TL: Okay. Let's start from the beginning Seth... you were saying... Light bulbs went off…

SG: Yeah, so I think there's NFT kind of 1.0 and there is kind of 2.0. And 1.0 was 2017 era where you had the introduction of CryptoKitties on Dapper, which is, you know, canonical similarly Crypto Punks was around that time.

I wasn't as aware of them. but they were generated around that time off of standard Ethereum contracts and. Yeah, none of this was really seen as art, right? It was, it was seen as a kind of wonky, nerdy, digital, collectible, Finney. But you know, when we look back now, those are clearly sort of part of the origin story.

Right. So when you know them personally kind of situating myself - I was curious back then. You know my own background. I've been sort of an entrepreneur, but also kind of artsy. And I went to performing arts high school for theater. So I've always tried to see both the artistic aspects of technology and sort of the technical aspects of art over the last 20, 30 years. And, I say specifically in terms of this strain, I started a kind of a blockchain coworking space, in 2017, 2018, called Node.

And that was, kind of very much part of that generation of kind of crypto ascending into an asset class … the rise of ICO's, initial coin offerings, initial coin friends. And then a lot of these markets that kind of bubble burst and a lot of the easy money went away. And things kind of retreated. And that way it was kind of 1.0, right. So let's stop way before we get to 2.0.

TL: Oh, before we get to 2.0, I want to do a little more basic on Seth. Okay. So tell me a little bit about what kind of art you make, because I know you make different types of art. And I know that you've always had both strains, but how you kind of moved, more significantly, from new media entrepreneur to, new media maker.

SG: So I'd say, going back, way back, like in ‘90, I'd say ‘93 ‘94 before the web. I was really interested in multimedia art - in CD ROMs. Just sort of, as you remember, like the precursor to the web. And, I was working with right out of Columbia, undergrad.

I was working with Robert Wilson, the opera director, and artists to put his archives onto interactive media, which was a CD rom. And, I did that and I went over to Germany and I worked at what was brand new at the time. It was called, ZKM, which stands for the center for media art and technology, in Karlsruhe.

And, went over there to work with, Bill Forsyth. Who's an amazing choreographer who ran the Frankfurt Ballet. And it was all around kind of getting there. Kind of showcasing their work in an interactive format, which was CD ROMs back then. So that was, for me, multimedia art prior to the kind of multimedia entrepreneurship stuff that I later did where I met you.

But that was always there in the background. It was clear to me that from a young man coming into the world, thinking about his future perspective that the art world was very narrow. But the web world was very big. And so when the web opened up in ‘95, I definitely took a right turn towards commercial applications as opposed to a less churn towards more artistic applications.

And the commercial applications were… I worked @agency.com doing websites for Chan and Kyle . And then I worked at Condé Net online designing Epicurious. And it became much more like modern publishing and I started my online agency Site Specific, which was named after a an artistic idea of doing site-specific performance art, but in fact was just a web agency, designing websites for Duracell.

So since from 95 going to work with Fred and Jerry and yada yada, yada, it was just being creative about using technology to open up new business opportunities. So today…

TL: Seth, hold on one second. I want to skip ahead a little bit, unless you think that we shouldn't - to today. I know that you've had many successful ventures in the digital music space, et cetera, bringing technology to different, parts of the media industry. Right. But today in your personal practice, you make photographs. But you make different types of photographs. Right? You make some, analog, so let me jump forward.

SG: So, okay. Flash forward, 20, 30 years, we’re in mid pandemic in end of 2020, a couple of things happen. Obviously, we're in pandemic. And also seeing and feeling, the, how do I put it, like the death of a certain kind of, laissez Faire, rah-rah, techno utopian, capitalism, right?

We’ve seen now what happens with the Facebooks and the Googles and, what we call surveillance capitalism. Like as much as there was good creativity that went into it, there's a lot of bad consequences and a lot of really creative, artistic people don't feel good about working at those places or being part of those ecosystems.

Right. So there’s a backdrop there which got me into the privacy space, which felt, a little bit more forward looking and, and more, helping giving people agency back that they may have lost over the last couple of years when they've given away all their privacy. So I was focused on that.

