Well, thank you so much everyone as always for joining.

This is session five of META-511.

Today we're going to talk about generative art.

And I don't know if this is my favorite art topic in NFTs, but if it's not my favorite,

it's very close to my favorite.

And in any case, it's a topic I'm very, very excited about.

So let me see if I can get the presentation up and running.

Oh, we have the presentation of the story.

So like last week, the presentation is pretty good, but not 100% final.

There are a couple of tweaks that I would like to make.

So we won't mint this right away, but we'll mint it in a few days.

And I still owe you the one-on-one presentation.

I want to take a moment on this one in particular and really thank NooNe0x.

He's helped him certainly with the prior presentations, but this one, as you're seeing it today,

is entirely his work.

I need to make some small adjustments that I want to add from our interviews.

But really, I did not make this presentation.

NooNe0x did

It's a really good job.

And I want to thank him for helping me here.

So let's go through it.

OK.

Let's start here.

And I think the first message that I would like to pass along is that generative art is

not something new.

It's not something that started with NFTs.

It's not something that started with blockchains.

It has a long history.

And the general way that I think about it, that I think someone can think about it, is

that part of the output or all of the output or some aspect of the output is generated procedurally,

autonomously, outside of the artist's control.

And so this, to me, is the key point about generative art, which is very different than

saying I'm going to take a photograph and then I'm going to work on it and Photoshop

and then I'm going to print it or I'm going to make a painting.

And all of those things are 100% the artist has created it.

Here in generative art, of course, the art is created by the artist.

But the way to think about the art that the artist is creating is to say the artist is

creating a system that creates the art, a procedure that creates the art, that has

some type of input from the outside world and that input from the outside world help

generate the piece.

So we have art known back in our presentation again, just like we did last week.

I would generalize this, right?

So here it says, a computer introduces randomness as part of the creation.

This is true, it's 100% true, but it doesn't have to be a computer.

You have the example at the beginning of the Aeolian harp.

The wind was creating part of the artwork.

You could have a physical object creating part of the artwork.

I've even seen generative art where biological processes are creating part of the artwork

and so that where you have actual chemical reactions or biological reactions, the

the outcome of those reactions feeds into the artwork.

So yes, it is absolutely true that in practice, in most generative art, the independent actor,

the non-human actor is in fact a computer.

But it can be any process that is not the human artist themselves.

So generative art as a movement.

I think my sense is it's mid-century.

I haven't mentioned these things.

You can argue if it's the 1960s or 1940s or 1950s.

I think in the mid-century it comes out of a world of avant-garde art and futurism and

bowels, but it's also a different thing.

It's almost impossible to imagine it would have developed this way if at the same time

you didn't have the first computers coming into you.

So I truly think generative art and its breadth in the 1950s to 2020 period is in fact linked

with the rise of the computer.

Just like I'm going to argue that the next phase is linked to the rise of watching it.

Could there be a lot of designable computers?

Could there have been generative art in the past like the readers?

Yes, there could have been, there was.

But is it very natural once you have the power of computation to think to yourself, how can

they, how can computers generate art, generate beauty?

Because the nice thing about today's presentation is there's a lot of pictures in it.

I'm going to go through all the slides and we will see some very interesting images,

but I'm not going to talk about each one because if I do we'll be here for four hours, not

one hour.

And so some of the things will go through fairly quickly, but what this presentation has is

a lot of the historically important generative artists and the currently important generative

artists and by no means an exhaustive list, right?

There's hundreds and there's maybe 15 of this presentation.

But for someone who does not know generative art well and following up checking these folks

looking at their work, we'll start to give you a sense of how this movement has evolved.

Yeah, and I think this is, this is the part where I'm mostly going to flip through slides.

And now I mostly want you to get a sense of the style.

As opposed to we need to do a deep dive on each artist.

By the way, Herbert Frank very recently passed away and he was a legend in the field and

just before he passed away, there was an NFT collection of some of his pre NFT works.

He's been working for many decades.

And then now there are a lot of tribute collections to him is beloved in the community.

And it's thought of as an important pioneer.

This era, you can see how they are computer influenced.

It's obvious that these are things that came up in the era of computers.

