The Art of Technology, The Technology of Art

This episode explores the evolving relationship between art and technology, focusing on how technological advances like the internet, smartphones, and blockchain have influenced artistic creation and perception.

1. The relationship between art and technology is deeply intertwined, with each influencing and shaping the other's evolution.
2. The advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media has created new platforms and mediums for artistic expression, enabling artists like Simon Denny to explore digital culture and its impact.
3. The rise of crypto art and NFTs represents a significant shift in how art is created, owned, and distributed, challenging traditional notions of value and ownership.
4. Artists play a crucial role in critiquing and interpreting technological advancements, often providing insightful and alternative perspectives on the digital age.
5. The global nature of the art world, influenced by technological connectivity, allows for a more diverse and interconnected artistic community.

1. Introduction and Simon Denny's Journey

Explores Simon Denny's background and his path to integrating art with technology. Highlights include his experiences with entrepreneurial culture and his transition from traditional to digital and crypto art.

• Simon Denny: "My work joins the museum world with the crypto world."

2. Art in the Digital Age

Discusses the transformative impact of digital technology on art, including the role of the iPhone, social media, and generative art.

• Simon Denny: "Digital platforms enable new forms of engagement and artistic expression."

3. Crypto Art and NFTs

Focuses on the emergence of crypto art and NFTs, examining their implications for artists and the art market.

• Simon Denny: "NFTs have changed the landscape of art, offering new ways for artists to monetize and distribute their work."

1. Embrace New Technologies: Stay open to exploring and adopting new platforms and mediums for artistic creation.
2. Understand the Digital Marketplace: For artists, learning about the intricacies of crypto art and NFTs can open new avenues for showcasing and selling their work.
3. Critical Engagement with Tech: Use art as a means to critique and analyze the technological changes shaping our world.
4. Foster Global Connections: Utilize digital tools to build and maintain a global network of artistic peers and audiences.
5. Experiment with Cross-Media Projects: Blend traditional and digital art forms to create innovative works that reflect the hybrid nature of contemporary culture.

with @dennnnnnnnny @smc90

We know that technology has changed art, and that artists have evolved with every new technology — it’s a tale as old as humanity, moving from cave paintings to computers. Underlying these movements are endless debates around inventing versus remixing; between commercialism and art; between mainstream canon and fringe art; whether we’re living in an artistic monoculture now (the answer may surprise you); and much much more.

So in this new episode featuring Berlin-based contemporary artist Simon Denny -- in conversation with a16z crypto editor in chief Sonal Chokshi -- we discuss all of the above debates. We also cover how artists experimented with the emergence of new technology platforms like the web browser, the iPhone, Instagram and social media; to how generative art found its “native” medium on blockchains, why NFTs; and other art movements.

Denny also thinks of entrepreneurial ideas -- from Peter Thiel's to Chris Dixon's Read Write Own -- as an "aesthetic"; and thinks of technology artifacts (like NSA sketches!) as art -- reflecting all of these in his works across various mediums and contexts. How has technology changed art, and more importantly, how have artists changed with technology? How does art change our place in the world, or span beyond space? It's about optimism, and seeing things anew... all this and more in this episode.

As a reminder: none of this is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

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Sonal Chokshi

Hi all. Were back with all new episodes and with that, new updates about other shows that you might want to listen to too. If youre looking to stay on top of the changing nature of work and how that work is changing us, then I want to tell you about Linkedins flagship podcast, hello Monday, hosted by our friend Jesse Hempel. To thrive as work changes, and this theme is relevant to many listeners of this show, were going to have to be more flexible, more curious, and more connected to purpose. So each week on the hello Monday podcast, Jesse helps listeners tackle career challenges like asking for what you're worth, finding new, better jobs, and addressing burnout.

You can find hello Monday wherever you listen to podcasts and then find the conversation on LinkedIn welcome to web three with Asics and Z, a show about building the next heir of the Internet from the team at AsicSNC Crypto. We're excited to be back with all new episodes. I'm Sonal, editor in chief at AXNC Crypto, and today's episode is all about how technology has changed art and how artists change with technology, from the emergence of the browser, the iPhone, and social media to generative AI art and blockchains to nfts. We also discuss debates that seem to come up in every art and tech shift, including between inventing versus remixing, between commercialism and art, between mainstream canon and outsider art, whether we're living in an artistic monoculture now, and much, much more. Our special guest is Simon Denny, and we recorded this live in London a few days after we opened our London office, which is fitting, since Denny is a global artist based in Berlin, but has shown his work in various countries, biennales, museums and galleries, including a metaverse landscape solo show called read write own at Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco last year.

As a reminder, none of the following is investment, business, legal or tax advice. Please see asix one z.com disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investment the first half of our hallway style conversation tours through the evolution of art with technology, and the second half goes deeper into blockchains and art. But we began briefly with Denny's tech journey and how he thinks of entrepreneurship as an aesthetic. Obviously, this is a crypto show, and it's also a technology show. I mean, crypto is all about technology.

One of the reasons I'm in this world is it's a very multidisciplinary field, brings together economics, it brings together philosophy, it brings together networking, it brings together security, cryptography, like there's so many layers to crypto. Yeah. And I definitely want to focus in on the art aspect. Tell me a little bit more about your actual practice today, too, and then. We'Ll go back to the evolution at the moment.

Simon Denny

Today, I work across lots of different media in lots of different contexts. So I make both installations for museums and art galleries. I paint as well, but I also am very involved in crypto and crypto art. So I design NFT projects. But I guess maybe where I really specialize is I make things that join in the museum world with the crypto world.

So I'm interested in the history of art and artists who make for new technologies as they emerge to kind of explore what's possible on them that wasn't possible on other platforms previous. Exactly. But I personally got really interested in people, the people who were making the platforms, the people who were designing the systems, because these were new systems, we were experiencing them. We were feeling different ways, doing different things on them. One of the first times I encountered entrepreneurial culture, for example, that just inspired me unendingly, right?

Because it was so different than the attitude of my artist peers that I encountered. They were excited, they were bullish about the future. You know, in my world at the time, I think it's actually different now, but at the time, in my art world, it was very common to be incredibly critical in cynical cynicism was the go to. And I get that culture. I kind of love that culture.

It's sort of like indie rock or something like that, you know? But then I encountered all these incredible optimists, and I was like, wow, this is a force that I can't understand culturally. That's fascinating. I never thought about that. You're coming from a cynical kind of default, cynical art world and then being like, totally inspired by the optimism.

Sonal Chokshi

Cause I feel like those of us in Silicon Valley take that for granted. Attracted to value systems aesthetically, because I'm an artist and I think visually and culturally that I don't know everything about and I don't completely understand, you know. So I started to go to technology conferences, and the first thing that I did is I went to a prominent conference in Munich called DLD, and I made an artwork about DLD in 2013, a one year history of the conference. A year later, I made a maze that people would walk through in this museum space just down the road from the conference, where there was a graphic panel for everybody. Talk panel, basically.

Interesting. So you would look at, pull quotes that I pulled out from the entire conference and encounter things that Jack Dorsey was saying, things that the founder of Wikipedia was saying, pavel Duroff was saying, like, interesting entrepreneurs that they were able to gather there and the things they were saying about the world. And it was kind of overwhelming. Sounds really immersive too. It was super immersive, but very digital.

Simon Denny

I also leaned into the design interfaces that were contemporary at the time, which look really ancient now, which is really interesting too, because it was like iOS when it was skeuomorphism. So it was like all of these bookshelves as stages, as whatever, digital buttons. And that was the kind of graphic language I used. Cartoon fond. That looks very strange, but it gave this overall sense of this really vibrant community which I hadn't really encountered before as an artist.

Again, the art world's a little different in terms of culture. And that was one of the first times that I was like, wow, this is incredible. There are people here who are really optimistic, super excited about the future. Yes, they're critical thinkers as well, but they really want to build something. And that was the first time I encountered that culture.

Sonal Chokshi

Tell me a little bit about how you actually came as an artist to the technology world. So, yeah, I grew up in New Zealand. I went to university at the University of Auckland to first study art. Like, that was the thing that I fell in love with as a painter when I was younger. New Zealand's amazing, but it's also very small and quite remote.

Simon Denny

And I learned about how big the kind of contemporary art world was, which made me want to go study in Germany. Germany is a really special country for contemporary art. Every little town has a major contemporary art museum, which is really unusual in the post war period. It's been a really important place for lots of different artists internationally to kind of do museum shows early. There's also an incredible education system there.

