Primacism: David Rudnick on the struggle for Primacy, type and poetry's unique value in an age of digital and physical conflict, and Percy Shelley's Mont Blanc

Hi everyone, this is Holly Hernandez. I'm Matt Dryerst. And you're listening to Infective Pheasant. Hello, Holly, hi Matt. Hi. How are you? I'm pretty good, like strange days, but I can't complain. I had a delicious cup of tea, it's about as good as as you can be. Wonderful. And how is Gent? Do you perhaps think Gent or do you go ahead? I can't, I can never. I say Gent because I'm an inventor for an hour. The local accent is not quite a hard like, it's a sound that if I ever fully become fluent in pronouncing that effulocely, then you'll know I'm a true Gent and I but I think it's somewhere between a like a her and a her. It's not a full her. It doesn't have a pretty impressive. That was pretty impressive. You just like flipped it in there. Yeah, we actually kind of like looked at each other like we remarked upon. Wow. Very cool. I'm very, very, and I think this is a hilarious thing to throw in the context of the conversation we're about to have. I'm phenomenally bad at languages. It's I actually got an exemption in college from having to pass the language requirement because I was so bad that they eventually tested me and they were like, okay, you have a disability in learning. My language are you trying to learn? I first tried to do Chinese as a hack because I knew how bad in high school I also got an exemption and I did Latin because then I didn't have to speak it so it was just vocabulary. And then I tried to do Chinese in school on the basis that this is my terrible attempt to hack this process. It would be really hard for everyone and it was also learning a new visual alphabet so I thought I might have an advantage there but I was of course I was just really difficult. Yeah, I was so bad at Chinese but I thought because it was so alien to the way that the fundamentals of the tonality of the speaking and a completely different writing structure that might be a good move but it was not a good move and I was terrible and they forced me to move into Italian and I was so bad at Italian they were like, we're gonna you need to go to the psych facility and they need to test you. So we've already established before we've done the introduction that from a very early age you were interested in alien glyphs. Oh cool, so for we actually asked our guests to do this for us because I mean I'll consider it's easier but I think it's also more interesting. It's more accurate. It's more accurate for us to ask you to introduce yourself to people who might not be familiar with who you are. I'm David Rodnik, I'm a graphic designer. I was born in the UK in near London in a village called Leccimohi. I grew up in the UK and I went to college in America and I spent my I guess my my twenties I studied art history in college and I spent kind of my formative years kind of grappling with trying to understand from an art historical perspective where we were in this moment in terms of what making art was, what making visual culture was and I had the phenomenal privilege of studying art history under a tutor called Christopher Wood who's who specialised in the Northern Renaissance and in Christopher Wood's understanding of the history of art. There is no real separation. It's not a history of objects of extreme value which is I think how a lot of history of art is taught. This is like how is a totemic value created in societies what are the most valuable objects and therefore like can we learn around those instead. He's almost a much more vernacular understanding of art as a component of visual culture. Sometimes leading to objects of extreme value but other times leading to objects which are almost unrecognizable which exists in the lingua franco-ibaculture and are kind of embedded and influencing. It's a much more murky much more chaotic understanding of how these things interact and I think coming out of that space, coming out of that having given that kind of initial platform for understanding work and how work was made. I actually entered into like a really very difficult period in my life where I didn't know if I was making art or if I was doing design or what my work was and struggled with a whole bunch of ideas for a long time. My practice eventually aligned around graphic design and maybe we'll get a chance to talk in this about what some of the things were that made me feel like I understood what the parameters of that practice was. Why I felt calling myself a graphic designer was a good framing for allowing me to continue those explorations and where you know kind of where the ideas that underpin them came from and how they kind of emerged in my work as well. And I'm still a graphic designer to this day. You are and I would say I would say a heavily influential one at that. I actually want to think it's good to jump straight into that. The only thing I was anticipating before we talked about why you made the decision to go into design is just to say that this is it's actually really cool to get to I mean we've known you for a long time but like it's really cool to get to talk to you on record about some of this stuff and the genesis of this stuff because irrespective of the fact that I think your visual language exists far far beyond you. I mean it's something that I encounter in the world regularly right like you rarely make you rarely speak in public and that's really cool. I