Similarly, if I asked someone to look at this in yesterday's session, this is digital art

as our last week session.

This is digital art.

And is it generative art or digital art?

Yeah, usually yes.

But could this have been digital art and not generative?

Yes, of course.

Someone could have.

Again, giving a flavor to the stage of the era.

Vera is also very interesting.

She is, she dropped an NFT collection this year at the age of 98.

So it's really quite incredible.

And it included some of her earliest work.

And she's like Herbert and other artists here considered an absolute pioneer in this field.

Again, another set of incredible artists.

And think of what we just went through as the historic precedent for this field, right?

And this field is in the NFT space in the blockchain space.

What I think is interesting about generative art NFTs is that I, and here's a concept I

would like to communicate, is that I think they found their natural medium with the blockchain.

And in fact, my argument is that the vast majority of the field is generative.

And I had a long chat yesterday with Snowfro, which will be released on Monday.

And I was very pleased, intellectually pleased to hear that he thinks exactly the same thing.

In fact, he became involved.

He was a generative artist before NFTs.

And he became involved in the NFT space because of the crypto punks.

He claimed a lot of crypto punks.

He claimed 34 zombies, which is a mentally mind-boggling number.

But he was excited about the crypto punks because they were generative.

He was a generative artist.

And then he went on to found Art Blocks we'll talk about.

And the thing that is accurate, I believe, about this space is most PFP collections are

also a light form of generative art.

The crypto punks were not drawn 10,000 punks one at a time.

The crypto punks were drawn by an algorithm and a random algorithm.

And they are close to a billion possible crypto punks.

People don't think about this, but it's true.

You see those 10,000 crypto punks as well, it's kind of obvious that obviously some trait

combinations are missing.

There is not, for example, a hoodie alien.

But if you do the factorial math of how many crypto punks could have been created, it's

close to a billion.

And over those billion, 10,000 were created.

So the design space was a billion and actually 10,000 punks were created.

And this is generative.

It's algorithmic.

It has randomization.

It is, in my view, appropriately thought of as generative art.

And of course, it's vastly less complex than the generative art that is created explicitly

as generative art, as opposed to PFPs.

But it doesn't change the fact that the PFPs are also generative.

In this case, if you look at the space at large and you look at the activity in the

space at large, or the market cap, or any metric of activity.

Almost the whole space, 80% plus is generative.

And this is, I think about this all the time.

And it was, you commented from both directions.

Most of the NFT space is generative.

And there has been an explosion in generative art, both in terms of how many artists are

working, how many people are collecting, how much.

How you as being transacted in generative art.

And I think it is because this is the natural home for it, the natural medium for it.

And NFTs are a medium that is as two interesting components.

The first interesting component is that it is digital.

It's digitally native, right?

It's not a computer.

Another component is that it is, preferably it is what it is.

It can make, because it's our blockchain, it can make all types of statements about what

it is.

And all those statements are provably true.

And those two things together suddenly create a framework that didn't exist before.

That allows you to do very interesting, provably true things on a computer and express those

as NFTs.

Well, what I would say is NFTs are not a surprise that NFTs are largely generative and generative

has done incredibly well in the era of NFTs.

Because NFTs combine two distinct features.

They are in computers.

They are digital.

And they are on blockchains.

And what do we know about blockchains?

We know that blockchains can make provably true statements.

And so, what does this mean?

Why is this relevant to everything?

What do you mean by provably true statements?

And I'll go through some of them.

The first provably true statement you can make, take something like the crypto punks, is that

there are 10,000 crypto punks.

And this sounds trivial.

Why is this hard?

Why is this a big deal?

Well, you can't actually do this with none NFTs.

If I started drawing 6529 punks and started handing them out or selling them in a gallery

or selling them on my website, and I said, I'm going to make 10,000 of them.

But no more, there's no way for me to prove them.

There's no way for you to know that I didn't make 10,001.

I might have one hidden in my closet.

Even if it's true, even if you audited me, checked in all my cupboards underneath my desk,

said, I go, okay, we're convinced 6529, only made 10,000, 6529 punks.

While a year from now or 10 years from now, I could change my mind.

