Salon 12 // Carter Hodgkin, Michael Rees, Colin Goldberg, Michael Price

Oh, okay. Please ask. Oh, I need permission to record now. Hold on. Yeah, apparently I lost my permission to record. Everybody has gotten a permission pop up. Did you sign into Zoom before the meeting started, Davo? Like, would that email address or something? I made you a co-host, so you could try it now, but that could be it, too, if you had signed out of Zoom, possibly. It might not be recognized. It says it's recording. Oh, yep, it's recording now. Okay. I'm not sure what that was about, but all right. Things happen. I initiated a cloud recording, so we're definitely recording there, I think. Yeah, and it is recording on my end, too. Is it? Yep. All right. Sure is.

Davonte Bradley

Okay. Hello, hello. Welcome, everyone. My name is Davonte Bradley, and welcome to our 12th Techspressionism virtual salon. It is 3 February 2nd. I mean, not February. Wow. March 2nd, 2021. 2 p.m., 2 10 p.m.-ish. And welcome, welcome. We have quite a few presentations lined up for today. That's usually our format. We have Colin Goldberg here, who is the person who coined the term Techspressionism and kind of helped bridge and collect all of us here in this wonderful space.

Davonte Bradley

He's going to be our, essentially, our timekeeper. We've gotten a little lax on that these days, but it's all good. Yeah, I mean, I'm inclined to just sort of do away with the idea of timekeeping, you know, like, you know, 10, 15 minutes, something like that. I would feel really not, so inclined to say, you know, time out, because it's really getting in. So, you know, I'm here as a vestige in that capacity.

Davonte Bradley

Oh, how the job titles change so fast. All right. So, typical format is, first, we have our five presenters, our five art presenters. Among them today, we have Colin and... I actually wrote this down. I've misplaced it. Colin, Michael Price, Randy, and... Apparently, I did not write down the other two people. I know Michael Rees is in the lineup. Michael Rees, yeah.

Davonte Bradley

And... Carter. Carter. Sorry. Okay. So, Carter, Michael Rees, Michael Price, Colin, and... And Randy. So, those are going to be our five presenters for the day. After the presentations, we will have kind of an introduce yourself, general discussion kind of time, go over what's going on with the movements, the content we're producing, all that good stuff. All right. Sound good to everybody?

Davonte Bradley

And we can dive right into our first presentation, which we're going to be handing that off to Carter. Hi. All right. Okay. Yeah, before. Let me... Thank you.

Thanks for having me. Let me share my screen. Okay. Slide show. All right. I decided to do a PowerPoint so I can zip through things quickly. And I'm going to talk more in the beginning than I am towards the end. So, I hope I don't go too... I'm not a big talker at this time. I'm not a big talker at this time. So, anyway. So, I'm going to start at the beginning of after I got out of art school, which was VCU in Richmond.

Carter Hodgkin

And I moved to San Francisco. I was influenced by the postmodernist that we're engaging in process. So, let me go to my next screen. I started working with oil pastel on rice paper panels. And in engaging in a procedural drawing process to generate abstract sequences of colored squares. And these could be replicated indefinitely.

Carter Hodgkin

And this is a detail of the rice paper, the oil pastel and pencil. My aim was to have the order of the sequences be decoded by the viewer and engage them in a sort of pattern recognition during the process of looking. So, I'm going to go to my next screen. And I have to say at the outset, I have a background as a painter. And I've been compelled to somehow keep painting and keep my focus on bringing what I see as a digital visual language into into painting. Hey Carter, I don't mean to interrupt, but is anybody else able to see Carter's screen?

Carter Hodgkin

Is it just me that can't see it? Yes, I can see it. It's good. That's weird. Okay, apparently I'm the only one that can't. That's all the technical difficulties. Sorry to interrupt. That's okay. I guess I'll figure it out on my end. Okay. When I moved to New York in 1980 and I was taken aback by the ongoing discourse about photography painting. And I was taken aback by the ongoing discourse about photography painting. And the nature of representation. And no one talking about anything digital.

Carter Hodgkin

It just kind of I couldn't understand why that was happening. So this is a painting from the mid-'80s. And let me go to the next slide. So I started exploring the idea of imaging that I had been exposed to. In California and San Francisco. And at the same time there were a lot of new technologies like MRIs, SEMs and PET scans. So I saw this as an interesting intersection between representation and abstraction.

Carter Hodgkin

And I started seeing similarities between art and science and how each tends to be used as a mapping tool or system. And... Okay. So... One of my goals has always been to avoid a slick computer graphic presentation of my work. So... And bring back the hand and the tactile to the digital language. I was also really interested in the congruence I saw between imagery of ancient origins and the high tech. So in a piece like this... I'm painting... I started generating fractal geometry early on before... That was my first paint program, really. I don't even remember what it was. But... You know, I have a photo... Slip screen of... I would have computer chips and then these long vertical images are from the Maori...

Carter Hodgkin

Kind of patterns that they were... They would do on different things. So I was combining a lot of imagery from high and low tech at that point. This was the mid 80s, 1987. So now I'm going to jump. I used a lot of different materials and methods during this period. So I'm going to jump to the 90s. And I started getting more interested in cells and looking at scanning electron microscopy. So I would scan images into Photoshop and get what I would call an edge detection. Edging of the form. And then I would print these out on rice paper panels.

Carter Hodgkin

Well, rice paper. And then collage them onto larger rice paper panels. So this was called the specimen series. So I'm just going to show a few of these. So... That's before Amina Farah. So... Okay. So I'm fast forwarding again. And now we're at 2005. But I'm referring to... This image was done in... It's a detail of a painting done in the mid 80s where I was using bubble chamber photography.

Carter Hodgkin

I had... When I was in San Francisco, I had a... I had a physicist friend who worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. And he showed me these images of bubble chamber reactions that he was doing in his experiments. And they really charmed me for their eccentricity and their quality of the lines. And I became fascinated by them. I used them a lot in pieces during the 80s.

Carter Hodgkin

But in 2004, I found that I could actually... Well, I went on the website for processing and downloaded it and found I could generate my own bubble chamber collisions, which has led to a lot of the work I've been doing since then. And it's been a lot of fun. And it kind of ties into the procedural process that I've worked with before, previously.

Carter Hodgkin

So these are... There are three of them. These are from a series called Electromagnetic Drawings. And they're on... They're 12... No, 17 by 22 inches on handmade paper and they're watercolor. And I engage in a procedural generation process where I select behaviors for the particles. And they form densities of spirals and lines. When I generate the reaction, I never know exactly what I'm going to get. So it's a kind of a process of randomness.

Carter Hodgkin

But I transfer them onto paper in this process and paint on top and bring out different aspects of what I've captured. So that's a detail. That's another piece. And here's another piece. So in terms of randomness, something really random happened to me in 2006. I got shortlisted for a public art project that I never applied for. And I actually got the project, which was even more surprising.

Carter Hodgkin

So I had to figure out what I was going to do. And my proposal was to create a mosaic. So I don't know if I should... Let me get rid of that. That's in the way. So this was at Queens College. It's a three-story addition to the science building. And the collision starts at the top and falls all the way down to the bottom. So you can see from the curtain wall how the collision is at the top and falling to the bottom. And then there are columns. So there are columns. And these are lounges for the students. So each floor is a lounge with the column and the wall. And then on the side, I'll show you, there's...

Carter Hodgkin

Whoops. So this is a close-up with me to give a little scale and show how reflective some of the tiles are. Let me go to the next slide. This is the bottom wall. And it's really hard to photograph these. Because they look amazing in person with the tiles. But they're very small here. This is like an 11-foot high by 16-foot wide wall in mosaic. And each tile is 10 millimeters. And it corresponds to a pixel in the image.

Carter Hodgkin

Here's the hallway. And that's a close-up on the right-hand side. So you can see the tiles. And on the... In these hallways, there's a curtain wall here on the left of glass. So if you're outside, you can see all the particles wrapping around the columns and going vertically down three floors. So that was my first mosaic. And then Neiman Marcus asked me to do a mosaic for this curved wall they had. And it became the ladies' shoe department, Champagne Bar.

Carter Hodgkin

And so I created this collision that happens in the middle and emanates outward to wrap, to envelop the viewer in the collision and the particles and the spirals. This, I'm not sure how it's going to show up. But it's very reflective. It does show better. It's not the greatest photograph. The tiles themselves.

Carter Hodgkin

And that's what the Champagne Bar looks like. Okay. So then I'm just going through... This is another commission I received from Capital One in 2018. And for this wall, it's... I think it's 12 or 11 feet high by 45 feet long. And I decided to create this wall. And I'm going to show you this collision where the...

Carter Hodgkin

It's coming down from the bottom, from the top of the wall, coming down to the bottom and emanating from the top. So this is a side view. These are hard to photograph. But here's a close-up. So you can really see how the tiles are. They're very luscious. So I've been painting and transposing these collisions in different ways. But became dissatisfied with the last body of work I did. And started taking this process of the tiles and the collisions into painting with collage, basically. And I'm creating this... So I'm doing backgrounds and printing those and then collaging on the top with squares of paper that I color. Or I've been doing a lot of printing of global warming diagrams because they really interest me. And they're kind of scary to look at.

Carter Hodgkin

So this is a detail. I'm gluing these pieces of paper together. This allows me to work out a lot of ideas that I might not be able to do, you know, until I get a commission for a mosaic. But I'm enjoying this process and what it's bringing to the work. This is a... I've done a lot. But I'm just trying to get through this quickly. So this is a close-up of the process. And I'm going to show you the previous slide.