So I went to art school then in Frankfurt at this very special school called the Stedelschule in the mid two thousands. And at that time, the director of the school was also the director of the Venice Biennale. And all the teachers that I was learning from, there were these international artists that I saw on the COVID of all the magazines that I was reading. So it was a really exciting hub of international practice. And there I got super interested in the history of technology and art because I moved there in 2007, the year the iPhone came out.

And like, I moved with a laptop, didn't have an iPhone because it was a brand new, very expensive thing. But we were all just starting to use social media like Web two in a really interesting way, of course, because I moved away from all my friends and family. That was one of the things that really kept me connected. Laptop I used for education, watching movies, but also keeping in tuples with friends in a really intense way. And so a bunch of artists that were studying at that time got really interested in this new wave of, like, technological stuff that was enabling a different type of engagement.

And Berlin. So for those who don't know Germany, it's like Berlin's, I guess, a place where a lot of contemporary artists live and work. And there were, like, this little hub of people that were really interested in the history of contemporary art. The history of art made for digital platforms like web art from the 1990s, which is a very interesting specialist field. So when browsers came about, when the World Wide Web started, when people started using mosaic and Netscape, there were artists designing for that.

As a specific. Yes. I want to go back to how when you were in art school, you and your cohort came across the iPhone for the first time. Oh, my God. And you don't necessarily immediately think viscerally about the iPhone as, like, a creative medium.

Sonal Chokshi

The way one thinks about caves for cave painting, or paper for drawing or canvas for painting, or led lights for a certain kind of electronic art installations at mass scale or whatever. Neon. It's funny that you mention that because it's just sort of like this little tiny, like, it's a device. It's a computing device. So can you tell me a little bit about how you and your cohort at the time sort of experienced the advent of the iPhone as, like, the moment that tipped into your interest and the intersection of technology and art?

Simon Denny

I mean, I think it was a conflation of a few different things that I was really compelled by when the iPhone came out. One was the really strong marketing component to that. I think I was particularly impressed by that. Like, the Steve Jobs moment was very compelling. The narrative part of it.

The narrative part of that, you know, like, the way that Steve and other entrepreneurs around him at the time seemed to be offering, like, a really cohesive vision of the world, but also the aesthetics. There was a kind of a design hegemony that got installed, but also as a person who was looking at the history of artists designing for particular mediums, you could do stuff with mobile and social that you couldn't do before. Right. Artists had been making amazing artworks for browsers. There's an incredible history of that.

They'd even been making artworks that dealt with the culture of companies. There was an amazing browser based group in the nineties who were called Etoy. Oh, and there was an. Etoys was a real company, right. I remember that Etoy started before Etoys, but they tended to be quite antagonistic.

A lot of browser based work from the nineties came from artists who were really resistant to the commercial aspects of the Internet. They were really anti commerce. They were sort of purists about the Internet for just communication. Exactly. And I think they really idealized moments where it was a more collective experience, and the commercial part seemed to be a difficult thing.

But Etoy, I think, was an amazing collective because they were completely anonymous. They were a collective, and they basically ended up coordinating a DDoS attack on eToy, the real company. That's like activist art. Exactly. Activist art was really close to that browser based work.

Now, me and my cohort were less anti, right? Like, I'd come up already through a commercial art world that was offline. I really valued the work that commercial agents were doing to make the work known, and I didn't have a problem with that. And I think a lot of the people who were using social media early were also okay with the idea of promoting themselves. So we were less against.

We designed things that didn't necessarily have this kind of anti commercial message. That's fantastic. I mean, there's always been this long history and tension, as you obviously know, with, like, artists. And the commercial aspect, I mean, Andy Warhol is the most obvious, exact example that comes to mind for that. And it's interesting because we'll get to how this may play out with the NFT world in a little bit.

Exactly. You talked about the early days of Web two. Browser based art is maybe the moment in your age that's like Web one eye, Web one, browser based web two, some of Instagram, social and mobile. One of the greatest examples, I think, of people making artwork for social media plus mobile was this work that a friend of mine, Amalia Ullman, did a little bit later, like in the early two thousand ten s. And this is when Instagram was like, really the medium that everybody was using in the art world, at least in our art world.

And we were all posting our exhibition photos on there, posting selfies of ourselves, whatever. But she was using it in a different way, where she really occupied this proto influencer idiom. She started taking photos of her, and then gradually over time, her image changed. Less kind of art world girl, more kind of like basic, quote unquote looking person. Like, her makeup was more extreme, her body became more extreme.

And then at one point, she was announcing that she was going to have surgery on her body. And then we, as a community of artists that knew her, were like, wow, Amalia has really changed. Like, this is really super difficult. And then she had these incredible pre and post things of an operation or whatever. Yeah.

And then it came out that it was all a performance, and we were all completely duped by the whole thing. It was really, really believable. And again, it used all of these emergent properties of that medium to really do something that said something about the way that the world was going. Yes, that sounds like performance art. I actually think I heard about this.

Sonal Chokshi

Right, exactly. And speaking of the specific properties of that medium, you also mentioned the word proto influencer, which I think is very interesting, because obviously there is this element of influencers today on Instagram and beyond in social media and influencer culture. So this is sort of pretty. That sort of. It was emergent with it, I would say.

Simon Denny

And I think this is what artists are good at doing. They're good at seeing emergent properties that are happening both in visual conventions, like how photos are looking. Cause that was another thing, like, visually, there was a particular style to these images, right. That came from the hardware, came from the way that the phone looked, came from the lighting that was common in a bedroom or whatever. You know, all of this also was a kind of an aesthetic layer to it.

Sonal Chokshi

It was also constrained by the technology at the time. Right, yeah, exactly. And all of those things come together to make a particular medium possible, including the network. Right. Which I think is also interesting if we're thinking in the future about nfts.

When you say the network, do you mean the network as in the community around her, or network of her followers and her social graph, or what do you mean by network? I think there's a few different layers to the network thing. The performance, if you categorize it as a performance piece, happened first to her friends that knew her, because the strangeness of experiencing that change was the thing that made the effect. Right. But that network of friends also had a second order network of people that knew of her.

Simon Denny

So this classic social network kind of social graph world, it's spread out into, but also the hardware, the technological layer of the network, where you couldn't have these distributed, performative moments without iPhones, without satellites, without cables. So it's really like quite a lot of things coming together in this word network, I think. Interesting. So then, Simon, on that note, what are some of the other milestones for your experience in evolution as an artist? In the technological moments?

I mean, artists have been dealing with technological changes and expressing the visceral feelings of inhabiting new technological moments for a very long time. So realism and data is an early 20th century moment that dealt a lot with the changes, both, and advertising language, you know, and mediums around communication. Surrealism really leaned into the illustrative aspect of that. Right? But, like, data and stuff, artists like Picabia and people making images of machines of post industrial revolution kind of worlds, a lot of early modernism is depicting machinic worlds.

When you then jump, let's say, to the post war period in the 1960s and seventies, you started to have groups of artists around pop art and neo pop, dealing again with the language of advertising and ambivalence called commercial culture. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg, who was a kind of proto pop artist, working with people like in collectives like eat the experiments in art and technology, which happened in dialogue with Bell Labs at the time. Oh, I didn't know about that. Can you know a little bit more about that? I mean, I'm not an expert, but there was this really amazing moment where these very prominent people were in dialogue with people in Bell labs.

And so they made experimental, technologically enabled sculptures. There was one Rauschenberg piece that I'm thinking of, actually. I don't know if you made it an eat or not, but it was like a bed of mud that was bubbling, that then had a sensory component on it as well. Like really amazing kind of machine and object based work, but also a lot of kind of theater based experience and performances, which were also done with early computer systems. There was also people being given, for example, early Portapacks, which was the kind of first video equipment by Sony.

So Sony was really involved in donating to artist groups. And there was an artist group that was in New York that was really adjacent to the whole Earth catalog in the Stuart brand world, right? There was another magazine called Radical Software, which was produced at the time as well. And radical software was run by an early artist corporation called Rain Dance Corporation. They incorporated themselves, and they had a space in New York where several porter packs were that artists could come and use.

They would make footage, they would bring the footage back, and then they would make artist libraries that you could pull as stock footage and make montages from. So that was also like a really interesting early moment that inspired me a lot. And out of that group came early experiments in broadcast television and cable network television. There was an amazing collective called top value television. And they, for example, produced one of the most amazing artists, made documentaries that was then screened on cable television at the time, looking at Madison Avenue and advertising producers, but also a Nixon convention, they went and made a kind of political documentary.