I could decide to make another one.

So this ability to make a hard commitment on, I think the most simple thing that there

are 10,000 crypto punks is new.

Anyone can go audit it.

Anyone can go to the blockchain and see that that contract has exactly 10,000 tokens.

And that's done.

It's not going to change.

The second part that you can do, and let me start again with the EZ mode, which is PFPs,

you can prove that the collection was algorithmically generated and that the collection was not

previously known by the creators.

So a common structure of a PFP contract is that it brings in a source of randomness from

Chainlink.

It's another blockchain.

And that is an oracle.

And that source of randomness determines what traits you get in your PFP at the time that

you're minting.

That way, the creators don't know what exactly the collection will look like.

They don't know which PFPs would be quote unquote the good ones.

And the, it's probably random.

And you know this because the contracts on the blockchain and the PFPs are on the blockchain.

They're auditable by anyone.

This actually gets even more complicated in actual generative art collections.

So I had a long discussion about this with Snowfro, the founder of Art blocks, yesterday.

And that session is going to be released on Monday.

And Art blocks has a very sophisticated process to generate pseudo-randomness.

So when you mint something, when you mint an Art Blocks pieces, it takes all types of

data from the internet and even from your wall and creates the randomness that generates

the piece.

So one thing that people sometimes think that is not actually accurate is let's say you

minted Fidenza 314.

What is up here on this slide is a very well-known Fidenza that I collected over year

ago.

It's Fidenza 313 the tulip.

It's very nice.

And let's say you minted Fidenza 314 and you think to yourself, oh man, if I just if I

just had minted a little bit earlier, I would have gotten Fidenza 313.

You would have not gotten Fidenza 313.

You would have gotten, you might have gotten Fidenza till

it's even calculable.

How many potential ones there are?

I think it might be unbounded.

I haven't done them after a double-check, but I think it might be unbounded.

And so there is this endless universe of possible Fidenza.

And then there were a thousand that were minted.

And those 1,000 were in a way co-created with the collector, the minter, because the specific

Fidenza that was specifically created at that point in time had to do with when you pressed

the button and who you were and from which wallet you minted and so on.

This is something very new, very different, right?

Like it doesn't.

It is very different than the traditional way generative art was made.

Where in Gaudier studio, you would create an algorithm.

You would run the algorithm yourself.

You'd see a lot of outputs.

You'd pick some.

Let's say you're five best.

And then you'd make them real in some type of physical object, maybe you printed them.

Maybe an installation that included your computer.

And then you took it to the gallery and you said, look, here are five really nice pieces.

And I made them with my algorithm.

And I went to the other very nice and I'd like to collect and put them on my wall.

And this is wonderful and fine and there's nothing wrong with what I just said.

But what is happening today with generative art collections is much richer, and much more exciting.

And I know what happens is an artist creates an algorithm.

That algorithm is provably, understandably, that algorithm.

You can't fake it.

This is the algorithm.

And when people mint, random variables are pushed into the algorithm and the pieces come

out.

And so it is 100% true that Tower Hobbes, the creator of Fidenzas, did not know which Fidenzas

would be created until the Art Blocks meant grand and 1000 Fidenzas were created.

Well, this is both, I think, possibly a higher level of challenge, right?

Because a very good collection of this type.

It has to produce good outputs across the whole collection.

You don't have the luxury of having 10,000 outputs of which 9,900 are not very good,

but five are interesting you take back and say, look, that algorithm may be fine, which

is fine.

There's no problem with that.

But you've made five good outputs.

You have to create hundreds of good outputs.

And you don't have to, but it'll be more valued if it does.

And in some way, and this is a small land, we'll talk about another collection where

it's a bigger way, the collector was a co-creator with you.

A sort of mechanical co-creator, to be honest, in this case, but nonetheless, a co-creator.

Tower Hobbes generated a term for this.

It's called the long form generative art.

It's on the next slide.

But the idea of long form generative art is where the artist does not select the pieces.

The pieces are created by the algorithm in combination with the mentors.

And everyone discovers at the end what the collection looks like.

And what is thought to be interesting in these collections?

What collectors look for?

What I look for?

