How have different versions of the internet informed each other? Zora Zine Print Issue 001 transcends nostalgic idolization and naive iconoclasm to place the vanguard of crypto and culture in conversation with its historical forebears.

Intergenerational Dynamics

A good-looking middle-aged man with silver hair, slightly curly, stands in front of a painting made of drips and big gestures of deep blue, overlapping with scribbles and squares of paint. The man holds a mug that has stains of paint around the handle. He talks to the camera in a tone that is serious and slow-paced, slightly rehearsed but not forced, breaking up his sentences with a carefully placed smile. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to sell your art,” he assures us. “But you want to double down on your own unique vision.”

The man is Nicholas Wilton, and I’m watching a YouTube video he made called “So you want to sell your art?” With the calm humility of a preacher and the suave authority of a talk show host, he explains to the viewer that if they prioritize their own interests, hone their skills, and make art that feels authentic to them, then the sales will come. His discussion of art-making focuses on developing confidence and authority within one’s own practice, deferring specifics about navigating the art market or creating a collector base to a distant and ambiguous future. The video ends with Wilton thanking everyone for the comments about a recently deceased pet, followed by some platitudes about grief and the happiness a pet can provide.

Wilton is the founder of Art2Life, a company that offers painting workshops via Facebook Live and other platforms to help amateur painters improve their technique and style. Though participants can expect to learn how to mix colors or work with different brushes, the workshops are advertised as a form of self-improvement. The company’s website is cluttered with bolded, serifed inspirational phrases, suggesting that the Art2Life method can improve not only your artistic practice but your life. A horizontal flow chart on the website illustrates this process with colorful circles, outlining a journey that gets progressively deeper and more abstract: “Design —> Value —> Color —> Texture —> Risk —> Soul.”

I became curious about Wilton and the group in the summer of 2018, when my mother attended a week-long course hosted by the company at Esalen, a historic and iconic New Age retreat center in Big Sur. When I picked her up from the retreat center after the week’s end, she gushed about how heavenly it had been to wake up in her cabin and head down to the painting tent where Wilton and 15 other women started the day by painting and listening to music. She recalled the fun she and the women had had together and the encouragement Nick had given her about her work.

She planned to keep in touch with them and even introduced me to a couple of the women. Most were mothers or retired women who painted on Sundays in their guest bedrooms, though there were some who had never painted before. My mother had studied studio art at a prestigious liberal arts college in the 1980s. It had become a hobby by the time she had me and worked full-time. But, following her divorce, she’d taken up the practice more seriously, making it easy to understand the retreat as a kind of post-divorce, soul-searching activity.

By using social media and the internet to display and sell their work, artists from my mother’s generation were tapping into the power of online communities.

When she got home from the workshop, she joined the company’s private Facebook group, officially becoming part of the Art2Life “Academy,” for painters who have taken at least one physical or digital workshop. Members of the group share images of their work, chat about different techniques, and share tips about branding yourself and turning your painting practice into a small business. Academy members are encouraged to invite others to take classes, and they receive a small sum whenever someone signs up through their personalized affiliate link.

After she returned from the retreat, my mother began selling paintings out of her studio to neighbors, friends, and relatives. She hosted an open studio in our house, putting out paintings with price tags and serving wine and cheese on the deck. I was in charge of handling the transactions. She sold a number of paintings and was happy with the turnout.

I began thinking about how, by using social media and the internet to display and sell their work, artists from my mother’s generation were tapping into the power of online communities in much the same way that younger generations were, in a similar spirit of optimism and with a parallel understanding of these tools as a potential form of resistance to the elitism of the art world. “It felt hard figuring it all out alone,” a quote from Wilton on the website reads. “I didn’t see many people pulling this off and the artists that were successful wouldn’t share.”

The Art2Life community’s optimism about figuring it out “together” is complemented with a kind of cynicism about those with success, a sense that powerful elites have hoarded a golden ticket to success and wealth. Zora’s manifesto hits a similar note, criticizing an ambiguous “they” that seems to refer to some combination of Big Tech, the entertainment industry, and the establishment art world: “They have a monopoly on ownership, a monopoly on creativity and they have been robbing us of the value we create for as long as there’s been a creative industry.”

, Zora co-founder Dee Goens speaks emphatically about the community aspects of crypto. “The superpower of crypto that no one talks about is community,” he says on the magazine’s podcast. “And now we’re seeing what crypto can do when that superpower is applied to art … like when communities can collectively organize on the internet and accrue capital.

Here, Web3 and something like Art2Life seem to be driving toward the same goal: the idea is making money together, for one another, in a democratic way. The community is the draw, because people want to connect with other people. And yet, more often than not, these communities offer little more than an illusion of connection, disembodied through platforms like Discord and Facebook Live. Together but alone.

, Lana Swartz addresses this contradiction in an essay about Bitcoin, writing that “the logic of crypto memes is also one of deferral … Everyone tells everyone else to keep the faith as they themselves sell off while the price is high. Eventually, it’s revealed that not everyone is actually 

, and the price comes down.” In typical capitalist fashion, an individualistic mentality takes over, and it’s every man for himself.

Art2Life is a company about community, but it’s hard to detangle that community aspect from the cult of personality around its founder. Across its website, Wilton appears as the avatar and mascot of the program, an older white man with a following that consists mostly of women. At the end of the day, Wilton is selling a product, using himself and his charisma as a selling point. And he’s there to help his followers sell a product too, a product that he continually reminds them is a natural extension of the self.

Art2Life’s public Facebook group, a general forum where people can post their paintings and solicit advice, has over 50,000 members. On a day in August, a poster shares a painting she made called 

, which depicts four women on a beach: “Should I do it vertically or horizontally?” she asks. As the comments fill up with effusive praise and thumbs-up emojis, she is gracious and engaging, in a way that suggests she has read a thing or two about how to build a following online: “Thank you, Nancy.” “Appreciate the feedback!”

The future, whether you’re talking about a new economic market or your art career, isn’t something that is ever guaranteed, which means that perhaps a better way of thinking about it is as a product being sold.

The feed is also filled with countless videos, posted by the administrators, with clickbait titles like “WHAT MARY DISCOVERED THAT SHE NEVER HAD BEFORE,” or “FEAR KNOCKED AT DANYELLE’S DOOR. RISK ANSWERED.” In one of them, “Now it is time to Be You,” a middle-aged woman from Ireland talks about her struggles to find her “path.” She says that she’d always been interested in art, but struggled with her self-worth and lacked the confidence to get her there. She speaks to the camera about her failed marriages and troubled relationships, about men who dismissed or even destroyed the art she made. It’s a triumphant story that ends with her activating a dormant desire to make art and be in charge of her own life.

In the world of Art2Life, awakening your inner artist and reaching your full potential always seems to involve a process of breaking with the past, of moving forward from the self that kept you from achieving these things. Many of the most popular self-help programs and books from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s—

 (2012)—were oriented around similar ideas. And they frequently targeted, or ended up being embraced by, middle-aged women and divorced mothers, a demographic that was quietly struggling with self-worth.

As I fell down the Art2Life rabbit hole, I began thinking about the way Web3 has drawn people from so many different backgrounds to start buying art, making art, or investing in cryptocurrency. The goal of achieving autonomy over one’s work, or over one’s financial destiny, is the galvanizing idea behind both of these movements. And both hinge on the belief that technology will free the individual from her attachment to larger institutions or systems, or at least allow them to take back a degree of control. As Zora’s manifesto puts it: “The current system is fucked and we want out … We want to 

But who is this royal “we,” and how strong is it to begin with? In the world of Art2Life, women gather at a retreat center to support one another and build a community. But the organization is still helmed by CEO Nicholas Wilton, the person who has the most to gain, both financially and in terms of his own public profile, from the selling of these workshops. Crypto bros will rally behind an exciting new coin or NFT collection, only to splinter off based on their changing affinities and goals. Members of both communities ascribe to a kind of faith in the future—the idea of investing in a better self or world—while taking on a degree of personal risk that is encouraged by the collective. There’s a group buy-in, made by individuals whose investment may or may not be earned back.