Carter Hodgkin

And so I'm having a lot of fun doing those. And... Uh-oh. That doesn't show the most... I've been doing a lot of... Let me get the PDF. Let's go to... It's not letting me forward. Go to... The animations. Uh-oh. Okay. I'll go on my website. So I've been doing animations as well. And these were at the LED lab in New York, unfortunately. The LED lab doesn't exist there anymore.

Carter Hodgkin

But they had all these... They had a controller. So you could just load the file into the controller. And then it would play on all their different screens. And it's... I loved it. Let me fast forward. So it's... The thing I like about it is that it's almost like the act of painting or something playing out as an animation.

Carter Hodgkin

Carter, I don't know if we're seeing what you're showing. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't... Maybe... Yeah. Maybe I'm having a Davonte moment, too. Maybe it's just my screen. But I noticed when I did PowerPoint, it takes over the entire presentation. And you almost have to get out of share and go back in when you're not in PowerPoint. Because I found when I've done PowerPoint, it's very hard to get to that... I have to leave....other things. So maybe I'm wrong. But I'm still looking at your PowerPoint presentation. Thank you. Okay. No, don't leave. Just stop sharing. And come back in again. Yeah.

Carter Hodgkin

Stop the screen share and then start it again. Okay. Let me get back in this. It is something... It's good for people to know if you're going to do a PowerPoint, it'll... At least I haven't figured it out. It'll take over everything. So either put everything in there and link to your website and then come back or just do what we're doing now. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Let me share the screen.

Carter Hodgkin

They should make the screen sharing a bit easier, I think. Okay. Can you all see the animations? Yeah, video, right? Yeah. Okay. So you can see them kind of playing out in time. Okay. Let's see. Okay. So that's not working that well. But... Can you all see that animation? Not really? Yes, I can see it. Okay. So...

Carter Hodgkin

All right. Well, I'll stop it. But it's on my website. It'll play better in a different situation. I don't know why it's so slow right now. And I can't move... Here we go. Let me see if I can move this forward. Yeah. It looks great for me. Oh, good. Looks great. Yeah. I would like to get one and be able to afford to get someone to fabricate one of these orbs or cubes.

Carter Hodgkin

And I've looked into it. It's expensive. So I haven't done anything. Okay. So that's it for me. Thank you. Great work. Thanks. Awesome. Really beautiful. Thanks. Thank you so much, Carter. Thank you. It was great. I wish I could have seen the majority of it, but it didn't actually start working until like the last 10 seconds. So I saw the last 10 seconds of it. The whole thing? Yeah. The whole thing. I couldn't see it. But if you wouldn't mind potentially sharing the PowerPoint itself or sending that to me so I could see... Did anybody else see the PowerPoint or was it not showing at all? For me, it was missing. It was missing. If you could paste the link to your website in the chat, that would be great too. So people can apparently could just... I did that already. I put that in there. Yeah.

Carter Hodgkin

My website's better. I just didn't want to flip around on the website because it would touch... I think hopefully it should show up in the recording because I was seeing it on my end. Oh good. Okay. Yeah. It's just, I'm not sure what was going along with my... Zoom itself is crashing a bit somehow on my end, but I'm still in the chat. I don't... I don't know what's going on with it. It's having a moment.

Carter Hodgkin

Hopefully for the next presentation, it should be fine. If not, I might have to leave and come back really quick and see if that'll fix anything. That being said, did anyone have any questions for Carter that they want to ask or any comments? No. If not, I'm going to see what's Hey, Gary, your mic is not...

Carter Hodgkin

Oh my God, what happened? What happened? Your mic is very much malfunctioning. All the technical issues today. All of them. I say it just is. Yeah, it's just not. I was wondering if that was some crazy audio filter. That was great. I needed a laugh like that. Well if you if you do have something to say gary you might be better off just typing in the chat at this point or maybe unplug your mic if it's external or oh zoom zoom's a zoom's a fun creature sometimes and technology is a fun creature sometimes well I have a question to carter love your work carter love the whole history of it where I how are you putting these mosaics and like the globe together do you work with outside artists or manufacturers or well the led is are my animations which are on my website they're just plain old animations but they look really amazing on these leds!

Carter Hodgkin

Displays that are configured in a certain way I haven't done anything because they're too expensive for me to produce and I haven't found a place that would I just haven't made that connection I'm really a painter that stays in my studio a lot so and I just retired from teaching that's another big excuse for not getting it out there more but as the mosaics they tend to just people have contacted me I tried applying a lot for maybe seven years to different things and nothing ever happened so I kind of stopped and then something started happening with people asking me so that's how that happens and I fabricated all myself with assistance does that answer the question yes it does thank you well so you did the mosaic yeah wow I'm super impressed they're fun I really like the mosaic with the idea of the cloud chamber because it's measuring you know the smallest particles possible and then the mosaic is like the pixel like is this really nice that's what I'm trying to realize them in I can't always verbalize it sometimes but yeah that's the core the core idea all right

That was a great presentation that the bit that I did get to see hopefully I'll be able to see the whole thing a bit later but moving right along long. We have a presentation by Michael Rees. So, Michael, you do have the floor. And everyone, if you are not speaking or not presenting, please mute yourself until the presentation is over. Thank you so much. Okay, great. Thanks. And hi, everybody. And I see a lot of familiar faces, old friends and new friends. Hi, Carter. Nice to see you and Patrick and Ann. And, you know, I'm sure there's others on the call. I haven't been through the whole list. But hi, everybody. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to share from my website.

Michael Rees

And so that shouldn't be a problem or it hasn't been in the past, except that my desktop is super messy. So let me just try to make it so that it's not so messy. So yeah, my website is MichaelReese.org. And one of the big events of August of 2020 is that I finally published a book that was called Sight and Parasite, which was at Grounds for Sculpture. And I'll be talking about that today. But it's a big, beautiful book, and I hope you all get it. And it's better, of course, to get it from IndieBound than Amazon. But, you know, it's up to you. But so shameless plug. I'm starting off with a shameless plug. So Synthetic Shells, Sight and Parasite was an exhibition that ran, I was very fortunate, it ran for almost two and a half years. And it started in June of 2018 and it closed in January of 2021.

Michael Rees

And, you know, it's a little bit, you know, sometimes you work on a project, it took almost three and a half years to realize this project. There was a lot of research involved, and I did a lot of things that I had never done before, which I like to do. I always like, but it's also like flying naked. You know, you just don't know if you're going to land the plane properly, or whatever the case may be. So, but what's, but it's also I think kind of important to acknowledge that this was sort of a sister show or brother show to a previous show that I had done called Clowntown, which was a little very different, but it's worth mentioning. This is a very political show. It's a very complicated show. I didn't try to make it easy for anybody. The titles were really long. The titles themselves had footnotes in them.

Michael Rees

I conceived of the show as a picaresque novel, and the central character was a clown. That show opened in October of 2016, the month of the election, the month of maybe the worst day of the last four years of our lives. You know, so it was a very, and it was about that. It was about the, you know, the clown character or clownishness. And it was about this sort of leveling. But at the same time, it also developed. I developed a platform where I was dealing with physical objects with augments or targets for augments. And then I was dealing with the actual interactive augmented screen. And you know, I won't go into this show, sorry, I won't go into Clowntown in great detail, except to say that because it's a difficult show, it's difficult to explain, it's difficult to understand what I was doing.

Michael Rees

It's difficult to understand, you know, it's lots of rationale. But at the same time, it was a super rich show for me. It opened, it was like, it's like doing the research and opening up all kinds of territories for yourself. You know, like one of the strange things is that after I was done with this show, I felt more that I had written a show rather than I had made a show. And I found that to be a really intriguing metaphor. 00.04.08.05 the physical objects I made you know I printed all the photographs I did all the augmented reality but at the end of the day that conceptual framework was everything for the show even though I'm have always been extremely involved in manufacture of objects and you know I sort of think of myself as a sculptor maybe in a 21st century kind of way but nonetheless a sculptor so against that backdrop I got invited to do this you know present a presentation for this exhibition and the exhibition I'll explain the title in just a moment but it was at grounds for sculpture which is in southern new jersey near it's near trenton it's in a place called hamilton township and I don't know if any of you have been there but it's seward johnson's sort of pet project he was he fancied himself a sculptor and many of his sculptures are all over the campus but actually and so it has a kind of a weird vibe to it a lot of people don't like it they don't know about it they don't take it seriously whatever the interesting thing to me is that place is sort of under the cover of seward johnson has often exhibited really interesting sculpture over the years and done really interesting projects and you know at the same time seward was and was this sort of straddled the time when he said I'm out I'm no longer supporting this end of life kinds of issues and they wanted to really step forward with a new program with a new possibility for sculpture and to look at sculpture in that new way new way and the other thing is I'd come off of doing that show of the clown town show and I felt that I had such a strange bunch of problems around doing such a complex and political show in that time and one of the things that I felt really strongly was that the analysis of power which we are all tempted to do and to engage in the watching the news and reading between the lines and figuring out what these people are up to whatever and then arguing about it all the time or posting about it or making a point it seemed like it really didn't change anything it wasn't working the critical position of course it's extremely important I'm not arguing that it's not important but I'm what this moment for me was I wanted to set up a different experience a different kind of experience and that experience could be could be joy and so that was my goal was to create an exhibition that was joyous and joyful and that was full of the same kind of strangeness because if anything my work and my And my research, my attitude, I'm really extremely interested in the strange.