It’s very adjacent to the crypto world. And I started a company a couple years ago called Spartacus.com, and It's a place for people to take back their privacy. So that's what I was focused on. And at the end of 2020, I'd moved to Venice beach. Actually, I had quit two or three years ago. I had a gallery in fisherman's Wharf and I was just painting abstract paintings and, more traditional art.

But I definitely have always felt connected to the art world and wanting to create spaces for artists. Anyways, so end of last year, I was working on Spartacus, tired of sort of traditional, and I know I no longer felt like it was that creative to just start another venture funded startup.

Right. The world didn't need more of that at the same time. In pandemic, a lot of you could sort of see that a lot of people more and more were collecting things. They were collecting for example; baseball cards were going through the roof. Part of that was because, people were home and they were trading stocks on Robin hood, et cetera. Part of it was that they didn't trust the dollar because we're printing money. Right. And so, I'd rather hold a rookie Tom Brady card than hold dollars. And what came out of this that I think is really important in the conversation about NFT’s and what ties us all together is the phenomenal phenomenon of NBA TopShot.

And what that really was, and is, is kind of the, it, it crossed the chasm from early adopters to the beginning of a mass market or of consumer demand. And so, it’s worthwhile kind of looking at density and what happened there that gave rise to this new art form. What happened is the NBA, as the brand and as the licensing entity, partnered with.

Dapper labs, which is a same blockchain technology behind the original CryptoKitties, which is the same. Sorry, hold on a second. So let's say, did you say blockchain technology? Sorry. The same blockchain technology behind CryptoKitties. Yeah. Sorry. You just, you, you garbled for a second. Okay. and that, has really been a watershed and I started paying attention to this at the end of last year.

It has a lot of characteristics that the original CryptoKitties had. Plus you can buy these moments with a credit card. Right. You don't have to use a Etherium or your crypto wallet. And in the last four or five months, there's been $500 million worth of transactions in this marketplace. And the TopShot marketplace or NBA TopShot.

TL: So Seth two question about that. I didn't realize that you could buy TopShot NFTs with actual cash. So how does that work if you buy an NFT with cash, how does work? Is the transaction still on the blockchain.

SG: The same way it is if you're buying it with Etherium. What’s happening is you're buying it with cash, but they're converting it to Eth.

TL: Okay. Right. So it's just kind of like an it's like an on-ramp.

SG: Yeah. but it just lowered the bar for adoption. And so there's been probably 150,000 or 200,000 people, that have bought NBA TopShots.

Right. so I noticed this, it was really interesting. I sort of have a diagram that I just made earlier today, where it's imagine if you had four quadrants and you have one axis that is hierarchy on the top and high on the top and low on the bottom. And then another axis going left and right. Which is, collectibles on the left and art on the right.

TL: I'm drawing as you speak.

So imagine the top right quadrant is high art. And I'd put Gagosian there on the right right. the top left quadrant is high collectibles. There I would put a Michael Jordan rookie basketball card that might be worth a million dollars. In the lower left quadrant is probablya cheap NBA pop shot. In the lower right quadrant might be someone Hocking street art in the Marina. Right, and to me, like all NFTs are, is a file format that relates to all quadrants.

It's not just about high art. Right? I think that's really important. And that's why what happened with NBA TopShot was sort of opened up this market. And so that's happening. There's a liquid market there. and separately, in terms of my own practice like you, I love photography.

I got a camera and I started taking, these closeup photographs of the waves at sunset at Venice beach as a daily practice - every single sunset starting at the beginning of January For a good month or so, I would take these pictures… and then trying to remember how I got turned on to some of the AI algorithms.

But, yeah, there, there is. you know. Obviously the last couple years has been a lot of interesting stuff happening in the world of deep fakes and style GaN algorithms to create new images and words based on AI. You know, some of that's based on GP T3, some of that's based on their algorithms, but I found a platform that I liked called Runway - Runwayml.app. Which I sort of compare to like Adobe Photoshop for AI.

