Tech Epochalypse

0:00 COLDIE: My name is Coldie. I’m a stereoscopic artist who’s been creating a variety of works, physically and digitally, for the past 20 years. I found crypto art in 2017, and back then there really wasn’t much of a community, or the revolution was just getting started, especially with art. So I wanted to do my part to spread the word about crypto, and I started minting my works on R.A.R.E. Art Labs, which was before ERC-721s. So I was very early on, and I was just trying to spread the word about decentralization, anonymity and all the different things that come with the blockchain.

0:47 So over the years I’ve been doing art about culture, about finance, about the people that are affecting the world we live in, which kind of ties in this Tech Epochalypse series. Yeah. So I mean, over time I would say my consistent take is that when I create art, I react to the environment that I’m around. So in respect to portraits, there’s people that are doing certain things at certain times that are affecting the space, and I have to make the decision of who I want to be in this series.

1:36 Backstory: I was at an Andy Warhol portrait exhibit, and it was super interesting, who he chose to be in a place in a time. Some people were Marilyn Monroe, some people were bankers, some people were just random people, but the totality of it is what creates a body of work. And I’ve always been super thoughtful of the people who are moving the space forward positively, as well as people who don’t like crypto, like Warren Buffett.

2:00 I’ve done multiple portraits of Warren Buffett because it’s educational. Someone can look at this portrait and say, “Is that Warren Buffett?” Yes. And then we can have a conversation why he doesn’t like crypto, and it starts that education through art.

2:25 The series is called Tech Epochalypse, and the word is “epochalypse” instead of “apocalypse.” And an epochalypse is something that happens over an epoch. So a long period of time that is a dynamic shift of reality, right? There’s a movement. And for this series, I am choosing to step outside a little bit of the crypto personas and look at what I’m calling the tech overlords. They’re the people who are in front of the camera or behind the camera, affecting our lives. They’re controlling everything around us.

2:49 And I think that some of that’s good, some of that could be bad. That’s not up to me. But again, through art, I want to educate people. So I want them to look at this portrait of Sam Altman or Jeff Bezos and have a thought of, wow, it’s super convenient, I can get my Amazon box in an hour and a half, but what’s the trade, right? There’s a trade, and everything’s transactional.

3:13 So this series is meant to open up that conversation of these people and what they’re doing, what maybe my hopes are of them being altruistic and doing it for the good of mankind, but there’s a balance, right? Life is full of balances. So it’s been super fun to get outside of just your Vitalik Buterins and the people that we know, and actually start looking at culture from a little bit higher lens.

4:02 There’s two aspects to the Tech Epochalypse series. The Genesis interactive tokens are a series of all five characters. So we have Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang. Those five people are the main characters. And there’s interactive versions of my artwork that you can manipulate in 3D. You can move the pieces around. And the goal of this is to touch the art. And that’s been my driving mantra for the past couple years: how can I invite people to do more than just stare at the art, and in a sense collaborate and have a thought and do something and feel more about the art?

4:48 The story came together — again, my life and my art is very much of an input-reaction situation. And I take my son to art galleries and try to expose him to culture and just learn about things outside of his 11-year-old world. So when you take him to the gallery, he wants to touch the sculpture. He’s curious about the textures. And I’m like, “Don’t touch the art. Please. We’re not taking this stuff home. We’re just here to admire it.” And innately he’d still touch it.

5:11 And I kept this repetitive “don’t touch the art, don’t touch the art,” and it created this negative feedback in my head, and it really pissed me off. I was like, why am I chastising my son about wanting to interact with art? So I internalized that and decided to flip the script, and I want to say “touch the art,” right? So I want to reinvent that situation. Instead of saying “stand back,” now it’s like, go up to it and touch it and move it and get that experience.

5:57 And that’s really what set my last two years of exploration with digital manipulated art, magnetic physical art. And it’s been a conversation between — the art is talking to itself, and I feel like I’m the middleman a lot of times, where I’ll figure out something with the physical magnets, and then that starts a conversation where it’s like, how can I do this digitally? And then I create the digital side, but then I learn something digitally that I want to bring back. So this ping-pong is happening back and forth, and it brings me joy.