Michael Rees

I'm extremely interested in the feelings that one engages when one experiences something that is hard to fit into their conceptual framework, hard to fit into their world. And I think it's useful to say that for me, you know, the strange and all that fits so beautifully with the experience of augmented reality. And augmented reality is such it is such an interesting and strange thing in and of itself it's a media that's so self-conscious in a way it's you're never can you're never you're never into believing that it's somehow real. You're never fooled into thinking that, oh, I'm seeing this thing on the screen and that's the real world. And then the sculpture that I'm seeing is the fake world. It's always the other way around. You know you're seeing a contrived event. And that development of a contrived event is, again, it was like the writer's room.

Michael Rees

It's like trying to fit it into your framework, into your idea, and spending time writing it and rewriting it and rewriting it again. So the structure of these objects are such that there's an overall, oh, let me just get this out of the way right off the bat. You see all that hardware? Yeah. That's because the art space rents that room out some 60 times a year. And so I had to devise a system. I mean, I could have told them to hell with it. I'm not going to do the show. Because I much prefer not to have all that hardware around. In fact, I'm very unhappy about it. But at the same time, the point was is that I could pull those sculptures up into the air using a little app. And we Bluetoothed the winches and, you know, the cable so we could pull it up into the air so people can have a party underneath the show.

Michael Rees

And then it could come down into the space when they were done and be presented like that. And, you know, the place was so wonderful. And they engaged me so thoroughly. And they really supported me that, you know, I guess that's sort of a small price to pay to not be able to have the, you know, the perfect visage for the show. But so, so try to ignore those.

Michael Rees

Sorry, but true. Maybe we'll see them someday in a way that doesn't have all that hardware around it. Actually, I did a second show and I did do that. But so here's the thing is that these sculptures have sort of this physical presence, which is the double chambered inflatable object. They have the target or the augment, which really speaks to, you know, that first, the sculptures really speak to the language of sculpture. Speak to a kind of modernism and a kind of, you know, a kind of modernism. Utopianism, etc. And I really had conceived of the underlying tone of the show as being a collision of utopias, right? The one utopia, maybe from the 60s of, you know, I loved House Rooker. And there's a lot of quote in a weird way to House Rooker and to their sci-fi.

Michael Rees

And sci-fi wasn't science fiction. It was a portmanteau of psychological or psychology and physics. Sci-fi. And I just, you know, I don't know. I just love that. I love that construction. I always have. And I always was so inspired by House Rooker. And so, you know, that famous document, the piece where the bubble is coming out of the side of the building and all that stuff. And there was a utopian moment. We were going to live in plastic houses.

Michael Rees

Also, there was a guy named Quasar Khan, who was a Vietnamese designer that was living in Paris. I was so interested in that guy. I thought he was so amazing. And so, you know, so there's that physical moment. There's a modernist utopian language that is certainly built into that. Then there's this sort of photography thing and all the tropes and memes and whatever that are not mostly tropes that engage photography. And then finally, there's the interactive component or the augmented reality component, which is, you know, once again, such an odd thing. And each one sort of destabilizes the next one. So, I mean, I sort of conceived of this experience as an extremely destabilizing.

Michael Rees

And as you can see, what happens is a pig appears in, well, different augments have different things. Usually animals and insects commensal with humans. So there was a fly, a turtle, butterflies, rooster. And then there was a pair of feet, which probably had no business in the show. You know, but whatever. I mean, you know, I was landing the plane naked, as I told you. But, you know, there were animations. And not only were they animations. But you could interact with them. So this pig walked, this big old pig walked in the middle of the screen. And then you could interact with it with your fingers. You could move it. You could zoom in on it. You could orbit it. You could rotate it. And basically, it became an instrument for people who were comfortable. And that was often people, you know, under a certain age.

Michael Rees

You know, people that were comfortable with digital media to perform. And so it became another interaction happened on top of it. And that was that people would pose themselves in the composition that you see on that tablet. You know, either being trampled on the pig or taking a bite out of the pig or what have you. And then they would take a photograph of the whole thing.

Michael Rees

I can't hear you. Yeah. So we have some more technical difficulties happening again. I can't hear. Yeah. Screen share is still going. But it looks like the audio has become destabilized. I guess we will kind of hang out until he returns. Or try to. Yeah. I can hear you, Davo. But not Michael. He might have actually disconnected. Like that sounded like, yep, there he goes.

Michael Rees

Okay. I'm back, I think. Are you all still there? We are. I'm wondering how long I went on before. It was only a couple of seconds. Oh, good. Maybe like 15 seconds that you were out. Don't you hate that when you're like talking on the phone, you're on for 15 minutes and the person's been gone, you know, whatever. So the point that I was trying to make is that these objects became multivalent. And they became obviously multivalent. Right? And so people had that direct experience. Because you could zoom in and zoom out, focus on any aspect of that object in any way. And oh, sorry. Let me share my screen again.

Michael Rees

There we go. And so, you know, so here's other pieces. Not every single piece had an augment on them. You know, I had to work, you know, getting augments to read on the shiny surface was really, I think Anne Spalter and I have emailed actually about getting augments to read on balloons. Really not an easy thing to do. But, you know, some of them, mostly they all worked. Mostly they all worked. And, you know, this one was, you know, they had titles like Synth Cell 001, Synth Cell 002, Synth Cell 003. Et cetera.

Michael Rees

This is a clown image with the ants crawling out of its head. That's what would happen. An animation would happen. This was a particularly striking piece. They're very large. And I don't have that many good shots of people next to them. But that's about 12 feet tall, 12 feet cubed. And so they really have a wonderful physical presence for you. And they're very, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if it's because it's the same material that beach balls are made out of or whatever. But there's some pillowy kind of interactive thing that happens between a human body and that kind of surface. It's not a hard surface. You know it to be soft. You expect it to be that way. And, you know, at the same time, I was, you know, I just really enjoyed this, doing these texture maps that then got printed onto the objects and stuff.

Michael Rees

Again, this was the object that was maybe an outline. Or a non sequitur. It didn't really quite make a lot of sense. I mean, I guess I love the non sequitur. And I guess that these objects are often non sequiturs. There's a turtle. And this turtle is a clock. But it's a three-second clock. So it rotates. And it does so, you know, X number of times, 10 times around a 360-degree circle. And it puts its head out every three seconds. So it rotates three seconds out, three seconds out, three seconds out. And so I was making a clock. Then, of course, I had the requisite fly. Oh, my God, I love this fly so much. And this fly is such a delight, you know, to have something that really people despise. And yet it does these elegant things. It rubs its proboscis in it. Flies up into the air. And, you know, it squiggles around.

Michael Rees

And trying to engage this as quickly as possible. And it's, you know, and then the rooster, of course, which is such an artificial colored rooster and all this stuff. And then interactive, you know, the rooster walked around and did all kinds of things. The butterflies, et cetera. Now, I'm kind of short-handing this a little bit because I want to also introduce another aspect to this exhibition. And that is the synthetic cells aspect. And what I did was I invited, well, you know, it was a whole big rigmarole. Because we invited curators who then curated a shell on top of my shell. Now, that may sound a little bit odd or you may say, well, you just did a group exhibition or something. But the goal from the very beginning of when I proposed this project to them, I told them that I wanted other people to create augments to be in the show.

Michael Rees

And we had discussed for a long time that it would be open, that anyone could create an augment. And there were all kinds of logistical, primarily logistical hurdles to making that happen. So, you know, I wanted to open it up to the world and let anybody in the world put their augments on it. But that's not what happened. So we decided to be very focused about it. And we decided to invite each individual artist to create an augment, to create an app that was on the tablet and each of them could experience it. And I can't talk to all of these people's works. But they're all, I admire them all so much. I'm so proud that they were part of my show. And they all did it. They did beautiful and fantastic works. And if you know some of them, John Craig Freeman and Claudia Hart, I'm sure you know some of them, Will Pappenheimer, Tamiko Thiel, and Carla Gannis and Chris Manzione.

Michael Rees

And the show is curated by Ed Winkelmann and Marat Orozcov. Right? And so, you know, I, it's worth, I hope you guys will go to the website. I hope you'll go. I hope you'll read about each one of these people and their works and what they did. And I hope you'll really try to experience it in full, in full away as possible.

Michael Rees

Again, there's also the book. And, you know, I want to break for just a moment to my library, my photo library here. And I want to go to the sketchbook. Oh, boy. I'm sorry. I probably should have set this up a little bit in advance. I did a bunch of, sorry about this. I was on a faculty meeting just before this show. I teach at William Patterson University. And we're going to go through like 100 job cuts and everybody's freaking out. So, sorry, I'm a little disoriented today.

Michael Rees

But it's in here somewhere. I know it is. Don't you love your photo library? I just love my photo library. Okay. Here we go. Here we go. I'll only play one of these. But it will give you the sense, I think, I hope, of how this worked, you know, how you could interact with the pig and do all that sort of stuff and create compositions and so on and so forth.

Michael Rees

And, you know, I have to admit to being absolutely terrible at documenting augmented reality. I have not done a good job of it. And I'm not happy with any examples of it that I've seen. And there's such a sense of surprise and discovery that just does not show up in these videos. And so, you know, I just want to play one more here.

Michael Rees

You know, I also think it's important to note and valuable to note, let's see, I think this one is a pretty good one. Okay. So, you know, I'm always intrigued how different disciplines pop up with similar issues simultaneously. Right? And by this I sort of mean I don't think you can deal with augmented reality in a way and object and image without recourse to philosophy and without recourse, for example, to speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, which has been very interesting. Right? One thing is like when we talk about poetry in science as being quite influential on me. I really enjoy thinking about that stuff and playing with it. I think my use of animals in this sense was very connected to that. And I want to be very mindful of my time and not go on and on and on about it. So I just wanted to say that is an important element or aspect of the way I'm thinking about the way I put these things together.

