Salon 15 // Andrea Bonaceto, Tommy Mintz, Clive Holden

Okay. Welcome, welcome, welcome to our 15th virtual salon for Expressionism. My name is Davonte Bradley, otherwise known as Davo, and with me is Colin Goldberg, the founder of this wonderful movement of ours, and this growing, rapidly growing community. Today we actually have some interesting things on the agenda. We're going to kick things off with our, you know, regular business presentations with three artists. We have today Andrea Bonaceto, Tommy Mintz, and Clive Holden, who are going to be presenting today. One of the three was actually in, kind of made headline news with his NFT collaboration with Sophia from the, what was it?

Unattributed

Hansen Robots. Hansen Robotics? Yes. Hansen Robotics collaboration. That's it. Yep. Yep. And yeah, that was kind of a big deal or is kind of a big deal. So we're all looking forward to hear from Andrea about that and whatever else he's working on. And then after our presentations, we have our debut for our Tech Specialism Collab exhibition.

Unattributed

It's going to be the exhibition of the first collaboration project. It's going to be the exhibition of the first collaboration project. It's got eight artists in it, myself included. It was a very exciting kind of long drawn out process, but it was well worth the wait, I believe, and I hope everyone will enjoy it once we get to it. But until then, let's get to those presentations.

Unattributed

I asked everyone involved in this to please keep themselves muted if you're not presenting. And with that, I give the floor to Andrea. Go ahead.

Thanks, Davonte. How much, how long do I have for the presentation? You have 15 plus minutes-ish. Thereabouts. We're kind of fast and loose with that. Perfect. No, I'm happy, first of all, you know, to present here because Colin was probably one of the first people I approached. I mean, he approached me on Instagram when I went public, you know, with what I was doing.

Andrea Bonaceto

So, yeah. I mean, it's really good. I think, you know, the community, you know, you put together with everything is really great, really welcoming. And I like it. I mean, my story is a bit weird because I don't have a formal art background. And I've been, you know, involved into art in some shape or form throughout all my life. But nothing, you know, formally like I have a more, I have a financial background. I'm an investor in the blockchain space. I follow the blockchain space since the very beginning. And so I also followed the NFT space from the very beginning. And because of my art interest, when the NFT space came in, it was like, wow, the planets are aligned. And I can now merge my interest for technology with the interest for art.

Andrea Bonaceto

And so, you know, from the very beginning, I started exploring it. I decided to go public with what I was doing. And then, you know, it escalated quite quickly. There was a lot of work. The way the project came together with the Sofia the Robot was as follows. So I went public, you know, with my art. And one of my friends, Marcello, Mari, approached me and said, OK, nice artworks, but nice portraits. But one question, where is my portrait? Why didn't you do a portrait of myself? I'm like, OK, send me a picture and I'm going to do it. So he sends me the picture. I do the portrait. And because I knew that it was linked with Sofia the Robot, then when I showed him the portrait, I was like, OK, you know, I think contemporary art is a lot about making, you know, a statement, like trying to come up with something, you know, innovative on top of, you know, the aesthetic connotation of the artwork.

Andrea Bonaceto

So I proposed him to basically go and do something together with Sofia where, you know, I would do the portraits of Sofia and the other key people from the team, namely David Hanson, the creator of Sofia the Robot and Ben. And then, you know, I was like, you know, we could see how Sofia, you know, can start from these artworks and then, you know, create from there. And to be honest, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't even know if they would like this idea. But when I presented it to David and Ben, they really loved it. And so we started working on it. It took a few months and it was, you know, crazy process. Like very, very hard. Very interesting. It was also quite challenging because we were spread on different time zones. So it was I'm in London right now. David and Sofia are in Hong Kong.

Andrea Bonaceto

And the gallery that helped us doing this art sale is called Ivy Gallery and they're based in L.A. So it was, you know, difficult to coordinate, but we did that. And it's also important to note that this was done, you know, fully remotely. So it was a project that from beginning to end was delivered fully remotely.

Andrea Bonaceto

And the steps, I mean, were in the end, you know, quite simple. So Sofia started from my artworks. And then you can think like as a kid, let's say, looks at the tree. And then with, you know, the experience here she has, you know, in doing his or her life, you know, she basically draws the tree. That is the result of her experience. You know, Sofia pretty much, you know, did the same.

Andrea Bonaceto

Want me to share the screen? Yes, of course. Yes, I can show you what I talk. Some of the stuff that I do. Can you see my screen? These are some of the artworks. But basically, I mean, Sofia took my artworks and then also other pictures were fed into her brain. Basically, her neural network. Yeah. And then through several iterations, she basically arrived at some final results, like some final output. So we sold the artists on Nifty Gateway. This is the website.

Andrea Bonaceto

The one that we sold were like four open editions. Like one was like Sofia portraying David. And there was Marcello. And there was Sofia. Bango's. And then we did some transitions as well. Basically going from. What is it? Basically going from Sofia's from my piece. Then morphing into Sofia's piece and then going back into my piece. And these were limited editions where one, two, three and four.

Andrea Bonaceto

And then one piece was sold at the auction. And these Sofia instantiation. Actually, now they withdraw it from Nifty. So you cannot see it on Nifty anymore. And this piece also came with a physical with a physical artwork. So. During the last hour of the drop, actually, we had the live stream from Reuters. Well, you know, they basically went with a crew to answer robotics labs.

Andrea Bonaceto

And these pieces came with a physical article. So basically it was a physical version of the piece like drawn by Sofia with the brush with a physical brush. And then the collector that actually got the piece. Who goes by the name of 888. No one knows who he is. It's like the Satoshi Nakamoto of digital art.

Andrea Bonaceto

Also had the opportunity to basically show his face to Sofia and then Sofia to look at his face and incorporate. Himself into the artwork. But he didn't want to show his face. So he sent us a picture of his arm or like painted with colors. And Sofia took that and then basically closed the artwork live.

Andrea Bonaceto

The physical one with a few last brush strokes. And that was, you know, the piece that also, you know, he got on top of the digital piece. And then in general, I mean, the artworks that they do, as you see, like I do mostly two things, portraits and the digital art. I started. I started actually with portraits of doing portraits of family and friends.

Andrea Bonaceto

33 family and friends. And then I went from there and I did all support. These are all my friends, my mother, my father, my girlfriend. People that I met. I also have a basking license here in London. So he's a guy for the same at playing. In the industry. The. Show. What? I said basking license and the music soundtrack came. And these are more like of the abstract stuff that they did more like at the beginning.

Andrea Bonaceto

And then and I was doing that on acrylic with acrylic colors, mostly on paper and canvas. And then I went into buying an iPad Pro starting doing digital art. Mostly Victoria. So the last ones that you see here, like, let's say this one of George Floyd. He's a Victoria artwork. Drone on an iPad. And now I'm doing an hybrid of both. To be honest, I still like to do the physical ones, but also the digital ones. So now now I'm to be honest in a phase where, you know, I'm trying to understand a bit my next steps. It was a big, you know, Also psychologically, it was a lot. All this thing with Sophia with the drop with that happened. So I'm not trying to.

Andrea Bonaceto

Calm down and understand, you know, as next steps. Also what project, you know, I should focus on and I'm still. Exploring it. These, as you can see, is Bob D and this is Nietzsche. Ezra Pound. I also did some artists that, you know, I admire. These are two Italian poems. Eugenie Montale and Dino Campana. That I really love. Then I started doing portraits as well of people. I think are, you know, giving a positive impact, like creating a positive impact in society. Like, you know, the co-founder of an Ethereum. The founder of Twitter.

Andrea Bonaceto

People behind Sophia as well. So this is pretty much the concept. And, you know, let's see. I'm quite open as well to new ideas and I'm not really setting stone to do these. Projects forever. One thing that for me is very interesting is that with non fungible tokens. You can also explore hybrids of different kinds of art. So two other things that I really like a lot are poetry and music. So I'm hoping that at some point. You could have a dynamic artwork with the music. Going underneath like an original truck. You can cite as an NFT or you can have a poem in your stated as William Blake used to do. And you can actually sell it as a unique non-fungible token. I think this will unlock a lot of new also business models and way to create and to channel any form of art. So I'm very open to explore all these things.