mean so you're going from studying with Christopher Wood there's an art historical context there where he's looking at these kind of symbols or things that you might not notice as opposed to maybe like this kind of a more classic art historical understanding of things as being like periods of time defined by a certain style that then goes out of style right. Is that a correct distinction to make? Chris is a very good person to read a two books the anachronic renaissance and another one called forgery replica fiction which even those titles the anachronic renaissance is a kind of paradoxical framing of the renaissance. The renaissance not as a period of time but as a kind of an abidance of ideas some of which may have not been contemporaneous and some of which may still be accident and the other and may have existed prior to what we call the renaissance and the other is forgery replica fiction which is a really beautiful work that again shows the importance and I think again for people who are interested in this moment in art the kind of the phenomenal transfer of value that are taking place this week and also the kind of look at that but just this idea that forgery concepts of forgery concepts of replica concepts of fiction are kind of intrinsically tied to their opposites of creating ideas of permanence of the sacred of the iconic and that he very saliently analyzes that sometimes some of the most remarkable advances in creating like kind of what we see as permanent systems of value emerge simultaneously with new vulnerabilities or threats and something wasn't that one always preceded the other. It's an amazing way of looking you obviously have people who analyze contemporary art and especially kind of the current space cryptographic spaces like this of looking at vulnerability and value simultaneously but to to to read someone who's been looking at the art of northern flandas for 20 years like that from the 15th century and to see such an amazing perspective grounded in objects that I think culturally people don't take for granted but I think they know very well they see them as very they have very relatively fixed meanings at this point and in a similar way to the ideas that Chris is seeing in this work are absolutely relevant to the current day and the way that he reads it these are kind of abiding components of how image creates value and meaning and culture and I think that that's that also you know if we want to talk about like kind of my path to my practice I think after I graduated from my undergraduate degree in art history I kind of was stuck between New York and London because I was with my girlfriend I was dating someone in New York and I couldn't get there because I had no grounds to get like a kind of visa to be in the United States so I'd kind of go back and forth aimlessly and try and try and make some kind of dialogue in London as well I loved music I'm deeply passionate about music and the kind of hand holds I had in a scene were very much that of the London like kind of underground electronic music scene with Errol Alkin and Trash and and that's where I started making visual work alongside that I'd done some during my undergraduate because we founded a music magazine near my friend Alex and that's those people you know kind of were staying in touch with those scenes but it was very very hard for me to reconcile any kind of like ideas about art and being an artist with this design side and it was quite shameful to me and I wasn't making any money or I couldn't like pay my rent I was I was really struggling and and it was just embarrassing for my girlfriend and eventually you know after four kind of increasingly torturous years we broke up and it was you know this is now 2012 and it was just to kind of incredibly painful moment in my life where I had all these different pieces of value that didn't fit together and 2012 was an enormously It was the hardest year of my life. I never want to live 2012 again It was a very very painful time, but it was where I had to kind of From absolute zero and I really mean absolute zero kind of try and put some of these foundational blocks together and try and understand How how some of these different parts of my life and my interests might actually fit together in a coherent way But I you're right to say that I don't talk publicly often and That's I think a painful lesson I learned when I came back to London in 2012. I was desperate to talk to people talk with them Not even necessarily talk to them and I kind of entered Kind of the space there of the kind of contemporary art scene because there are a lot of free artists talks at the time and being Dead broke and and having kind of no other means of really interacting with people I would go into a lot of these talk so you talk to people there, but I think it was really clear that like I tried to express some of these ideas then Even with some of the text that we might talk about later and I think my context was was Totally understandable. I think was just really confusing. Here was someone who wasn't trying to be an artist trying to talk with artists in a scene where Creating capital present personal branding as an artist was of paramount importance Was up trying to be a critic wasn't didn't seem to be trying to publish this work Just wanted to share the text again amongst ambitious young writers who were very keen to create like a critical context for their work So it was just like and I think also it's fair to