The future, whether you’re talking about a new economic market or your art career, isn’t something that is ever guaranteed, which means that perhaps a better way of thinking about it is as a product being sold. Or perhaps the product is a belief in the future. If the investment goes well, we’ll be affirmed in our belief in the world, in our communities, in ourselves. If it goes poorly, we’ll feel bereft and alone, looking for the next bet that can restore our faith again.

ZINE - That Cult of Personality? Don’t Let it Ruin my Retreat

That Cult of Personality? Don’t Let it Ruin my Retreat

“The purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe, to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us,” writes Denis Diderot, editor of the 18th-century 

, in the entry for “encyclopedia.” An emblem of Enlightenment thinking, the 

 was not the first of its genre, but it remains one of the most influential. Among its distinguishing characteristics was an ambition, per Diderot, “to change the way people think.” The 

 achieved this in part through its critiques of academic authority and its unorthodox curation of topics, such as entries on the “mechanical arts,” which had been dismissed as base and vulgar since antiquity.

Later in the text, Diderot compares the sum of human knowledge to a machine. “The larger and more complicated the machine, the more connections there are between its parts, the less we know these connections, the more different perspectives for description there will be,” he states. “What, then, if the machine is in every sense infinite; if we are speaking of the real universe and the intelligible universe, or a work which is like the imprint of both?” Given that this machine was immense and nonfinite, Diderot argued, the task of its representation necessitated continuous revision.

A lot has happened since the 1751 publication of the first volume of the 

. Kings lost their heads; academies, their authority. Diderot and his fellow Encyclopédistes bear some blame for both. Even if not all the contributors were revolutionaries, the overall vibe was anti-establishment. Like all things, the Encyclopédie also lost some of its edge with time. Meanings change alongside know-how, as does the direction of revolutionary impulse. By the early 20th century, for a certain milieu of avant-gardist thinkers, the 

 was representative of an institutional drive to hierarchize knowledge and fix interpretation. In reaction, these artists, writers, and philosophers produced a series of editorial projects that could be described as “anti-encyclopedias,” which has since become something of its own literary genre—or perhaps, a recurrent impulse.

Machines, of course, have grown in complexity and utility over the years, and with them, the volume of knowledge produced and accumulated by humans. The most widely used encyclopedia today is likely Wikipedia, a constantly growing archive with a contributor base that numbers in the millions, facilitated by an open-source framework for compiling entries. Although it sources its entries from legions of geographically distributed volunteers, Wikipedia isn’t all that different from a traditional encyclopedia. It still has editors and fact-checkers, and despite what your high school teacher might have said, most entries are fairly well backed-up and attributed. Wikipedia is not so much an anti-encyclopedia as a very big one, disseminated by servers rather than movable type.

, a forthcoming publication by the artist Andrea Avellino of the Berlin- and Milan-based creative studio New Format, sit somewhere between the encyclopedia and its antonym. Developed in collaboration with an artificial intelligence, it culls a significant chunk of humanity’s collective knowledge output—the internet—into a dataset to produce alluring, if sometimes unnerving images. From Fra Angelico to Pittura Metafisica, Dantean inferno to luxury fashion, they traverse a sort of echo-geography of potential source material, forcing the viewer into a game of interpretation and identification. Gender-ambiguous bodies merge with vegetal growth, like Adam became Eve and returned to the Garden. Elsewhere, excarnated limbs yield insectile apparitions. All of these forms, of course, are approximations made by a machine—these readings, my own. As soon as clarity begins to appear, it dissimulates, with resemblances unsettling as quickly as they emerge.

Over the phone, Avellino suggests that in generating these shadowy images, at once familiar and not, the database serves as a sort of proxy for the human unconscious. “Through the study of human reality, the AI learns the ability to transcend, to create manifestations that whisper words that are almost comprehensible to our subconscious, but inaccessible and completely new to the rational mind,” he speculates. Beyond this, Avellino refuses to guide my interpretation of the results. That’s the point.—Nicholas Korody

ZINE - Against Interpretation

Green

Against Interpretation

Piloting more community-facing models in order to determine what went into print was one of the Special Edition Issue’s core experiments. After asking Zora’s Discord “How would you visualize Hyperstructures” in AI, 3D, and open-submission categories, we received pieces depicting not only physical architecture, but abstract and metaphysical networks as well. The following three illustrations are what the Zora community voted on.

ZINE - Choral Works

Choral Works

Niall Ashley and Matthew Stone are at home in hybrid realities. Both artists blur the boundaries between painting and performance, digital and physical, art and life. Stone got his start spearheading subcultural happenings in London in the late 2000s, while Ashley began minting work in 2021. But despite launching their careers on opposite ends of the sudden virtualization of everything, they share a fascination with the decidedly analog art of painting as a means of making sense of this transformation.

Born in Bristol and currently living in London, Ashley rose to prominence over the course of 2021 for their NFT “metapaintings”—looping performance videos in which Ashley uses augmented reality tech to make elements of their graffiti-inspired canvases spill out into the world outside the frame. Ashley will jump in front of a painting and suddenly be sporting the mask of the figure it depicts. More recently, they have leveled up their practice and begun working with game engines to deploy these painted avatars into sprawling 3D environments—such as in 

 (2022), their parafictional promo video for the inaugural FWB Fest.

But even when they are using rendering software, their sensibility is more that of a painter than a model-builder: avatars glitch to reveal raw motion-capture footage; dense cityscapes collapse and contort to form an impossible architecture. At once self-portraits and prototypes for possible selves, Ashley’s avatars reflect on their experiences as a Black, non-binary, working-class artist while gesturing toward a utopian beyond.

But the truth, which Ashley and Stone’s work makes clear, is that painting has always been a technology: the development of oil paint was as much a disruption to image-making in its day as widespread access to text-to-image AI is now.

Two decades into a career encompassing legendary South London squat parties with the art collective !WOWOW!, operatic performances at Art Basel in Miami, manifestos for “optimism as cultural rebellion” published in 

, and visual collaborations with FKA Twigs, Stone’s polyvalent practice as a photographer, sculptor, performance artist, painter, and self-described “art shaman” has converged on a similar terrain of technologically augmented painting. His most recent exhibition, 

 (Unit London, 2022), comprises a series of works in which photographs of individual brushstrokes are digitally manipulated to adorn and envelope a cast of 3D avatars. Nested within these busy compositions are AI-generated paintings outputted by DALL-E 2 in response to inputs from Stone’s existing oeuvre.

Through these multiple layers of representation and reproduction, Stone stakes out a symbiosis between analog and digital, exploring technology as an extension of human expressivity rather than an interruption thereof. All paintings, Stone suggests, create their own virtual reality, conjuring a possible world in the viewer’s mind. It’s this appreciation for art’s multiplicity that excites him about NFTs, which he describes in this conversation with Ashley as a “foothold in the infinite.”

We are used to thinking of painting as an inherently conservative medium. Paintings are decorative playthings or market-friendly assets, holdouts from capital-A Art’s glory days. But the truth, which Ashley and Stone’s work makes clear, is that painting has always been a technology: the development of oil paint was as much a disruption to image-making in its day as widespread access to text-to-image AI is now. And as the old adage goes, technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. Ashley and Stone are less interested in bridging the divide between the digital and physical than they are in seeing what’s possible when we accept that there was never any divide to begin with. If screen and canvas are part of the same reality, then perhaps we can get to work on the more important task of expanding what that reality can be.