Andrea Bonaceto

I think that's pretty much it. I don't know if you have any questions, if it's also open for questions, but I think I'm done talking about myself. All right. Well, thank you very much for your presentation. Your work is amazing. And also again, congratulations on your collaboration. Thanks. Also want to apologize for whatever happened in the latter part of your presentation. I'm not quite sure what that was. I guess a spammer got into the Zoom or something happened, but that's... I think that's what it was about, but they're gone. I kicked them out. So if anyone has any questions for Andrea or comments... I see some questions in the chat. Yeah. Okay. The screen, I did share the screen. And yeah, how to apply on Nifty Gateway. The thing with Nifty Gateway now is that they're really like overwhelmed right now with a lot of things.

Andrea Bonaceto

You know, it's becoming a bit of a platform where VAPs go to do... You know, it's becoming a bit of a platform where you can sell NFTs, like even musicians, like Calvin Harris made a sale there, The Weeknd made a sale there. So when I entered into Nifty Gateway, it was basically months ago where, let's say the interest of NFTs was not as high as it is right now. So now I think they do have an application process, but yes, they are really bombarded basically. So it's tough.

Andrea Bonaceto

And I think that's a good thing. Anybody else have any questions about the artwork itself? Anything like that? I have a question, Roz. All right, go for it. Andrea, thank you very much. I love your openness and those portraits are interesting. Do you have any artists that, you know, that you particularly, that were influential to you in terms of doing your portraits or other works?

Andrea Bonaceto

Let's say two that for sure are influential. Like quite classical are like Van Gogh in the way he used colors, Kandinsky as well. Like one book that for me was very influential was Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Kandinsky. And after I actually read that book, I started drawing really, really compulsively. And, you know, I got that book when I was 30 years old. Kandinsky started drawing when he was 30. The book came to me in a weird way. I was at a blockchain conference and I met like a guy that was interested in rare books. So he asked me for a place in Rome to find the rare, like a rare bookstore, like a bookstore selling like rare books. We went there together and the owner of the place told us, okay, wait, I need to give to this book. And then that was the book of Kandinsky. So he came to me.

Andrea Bonaceto

I like to see, you know, things happening to me in a fluid way. And then, you know, I'm like, okay, whatever, let's read this book. And then it was, it ended up being quite influential. Then another artist that I really like is Modigliani, you know, for his portraits, you know. Oh yeah. So all of them, I think there is something of all of them into what I do. And I like that you mentioned William Blake. I mean, he's such a different character, you know, he went his own way, but he combines spirit, religion, poetry, art, everything, you know. Exactly. I also like, you know, to think that I don't like to be, you know, I like a fluid way of experiencing art as well. You know, when not necessary, you need to only focus on visual art. You can also focus on, you know, other things and then, you know, meld them together and, you know, craft something which is new.

Andrea Bonaceto

And I think with NFTs, you know, it gives you the possibility to channel that through the public, you know, to create original content in a new way. And yeah, that's very good for artists as well, because I think also if you consider like the fees that Platon's like Nifty Gateway take compared to other galleries, like they're going, they are taking 15, 20%. So when you compare to, you know, like, yeah, like the traditional 50%.

Andrea Bonaceto

Yeah. And also a very important thing with all the artworks that you sell as NFTs forever, you're going to make 10% in royalties. So whenever there is a secondary sale, the art is going to be paid straight away 10%. So I think it's also good, you know, for the way artists are, you know, remunerated for the work that they create.

Andrea Bonaceto

Thank you. So thanks for sharing. Thanks for showing this amazing work and such a cool project. And I wonder if you could comment even more on that, the whole the difference between the traditional art market and what you've experienced with the NFTs. How were you selling work previously? Was it through a gallery? And without giving information that you don't want to give, what is sort of the difference with pricing in the traditional art world versus what you experienced with the NFTs? Yeah. I mean, I have no experience in the traditional art world because I wasn't selling anything before, like in the traditional world. But from what I heard is, I mean, there are some dynamics that are still similar, I think. It's just that it's a completely new space. So, you know, you start from scratch.

Andrea Bonaceto

And the people that the average collector in the art world is not the average collector in the NFT space. The average collector in the NFT space is someone that made a lot of money with Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies very early, likes art. And he's really pushing the space to evolve. So I was myself, you know, connected with some of these people. So this for sure, you know, helped. And also, you know, one thing that I like is that people in the blockchain space are a bit weird, which is good.

Andrea Bonaceto

I agree. They are like non-conventional, you know. So when then you create something where, oh, you can do art and do it on the blockchain, they go mad with it. They're like, OK, we will do it. You know, we will go in like properly. And then, you know, if you take also the pandemic element, you know, the people couldn't go to physically, you know, to galleries. So it was a way to do things in a new way. So, you know, it's difficult for me to compare the two. I would say that they are like two different worlds. But for sure, there is something for the traditional artwork that can be taken from the NFT art world. And, you know, and the reuse, you know, I think it's important that from an esthetical standpoint as well, you know, there is a certain bar, you know, because now with NFTs, you really see a lot of stuff right there from gifts to who do like artworks.

Andrea Bonaceto

So I think you do need to set the bar at a certain level, you know. So it's important, I think, to have people with a lot of experience in traditional art space that they come into the NFT world. And they say, okay, look, actually, this is very good, you know, artwork. And this is, of course, art is subjective, I know. But, you know, you don't need to reinvent the wheel basically from scratch, I'm saying.

Andrea Bonaceto

I was just distracted because I saw the question coming up. Can you explain a bit more about Sofia's participation in your work? Oh, hold on a second. Patrick did have a question for you. And then after Patrick, Colin had something he wanted to ask you as well. Okay. Anyway, good to meet you. This is super interesting. Actually, the thing is that Negin, who's always in here, who's also in here, she and I lived in Abu Dhabi for five years. And remember when Sofia got her citizenship, the Saudi. So, you know, this is super interesting. And so anyway. Another thing is that Kandinsky is also my starting point back in 1990. In other words, that's exactly the book that got me going on my painting. You know, so that's great. You know, I'm glad to see somebody, you know, hitting the same touchstone.

Andrea Bonaceto

So anyway, what happens is that I'm just kind of wondering is that, you know, every artist has kind of their process, their style, you know, that sort of thing that they establish for themselves. And the thing is, is that I think every experience we have, you know, affects us in some way. So did the collaboration with Handsome Robotics, you know, add something to your artwork or and if so, how did it affect you? Yeah. No, definitely. I think it showed me the potential of what I was doing in the sense of how you could explode my artworks in a way that was very abstract. That I actually like and I would say even probably enjoy more, you know, to go with more abstract art.

Andrea Bonaceto

It showed the abstract potential basically of my portraits. Because what I try to do with the portraits is always to try to express the essence of the person. In fact, I understand that if I know the person personally well, for me it's easier to try to convey that. I don't know how to explain. But when I look at it, I can. I say like, okay, it's okay. This is fine. It makes sense.

Andrea Bonaceto

And with Sophia, it was basically the opportunity to also, you know, bring it one step further and like go almost beyond the portrait itself. And this is something that I'm currently now thinking about, to be honest. It really made me ask myself new questions that I don't have yet. Yeah. I'm not sure if I can answer the answers. Yeah, yeah. Actually, the one thing is, is like this notion of concerning the spiritual and art and how we work with technology and that sort of thing. This is one thing we talk about here in the group is the idea that saying, okay, where does the spirit of art, you know, emerge from, you know, the machine, from the technology? And I think that's, you know, what you're, you know, what you're dealing with. I think that's great. In fact, that's also a controversial point if you want, right?

Andrea Bonaceto

Because some people might argue AI cannot create art. You know, it's bullshit. Like, what is it? But the way I see it is that it's basically a new avenue for, you know, even, you know, many people to then, you know, to follow. Like, you do something like that where you basically say, okay, AI, robots, and humans in the future will collaborate together not only on operational tasks, but also on creative tasks. So maybe now an AI, you know, does not have the metaphysical element of us humans, you know, does not have the metaphysical element of us humans. So maybe now an AI, you know, does not have the metaphysical element of us humans, you know, does not have the concept of, you know, death, of, you know, meaningless of their lives, you know, for now. But through time, they will evolve. And we might, you know, arrive at a phase where the singularity is achieved, where the intelligence of AI is at the level of humans and actually goes also beyond that.

Andrea Bonaceto

And at that point, you know, basically you need to start somewhere, right? And I think now merging like a human with an AI, it can craft something. That creates an emotion in whoever sees that and raises new questions. That was really the point, raising new questions without providing any answer. And then, you know, everyone goes home and they do whatever they want.