And then of course there's like more famous examples like Warhol television and stuff like that, and global networks. And that comes to mind when you said that the example of the early stock library type of idea that people could take and that you said that inspired your work, what really stuck in my mind about that is that's like an analog version of remix culture. Absolutely. And so tell me about how it inspired your work specifically. Well, I'm a bit of a historian, and I actually made a show here in London in 2012 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the ICA, where I managed to convince the broadcasting network, who were changing over from analog broadcasting to digital, to give us one of the old analog broadcasting machines.

And I dumped that in the middle of the Institute for Contemporary Art and put all of these libraries of old network videos made by people like Ryan Dance Corporation and their peers around in a video library where people could watch them. And one of the things that I found in an archive of theirs was a way of categorising different types of tapes that they were made. They made early data versions representing what was being made in those libraries. So I found those resonant with what people were doing on YouTube, the artist peers of mine were making, which were kind of remixed things and appropriated things. A bunch of my work is very liberal with ownership.

I believe that one doesn't invent something. I believe that one finds things and combines them with things. So I prefer the notion of like a value add than like a kind of invention. So I don't believe that you can invent things. This is why I think movements like pop art were so profound, because the direct appropriative touch of making an image of a Campbell soup can and claiming that as an original thing, recontextualizing it, was one of the biggest things.

And I think sampling culture and all of that stuff like builds on the back of that. I find that so personally fascinating too. So we talked about some of the pre influences in the technological side. Let's talk about some of the post influences, post iPhone. Like, are there any other technological moments?

Yeah. So I think the next big moment in the mid two thousand ten s, I was lucky enough to do the Venice Biennale pavilion for New Zealand. The Venice Biennale is kind of like the biggest art show in the world, and there's country by country pavilions. So I got to do New Zealand, and in order to do that, it was 20 1314. I was working on it.

In 15. I presented it. I was interested in the WikiLeaks moment. At that time, artists like Trevor Peglin were involved in those communities. So I was sort of perfectly aware of those groups around transparency and stuff like that.

Sonal Chokshi

By the way, I was at wired at that time when that was playing out. Keep going. When they released all these documents, I found the kind of, like, clip art on the DoD and internal NSA documents. I found them really aesthetically surprising. There were these very playful images that were representing kind of very serious things.

That's so interesting. I never thought about that. You had literally a magic card standing in for a big offensive that was looking in on everybody's privacy or whatever. But I was so interested that I really wanted to find some concrete examples of who was making those images, who were those artists, right? And I found this one guy's LinkedIn page, this guy called David Dachicourt.

Simon Denny

And David Dachycourt was self proclaimed on his LinkedIn. This is against social media art, in a way. He claimed that he was the creative director of the NSA for the 20 years preceding the leaks. And he had a really big Adobe platform portfolio of his work on it as well. So he had designs he'd done for the NSA, slip mats, mouse pads, training posters, all these things.

And I made copies of all of them. I made giant interpretations of his work. I changed medium from them. So I made sculptures out of things that were diagrams. And I situated them in this library right in the middle of Venice, next to the Doge's palace, which was designed by Sansovino, this very important architect then.

And that is a very ornate room that has images of druids and wizards and all these fantasy things that went into Tintoretto and all these artists that were working in that period. And I put his work alongside their work. And there were these crazy synergies, bearded men, strange books, fantasy imagery that was throughout the NSA. Material in clip art form was very close and resonant with these kind of like, renaissance images also. I guess the key thing was it was a performative piece, because Dashiko didn't know that I did this work.

Sonal Chokshi

I was about to ask you if he knew and you talked to him. So it was all appropriated. And the only moment that he found out that that happened was when the Guardian called him on the opening day and said, hey, did you know there's a bunch of stuff with your work? Why did he react, by the way? I think he was a little confused.

He's like, what is this guy doing with this? Yeah, I mean, it was really important to him at the time. And this came out in the Guardian article, too. When the Guardian spoke to him, it was really important that he was attributed, which he was. His phone number was on there just like it was on the web, you know, I mean, that was part of my gesture.

Simon Denny

And I think he found it really interesting, of course, as the gesture was a little bit like performing something like what the NSA was performing on all of us, but on artistic work. And I think that was, again, complicated by the fact that I was from New Zealand. This is us culture in a certain sense. So I think there was a lot of really interesting tensions around ownership. Right.

Sonal Chokshi

And it's funny cause the technological underpinnings are fascinating to me because you said briefly that in a way, him putting that he was a creative director for the NSA on his LinkedIn profile is almost performance art. Exactly. And then the other point is that these materials you're talking about, these artifacts, were leaked online. Yeah. And I think this brings up the kind of art networks that preserve and take care of culture.

Simon Denny

I think they take care of things that are otherwise not seen and not cared for. So I really like to act in that domain. But of course, that's a sort of object based medium in itself. You want to go into a room in a museum and you want to have a rich experience in there. Translating browser based work into a projector in a room doesn't always work so well.

Right. Did you create it for the b and L? I created it for the Biennale. The way that it works is you get commissioned, you can kind of do whatever you like. You work with a curator.

Government of the country sponsors that. And then the Biennale acts as a sort of presenter, in a way. By the way, one more note. You mentioned a couple of times that you're from New Zealand and you were in this biennale. You were representing New Zealand's pavilion.

Yeah. How do you think that influenced your work? Because you live in Berlin today. You're recording this as we speak in London live. You presented your work in a show in San Francisco, and you're very global.

Sonal Chokshi

But I am curious about if you think how being a New Zealander influences your art. Do you think there's any kind of influence there? I do, and I think it's quite a deep one, actually. So I grew up in New Zealand, but all of my ancestors did things which I find complicated and difficult. And while I felt I grew up in a place where I felt a kind of a homeliness too.

Simon Denny

I also always felt like it wasn't really totally my home, and I was always a part of a global world. And that was honestly one of the reasons why I was viscerally attracted to global community. You know, found community, the Internet, as a kind of tool for challenging the notion of a nation state as a body and identity. Like, I very strongly identified with that. I feel more connected to the people that I work with around the world than I do to one particular location.

Sonal Chokshi

That's fascinating. So, it's funny, the reason I mentioned it, too, is my first time at Art Basel was 2006. Same. Oh, you two. Same year.

Oh, God, I wonder if we cross each other's pads. You never know. I always think of sliding door moments. But it's funny because that was the year that Mark Newson was named designer of the year. And it was also right about when Art Basel had finally.

It's been established for a number of years, but it had started now to finally really jump the shark, so to speak, like, hit the mainstream awareness. I remember this because I was behind Vanity Fair, who was covering it for the first time. When they were touring the floor, they were on a tour that the art Basel group had actually curated, and I was, like, on one of the tours with them. Amazing. I wasn't working for them or anything.

I just happened to sign up for that time slot. So that's why I was in that tour, and so I got to follow in here. So it was very interesting that year. It was also the year that they started to, you know how, like, now art Basel is all about the satellite and everything that surrounds it locally, which is amazing. It spawned, like, millions of other.

Especially. I'm sorry, I'm speaking specifically of art Basel Miami. Exactly. And now they have nada and they have all these other things. But at the time they started design Miami, and they gave Mark Newson designer of the year.

Simon Denny

Right? He's like a sculptor, essentially, the famous Lockheed lounge chairs. And then obviously, people might think of him in the tech sense, because he was good friends with Johnny Ives and there was some collaboration there on the technology side. And he's australian, right. He said something that really blew my mind, which is that he felt that growing up in Australia, he was liberated as an artist because he didn't have the legacy and influences that one would have if you grew up in a place like Italy, where you have, like, renaissance history, where you're surrounded by all these sculptures that were created, like, thousands of years ago.

Sonal Chokshi

So he felt that he had almost an unopinionated journey to art and a lens on it that it almost gave him like a more neutral palette growing up in a place like that. Which is why I asked about New Zealand. That's so interesting. I mean, I would frame it slightly differently. Great.

I want to hear. I found that there was definitely a weight of the situation and the history that was definitely there, but it wasn't, of course, the same one as the kind of canon at the same time. In a parallel way, you have this other influence of indigenous culture playing out at the same time. Right. So I remember one of my key inspiration moments when I was learning art at the first time at the University of Auckland.

Simon Denny

Had this incredible professor, Michael Patakofai, and he is an incredible sculptor, grew up in a Mori context, but he was making work that resonated with eighties and nineties pop artists like Jeff Koons. He was making big shiny things that used the language of advertising, that also spoke to the indigeneity in New Zealand at the time. So that was this, like actually drawing from a canon, but also coming from a place which had other information to bring, you know what I mean? And I think that's the thing that I was really inspired. I love that.