For those who don't know, I'm thought of as pretty good at collecting generative art.

And the mental model that I think we mostly have is the phone.

Are the outputs of the art visually appealing or interesting?

A, B. Do they look sufficiently different from each other?

And an algorithm that creates the same image but changes a couple of colors is not hugely

interesting.

An algorithm that creates a widespread of surprising images is more interesting.

And then the third part is doing the collection nonetheless hold together and do the pieces

look like they came from the same collection.

This is challenging.

There are hundreds of generative art collections out there.

And I respect all of them but also obviously some people have succeeded in creating higher

levels of complexity in their work.

More aesthetically interesting.

And hitting these three parameters that they're aesthetically interesting, they are each

pieces different and that the pieces are unified within a collection.

This is what we've now and I think Tyler certainly popularized the term.

It's what we call long form generative art.

And what you're looking at here on this slide, there's another fit-ins, then the middle is

ringers by the microtroniac was another exceptional generative artist.

And on the right is a chromie squiggle by Snowfro.

We'll see on Monday.

And short form, you see this is not more showing fiddensis as a short form at the top

but obviously, fiddensis are not short form.

Short form would be the traditional model.

The artist generates a variety of outputs by themselves and then picks them and says

we're going to mint these.

Long form is the artist doesn't select any at all.

We will discover what the pieces are when they are minted by the mentors when they are

co-created by the artist and the collectors.

It is possible that I've heard but I find this absolutely fascinating, absolutely amazing.

Thrilling, to be honest.

Every, the major platform today for long-form generative art has been Art Blocks.

There are new ones popping up now but historically it's been Art Blocks.

And multiple times a week or sometimes every couple of weeks they have new drops, new

collections that are minted.

And the, it is genuinely to me very excited.

I'm often there at the drops.

Sometimes I'm in, sometimes I'll collect afterward.

And what's interesting is seeing the art be created in real-time in front of you.

You will see as people mint new pieces are created, new outputs are created and you can

see how the collection is being formed and you're seeing it at the same time as the artist

is seeing it.

Right?

That's incredible.

And not just you, you as not a collector, you could be literally anybody on the planet.

Anybody on the planet can be sitting there refreshing the collection as people mint and

watching a collection of art, a collection of work being created in real-time.

Probably from the algorithm, probably the way the artist says it is.

I find this absolutely fascinating, absolutely interesting, super interactive and engaging.

I also think it is somehow reflective of an era we are entering and the era we are entering

well, we've really been there for probably a couple of decades, but it will continue

to be this way.

We're in an era that is a very much a hybrid era of humans and machines.

If you took away from me my computer and my cell phone, which is just another computer

of course.

I am not the same person.

I am nowhere near as effective.

I am used to using them to do everything it is that I do, right?

From the most simple thing, calling a friend, sending an email, making a presentation, tweeting,

buying things, selling things, we are in a hybrid environment.

Generative art as it is today is an extremely well blended hybrid environment of person

and machine, the person being both the artist, the machine in this case being a blockchain

and the computation around it, it is not just a blockchain computation and the mentor and

collector.

This is a legendary, legendary Argentinian, generative artist.

Manly works primarily in short form, but his work is exceptional.

Those red trees is another piece that I had collected with some of my colleagues.

It is wild that that is created by a computer.

It is an incredible piece of work.

This hybrid environment, this human-machine hybrid environment, I think is reflective

of how we live now.

This is who we are.

It is very well suited to our age, my view.

I think we will see a lot more of it.

This doesn't, we spoke last week that there was one of one art and digital art and crypto

art and one of one art is just art.

Digital art is a subset of one of one art, but digital art is getting pretty broad and

diffuse and a lot of things are digital art and it is not clear that just including a

digital tool in art is necessarily reflective of digital art.

Or maybe it needs to interact with the medium more and then crypto art being a subset of

digital art and crypto art is very clearly aesthetic movement.

On NFTs there is going to be NFTs, of course, digital in the broad sense.

They include an NFT token, that is digital.

But there is going to be a wide variety of aesthetics in the NFT space, not just crypto

art, of traditional landscape photography, that is a aesthetic.

But crypto art certainly will be an important movement that reflects the space.

