Then all the people that I’ve been making work with online for the past five years like Manolo, Matt Deslauriers, and Tyler Hobbs will see it, and then you’ll see another level of generative art.”Īnd it worked. My reaction was: “I’m going to show you a project that I think is going to help people learn about generative art. Snowfro reached out to me on Twitter and introduced me to the Art Blocks website, which was still rudimentary at the time. The first time I came across Art Blocks, crypto art was starting to build some momentum outside of its small but passionate niche. However, at that time, code-based art still wasn’t well-known in the crypto community other than by the Autoglyph connoisseurs. That energized many to engage with crypto, while also showing more established artists who might command higher prices that there were collectors here who took them seriously.ĭmitri Cherniak, Self Portrait #1, 2020. They did research on each artist and even called them up to learn about their work. Led by Colborn Bell and Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, at the time MOCA were taking the world by storm, bidding on almost anything on the low end, but also bidding higher for works by artists entering the space whom they regarded seriously. Things heated up over lockdown and MOCA bought one of my works for around 10 ETH, which at the time was around $4,000. But, for me, the most natural rendition of the piece was a tokenized form of the output created by the code. The way NFTs were presented at Christie’s in the form of Robbie Barrat’s AI-Generated Nude Portraits - the so-called “ Lost Robbies” - also showed that NFTs definitely worked. Was it a collectible to go alongside my works or was it the work itself? Ultimately, I determined that the NFT was the most native form of the work, so that was what I considered to be the work of art. That prompted me to reflect on what exactly an NFT was. We felt like we were on a roll, and then COVID happened. There were a lot of really great artists making incredible work, including Helena Sarin and Manolo. Things were going well - my works were selling and people were learning about generative art. We started putting works into shows like CADAF in New York and Miami. We messaged on Instagram and decided we wanted to help make generative art a “bigger thing.” We were both so surprised at how little people understood about generative art, and we thought it could be well received by a wider audience. In 2019, I met Sofia Garcia from ARTXCODE. You would press a button, an artwork would generate, register on the blockchain, and after a certain number of presses it would destroy itself.ĭmitri Cherniak, It’s such a shame I fixed this bug, 2021. But I knew we’d need some provenance to understand where the works originated - that was where the blockchain fit in. So I started working on an idea where I would take a Raspberry Pi, put the code on it and lock it down entirely. I basically asked SuperRare to make Art Blocks but they said they weren’t interested. To highlight generative art and help people understand it in context, we needed more. It felt like something was missing because the edge cases and nuance of all the possibilities weren’t always visible to observers.īack then, I was minting on SuperRare, but I felt constrained by the fact that I could only upload image and video files, which limited the possibilities for interactive and live-coded works on the platform. I would write an algorithmic system, but instead of capturing it in its full diversity, I might just mint one or two of my favorite outputs. At the time, I was rendering individual frames or outputs from the code running on my computer. Dmitri Cherniak: When I saw Autoglyphs (2019), I thought: “that’s how I should be doing this.” Except, I wanted to use JavaScript tools. Jason Bailey: I don’t think there were many generative artists exploring crypto before you, right? This conversation is also available as a podcast.
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