say that like a lot of them weren't interested in Why was writing either? You know, that was really I I think I had to learn some hard lessons It's not that any of these people were wrong or ignorant of why I was saying either I like I kind of I'm glad that I didn't become I made a conscious decision to like kind of try and do my talking in the work for a while or to do my thinking in the work and to be I definitely didn't want to be a personality or presence in the scene and I think that the kind of personality I might have represented is is vastly overrepresented in in our and critical life this you know kind of it's very 20th century figure of young white male who went to a prestigious academic institution and has grandiose ideas about the future of our world I was just like I Hope the last ten if you look back on my work like I've that if it's nice to hear you say that I haven't talked often because it means I was successful in shutting up and trying to make the work talk but As you're here on the edge of hearing this call shutting up is not something I'm very good at so I really had But I want to I want to kind of like nail down a little bit further this kind of it seems like there was kind of a conscious choice that you made between fine art and graphic design as like two kind of separate categories in your mind and I want to kind of tease that out a little bit because I was reading I think it's an interview right after your stroke of talk and we can post all this in the show notes where there's a pretty provocative statement that you make that says This is the main difference art is a pure form of expression and graphic design requires responsibility. I thought that was a pretty provocative statement I'm gonna say this I'm gonna say this right now if that interview in the aftermath of my Is the one that's like hosted either on stroka. I just got to say that that did do a game of telephone where it went from English to Russian back to English So you're actually saying I'm really hungry I need a I Um with love and respect maybe Don't post that one in the show notes or post it at least with a big like kind of qualifying morning but nothing I say that is a direct quote at all Uh, very very very much like kind of I don't direct people to that Because I don't have much on line. I hope that they watch the stroka talk but only is talking in my own words But I definitely would not frame uh either a definition of art or a definition of graphic design in such a such a binary Manor um so Okay, because I was like wow that's very provocative. I wonder what you mean by that I would go so far as say like kind of yeah in the framing that they put it there. It's it's straight up incorrect It's not a statement. I would agree with um, but um either side of that I wouldn't describe art as a pure form of expression. I wouldn't describe graphic designers requiring responsibilities either um Uh, yeah, we don't need to go into that too much. I would say um um um in terms of in terms of how I how I resolved like any feeling of Kind of choosing to say like I am a graphic designer and focusing my practice there Like hopefully some of the ideas we might get to talk about in this in this call the reason that I'm I'm interested in in kind of even talking about them now and coming back to them as I think that they were very alienating For me when I share them in 2012, but I think what the primary concern So underpinned them were have finally reached a stage where Almost everyone observing our contemporary moment would be able to recognize I think The presence of some of these ideas in what we're experiencing now whereas then it was these were concerns about you know kind of What for me felt like a catastrophe that we were was clearly unfolding that we were entering into that was you know The kind of the world was pregnant with the state and that um trying to Preemptively think about what strategies might be as we entered into this kind of maelstrom of the emergence of a digital paradigm that Started to occupy not just the Kind of the time and the activity of users, but even mentally ontologically started to become The world the permanent from how you understood value from how you understood objects from how you understood images and this you know in my practice um I've really like because I haven't published much any writing and I haven't done many talks like kind of the term that I've used Personally to kind of pass this state is a struggle for what I call primacy Which is based on just like a personal Read of you know kind of ontology but basically The viewer builds the world based on the world the view of sees viewer understands the world has to make sense of the world Uh in my struggle talk I I use this term narrative which is kind of the means I developed for myself Of trying to understand what a viewer's history of the world might look like over time and therefore um, you know how they pass meaning from creating these these blocks of recognition You see this thing and you see it again, and so you start to elevate it is important so it becomes more useful as a component of language and A very simple thing to say is that you know prior to the invention of a persistent digital realm um Everyone's world everyone's narratives for the most part existed Things that had real world origins or were fictions that could be traced to real world sources So you can have texts you can have books you can have you know like kind of myths and therefore