Andrea Bonaceto

Cool. I had a question. I'll jump in, I guess, to save Dava the trouble of calling on me. So, I had a question. I'll jump in, I guess, to save Dava the trouble of calling on me. So, I did an interview with you, Andrea, recently that's on our YouTube channel. And you mentioned the metaverse. And kind of since then, you know, like I recently minted an NFT and sold my first NFT. And then I got a request from someone over Twitter to create another one as a commission for his CryptoVoxels gallery. And I didn't know what CryptoVoxels was. So, I went in into the link that he sent me. And I saw that it was sort of like, you know, this. Shared VR space where you can buy virtual real estate. And I guess there's other platforms similar to that, like Decentraland is another one. I mean, do you envision a day when all of these sort of disparate platforms are interconnected in some way?

Andrea Bonaceto

Or if the metaverse could ever exist in a way that, you know, the sort of the idea of cyberspace as William Gibson, for instance, presented it. Where it's a consensus. Where it's a consensual, you know, hallucination or a consensual virtual reality. Like, you know, do you think that's something that's possible? You know, that these different places would be interoperable. Or that there would be some sort of an open source standard where people could go in with a headset and basically be in this, you know, this metaverse. Yeah. So, I just shared the link because what you mentioned is very interesting. And I wrote a blog post about it on medium. Where I talk about NFTs and as well the metaverse. So, I would say two things. The first is that I'm extremely bullish on the metaverse. And the metaverse is basically you can think as a parallel world where everything is an NFT.

Andrea Bonaceto

Because NFTs are not only for digital art. Anything that is non-fungible, so that is unique, can be represented as an NFT. Like a house can be an NFT. A car can be an NFT. A guitar can be an NFT. In this metaverse, you exist in the form of an avatar. And you go around. And there are museums, houses. You can meet other people.

Andrea Bonaceto

And, yeah, Cryptovoxel, there are also some of the artworks that are sold on Nifty that are in a museum there that you can go and check them out. And, you know, think about how democratic it is in terms of access to opportunity, you know. I'm originally from a very small city in Italy called Viareggio, 60,000 inhabitants.

Andrea Bonaceto

Now I live in London. But let's say I was still in Viareggio. If I want to access, you know, a museum with NFTs and I probably in the future will be able to do it by going into the metaverse, meeting, you know, some collectors and galleries there. And then I can engage with people on Twitter. So, you know, it's a very interesting concept. And I hope that these, of course, will go together with also meeting people in person, not that we are like becoming avatars ourselves in our real life. So this is one of my ideas. One point, super bullish on the metaverse. Second point, what Colin was saying is basically the omniverse. To have a sort of interoperable metaverse and have a situation where, you know, from me to going from Italy to the UK and I have to take a plane. And same way, you know, you could have a channel to go from Decentraland to CryptoVoxel or to Somnium.

Andrea Bonaceto

That is another metaverse actually very popular for crypto art and NFT art. So I think we are going there. And this is just a very, very beginning. So there is so much potential and is actually, you know, amazing that even though the experience right now is so bad because these metaverses are not good. Like they don't really, it looks like Super Mario Bros in the, I don't know, 95. It's not like a gaming, like 2021 experience, you know, but still people, they use it. There is a community that is very, very engaged. So imagine when this will become very, very polished. You will have an avatar that looks exactly like ourselves. You go there with a headset. You can meet people, you know, new generations will not need to be convinced about that. You see, like Generation Z is already extremely familiar with the digital world.

Andrea Bonaceto

They cannot, they never even experienced a non-digital society. So for them is a no brainer. So for me, is the next logical step. And NFT is a new step. And these are going to be a catalyst for this to happen. Second life. Once I go, someone is mentioning second life in the, in the chat. The thing about second life and the big difference with second life is the second life is a centralized platform. Okay. There is a company behind second life. And if tomorrow this company says, oh, you know what? I'm going to shut down second life. Second life is gone. Or they're going to repurpose their business model or whatever. Things are going to change in second life. These metaverses are decentralized platforming that there is no unique point of failure. That's why people are spending hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions in purchasing land, in purchasing a house on the metaverse.

Andrea Bonaceto

Like you would be like, are you mad? You're going to buy a virtual house that you cannot even live in. Yeah, you can. I mean, you cannot live in as a person now, but you can create a museum. You can create the Louvre in the metaverse. And you can buy the book. You can buy the land. And this is something that no one is ever going to take it away from you. You own it. And it's going to stay there forever.

Andrea Bonaceto

Things that doesn't happen in the central land. That was, you know, gives you the, sorry, second life. It just gave you like the gist of what could be to have like a life in a digital world. But here you can actually have, you know, you can buy stuff. You can own things. If you own something that doesn't sell well in your central land. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Andrea Bonaceto

Well, this is actually a conversation that I'd love to like be able to continue. Unfortunately we do have two other presenters that we need to get to before the end of this meeting. Meeting but there is one more question from cynthia with I did promise her that she would get to that question she wants to know she wanted you to explain a bit more about sofia's participation in your work and after that then we can go ahead yeah so sofia's creative process is through her neural network which is basically another word to mention let's say her brain okay so she looks at my artworks she looks at other artworks as well and then you know she produces an output and then this is fed back into a neural network you know we went through multiple iterations up to the point where we did actually like you know everything that we saw we felt it was at a certain level and that was the final version I know that david all!

Andrea Bonaceto

Also put into sofia's neural network for sofia instantiation so the final piece many things even you know portrait of cleopatra because he wanted also to encompass you know the beginning like the ancient physiognomy you know of a face it was also part of his wife of you know marcelo ben himself my portrait of sofia other portraits of sphere that I made that were not part of the drop so many things went into this and then you know you see it at the end as the result of many iterations because I said sofia produced an output then do this went back in it went back in and then the final piece also had the sofia drawing you know they're basically having all this knowledge in her neural network and then also with the brush being able to actually do the brush strokes herself and that was also the physical piece so that was pretty much the creative process that was one of the things that what this was like it was not for an original project it was for thehaven did the process of like they've been doing it for you know like for the last three years we've been doing it for you know this for the last three years it's just an either or think about it in the next year we're going to have to think about it in the next year we're going to have to think about it in the next year we're going to have to think about it in the next year we're going to have to think about it in the next year we're going to have to think about it Gotcha.

Andrea Bonaceto

All right, well, we can give you a round of applause now I think without further ado. Thank you. Thank you for having me. No problem. It is a pleasure to have you. And that was my cat apparently also giving you applause. So next up

We have Tommy Mintz, you ready for your presentation. Absolutely. And I actually, I mean, I just like to chime into it. Andrea was talking about there of like thinking about how the digital world has changed how we like think about space or property and objects and value. Yeah, I have a slideshow here actually I'd like to try to share, let me see if I can pull this up quickly.

Tommy Mintz

You tell me if I just lost everybody so it looks like I shared correctly. So, I'm going to quickly go through a slideshow actually that I've put together, let me know if I'm going too fast, or if my audio drops out please. I'm on a wireless microphone. So, before you get started you mind introducing yourself, like, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Okay.

Tommy Mintz

And thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to, you know, talk about me and my work. My name is Tommy Mintz. And I'm an artist I see that. Okay, yeah, that's on. I have an algorithmic process that I've been using to create time lapse images. I'm fascinated by our sense of time, place and memory. And I think our digital tools that we're using these days and methods of creating our understanding of space and time you know like blockchain really does affect how we understand our space. Because if we understand our senses and what we value in our perception right and in the past. People talked about like metaphors of like clockwork thinking and like the mechanical ways that we worked and now we're sort of reframing our metaphorical understanding of, you know, our brain has neural network and all these sort of new ways of understanding who we are where we are when we are.

Tommy Mintz

And I like to think of like Marshall McLuhan's, the medium is the message to sort of understand how the digital medium affects what and how we remember, how we understand ourselves, both individually and collectively as a culture, right? Being affected by our digital tools. So as a photographer, I'm a photographer, I document the world around me, and I'd like to begin by acknowledging the extraordinary privilege I have had of growing up and living in lower Manhattan my whole life.

Tommy Mintz

And I'd like to also acknowledge and question our history by naming the Munsee, Lenni, Lenape tribe, the Canarsie tribe, the Unkachug and Shinnecock tribes, who people the lands that I take pictures of now. So I'm gonna go through some slides of previous work, just to give you a sense. In elementary school, I spent a lot of time in a dark room at the Children's Aid Society on Sullivan Street, kind of a legendary community center. And I still feel quite attached to community centers.