General of art, I view it almost closer to digital art in the sense that it is a horizontal

technology.

When I was saying I think generative art is closer to digital art in that it is a horizontal

technology and I think we will see its application everywhere.

So we have seen its application in PFPs.

We have seen its application in fine art, for denses or fine art.

I think we will see its application in gaming.

I think we will see its application in metaverse spaces.

I think we will see its application in consumer products.

Art Blocks has now created an API that allows people to make anything generative.

And so what do I mean by anything?

One example which I don't know if we will succeed in doing, I had told George about this

and if we can figure it out we will do this, is to make the core certificates at the end

generative so that everyone of course will have the same information on the mobile.

I assume a unique logo.

But there will also be some aspect of the core certificate that will be generative and will

be unique to each certificate holder.

This ability to both mass craftsmanship, and mass personalization and also provably so.

I think it is very interesting.

I think it is going to make the world, and I have mentioned this to stuff right, it will

make the world a more beautiful place.

We used to have non-scalable craftspeople, 150 years ago, 300 years ago, pre-industrial

manufacturing, everything was unique because individuals were making it.

And then we have mostly gone through 150, 200 years of things being extremely standardized

and the reason they are standardized is because the demands of making things at high volume

at low prices push them to standardization.

That is fine, it is great, we have a higher quality of life because of it.

Cars are better and cheaper because they come in specific models and not each one is handcrafted.

So our chairs and tables and iPhones.

Now we have the beginning of a technology that for certainly digital goods and virtual

goods and goods in that part of our lives society economy that is going to be an increasing

part of that, better going to be more crafted, more individualized, more personalized, less

mass produced.

And then there is a very interesting question.

The overall thing is that in physical goods too, it is not clear to me how that might

happen but maybe with 3D printing, if you had a generative algorithm with 3D printing,

you could actually start seeing this in physical goods too.

But for sure in the short term, we will see this in digital goods and virtual goods and

NFTs and in anything in the kind of metaverse environment.

Now let's go through a few kind of background slides that I think people should probably

know for in the NFT generative world.

So the autoglyphs are largely believed to be the first on-chain generative art NFTs.

Amazingly or maybe not amazingly, they were made by the larval apps team which is the same

team that made the crypto punks.

And it's both amazing that they did the punks and they did autoglyphs, it's also not amazing

because both of them were generative.

So it's the same thought process.

What is very interesting about the Autoglyphs is that all the instructions to make them

are 100% on-chain.

So you can just have the token.

If you have the token, you know how to draw the Autoglyph represented by that token.

There was then a kind of break of year, year and a half when there wasn't a ton of activity

in generative art and then on-chain generative art.

And then there was with the chromisquivals and construction token and you know, art blocks

and the platform kickstarted a huge explosion in generative art collections.

Some very high percentage of the market cap of generative art is actually Art Blocks collections.

Someone the 80% range.

There were 100 collections were created on the platform that Erick Cakderon created and

it was the hub of this activity.

It still is though what is happening now and it's natural and healthy, more platforms

are emerging.

And so I think that percentage will obviously go down over time.

But between for those and this part of the business is very straightforward for those

who are in this space.

Autoglyphs and then Art Blocks.

I think were very important foundational steps in on-chain generative art.

Let's talk a little bit about on-chain enes and what we mean when it's on-chain.

What we mean when it's on-chain.

We call it on-chain sure.

So let's work through this chart.

Level three, zero dependencies means that everything you need to regenerate the piece

isn't the token itself.

And so you don't need anything from anyone's server.

You don't need anything even from decentralized storage like IPFS or ARLiv.

The only condition for the artwork surviving is the block chain that you have used.

The Ethereum and there's a platform called FXASH on, that is also popular for generative

art, is that that blockchain survives.

If that blockchain survives, within the token itself, you have everything you need to do

to recreate the artwork.

Level two, there's one dependency and I put in four zeroes.

It's not only some artists are now uploading the libraries into the project, so I want

to dig into that a little bit more because I think there might be some projects that

are art blocks and are level three.

I'm not 100% sure about this, so I need to double check this.