What's really interesting is that like traditionally through history those origin points a crew Consistently through all cultures all human cultures phenomenal value Because there is this intangible realm that has meaning but cannot be directly accessed through the physical world And these portal points have very high community value because they are the means through which we can talk about this other world Um, if you want a better definition than the stupid one of my strong range of view of what art is that is it And that is something which is consistent across not just western cultures but all human cultures since the very earliest human cultures when even you know when we would have cave paintings etc. These are um, these are language bridges between a real world and a shared imaginative fictional world which allows that world to a crew value What the creation of a persistent digital realm does is you no longer need activation objects that exist Necessarily in the physical world you can almost have world objects in the dream world That activate other components of the dream world. I don't like using the word dream world And I don't like using a dialectic which is like real V fake. I'm going to talk about it in primacy It's just it's just to introduce the concept and I'm going to talk about it in primacy terms from this point on we in our lifetime For many of us the persistent digital realm was kind of created and propagated to the point where people started to crewing more of their daily experience more of their memories more of the components of value in their daily lives and now with the invention or the propagation of crypto currencies and purely digital side capital repositories It's it's fair to say that like the cycle the loop has The the foundational architecture is now entirely complete for someone to be digital prime in the sense that It's no longer an imaginative realm for them. They're their mythic world exists there But also the permanent value of their world also exists there So you can have some people who are digital prime and then you may have other people who You know staunch traditionalist conservatives or people who quoteation marks just don't get it who are you know like kind of Doggidly real world prime and they just insist that nothing in the digital realm can possibly have value And they don't understand the nature of the bridge. I Frame my practice and everything we're going to talk about and everything that kind of like starting in 2012 For these really difficult moments where I wrote these texts and had these ideas and kind of failed to express them then and so started on this project From the things that I love learn in the text of how I might try and share some of these ideas in work and build links to other people in the world and make use value out of them, which is my graphic design practice. It's basically an exploration of this idea that I am, we are of a generation that are born between two worlds. The movement of capital, the movement of value, the movement of meaning from a world that is real, physical, and physical, and digital. It's going to be one of the most extraordinary or deals in human history. It's really hard to understand the fact that the meaning and value of everything in our lives will change. Anyone who has read a history book, these are horrendously violent things to happen to any society. Civilisation is a lost and smaller ideas than this. Therefore, the stakes at this moment are extremely high. If you care about, because I grew up in, I did my formative thinking and learning in a world that was physical prime, I am grateful and feel like the inheritor of many, as we all are, inheritors of many very precious, very valuable, beautiful notions in that, well, at least our ecology and bias there, without which we cannot survive. Which is why, ultimately, I think that's going to be just, sorry, spoiler warning, but the final conclusion of any argument for why I am a primacist, not a real side primacist or a digital primacist, is to explain what a term means, but the two cannot survive without the other end, that if one becomes fully dogmatic of either, we will surely, I think, kind of, they depend on each other to survive. There is a kind of. You could say they're interdependent. They're interdependent, very beautiful. Drop the term, David. This is all very beautiful, but you'll drop the term. They're interdependent. I understand it. And it's a good thing to be known, because basically in my practice, I, the way I would reconcile trying to make sense of this moment, but also to create statements that I felt could have ongoing value. Again, we talk about these kind of tokens for accessing the myth, these statements, these symbols, which allow multiple individuals to access ideas, which might otherwise be remote, and talk about them, learn from them, share them. Texts, poems, stories, novels, fictional characters, images, myths, religious texts, all of these things. This is the body of what that capital A term art refers to. And it's also why, from a Christopher Woody in perspective, now you can totally understand why Trevor, God, I love Trevor, like, dear friend, but it made this, this meme post on Twitter day, you know, like art is just stonks, has been all along, completely, comically wrong. How many elements of the categories that I just articulated have no currency value, no external currency value, and also how, that's why I was like, well, this is really fascinating