TL: Is runway ML, one word or two?

SG: It's one word. We can find it on the web. and I started to experiment with taking these hundreds, if not thousands, of images, I was photographing uploading them into this platform and training my own AI to produce synthetic versions of this kind of visual idea that I was going after, which was, for lack of a better word, diaphanous waves.

I was really in love with the idea of photographing waves that have the sun coming through them from behind when the sun is setting. Okay. Beautiful. And that was it. You know, it was just like, okay, I'm going to take pictures and I'm going to try to train an algorithm to produce this effect. And I started going down that rabbit hole and I started to make these videos. I made a video, just to give you a timeline, at the end of January - of a 32 second video of what I call an imaginary sunset with imaginary waves. But it was all trained off of original photos that I had taken myself.

Right. So there's a lot of AI that's out there that's using people's faces are all sorts of clip art. What's different here is all of this AI, even though it was synthetic, these deep fakes were trained off of my original work. I was feeding it like you know, grain fed chickens.

No, there was nothing artificial going into it. And so I felt a certain kind of control and a certain kind of artistry around it. Even though the output was synthetic and somewhat arbitrary. So that was my particular aesthetic and that's what I was working on. And then I kind of randomly, I think I told you, the story. I shared it with Fred Wilson who, has a place in Venice and was kind of going back and forth from New York to Venice. Cause I know he likes his beach and I said, “Hey I'm working on this photography, what do you think?” And I showed him the video and he said, “That's awesome. You should mint that as an NFT on Foundation or Super Rare.”

So this was late January and, for me, that was like an FTS 2.0. It was right before we saw this huge spike in popularity around this for me.

It's a smart contract that lives on the Blockchain and can prove itself as one of one, right? It's a record on the blockchain and the language around how it comes into being is, as I understand it sort of minting and listing.

TL: So you have to mint and NFT, right?

SG: And minting it is on some level, producing a really, really, really, really, really long number that is impossible to guess. Right.

TL: And then who produces that number?

SG: So the minting is sort of built into Ethereum. And based on public key cryptography and based on the same kind of ecosystem of Bitcoin. But you are using computers to create a code that's so long and so impossible to guess that it's secure.

TL: Right. And that takes gas. That takes effort of computers to produce that. As I understand it the really long number. And that minting is something you can't just do on your own, on your laptop. Correct?

SG: Right. You need, and up until recently, you couldn't really do it unless you know computer programming and what's different now. What's different is that the last couple months is there's more and more ways for non-developers to mint their own NFTs - like to bring them into being, and by bringing them into being, you're creating this really, really long number and you are recording it, on some level on the blockchain. And you're saying this number is attached to this piece of art.

Well, this number is, a unique record on the blockchain. And I can now attach to this number, to this NFT, some assets like a video or a photograph.

TL: So are the Foundations of the world creating these numbers for artists now? Or is that something different? An app?

SG: I mean, what they're doing is sort of there in the same way.

And you know, going back to 1995 I had to learn how to write HTML, but a couple of years later there were programs that we could all use and you didn't have to know how to write HTML. Right? So the Foundations of the world, the way to think about Foundation or Super Rare or Nifty Gateway or Opensea is on some level. They're sort of like the modern-day equivalent of Squarespace and Wix blogger. Right?

TL: So using that analogy I can go to a Squarespace already having purchased or established a URL, but they can also do it for me. So is that kind of the way to think about it? Like I could create the NFT or create this really long number myself, but I could also have them do it. Does that, is that fair enough?

SG: Yeah. And some platforms are more we'll hold your hand more than others, right? So the Foundation is great because it’s pretty easy to use. at the same time I think they, they take 15% commission for anything that gets sold through Foundation.

And you have to pay the the Ethereum gas fees to mint, and then list your NFT on your platform.

TL: So can anybody list their NFT on these platforms or do you have to be accepted?

SG: It depends. So a PLA a platform like Foundation is curated. You have to have an invitation to be a creator. And they've gotten increasingly hard to come by because the platform has gotten really popular because there were artists early on that were making thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. And there's a lot of poor 3d graphics artists that just rush to the platform because they could smell them.

