in my life. Aside from just being beautiful, the thing about fractals is that each microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm, and vice versa – you can zoom in or out indefinitely. I think a sense of scale, or rather being fluid in your perception of scale, is hugely beneficial in the NFT space. Everything is interconnected, and you can surf the waves better if you can keep that perspective. I think humanity, as a whole, is going through growing pains as we evolve from a dominant mode of linear thinking to Boolean thinking. I suppose this is why I personally feel excited about the future, I have a web-like thought pattern.

My use of video feedback and strange loops in my art are a means of visually reflecting this way of viewing the world.

Recursion

LW: Strange loops, as in Gödel, Escher, Bach strange loops? I can see how video feedback reflects that sense of surfing the wave. Correct me if I’m wrong but, do people often label these techniques as representations of a nostalgic mood in your work? If so, is this intentional? Do you enjoy playing with this mood, twisting it? Or is the nostalgic interpretation just a byproduct of you experimenting with concepts like strange loops and the tangling of analog and digital?

SZ: Yes! Strange Loops as in Gödel, Escher, Bach… I think reading Douglas Hofstadter had a huge impact on my thinking, and continues to inspire how I work with video feedback as a compositional (and philosophical) technique.

People do often assign feelings of nostalgia to my work, and I like to think of that as a Trojan Horse: the nostalgia factor creates a sense of pleasure and ease which opens the viewer up to the ideas and feelings I’m conveying. I am also very much playing with the notion of mediation itself, intervening with the expected experience of the screen. I like to think of my work as evoking the Past as a means of glimpsing the Future, which leaves you very aware of sitting in the Now, the fulcrum between the two. I like Art that can be experienced and appreciated on various levels, and I’d like to think I achieve that quality with my work. It has a visceral aesthetic impact, but there are deeper hidden meanings if you start to dig into it, especially if you look holistically at the ongoing story I’m weaving.

Space Loaf

LW: Well thats a pretty great segue to talk about the piece for the Bonham’s auction, Space Loaf. The description on SuperRare begins, “Space Loaf hovers through the cosmic Ether. It’s not Here, and it’s not Then, so it makes you ask… When?” Does this messaging, and the vision behind the artwork itself, tie into what we’ve been discussing with exploring spacetime, fractals, strange loops?

SZ: “Space Loaf” is a piece I created somewhat serendipitously through the contribution of my cat, that has always connected deeply with people. It’s funny, sure, but I think it’s because there’s something so relatable in what’s going on. It speaks to the experience of being an early pioneer of the Metaverse, a silly little creature exploring this newly forming realm.

People may not realize that the term “ether” and “ethereum” have their roots in 19th century mystical groups like the Theosophical Society or the mesmerists. These people were doing their best to grasp the metaphysical aspects of mankind’s newfound understandings of electricity and atomic space. They came up with the concept of ethereum as a fluid substance that connected everything, allowing for energy (and information) to travel. They were, essentially, setting the stage for humanity’s march towards networked evolution.

“Space Loaf” is a celebration of being a denizen of the Internet, an intrepid explorer of the ever-shifting ether that connects us. It’s a concept best conveyed through the Internet’s native language – cat-based humor, of course.

LW: Can I ask about the process behind creating the piece?

I shot the original footage of my beloved queen, Ginny, when she made herself quite at home in my studio. I piped the digital footage into the analog video rig I’ve built for myself, at which point I created the video feedback manually in response to the footage. It’s a bit like playing an instrument when you work with analog gear, you have to get a feel for what to do and when to create something harmonious.

Ouroboros (left), Sphinxies (right)

LW: Do you see NFTs as a playing a pinnacle role in the march toward greater embrace of the Metaverse?

NFTs are certainly one of the crucial technologies that form the foundation of a new culture online. They are as simple as they are groundbreaking, which is why they have utility across so many different applications. I often like to say that we are the Ancients of a Future Civilization. This is our chance to set new social standards on the precipice of networked humanity (assuming we can survive long enough to get there). NFT technology answers for many of the unenforceable grey areas of intellectual property law. I, for one, am both excited and not surprised to see artists leading the way.