 Who are your north stars, creatively? Who’s informed your work the most as you’ve cultivated your aesthetics?

 For me, it was Andy Warhol, but also Joseph Beuys. When I was at Camberwell [Arts College], I wrote about the spiritual content of Andy Warhol’s work for my dissertation. In different ways, both Warhol and Beuys were talking about everything being art. Warhol thought everything kind of already was art—so, a can of Coke can be art— whereas Beuys, as this postwar German conceptual artist, was saying that everything should 

 art. He was sweeping the streets as performance and things like that.

That was really inspiring in terms of thinking about living a life that is lived as art—about artworks not just being things that hang on walls, but collective, social, expanded happenings like Warhol’s Factory. For me, coming to London was about finding other people to make my factory with. Niall, I actually remember you mentioning Warhol and Basquiat in a Twitter Space. You liked Warhol, right? I feel like that was one of the touchstones that you mentioned.

I liked the Factory aspect, even though I was questioning things about it. I liked it because it made me think, “What if everyone could become their own factories through avatars, facilitating multiple branches of yourself or your identity?” You could create your own metafactory.

 The Factory becomes yourself. With social media, we have a camera on everything. Every life has become performance. We’re all within our own little factories of cultural production. Everything’s become this thing of, “How does it look in this frame?” But if we acknowledge that condition, we can create something interesting.

 So you see social media and the virtual space that the internet opens up as an opportunity to expand creative identity? [A place] where performance doesn’t have to mean inauthenticity?

 No. I think it can mean play. I feel like the reason it means inauthenticity for a lot of people is that they try to duplicate themselves; there’s a pressure to represent yourself accurately.

And perhaps also to present a version of the self that is assumed to be more acceptable. Maybe one reason why we are both excited about this technology is that we are open to that aspect of fantasy or creativity. You’re not trying to represent something directly; there’s an okayness with the subjectivity of making something up, inventing worlds. Creating something that is unreal in one sense, but allowing what is created to be filled with something that is authentic.

If NFTs grow and become something that all artists can credibly engage with as a way to make money and support their careers, then they don’t have to strategically leverage wall-based works anymore.

 How does Web3, where pseudonymity is often enshrined, fit into that? What’s the difference between having a pseudonym and having an avatar in the way you were just describing, Niall?

 Personally, I feel like with the PFP crowd, there’s no one point you can say everyone’s at. The address changes every hour. You burn the address and everything keeps moving. That’s how the Web3 space sees decentralization, but it’s kind of utopian. The difference with the avatars is that they add up to make one central figure. There has to be some sort of PO box.

 I feel differently. Web3 is ultimately an experiment in direct democracy, albeit a very imperfect one, as most experiments are. I understand the desire to have someone at the top who can be the final authority, but who gets to be that person and how do we make sure that they’re the right person? Ultimately that’s a collective responsibility. We are in it together, whether or not we act like it. The reason I’m interested in Web3 is that it’s not afraid to be utopian. It’s proactive, optimistic, and not just a passive critique.

There’s often a crude framing where Web3 acolytes position the optimism of the space against the supposed performative criticism of the trad art world. How does your experience of those two worlds compare?

 I think that particular criticism of the traditional art world is a cynical and passive critique in and of itself. You look at certain areas of crypto, and there’s a lot of corruption. You look at certain areas of the traditional art world, and there’s also a lot of corruption.

When I was younger, most of my creative friends were working in fashion or music or magazines; friendship and collaboration were fairly easy, as there wasn’t direct competition for the same opportunities. I had fewer friends who were involved in the art world, and it felt like there was more competition or just a lack of an overriding sense of community with other artists.

I have had a complicated relationship with the way the art world functions and what it means to win within that, despite still wanting to do so. But coming into the NFT space, I very quickly had meaningful exchanges with people online that felt really wholesome. I was also just excited to be involved with a cultural moment that was geared towards imagining a different way of doing things.

 Niall, you’ve come up entirely within that world. What were your early experiences of the NFT space like?

 The first piece I minted on Zora was like the 600 or 500th mint, so there wasn’t that much else on there at the time. It was interesting seeing my stuff alongside other people’s stuff, seeing how they worked together, and then being able to hit up someone who was on there directly because there weren’t that many people using it at the time. Those times were really lovely. Then the money started coming in and with it more people, which was great because it was more exposure, but it was also a lot of noise. Even now, I’m happy that things are quieter. I was really interested in the idea of just minting something and being like, “This is the one of one. Here’s proof. It’s on the blockchain.” I couldn’t have done that if I had just posted on Instagram or TikTok and left it there.

 There are obviously so many facets to what you do. There’s the social media performance of it, the physical paintings, the videos, and then the NFT. Do you think there is an original artwork for you in a traditional sense?

 I feel like the original is the intersection point of all of those experiences. Every time I put it on a different platform, I present it in a different way

 I definitely connect to that idea of [the original] being the meeting point between things. Some digital artists say the original artwork is the file, which can then be 3D-printed or manifested in AR. For almost all painters, the actual painting itself is the original artwork, and everything else is just documentation. But I take the view that the artwork is everywhere—or everywhere that some mediated manifestation of the original creative impulse lands on somebody else’s consciousness.

The artwork is the digital file. It’s the social media posts. It’s the physical work. It’s other people’s photographs of the work. This is why NFTs are interesting: they provide a kind of foothold in the infinite. There’s all this networked creative activity, and with an NFT, the artist can say, “Well, actually, this is where it is.” If NFTs grow and become something that all artists can credibly engage with as a way to make money and support their careers, then they don’t have to strategically leverage wall-based works anymore. It can be anything.

For so long, we’ve been trying to compromise with the digital and trying to thumbnail and render down our real artworks, taking photographs and whatnot. But I think the interesting part is to embrace the reality that most people are going to be seeing your artwork digitally, which is the most democratic way of viewing artwork anyway. Coming from Bristol, the first paintings I saw were just old paintings of the British royalty. That was my idea of artwork, [but] the things that stood out to me weren’t those things; it was the things that I saw on Tumblr or Instagram or YouTube. The idea that anything of value has to be on canvas is so limiting, because there’s only so much you can do with that one material. You can put anything on an Ethereum block, be it physical, digital, audio, whatever. There are way more creative possibilities. So yeah, I just think the digital is the real.

What does making good on those creative possibilities look like? Where is this all going? Both of you seem interested in carving out new worlds through these technologies, without giving in to either cynicism or naive utopianism. I’m curious how each of you think about that balance.

 It comes back to this idea of taking up digital space— not necessarily as a reactive position to platform capitalism, but consciously and creatively defining virtual space and showing people that it’s not a done deal, that reality is still being created in the digital just as it is elsewhere. The resistance that some people have toward online life is wholly understandable because of the nature of social media. There’s a reason that people think that digital work should be free, [which is part of] why high-value NFTs were such a disruptive meme. It’s an idea that has been engineered culturally by platforms like Meta to get content without pay, so they can make money from that work. It’s no accident and it results in a cognitive dissonance where people often can’t see the things they’re creating or recognize their own digital labor.

I think it’s significant that almost everyone on Earth who has a smartphone is in some sense a photographer, an artist. That was the dream of many artists of the past: to inspire other people to engage creativity in their life. I think that the more people there are who are engaged with their own creativity, the less violence we’ll see in this world. I can only really go off my own experience, but I know that creativity in my life has been transformative and healing. Creativity in the digital sphere is not even the future; it is our current reality. I’m optimistic about pulling focus to that, because I believe in the creativity it unlocks, and not just my own.