Michael Rees

You sort of have a math object all around me. The way to nature. And that is quickly becoming the way that we actually engage nature. And so that's kind of a fascinating thing to be thinking about and working with. And I will also say one other thing. I'm not so much of an artist that sets up some sort of grand statement, you know, some grand white paper. And hence, when you're done, you will have experienced my white paper or my concept or my idea. I really love the concept and the idea that I invite you into a space that it's kind of like my little favorite space, just like I remember when I was in high school or something, I had these weird places that I would go to escape my family and my high school and all this stuff. And I would share them with people. And I would bring them there.

Michael Rees

And it wasn't so much like I was bringing them to have them have the exact same experience as I did. I would bring them that we may look at them together and that we may engage with each other through these spaces. And so I believe that I've set this show up in that same kind of way, is that you would look together with me into an invented theater and that we would discover together what may be there. And I love that idea, you know, of a little bit less of being an auteur, you know, an abstracted auteur and love much more being engaged and together with you and everyone else that may experience and explore it. And that you're, of course, your perspectives on that are as rich and valuable as mine. So thanks, guys, for giving me an opportunity to present that to you. I really appreciate it.

Michael Rees

I hope someday you'll all be able to see it in the flesh because it's a completely different. Experience when you do. Hopefully, hopefully. And thank you for presenting. It was wonderful. It is actually you had two questions from earlier in the chat. I'm not sure you actually saw them. No, I wasn't. Yeah, I didn't see them. Let's see. One. The first one was from Michael Pointer, who was asking, what were you researching exactly for your show? Well, first of all, how to make them. That was a big deal. And this sort of. Speaks to, you know, all the issues of manufacturing in the country and all that sort of stuff. It speaks to the collision between automatic manufacture and high and high end industry and then manual manufacture and that kind of thing. I ended up doing them in China and I made a I made a really good friend, you know, with a with a company there, a guy named Bruce Shaw, and he oversaw that.

Michael Rees

And he really, you know, he collaborated. He collaborated in this. I mean, I consider it a collaboration. I mean, we paid him so it was work for hire. So I didn't put it on the credit list that he did the work for hire. But, you know, he showed up in a in a super way. He was very, very present to the works. So part of it was research. And the other part of the research that was really important is researching inflatables in general. And, you know, I went back to I went back as far as I could. I mean, as far as I know. That maybe the earliest.

Michael Rees

Inflatables are balloons in France in the 17th century. Maybe it's the 18th century. I can't remember which. See, I'm not a very good researcher. But then also, I really wanted to know everything that had been done with inflatables. And so I, you know, I collected a mass, a big bibliography about projects and things and artists. Because what I didn't want to do is I didn't want to just rehash what had been done. I wanted to be very alert and aware to all of the vernacular, all of the language of inflatables. And I actually made an innovation. The innovation that I made in these pieces was the double chamber innovation.

Michael Rees

And, you know, weird words. But anyway, I did the double chamber thing. It's been done and other people have. But I really feel like I came up with it. And part of it was to create the stasis from the internal shape to the external shape. And so the internal shape maintained that vital sort of, you know, math object kind of feel that I was after. And then also to be ensconced inside of that tube or the cube. I mean, sorry, the cube. Those were all important details. The other kind of research I think I was doing is I was doing a lot of reading, just a lot of technology. Not technology, sorry. A lot of reading about, you know, the content that I was trying to get into the work and what that was about. You know? The philosophical elements and, you know, and trying to locate the.

Michael Rees

And again, I have to say that I'm not sure that those things necessarily are foregrounded. They're very much in the background. They're very much sort of a meta kind of thing. But I was trying to think about all those issues and I was doing as much of that as I could. I loved, you know, I loved looking at all the books. And looking at all the, I mean, I'm still so in love with House Rooker and all that stuff. One of my favorite things was the How to Make an Inflatable by Ant Farm. Ant Farm published this beautiful, it would have been mimeographed.

Michael Rees

That cracked me up. So I have a PDF of a mimeographed Ant Farm manual about how to make an inflatable. And I'll tell you, that was some of the best stuff that I found. Absolutely the best stuff I found. I read some engineering books. I read some other things. Things I didn't understand very well. You know, little pocket books for engineers about pneumatic structures and stuff. And I was just trying to get a good handle on what I was doing with pneumatic structures. I am a little bit of a, I mean, I think all of us in the tech world wear a hat of figuring out problems, solving problems. And I think it's a really positive thing. I don't think it's very well acknowledged in the art world. I don't think people, you know. I think people who are in the art world, the New York gallery art world, they don't really care.

Michael Rees

Or they don't think that's important or they're not. They don't value that very much. But I love it. And I value it very highly. I value seeing it in other people and how people solve their problems and stuff. Sorry, I'm going on and on again. Let's see. I'm also seeing that it, let's see. Thanks for doing that. Ann had a question. What was your, oh, the fan. The fan, fan, fan. I didn't use fans on purpose. Because I wanted to, I didn't want the noise. I didn't want the sound. Did you have trouble with any leaks, though? Oh, yeah. We had to fill it up once a week. Yeah. But it worked. It worked. And they, you know, the crew at Grounds for Sculpture, oh, my God, bravo. They were on top of it. I never went there that everything was slumped and deflated. It was always tuned. Beautifully done.

Michael Rees

And so, you know, I don't know what that means. I don't know if I would ever show these works in a place that didn't have that kind of support. They would just, you know, flip and flop and look terrible after a little while. I mean, maybe not so terrible. But you know what I'm talking about. I absolutely do. Yeah. Having done a lot of. When they're tuned, that's when you love it. You just, wow. That's the cat's pajamas.

Michael Rees

So let's see here. What is the real world correlate for the large pink, or is there one? Why are they surrounded in plastic for protection? I think that was Verneda Lights, right? And so the real world correlate. Can you be a little. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? I'm not sure what you mean by that. Well, I wanted. I want to know whether or not you had any.

Michael Rees

Image in mind. As you created a sculpture. Inflatable. Okay. That's a, you know, that's a great question. And the way that I work is that I dive in. And I just keep trying. And so it's like stabbing in the dark. You know, I didn't have an initial image in my mind that I was going to realize. I knew that I would do. You know, a couple of things were given. And I knew I would do that. You know, they had to have photos because I don't really, I mistrust.

Michael Rees

Geolocation. For augmented reality. I mean, I do location is great and offers amazing opportunities and works for a lot of people. But it's. I really wanted to have that. Focus tunnel view that. That. You know, the clown came up or the ants came up on the clown. The pig came up on the. The pink piece with the Chinese wall. That, you know, you follow what I'm saying. But there are correlations between why did I choose this to that, to the other thing? I. You know, I have to give. I look, this is back to the speculative realism.

Michael Rees

And, you know, and the idea. Actually, this isn't speculative realism, but the idea of pan psych is, you know, the, the notion that. That consciousness. Is an essential. Quality of matter. Right. Just like weight or mass or whatever. Consciousness is an essential quality of nature of matter. And so. I functioned as if that were so. And so I tried my level best. To listen.

Michael Rees

To these things. You know, to listen to the plastic. I mean, I know this sounds very romantic and kind of woo woo. But what the hell, man, that's where I went. I really, I wanted to, I wanted to sort of put my fingers. And listen to them and hear it back. You know, I think as artists, we all understand when we've made something. And we've gone through all the steps and it should for all intents and purposes. Be perfect. And it should work and have life. Right. Life. And yet you're done with it and it's dead. Now. You know, how does that happen? Like you did it according to all the things, you know, best, but it died somehow. And that's because, you know, the work of art or anything is a living thing. It all the things that happen between you and it and it's. Development and possibility. That's a living thing.

Michael Rees

That's a living relationship. And so the real world Corlin in some senses that I treated these. I mean, I tried to treat. I tried to listen to them in a way that I put the appropriate thing with the appropriate thing. You know, I asked the question because. To me, they resemble. Bone. Okay. And. And even more so. That the structures are surrounded by.

Michael Rees

You know, the plastic plastic and air in a very basic kind of way. It is, you could say a symbol for humanity, human beings, primates, people with vertebrae. And I was especially struck by that thought when the large paint sculpture was juxtaposed with what looked like a slide of cellular components.

Michael Rees

They remind me of bone marrow aspirates we did when I took oncology as a medical student. And so that's why I asked. I want to say thank you very much. Thank you very much for that reading. It's a very beautiful reading. And, you know, it's funny that I just didn't quite get your question. I think of myself as a figurative artist, and I thought of these, just the use of the word cell was very intentional and kind of a, you know, I mean, kind of a biological referent and metaphor. And so I thought of these as cells or even as organs, you know, the air, you know, the air, the containing of the air in your lungs and all that sort of stuff. And, but, but your reading was just, gorgeous. And thank you. Thank you very much for that. Thank you for your work. It's inspiring. Yeah, thank you.

Michael Rees

All right. I think we have time for like one more question. And then I think we got it. Yeah, three more presenters we need to get through. The last question I think was from Matej, who wants to know what software you were using for your AR. Yeah, I used, you know, you're always juggling a variety, a variety of things. In this case, you know, I'm not much of a programmer. So I admit to that, I don't have any problem with that. And so I engaged a person that I met in the Czech Republic, who is an excellent, you know, computer science student, but who then went on, you know, got his PhD and his name, I'm drawing a blank on his name right now. But anyway, he was amazing. And so we used, we, we developed things in Cinema 4D and in Maya. Those were the authoring, software's for the 3D spaces. And then we ported it into Unity.