Sonal Chokshi

So then, going back now to the moment at the Venice Biennale when you did that WikiLeaks moment, were there any other technology milestones on the way to crypto and blockchain art? I'll say one more. So I mentioned this piece that I made where I was looking at entrepreneurs through DLD, through going and hanging out at conferences, that was really inspiring aesthetically and everything for me. It's so funny to hear about entrepreneurship as an aesthetic. Yeah, I love it.

Simon Denny

And so this is the thing, I leaned into the Berlin of that time as well, and I made a series of works about young startups. So, for example, I took a wired roundup, like top ten startups in Berlin, and I made almost like a deal toy meets a gaming computer meets a kind of like a piece that might go in a trade fair booth or something like that. And I would make these pop art inspired sculptures that were celebrating the culture of entrepreneurship. Wow. And that was something that I ended up culminating in a big show that I did also in 2015 at MoMA Ps one, which was called the Innovator's dilemma.

It was like named after the Clayton. Christian famous Christian book, right. Where it brought together a bunch of different projects that I'm doing in general about entrepreneurship. I made something about south korean entrepreneurship. I made a big project about Samsung during those years, which looked at their turn to be more global in the 1990s, I also did a really big round of work based on Peter Thiel.

It was inspired by a kind of moment in New Zealand where it was realized that Thiel was a citizen. And I made like a big group of artworks that were based on board gaming and the language of gaming, which mapped out ideological narratives that came from Peter's world, which is very, very influential in entrepreneurship. So I did a show that was at a small gallery in Auckland, in New Zealand. Not a kind of big space, but Peter ended up coming there. He ended up seeing the show.

We ended up getting in touch after that, when he was still based in San Francisco. And that was, again, this really interesting moment of bringing the way that certain ideas were received in a local space with something that was very influential in the business world and the technology world. I also made artworks. About Kim.com, who is this german finnish entrepreneur who built a platform called Megaupload, which was one of the most used piracy network things for downloading, like Hollywood content. And he was sued by the US government, I think, in 2013, 2012 even maybe.

And there was a massive bust on his home, which was a collaboration between New Zealand armed forces and police network and the US. And they tried to extradite him ever since. Of course, we did a cover story on kim.com. That cover story I was very inspired by at the time. And also because he was based in New Zealand and the whole bust went down in this very glamorous property in Auckland.

I have to say, he's still living in New Zealand. They never managed to actually successfully extradite him. And he made other platforms. Since I was also watching all of my content on his platform. Actually, at the time, there was another thing.

Living in Germany, you couldn't get Netflix at the time. We were all pirates. At some point in your career, especially if you grew up in any point in the nineties onward, it was all pre Netflix. That was the only way to get things. Do you remember burning CDs?

Oh, of course I remember burning CDs. Exactly. Now that looks. You wouldn't download a car. Well, now I look back on it as a creator, and there's a big difference.

Sonal Chokshi

When you talked about how you were doing literal appropriation art, in the case of that NSA artist, that's a specific performer. It's a gesture. It's a gesture, exactly. Now I'm mortified as a creator at how I treated other creators works when I realized that we just burned CDs, pass them to our friends. This is like a web two question as well, right, a little bit, because it's also about, like, what is promotion?

Simon Denny

What is popularity, what is attention, value, worth? And where do you monetize that? Burning CDs is a proto expression of that problem. Right. You've mentioned a few times, actually, this tension between art and commercialism.

Sonal Chokshi

And I want to go back to it is quite fascinating as a thread in your work. You seem very inspired by advertising culture. Oh, my God. Yes. Yeah.

And like a lot of people would argue, advertising is not art. Yeah. So clearly you fall in this other camp, like, yeah. Tell me more about that. I mean, I think it's also not so unusual within the art worlds that I occupy.

Simon Denny

But essentially, pop art is a really great example because everybody's heard of Warhol, but there's many practices that came in the wake of that big idea and also the scale that he was able to bring to that big idea. I think the notion that pop art proposed that your role as an artist is to describe how it feels to occupy that contemporary world and you're not an ethical agent. It's just like I go into the street and I see a giant billboard, and it does something to my heart. And that is culture. Right.

Like, that is the claim of pop art. That's exactly right. That is culture. But one thing I do have to ask you about on the advertising and also globalization. So two themes here.

Sonal Chokshi

But I think back to, like, when I used to go to India and I'd see, like, Bollywood posters, which is its own aesthetic. Yeah. Hand painted often. Totally. That actually is dying art now because I'm being digital now.

But it was an incredible thing to see that art form, especially in my parents tiny village. Yeah. Incredible. It's like this pop of color and this kind of almost desert landscape. Yeah.

Simon Denny

And glamour as well. It's very glamorous. Exactly, exactly. I edited one of my friends. She's also an author, Virginia Postural.

Sonal Chokshi

She wrote a book called glamour, which actually, it's funny you said the word glamour because it has certain specific connotations to it, which is great. But I do have to ask you, Simon, do you think there's also this kind of monoculture that's happening because of that globalization and in that aesthetic? Because I feel, especially in the case of pixel art, that there was a point when everyone got a little too digitally influenced and everything started looking like the eight bit thing, and I got very bored of that. Isn't that. And so I just wonder if you think there's this sort of homogenization happening as well in the aesthetic.

Simon Denny

Yeah. I guess this is a narrative that comes up from time to time. I mean, it's not only in art that it comes up, right? I mean, Netflix culture is a great example. Netflix culture is a great example, too, but I think people bring it up politically, which is, like, the most charged context for it.

Sonal Chokshi

Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. You know, there's these kind of conversations about how homogenous things are becoming because of, like, the speed of travel, the ease of travel, these kinds of things. But I don't really believe that that will ever make a true homogenization. And my understanding of the way that cultures have emerged is they always immersion hybridization, right. There is no such thing.

Simon Denny

Again, this is an originality question, right? Like, there's no such thing as a true original flavor of x or y. There's no first anything, and there's only kind of encounters. And I tend to think I'm sort of like an encounters maximalist or something like that. I like that.

Sonal Chokshi

That encounters maximalist. I mean, that's something I literally just coined. I love it. We were inventing things on the podcast. That's how we go.

Simon Denny

But I tend to think that more hybridization is always positive, and I don't believe that this true homogenization really ever happens. There are kind of trends and moments where certain boringness settle into a market or whatever, where a lot of people try and do that thing. And yes, I get very bored about that very quickly. Boring homogenous stuff is boring and homogenous. And I think the way that NFTs stratified very quickly in 2021 into particular genres bored the hell out of me.

I mean, this is true in the art art world as well as the NFT art world. But, like, expensive things are considered to be important. But on the edges of those things, I could tell you ten examples of things that did incredible stuff with the kernels of things that went into those strata, but then did something truly amazing on the side of it, at the fringes, at the side, outside of those movements, are always something where there's somebody mixing that with something that's never been seen before, that's great, and then that makes something new. And I think that's a very old story. I also think globalization is a much older story than is often assumed colloquially.

Cultures have been mixing across Eurasia, for example, for very long time. Oh, totally. I love that you pointed out that this kind of intermixing has been happening for, like, eons. There are other things and many examples across the history of art and culture of things that happen on the fringe of those environments that are a little harder to see at the time, that certain enthusiasts get really excited about around them as they happen, but don't scale in the same way, don't reach the same price points, don't enter the same museum collections that are then kind of later looked back on and seen that there's things that happened there that were just super exciting. Right.

Sonal Chokshi

That's fascinating. When I think of even the outsider art movement, right, which is kind of a literal fringe movement version of outsider. I mean, that's a name. It specifies this. And, you know, this is a very literal interpretation of fringe.

And I know what you mean as fringe is more nuanced than that. But I have a piece by Howard Finster. Oh, interesting. It's one of his dinosaurs. It's like this little cardboard cutout dinosaur on, like, a little platform, and he's handwritten in Sharpie.

All these biblical verses, like, kind of like fire and brimstone. And it's really fascinating because he was an ex minister. And to me, that's an encounter between, like, christian faith and thinking combined with this encounter with evolution and what it means. Because it's, like, so bizarre to have, like, biblical verses on a dinosaur. Yeah, that's incredible.