 I don’t always feel that optimistic, I can’t lie. We’ve had so many of these conversations about Web3 tech and what it enables or how it empowers people. It’s cool, but at the same time, I think the more interesting part about it is the mediums that are coming out of it. I’m really interested in how we use those tools without it just being a magic trick—an “aha” moment. Even with my own work, I’m so bored with just breaking the fourth wall.

 You’re like, “It’s already broken ... It’s all one reality. There is no virtual, there is no physical.”

 And if there’s no virtual and no physical, what can we do with those tools? With Unreal Engine, for example, you have the MetaHuman plugin. You can make a 3D version of yourself for free. What can you do if you have a 3D version of yourself? You can place yourself anywhere. I can place myself in the Sahara Desert, and I can cut myself in and out of real time and digital meatspace. If people are playing with digital and physical meat space so much, it will eventually come to a point where we don’t know what is what—and if you don’t know what is what, then it means gravity can change for once.

We spend so much time suffering in physical space to make our digital selves look more appealing to other people, but what could we do that isn’t just about replicating a fantasy from the physical? What more can you say about yourself when you can easily render 3D models composed of millions and millions of polygons? What can we do that gets us out of this despicable moment and extends a narrative into the future? There’s reality in the digital and reality in the physical. Now that that’s established, what can I do that I couldn’t have done before?

ZINE - Niall Ashley and Matthew Stone: Beyond Screen and Canvas

Blue

Niall Ashley and Matthew Stone: Beyond Screen and Canvas

For most of us, self-awareness is arguably always in rather short supply—and even more so for the young, the entrepreneurial, the vain, and of course, the multitasking. Funnily, the further we delve into the netherworldly abyss of the ever-evolving phases of the internet, moving from the ad-ridden, multi-tabbed labyrinth of Web2 into what has recently been christened Web3, it seems that more and more of us end up, whether by default or necessity, falling into all of the aforementioned categories … simultaneously! Among other things, this “Eddie Pie Hands” syndrome can clearly cause all kinds of attention deficits that may lead to even (horror of horrors!) MORE unawareness of one’s online surroundings and how they may be working for or against your own interests. And of course, “Eddie Pie Hands” refers to the riotous character from the show 

, Edina Monsoon, a 40-something British divorcée who runs a PR firm, deals in old African ceramics, produces fashion photo shoots, and regularly parties like a pill-popping lunatic at the hottest of nightclubs, all while redecorating her living room and kitchen on a seemingly daily basis.

This fracturing of our informational intake inevitably bleeds out into different aspects of our lives. For many of us, a typical day starts—first thing in the morning, before even getting out of bed—with a quick check-in: emails, Instagram (mostly stories, because they’re at the top and it somehow seems faster and less committal just to skim through them before mustering the will to get up and get going), maybe a quick swipe through Facebook or Twitter. Then, as we suck down an iced coffee or a smoothie, mid-transit to work/ school/internships/studios, comes the first of the deeper dives: actually scrolling downwards on Instagram into the mains, dashing over to Discord to check the unread messages, maybe even screen-grabbing things to remember and find the time to read in more detail later on. Not long after arriving at wherever it is we go comes that desperate feeling of needing to “take a break.” But we all know that “break” isn’t actually a rest, or a respite: most of the time, we’re filling it with images and slogans that have been dispatched straight into our eyeballs by teams of practically telepathic robots that know our every fear and desire. This does not necessarily mean that we, haplessly unheeding individuals that we are, will end up having no sense of what we do or say, whether online or off. We are so used to it by now that we don’t stop to consider the reality and toll of everything that our minds are absorbing as we jump from app to app and site to site—and from one form of content, displayed within one visual and experiential interface, to another. Despite this plainly tumultuous modus operandi, surely we can contend that just because our minds are not merely “elsewhere,” but are often in many different (if interconnected) places at the same time, that isn’t a reason to cognitively count us out altogether. Nonetheless, it is certainly worth recognizing that unwittingly living and breathing the internet creates the ideal conditions for a lackadaisical kind of informational screening process, a faculty that is all the more critical when operating within such an immersive and immodest environment.

If, for example, we think of the internet, overall, as basically encompassing the entire fucking world, Web3 likes to imagine itself a small town full of little village dwellers, urging us globetrotters to return back to the simple comforts of local life.

Web3, though inherently tied to crypto transactions and exchanges—that of NFTs in particular—is still more a state of mind than a fully fledged new world. It purports to re-domesticate, in a manner of speaking, the vast and all-powerful corporatized platforms that dominate the omnipresent internet we have come to accept as the norm. If, for example, we think of the internet, overall, as basically encompassing the entire fucking world, Web3 likes to imagine itself a small town full of little village dwellers, urging us globetrotters to return back to the simple comforts of local life. It purports to be the humble Mom & Pop to the Googles and the Metas lording over us all, and often refers to itself discursively as an intentional “decentralization” (or redistribution) of the wealth amassed by tech conglomerates.

With that guiding M.O., Web3 does its best to hark back to the hippy, DIY mentality that so resolutely grabbed the attention and shifted the lifestyles of the young and the restless when the Boomers were coming of age and defining it for themselves by their vehement opposition to the Vietnam War. The connection between the two time periods is understandable enough, the hippy movement having gained steam in large part as a response to the 1960s “madmen” and their commercialization of the shiny veneer of a “wholesome” American way of life, which began to crack under the weight of political and global strife. Today, the real world is looking less and less shiny, so we exist more often online, through a scrupulously tailored set of subscriptions and plans that we buy into. These apps, memberships, and fraternities (for all intents and purposes) have replaced, for example, the chipper, spotless aisles of the neighborhood grocer, where housewives used to chat and relay the day’s gossip. Now, instead of businesses and media promoting these spaces as places to socialize and participate in discourse, they sell us ways to simplify interactions and lifestyles through the rampant, blob-ish universality of Alegria design. It is only natural that as the structure of our digital habitat continues to develop in this way, a counterculture motivated by reclamations of autonomy, such as those that Web3 fashions itself to espouse, would materialize.

Of course, this dynamic begs further scrutiny: considering the murky waters within which we are all wading, can we really be so sure that Web3 actually intends to right the wrongs that continue to plague the mimetically capitalistic power structures to which the internet seems inextricably shackled? If we look again, back to what is so often hailed as the “glory days” of the countercultural defiance that characterized the 1960s and 1970s, an oft-forgotten and forever under-celebrated performance piece by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, titled 

 (1973), comes to mind. The piece was staged at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, and as its title connotes, it involved Ukeles taking the keys to all of the galleries, offices, and archives away from the directors, curators, and administrators, locking them out of their respective roles.

By proving that the museum could function just fine without the head honchos in management, the performance laid bare the pillars of infrastructural power at the crux of such cultural institutions. In doing so, it highlighted the importance of the museum’s lowest-ranking and least appreciated staff members: the janitors, custodians, and conservators responsible for the daily maintenance of the artworks in its collection. In line with her seminal publication 

, Ukeles’ point was that the longevity (and therefore overall value) of these works could not be sustained without the work of those who were entrusted to rather meticulously care for them.

Web3, and the growing crypto networks and cliques upon which its mores rest, clearly hopes to take up a similar mantle. The move away from the internet’s conglomerate overlords is meant to underscore the real source of their power: the people who use their products and whose data they garner in order to further their own ends. Seen through the most rose-colored of lenses, Web3 could almost be understood as a project that seeks to reveal who, in truth, holds the keys to today’s infrastructural value capture. The wager being that by explicitly crafting their brand as “path-treading,” they can siphon off a noticeable enough amount of the capital that streams endlessly into the coffers of the tech industry’s most nauseatingly profitable companies. If this were possible, they imagine, if they could corral a significant number of online badasses like themselves, then they would be able to prove to “the man” that without “us”—with our non-stop scrolling and clicking through their apps, feeding them the data that they can turn around and sell to trend forecasters, and without whose eyeballs they couldn’t sell their ad space—they would be nothing!