Tommy Mintz

And in high school, I worked in dark rooms. I loved being the identity of being a photographer. In the 90s, I went to Sarah Lawrence College and had access to computers and I was able to scan film. And in the 90s, I went to Sarah Lawrence College and had access to computers. And in the 90s, I went to Sarah Lawrence College and had access to computers. And pieced together using software on Windows computers in the 90s, kind of large collages. I would make prints on color laser printers, tiled across multiple pages, and put them together using acrylic matte medium to create wall-sized prints.

Tommy Mintz

So yeah, I did a lot of that in the middle of, Sarah Lawrence took some time off, studied alternative processes at the New School, learned platinum palladium printing from Arkady Lvov, who's kind of a master printer and opened my mind up to thinking about the print, and really reconsidering the print itself. And that's something that sort of has been a challenge. And one of these things that I think about, like what is the way we present our artwork, especially digitally now that we're coming into it? So I went to graduate school at Queens College, CUNY, Queens College. So I went to graduate school at Queens College, CUNY, Queens College. And I studied with Tony Gonzalez, who is a gum by chromate printer. And he does digital negatives for gum by chromate printing. And I was trying to make digital negatives for platinum palladium printing.

Tommy Mintz

And he also introduced me to other printing processes, such as cyanotype, which I love. I love the color of, and also the method of making negatives from prints on paper. And you, you can wax them to make them translucent, and then you could print very, much like a negative made on plastic. So yeah, another side note, I studied dance as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. And I think that informs my work and understanding of movement and the human body through space. So I choreographed some work thinking about choreographing for creating a collage. I found places where I'd see people, people move through space in interesting ways, trying to isolate that. This is all by hand. I'm cutting this out in Photoshop, you know, using the mouse and tools. Here's a self portrait of myself cleaning.

Tommy Mintz

And I cut that out. I also have this image that I was able to print. And actually, let me back up one second. In 2002, I was asked to submit 10 prints to a show called Identity Paradox at the Austin Museum of Digital Art. And I priced out these prints. And it was so expensive that it was cheaper for me to buy the new Epson 7600, which changed my life. And I had the ability to fabricate prints on any material, like huge lengths.

Tommy Mintz

And you can see those strips of paper here. These are 24 inches wide coming out of my Epson 7600. And here I walked around a tree, cut it out from its forest, and you know, each image. And I stitched those together. So that's a very large print. So movement, time, space. I'm still a photographer. I go around taking pictures like Henri Cartier-Bresson, you know, that idea of images a la Suavec, just observing the things we see around us, you know, the spaces that we're in. I printed these out on very thin paper, rolled them up like posters, and presented them. I sold them as cheap shots and sold them for five bucks a print, like posters. And I missed these old poster shops that I used to love as a kid and was trying to replicate that a little bit. So I have these prints printed on thin paper that I then hung in Queens College Library.

Tommy Mintz

On the sixth floor, they have an art center. And along their walls, they have heaters that have hot air rising up along the walls. And this started to rustle. And then I saw the print, the paper that was there. And I kind of fell in love with that materiality. The ability of the paper to move was something that I found really exciting. And I've been continuing to think about that thinness and of the capability of paper. So let me now jump ahead to my current work. So right now, I wrote an algorithm that creates a collage. And I wrote this after asking all my programmer friends if they would do it for me. And they were all too busy, always. That's how it is, right? So I had this idea. I put it up for a long time. I had this idea in maybe 2004. In 2012, I was asked to have a show at a gallery and make a proposal.

Tommy Mintz

And I proposed to do this thing I've always been thinking about. I'm going to do it. And so at that time, the Raspberry Pi computer was also released. And this was sort of the perfect tool for me to dedicate a computer to something that I wanted to do, which was generate a collage for me. I was tired of doing all this sort of repetitive task. And I thought the computer could do it. So the collages that I'm doing, I'm generating, did I just lose everybody? I'm so sorry. Can you give me a thumbs up if you can hear me? I feel like I click. Thank you. So these collages, thank you so much. These collages that I'm generating are generated algorithmically.

Tommy Mintz

And the algorithm is detecting areas of difference. And the way it works is I take a picture that's a baseline picture, I call it the baseline image. And then subsequent images are compared to that. So here's a second image. And the difference is turned into what I call an alpha channel. You might call it a layer mask if you're using Photoshop. And this is saved as a JPEG that I call alpha channel. And so then I have that tool of comparison. And then I lay in those white areas. The white areas are added. The black areas are left alone. So now I'll take another picture. Here's photo two compared to the baseline. That's the difference added together. And I iterate that over and over. And over. So I would sit there with my Raspberry Pi computer doing this. It was kind of a beautiful thing. And here's these collages that I was generating.

Tommy Mintz

And here's what it looked like when I was there with my computer. On the left-hand side, I had a light stand. At the top of the light stand, I had my webcam. I had my Raspberry Pi. Can I annotate this here? Let's see. I'm going to mess everything up. I'm trying to get fancy. I'm not going to try to annotate. Sorry. You can see the Raspberry Pi dangling. Off the light stand. There's wires. It's kind of a messy DIY.

Tommy Mintz

I like that aesthetic though. And here's what was being generated. This collage on the right-hand side of people walking by. And there's a lot of edges. I'm very interested in these edges that are being created that I wouldn't. All these decisions that are being made that I would never make. Here's how it was installed in the gallery. People would see themselves.

Tommy Mintz

The Raspberry Pi was taped to the wall. There's a camera. There's a tape to the wall. Also attached to the wall was a printer. And every so often the collages that were being generated would be printed. And I taped those prints to the wall in the background. You could see it close up here. And then along another wall I had a series of repurposed digital photo frames that I loaded with my series of collages that you could see the animation of the generation of these collages happening. Happening. So I continue to iterate this. I showed at Maker Faire a lot. Maker Faire is a really great community that I found super supportive. Next to me there were the IEEE folks who told me what I was doing was somewhat the same compression that digital television uses, but sort of I'm doing it in reverse or something.

Tommy Mintz

So it's interesting because I was noticing how people have been sort of noticing that same glitchiness that I kind of love here. So yeah, it kind of does look like digital TV in a way when you're seeing it at this low resolution version. So these low resolution cameras were what the first Raspberry Pis could run. Version two, I got a faster Raspberry Pi. I could try to connect some different buttons, add a little more interactivity. I dragged it around, battery powered on a cart, and did outdoor pictures at Maker Faire in 2015 at the Queens Hall of Science.

Tommy Mintz

Here's a picture that was generated there. I was invited to a show at a movie festival. I guess. Outdoors, projecting this work onto, and I don't think this is supposed to be a video. I'm not going to try to click it, but I have videos up on YouTube of people interacting with it and seeing themselves projected up onto this beautiful building in Snug Harbor on Staten Island.

Tommy Mintz

Here's another movie I'm going to skip. So in 2016, there's another version of the Raspberry Pi released, which at this point could support me using it. So I took my Canon 5D, which was the best camera I had at that time, access to at that time and started taking pictures, which revealed a level of detail that was so different than before that I was able to detect movement in ways that I wasn't able to before and pointed my camera at things like flowers in the breeze and getting the change of position in those was kind of a fantastic thing to notice. So I'm going to skip this.

Tommy Mintz

Hope hackers on planet earth was another venue that was like, come show your work here. Cause it, you know, I printed out the code and showed three versions of that. And you could see a guy zooming by on a segue on the segue track back there. The Raspberry Pi zero came out in 2017 and I set that up to be like a wearable version of this, where I just stuck it on my helmet or my backpack or my wrist and word around. And then when unload thousands of collages at the end of the day, and I still haven't gone through all of these. I mean, this was where I went down a rabbit hole. I was like, Oh, maybe not.

Tommy Mintz

So I concentrated a little more on the high resolution. Upgrading my screen. I had a lot of trouble with battery powered screens are really were really expensive. Were the sort of thing that slowed me down most. How did I control my computer? Eventually I started using a desktop mirror. I started using a desktop mirroring on an iPad. I just have my Raspberry Pi running remote desktop and a wifi hotspot. And I log into that and, you know use that remote control. So I generated a lot of these, you know, I stand somewhere for a couple minutes to a couple, you know, more and just take pictures on the tripod in the beginning. And I've started to move the camera. I haven't gotten to that yet. So on a tripod, I'm just really detecting the movement of people. And then, Oh, here's some more of that.