There is, the code is, the art blocks project is on the blockchain and then there are run

edges into libraries, but I do believe for some new projects libraries are also on chain,

so the whole piece is on chain.

So how to dig into this with Snwofro and we might update the slide a little bit.

Another interesting thing about Art Blocks projects is their resolution independent.

And this is a condition for minting on the platform and really smart future proofing.

They should work the same way on today's screens of 4K, but also in 8K, 16K, 32K, 64K,

I don't know who we'll end up to over time, but however high resolution the screen will

be in the future.

The piece should render natively in that resolution.

The code is resolution independent.

Yeah, level one, they are created randomly on blockchain, but the image itself is offline.

It must be a piece like this.

One interesting project called Cyber brokers then minted the images on chain as well

and it could cost them 70, 80 ETH, but so the images themselves are also on the blockchain.

And even here, there is an interesting question.

It's not necessarily the case that the developer can change.

The pointer, you could have a contract that is sent to the burn address or the owners,

the owners, the burn address, it points to our weave.

Then your certainty of provenance is Ethereum plus our weave surviving, right?

Truthing surviving.

It does not necessarily mean that you have to trust the developer.

It doesn't mean that there are two aspects that are needed.

So someone asked, why is this all happening?

Why are people doing this?

Well, it's because on a major blockchain, blockchain space is expensive.

So putting even a 2-3 megabyte photo, even in low gas times onto the theorem blockchain

will end up costing tens of thousands of dollars.

And this is, and larger files, you can't actually get them all on the block, you have

to break them up and it'll be hugely expensive.

It's effectively not viable.

And so this is another thing that I think pushes generative art, pushes certain uses

of NFTs to generative art because the instructions to draw something are generally much cheaper

to store the end image.

And so, now, I want to be clear, this is not necessarily a problem.

I collect photography, aren't you?

Photography is not generative, it's not stored on the blockchain.

What I would like to see, though, is that it's at least stored on a decentralized storage

provider like IPFS or what I would feel uncomfortable with, or what I do feel uncomfortable with,

is projects where it's stored on someone's server.

The thought that the server will survive for years and decades, centuries is highly unlikely.

People will not be around to hold that together.

So this is Art Block's effort, as we've discussed it.

Now, as you've mentioned, Deafbeef, is fully audio-visual.

Art and shame is very, very famous pieces.

Some of them sold famously for an awful lot of money.

And again, it is extremely cutting-edge work before it's time.

I had shown some of this in my prior presentations.

Refrigerator does incredible generative work.

This is Castle Butler that we had collected, which here, if not longform generative, it's

one piece.

But it is generative in that the artwork is being determined by data from environmental

sensors.

And so it is generative in the classic sense of gyrid of art, and then it is, of course,

represented in a blockchain.

But the data, in this case, is coming off-chain.

It's not coming from, you know, chain link or something like that.

It's actually coming from Barcelona, from the house itself.

And so it's a more classic approach to gyrid of art.

Hybrid, in a way, but represented ultimately by an NFT.

And yeah, this is how it looks when represented physically in a very large screen.

I am going to stop here for today.

We have a huge, huge, huge number of guests in the generative art space that are coming

into the course.

So what I wanted to accomplish today is give you the frameworks.

So the frameworks of riots and interesting art movement riots and interesting medium

for generative art, how the space is largely generative.

What long-form means, what short-form means, what some key checkpoints were in the history

of generative art.

And then we're just going to have a huge number of interviews, one of one's panels

with generative artists.

I hope you can watch many or most of them because those get much more sophisticated

than this.

And again, this session is meant to give you the base level to enjoy and understand what

we're talking about in the other sessions.

And then, and I apologize for this, but I think practically there is no other way this

is going to happen, as will happen, I'm going to come back and update this presentation

a little bit, put some concepts in that come out through the interviews, and then distribute

the final one a few days down the line that reflects everything we've learned through

the next week, week and a half.

So again, I want to thank NooNeOx.

Quite frankly, this week, if it wasn't for him, they're willing to have their presentation

all.

So he did a great job, and I want to thank him.

But I do want to incorporate what we're going to learn from these amazing artists.

As with last week's presentation, we truly have an incredible set of generative artists

who are going to join the course.