Michael Rees

So I was involved in a lot of those aspects, you know, making that but oh, the models, for example, were bought on, you know, Turbo Squid or something like that. I didn't model the pigs. I mean, it could have modeled the pigs or whatever. But I'm like the whole dialogue about the found object. I'm just so fine with going and getting those models and using them if they work for you. And, you know, blah, blah, blah, I just have no problem with that whatsoever. And then, you know, I also do a lot of 3D modeling and 3D printing and robot carving and all that sort of stuff. I teach at a university, William Patterson University and run the Center for New Art there. And we have robots, we have a large scale robot that we use for CNC carving. And we do a lot of stuff with 3D printing and on. And by the way, I invite you guys to learn about that.

Michael Rees

And maybe some of you have some projects or some ideas for realizing things at the university. And, you know, we're going through a budget crunch. So I don't know if we're going to ever have any money again, but nonetheless, we have the goods. So, you know, cook something up and, you know, come to me and let's do something.

Michael Rees

I'll also tell you that I'm running a little workshop this summer from June 3rd to June 17th. And I'll put the link in the, in the chat. And that's a robot carving workshop. And we're going to have an augmented reality. If we have full attendance, attendance, which would be about eight to 10 people, we will run an augmented reality workshop concurrent with the sculpture carving. So I think, I think there's plenty of people on this call that might be interested in that. And so again, I'm going to post that to the chat and I, and I hope if you haven't, the deadline for applications is March 8th. So you got a week, you know, I'm sure you guys got some projects that you'd be interested to realize and, and do things with.

Michael Rees

And yeah. So, Hey, everybody, thank you so much for allowing me to speak to you. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you for your time. You guys are amazing. I'm glad you're doing this. I'm glad you're all here. I look forward to being a part of this and you know, it's super cool. NFTs. Oh man, that's a whole other conversation.

Michael Rees

All right. So

Thank you very much, Michael. This is, this is our first Michael for the day. We do actually have another Michael that's going to present today too. But next up we have Colin. So I'm not sure if you're ready or not, or your connection stable enough. Are you. I think so. Yeah, hopefully. I mean, I'm still tethered through my, my phone, but my six-year-old is doing her virtual learning right now. So I have a feeling that's actually sucking up a lot of the household bandwidth.

Colin Goldberg

But hopefully my connection, is stable enough that you guys are able to hear me and see me. Okay. So, yeah, you know, I'm going to, you know, I, I've not presented on a recorded session yet. So I just wanted to quickly share some of the stuff that I've been working with this past year and then segue into this topic of NFTs, which I know a lot of people have been talking about. And I kind of have been, you know, seduced by, you know, I initially found out about NFTs through this group, through a couple of people. There was one guy, Andrea Bonaceto or Bonaceto. I'm not sure exactly how his name is pronounced, but he's an Italian artist in the UK that initially kind of told me about what he was doing. He's also a blockchain investor and sort of entrepreneur, but he's been involved in the space since early on.

Colin Goldberg

And then there was also Peter Bourget, who's, when first I think he might've been the person who first told me about super rare. And that's kind of what I looked up and started checking out the NFT scene a while back. So I'm just going to quickly share my screen here. Okay. Can you guys see my screen?

Colin Goldberg

So this is, you know, my site, my site is just goldberg.art. And primarily, you know, my background is in painting. Like the past year or so in 2020, I just painted like a maniac, you know, and made a lot of new work, which I put together. It's sort of online viewing room. And that uses Kunstmatrix, which is the platform that we're going to be using for some of our virtual exhibitions.

Colin Goldberg

And then I also have a lot of other stuff that I've been working on. So I'm going to show you a little bit of a picture of the, of the so these are some of the paintings I created in the past year. They're about the one, the kind of one that's facing the camera right now is about three by four feet. And they're all a combination of multiple layers of acrylic. And then they run the painted surface through my printer and print directly on top of them and rinse and repeat a bunch of times kind of in the spirit of the way artists like Rauschenberg and Warhol used photo silk screen in combination with painting. So, and I've kind of just, you know, kind of hijacked some of their method but swapped in a bunch of other things. And I've also done a lot of large format digital printing for the photo silk screen.

Colin Goldberg

And I learned a lot of the photo silk screen through my undergraduate internship, working as a studio assistant for Steve Miller, who actually, you know, put me in touch with Michael Rees, the previous presenter. It was an amazing presentation and part of you as well. I met Steve. So Steve has been a huge influence.

Colin Goldberg

And these are some paintings that were done in the beginning of the year, right after my wife and daughter and I got tested. For COVID. And I took these pictures. Out of the car window and just was a shock. Surreal nature of the situation. The tents and. People in camo. These are fairly large paintings. They're about 60 inches tall. So this is kind of like what I was doing up until the point that I heard about NFTs. And then when I heard about NFTs, I sort of became obsessed with the idea of learning about how to create NFTs. And.

Colin Goldberg

Basically. You know, I got involved in crypto. Back in 2017, I guess, when the sort of first Bitcoin bubble happened and got interested in it for a variety of reasons, but I just thought, you know, From the standpoint of. Computers and, you know, cryptography. Cryptography and, you know, it just seemed, it seemed really interesting. And I was always, you know, a big fan of. Cyberpunk fiction.

Colin Goldberg

And. You know, stuff like that. So. Got in, got kind of interested in, in. In Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. And then when it came along. You know, I, I, I sort of dove in, so I'm going to try to share my screen with. Computer audio so I can play this one. So I just recently minted my first NFT that incorporates audio. And it's based on a digital drawing that I did back in 1999.

Colin Goldberg

That was drawn in illustrators. Let me just see if I can. Share the screen with audio. So. I'm not sure. I. Was. Using. The. Digital. Drawing. For. My. The next stop is 23rd Street. So hopefully you guys were able to actually hear the audio I ran a couple of tests I usually said I couldn't get it to work properly, the show to actually play the audio. But so, you know, basically the drawing was done quite some time ago, over 20 years ago. And I never really knew what to do with this work. I, you know, addition to addition these pieces, I have a whole series called Metagraphs that are these vector based digital drawings. And I've done them as prints and kind of played around with the idea of digital monoprints on canvas. But nothing really felt right until I found out about NFTs. So I'm going to just sort of share the screen again without the audio.

Colin Goldberg

Hopefully you guys can. Also hear me now. So the work is actually based on the series of drawings, which I call Metagraphs. And the reason for that name is that I feel that the actual art is not the physical object that ends up being a print of the work. But it's actually the piece as a digital object that you can open up. These are all vector drawings. So you can actually open up these files in a text editor. They originally. They were made out of EPS files and read the code for the work. And I've often thought about doing the show where I would actually print the code out on old school tractor feed printer paper and kind of like put that on the wall next to the piece or something.

Colin Goldberg

But so like this is the original drawing and there's a whole slew of these that I made. Most of them, you know, a lot were done in 99. And I had another whole bunch that were done in 2000. In particular, I think it's interesting. It's called Kneeling Icon. And it was originally untitled. And then multiple people actually told me or they asked me, is that the Virgin Mary? And I thought that was just such a strange thing for people to have that specific of an interpretation of the work where that wasn't my intention. And that's where the title came from. But, you know, one. Part of doing abstract work that's really interesting to me is seeing the Rorschach test aspect of like how people read it. So a lot of these Metagraph works, you know, the titles are sort of based on what people saw in them.

Colin Goldberg

And a lot of this work and the whole NFT scene really. Well, let me just show you. So this is Adobe Animate, which is what I created the piece of the NFT. And. And I pulled in my illustrator drawing, broke it up into layers. And then in Animate, which is a direct descendant of Flash, which is a direct descendant of Macromedia Director, which is a tool that I used back in the mid 90s to create CD-ROMs. That's kind of like where I got my chops was in sort of, you know, quote unquote, Silicon Alley back in New York pre-web. And I was doing director based CD-ROM development. And a lot of this. This interface is really derived from director, which became Flash, which became Adobe Animate. And it's tween based animation. So it's taking these layers and creating motion queens, basically. And I created the audio from some of the samples were pulled from video footage that I shot while I lived in Beats Village.

Colin Goldberg

Some of the samples were purchased, like Michael was saying, from all my marketplaces. And I mixed the beats and stuff together in Audition. And I have a couple other. And if you said that when I minted on a platform called wearable, I'm still kind of looking at different platforms, but I have a couple other ones that aren't released yet. I haven't done the audio for these, but they're kind of works in progress that are based on some of the other drawings.

Colin Goldberg

This one in particular, people seem to really like the psychedelic and trippy aspect to it. Like a lot of people say, oh, that looks like a 60s or 70s rock and roll poster or something like that. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. And all of these are really they're set up to loop. That's part of it. And the duration of the loop is important. They're all 23 seconds. And I incorporate significant numbers into my work. A lot of times if I'm working in Illustrator and using like the transform tool or something like that, I'll plug in 23, which I was born on the 23rd. Our daughter Aya was actually born on the 23rd. I was born on December 23rd. She was actually also born at 623 on the 16th. So it's kind of like a mix of those things. So I've used 623 as an important number in a lot of my transformations also.

Colin Goldberg

And 71, which is the year I was born in. Sometimes I use that. This is another piece called Holism, which I've started to work on developing into an animation. And I'm going to eventually drop this in MFT once I figure out what I want to do with the audio. But it's a lot of fun. I find that it's a way that I can.

Colin Goldberg

Revisit this work and turn it into something new. I actually worked on an animated version of a lot of these pieces a few years back with a German drum and bass musician in Indra Soler, which, you know, after he released that piece. But he actually created a track, a really cool drum and bass track to a series that was sort of strung together and edited together.