Tommy Mintz

It's one of my favorites. This one sold. I'm printing by the way on dye sublimation on aluminum. A lot of these prints hopefully show in just a second an installation view. And here I'm moving the camera a little bit. And this creates these wonderful edges. When I reposition my layers, I align things first, run it through my algorithm and the edges of the frame become prominent, which is something that I really enjoy. This sort of. Speaker 2.

Tommy Mintz

Speaker 3 So I'm turning my camera. I tried to plot things out very carefully to create panoramic X that I was then printing on no cares of detail of it printing on fabric. So I have dye sublimation on metal in this show. This show the Hudson Guild asked me to do a second show in 2019 and I applied for a grant to do experimental printing dye sublimation on aluminum is beautiful. Speaker 4 It's not cheap. And also the signs.com print on fabric is the cheapest thing I found to make as large a print as you possibly can. So that fabric print on the long wall here, 54 inches by 168 inches, you know, it had this. And I do I have a video here that I know is not going to run. I have a fan blowing on this in the gallery so that it moved very much like that paper, emphasizing the materiality of that fabric, as opposed to the hard, cold quality, which I also enjoy, of the dye sublimation on aluminum and how that describes a digital image in a very digital way.

Tommy Mintz

So here's some dye sublimation on aluminum prints that have been shown in a number of venues at this point. It's been very well received, these prints. Our variety of sizes. This is six inches by four inches. It's kind of small. I love the idea of making these small postcard size gems. And here, going back, is 60 inches by 40 inches that I'm able to now generate very high resolution pictures using, you know, 50 megapixel cameras. And I'm processing that later on my Mac. So I just had a show where I printed on shower curtains, which was fun, hung those in a circle around people with a split in the middle so you could walk in the middle and walk around the outside.

Tommy Mintz

I carried it on, on the airplane, you know, in my carry-on. I didn't even have to check my bag. This is in Budapest, which is the city I recommend. I'd never been there. I never thought about going. I love it. I love Budapest now. So, Pooch Gallery in Budapest. And here's a detail of one of the panels that was in that last show. Oh, not last show. It seems so long ago. So I had another show with another set of panoramics and printed those on. Okay. Printed this panoramic image on fabric, again, wrapped around a wall, had a fan going on it, so it moved. You see a little fan down there.

Tommy Mintz

In relation to those dye sublimation hard edge prints that I kind of try to make a contrast. So right now I have one. I got another grant to push this even further. I have a really big, hot pair of prints that I've gotten ready for, hopefully, a display in public here. On the west side of Manhattan, there's a community center that I'm involved with called Hudson Guild, right, that has shown my work before. And they have another space. It's on Ninth Avenue and 18th Street. They just renovated, and they have public-facing windows. So I'm going to wrap large prints in a U-shape towards the window so people can maybe walk into it or even just view it from outside. So that's an upcoming installation. Here's my work this year. So I'm shooting now with a very high resolution camera. Came down in price.

Tommy Mintz

The Canon 5DS was, it's been discontinued. It's a 50 megapixel full-frame beautiful camera that creates this level of detail that allows for, you know, descriptions of things that you don't see in the moment. They surprise me later. That I find to be one. Robin Kelsey, I think he teaches at Harvard, wrote a book called Photography and the Art of Chance, which I recommend reading. It's fantastic. It's a fantastic book. And in it he describes how chance, this idea of finding something, happenstance in your pictures or, you know, you happen upon something, or you see it later in your work, is this inherent joy in photography. And I think this process repeats and emphasizes that for me. It makes me really excited over and over, this unknown.

Tommy Mintz

So that's the last of my slides. Thank you so much for your attention. Parting thoughts. Photography. You know, it's interesting to think about, you know, art. And science. Right? Here we are in this technology space playing with technological tools as artists. Right? And what does that mean? Right? And there's some resources over there.

Tommy Mintz

I'm happy to. How did I get the print on the shower curtain? Online. I could find the website. I think it was, gosh, artscow.com, A-R-T-S-C-O-W might be the website. It was in China. It took four weeks to ship. You know, but it was super cheap. All right. Well, thank you very much, Tommy, for your presentation.

Tommy Mintz

There's a lot. Photography isn't one of those things that I readily grasp, because I just don't have that much familiarity with it. But it's still very interesting to me. And it's amazing what you've been doing and what you're capable of doing. And it's also. Interesting to me that, like, there's this thing that appears to be a trend now that I've noticed with many people in our movement actually do dye sublimation print on aluminum for our works. Like piece that I have right behind me is that.

Tommy Mintz

I know Francine definitely does that with her work. But yeah, quite a few of us have been using dye sublimation on aluminum for our work. I guess there's just something about it that just makes things better. I don't know. Well, it gives it a nice dimensionality to the image. You know, like the way the light penetrates past the pigment and, you know, it really has a more dye and has a.

Tommy Mintz

You know, it feels modern in a way to know, you know, it's not trying to be old fashion. It's not. When was that made? Question doesn't come up. Which, you know, maybe. Maybe it's not. But it's very much of its time and it'll look dated soon. But I'm enjoying it right now. One last thing is there is a material called transfer ease if you don't want to go get dye sublimation from a printing facility you can buy a chemical that you print out of your normal inkjet printer onto a piece of plastic, you coat any surface with this thing called transfer. E E Z E, I believe is transfer easy.

Tommy Mintz

And then you put the plastic, you know the print of on plastic on that and let it do its thing for a minute you peel off the plastic and the pigment remains on the surface, and I've been experimenting with that and really enjoying that because I like the tactile thing of working as an artist on you know something. And that's part of the conundrum.

Tommy Mintz

Well thank you. Let's see. I don't know if we have any questions for Tommy about his process and he comments about his work and he prays that you can shower him with because you know artists always look praise. I praise. There you go. The work was really awesome. And I want to say like your students are very lucky to have you as a teacher I saw your professor, because you know so much about the traditional techniques and the technological ones, and can you know teach both of them from either side. And I think that's really valuable for students to see.

Tommy Mintz

Thank you. Yeah, it's tough right now. Everything's closed. Kingsborough darkroom is definitely closed for another couple semesters, and I'm not planning on opening the darkroom right now. So it's all digital. It's all digital. Absolutely. I really like your work. So I have a couple questions are there sort of related obviously. The urban environment, since you live in a very urban environment I find really fascinating. And I really liked the flower image that you showed. Have you done any more in terms of natural landscapes.

Tommy Mintz

That was my first question and then do you are you setting up. Like regular intervals in which you're working. Are you taking the photographs, or are you winging it or it's all like programmed it. So, I'll answer the first question first and then the second so the answer is, yeah I point my camera at what's around me right now, flowers are blooming, I go to Central Park a lot right there's a lot of natural setting there. But yeah I do get out of the city and photograph outside of city if you look at my Instagram feed.

Tommy Mintz

I think my most recent post was. I think my most recent post is another daffodil, if you will, you know, there's more there. And the second question. In the beginning I was running everything off a timer, although then I added a button. And I've since stopped actually using the Raspberry Pi in the process and I'm just out there with my camera like any other photographer pressing the button myself. I do sometimes have a cable release that I'll attach to my camera. I'll attach to my camera. I'll attach to my camera. On the tripod if I want to keep it really still. So, people ignore me, or I'll smile at them. I mean I do really like being the photographer, you know out there people chat. I always have postcards that I'll give people of past shows didn't explain what I'm doing. You know people are.

Tommy Mintz

I like that exchange on. How about how about at nighttime. Any, any nighttime photography. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. Thanks. All right. We have two questions lined up for Tommy now one. First one being from Ross and the second one from Susan. So Ross, go ahead. Tommy. Oh, that was a beautiful, you have such a I put it in the remarks, you have such a poetry to your work.

Tommy Mintz

Then I just immediately respond to, and it brought it for me. The word discernment, you know as an artist I've been recently talking with people a little bit. You know as an artist I've been recently talking with people a little bit. I remember asking and Svalter about this with working with AI and, and recently listening to Andrea like we're, you know, there's a poetry in there where an artist's eyes at work and whether you're working with an AI person or what I'm just curious where, you know, you know, an AI think it's fit out all these things but then you throw out thousands of they go oh that's the only one I like and you train that agent to your visual whatever it is you have. And in your work there is a continual poetry of vision that I just call poetry. And I wonder, do you throw out tons of things or is it or is it.