For many of us early to crypto art, we knew a time would come where the world would take notice of what we were doing. But I don’t think it would have happened as soon as it did if it hadn’t been for the global lockdown. Everyone went inside and online, and they had to look to us Internet people to figure out how to be. It’s not a new phenomenon: the Renaissance followed the Plague, the Roaring Twenties followed Influenza. The factors of 2020 were a perfect storm that allowed for what we were building to suddenly ignite and take off. While I think it’s only reasonable for the hype to settle, it doesn’t mean Crypto Art is going anywhere. This was just the beginning, the big bang: the landscape of Art and culture has been forever changed. I can’t wait to see where we all go from here.

Read the next article in the CryptOGs series:

SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Matt Kane

15

Luke Whyte

Luke Whyte is SuperRare's Editorial Director.

Art

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

Jun 29, 2023 /

SuperRare Labs digital editor Shutong Liu interviews Emily Xie about how her Art History and Engineering background informed her work, her past year as a full-time artist, and the generative art landscape. 

Tech

Curators' Choice

SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Coldie

SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Coldie

Jun 21, 2021 Artist Statements

TAKO

SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Coldie

Whyte Luke
3 years ago

Taking a flat plane and fooling the viewer that the image is no longer flat, but instead has depth both forward and backward in space. That space is where I want to create.

RYAN (COLDIE) COLDITZ
LEFT: PROOF OF WORK – GENESIS

(ON AUCTION @ BONHAMS)

By Luke Whyte, Editorial Director

Calling California-based mixed media artist Ryan (Coldie) Colditz’ art “3D” doesn’t really do it justice. Combining source materials from a variety of mediums with stereoscopic techniques and shifting focal points, one seems to fall into Coldie’s work only to be spit back out with more questions than answers, like staring into one of those Magic Eye posters from the ‘90s.

This depth in perspective is matched by a depth in narrative. His work mixes socioeconomic statements with metaphysical metaphors to tell stories about our place in history and in the universe.

We sat down to discuss these visions, his experience in the NFT community and Proof of Work – Genesis, the artwork to be auctioned in the SuperRare x Bonhams collaboration.

Click here to visit the Bonham’s CryptOGs auction page.

An early adopter of NFT art, Matt, like most of the CryptOGs, felt like an outsider before finding the CryptoArt community. Today he is seen as one of its leading pioneers. Over the last week and a half, we spoke via phone and email about his process, his history in space and M87 Black Hole Deconstruction #9, the artwork to be auctioned in the SuperRare x Bonhams collaboration.

Click here to visit the Bonham’s CryptOGs auction page.

The Lost Vitalik – Decentral Eyes Genesis

LW: Can you talk a little bit about how you got into digital art in the first place? When did you start as an artist?

RC: The very first place I did digital art was at my grandparents house who had one of the first Macintosh box computers. I was about 5 years old and my grandpa would load up ‘Paint’ and I would play around. I vividly remember using the fill tool to make a brick background and drawing on top of it with the marker, doing some type of graffiti. Then I remembered that all I had to do was double click a button and it will all wipe away and I could start over. I had no prior interest in art or creativity like this, but even at that time I could tell it was something that I wanted to investigate further.

I would consider myself starting creating art in 2010 when I moved from Los Angeles became to my hometown to live with my parents. It was a transitional time for me and while I was in LA I had come up with so many ideas, I needed time and space to create and in my parents basement was where that happened. These unique techniques from professors at Cal Poly Pomona allowed me to take my digital art and put it onto a canvas. It was the process and medium together that took my digital ideas into being art on canvas. Those early works I still own and they are a testament to ‘going for it’ and doing the very best with what you have available. 

The Lost Vitalik – Decentral Eyes Genesis

LW: Can you talk a little bit about how you got into digital art in the first place? When did you start as an artist?

RC: The very first place I did digital art was at my grandparents house who had one of the first Macintosh box computers. I was about 5 years old and my grandpa would load up ‘Paint’ and I would play around. I vividly remember using the fill tool to make a brick background and drawing on top of it with the marker, doing some type of graffiti. Then I remembered that all I had to do was double click a button and it will all wipe away and I could start over. I had no prior interest in art or creativity like this, but even at that time I could tell it was something that I wanted to investigate further.

I would consider myself starting creating art in 2010 when I moved from Los Angeles became to my hometown to live with my parents. It was a transitional time for me and while I was in LA I had come up with so many ideas, I needed time and space to create and in my parents basement was where that happened. These unique techniques from professors at Cal Poly Pomona allowed me to take my digital art and put it onto a canvas. It was the process and medium together that took my digital ideas into being art on canvas. Those early works I still own and they are a testament to ‘going for it’ and doing the very best with what you have available. 