Colin Goldberg

And I showed some of that work as a projector-based installation. So. I'm going to show you a little bit of that. So, you know, with regards to NFTs, it's definitely a steep learning curve. And, you know, part of the inspiration for this is actually the. You know, the philosophy behind the distributed financial system and, you know, the sort of very punk inspired aspect of cryptocurrency and also the NFT scene. It's very closely related to me, too.

Colin Goldberg

You know, the street art. You know, the art movement in terms of people using handles and there being a level of anonymity. And also it's an outsider movement, so to speak, comparatively to contemporary art, which is very much sort of like a club in a lot of ways. And as you know, so and also cryptocurrency, though, to me is particularly associated with sort of a punk rock mentality, a reaction to a global hierarchy. That's based on fiat currencies. You know, and anyone involved in blockchain that really is into it is sort of interested in the philosophical aspects of it. I think, you know, other than big bankers who are finally starting to buy into the whole blockchain thing. But to me, a lot of the artwork that's inspired that is showing up with NFTs.

Colin Goldberg

Like my interest in it kind of stems from. Yeah. You know, my first computer was Commodore 64. And when I was using a Commodore, I had a modem, a 1200 modem that I used to dial in to these bulletin boards. And they were all basically kids pirating video games. And, you know, that's where this culture came from of hacking and basically this whole sort of NFT culture. Came from a hacker culture which came from teenage kids pirating video games. And the reason that kids started pirating video games, obviously, is because games were expensive. So most of the games were released in England first. There were test marketed there because the market was so small that they could release a game and see what would sell and what wouldn't in the American market. So that's where this idea of free game came from, which is spelled with P-H-R-E-O-K-3.

Colin Goldberg

And so kids didn't really know what they were doing. They didn't want to obviously call the UK on their parents' telephone lines because they'd get a giant telephone bill, which I got. My parents took my modem away and I got a $400 phone bill. And also, basically, the freaking came about by people hacking the MCI card, which was, I remember the dial 950-1986.

Colin Goldberg

And enterprising young teenagers wrote scripts on the Commodore and base it. That would. Generate a five digit code, which was the passcode and dial UK and get these games and trade games on both. Which I was involved in. And so there was tracking groups and hacking groups like one of them. I remember on the C64 side was PSI, Eagle Soft Incorporated. That was a big one. Cult of the Dead Cow was a big one on the Apple II side. I know that guy better or more like admitted that he was part of that, that whole thing. But, you know, I mean, basically. These were bands of teenage kids hiring video games and trading video games. And if they traded like MCI codes, that was just a way to trade to get bigger games, which then became called Wares. With a Z at the end of it. That was sort of what stolen software became known as after like down the road.

Colin Goldberg

And so anyway, these groups created what are called demos. And the demos showed off the group. It was almost like graffiti artists. And so for me, this is the general culture. Demos is where a lot of the pixel is coming from. And where a lot of the money is needed to work. Commodore is the demo. And like all the hackers, right? Like the tracking groups and the hackers. They were really practical. But they would release these demos that showed off their group names. And they were all like controlled.

Colin Goldberg

But I mean, if you Google like C64 demos, you know, you'll see a lot of the examples of this culture. And to me, like this is, you know, I mean, this brings me down. And at some point, you know, I actually got a call from somebody that claimed they were like with the FBI. Although I think it was actually one of my dad's colleagues pretending to be the person. Because my parents were sick of me getting giant.

Colin Goldberg

And they said, you know, we have reason to believe that trading in pirated software. Which were these video games. And so I actually took my box of floppy disks and buried them in my parents' backyard for a while. Because like I didn't want to get rid of them completely. Because like it was a pretty nice game collection. But also I was really paranoid about like someone showing up, you know, at my high school. You know? And I was like 15, you know, in dark clothing and sort of risking me away. It never happened. But that was a little story about that. You know? And obviously once I got involved in doing commercial work, that was sort of the end of like my waresing. Because I realized, you know, any piece of software worth its salt could dial into the mothership and find out if your cereal was pirated or not.

Colin Goldberg

But, you know, I mean, that's, anyway, that's kind of like a whole. Other aspect of things. But, you know, I think that the NFT phenomenon is really interesting. It's a little bit of a steep learning curve for sure. But underneath the financial craze of it all, I think there's an underlying philosophical basis for its existence.

Colin Goldberg

I can't really afford to say what that is in particular. But there is a level of democratization. I think that exists there. And the ability for somebody. Like there's platforms like Mintable where you, I believe, don't pay a gas fee to mint your work until it's sold, for instance. Where there really are ways that, you know, people can get into making NFTs and minting NFTs without a large upfront cost.

Colin Goldberg

You know? And I think that this, you know, I actually posted my NFT online. And I got a comment from a friend. An artist who is an amazing photorealistic watercolor painter. And she's like, well, you know, this has nothing to do with me. And, you know, I said to her, like, I kind of disagree. Because in a way, people who make physical work could actually leverage this as a way of getting their paintings in front of a new audience. And there are definitely people working with NFTs right now where the end result is you get sent, like Beeple. You get sent something in the mail. I mean, he sends out something that has a QR code on it. And the piece, a print of the piece and whatever. But it's a physical object. So there's no reason why someone who makes amazing photorealistic watercolor paintings couldn't also release them all as NFTs for the value that they want to sell the work at.

Colin Goldberg

Get it out in front of people. You buy the NFT. You get a nice little JPEG. But then you get mail to Beeple also. And you get access to a world of collectors by doing this. That never would have seen your work before. You would never have seen your work in a million years. So to me, that's the interesting component of this NFT phenomenon is the unrealized usages and usage cases that artists can sort of, like, exploit. And as digital artists, like, hacking is part of the culture as far as I'm concerned. And hacking every possible existing system, that's how artists empower themselves. Right. So that's just the way I see it. You know? And anyway, that's enough out of me. I want to leave time for anyone else. So thanks for letting me share.

Colin Goldberg

That was great, Colin. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. And I got to say, I too was one of those kids that was bailing in not so legally acquired software and video games for a time. That was me from, like, 20 years ago. I was in, what, third grade all up until, like, eighth. So I was in there. Like, I even ended up getting my hands on a pirated copy of Photoshop, which kind of helped spur along my digital art career.

Colin Goldberg

But you didn't hear that from me. That wasn't me. Third grade. That is impressive. I didn't start until eighth grade. Colin, could I ask you? I wrote a question, like, is there, do you recommend any great how to get started with NFT guide? Well, I have. I mean, there's tons of them, right? Yeah. But I wonder if there's one that you particularly recommend or that you like?

Colin Goldberg

Yeah. On my site, on goldberg.art, there's a page that I have for NFTs. And at the bottom, there's a link to an article medium. It's a pretty good summary. I mean, I would recommend. And I think Steve Miller is sort of a quick primer. You know, if you don't have any cryptocurrency, everything is done in Ethereum. Or at this point, it's moving towards WETH, which is wrapped Ethereum. But, you know, you can basically start by getting an account on Coinbase, which is the main exchange at this point. They're actually having an IPO pretty soon. But you can sign up for a Coinbase account and buy a bunch of Ethereum with a credit or debit card. You know, a couple hundred dollars worth is probably a good starting point just to have enough to mint on the platform of your choice. And then, you know, there's a bunch of different platforms out there.

Colin Goldberg

I actually minted the piece that I released that I showed on Rarible. One thing that's interesting about Rarible is it accommodates unlockable content. So you can provide a URL which gets given to the person who buys the token. So, like, the unlockable content for this piece is there's a 30-minute link. There's a 100-meg file size limit for the video upload. But the person who buys the piece gets the full res, like, 200-meg, like, MP4 file. And I've also, you know, thought about the vector work they could get, the vector art that's printable at any scale. But there's also other platforms like OpenSea that I believe might have a different model as far as, like, you know, I know with Rarible, you pay a fee out of your Ethereum to mint. I think with OpenSea, you pay one fee. And then you can mint multiple pieces.

Colin Goldberg

And then there's Mintable, which from what I've heard, I haven't used it, the purchaser pays the fee. One other interesting thing to note about NFTs is that they're smart contracts. So if the work is sold on a secondary market, you can actually get 10 percent or, you know, you specify as the artist the wealth. I think that's one of the most brilliant moves that could possibly be made. And, you know, look, the federal government. You know, Edward Dunham. Edward Kennedy tried to get that enacted into law that artists would get a cut of future sales and no one would ever give it to them. No one. Never, never, never, never. And so I just think that's brilliant. And also, you know, if you're a young artist today, Jesus, man, get into the NFT. Seriously. Skip the art world. I'm trying. I think it's really amazing.

Colin Goldberg

And so one other quick thing. So Coinbase account, get some Ethereum is step one. Step two is signing up. And I would recommend this for anyone on this call is every single NFT platform you can and grab your name as the profile. You know, you don't need to set up an account or mint anything or whatever else. But like this is just general marketing stuff. And, you know, I worked in agencies, you know, I paid my dues to have be able to make my art by marketing widgets for America. You know what I mean? But basically, like, you know, you get your name across the board. You know, you're a. And even places like super rare, you don't need to be approved to have a profile. Just go in, set up a profile and grab it and then get in the waiting list like everyone else, which I'm still on. And that's why I chose to mint on wearable because it's community owned, quote unquote, community owned NFT space where you're not.

Colin Goldberg

You don't need to be curated into it to mean something. And then there's a what's called a wallet. So two of the main wallets are. Fort Matic and MetaMask. Both of them are like local sort of cryptocurrency wallets, so to speak, a virtual wallet. So what you do is set up the account on the platform you want to mint something on and set up a wallet with either Fort Matic or MetaMask. And then you can have you have this long ETH address, which is your wallet address. You copy that. Go into your Coinbase account and send it. Send yourself some ETH into that wallet address. And then at that point, you have the ability to mint on the platform, you know, and then it's just create some content and put it out there and marketing it. It won't get seen unless you put links to it in a lot of places.