It's like, so great. Oh, my God, I want one. Oh, yeah. I think what's really interesting about the outsider is in general, as a category is really interesting because I think a lot of people that came from the art world that I've been talking about up until now, like the world that kind of circles around museums and art fairs and galleries, when they looked at NFTs for the first time, I think a lot of them saw outsider art. Right.

Simon Denny

Because it was people who were not trained in the art tradition, who were given a certain technological stack, who were then able to create and promote and sell whatever worked. And that kind of opened up to a whole lot of creators that were definitely not schooled in the canons. And then lots of super interesting, weird stuff happened on the side of those, which I personally found as a wealth of compelling examples of emergent culture. And then there became own kind of homogenizations and canon buildings within that sub community around NFTs. And those things I found often a little less interesting.

You know what I mean? Yes, I totally agree. I'm about to ask you about blockchains and nfts in just one more minute. I'm also trying to think of when outsider art becomes establishment in other ways. Yeah.

Henry Dodger is a very canonical example. It's a very strange hierarchy that gets established, especially with the use of the term outsider. It also kind of brands somebody as not legible and included them in the canon. But as an outsider. Right.

I mean, these tensions are very strange. It's about academy versus not and certain people who are able to say that's important and that's not, and value and where money lies and all these other things that are really interesting around culture. One example that comes to mind for me, it was in India when I went to Chandigarh, which is in north India. I know it. Yeah.

Sonal Chokshi

Okay. And they have, like, this thing called the Rock garden, which is designed by Nek Chand. And that was also a form of outsider art. He literally collected garbage and recycled materials for years, like glass. Amazing.

And shards and rocks. And he built this incredibly fantastical, like, fantastic fantasy garden. It's called the rock Garden in Chandigarh, which Chandigarh itself, speaking of layers of history and culture, was designed with the. Help of Le Corbusier, right? Yes, Le Corbusier.

And also the Imes. Exactly. Very influential in the fifties. And modernism meets the built environment meets planning meets the history of colonialism. It's very fascinating.

Like, layers and layers of things. Okay, great. Let's talk now about blockchains and crypto art. So you mentioned, like, all these technological milestones on your way to your evolution as an artist. Tell me about how you came to blockchain art.

Simon Denny

Yeah. So, of course, if you're muddling around in Berlin, in the communities that are building new products and new companies in the early mid 2010s, you come across bitcoin. And the more I dug into bitcoin culture, the more fascinated I was. I was just like, well, as somebody who's looking for new aspiring narratives, this notion of sovereign free money, I then started to pay attention to people who were kind of advocating around exit versus voice and also self sovereign. I read the sovereign individual as a book.

And then, of course, in Berlin, you heard about Ethereum as it emerged, because the Ethereum foundation was getting set up and started there. So for the 2016 Berlin Biennale, I made my first big piece about crypto. And that was three different fictional trade fair booths based on three different entrepreneurs that were looking at three different narratives that were emerging from blockchain. One of them was Blythe masters. So Blythe masters was coming from the banking world, right?

She came out of securities in the 1990s, and she made this company at the time called Digital Asset. I made a big kind of installation about her. I made a big installation about Balaji and about 21, Inc. Before it was changed or whatever. And then I made a big one about Ethereum and Vitalik, and it was like those three narratives I was looking at.

At the same time, I made little postage stamps that I worked on with the german postal, because I thought postage stamps were both expressions of sovereignty. Right. They were also design objects, and they were also kind of a kind like a parallel currency. So I made design stamps and booths. That's also, by the way, fascinating about postal stamps is that they are expression of sovereignty, but they're also, like, ways to get out.

Sonal Chokshi

They move objects around the world. Exactly. They're infrastructure. Fascinating. Right?

Exactly. Exactly. So I thought they were like the perfect scope of form for work. About this emergent network so far, you. Described how you were using blockchain and crypto as inspiration for your art, the subject matter of the art.

But now blockchain is a medium. Let's talk about that. Yeah. So there were a few people at that time who were starting to design kind of web based art, like brown browser art that I described earlier, or web two art, let's say that was based on coding on emergent blockchains. Right?

Simon Denny

So there was a project called Ascribe, which was actually something Vitalik worked on as well at the time, which was an early system that tried to put artworks and link them to the bitcoin network. There was a conference in 2014 at seven on seven that rhizome did, which was connected to the new museum where they pair an artist with a technologist. Okay. And at the time, they designed something based on colored coin, which was essentially an NFT. And then I started to learn about other projects.

I'd learned about Terrazero, which was a really interesting project, which was a group that were proposing to make trees own themselves as entities. Trees own themselves. Yeah, exactly. Wow. They were like, look, if you can do a blockchain system based on Ethereum, if you can have smart contracts, then why not give the sovereignty of ownership to the trees?

Why not have a commercial forest own the produce of its own work? Let's say I was fascinated by that. So I curated a little show in 2018 at a space in Berlin called the Schinkel Pavilion, about artists that were doing these experiments. So also included in that was cryptokitties. Okay, I don't know if you remember this, but Christie's did a weird little collaboration with consensus.

Sonal Chokshi

Oh, yes. Where they sold a hardware wallet with a specially designed cryptokitty on it, where Gile Twadowski, who was the guy who invented the visual aspect of the Cryptokitties project. So not the kind of mechanics, but the actual cats made a special one, and they sold it as a hardware wallet, which was also specially designed in an auction. And it was big news in the New York Times. And so I included that in the show.

Simon Denny

I included Terrazzuro, this forest project in the show. I included other artists like Kia Kreutler, who was also working around gnosis at the time, doing interesting designs for that. And the whole show was set up. The curatorial premise was also based on blockchains. Because I didn't want to decide everybody in the show.

I asked somebody else to choose two things, and then they would choose two things. And then we did a transparent publishing of all of the decision makings on the wall as a curatorial protocol. So you turned curation, the act and art of curation itself into a form of art that actually also showed the process behind the outcome. Exactly. Transparency networks, all of these things that kind of so important to blockchain, decentralized decision making.

Right. And so, yeah, we had this kind of protocol that we designed where everybody knew who picked them for being in the show, and I wasn't making all the decisions. And that show was called proof of work, but that was way before nfts were a thing. Yes. And before we talk more about nfts, what do you think is unique about blockchains as a medium for art?

You know, one of the interesting things about blockchain as a medium, I think, is that the cultural asset and the financial container is the same thing. Yeah, right. That's sort of true in art in a way, but literally as an NFT, those things are much more structurally combined. Right. And web two art, and like art designed for social networks, they're also like networked objects.

They're connected to other things. And settlement is immediate. Right. I mean, one of the things that artists got really, really excited about with the emergence of blockchain art, and this is really going into the NFT moment now, but the idea that you could have settlement immediately on sale and that you wouldn't have to have an intermediary because, you know, gallerists and whatever, it's very complicated system. Yes.

So the simplicity and the directness of that was really attractive. But also this notion of resale royalties, the idea that you would sell something on a secondary market and immediately the original creator would receive some compensation for that. That's been something that the art world's been dreaming about since the seventies. There's a conceptual art piece by a very famous curator, Seth Sieglaub, that he did in the early 1970s called the artist contract. So let's talk about NFT specifically.

Sonal Chokshi

So we've obviously been dancing around that this entire conversation. But I think crypto art is bigger than just nfts, to be clear. Agreed. And blockchains as a medium is bigger than just nfts. So we agree on that.

But let's talk about nfts specifically, because that's the thing that really captured the mainstream attention and actually maybe even catapulted crypto into much more mainstream awareness. And to be clear, I mean, this well beyond the financial, I'm talking about as an artistic thing. This includes. Includes multiple auction houses, like doing NFT auctions, like being participating in it. Multiple people who only came to crypto for the first time and set up a wallet in order to buy nfts.

Who knew? Of course we knew. Well, that culture would be the thing that brings people to technology. I mean, retroactively, it looks logical, but I don't think that was a given. Oh, interesting.

Tell me why. Well, I don't know. I mean, I think the moment that changed for me from knowing about a small group of people messing around with blockchains, making art with it, to like the post people auction moment, I guess. That'S maybe like people is the right thing. Post people.

BB and PB. Yeah, right, exactly. BB and PB. And that was also in cohorts with the auction houses. I mean, Bibi was not an unknown entity before that auction, but he was known in the graphic arts world, right?

Simon Denny

Like he was a very, very well known figure there. But then with this signal from the blue chip art world, you know, from those auction houses, I think those are the things that created that change and awareness. But I think there was more going on there than just the cultural. Yeah, say more like why you think it was a given that this would happen? Well, if I think back to web two, for example, I don't think culture was the thing that brought that into like mainstream awareness and usage.

