There are 3 things that contributed to my commitment to making generative art. Haha just kidding, there’s no way to put a number on these things. Life is what brought me to a place where I found some love for a thing that I had left years ago in utter frustration.
One day soon I’ll write out the particulars of what happened after I got into project building in the NFT space, specifically during and after the Spring of 2021. But for now, I’m going to draw out a brief timeline of events that led me to enjoying creating these tripped out geometric point clouds, after coming to utterly despise programming and development for a long time.
Web v0.0001
Back in the 90s, I was deeply immersed in BBS, Usenet, IRC, and general computer culture at the time. You can check my origin post if you want to read a little about it - my roots with code and art started with online communities. The 2000s brought a whole new level of connectivity with broadband becoming available outside of large institutions and universities. I was suddenly aware of opportunities to make a living that did not involve wearing a suit, or going into an office like everybody else seemed to be doing.
My first remote freelancing gigs were mostly DevOps and SecOps related, using ethically questionable methodologies. The clients varied from corporate to private, but they all had the commonality of being completely clueless about this new world of technology. Payments were kind of problematic, especially when dealing with private clients. Thankfully nobody really wants to fuck with folks that have access to all of their supposedly secure data. I got paid in 0-day warez once. Another time I got paid in an open bar tab at a bar. It was a weird time.
Web2 Burnout
Around 2005 I got into web design. It felt safe compared to my previous black/gray/whitehat gigs, and the industry was kind of exciting. We were still disrupting a lot of tech as anarchist freelance coders and designers, but it didn’t feel like we were taking advantage of people. Starting out with Flash, I built everything from full on websites, to k-12 educational “apps.” From there I dove full on into AMP stacks, as CMSs were the hottest thing. After a very long and abusive relationship with Drupal, my patience finally ran out with the industry, and I quit.
I was already suspending people for a decade at this point, and had just hosted large public suspension installation events, with performances, living sculptures, and all the fixings that come with that world. So I moved deeper into the world of fabrication and installation work. I learned to weld, do woodwork, work with different mediums like plastics and fiberglass a bit, and also found myself programming LEDs for a wide array of projects. I had told myself I was done writing code for others, but this felt different. And it was. I even merged suspension, LEDs, and a video game written in Lua with Löve2D together, with human biorhythms acting as the interface for the system. Check out full project scope here.
Fast forward to the pandemic » everything stopped. No fabrication, no fancy LED projects, nothing. By the time things started opening up again I had already closed down my studio, and was no longer getting steady work that could sustain my lifestyle in NYC. And then NFTs happened.
At first it was exciting. Then it was a grind. Finally it became unsustainable, after the bubble of 2021 began to deflate like a sad birthday balloon. The flippers were still going strong, and I had skills with marketing, project management, web dev & design, and more that could contribute to multi-K project building. So I went full in.
Web3 Burnout
There was some money at first, which was great. But then a few things happened: Humans lied and made shitty decisions that tanked projects. The scene favored fake hype, and low quality work. And then the market just fucking tanked. All of that hard work suddenly had no great pay-off and many of us were left a little high and dry. Unlike the real world, where going all in and working hard pays off, the speculative nature of crypto art/projects got the better of us. We gaslit ourselves and got screwed. We burned out.
I often think about how I was joking that we could just mint 10K 3-trait dildo juice containers that look like douches, and we would have come out with a million bucks. Not so funny now, should have just done it probably. Integrity is a demon on your shoulder sometimes.
Stuck in a Web of My Own Doing
Right around September, I started going through a very overwhelming bout of depression. These projects were supposed to have helped me resolve my very real problems IRL, and now I felt like I was back to square one. I lost my drive to create, build, and even write. My loathing for myself, the NFT world, and many things in the world around me was at an all time high. As is often the case with depression, realizing this just made things worse for me mentally.
Very late one sleepless night, I watched Daniel Shiffman go down the rabbithole of using mandelbrot sets in p5.js. I was already fucking around with p5.js at this point, but never on a serious level. Daniel is difficult to watch for me sometimes, because of how overly enthusiastic he is, but I fucking love his enthusiasm. And for the first time in a while, I found myself forgetting all about my problems for a bit. I found myself flowing in code in a way I hadn’t for over a decade. It didn’t feel stressful - probably because I wasn’t doing it for somebody else’s needs.