Tommy Mintz

I mean I just, it's not all automated right with this algorithm, I'm just curious where discernment, throwing things away and keeping things comes in, is that part of why all these things look beautiful. Yeah, I mean I have hard drives full of images that are part of the process, if you will, you know, building up. Maybe I've gone too far and I'll step back and look at one of the ones that you know was more successful and choose that. As the final product.

Tommy Mintz

Yeah, and I you know I'm not going to share my clicking or typing in my, my commands but you know I actually have a YouTube channel where I posted a, you know, what do you call it when you record your screen a screencast of me going through the process and you can sort of see how I enter us, you know the pictures into the program.

Tommy Mintz

Yeah. And then, what that will come out. Yeah. And then, what that will come out and then choose what happens next. Yeah. Yeah. You don't show everything obviously but I was curious about that because there's always that artists wrestling thing that goes on when you're working with a piece, you know, it's kind of a universal I think that with a great work of art anyway.

Tommy Mintz

Thanks. Yeah, the nice thing about working digitally is you don't leave a huge mess behind, you know, you know, all those extra pictures I didn't waste. You know a pound of film on or whatever. But you always have all these more options I know all these layers and Photoshop drive me crazy but I go no I'll put this one above and below and some people can't do anything in digital art because then making that decision just drives them. There's too many options. I mean you have to know where you're going or you're just going to make a big mess. So, thank you so much. That was a beautiful presentation. Thanks for us I appreciate it.

Tommy Mintz

Okay, and next up we have Susan. Go ahead with your question. I'm not to say that I felt I have a the same but similarity coming from alternative photography and alternative work in the art world. And then, anyway, I can he said that really information for me. And I'd like to know, I don't mean to interrupt but your been a dancer.

Tommy Mintz

Your connection seems to be, oh, did she cut out completely. Susan you still here you still with us. Oh, no. That kind of, if you if you don't mind would you be able to like type out your question because it seems like your connection quality is kind of poor and you're just breaking up really bad. I don't, I'm not even sure Tommy or anybody else could really hear complete thoughts.

Tommy Mintz

But if you type it out I'm sure we could we could get to that. Oh, okay. Sorry. I'm still breaking up. Yeah, it's breaking up pretty bad. Like I, the only two words that I heard if you've been speaking for like the past 10 seconds we're breaking up. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I guess we'll wait on that for a second.

Tommy Mintz

The joys and wonders of technology and when and when it does not actually perform the way we want it to comes with the territory. Beauty of glitches. Which is, yeah, I'm, you know what I'm sure there's some artists out there using broken up or disconnected audio from like zoom meetings to create something. I would not be surprised.

Tommy Mintz

Here first. No, actually we might have somebody in here that could probably run and go do something with that because we do have quite a few audio visual artists here. So, I don't know, it could be an interesting project to for somebody to go down if they're curious. I was thinking maybe down the road we establish a wallet for the group and men.

Tommy Mintz

So the next time you're going to go and do it. We just want to get that up and running. So I'm just going to get that up and running. So I'm just going to get that up and running. So I'm just going to have to think about it. And that's we're going to have to think about it. And that's we're going to have to think about it. And that's we're going to have to think about it. And that's we're going to have to think about it. And that's we're going to have to think about it. And that's we're going to have to think about it. And that's we're going to have to think about it. That I felt some similarities to your work, Tommy, and having gone from a darkroom photographer and learning to use alternative photography like cyanotype and those types of things, and then progressing into using digital.

Tommy Mintz

And I also was attracted to the idea that you used your dance experience. And because I haven't thought of that, because I was a dancer as a child and to adulthood, and I haven't thought of connecting that in my thinking about my digital work. So that I appreciated. So I wanted to say that, and I'm hoping that I might have a little bit of a connection with you, maybe on Instagram, but maybe ask a couple of questions outside the group and connect with you. So that was my question. And thanks for letting me come back because that was frustrating.

Tommy Mintz

Okay, bye-bye. Thank you, Susan. All right. All right, did I miss anything? No? Maybe? Yes? Nope, nothing? All right. If there are no further, oh, wait, wait, wait. There is one question I saw earlier in the chat for Tommy, before we move on. I think Giovanna wants to know the address of your upcoming show because she's also in New York.

Tommy Mintz

Yeah, because I just heard you say something about you're going to put up some of your work somewhere on 9th Avenue. Can you type the address and the date? Yes. There's no date yet. They haven't reopened the gallery yet because of COVID. So it's TBD, but this is in the planning. But yeah, I'll put the address in the chat right now. Thank you. I'll let you know. And I'll post to Discord. I'll post the text version is in Discord and it'll be up, absolutely. Yeah, by the way, guys, if you do have like an upcoming event or an exhibition, or a show planned, feel free to share in the Discord because there might be actually somebody in the area that can actually attend, but you never know. Oh, actually we do have one. So the Gramercy part, our venture partners office, Dadaada, still call for submission.

Tommy Mintz

I already post on Discord. Yeah. Yeah, that is a resource that people should definitely use if it's there. I'm always actually kind of plugging Discord because, you know, we need people in there. We need people interacting with there. So anyway, if there are no further questions for Tommy, I think we can go slide right into Clive's presentation. Thank you, Tommy, for your time and your presentation.

Tommy Mintz

It's a pleasure to have you.

All right, Clive, you have the floor. All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Clive Holden and I've been making work for about 40 years. So I'm going to have to skip over some of the early stuff. Let me just do a screen share thing here. I made experimental films for quite a while. And that's how I got started in visual art. Went to film school and art school, and that's what took over. And then I'm just skipping over this early stuff. I did a big project that I'm maybe best known for called Trains of Winnipeg that traveled around between 2001 and 2008. And it had a book and a CD and a website artwork and a feature film. And that was a lot of fun. I suppose you could call it multidisciplinary art, although that was a brand new term back then. I just thought of this project as wanting to take the same materials and see how it all interrelated.

Clive Holden

And it led me to... Really where I'm going to talk today, getting into more digital art. The Trains of Winnipeg project really was digital, but it was digital and film mixed together. I did a digital intermediary and then transferred it to 35 millimeter film for projection at the end. Don't need to do any of that stuff now, which is great. We have high quality digital distribution for free. It's all a much better space for distributing your moving image art now.

Clive Holden

What I moved into in the late 2000 knots was a net art initially. And I made a bunch of these for two or three years and I'll show you one in a moment. And that's really the beginning of my making code based art, which I'm still doing. A lot of my work is a hybrid with analog materials. And basically that comes out of my filmmaking. Making a lot of the early things involved, making film loops and turning them into things like gifts. So I'm going to go over to an artwork right now.

Clive Holden

That's called... Let's see now. I'm going to make sure I get this right here. This is called dirtyfilm.org. It's still at that address on the web. I had quite a few of these up at one point. It was a little era when these were happening. And this work is, as you can see, a series of gifts made out of a super eight film leader, literally dirty film. The art world loves a good pun. And I was often editing films back then, and I'd be throwing film like this on the floor and often thinking I should make an artwork out of that. And I finally did. This was the first one. And it's a bit deceptively simple looking. It's... But what... What's exciting about it for me, and it still is to this day, is that it's the first time I used JavaScript randomization algorithms. Or another way of putting that would be algorithmic chance procedures.

Clive Holden

So I was really thinking a lot about John Cage and the use of chance in making an artwork, but in this case, embedding it right into the artwork. So that in a sense, the algorithms are acting like jazz musicians. They're almost like... Or Indian classical... Indian classical music where there's a set structure. And within that structure, they're making improvisation decisions on the fly to decide which of the loops are going to end up in the different rectangles. So this work you're seeing now will never be seen this way again. It's a unique viewing of the work. And that's constantly the case. That's continually being refreshed. And in a sense, this is a crude version of what we now call AI. It's the artwork, artificial intelligence, collaboration, and the art that's operating with me and completing the artwork as we watch it.

Clive Holden

So I find that a very exciting idea and it really informs a lot of the work I've made since. And these net artworks, they led into larger works that I made for offline purposes. So I'll show you one of those now. Let's see. Wind at Lake Manitoba, which is a big lake near Winnipeg where I used to live, in the center of Canada.

Clive Holden

And it's made out of a few strands of Super 8 film. And a lot of what I wanted to work on in this case, it's a much bigger work, much more complex work. Like I said, when I moved this tech and kind of packed it for offline purposes, I was able to do things that were more complex because you're not limited by the internet connection. Not that's as big an issue now, as it was in 2011 when I made this. But what I was thinking about a lot was the live processing of the data as art. So in this case, the metaphor really is that the tree branches are the data and the wind is processing the tree branches. So we're seeing live processed data. And again, this work is never repeated the same way. It takes about, not 12 minutes to cycle through, but it cycles through completely different each time because it's choosing the different, what I call media tiles in different orders all the way through continuously.