I mean, unless you count kind of sociality as a layer of culture, which I guess one good thing, and I guess I do in a way, but it's not high culture. Like you didn't learn about Facebook or MySpace because of an exponent art. Whereas I think a lot of people's mainstream adoption and understanding of web three came around that moment, which was associated with an art and an artist. Web one also didn't happen like that. You know, you didn't hear about the Internet because you heard of some artist piece being made by an artist.

Sonal Chokshi

No, I agree. I totally agree with you. You've said multiple times about this conversation that culture emerges. And so what do you think about this moment? Made this, like, the time?

Like, why now? Well, I mean, I think auction houses are always looking for new things, new markets. They've constantly done that. You know, before the 1970s and eighties, they didn't sell contemporary art, for example. They only sold old masters.

Simon Denny

So moving into new areas is kind of like a textbook thing. But then Defi Summer came, and there was all this liquidity created in the ecosystem from people who had been successful, which then they started to filter into these cultural assets, and I think that was what built up to the crypto. Yeah, but why the art? Because they could have also funneled that liquidity into something else. You know, I can't answer that question.

Yeah, but I think people want to buy art that support the cultures that they believe in. So it's about identity and belonging. Yeah, exactly. And affiliation. And people who'd been excited by what was possible within the DeFi world, within the kind of crypto world in general, saw an emergent cultural package that kind of embodied the value of that.

And they were like, okay, I believe in this cultural age, and I think that mostly really happened around pfps. Yes. Like profile pic type artists, profile pictures. Like cryptokitties and cryptopunks. Artistically, it's really an interesting mechanism.

You sell something initially to a large community, a bunch of people hold the same thing, and then that also moves around in networks. It changes ownership, owner to owner. Right. And with that, the community grows, the people who have touched that asset. And that means that a large group of people are suddenly almost fractal participators in kind of one cultural moment.

Right. In one cultural asset. You know what I mean? Exactly. They're designed to participate in networks.

The provenance is important. Where it came from, where it's going to is important. Tracing these relationships as a part of the media is what's so super interesting about it. It's fascinating. And the networks themselves are in the cloud, or blockchain.

Sonal Chokshi

One of our colleagues, Tim Roughgarden, calls blockchains computers in the sky. They operate without any central, accessible to all. You talked earlier about coming from New Zealand and this idea of the borders and the inspiration for you being almost global by default, this is that exact, very example, the portability of the asset. It's not just that. It's the portability of your humanity, your identity, who you are, your network, or even belonging in a network, regardless of border, place, location, into a different kind of identity online.

Simon Denny

And I mean, there's a sort of more humanity side to this argument as well, like the Donna Haraway notion of the community of Kim. But it's that within a digitally designed artwork network, I mean, that's so cool. Say more of community of kin. Well, one of the cool things that I found in art school was, like, me and this one other person loved this one artwork by this one artist, and we found a passion in there that meant we were compatible across all sorts of different. Oh, my God.

Sonal Chokshi

You know, you're so right. Yeah. One of my absolute favorite artists is this New Orleans artist named Rebecca Rebuche. I'm a big fan of her work. Very fantasy.

She has a lot of portals. Yeah, I love that type of thing. And I collect a lot of her pieces. Oh, interesting. And so I went to her art patron dinner, and I've been to multiple shows of hers, and I feel like the community that comes around the art, these are people I've never met before, right.

I have no history, no demographic in common. It's like an instant affiliation and true connection. Yeah, exactly. Because what better proxy for understanding that kind of like mindedness than having that same shared love? Oh, my God.

I totally agree. It's a really precise cultural signal. There's also another artwork that I want to mention here that is maybe less known and is working differently than many NFTs in terms of dynamics. It's a project by Sarah Friend, which I actually showed in another curated show that I did later on called Proof of Stake, and that was all about ownership in particular. And she did this piece called lifeforms, which were designed on polygon, but the NFTs were designed to only live, quote, unquote, if they were transferred.

Simon Denny

And so they had, like, a time life programmed into them where if they stayed in one wallet longer than three months, they would completely self destruct. Yeah, got it. I don't know if you've heard of this, but. Og crystals. Oh, yeah, sure.

Sonal Chokshi

And the artist was Michael Ju, and he did it with Daniel Kriveruchko. Anyway, what's really fascinating about it is that. But the NFT, to your point, that's an example of, like, it has to be transferred in order to exist with. Serif friends life forms. I love that it's called life forms.

This was really interesting on the coral reef diversity side, where every time you transfer this NFT, like the properties of other things in that person's collection inhabit, it's like an organism inhabit that NFT. So what happens is, for instance, if you own, like mebits, then that NFT, the crystal, the form it expresses, will have like this, like 3d, like kind of cubic element that respond to the coral. Exactly. And it evolves. And so the art itself evolves as it gets transferred, which I think is so fascinating.

Like that is, I have goosebumps talking about this, because that is the essence of truly being native to the medium, because it's not just taking something and then taking it and like, oh, I'm going to apply it to blockchain. Right. It's taking the inheritance nature of blockchains and evolving that with the art. It's just incredible to me. Yeah, I agree.

Simon Denny

And the online offline connection is also still really important because even the virtualists are physical, right? Because screens are real, pixels are real, you know, like networks are made of atoms as well as bits, you know? Yes, yes. And the recent body of work that I made, that was actually named a little bit close to this book from Chris. So I made oil paintings of other people's metaverse property tokens.

Sonal Chokshi

Ah, made the digital physical. Yeah, in a way. Because I thought about territory, I thought about community, I thought about history, and I thought about like, the fact that these tokens, when I looked at something like Decentraland or sandbox, these very popular crypto based metaverses, when I looked at the ownership tokens for owning a piece of property in those worlds, I saw a grid that looked to me like mid century painting, because it's a grid. These projects, if you buy a token, you get an NFT that looks like a part of the map of the project. But I was thinking, oh, that's so interesting.

Simon Denny

Cause it looks so much like mid century painting. And then I was like, oh, wouldn't that be funny to paint that, actually? And then I was like, that would be a landscape painting of a piece of property in the metaverse. That's so weird. And then I was like, what is landscape painting?

And that, again, goes back to my background. I grew up in New Zealand. The first thing we learned about is colonial landscape painting. And I was like, oh my God. When I see these NFTs, this gridded system, it's like modernism is being projected onto the metaverse, you know?

So it's taking an old modernist trope and putting onto the metaverse. But it was important for me to underline the networked element as well. So while there were paintings of somebody else's property, I included two QR codes on the side of each painting, and the first one links to the original property. So you can kind of look at the property that the painting is of. So you know.

Exactly, because that's interesting as well about metaverse interfaces. That's already gone through a few rounds of ux. So the painting is of an kind of early version of a landscape, and then you have a link to what the real one looks like now. Right. But then I designed an NFT that looks like an ownership card that you would get a monopoly for owning a piece of property and tells you who owns that piece right now.

And it links you to the person that owns that piece. But it's also permissionless. Right? So it's a painting which permissionless of a property that you don't own that then you have a kind of other piece of ownership property that always links you to the person who currently owns it. It's, like, so fascinating exploring the nature of ownership.

Sonal Chokshi

So this is the exhibition you debuted in San Francisco. Why did you title it? Read, write, own? Well, I was really interested in always, like, what are good descriptions of what's different about networks. Right?

Simon Denny

And when I read about Chris's book, coming out and read write on was kind of, like, underlined as a way to summarize, you know, web one, web two, and web three was the title of the. It resonated with also the design on the COVID It was a little square in the middle and a kind of landscape like object around it. And I was like, oh, my God, this is what I've been painting. I've been painting the difference of ownership in web two and web three, and kind of how these things layer up. Also, ownership is really something that's really important in art.

It always has been important. And so people owning properties, people owning images of other properties, again, these notions around landscape, when you paint a landscape, it doesn't mean you own it. It's a picture of something you often don't own. It's funny you mentioned the COVID because the designer, Rodrigo Corral, and obviously, Rodrigo Corral Studio, has done a lot of work for, like, the book after that. But the other thing that's fascinating to me about what you're saying about this is that this idea of ownership and what you're doing with the paintings and your exhibit for read, write, own, is this idea, too, that we ourselves are transient humans and the ways we put our stamps on the world, sometimes, like, the only thing that endures is art, right?

Sonal Chokshi

Whether physical or emotionally, like, the things we leave behind. And it's funny. Cause I used to be a huge fan of Christo and Jean Claude. Oh, yeah, sure. Big fan.