Once I got some point clouds going, I realized the code could use a ton of modifiers, from mathematical variations, to simple visual outputs. I found myself iterating through a few variations, and realized a few days later, that I had essentially created 20+ variations of the same base mandelbrot sets I had started out with.
The thought occurred to me that this would make a pretty cool 1000 piece collection - I could easily build a narrative around it, set up some basic marketing, get up a website, start a new twitter account, start doing th- FUCK. No. I had just spent half a year doing this shit and had nothing to show for it… Well I had the experience, so that was something.
Stuck in a Loop?
And I thought to myself, NFT culture is fucking trash right now. Botted mints. Anon projects marketing and selling out literally nothing with 650ETH+ volume. Flippers desperate for $1.00 profit tanking floors. Folks straight up lying to others by yelling WAGMI! just so they can pump their own bags with some shit-ass projects. So why build a narrative around that?
I was looking for IRL work, and had a bunch of free time, so I decided to create 999 of these iterations, setup up a twitter schedule and automate 90% of it, and build a narrative anonymously, built on mystery and vagueries. It made sense to me that I could launch a project for low effort, and then post-mint, tell everybody who we (the team) are, and why we did the project the way we did.
I have a perma-shadowed Twitter account, and my reach is limited in a space that champions digital art. This would be a good way to show how projects that promise nothing, with unknown creators do well in the space. Plus, the aesthetic around it is rooted in the early days of the internet, which is analogous with where the blockchain currently is. Bleeding edge tech is usually pretty fucking broken, till it’s no longer even cutting edge; ie. blockchain apps and services.
Well, that all didn’t pan out. I had good advice, and a good plan, but the market was dead. Engagement? Shot. Some folks were genuinely interested, but not enough to justify launching a mint. So I wound it down, and let it rest. In retrospect, this was the only logical decision to get me out of the unhinged loop I had been stuck in.
Refactoring
In the last few months, with the help of some very dear friends in crypto spaces, I have come to realize the project is very meaningful to me. It kept me busy, and I genuinely enjoyed exploring fractals, code, and doing some world building. As I slowly climbed out of being depressed to a point of incapacitation, Iterative was there with me, providing an escape that was functional. I’ve learned a lot just from tweaking iterations, and I do love me some fractals. My first FND purchase was fractal art from one of my favorite Fractal artists, thatspix.
After numerous discussions and reviews, it is time to reboot this project, and rebuild it better than before. Our team is wildly talented, highly experienced, and extremely well versed in both NFT tech, and culture. These are individuals that I have worked with in some capacity across multiple projects now, and we have a level of trust that runs incredibly deep. At the core of it all, is a sense of integrity, support, and objective realism. We are too busy to speculate; we are just building, creating, and continuing to find our own ways through our own lives.
This project has a strong foundation.
Building on core principles are integral to the longevity of any project. Integrity alone cannot contribute to mental health and success. Discipline, fun, community, commitment, and honesty are incredibly important. And at the very center of it all is an element of respect. Respect for the self and respect for others.
We have some work to do. I’m rebuilding the website with the help of a couple team members. We are re-factoring the minting model. We are getting together an organic marketing approach that is realistic. We are starting to plan collaborations. I am reconsidering total supply, and the mechanics of the project, and how best to roll this all out without turning it into an awkward grind for everyone.
We are building a platform, not just for cool generative art, but one where our community can have a voice. As a team of individuals that have all experienced extreme highs and lows on personal levels, we are committed to empowering others. At this point in my life, I cannot create something that does not focus on this. From suspension to digital art, my intention to help people find forms of release is infused with every action I take.
Come join us on this generative art journey that helped me climb out of very self-destructive mental spaces. We’ve got some really trippy stuff to show you, and can’t wait to see your reactions to everything we’re putting together. More importantly, we can’t wait to have some higher level discussions with you all, about the future of web3, generative art, and beyond.