Clive Holden

In a sense, it has an infinite duration. And so I've made quite a few of these. And especially back in that period of time, 2011 to 2015 or so. And I'm definitely now returning to some of this work. It's interesting to think of the, AI connections of this, and also my fascination with movement, which is ties in with both Andrea and Tommy's work. So sort of a theme developing today, which is nice. Just let this run for a little bit. You can see how sometimes, I can't predict when it's going to happen. The tiles rearrange themselves so that there's a flickering effect through the screen. And that's all very exciting, kind of mirroring the movement of the leaves, on the tree branches.

Clive Holden

For me, it's particularly exciting because it makes it more clear how exciting, how beautiful what we're looking at these days is. I mean, the data itself, not just the images. So these are traditionally beautiful things, tree branches, but we're also, we're looking at, it's worth remembering. We're actually looking at, we're looking at digital map.

Clive Holden

It's not just the paper. That is very much in the design and the design of the art. And that's an interesting thing. And in the other hand, you can see that you can see the art in the form of the art. And you can see that you can see the art in the form of the art. Picture frame around it and I use a Mac mini velcroed into the back and it's really surprising how this changes how the display looks just putting a simple picture frame around it and that has turned out to be a very good way to display the work in galleries and also because sometimes art clients want to buy a thing if you can take a software-based work put it in one of these and sell them the whole thing and it not that I sell all that much work that I do some and it's it seems to work better making it into a kind of a quasi thing and so I've also shown these works in you know in some museum contexts and this is another one called un-American Unfamous was positing the idea that it's un-American not to be famous and so putting forward that idea that you know so what I did is I took a lot of given I was given access to the Black Star photo collection at Ryerson University and I went into the background of a lot of famous photos and I took out pictures of unfamous people behind famous people and I put them in this big work that again is never seen the same way twice you see it's another screening here they're all continually being changed and updated and a lot of movement a lot of rhythm they're very musical a lot of my work is very musical I'm using music analogies a lot of the time when I'm making them and then 2016 2016 is when I really moved into seamless video loops which ties back to my filmmaking but again they're sort of without duration they're they don't at the beginning they seamlessly go back to the end you don't or from the beginning from the end to the beginning I should say and they really start when you enter the room and leave when you leave the room and they're usually quite long this one a loom for Ani Albers came out of my looking reading her essays and one day I was leaning forward afterwards doing some coding and three-dimensional video editing thinking a lot about the vertical and horizontal and depth axes and I just suddenly thought of her working at a loom looking at her horizontal and vertical and the depth of her loom that she's working at and so that's what this work came out of it took me several months of very patient meditative coding and this is the work now it's the strands of wool I used to make the work lent a really crucial element of the organic variation you can see in the hair itself the hair is coming out of each strand of wool and the point of this hundred hundred minute work is that none of these moments repeat every moment throughout the whole hundred minute loop is unique and so it keeps the mind alive when watching it keeps the interest level high because we quickly respond negatively to seeing things that are repeated one of the challenges with digital art digital technology is there's too much precision and that's part of why I fold in analog materials like film in this case wool sexy for Morden Felden has called that because it's filled with sixes and it was a tribute to many of his ideas this one's four hours long again there's every every moment is unique through the whole work and that's a big part of what I do is take live processes in this case I'm using some VJ software mixed with quite a few other I use quite a lot of different software programs and also this is built up from hand-painted 16 millimeter film so I've again I've got that hybrid element I'm very much working with digital tools all the time but I tend to bring in terra firma as well things that you can touch initially in this case the film was painted and then transferred to the digital and you can see the pattern the rhythm setting up after a while of watching this where this every the six second jump cut creates a sense of rhythm which is very important to the work and then my current work which I'm about to release I'm making an art app that's part of the internet mountains project which I've been making for a few years now it's included a print series also on dye sublimation metallic printing I do I use it because it looks like the image did on the screen that backlit look and I think it's interesting to see how that's going to work and I think it's interesting to think about backlit media as dating back to stained glass windows and even neon and of course television's computer screens and so these prints even though they're not backlit they look backlit they have a little bit of that diffusion of the light you know late renaissance you know glazing etc it's a it's a beautiful effect now this work this latest internet mountain work is a series of 20 second loops they all can function independently they're all they're all seamless loops 20 seconds each and in this case I've assembled them and I'm going to be putting this into I'm building an app that will be two forms of app it'll be a standard computer application or software program that'll be on a desktop computer and then there'll be a remix version as well that will be on the iTunes app store a little bit retro making making that work artwork app in a sense but it's an exciting thing because in both cases the loops will be served up in random order continually so it's getting back to using the chance procedure algorithms to show all these different loops in different orders all the time removing the idea of duration which is an idea that kind of fascinates me the idea that we're moving into a kind of era where traditional duration is changing and we're experiencing a new form of time in a sense you know time was greatly changed when the railways were invented and everything became very ordered and now we've all got access to incredibly incredibly precise time and with digital clocks and watches and our computers and I think we're actually moving beyond that now into a new sense of time that is again cyclical so anyway that's it for that takes me from the past to right now so well thank you very much Clive thank you very much my work is amazing thank you yeah does anyone have any questions for Clive or compliments to give praise you know we give that out freely here looks like oh there wasn't one question on my screen I believe in the chat earlier.

Clive Holden

Michael wants to know, Michael Pointer wants to know, what did Annie Albers think of the work that you did? I hate to say this, I don't know if she's alive or not. I assume she wasn't, but does anyone know if she's alive? Oh, well. I would love to show this work to her and tell her. I just Googled her. She's been dead since 94. Yeah, that's the one I had.

Clive Holden

1899. Every now and then you think someone's dead and they're not. I just was curious, you know? Yeah, wouldn't it be great to show it to her? Yeah, no. Ed, is there any other written questions or? Scrolling through, I... Looks like it was just all praise. Not too many questions, but all praise. It's such impressive work. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. It's very strange to go through all those years of work in 14 minutes.

Clive Holden

I'm gonna ask something about this. I always wanna talk about discernment. I'm going to the opposite side now. You know, when you're working, it's interesting how all three of these presentations did sort of bring together time and energy. It's interesting how all three of these presentations brought together time and space questions that are very, very interesting.

Clive Holden

But what we feed it, I guess I'm still trying to take control as an old fuddy-duddy artist. But what you feed into it, does that matter what comes out? I mean, you do this live. I love that your whole thing is about something that is alive and totally changing and random. And I just wonder if what we put into things, like again, I'm thinking about with an AI situation, what we feed it also determines what comes out. You know, like your question about famous and not famous along the multi-layering of that idea for me, along with the live presentation, really set something off in me and more than maybe some of the pieces that were more difficult for me to get the internal subject matter or something.

Clive Holden

I don't know if that's a question, but maybe you can- I think I can think in the middle of that, of something that I do think about, I can speak to that where, well, I mentioned Indian classical music and I'm not an expert in that by any means, but, and this actually relates to a lot of jazz too, but there is a rigid structure for a musical piece.

Clive Holden

That then allows improvisation within that structure. And so unless you get into open jazz and tremendous amounts of improvisation, usually the music we hear that has improvisation is actually relatively structured. And so again, the musical analogies I was talking about. So the works I've made including these algorithms have a rigid structure and that is really critical to how they turn out. You have to, in a sense, support them.

Clive Holden

Hold them in the right way so that they can then do their magic. Thank you. Thanks. Can I have your turn? All right. I'm not sure if I saw this, but Michael Price, did you have something that you wanted to add? Cause it looked like you were wanting to comment and then stop yourself. Yeah, that's fine. Actually I would, partial comment, partial question. I really think that the natural rhythms is like a really key element in here that it's not just random as we would see random like being noise. And I think that's a huge thing. And I guess I feel an affinity for a lot of what you've done, Clyde. Going back to my game design days when we were trying to design AI and artificial life within games to create natural senses of opponents.

Clive Holden

There's this thing of you're still creating algorithms but you're looking to this thing of what does it feel like organically? And I think that comes through really, really well. And my question was The people that you were talking about in your program. See your work or that don't know the inner workings of the algorithmic quality, do they ask you about that? Or is it such that the surface end result is interesting enough that they don't understand kind of the smarts behind the whole thing? And I found that in my work a lot of people just do not get it at all. And I was just curious sort of what your response, how people have responded to your work that way. I love to quiz people that are looking at my work in a gallery. It's a bit hard on them sometimes. I walk up and say, so what do you think?