But, by the same token, the fervor surrounding the advent of Web3, and the hustle culture that buoys its casting of NFTs as a new and impressively dynamic art market, does not have much at all to do with art, per se.

The difference between Ukeles’ critical intervention and the mimetically righteous guise of Web3 is that the latter is actually yet another up-and-coming spiv. Admittedly, it is commendable to try to find proactive ways to utilize the practically universal hatred of the uber-rich, evil men who rule and ruin the world. But, by the same token, the fervor surrounding the advent of Web3, and the hustle culture that buoys its casting of NFTs as a new and impressively dynamic art market, does not have much at all to do with art, per se. Unlike 

, their project isn’t really about abstracting the acting out of an academic and economic convention. As of yet, the imagery and content of an NFT seems to be of little, if any, consequence, even to those investing in them. More critically, beyond those investing, what discourse (which, however antiquated the concept might sound, still tends to play a rather significant role in the valuation process of a work of art in the long run) is there to flesh out the potential meaning of any given NFT? Most of the writing surrounding their debuts, their rises and falls, focuses on the machinations of the tech itself or the circumstances surrounding their creation and dissemination.

Watching this scene unfold, proverbially speaking, through the skeptical third eye, it would not be unheard of to think of Web3, if not in every way, at least in many, as ultimately going through all of these energetic motions merely as a performative way of poking the internet gods that we love to hate in the eye, hoping to be subsumed by them like so many others—for the right price, of course. With all of this in mind, and all of the 60s jargon that it patently evokes, it is hard not to recall Whole Foods cofounder and ex-CEO John Mackey’s recent, audacious spewing of ridiculous gripes about how “socialists are taking over [the institutions],” by which, he went on to elaborate, so far has meant “[taking] over education…corporations … and the military.”

This endeavor, of branding Web3’s newfound mode of production (aka marketing) as something subversively holding the rabid capitalism of the tech industry to account, is as cyclical a ploy as any. I mean, we always start out loving something seemingly obscure. The more we come to love it, the more it ends up being pushed into the center of social consciousness as other people buy into it, bit by bit. And then, one day, we come to realize that it suddenly represents everything that we hate about “the mainstream,” “the man,” and everything else that is conventional and decidedly UNCOOL. So, without fail, we do our collective 180s and begin the circumventive process of forestalling our interests away from the thing that we loved and have aligned ourselves so closely with—be it a type of music and the communities that come with it, an art form, a celebrity, or a genre of some sort.

Web3, we could say, is a form of this backlash happening on a global scale, and in response to something as indelibly ubiquitous as the ways that the internet operates, and how we navigate our identities and interests within its (rarely regulated) jurisdiction. Through that anthropomorphic lens, we can view these portentous shifts as appearing noble enough. Clearly we can all agree that we hate Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and that the world would be a far better place if they were thrown into the blaring flames of hell and their massive fortunes handed over to the young and the underprivileged. 

, undoubtedly, would know precisely how to divvy up such vast funds in order to fix all of the world’s enormous, self-induced problems.

This quaint ideology is understandably looking pretty cute right about now. The contrast between artists trying to get their piece of the pie by selling NFTs to tech-bro-turned-connoisseur-wannabes, and the consumerism cyclone attributed to billionaires upon whom it is easy to lay all of the blame for our social ills, is pretty stark. But Web3’s wielding of its popularity as a means for cleaving out little niches amidst the interminable cohorts that make up the internet’s most widely populated sites and networks also makes room for a potential undercover gambit—one that all of those unassuming, online busybodies may be missing as they are, consciously or not, lured in by what has been designated the next 

In this climate, it can be all the more difficult to suss out the difference between altruism and the same tried and true profit-leaching strategies of “Neuromarketing” that have tyrannized the good ol’ internet for the past ten years. Neuromarketing rose to a new level of prominence with the advent, not only of the smartphone, but of the rapid expansion of social media and the ineluctable ads that drive its algorithms. The term itself was technically coined in 2002, but its propagandistic tenets date way back before that, to the 1920s and the work of theorist (and perhaps unsurprisingly, nephew of Freud) Edward Bernays, often called “the father of public relations.”

Companies exploit our neurological data not only to uncover our desires, fears, and drives, but in fact to foment them.

Long after his time, his revelations about how psychology and public opinion are linked seem pretty rudimentary. Today, we see our psychological tendencies melding ever more seamlessly with our online user preferences. Companies exploit our neurological data not only to uncover our desires, fears, and drives, but in fact to foment them. This kind of preemptive marketing becomes especially troubling when we consider that younger internet users, who are coming of age precisely as these tools are being honed all the more sharply, are cultivating far more personal relationships with these interfaces than previous generations. Having never known anything else, it is understandable that it would be almost impossible to tell whether a great deal of what is being presented to you is something that you are (even inadvertently) choosing to see, or is actually just the amalgamated result of one’s seemingly benign clicks, cursor hoverings, and general thumb-tapping activity. How will future generations learn to refine their powers of calibration in the face of so much ruthless inundation? How will they craft their identities or understand who they really are—especially as Web3 further intertwines our financial status and valuation systems with all of our other platforms and subscriptions?

It is no wonder, then, that the current self-help and personal wellness boom has become such an attractive and profitable paragon for companies and social media platforms alike. The persistence of the desire for this kind of content, the neverending quest to quiet one’s mind, and the newfangled ways that companies are finding to exacerbate said desire is a quintessential example of the chicken and egg conundrum. Case in point: The current TikTok “phenomenon,” within the niche but nonetheless incredibly popular subgenre of “wellness warriors,” wherein (mostly young) people appear to be diagnosing themselves with all kinds of mental disorders, including the presence of “alters.” The enthusiasm that these TikTokers exude in their psychological proclamations to all who care to tune in is a perfect example of this nebulous confusion.

It is not really the fracturing of our collective minds, in and of itself, that is likely the worst culprit of the ever more nuanced phase of digital life into which we are veering; humans are nothing if not adaptable creatures, and our ability to compartmentalize and keep a number of balls in the air, feeble as it may have always been, still persists. It is the increasingly clandestine ways that such fragmentation will enable others to prey upon the new reality that we find ourselves within, and with which our sadly outdated BS detectors will have to contend. As Web3 becomes the new norm, rather than something that many are still unaware of or can’t yet distinguish from the rest of our daily fix of news, memes, gossip, hashtags, hype, and virality, we can expect it to reveal new pathways into our aspirations, angst, and standards—while attaching new forms of financial (and therefore social) value to them as well.

Unlike the internets of the past, which have been grounded in attention and sharing, the niche quality that Web3 fosters will likely just push people further into their own information silos, built upon both their entrenched and assimilated biases. Web3, at this early stage, is decidedly not the melting pot of cultural commentary that 2.0 at least attempted, at one point in time, to be. We can only assume that were Web3 to become a full-fledged, pioneering, alternate marketplace for art and ideas, it would do little to expand upon the intellectual limitations of its predecessor.

With that in mind, the more that artists are drawn into working through Web3 platforms, whether it be for the convenience of sales or for the sake of not missing the bullet train to the future, we could be facing a pretty bleak field of artistic musings. Furthermore, Web3 can already be seen to be tethering the fervor of constant and ever-increasing momentum on NFT marketplaces to the ability for an artist to acquire any notoriety to begin with, let alone sustain the kind of viable career for which it claims to pave the way.