to me because I was so disenchanted with art. I was so disenchanted with this, this game of value, but also this total small-mindedness that came from thinking that our tools for expression, if you wanted to be an artist, you should just focus on the ones which are traditionally associated with massive capital value, so which are painting, sculpture, gallery experiences, and, you know, that that's what being an artist was, and that's why I kind of moved into graphic design for one, you know, to one extent, in that it was, like, comically spurned as a space of creating value, and that I was creating digital images as part of my practice and posting them with, like, on void, which had no value and that I was forfeiting value, which is why this NFT moment is an extraordinary moment where it's like, new value hasn't really been created, it's like, in the ways that Trevor Tweet was wrong, you can see here, that the activation token for how a society accesses myth has moved over the course of two or three weeks, it's an extraordinary rock slide has spread this up, and it's like, the same myths are going to be accessed, but we now need digital ciphers to access them, rather than sculptures. And there's a degree to which some of the greatest zealots of digital primes, some of the most like kind of, you know, vapor-pilled individuals on the planet are those who've made extraordinary fortunes from really batting on digital prime through cryptocurrency, and they are true believers in a world where value does not require a physical anchor, and the myth does not require a physical anchor for activation. And so for those people, and I'm not condoning the values that are being, so I'm just merely reporting the fact that, in a physical world, if the sculpture, you know, was worth a couple of million because it performed something you could put in a public square that spoke to a shared myth, and now you have something which can sit in a visible public feed that similarly feels like the best collective tool for accessing a shared myth. I would say that, like, it is a frightening, it is a dangerous prospect, but it is nonetheless one which makes sense from a logical, like kind of macro conception of what the role of art is in human society, that some people will accrue enormous value to that object, even if it has no physical trace. I have a question, it's maybe like a selfish one because it's my personal interest, but I'm wondering how in your mind is music as a kind of time-based and embodied art form fit into the physical prime to digital prime transition? Do you see it as a kind of like harbinger or how do you see it fitting into this? Well, there is a visual supremacy usually when we have these conversations, right? Exactly. So, so, okay, I want to clarify one thing for I answer this. When I describe my work as primacist, and what I mean as well is that, like, hopefully, all my work since 2012, really, since the writing of a text which, I haven't put it on the internet yet, but a text which I would like to share soon. When I refer to primacist, what that does not mean is that I am a cheerleader in the war between these two sides. It is that I make work that explores the difficult space of compatibility between these two sides. What is the ongoing constant in human life and culture that can be preserved in a world of kind of ontological dualism that is that there are factions who are entirely digital, there are factions who are entirely physical, and there are a lot of people who live with one foot in both camps. And what are the bridge points? What are the activation points for myth? How do we how do we convey and transfer value in that? Completely. I actually read what you were saying as that. I just want to clarify it because I think one of the other reasons I don't talk often online, and it's fascinating to me, but some of the degree of misrepresentation of my position or my work from people, I guess, who just really don't like me very much is quite remarkable. I think they've, I've been painted as almost landian accelerationists by some people with no evidence whatsoever for this. That's horseshit. But it's quite remarkable to me. I mean, I find Nick Landsworth completely and totally abhorrent. And I think in many ways I would say that what I'm almost trying to engineer for a decade in plain sight in public are protections for safeguarding mechanisms, arcs for the preservation, for the transportation and preservation of very tender fragile romantic hard to observe, hard to preserve values in my life and in the lives of people, I think, around and in the viewers' lives to help them kind of pass through this storm. The idea of being some kind of, I mean, land is in many ways he's a digital prime to the post-human degree. He's an absolute nihilist of digital prime, where basically the human will be the last trace of the real side and he can't wait for it to be eradicated. It's like kind of digital prime as Kairos, like an end state. And it's a pigment. And it's something which I think has to be preemptively opposed. Because unless that's the other reason why I'm willing to do this podcast and to talk, it's like, I feel I have no choice but to talk now. We are obviously at a moment of enormous mechanical platform rupture, where these ideas, if we do not have tools to talk about them as a community and if we don't have tools to understand how they might be, how we might create shared objects that can preserve value in this