6:46 And if I’m not finding joy, especially in art making, I’m not doing it right. Right? Like, what else? I might as well have a day job. Right? So the joy has been driving me. My physical art collectors who have this magnetic version — so this is a magnetic version that goes on your refrigerator. And the idea was that art should be accessible and inviting for kids to play with, and I have collectors who tell me their kids move the artwork every single day, and that’s joy for me.

7:10 And joy for anybody who — like, I want to move this eye over here, or what happens if they don’t have hair? That is it. Humans like frameworks, because then they know what they can interact with. It gives them permission, but not too much. They want to have some rules. So I think having a — in my setup, these are the face pieces and these are some other objects you can move around, but then get as far away from that as possible and let people have a creative thought, or just do something that they think is unexpected. That emotional connection to art is what I think I’ve been looking for over the years.

7:58 I give people pieces of a face or different elements and different objects, and just take a step back and let them take control, right? It liberates people. And I think a lot of people don’t think of themselves as creative, and that makes me very sad whenever I hear that, because we are actually all creative. And I think some people just need a little nudge and a permission to take a chance, and that’s my goal with all of this: just take a chance and do something.

8:43 These artworks, the way I built them, they’re networked art creations. When you change it, we’re not locking the state. But that’s on purpose. I want people to then come back in a week and do something else. It’s like those watercolor boards, those meditation boards where you draw with water and then it erases. That’s the vision of this, where you have a thought and then it disappears. And I think there’s a lot of beauty in temporary permissioned action, you know?

9:32 It’s not like, “Oh my god, is someone going to judge this thing?” There’s no judgment with any of this. And that’s the goal: that everybody can make a rendition of this, and everybody can have a thought, and they’re all equally valid, because it’s not going to exist as soon as you’re done creating it.

9:54 So the other portion of this release is I’ve gone through and created a curated set of cropping frames from the series. So each of the five characters are going to have 50 frames each. And those are just different configurations where I’ve moved the face around. I’ve done different 3D angles and effects layers. And we’re talking thousands and thousands of outputs that I’m looking through for ones I like.

10:17 And again, the idea is to have this be a [inaudible] community drop, where there’s going to be 250 frames, and you’ll mint them, and you’ll get a live reveal. They don’t come in order. You might get Elon, you might get Zuckerberg. It’s totally randomized, but you get a piece of the collection, right? It’s not editable like the Genesis tokens, but I also think that they just stand on their own. They look nice, right?

10:41 And on top of that, what I’m doing is, of the 250 still frames, there’s going to be three winners. It’s basically a Willy Wonka RNG selection, where you get a piece of art — hope you enjoy it for what it is — but you might just get lucky. And I think that’s another fun thing that I’ve always loved in life: the chance of opportunity. It is going to be people’s lucky day. And that — again, I’m feeling joy right now saying that. So I know that’s what I need to do, right?

11:29 So I listen a lot to my, I guess, intuition and just internal feelings, and that’s a feedback. And it’s fun to talk about it live, because it’s like, yes, that is what I want to do. So art needs to be accessible. There’s nothing that I hate more than when I talk to people and they’re not a one-of-one collector. And I started with a lot of one-of-ones, and that’s great, but it cuts out such a huge amount of people who want to be a part of art collecting. So this, again, is a very joyous way of just inviting people in. I wanted people to experience my art.

12:17 The technology that’s happening — it used to be every year a new tool comes out, and now it’s literally every day. The barrier of creative manifestation is — there’s no barrier. The barrier is like this. And for me, I’m always the type of person who is always wanting to dabble in new tools, and just see if it resonates with me. And this project is code and AI based on my brain. I had this idea in my head for a long time, and I realized, why not try to make it with code and AI? And it all works.

13:04 The feedback loop is — I love “yes, and” situations instead of “no, but,” and AI is very much, “What can we do next? What would you like to do next?” And creatively it creates rabbit holes that I love exploring. I also really love releasing in a serial progression of where I’m at, at a place in time.

13:28 So for this series, for the interactive ones, they’re called 7160 tokens, which means you can add versions to it later. And that frees me up a lot, because I don’t have to necessarily finish the final step that might be years away. I can release it now and invite people in, and then as it evolves, it’s just a metadata update, right? So it allows me to explore but not get stuck on this timeline of — there’s still so much more to do. I just want to release and free myself and then make more.