That Was The Week That Was – 14th August 2022
It's been a tough week in many ways. I generally don't talk about personal things on my blog but the week has been dominated by elderly parent issues which are ongoing. Whilst I'm proud of the NHS in this country it can also be incredibly slow moving and frustrating, despite all the hard work from everyone working within it.
Escape Key
Press Any Key to Escape was sold on SuperRare to art_pleb. This real-time generative work is currently on display at the SuperRare gallery on West Broadway in New York as part of the Ghost in the Machine show, curated by Mika Bar-on Nesher, till the 20th August. The collector also receives the mini-pc – a Latte Panda – which drives the work so it can make these patterns for the rest of time. I'm looking into making more of these tiny generative art machines for future work.
The Beast
At the beginning of the week I ordered a new Mac – a Mac Studio M1 Ultra with 128GB of Ram, 4TB of SSD and 20 core CPU and 48 core GPU. On the Apple website it was giving a delivery date of November but managed to find one in stock from Jigsaw, whereupon it arrived next day after my order went in. Using my Time Machine backup Apple Migration Assistant took 22 hours to transfer everything from my iMac Pro to the Mac Studio. The Migration Assistant is really impressive – everything worked fine on the Mac Studio, even all my command line and Vim settings. The reason for upgrading my Mac was partly due to having something nice and powerful for the Eno project with Gary Hustwit, which involves a lot of video. I'm yet to really put it through its paces but so far I'm really impressed.
Making an FXHash of it
The majority of the week was taken up with getting my debut drop on FXHash ready. After people clambering to get on the allow list – which now numbered 2000 – It seemed it was going to be a sellout. Or so I thought. When Friday arrived, and the clock passed 4pm there was pretty much silence. Many were underwhelmed with the work, expecting more obvious variations, and the majority on the reserve list – which was now limited to 250 – didn't want to mint it either. Many cited it was too expensive. Eventually things did pick-up a little and after some discussion on my Discord, I decided to burn the remaining editions, making it an edition of 128 which minted out.
Lots of learnings with this drop with regards price, variations, expectations and being seduced by an allow list which pretty much means nothing. Some people also seemed to be under the miss comprehension that good generative art should be complex. Let me explain my thinking: that's utter bullshit. There's only one thing which matters and that's if the work resonates with the viewer. Nothing else matters.I think going forward if I do another drop on FXHash I won't announce it ahead of time nor will I do any kind of allow list – it's just too much of a headache.
Conferences
Had a great call about appearing at an art conference at the beginning of October in London with an incredible line-up. More details on that soon. A week later I'll be heading to Mexico City for OFFF MX. It'll be my first time in Mexico so very much looking forward to that.
Tribute to a Legend
On Friday a tribute to computer arts pioneer Herbert W. Franke was announced, curated by Anika Meier, which I'm very honoured to be a part of. His book sits on the shelf above me as it has for the last few years. The tribute will launch at the end of September.