Crucify Fiat

LW: You worked as a graphic designer with LA Weekly and as an art director, do you feel that work shaped you as an artist?

RC: Those LA Weekly years were definitely what shaped and formed my brain early on for creating art in a fast-paced environment, where the wild idea was applauded, but it must be executed correctly the first time due to the nature of the weekly paper publishing. It was also a really fun challenge because I would be given a few small JPEGS by the writer and told to use these for the artwork. Often the artwork was totally not usable and I had to riff off the images to create something totally unique, many times with only a few hours to go from concept to final production art.

As I developed into an art director, these same skills would come into play, but now I was both designing at times as well as giving others direction of what to create. It’s always a give and take with art direction because I want to honor each artist’s vision and talents and its finding how their secret sauce can accentuate an idea in perhaps a different way than I had visualized in my own head. Teamworks has always been my mantra with art and design. When all parts come together and add a unique touch, that is a winning project.

Warren Buffet – Decentral Eyes – Variant 02

LW: What does it feel like to finally be able to quit your day job and focus on art? Is it intimidating to be out on your own now?

RC: Over the last year, it was becoming more and more common for artists in the space to reach out to me, asking how I was able to do a full-time art director job as well as create art. My response was that I didn’t have a choice and I was trying to make both work. For the past 11 years of making fine art, my goal was always to do my best work, and find ways to carve out a little more time to focus on the art and shift the focus from commercial work to my own passion projects. I grinded HARD at all times. Most nights I would work my job, take care of family responsibilities, then around 9PM I would have a little bit of “my time” that I would alway devote to creativity. The problem with this was it was always when I was wiped out and I considered it ‘trash time.’ I was always driving to photograph concerts with my 3D camera. I never got paid a dime for all the time and energy it took to make these projects happen. I create for the pure joy and passion and I only like to make things that interest me. With such a healthy does of ADD, I was always trying to outdo the last project to give myself something new to learn and grow. To me, sweat equity is the best way for anyone to get places they want to if they don’t have money to fund it. The hard work becomes its own currency and fruits of the labor is the art. 

My solution to this dilemma was that during my day, no matter what it was, I was mentally designing the artwork I would do at night. I was literally mentally moving layers around, changing scale, testing collage layouts in my head. I would make so many stylistic decisions or at least boil down to a few optional solutions that when my free time would happen, I was able to very quickly execute the idea that had been percolating in my head and come up quick progress. This points back to my LA Weekly days of efficient use of time and effective art making skills to make my ideas come to fruition most efficiently.

As the crypto art community grew, i was in a creative flow and through that was building my own style and voice, the opportunity to change that balance to fine art became an reality. I would  continue to get the questions asking how I did both the art director job and art, and it became harder to answer. It was a LOT and the strain was taking its toll. I was still giving everything my total effort, but I saw that there was a huge opportunity that if I were to go all-in with art, that the possibilities far outweighed the fulfillment of commercial art and design. I literally held onto both as long as I could but now that I am on my first day of not having the art director job, I have never been more excited to get to work. I have decades of dreams that were never possible. Now, every single one is, and over the last decade my skills to execute those dreams is greater. I truly feel like I have just started a new renaissance period in my own life.

Alan Turing – Decentral Eyes – Variant 01

LW: Do you consider yourself a collector as well as an artist? Why do you collect other artists work?

RC: Now, I consider myself a collector as well as an artist. In my 20s living in Los Angeles, absolutely not. The major distinction is that I never had a means to collect. Both in terms of the monetary as well as the storage space. What I used to do in LA while at LA Weekly was going around to all the galleries and openings in town. I would study every show. The font on the window titles. The reception booklet. The arrangement of the pieces. The amount of people in the room and seeing who was actually there for the art, or for scenester reasons. I would study the fuck out of pieces that caught my eye. Would get up really close to see how the paint sat on the canvas. How the artists dealt with the sides of canvases. I always smiled when I saw an artist would continue the art around the edge. This whole time, I was broke as a joke. I would go around and pretend I was a collector and I would pick my favorites. This practice was not only a cheap way to mentally collect art, but it began to shape my taste about what I appreciated in other people’s art. Many times it would be way different than what I made. I could fall in love with a knitted blanket if it was done in such a way that amazed me. 