The feel-good vibes that Web3 so clearly wants to put out into the world mask just the kinds of corruption that inevitably lurk in the wings of any system that so closely ties psychological tendencies to commerce. Moving forward into the congenial, idiosyncratic clusters that Web3 exalts will only mean implicit and explicit messaging, encouraging us to exhibit the very feelings and behaviors that oblige the larger markets that it will always serve.

ZINE - The Skeptical Third Eye (Proverbially Speaking)

Citrine

The Skeptical Third Eye (Proverbially Speaking)

“The voice is a collective instrument,” the artist Holly Herndon observes in this conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist. “It’s formed through everyone that it comes in contact with.” Herndon’s voice is central throughout her work, whether it be music—she has made three full-length albums, along with numerous installations and exhibitions querying the intimacy between humans and our tools—or on the podcast 

, where she and Mat Dryhurst interview guests on topics spanning art, music, philosophy, and tech. Through these endeavors, she forges networks for exploration and knowledge exchange that have shaped the public discourse around emerging technologies like blockchain and AI and their impact on creative production.

Broad, networked, and generative dialogue is also central for Obrist, a curator, critic, and art historian who currently helms London’s Serpentine Galleries as artistic director. Beyond his writing and exhibition-making, Obrist has conversed with all kinds of cultural figures for his 

, generating an archive totaling over 2,000 hours of talks. This “endless conversation,” as he describes it, forms a colossal web of perspectives on the history and role of art institutions, as well as different approaches to curatorial practice.

Herndon and Obrist are both, in this sense, paradigmatic of a certain tendency of Web3: value production through networked community. Both represent highly connected and dynamic nodes within their respective social networks, forging links between artists across generations, media, practices, and time.

In the years since Obrist began his tenure at Serpentine in 2006, the art world has transformed, prodded, and been propelled by the growing influence of new technologies like the ones that Herndon explores. And although he comes from the institutional—some may say “trad”—art world, Obrist has been paying attention to developments like blockchain for some time. In 2015, we did a show together at Serpentine titled 

, which centered on the emergence of organizational norms in businesses and governments and included work about Bitcoin and its attendant notions of decentralization. Obrist also interviewed Vitalik Buterin for 

 magazine in 2018, when the ERC-721 token standard was just being adopted. Buterin refers, in that conversation, to Ethereum’s plan to eventually transition from its original consensus algorithm, proof-of-work, to the more secure and less energy-intensive proof-of-stake.

There is an aspect of timelessness in much of the technology that is commonly lauded as new—of uncanny ideas that don’t go away, but go latent, only to get resurrected later on.

The day Buterin spoke of has now arrived: the Ethereum “merge” took place in September of 2022. To mark the occasion, ETHBerlin hosted a hackathon, along with an exhibition tracing the history of Berlin’s blockchain art scene across a number of events and gallery shows, some of which I had been involved in myself. During one roundtable discussion, visitors to the show, which was curated by María Paula Fernández and Stina Gustafsson, were invited to contribute to a crowdsourced timeline. Herndon and Dryhurst, her partner and longtime collaborator, recalled that her 2015 record 

 dealt with a number of topics that would go on to occupy mindshare in the crypto scene and the legacy art world alike. Among these moments of prescience was a song titled “DAO,” which included samples from a spatially distributed performance. It was simultaneously computer-mediated and intimate, reflective of trends that had begun to emerge and predictive of those yet to come.

The exhibition also occasioned a phone call from myself to Obrist. I rang him, inviting him to come see the show, interrupting the interview you’re about to read. He answered, and put me on the spot, wondering if there was anything I wanted to ask Herndon. I went with: 

“How can you retroactively apply today’s most exciting new AI tools to the past?”

She replied by observing that today’s models are informed by the past anyway. You don’t need to be deliberately retroactive about it; they’re already working this way by design. This resonates with dynamics I have explored in my own work, including, most recently, 

, a collaboration with CryptoKitties illustrator Guile Twardowski that resurrects companies that failed during the dotcom crash as NFTs, with new, AI-generated logos based on text inputs. Like Herndon, we were interested in exploring how, through machine learning and other tools, the internet can be made to reimagine itself.

There is an aspect of timelessness in much of the technology that is commonly lauded as new—of uncanny ideas that don’t go away, but go latent, only to get resurrected later on. Even blockchain and AI can be forces of re-evaluation and revival, resurfacing forgotten moments of culture and provoking new modes of engagement with the past. Just as Herndon and Obrist use their voices to do, these tools can engender novel forms of cross-generational dialogue—and create new openings, new value, in the process.—Simon Denny

 How did it all begin? How did you come to art and music? Was there an epiphany? Was there always new technologies or did it start in a more analog way?

 No, it wasn’t an immediate childhood fascination with technology. I grew up in Appalachia, in the shadow of Dolly Parton and her legacy. I started making art and music in the church and you can certainly still hear that in the work that I make with choirs. I was scared of computers until I was an adult, and then I realized that they were actually a really interesting new instrument that I could do more with than with the analog instruments that I was using at the time.

The choir and church thing is interesting, because I’m obsessed with Hildegard von Bingen, whom I think is one of the most contemporary of our composers.

That time period, and of course her music, you could say, was an influence. She was a beast. It’s funny how music aesthetics get really baroque and complicated, and then we rediscover minimalism and history falls in on itself.

 What about other inspirations at the beginning? I recently spoke with Sylvia Wynter. Alexis Pauline Gumbs did this great book on her called 

 (2020). Gumbs says she’s obviously inspired by Sylvia Wynter, but it’s not like a genealogy, where you are inspired by the past. She said, “I’m working with Sylvia Wynter.” The question is not so much whom you’re inspired by, but whom are you working with from the past?

 I’m trying to think about technological systems dealing with AI at the moment, thinking about them as a new internet and thinking about the evolution of the internet as something that came out of humanity and human collaboration. I like to go back and think about early tool development and the early choreography that impacted our brain development, early ancestors we’re still collaborating with today. I don’t know their names, but they’re the Neanderthals and early humans that are still in our blood.

 Because we’re talking about beginnings, what is your number one in your catalogue raisonné? Visual artists, usually at some point in their life, make a catalogue raisonné; some do it towards the end of their lives and some artists never do it, it’s done posthumously. But I always think it’s interesting. What’s the first work you did which was no longer student work, where you feel the language set in?

 I think it’s when I started to use my name. Before, I was always using monikers with collaborative music projects. But I would say my first mature work was 

I could do all kinds of things with my voice if I put it into this digital space that I couldn’t do in the acoustic space, essentially exploring this intimate relationship that I was having with the laptop.

I was coming out of Mills College at the time and really embracing the laptop as my primary instrument. I was learning programming and I was using my voice as a data input stream or controller for performance. I wasn’t thinking of myself as a vocalist in the classical sense. I was trying to make laptop performance embodied and physical. I could do all kinds of things with my voice if I put it into this digital space that I couldn’t do in the acoustic space, essentially exploring this intimate relationship that I was having with the laptop.

 Because before we talk about the “Extreme Present,” to quote the book Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and I did, I just want to fast-forward through your main epiphanies. After 

 (2015). It wasn’t just an album. It came out of a series of different projects. I was really coming to terms with online life and how the politics of the platforms we were all using, like Instagram, where we had really hyper-intimate relationships, were not actually public spaces but private, for-profit spaces. I was also trying to uncover some of the more intimate and real relationships there, trying to see my digital self through that album as part of myself, not as this other. That album actually has a track on it called “DAO,” which was made in 2014. I think it was even before Ethereum was released.