Colin Goldberg

So it seems like Twitter apparently is like the sort of platform of choice for a lot of the people involved in NFTs at this point versus Instagram, which is interesting. But it just seems to have worked out that way for whatever reason. What I'm sorry, what was the before Instagram? What was the platform? You said Twitter? Yeah, it seems like a lot of the people involved in NFTs are actually using Twitter as a way to get their NFTs out in front of people versus Instagram. I'm not sure exactly why that it's just part of the culture. It seems like I can tell you why I figured it out. Actually, I found that out not so long ago. And it has to do with the fact that Instagram is owned by Facebook. And Facebook. Facebook very much has a very strict policy about even talking about any kind of cryptocurrency or anything like that.

Colin Goldberg

Like if you try to create an ad. Unless it's their own one. Correct. And that's the thing. If you even mention the word crypto, like cryptocurrency or Bitcoin or anything in a post, you can get flagged. Well, no, actually, now there's a ton. I noticed over the weekend, there's a ton of NFT groups on Facebook. Because after I minted mine, I searched on Facebook and I was like, wow, all of a sudden there's like dozens of NFT groups.

Colin Goldberg

Several months ago, like I got flagged for like two things and I wasn't even like linking to like crypto. I was just talking about it and my post got flagged and taken down for ourselves. Whoa. Yeah. Facebook probably bought an equity stake. Maybe they changed their mind after. I don't know. But this was a couple of months ago this happened. I was like, I'm just talking about it. What's the problem?

Colin Goldberg

Anyway. I wanted to just interject that I don't know if you guys know this, but when you work in Photoshop, there's a place where you can attach file info to your imagery. And I do wonder per Davos point, you know, these companies, they want to, if you don't go in and say that you're a photographer, you're not going to be a photographer. They want to make sure that your work is copyrighted or that you did it. I mean, if you know if you said if you go out and get, you know, I don't know, picked up by a giant bird. I mean, after listening to Michael Rees, I have to think of something more interesting than being hit by a streetcar. But, you know, if something happens to you and you've done a great work and it becomes something important if you haven't I wondered about I noticed this file info thing and I think it's a tag that maybe goes with your imagery.

Colin Goldberg

I'm not sure. But to Davo's point they want to own everything out there that I think you're saying you don't and so that's very interesting Davo that you unearth that because there you go. Like you cannot unless their policies change without me knowing about it but I know very much that like even if you did like Facebook ads and your ads mentioned cryptocurrency or like any kind of crypto related stuff it would get flagged and taken down like they would just straight up not approve it. Appeal after appeal after appeal and I got nowhere so.

Colin Goldberg

It just shows that when you're doing anything anything authentic and interesting comes up it's a threat to the system. Until they can profit from it. They've been in development of their own cryptocurrency for some time now. Yeah. It got sort of like shut down as a project I think temporarily. It's hypothetical to what everyone in crypto is doing for there to be a giant. Corporate cryptocurrency but I mean MasterCard is going to be processing Bitcoin transactions starting this year.

Colin Goldberg

It's crazy. We might have to go back to drawing and painting or something. Nah. No. Well a lot of people can sell real things. I mean there are all I listen to a little radio podcast thing called the Delphi Oracle I think or the Delphi podcast. I think it's not Oracle it's the Delphi podcast and there's these people interviewing all kinds of people trying to rethink commerce and stuff through the blockchain and through cryptocurrency and it's fascinating. Yeah I noticed some of them are even services like UnRarible that guy Mark Cuban you know like from Shark Tank or whatever he seems to be like a big buyer like he's always showing up on the top collector list but he.

Colin Goldberg

Was selling an NFT and I looked at it like what is he selling you know what is he making his NFT was that if you buy the NFT you get Mark Cuban to do a little infomercial about your stuff you know what I mean so the actual NFT is like purchasing is. You know influencer. Time you know which is really interesting I mean people are selling all sorts of stuff and I think the NFT is just a way of tokenizing. Values to like you know I don't know that it necessarily even needs to be. I mean a lot of the work on wearable is really like to me that.

Colin Goldberg

The NFC they're like the digital equivalent of Pokémon cards and I was talking to someone recently about the whole phenomenon of people selling like NBA dunks and stuff like that it was Steve Miller actually that said like you know. These are what today's baseball cards are you know instead of kids trading baseball cards they're going to be like oh I have Michael Jordan's dunk you know from. 2013. When they were playing the next whatever and it's X amount of dollars and then they'll trade it with their other friend for something else you know.

All right we actually do have one I think we. We lost a presenter or either they didn't show up today but Michael Pierre Price is still here. For his presentation. So I know he's probably been patiently waiting for. His time to go. But you do have the floor Michael so go ahead. Is everybody still awake at this.

Michael Pierre Price

We're here. Okay well. Am I going to turn into a pumpkin right at four o'clock your time or. Okay. All right well let's see here. I'll just go ahead and do. Screen share here. Everybody see in my screen. Yep. So. I just want. I don't know if everybody is had a chance yet or not because it just got posted tail in the last week but.

Michael Pierre Price

Echo Davos. A. Statement about. You know getting a chance to see everybody's. Talks that have been recorded to this point we do have a really wide variety of folks and. Expertise in different areas so today I feel really. Like the tail end of the snake or something here as we come around full circle.

Michael Pierre Price

And. There's this real sense of synchronicity following. The three previous. Sharing of artwork today and experiences and also. So I'm coming from this I almost feel like the other side of the coin. And. In my solo show that I had last year the square root of negative one. There were three truths. That I had prominently posted.

Michael Pierre Price

In the gallery space and I've got them here on the background screen here. The first is the world is not as it seems. The second is I am a heretic. And the third is nothing is sacred and for me those are three really powerful self truths. And things that I want other people to know about me and my work. And. And with my physics background and that's where I'm going to kind of just start.

Michael Pierre Price

So for me. This represents. The. Center of my being and my artwork and my spirituality for me this is kind of. This was this was. An article a research paper that I had accepted into the American Journal of Physics when I was at the University of Toledo and for me this is like my. Lasco painting this is this is my prehistoric animal on the wall that everything else follows from its. This is my. It's why I see the universe is sacred it's why I see what all of you are doing our connection to technology.

Michael Pierre Price

And our human expression for me I see this from the point of view of the universe and what I love about what has been shared today is so many of you have been approaching this from the very humanistic standpoint. Connecting to the technology connecting. To the universe and for me I want to be that voice of the universe and that's why I said the world is not as it seems we live in a very new Tony and world where cause and effect is very direct and when as was being shown.

Michael Pierre Price

Earlier with a beautiful beautiful bubble chamber. And I don't know what you what I'm before the very center of where all of my artwork and everything comes from. However, before becoming an artist, I had a 30-year detour after leaving academia that I became a game designer. And I'm going to go through some of these things very, very quickly.

Michael Pierre Price

Where do we go here? Ah, here we are. Okay, so. Back in 1980 82 83 and 84 in 83 I went to work for calico and the video games were being hooked into the television sets of the time you had to either choose channel three or channel four that wasn't your normal game and you had to choose channel four that wasn't your normal game and you had to either on the video game and you had to either click on the video game and you had to either on the video game and you had to either set the channel for that or just play the video game and you had to either play the video game and you had to either play the video game and you had to either play the video game and you had to either play the video game and you had to either play the video game and you had to either play the video game and you had to either play the video game and you had to either play the video game and you had to either play the video game and you had to either play the pixels.

Michael Pierre Price

And we had a total of 16 colors to choose from a white, a black, a light gray, a dark gray, and then a light version of the rainbow colors, the six rainbow colors and a dark version of the six rainbow colors. And that was our universe in which to draw all of the games that we ever created. That's what the artists had to be creative around. I think the popularity of retro gaming is because we had to be creative as hell just to create something fun and interesting.

Michael Pierre Price

And even though this was a novelty in the early days, people have come back to it. It's not just people my age or a little younger. It's even really young kids because it's all about the gameplay. You don't have to worry about realistic graphics or 3D environments. It's about trying to create something that's fun and interesting. And I think that's what we had to do. And I think that's what we had to do. And I think that's what we had to do. And I think that's what we had to do. We had to do something innovative, shoehorning in. This was the version of Spy Hunter that I designed for Coleco. It was the very first 32K cartridge game that Coleco ever did. Our games before that were either 4K or 8K. That included all of the graphics, the sound, the programming, the gameplay. We have texture maps that blow.

Michael Pierre Price

We have texture maps that blow this out of the water in games today. And this was 36, 37 years ago. So, you know, it was we've come a long way in a relatively short time. In 2016, there was a retro gaming conference in Phoenix where I live. And these two fellows, they did the retro gaming conference in Phoenix where I live. And these two fellows, they did the first official history of Coleco. They had it published.

Michael Pierre Price

Myself and a number of other Coleco designers and artists had been interviewed in their book. And so they invited me to come. This was the debut of the book. And so I did some signing for them and all that. So that's what these are from. Fast forward now to late 1990s, well, mid-late 1990s. I was one of four people. I was the chief creative officer. Don't yell.

Michael Pierre Price

Pardon me? Oh, okay. So, we had a small game development company in Louisville, Kentucky. And we had started our company because we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company.

Michael Pierre Price

And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company.

Michael Pierre Price

And we had been running a company called the Game Development Company. Had a lot of experience with. So this game was in, came out in 1999 and it was a massively multiplayer game. It was a strategy based sword fighting game. And, you know, if you think back to this, this was when AOL was still the main avenue for people getting online.