Once NFTs started happening and I was on SuperRare, I was surrounded by some really amazing art and moreso the artists who were making the art. We were a little family and all inspiring each other and experimenting. I never felt ANY competition from others and I never tried to compete. I was so taken back by what was happening that I began to use a portion of my art sales earning to reinvest into the ecosystem. Part of me was collecting art that hit me just in the same way as the LA gallery days, but this time it was different. I KNEW these people and I wanted to capture that magic in a way that spread some love back around and inspired new thoughts. 

I have a pretty vast collection after 3 years of being in crypto art and NFTs. When I look at them all together, its really cool because I can definitely break my colleciton into several major chunks of interest. I was all-in back in 2018 just as much I am in 2021. I am even more all-in because all the speculation about where this was all headed was just that, a “dream”. But dammit, we made those dreams a reality. Everyone did. No single artist can be pinned down as the “one” who did it. That is why my collection means so much to me. It is time capsule of all my really cool and talented friends creating art and expressions for the pure love of art making. 

CRYPTOART MONETIZATION GENERATION

LW: I love your use of color in your work, it is so powerful. Can I ask about how you go about choosing palettes for your works and what drives your choice of color?

MK: Thank you for saying so! I have a very strong mind’s eye. I describe what I do as “tuning” into color. It’s something I remember doing as a young child with our black & white TV and later rediscovered when I was a young man developing into an artist. I focus and tune my mind to see colors that aren’t actually there. It’s most effective while I’m in a flow state and I look at something absent of color, like a black & white photo. I’ll see colors in my mind’s eye and lay one down. And sometimes I inject my own intellectual ideas about color which rival what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye. The process is a bit like jazz music’s call and response. As I lay a color down, the colors I see around it change and I’ll then respond to that. This process began 20 years ago with acrylics and gel pens over photos printed on paper. But it really extends itself so naturally into my software, where I can rapidly integrate my “tuning” into my creative production.

“One of Us” Variation 1

LW: What did the digital art landscape look like before NFTs? Were you struggling to make ends meet as an artist?

MK: In those early years of 2014 – 2017, I was contemplating how on earth I was eventually going to bring any of my work to a market. I didn’t necessarily want to feel forced into creating physical prints just in order to satisfy a market’s demand for physical goods. A paper certificate of authenticity felt weak and incorrect. The next best thing was a diamond encrusted, gold gilded USB drive held in a cedar box. None of these things appealed to me and so probably delayed me even trying to bring my digital art to a traditional brick and mortar gallery. And of course I was struggling financially. I had run through my life savings during the time that I built my digital art studio software. I was fortunate to be in position that I could take on occasional web development projects again to make ends meet.  

Visionary Founder – Jesse Powell

LW: How did you first hear about NFTs? Were you skeptical of the market? Or, to flip this on its head, why did you believe in CryptoArt in the early days?

MK: I first read about art on blockchain in the Summer of 2017, a week before the release of CryptoPunks. I looked around immediately for places like SuperRare but I couldn’t find anything yet. I knew blockchain was a better technology than flimsy paper certificates of authenticity were for provenance. And I knew smart contracts could solve lots of problems, like secondary sale royalties, that have existed in the traditional art market. My hesitancy to join was in looking out for the interests of my previous collectors. If I minted NFTs, they’d be representative of artworks that I held as high, if not higher, than my oil paintings which had sold for thousands. I took time to watch the market and be sure I was willing to take that risk. Eventually, I came to terms that I should jump in and contribute to building this market by joining it. Most of us were willing to sell work for far less than we valued the work in USD, understanding we’d eventually make up the value by HODLing.

TAKO

LW: What did it feel like to realize you were becoming successful in this new space and part of a community we are now calling OGs?

MK: The wise ones in this space realized we weren’t building markets or careers for ourselves, but for future artists. That’s still the case. Digital tools are likely the present and future of popular expression. The foundations we set by our choices would have and will continue to have a loud echo. As I felt embraced by the community, it was like a warm hug. And I increasingly wanted to squeeze back. I felt like I was finally in the right place at the right time and it seemed like I was uniquely equipped with certain life experiences that would be of benefit here. That’s what I needed. I still wonder sometimes if I am locked in a coma having an elaborate dream, because it seems so unlikely to have been a part of all that I have been. 

