SBAC3 Andrew explains the NFT dispenser that went viral (and featured Bubiko.)
I have to sit this one out. It’s all Andrew, carefully explained what seems to be a historic use of frames. I am thankful and excited. I have been cautiously and skeptically watching the NFT art space for years. For example, I went to the Nonfungible Conference in Lisbon three years ago.
https://medium.com/@bookmerah/stephen-black-nft-black-paper-9-74e350222544
I went to NFTNYC two years ago, where Andrew and I watched Spike Lee talk about NFTs in relation to his movies.
At both events, I used AR to display images from Maith artists. At NFTNYC, I included a piece by Mike Varley; a pixelated bagel from his everything is everything series.
Last year Andrew patiently helped me set up the Maith NFT gallery, where I can experiment.
But yesterday, literally overnight, things got cranked up several levels! Andrew gained 400 followers on Warpcast, and the Bubiko New Whirled Series of 100 minted out in less than 30 min!
Money, though nice, was/is not my incentive. Here is one of my posts from when apeshit NFTs were selling like apeshit.(To be fair, the series of posts that preceded that were less obscure.)
Putting on my artist’s beret, this project with Andrew allowed me to further my work with AI. When we discuss the creative process of any artwork, we must be familiar with the characteristics of that medium. Jazz, for example is about sounds produced spontaneously by an individual or a group. Photography is about recording light. Sculpture is about the shape of materials in 3D space.
The characteristic of AI that I am working with now is unlikely/illogical prompts. Perhaps this is just my curiosity, perhaps this is my modern take on Isadore Ducasse’s quote, that Surrealistic art can be as beautiful ” ‘as the chance encounter on an ironing board of a sewing machine and an umbrella.’
In this series, Bubiko’s face and basic pose usually remain unchanged. But the backgrounds are difficult to describe; they are all unique and greatly varied. When combining prompts based on specific baseball cards (1973 Topps #350 Tom Seaver — New York Mets) with general phrases like “plaid”, “Egypt’ “water’ etc, I have to keep an open mind and wait. When a result feels like it has its own unique logic that is both secretive and loud… I have found something; something worth sharing.
Andrew: Build together, win together.
(At the conclusion of this video is a scene in which I asked AI to combine an urban scene of two bicyclists with a rosary. Unusual combinations are not always worth sharing, but this one was.)