Michael Pierre Price

You were using 28K modems at that point, or if you lucky, I think the 56K modems were on the horizon or at least the high end gamers had them. But since we had to default to the, you know, the lower echelon of more massively appealed gamers, we had to have slightly less restrictive. So I'm gonna just kind of go through. So then in 2003, I had left active game development at that point, and I was looking to leverage a lot. And I was still working with a couple of the guys that I had worked with at our game development studio, but we were trying to leverage our technology that we had developed at that point for mainstream, for the game development businesses. And we were trying to leverage our online 3D interactive worlds for business. And our former gaming development company had been right above a music publishing company, and they had a sound studio there.

Michael Pierre Price

So we ended up making a deal with them and they had signed this kind of Southern rock band called Ethan and the Ewoks, that really, a really nice group of guys. And their music was really pretty cool. So what we did, and I believe this is the only one that was ever done so far in the music industry. But if you know, you can create mixed purpose CDs at that time. Yeah. You can create music that contains both music and data if you wanted to. Not very many people tried doing this, but you know, you have 72 minutes upper end for music.

Michael Pierre Price

Anything you don't use technically, if you burn the CD right and you do the technology correctly, you can fit data on there. So we created a 3D interactive environment environment, fully immersive, that was based around the group Ethan and their Entropy Boy CD at the time. This is behind the stage. You could actually click on the band members and hear audio, things about who they were, what they did, all that. This TV set here actually played real streaming video so we could do video here as well. This was the courtyard area between the arena that I just showed you the one shot and there was like a museum or interactive building behind where the camera is here.

Michael Pierre Price

So people could, if you had a computer and played the CD in your computer, you could then download all the assets that were on the CD and play them on your computer. And then go online and interact with them. And if they were in the 3D world, you could say hi to your, you know, one of the Ethan members and you could gather and chat and all this other stuff. So if I had inroads into the art world, I would have pitched, you know, going to MoMA or something like that and see whether or not they might have wanted to have an interactive environment. But be that as it may, that didn't happen. So I just wanted to kind of give a little bit of a history of me before I decided that I was sick and tired of game development and all of that and just wanted to do something for myself, which is, you know, kind of where I am here today.

Michael Pierre Price

So let me then switch over. To where I wanted to go for today's action and Oops, that's not where I wanted to go. Please. Now let me, let me start with Okay, this Oh, here we are. Okay. This is where I wanted to get going here. So this In, in the talk that I did or the interview that Roz so adeptly navigated me through I talked about the importance of fractals and this was just one of those images that I think has become very, very iconic And what I didn't talk about in the interview and something that's very, very important and that ties perfectly to the other artists.

Michael Pierre Price

Talks today is this notion of Imaginary numbers in the square root of negative one. Because Imaginary numbers don't exist and what we would consider our normal use of numbers. They're not part of the counting numbers. They're not part of how we view numbers generally And I hope I'm not causing anybody to break out in sweats from either high school or college algebra or geometry or anything but it's this is very, very important because it's this is very, very important because Imaginary numbers Imaginary numbers We wouldn't be doing what we're doing today without imaginary numbers we wouldn't be on this on this Zoom call my artwork wouldn't exist because of it quantum mechanics Utilizes imaginary numbers so our modern our modern world relies on something That doesn't exist naturally in our world.

Michael Pierre Price

But our world doesn't exist without it either. So we had to, we had as human beings had to come to an understanding about what this is and how something imaginary is at the root underneath it all that has brought forth what we call the physical universe, which I find absolutely fascinating. And it's so ties into what the other talks, like I said, preceding me are all about.

Michael Pierre Price

So one of the things for me that I've gotten very much involved with and was inspired by work that I saw both from Anne Spalter, but also from Pat Litke. And this notion of being able to create new types of imagery or new types of works on neural networks. And so for me, what I did, you know, I'll bring it up really, really quickly.

Michael Pierre Price

This is the PlayForm site. And I have been working on, based on just, this has been just testing that I've done. A lot of my creative work is sort of the mad scientist, physicist, that feeds my soul a lot. So I took 105 of my own fractal-based artwork over the past six or seven years, just as an experiment to try out this PlayForm platform.

Michael Pierre Price

And these were the seed images then that I used to do the work. So I took the first set of 64, and I'm going to go back to my mathematics here. If you think of what's going on here, it's almost like these are derivatives of equations, of fractal equations. So if you look at the graph, you'll see that these are the results of the ities. These are things that you would never see as a regular fractal image.

Michael Pierre Price

And like I said, to me, these are like derivatives, mathematical derivatives of the fractal mathematics, now creating some new types of imagery that I'm going to be utilizing in some form or fashion. So this is kind of the vanguard for me of a new set of images. So I think it's going to be a lot of works, but I don't know where it's going. So I just wanted to kind of briefly share that with all of you.

Michael Pierre Price

And there was one last related... Oops... ities. … Seemed almost figurative. Like you could, you could see faces even. And like, I think in one, I almost saw like a horse or a lion or something. Like, yes, yes. It was, it was, it was amazing. Like I, I'm, I'm extremely impressed. Well, I want to do stuff like that. Thanks Davo. And I think what's cool about it is that my sense of spirituality is that to me, the mathematics behind our universe existing is for me, my true spirituality. It's where it comes from. And I really see my humanity and other people's humanity in that creative quest, which is why I love this group, which is why the deep thinkers here that have spoken today, nurture me and inspire me. And that's why I love the interview series and seeing all the various ways the folks that are using music to create beautiful imagery inspires me.

Michael Pierre Price

The, what Collins talked about today, you know, it's, there's just, there's just something for, but for me, I, I really am trying to show that the universe is so much more than how we experience it on a day-to-day basis. And, and that's where the mathematical, the physics comes for me. So yeah. Thanks for seeing that, that, cause I see that too. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's like almost, you can't not see it as weird as that sounds. Like it's, it's almost like it's looking right back at you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Pierre Price

And I, I, that's, see, that's what I love about the expressionist art movement is that you have, you're directing things within a certain amount of limitation. And, you know, Jackson Pollock said he denied that notion of the mistake or the random, or because it's part of the process. And for me, the mathematical takes over the physical quality of physical painters where that happens. So it's not about paint viscosity. It's not about gravity.

Michael Pierre Price

It's about the mathematics driving the unpredictable. And fractal mathematics, and it's not the only thing that I use, but it's part of a branch of mathematics called chaos theory. And it's the thing about the butterfly effect, why we can't predict weather any better than we've got because it's innate. It's the Heisenberg principle. It's not that if you knew more, you could get the precision. It's that there is no further precision. It's that potentiality in the universe is built into the whole system. And that potentiality has a certain amount of chaos built into it. Not randomness, but chaos. There's a difference. Randomness to me is pure noise. There's no information. This is information.

Michael Pierre Price

Information is at the heart of the process. It's at the heart of the universe. It's at the heart of all of our art. And it's where the interest lies for us. It's where we look for patterns. It's where we look for meaning and understanding. So that's a great question. And yes, it is directly, Tommy. Thanks for that question.

Michael Pierre Price

Did you see that question in the chat? No. Oh, Colin asked, is randomness a fallacy in your opinion? Oh, gosh. Well, we've equated chaos and randomness. And so for me, chaos isn't random. Chaos, I use, it's a mathematical term, but it's also, I, we, and so for us, chaos, again, when I talked in, in the, in my artist interview with, with Roz, I talk about this notion of chaos being the borderland between complete, complete solidity of, you, you have a frame of reference that is, it never changes.

Michael Pierre Price

And then at the other end, you have randomness, you have noise. And chaos is in that thin borderline between, it's where life is. Life is about change. It's about potential. And it's in there where chaos is the driving agent below, the surface. Because like I've said, in, in that interview is, life is about testing the waters of something new. And when you test the waters, the system, that great feedback loop of life, either reinforces that, that change is meaningful and it's going to lead to something further and further and further, or that change, is a dead end route that, you know, if all of a sudden, you know, this adaptation appears and the rest of the world around you says, uh-uh, not going to happen. You know, you're a dinosaur if you go down this path. And, and then you, you, you know, you, you wither and die.

Michael Pierre Price

Or it's something so outlandish, or it's like a cancer. You know, it feeds on itself and it goes away. It goes crazy and it consumes. So that, it's that trying to find where that balance is, where you don't, you don't try to step backward and say, oh, the 1950s was a great, you know, a great era to be alive. Let's go back to there. No, we can't go back. Or let's pretend we're in the year 2400, and everything is perfect. Well, that's denying reality. So it's like, where, you know, where, where do you, how do you move forward? Where do you move forward? So, well, thanks for listening.

Michael Pierre Price

My glasses aren't so great here. Okay. I don't think there's any more questions so far. I know we've run long, so. Yeah. Well, we also kind of had a late start too, because there were technical difficulties that kept popping up, but I mean, it's, it's all good. It's all value here. Yeah. Thanks again for joining us today. That being said we are inching towards 4 15 PM Eastern time. So we have run over a little bit, but I'd say this has been a great salon so far. For the entirety of it. Not so far. And we've had some really good discussions. Really great presentations.

Michael Pierre Price

And I think we can go ahead and close this one out. So thank you very much for being here. You're free to stick around after we stop recording everything, if you just want to chat. I'm going to be here for a bit after. I don't know if Colin's going to be here for a bit after too, or if he has to go. But- Yeah, I'll definitely hang out for a little bit. All right. But thank you for participating.

Michael Pierre Price

Thank you for joining. And we will see you next time. Yeah, thanks everyone. Thank you.