M87 Black Hole Deconstruction #1

LW: Why are you drawn to black holes and what is the inspiration for the series of black hole deconstructions?

MK: As a child, I learned about black holes by visiting planetariums and I became obsessed for a brief time at the age of 5 with the 1979 sci-fi Disney film, “The Black Hole.” I was fascinated by the black hole’s invisibility, gravity, size, and the concept of transporting to unknown location and maybe even time travel. I’d sometimes lay in bed with my eyes closed and imagine what it would be like to travel through one and come out the other end. 

For many years I internalized 2013 as being this period of time that I entered a personal black hole after the loss of my friend that year. There are these lost years with flattened memories between then and when I rejoined society in 2019. I’m not sure that those years were as much about my dedication to coding and creating my software as they were dedicated to avoiding feeling anything real. If I spent the day thinking about geometry and algorithms, then I wasn’t bothered by feeling my emotions. But at the same time, I was building something. And I knew I’d be able to create with what I was building one day. I’d come out the other end of my personal black hole and be at a destination I couldn’t have imagined. I’d be transported and transformed.

April 10th, 2019, the first image of a black hole was revealed to myself and all of humanity. I immediately set on painting it. Before seeing that image created by the Event Horizon Telescope, the metaphor I’d been using for my life was faceless. So now to finally see this thing, which had captured my imagination for so long.  Everything happened that single day. I created the black hole painting and a rudimentary way of capturing a dataset representing my grief. And then I’d expose the painting to that dataset, skewing the locations of all the components that made up that painting. It all took place that single day. The series intended to investigate the aesthetics that result from diverged paths, where all that goes wrong is sometimes made right. I wanted to transform what had been such a dark chapter in my life into a more beautiful, purposeful one. This is right before joining cryptoart and minting my first NFTs.

M87 Black Hole Deconstruction #9

LW: What is unique and/or exciting to you about #9?

MK: The nature of deconstructions, in literary terms, is that a text does not have a fixed meaning. Reading a book 20 years ago compared to today  takes on a different meaning. This is the first M87 Black Hole Deconstruction I’ve minted since May, 2019. There are only 9 of these deconstruction artworks that I made. We know what the work, at it’s conception is about; the transformation of paths gone askew. So how can we read this work differently from the previous, which were my very first NFTs? Have my contributions the last 2+ years to CryptoArt culture, NFT technology, and the future of art become part of what this work now represents? I like to think so. And then it’s also exciting that viewers come to this work with their own experiences and can enter it from their own perspectives about black holes and transformation. I love that art is open to interpretation– and although I provide some clues to my own personal meaning, this is not the only reading to make!  

Do concepts like recursion, fractals and toying with space and time influence your work? Particularly the black hole deconstructions?

MK: Broadly I love fractals and recursion. My custom software was designed for the algorithms to be interoperable and work recursively. When I actually implement things from this feature, I get really unexpected visual results and oftentimes a violation of memory or a system crash! These are really interesting concepts to work with though.   

This particular work provides a clue about my work’s transformational aspects, as this is not a still image, but has been animated. These animations I make of my paintings are all seamlessly looped to create an infinity of experience. Part of my larger concepts is about using the passage of time, evolution of technology to transform and reinterpret my past work. All my digital paintings are made to be future proof where they’re able to be adapted to future technology. There are 3 deconstructions I haven’t minted. I don’t know if I ever will. But if I do, the timing and treatment will be a tell-tale sign of how to read that work and perhaps the whole series differently.

Read the next article in the CryptOGs series:

SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Coldie

15

Luke Whyte

Luke Whyte is SuperRare's Editorial Director.

Hash Recipes

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

SuperRare Labs digital editor Shutong Liu interviews Emily Xie about how her Art History and Engineering background informed her work, her past year as a full-time artist, and the generative art landscape. 

Negative Space

Curated Conversations: socmplxd

Curated Conversations: socmplxd

SuperRare Labs Digital Editor Shutong Liu, alongside collectors Broke0x and EternalPepe, ask socmplxd about his practice, inspirations, and his plans for the future.

Weekly Top 10

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

Curated Conversations: Emily Xie

SuperRare Labs digital editor Shutong Liu interviews Emily Xie about how her Art History and Engineering background informed her work, her past year as a full-time artist, and the generative art landscape.