 A lot of this should be credited to my partner, Mat Dryhurst. Mat was at UCLA researching decentralized website-specific posting in this project he had called 

 (2015). He was trying to make smart contracts without knowing what smart contracts were. That’s how we found out about Ethereum. There’s also a collaboration with Amnesia Scanner on that album called “An Exit,” because “exit” was a really big topic at that time. We were thinking, how do you exit from the contemporary art world? How do you exit from the current economic paradigm that we’re all in? It was very critical of platform capitalism.

 With DAOs, it’s this idea of participation. How do you think your listeners can participate in and co-decide what you do next?

 That fast-forwards us way into the present where we’re dealing with machine learning models, and I think that’s very much an interactive and collaborative experience, specifically with the voice. My voice is a product of me growing up in East Tennessee, then moving to California, and then moving to Berlin; that’s a collective instrument that was formed through everyone that it came in contact with, but yet I as an individual perform this instrument with agency. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m so obsessed with the voice: it’s always in this gray area between the collective and the individual. I think things are about to get really cool and psychedelic with how people can interact with each other’s identities and artwork and catalogue and archive—everything.

 How did you bring machine learning into your album, 

 Mat and I teamed up with a developer named Jules LaPlace who’s an American software engineer, and we just started downloading software off of GitHub and reading white papers from academia and playing around. It was really important for me to understand the fundamentals and what was possible. For example, style transfer was originally developed for images—like Hans Ulrich Obrist in the style of Van Gogh, and you could get whatever image of that—but there wasn’t that in the audio space to the same degree. We were doing spectrograms, images of sound, doing style transfer, and then transferring that spectrogram back into audio, which sounds terrible because spectrogram-to-audio is not a high-fidelity situation. But now we have all of these really high-fidelity systems for things like timbre transfer. It’s been really fun to see that unfold and develop. We started that project around 2016, and it was released in 2019. It takes a long time to make these things. We knew from the beginning that what we fed our AI baby, Spawn, was the only world that AI knew. So the data is really important.

The child evolved. Spawn the noun has evolved into Spawn the verb. We use the term “spawning” for when you’re able to create new media trained on a canon of existing media. It’s different from sampling. Sampling is a one-to-one mechanical reproduction, and 

 is a generative ability to make entirely new works in the logic of something that came before. It’s a really important distinction that is difficult for people to grasp.

 There’s a lot of discussion about AI. We had this conference hosted by Google Cultural Institute [now Google Arts & Culture] with Ian Cheng, Rachel Rose, and Hito Steyerl, and the conversation surrounded whether AI would replace human labor. I think what the artists all said is that it’s more like a collaboration. AI becomes a collaborator. Is 

, and now Spawn has evolved into a larger framework. Essentially, you could think about machine learning as a new internet. The impact is that profound. Just as the internet replaced a lot of jobs, it also created new jobs, and I’m hoping that machine learning will do the same. But we have to deal with it now and not just wait for it to unfold.

 (2021) and that was based on the 2013 libretto we commissioned from Reza Negarestani, who’s a philosopher of artificial intelligence and technology. We wanted to revive that text, and I think those are some of the first NFTs and works made using the text-to-animation ability. It’s a 13-part narrative series that we released through Foundation.

 (2021); it’s really important for me and the epiphany conversation we’re having. It’s a series of self-portraits. Think about it as a corollary to the camera, capturing the reality of that latent space. I was exploring what’s known as an embedding within that latent space. My embedding often exhibits qualities of a red braid or blue eyes. You can actually check it out with a tool that Spawning [an organization established by Herndon and Dryhurst alongside Jordan Meyer and Patrick Hoepner that is building AI tools for artists] just released this week called HaveIBeenTrained.com. You can put in your name, which would be your embedding keyword, and all of the images that show up are attached to your name in the line system. This is where things get really exciting and psychedelic. This is the public understanding of you. It’s an exercise in self-portraiture. You don’t have control over that at the moment. That’s one of the things that Spawning is trying to do: allow individuals and artists to actually tweak what their embedding is so that when somebody types in your name, you can actually feed it with the data that you want, or you can opt out of the system.

Say you’re trying to build a travel agency on top of this AI substrate—it’s important that if you put in 

 that the collective public understanding of airplane is correct and that’s a one-to-one understanding. But maybe you’re an artist that wants to be more creative with your reality. The term we’re using right now is “reality engineering,” where, in your own personal model, you can actually have 

 be whatever you want and have whatever properties you want it to have. For game development or for playing with your identity in the public data, latent space is from these public images, but you might want to artificially inseminate it with your own idea of who you are or even a collective idea. That’s what Holly+ plays with a little.

 So you can edit. It’s also an exercise in portraiture and self-portraiture. A lot of portraiture in relation to NFTs has been the simplest PFPs. With Ian Cheng’s 

 (2022)—the way your wallet changes then your portrait changes—and with your self-portraits, they’re the opposite of PFPs now.

 The way I like to think about it is it’s almost like iconography in a really classical sense. We were in the Pyrenees a couple weeks ago and we went to this Opus Dei church. They have a giant collection of Virgin Marys from around the world. The Virgin Mary embedding is a mother often with a shroud, and with a child. But then you have people from around the world contributing their idea of what the Virgin Mary is to that collective understanding. Holly+ was built on a public documentation of my personal image, but where it could go and where we want to take it and where it’s interesting is having people submit, like the Virgin Mary, their idea of what Holly+ could be or should be, and then that goes into a collective understanding of what that character is. Then we can explore the latent space of what Holly+ is as a collective hallucination.

 Can you tell me about the podcast? Because I’m a fan of your podcast.

That started during the pandemic. Podcasting is one of these socially acceptable vehicles to just write someone out of the blue you find interesting and talk to them for two hours. It’s artists, it’s engineers, it’s people from the private and public sector, academics—anyone who’s doing interesting work. Shumon Basar’s episode was really fun. He defines a lot of really interesting terminology and operates at this really wonderful place where it’s academic in nature, but approachable. We try to shine light on really interesting projects in the Web3 space, explain to people who are coming to the space new what’s actually interesting about it—not just people trying to get rich. It’s actually people criticizing the current economic paradigm of the internet and trying to come up with a new paradigm

That of course brings us to the metaverse, the current buzzword which Neal Stephenson already coined in 1992. There are all these different definitions around. What’s your view on the metaverse? Gaming companies are very well-positioned in terms of building it.

Meta might have killed the term metaverse when they rebranded themselves because nobody wants to associate with that name now. It’s this idea that we would all be living in this one world that’s controlled by one company. It’s straight out of an 80s sci-fi dystopia movie. Of course it should be a polyphony. I think that’s one of the core ideals of the Web3 space that was lost in the cacophony of money. It certainly should be a plural space and it should be a space where you can port your identities, your connections, and your communities.

So interoperability is the key to everything.

100%. That’s really important. You can spend years building a community on Instagram and then they can take it away from you like that. You have no power in that decision-making. That was one of the core ideas behind Channel, which is another side project that we did during the pandemic.

Let’s talk about unrealized projects. There are writers, novelists, poets, visual artists, and designers—all artistic forms or artistic practitioners—with unrealized projects, some because they’re too expensive to be realized and some because of censorship.

Social norms are just a series of self-censorships.

My friend, the late Doris Lessing, said: the most important projects we should ask about, or should ask for, are actually the projects we haven’t done. I always wanted to write a novel, but I think it’d probably be embarrassing so I haven’t completed it yet.

 Oh, you should do it though, even if it is embarrassing.

 Right? And that’s a form of self-censorship. What are Holly Herndon’s unrealized projects?