And so the goal today was to give you the framework to understand those conversations

that are going to be a lot more sophisticated than these.

So the frameworks were that this appears to be a natural medium, NFTs appear to be a

natural medium for generative art.

And so what we're going to do is what long form and short form is, what were key points

in on-chain generative art, what does on-chain mean?

And so with these frameworks in place, we're going to talk to Snowfro, we're going to

talk to top generative artists.

And what I'd like to do is have you join as many of those discussions as possible, and

then incorporate learning from those discussions into this presentation, into the final version,

because it would be a shame not to do so, and then we'll distribute it, mint it, and so on.

How does an artist know that the pieces will fit together as a collection if they don't

know what will be minted?

The artist is running the algorithm before they take it onto the blockchain.

So someone creates an artist, someone creates an algorithm, they run into their computer,

they work on it, they see their outputs, they work on it some more, they see their outputs,

they work on it some more, and they have the ability to see what type of outputs it's

generated.

Once they're happy with the outputs, once they're happy with the outputs, then they take it

on blockchain, and then they'll discover what the specific outputs are that are created

at that point, but they'll have no idea which ones those will be.

The design space for some of these algorithms is utterly gigantic.

There is a project currently open called QQL, it's by Tyler Hobbs and Dendelite.

And here it's very interesting, the way the minting works is anyone can play with the different parts

of the algorithm, generate outputs, and decide if they want to mint their output.

So this collection is a thousand pieces like many other ones of these collections, that's

a thousand pieces.

But instead of the collector's kind of being conceptually a co-creator, because when they

press the mint button and what their computer is being important, here they are literally

actually co-creators, because they are looking through the output space and deciding which

ones they want to mint.

So in QQL they've sold mint passes, so there's a thousand mint passes, so the maximum number

of those which will happen, which will ever exist are a thousand, but the collectors will

get to pick them.

And this is super interesting because we have now, I even know the number is a few weeks

ago, collectors have created five million outputs or something and had minted about a hundred.

And I bet the number is more than ten million now and I think there's a hundred and thirty-nine

minted.

And so there will be this gigantic output space and from that output space only a thousand

of them will ever make it into finally being, finally being QQLs.

And I think it's a fascinating exercise, it's the URL is QQL.ART and I recommend it to

people as a way to learn, it is a great educational tool, I think I need to put it in the presentation.

If you go and create outputs on QQL to art and you can do this for free and change the different

parameters and see how the algorithm changes.

It's super super interesting and you get a sense of how these algorithms work and how

broad and deep they can be.

If the collector mints, where does the pay come from for the artist, how is the artist

paid?

Oh, that's very, that's very simple.

When you mint, you pay to mint, that payment goes to the artist or most of the ghost artist

there might be a platform fee.

Artists might also receive royalties on resale, but the royalties discussion is a big complicated

discussion.

The discussion that is for sure true is that they will receive the primary revenue, the

revenue when you mint, goes to the artist.

How does the artist control things?

The artist controls things by making the algorithm, but once the artist released the algorithm

on the blockchain, the artist no longer controls things.

That's what's super interesting about this.

The algorithm controls things.

Can we find patterns between the mintor and the algorithm using AI?

Now, I mean, it's not, you can see what the algorithm is.

The algorithm is not secret.

And you can see that what will the algorithm will produce if you put different values in

and the values that you put in create the different types of pieces.

And the pseudo randomness creates the values.

And for something like art blocks, the pseudo randomness is so sophisticated that you're

not going to be able to reverse engineer it.

There's a couple of other questions effectively about reverse engineering algorithm.

You're just not going to be able to.

That's a short answer.

Next question.

Why are NFTs in most cases rectangular?

This is a great question.

I mean, the real question, why is, why is most NFT art rectangular?

And I think it's because that's what we're used to in the physical world.

And I think that will change over time because there's less, there are few reasons for them

to be rectangular in a digital world.

How to write different generative art projects?

Well, that's, I'm certainly not going to answer that question by ranking them.

I think the general concepts that people look at are the output itself from an artistic perspective

is it's aesthetically interesting, is it technically challenging?

What type of output is produced?