Clive Holden

But the word word mesmerizing comes up, you know, the idea of being hypnotized by the things, I mean, finding the right vocabulary is part of their challenge. What I try and do is create a doorway in any artwork. So the doorway might be attractive colors. So someone comes up and they go, look at the colors there, that's the doorway. And then as they enter into the building, they go through a lobby and then and they go into the full. And so part of what's keeping them going into the building is the color and then rhythm. Because if they look at pretty colors for more than 10 seconds, they're going to start seeing and kind of hearing the rhythm you're talking about. And rhythm is critical to the whole thing. And I really think it's an under-recognized issue in time-based art. And so I'm really glad you brought that up.

Clive Holden

It's not talked about enough. And rhythm was a big word in the painting, in painting in the 1950s and 40s even. And they talked about it a lot in that house down the road from Colin there, where expression is the key. And I think it's a really good way to talk about American abstract expressionism got going. They used the word rhythm. And it's kind of died out of favor. It's not really part of what people talk about in visual art much anymore. And yet we're moving into time-based art more and more and more. And Instagram is half video now. And nobody talks about rhythm. I think it would be really good if we did. Because if you're making something, it lasts a certain length of time and you structure it. You shape it. Again, you hold it with rhythm. And it's pretty rare to get into music that doesn't have rhythm.

Clive Holden

It's obvious in music. And it really is obvious in moving visual art as well. Thank you. Yes, exactly. I agree with you. Because things that have a definite loop, when it loops back, you see, oh, I'm back at the beginning. With your work, you know, there isn't that sense of beginning and end, which I really, really love about. So that was, yeah, thanks. Thanks. No problem. My favorite analogy really is a pop song. Something that everybody can understand. If a pop song doesn't develop in the first 20 or 30 seconds, we stop listening. You know, we want, you know, oh, you know, the first few seconds is establishing a pattern. Oh, there's that. Okay, that's the beat. And then you can put up with exactly the same beat for maybe one or two more repetitions. But it has to start developing. There has to be some variation in that.

Clive Holden

Or it becomes dead in our minds and we're not interested. So, you know, this is the basis of time-based art, whether it's sound or visual. It's important for us to embrace rhythm. Rhythm and organic variation. I mean, those are my two things, really. Organic variation and rhythm. So. Well, this was definitely a lovely discussion. And I'm glad I was able to catch Michael wanting to say something and stopping himself a little bit.

Clive Holden

But yeah, this. I got a question real quick. Oh, go for it. Yeah. So, Clive, I know, like when we spoke, we did just sort of a call together a while back. You mentioned you were interested in exploring, you know, the use of NFTs. And I think that definitely, you know, your work relates to NFTs and certainly, you know, video work in general seems to have found a pretty nice home in that technology. What are your thoughts on it? And, you know, how do you envision? You know, utilizing that type of medium as a vehicle for your creative endeavors?

Clive Holden

I'm excited about it like everyone else. It's an obvious possible huge thing for digital art. At the same time, I'm trying to stay focused on the term digital art and digital artworks while I think about NFTs. I don't want NFTs to take over my thinking. So I've investigated it quite a bit. And I'm. When I talk to people who aren't that up on it, I use the term digital art marketplace, you know, things like that. I'm using terms like that so that we don't get wrapped up in these this jargon and I can't understand. I've got an ongoing conversation going on with my gallerist about it. And that's been very interesting. And I'm trying to keep it to these terms. NFT has now become a term that everybody has heard of. But when you once you go beyond that, it becomes really hard to have a discussion.

Clive Holden

It's a little tricky from Canada. The Canadian banks are you have like thousands of banks in the United States and in Canada, we have six big banks and they control things a bit and they're not being all that happy about cryptocurrencies right now. So that makes it harder to work with NFTs. It's not impossible. So that's been part of the thing I've been wading through.

Clive Holden

Also, the current charges right now, the minting charges are incredibly high. And so I've been waiting. For those prices to come down and there's not. And I asked Andre about this the other day. And he said that, you know, the future might include more other currencies that are more stable and become more affordable. So that's, you know, a bigger issue. I think it's, it's here to stay in general, and it's going to be it is the sea change people think it is. But I'm also like cooling my jets a little bit and being patient.

Clive Holden

So, you know, what I did is I tell you one thing I did is I opened up a brand new bank account, especially for the, you know, I didn't want to connect my usual bank account to, you know, these various places out there. So that was a good thing to do. It's a little bit of safety. And I put 200 bucks in that account. And I said, that's the money I'm going to use to try and get some NFTs going. That's my budget. And so far, I have not been able Tommy Mintz an NFT for under 200 bucks. They keep saying it's more than 200 bucks. So I think, no, I'm going to use it. But you know, that's, that's my budget. I'm trying to be disciplined about it. You know, obviously, I put a link up to a website that has NFTs. It's on a different blockchain.

Clive Holden

It's very, very inexpensive. $200 will last you like a year on there. Yeah, and a lot of artists have started going to this. Oh, you've got the link right here in the chat. Thank you. Yeah, check it out. It's much more kind of fine art oriented than a lot of the other ones like super rare and things. I'm going to check that out tomorrow. Thank you. Yeah.

Clive Holden

Great. Well, maybe I'll be on by tomorrow evening. Yeah. Yeah. In some places, it's hard to buy Tezos or Tez. You may need a VPN if it's not available where you are. I see. But go to their documents. They have sort of, you know, FAQs and how to get set up. And there's a guy where if you message him on Twitter, he just sends you to Tez, which sounds like nothing but actually lasts for a really long time. Thank you. And, you know, I really appreciate the help you've already given me, even though we've never... No problem.... Your interviews and stuff. I really like the spirit you're bringing to this. You're being very generous with what you're doing. The NFT community is in general very open and friendly. And I think we all went through a period where we didn't know what we were doing and we're really confused and frustrated.

Clive Holden

So that's so recent for almost everyone in the space that we're probably going to help other people get on board. I really appreciate your help. All right. It looks like... Malavika has a question. One second. Did you have a comment, question? No, sorry. By mistake, I have raised the hand. That's why I messaged. But we also have the same problem of NFT in India too.

Yeah. Gotcha. Well, it is right around 3.40. So we're actually 10 minutes away from our start time for the... Collab exhibition. But that being said, thank you very much, Clive. It was a pleasure to have you. And the discussion that followed was also great. So everyone's clapping for you. Well, most of us are on mute, but it's okay.

TECHSPRESSIONIST COLLAB#1

All right. Well, is everyone here ready to start looking at the Collab exhibition? Yes? Maybe? Possibly? Potentially? Yes. I wish I had some music. To go with this, but I don't. Yes, desperately waiting. This first one is very small, but there was quite a bit of work put into it. A lot of time and effort. A little bit of frustration because artists have to have suffer a little bit with what they do. Or that's what I've been told at least. Devo, is it possible that maybe those of us in this first Collab could just maybe raise our hands on screen so people who know who's in it or... Yeah. I was actually going to invite the people that are currently in attendance that participate to talk a little bit about what happened and their experience with the Collab.

TECHSPRESSIONIST COLLAB#1

Do you want to do that later after you show it? Well, can we see? Yes. Okay, cool. All right. So for you guys that weren't here in the very beginning, we talked it... I talked it over with a couple other... Artists involved in the group and sort of the decision was made to just embed the show directly on the homepage at Techspressionism.com just to maximize the visibility. So when you're sharing links, trying to promote it, if you're one of the artists involved in the show, you can send them directly to Techspressionism.com.

TECHSPRESSIONIST COLLAB#1

I just moved everything that was on that Collab page right to the homepage. And maybe at some point I might port the stuff that was... Right at the top of the homepage to an about page, like the definition and stuff like that, just to make it a little less lengthy. But I think that moving forward, we'll keep whatever the current show is, you know, the top line content. So that way it keeps the homepage fresh. But yeah, if you guys want to check out the show while Davo is giving his intro on it, you can just go right to Techspressionism.com.

TECHSPRESSIONIST COLLAB#1

All right. So I think we're ready to get started. I'm going to go ahead and enter. And I'm going to full screen this if I can, because... Hold on. Is it attempting to... Hold on. I'm not even sure what it's trying to do.