TL: Great. There are other platforms like, Opensea that are less curated - that are more bottom up where anybody can fairly easily create and list?

SG: Many may list their own NFTs, but, you may not get discovered because it's not as curated and experience as a Foundation.

TL: Are there ways like there are ways on social media to get discovered? Is there advice that you have for ways for artists who are getting into this market to make sure that they'd get good representation or that they get seen?

SG: Yes. You know, I think that's, what's emerging now is sort of the role of sort of the gallery, the role of the platform, the role of the curator, the role of the collector. And you've seen now not only was Christie's auctioning off the Beeple, but now, Sotheby's is auctioning off Pak, who was another, really interesting crypto artist. And then Christy's, as of yesterday, have a lot of nine crypto punks, that they're going to be auctioning off.

TL: So that leads me to your gallery that you are in the process of or maybe you have launched already. Tell me a little bit about that.

SG: So to back up a little bit, what the further light bulb for me was when I sold my first NFT. So I put it on Foundation. I got it up there Fred blogged about it. Next thing I know this 30 second video that I had put up there sold for two Eth, which was $3,000 or $3,500. And I was like, WOW! Because I had spent the last month or so before that, putting up a Shopify site and connecting it to a this lab in England that would print the digital prints and send them to people. And so I had it already. I was going to be selling these really interesting photographs and synthetic images based on these waves for $75 or $125. And next thing I know I put up a 30 second video that came out of my AI and I sell it for $3,000. Like it changes everything in your mind.

Then I am thinking about what that does for Seth the artist, but what does it do for Seth the entrepreneur? Because I'm like, wait a minute, there's gonna be a lot of artists that are gonna shift from sending one of a kind prints and physical objects to selling one of a kind digital objects, if this whole new format takes the way it has.

TL: What do you think is going to happen to analog?

SG: I mean, it's such an open-ended question.

SG: So the gallery concept, I'd say kind of opened up to me not that much later than when I sold my first NFT. Cause I was like, okay something is different. Something is fun. There's a big unlock. As I talked about - ther was like a creative unlock and this file format has unlocked. It’s like a platform now where there are not only NFTs on Foundation, like the ones I did, but there's also an NFTs of LeBron James dunking the ball. There's a, kind of democratization of this file format, where I just imagined a gallery where instead of looking at these, And also, it was interesting that there's the blockchain is public. All the information is out there. And so, the analytics around that are available and what used to be hidden before, in terms of provenance, in terms of pricing, in terms of who owns, what, who bought what from whom, is more and more in the open.

And you have tools. I use to slam on IO, and also crypto art.io, where you go to these sites and you see plain as day which pieces have traded hands for what prices and whether it's a basketball collectible or an edgy 3d crypto art. It's kind of like a stock market. In the same way you can look at penny stocks and blue chips and technology companies on a Bloomberg terminal.

Now all these different art pieces and collectibles have a common financial language to talk about them and that was always implicit. And now there's so much content now in terms of these NFTs that are public. And I don't need to ask permission to show them on a monitor because the people that are owning them actually want them to be stolen as media and shown as much as possible because all the value of accrues back to the owner.

Interesting. Right? So the idea of a gallery was first and foremost, to have a place in a high traffic area in Venice Beach, that can showcase this new media form, and people can walk in and experience NFTs across the spectrum. And particularly because people are comfortable with QR codes, you don't need to download any special software.

But you can interact and learn about these objects, without having to have any physical inventory or any insurance for that matter, because it's all virtual, it's all digital and moderately insured by the blockchain.

TL: I assume you'll have an online component to your gallery as well?

SG: Yeah. I mean, the way it will work is you'll walk in scanning QR code and you'll see on your phone, the little tiles of what you're looking at in the gallery, on the walls.

TL: Cool. And when do you think you'll be opening this gallery?