Cause I love landscape art. You would think it's so inane, like you're putting plastic to cover trees. Like, how is this art? But I love this idea that man, humanity, is conquering nature in a way that's not, like extractive, but that's actually beautifying it and showing our presence. And I find that building, like, it's just beautiful.

There's something extremely exquisite about it, which I'm bringing it up because it resonates with what you're describing with the read write Owen exhibit you did. For those who haven't heard of them, they basically, as a giant sculptural gesture, would wrap significant things. For example, the Bundestag in Berlin. That was like a really big one. That's right.

They just did in Paris. Well, actually, one of them obviously died, but the spouse is still alive. Yeah. Jean Claude. Yes.

And they just did. Like, the wrapping of the arche de Triomphe. Exactly. So often symbolic things, but also whole. Islands surrounding the Florida keys.

Yeah. And it makes a monumental gesture, but it's also, at the same time, a light touch. Right. You occupy it and then you. Unoccupied.

It's ephemeral. Yeah, but it's light touch, but it's so heavy in the moment there. And by the way, logistically incredibly difficult, very resource intensive. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

They're like massive engineering projects. And I bring that up because it is an example of how art is engineering. And you're describing, like, a lot of technology is art as art is engineering. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's exactly what art does really well.

Simon Denny

That's what NFT art is doing really well for blockchain networks and other types of crypto art as well, like tirazuro, that we designed. And the notion of kind of being able to give ownership to trees over their own sovereign space, these kinds of things are only possible because technologists have architected a certain platform or a certain environment. Yes, I agree. So let's do some quick, lightning round style kind of wrap up. But first, there's a couple of recurring themes, so let's just kind of pick them up and bring them back full circle.

Yeah. So one is, you've talked a lot about commerce and the relationship to commerce. What do you think about this in the context of NFTs and art and NFTs? What would you say beyond, obviously, the valuation aspect? Yeah, well, one of the things about nfts and art, the fact that the kind of financial container is the same as the artistic container.

One of the knock on effects that has happened because of that is that often value is accrued completely to price. And I think that is not necessarily the case for all culture. Right. Like, there's a term like priceless. Often you talk about priceless cultural works, but also there's this notion that something cheap can also be something valuable, you know, and I think that's harder to express in the current technology, technological stack of nfts.

Sonal Chokshi

What do you think the opportunity is to build that? Well, I think that there should be another layer of accruing and showing value in NFT projects that is not about how much they cost. I'm thinking about, like, something that could be like, a curatorial infrastructure for giving different signals that aren't only expressed in how expensive something is. Of course, expensive things that are in museums are important culturally and valuable in that way as well. And part of the price of them being so expensive is about how much their love does.

Simon Denny

But you can make something experimental that might not sell at first, or that might not be expressed as something expensive at first, that will later be something that is cherished and really valuable. There's this notion of the avant garde, which is something really important to modernism, where you can have a small group of people doing an experimental thing, really unpopular and very hard to understand at the time, that then later gets interpreted and valued in a different way, you know? And I think that's a little bit missing from the NFT art world, where financial success is the only expression of cultural value. It's not that I want to divorce that completely. No, you can't.

I just think that it needs to be more complex than that. I would say multi dimensional, because it's basically like, if you think about all these properties, like, there's community, there's belonging, there's expression, there's the aesthetic, there's the technological underpinnings. There's so many different dimensions you can assess something on. There's a reputation. Yeah.

Sonal Chokshi

Like, I totally agree that there needs to be more dimensions on that. Yeah. One example that I think is really fascinating here. So I co edited a piece of by Kai Sheffield, who works at Visa, and he wrote a very thoughtful piece on fantasy Hollywood. And this idea that you can essentially create characters that can be represented by nfts.

Simon Denny

Oh, wow. And essentially create a whole set of storytelling around these characters. And so the idea is that nfts are characters. And the other point is it's really about who gets to make this is a recurring theme and what you've been talking about, who gets to make these characters, because right now it's like centralized Disney. Right.

Sonal Chokshi

Or like a certain type of artist. Yeah, the IP world. Exactly. And so this idea that you can actually share and create this IP. But the real idea here is that nfTs, in that sense, represent community, belonging, character creation, collaboration, and then like a community of storytelling.

Simon Denny

Yeah. And it's funny because I was debating this with Bob Iger a couple months after we did our podcast together with Chris Dixon that we did on the show, which he kind of brought up like, is it really possible to tell really good stories in a decentralized way? And I was like, you know, it's funny you say that because you acquired Lucasfilm, right? And we talk about Star wars, like this franchise that was created by one person, and after that, many people took over and extended the canon and did different things with the stories. But there's actually a pre story that no one talks about, which is that Star wars itself is oral myth and storytelling that's been propagated over centuries.

Right. Yeah. Based on these hero story archetypes. Exactly. Like the Cambellion myths and the archetypes.

Sonal Chokshi

Exactly. The jungian ideas. And that bubbled up into what became Star wars, which now has become. There's a canon, and then that went beyond canon, and then we went back to a new canon and it's like continuing. And so if you think about the NFT aspect, like, this is very empowering for people, and you could add value that way.

Simon Denny

This relates back to my pop art thing and also the best parts of NFT art, which is this permissionless thing that I was leaning into canvases. You know, this notion that you can kind of take something that has a powerful effect in the world, like a Campbell soup can or whatever, that has a cultural effect that you live in and live with, and you can work with that and make expressions of your own. I mean, that's kind of what Andy Warhol did, right? In a way. And there was no kickback to Heinz, but in a way, there was an attention kickback or a kind of valuation, a branding kickback, maybe eventually.

Because it's like the notion of the candle soup can is retroactive, but I think there could be a more nuanced ecosystem around defining where value is added in that extent. That's right. I do want to ask you a question about where you think generative art and blockchains intersect. I think we get to a little bit of a problem here with term definitions as well, because I understand the broader definition of a generative piece is where you set up a protocol. You put something through a protocol, and it has a series of outputs, and those outputs are artworks.

Sonal Chokshi

That's right. But I think generative art now has come to mean colloquially, like, a particular aesthetic, actually. That is not about the process. Oh, you're right. It's rather about like, oh, this looks sort of like an abstract shape.

Simon Denny

It has a gradient to it, you know? Yeah, I find that trope, unfortunately, a little dull, because this is where the homogenization question comes in, and it actually starts to get really boring. But the notion of, like, artists setting up protocols and having outputs and that being a methodology that I find super interesting. You know what I mean? So I would say there's three layers.

Sonal Chokshi

So one is the generative as, like, you actually have a beginning of something, and it sets up a protocol and it creates a certain output, and there's a dynamic nature. I mean, the OG crystals project that evolves is by definition, generative. And a lot of PFP projects are also generative by definition, even though that's maybe not what you think of a generative art, because this is a by necessity thing as well. Right. If you want to make a collection of a thousand things, you're not going to design every single one from scratch.

That's right. You make up a protocol, and then it produces a thousand of them. That, I would argue, is a different definition, because this comes to the debate between customization and configuration, which is there is something that's truly generative. It's, like, unknown what the output's going to be. Yeah, right.

Some of the PFP projects fall in this category. Not all, but some of them just to be even more nuanced about it. It's actually, in that case, more that you have a set of attributes that you're just applying. Like crypto, coven, like, each of those witches, they have a very thoughtful. They've actually written some beautiful pieces.

I'll link them in the show notes on how they thought about sort of the properties that would manifest as different people minted the witches and how they sort of constrained them. That's another aspect of that. So I agree with that. And then there's a third part, which you're saying you're kind of bored by. And I don't disagree to some extent, which is sort of this aesthetic, where now this is all what generative art looks like.

I personally do love that aesthetic. I have to say there's nothing wrong with the aesthetic. No, no, it's just a lot of it. I agree. But, like, there's Zancane and there's, like, really interesting people, very interesting riffs on it.

Those are the people that emerge to the bubble. That, and Helena Sarin. I love her work. Like, there's a lot of artists whose, like, work bubbles up in that sense, and they bring a certain element to it. But, like Sol Lewitt.

Simon Denny

Yeah, sure. Exactly. How would you connect him into this movement? Well, again, Sola Witt is this mid century artist who basically designed instructions, and when you bought an art piece of his, you bought the right to perform the instruction, or even the right to employ somebody to perform the instruction. So it's kind of an algorithm that by, which is really amazing.