A, B, are the pieces sufficiently different from each other?

And C, does it hold together as a collection?

Now you might say, well, this is very qualitative and yes, it's true.

Just mental.

This is how art works.

But there's broad consensus on which collections have resonated better with collectors.

And you can see that in the price of them.

So if you can, there are several hundred collections on art blocks as a useful comparative set.

And you can go to various tools, the unit team has a tool, and if the evaluation tool,

set them by market cap.

The ones with higher market cap are for the, are on the whole, um, valued.

Now, it's also early.

Some of these collections, three year old, a year and a half old, six months old.

I would expect that this will also change over time because this is what happens when, or over time, people,

societies have times that reflect on different art work.

And what might seem very important in 2022 might seem less important in 2022.

And vice versa.

So I wouldn't necessarily say those are today's consensus opinion will be forever tomorrow's consensus opinion.

Some pieces might be ahead of their time.

Very common with artists, right?

Like some, an artist are ahead of their time.

And then over time, people look back and say, my God, this artist was actually saying something very important.

And we're all be appreciating it now because they were ahead of us.

So I don't think of it as a static environment.

But I do think that if you want to ask a bunch of folks who collect gender-de-vark,

what are their ten favorite collections?

Most of them would probably give you five or six that are the same with each other and three or four that are different.

And that's fine, and that as the space gets bigger and we see more types of work and more diversity of work,

it'll be less like that.

There'll be some styles and some areas and some communities because I think gender-de-vark will be like digital art,

a horizontal aspect, not an aesthetic aspect, a technique, not an aesthetic.

Why is Decagon so affordable for you when compared to other generative art collections?

Decagon is an evolving generative art project run by Decagon, which is an art-unftea display platform.

The reason it's affordable slash free is it's being done by the firm to help promote Decagon.

So the business purpose there isn't to generate money from selling NFTs, but to create something interesting,

generative for the community of folks, the deck of community.

And it's the community token in a way.

But like we said before, how things can be generative in nature.

It's a generative token and it's designed to incent activity on the platform.

So the more things you do on Decagon, the more complicated your generative piece becomes.

What makes a great genre of artists do they have to be great coders?

I think it helps to be good.

There is this concept of depends on what I want to say, like partnership, positively, negatively ghost coding,

where the artist has the inspiration, someone else codes a genre of code.

But I think the first concept is more appropriate.

Many things can be done in partnership with other people.

I think some of the top generative artists are quite good at coding.

Maybe not 100% of them, but certain of them are very thought to be quite good at coding generative part.

It's certainly not a substitute for aesthetic sensibility.

You have to have both.

But it's certainly not a minus.

Certainly, if you have aesthetic sensibility, the better your coding skills are, the more likely you are to be able to implement your vision in code.

So I think it's helpful.

How will generative art evolve and be like in 2030?

I would put it backwards instead of saying how will generative art evolve?

There's going to be all types of things in generative art, right?

I can't predict all the artists in 2030.

I would say, just how you can say it is more like digital art, that generative art will, generative techniques will diffuse into everything.

So what I'm comfortable is the case about 2030 is that the world, at large for sure the digital world and possibly parts of the physical world will have generative components.

Are there two questions together?

CC0 coding templates we can make derivatives with?

Where do you find out about creating generative art algorithms?

So this is a very good question.

And I think we need this in the presentation.

George, if you can flag it to make sure we do add it to the presentation.

And I think we can actually, if it's a question we should ask our guests of one of the best tools for someone who wants to get involved in generative art.

So it's a really great question.

And I think we should have, we should have it in the reading as a specific slide that says, I'm interested in generative art.

I want to be a generative artist.

Experiment with being a generative artist.

What are the best places we go to first?

So I think that would be, that would be super neat.

A lot of derivatives are full of generative art, but more manual at the level where the original meme is the algorithm and the derivative artist is the manual input.

Now I want to think about that one.

I don't think about that one.

I think generative art means that there is a part of the art that is being created.

The actual algorithm is created that is procedurally created, that is created in an automated manner without human intervention.

That's what it means to me.

Okay.

I think we're pretty good on the questions.

So I think I'm going to wrap up here.

Thank you everyone once again.