SG: Yeah. which is right underneath the sign and the idea to part of it's also, we're creating our own to call it a DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization with our own token. So that over time we'll be able to issue tokens - almost like when someone chooses an Olympic city, we'll be choosing other locations who applied to the gallery and then can take tokens and turn them into cash to get obese. Super cool.

TL: So, a little bit like the NFT version of a franchise, correct?

Exactly. Totally like a mesh network.

TL: Yeah. That's awesome. And what will the gallery be named?

SG: Right now - Moments.

TL: Awesome. And are you going to be focusing on a particular kind of art, a kind of NFT or no?

SG: I think it's the first couple of months are going to be learning in terms of what different day parts… Almost like it's more to me it's as much like programming a new cable channel as it is curating an art gallery - meaning, based on the traffic flows, it may be that Saturday and Sunday afternoons are better for NBA TopShot moments, and Tuesday evenings are better for AIG crypto art from Japan.

Right. So there'll be, you know, and people, you know, if you, if you walk into the gallery and you happen to have your own collection of NFTs, it would be nice for you to be able to, on demand, show all of them on, you know, on the displays, in the gallery.

TL: Super cool. And how, how will you be finding your artists?

SG: we've got this kind of community about of 40 people, and one of the kind of working groups will be a curating group of three or four people that will be on the lookout for local LA artists that we might want to introduce. It may that may not be NFTE artists. That might be interesting as potential NFT artists that we can help onboard and teach them. There's lots of different, connections and some of it's just going to be by chance.

TL: I guess my last couple of questions, Seth for artists thinking about, getting into this space for the first time, what are some of the things they should worry about? Or what are some things they should think about and what are some of the things that maybe they should be aware of?

I think my cautionary tale would be think of it, as think I said before, that NFTs are this interesting kind of bridge from conceptual art to contractual art. And that to me, what seems to have staying power are, artists that think in terms of series and sequences and editions, and that you paint more like you're producing the next generation of Pokemon cards, more than just a single work of art. The Beeple that was famously sold for $69 million wasn't so much a single JPEG as an accumulation of 5,000 days in a row that he has been making these kinds of ready-mades. There's an artist that I love conceptual artist named who was like every day would make a painting every day would, would write a journal entry. You know, for 13 years.

And my cadence is every week. I'd take the photographs leading up to it. And I produced one synthetic video that I meant to list as an NFT and sold five of them. I think there's four or five that haven't been sold. But I don't want to start to create different kinds of art based on what's selling as much as I want to sort of just feel like I've got this process that if someone wants to buy it great, but I'm on my own.

Kind of trajectory. I think a lot of the art, the, the NFT art is of a certain genre right now. It kind of looks like it's very much 3d renderings of Blade Runner kind of worlds. And I think that is just like hyper-realism is one genre of artwork. There's going to be lots of different genres of, NFTs.

There's a really interesting project called Artblocks.io, where it's more generative art. And what you're doing is you can decide to mint a hundred versions of a generative artwork piece and you say, okay, I'm going to I'm going to sell it at one Eth. And so every time someone buys a token for one Eth, they can generate a new instance of your algorithm. So there’s a lot of interesting stuff out there that are more than simply video game worlds. and I think there are a lot of collectors now that are .very sophisticated in the crypto world, but very unsophisticated, aesthetically.

And I think what's going to change over the years to come is we'll have more sophisticated artists and more sophisticated collectors. Engaging, around artworks and collectibles that are a lot more interesting than what we're seeing now, trade hands. Interesting. And there's also just a lot of, there's a lot of nouveau reach behavior, right?

It's sort of like whatever your reference point is for the nouveau riche, whether it was with Chinese consumers 20 years ago, or Beverly Hills, whatever, but like there's a lot of really gross, really disgusting flexes of capitalism that are abounding and has very, very little to do with the underlying substance of the art and more around just showing that you don't care about.

TL: my last question is, would it be okay for my classmates to get in touch with some other questions? Could they email you?

SG: Absolutely! And we want people to come. Anybody that's in the LA area should come by and see the space.

Email Seth Here:)

TL: Seth- I really can’t thank you enough. I can’t wait to come to Los Angeles to experience your gallery with you.