These are for wall drawings, in the case of solar wood. And, like, coincidentally, they look like what we think of as generative art. Like, bulky aesthetic. Yeah, it's based on kind of vectors and, like, you know, gradients and lines and patterns and stuff like that. So it has this kind of abstract element that reminds us of what we think of as generative art now.

But Solarwit, to me, the interesting part is, weirdly so, I'm going to say something maybe controversial here. Love it. Like, the notion of buying the idea is the thing that I like about sola. Witness the way they look on the wall, eh? I mean, fine, I'm with you, but.

Like, it's, you know, oh, my God. I'm 100% with you, Simon. In fact, this is a great example where I think people, and as a collector, I'm very careful to watch myself for if I'm falling for the idea of the thing and also the actual visceral response of the thing. So sometimes I have to hold myself back, because intellectually and intellectually, I'm actually definitely. That's a component of my decision making, for sure.

Sonal Chokshi

I have to intellectually, like, respond to it, like the visual language, symbolism, the lore. Right. But at the same time, I have to have a visceral response inside that I feel something, and visual response that I really want to look at it every day. That's incredible and very difficult to capture. It's very difficult to get.

Simon Denny

But that's the holy grail of the art experience. But I do think, like some projects in the academic, let's say, conceptual art moment, which came up in the mid century, in the sixties and seventies, were explicitly anti visual. Right. The work didn't exist. You were only moved by the pure idea.

Right. That was like a kind of aesthetic notion that came up around conceptualism. And, I mean, the earliest example of that that has actually been interestingly revisited in NFTs, actually, is Yves Klein. And this moment of the kind of invisible artwork he made, a piece that was made in French. And basically it was one of the first motions in the late fifties where people bought something that was actually invisible, and you were only buying the aura as a kind of genre.

Interestingly, an artist, Mitchell Chan, also revisited that in 2017, prior to the protocols that became nfts. But he designed an image artwork that was also based on that notion as a history, because what felt like at the time you were buying, when you bought an NFT was very ephemeral. And that work, for example, I love, even though there's no visual necessarily associated with it, I'm as moved by it as I am by a very visceral painting. You know, sometimes just the idea is the thing that moves you. Yes, I agree with that.

Sonal Chokshi

There's also this thing that happens with early technologies where people are limited. They think they don't see the expressivity that's possible. Right. And so they almost go for the most reduction way of interpreting that piece right. And thinking about it, and that to bring it back to generative art today, I think we're going to see a lot more very interesting things happen.

One thing I will say from a technological perspective, I ask everybody this question because I'm obsessive. Generative art. Oh, interesting again, for a very long. Time, which is what is unique about blockchains. Generative art is not native to blockchains as a medium, but it seems like it's found its native medium and blockchains.

And one of the technological answers I heard from one of the people on our team, Michael Blatt, and a couple of people made this observation that at the end of the day, it was so compute intensive to unfurl, like the code and the package and the storage involved. So there's something really great about having this executable on chain that lets you kind of unfurl these things visually. So I think it'll be really fascinating to see as the technological constraints get lifted and we advance blockchain performance, scalability, everything. What will then become possible when you can unfurl things online on chain? Totally.

I think we're going to see a lot, the thing that you're frustrated by, which is a sort of generic aesthetic, I think we're going to see a lot more expressivity at that point. I mean, one of the generative projects that I really, really love, that I think falls under your categories as well, of defining it is terraforms by math castles. I mean, I think that is a project which really does all of those things. And it plays with history as well because it's an ASCII component. It plays with complexity because of this territory component.

Simon Denny

Also, this notion that you have this kind of metaverse of terraforms that you can kind of invert and participate in on different levels, like all of that, I think it's like, again, pushing the medium of generative art to something like, beyond just an output of an algorithm, that's really boring. So last question for you. Another recurring theme, especially with your own history, just come full circle where we started, where we've been talking. Yeah. So you have kind of traveled from this legacy to digital art world.

Sonal Chokshi

What are some of the things, if you were to tell people on the legacy side about the digital side, what are some messages you might share and then vice versa for the digital world, trying to understand on the legacy world, what would you sort of say as a person who travels between both of those worlds? I think about it a lot because I do exactly that, and I value those communities as much as each other. I think they're both really compelling places to be and to care about culture and to make things and to learn about things and to collect things. So I would say, speaking to a legacy person about the digital art world, I would say take the time to get to know somebody who's passionate about what is going on there. And don't start with the New York Times or whatever.

Simon Denny

Don't just look at what you see first and come with your priors and buy. Embrace the learning curve. That is the exciting moment of getting to know somebody's passion and why they think this project is interesting and that project is boring. And what would you say specifically about crypto and blockchain art to that same? Well, one of the challenges I've always had with addressing the legacy art world with crypto and blockchain art is that people in the legacy world hear the word crypto, hear the word blockchain, and think a too complex.

I'm not part of that community. I don't understand the technology. Therefore it's too much work to engage, you know? And two, they also have a whiff of kind of a scandal around it or a swindle to a lot of art world people. That's really like a red flag for bullshit, you know, so, like, they just don't want to see that.

So I would also say this is like a little avant garde community that has its own aesthetic dimensions. Yes, there's a kind of a learning curve to understanding it, but honestly, in the art world, there's always a bit of a learning curve. You have to study art for several years to kind of really get into histories of the avant garde and whatever, and that's a rewarding process. People stay there because they love that. They love to get into those complicated discourses.

And so there's actually a lot of rewards for legacy art people, if they would kind of take the jump, and that's actually like a good challenge. Right. You know, and then what would you say, on the flip side, for both the digital artists understanding the legacy world, and then specifically for crypto? Yeah. So digital artists understanding the legacy world, I think there's a lot more continuity there than they might imagine.

Right. I think that often around these worlds, the notion of new things has a high premium, and I think understanding histories that actually have played into those is kind of undervalued. Right. So I would say to those people, and I actually often do this, oh, you're really interested in this artist that made this kind of digital artwork. Here's this legacy art person who you probably never heard of, who did something like Solarwood or whatever, that resonates with exactly that gesture, and they're often really charmed by that.

Sonal Chokshi

And by the way, you're not saying that in. I'm assuming this in a pedantic way of grumpy, like, oh, that happened before. It's more, understand some of the previous movements because it might inform and inspire you. Yeah, I'm a pedagogue sometimes, too, so I have to, like, watch my tone. But the situation is more like, you love this.

Simon Denny

You'll also love this. Clusters of interest. Exactly. It's like an Amazon recommendation or something like that. And I just am trained on a different algorithm where I know this other.

Sonal Chokshi

Characteristic and more beautiful, in a way, I love that. And that's about sharing passion. Again, that's a beautiful thing. And then on the crypto specific side, what would you say to that group, not just digital, thinking about the legacy art world? Well, I would do a more nuanced version of the same thing where I say, oh, you're interested in the history of networked artworks based on this particular asset.

Simon Denny

You know, there's this amazing group of people that were making things for cable networks in the 1970s. You know, isn't that incredible? You know, look at this Portapac art that was created around this you know, and again, it's about encouraging and getting the kind of infectiousness of the love that comes at the core of those projects. Well, I think that's a beautiful note to end on, Simon. Yes, this has been a fun conversation, but our newly opened London office.

Yeah. And I'm so excited to see more. Of the next thing I'm doing is building a big project about them, space. I'm looking at the kind of space networks and the way that people are imagining about building in outer space. I'm building an augmented reality work that is based on a sculpture of a mega structure that will hang in the Auckland Art gallery in New Zealand, but will hopefully travel in the future as well.

And that is actually based on the work of a company as well. So again, like starting with the research of one company and then kind of moving from that into a larger cultural. Imaginary, I love it because it's going all the way from the outer, outer worlds. Inner worlds to like external, like space worlds. Exactly.

And technological paradigms enabling new types of culture and worlds. It's like a totally different kind of world building. Thank you so much for joining this episode of Web three with a six and z. Thank you very much. I've been a long time listener, first time caller.

Sonal Chokshi

Thank you. Yes, thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to web three with a six and Z. You can find find show notes with links to resources, books or papers, discussed transcripts and more@asicsnsecrypto.com. Dot this episode was produced and edited by Sonal Choxy. That's me. The episode was technically edited by our audio editor, Justin golden.

Credit also to moonshot design for the art and all thanks to support from Asics and Z Crypto. To follow more of our work and get updates, resources from us and from others, be sure to subscribe to our web three weekly newsletter. You can find it on our website@asicsnzcrypto.com. Thank you for listening and for subscribing. Let's go.