If we can’t yet speak about them because they’re still under wraps, we can talk a little bit about the music you’re doing right now. What’s next?

We finally finished “Jolene.” We’re having it mastered.

Our conversation today began with Dolly Parton.

 She’s the patron saint of northeast Tennessee. Where I came from, she’s a really important figure. There’s a complex feeling when you come from a place like Appalachia. There can be a lot of shame, because it’s not a part of the world that’s necessarily celebrated, so having someone like her who embraces where she comes from was helpful for me as a child. I wanted to do a homage to her.

We have a new model of Holly+. The first model we released was with never-before-heard sounds, and that’s a polyphonic aestheticized version that was trained on my processed vocal stems. You can throw any audio file onto the interface and you get a choir singing back to you. The new version that we have was made with Voctro Labs. That’s a very naturalistic version trained on my natural singing voice, which is something that I don’t often release. Dealing with my natural singing voice was something that was complicated for me at the beginning.

We are working at the forefront of industry and trying to put together an infrastructure and a framework for artists to be able to have some control over their models, their own likeness.

 I found an interview saying you knew Voctro Labs from YouTube and then approached them, and it led to this interesting collaboration.

Jordi Bonada was actually involved in Vocaloid, which is Hatsune Miku. That’s a sample-based system. It’s not machine learning, but he’s been doing vocal tech for decades, and honestly, I think he’s the world’s leading person on vocal tech.

From Barcelona. He’s a researcher. He’s not a very public person, but I’ve been watching his lectures. He’s been releasing his research to the public for years, and I think he’s a hero. I always wanted to work with him, so I contacted him and his collaborator, Jordi Janer. They have this company called Voctro Labs. They were doing all this choral modeling for choral software for people to practice choral singing. I said, “Can we make a custom Holly model?” And they said, “Of course,” so we used that to make the “Jolene” track. We fed that Holly+ system “Jolene” by Dolly Parton, and then my friend, Ryan Norris, who’s a really beautiful guitar player, did some great finger-picking along with it.

We’re releasing a video in the next couple weeks with Sam Rolfes. He’s very connected to gaming. He built a gaming world essentially based on a pastiche of my childhood. He put himself in a motion capture suit that’s attached to an avatar of a Holly, and he performs the Dolly Parton song in this gaming world for the video. We just did a performance in Helsinki in August called

. That was the first large-scale performance I had done using this vocal timbre transfer technique. The new naturalistic version of Holly+ that they already made has a real-time system so you can sing into a microphone and, in real-time, my voice will come out. It’s really wild. I did a TedTalk on this several months ago.

 Can you tell us in a short synthesis the message of your TedTalk?

 Well, it is essentially explaining how some of these personal model systems work. It explains the concept of spawning and the idea of identity play: training a voice model and an image likeness model on an individual. It unlocks the ability for other people to perform through that individual—in this case, me, because I own my own IP. For the TedTalk my friend Pher performs first as himself and then as me so that you can see it in real time.

, I made an autobiographical play where I’m dealing with this idea of embedding a pastiche of my own childhood. Sam Rolfes and his collaborator Alexander Bowman created a virtual world of their idea of an East Tennessee childhood. They made an avatar version of me played by my friend Ryan Norris (who’s playing guitar on “Jolene”) and Sam Fuller-Smith (who is a vocalist from North Carolina) performing as me. Also, we have a choir, Philomela Choir from Helsinki, and they’re all wearing Holly embeddings which means that they all have a Holly-like presence.

 It’s brilliant. Sam Rolfes brings us to the question of gaming. Do you have any projects with games, and is there a Holly Herndon game in the making?

 I feel like the container of the game, not so much, but I like the ideas from gaming very much—that you can engineer your own reality

The way that I’m trying to think about it is a little bit less of a separate container and more of something that bleeds into reality. I think gaming is a huge influence on that. A lot of the work that people have done with worldbuilding—Ian Cheng and other artists—is very interesting. David Kanaga—we just did an episode with him on 

—is an independent game developer and composer, and he does really psychedelic games. He did a dog opera about universal basic income several years ago that was very good. His most recent project is a restaging of Wagner, and it’s narrated by Stephen Fry.

This is what artists are doing all the time anyway: we’re trying to create a reality that otherwise doesn’t exist. An in-person IRL game—there’s a lot to be done there—especially with this reality-modeling stuff. For me, it’s a question of: where’s the border of the game?

Do you want to create a missing infrastructure for artists to participate in? Can one say that you’re building an infrastructure?

Definitely, we’re doing that actively with Spawning. We are working at the forefront of industry and trying to put together an infrastructure and a framework for artists to be able to have some control over their models, their own likeness. Not just artists: individuals, people. Imagine a Disney film that comes out in five years, and someone’s kid wants to be the princess in the movie. This will be possible. You can be the character.

There has to be a privacy component to it, but the cool thing is that even the more cavalier developer communities want artists to feel good about their data being used. They want an infrastructure in place. No one has built it yet. So that is what Mat and I are trying to do: create a permissive IP environment where people can give consent, and remunerate or set rules around their own likeness. If they choose to opt out or if they choose certain ways that they want their model to interact, it’s important that there’s a consent mechanism in place. There is not one at the moment.

The good news is that we’ve spoken to almost all of the top studios and companies that are building these models and they all want a consent infrastructure. That’s what we’re trying to build. People can opt in or opt out. More people will opt in than out because it is the new internet.

Most people opted in to participate in the internet and then, once opted in, have some control over who they are in that space. You should be able to control what the collective understanding of you is online.

That
Cult
of
Personality?
Don’t
Let
it
Ruin
my
Retreat

Against
Interpretation

Choral
Works

Niall
Ashley
and
Matthew
Stone:
Beyond
Screen
and
Canvas

The
Skeptical
Third
Eye
(Proverbially
Speaking)

Holly
Herndon:
Epiphany
Epiphany
Epiphany

Here
Lies
Data

Alex
Bornyakov:
Ukraine,
The
Cyber
Front

Art
is
Property

Kilo
Kish:
Latashá
and
Kilo
Dox
Each
Other

Midday
Marauders

The
New
Robber
Barons

Wallet
Readings:
What
Kind
of
Collector
Are
You?

Jaron
Lanier:
The
Octopus
Is
on
Line
Two

Proof
of
History:
Against
Decentralization

Chaos:
Confessions
From
a
Headless
Band

Hyperstructures
Redux

Kevin
Kelly:
Daddy
Issues

Intergenerational
Dynamics:
A
Manifesto

The
Ice
Caps
Are
Melting
And
So
Is
My
Brain

No
Shortage
of
Brilliance:
Tyler
Hobbs
and
Herbert
W.
Franke

Snobbery
Isn’t
Dead

ThatCultofPersonality?Don’tLetitRuinmyRetreat

AgainstInterpretation

ChoralWorks

NiallAshleyandMatthewStone:BeyondScreenandCanvas

TheSkepticalThirdEye(ProverbiallySpeaking)

HollyHerndon:EpiphanyEpiphanyEpiphany

HereLiesData

AlexBornyakov:Ukraine,TheCyberFront

ArtisProperty

KiloKish:LatasháandKiloDoxEachOther

MiddayMarauders

TheNewRobberBarons

WalletReadings:WhatKindofCollectorAreYou?

JaronLanier:TheOctopusIsonLineTwo

ProofofHistory:AgainstDecentralization

Chaos:ConfessionsFromaHeadlessBand

HyperstructuresRedux

KevinKelly:DaddyIssues

IntergenerationalDynamics:AManifesto

TheIceCapsAreMeltingAndSoIsMyBrain

NoShortageofBrilliance:TylerHobbsandHerbertW.Franke

SnobberyIsn’tDead