moment, people like land will gleefully get the up end in the coming storm. It's not, I think it's not a trivial thing and I don't like stepping forward and talking because I don't want to make myself the focus of the conversation. But at the same time, if I can share terms or if I can share premises that feel useful to other people, then I at least feel like I've been trying to do my visual work. When they get adopted as trope, I feel that suggests that there has been something successful to a degree that other people saw myth value, use value in these kind of formal repeating qualities, these narratives to use the trope term I was embedding in the work. But sorry, Holly, your question was about music and I want to get back to it. I think music is in a remarkable moment of, I think it's really, really important that people in our community now acknowledge that I think it's an extremely fragile, dangerous time for certain aspects of music. Certainly the 20th century musical ecology had struggled to survive into the 21st century and I think what we're seeing now is a series of actions that too an already weak and fragile state like it's the last thing that needed to happen. There's been an earthquake and the president died and now there's an invasion by aliens in the kind of musical general economy like with all these things happening at once, COVID, inability to tour, inability to perform and now you have this sudden movement into a digital space. I kind of want to like just make a simple example where hopefully this, some of the ideas I'll express this talk, you can agree on this really, but I hope for some people, they'll see them as hypotheses as to why images have extruded such extraordinary value in this space. But that you, I've lived all my life and I've worked, I know it's also like a moment where like it's a really tragic and humbling thing. I never wanted this to happen. I've worked with musicians and I've always been happy being a supporting role to their practice that they would make a million dollars off the hit, hypothetically I don't think anyone would have worked with it, it's a million dollars off the hit. But I would make a thousand pounds off making an album cover and it was okay, I wanted to help them because music means the world to me, it's such a powerful and beautiful, oracular, myth-making component of culture that can be shared by hundreds of thousands, millions of people. This is a perfect example of what art is in this paradigm I described. And we're seeing a phenomenal recalculation of value whereby a musician has had to reckon with the fact in the last two weeks, some of the people I work with, that I might be able to sell an NFT of the album cover for more that they could sell an NFT of the song for. And that seems consistent too, right? I mean, because you know, if I think about, and this is in no way, this isn't really a criticism, I think it's just kind of the way things have been for maybe the last 10 years or so, right? Like contemporaries of yours, of course, we're very close to Medahaven, we're very close to Mikey Oswell, Chate Erichu, Chate like Hassan Reh, you know, this is just bringing out, you know, just have like a 10 minute credit of like incredible graphic graphic designers of the, but the point being is that, you know, not even saying just as a side all male in that list, just mentioned. And we can come back this later, but like one of the reasons why I think it's essential we intervene in this space right now is that the, if you look at the demographics of digital prime, it's absolutely terrifying. I mean, that is a space that like we're going to have culture reshaped by a space that is like 95% male, dominantly within like a 10 year band of age that have enormously like, you know, you want to talk about like kind of random individuals or or landian nihilists. Well, that space is like, unfortunately, there are whales in that space who absolutely represent those ideologies. It is, this is another is what I have to, I don't want to talk now to draw attention to myself, we have to talk now as a community, as a group, as a generation, we must act if I don't want. And this is another reason why it's like, it's very paradoxical and difficult for me to step forward and to talk right now. I know that I'm also like a white male 35 years old, who's like, like, I'm not representative of the cultural myths that mean something to me are not representative of, if the world is built in my image, it's still a disaster, it's an authoritarian failure, it must be built in the image of many, many, many more people. And if I can put tools out there for many more voices to come forward, I think that must be my priority right now. And privately, I will say like kind of, that is what I am primarily working on at the moment in my practice is in addition to kind of trying to understand how I can frame my work to survive this transition, how to open source the tools for other people to create visibility and value in what's going to be a very, very, very rapidly changing environment over the next weeks and months. Can I shout out a female graphic designer? Please do. Yeah. Can we work for good? It's actually a duo. Well, I was going to say, I was just going to say, I think a crook too. Exactly. On that point. But the point, but the point is what the point is well taken. I mean, but what I was going to say on that is, you know, in, in maybe let's say a fast approaching a decade of let's say Instagram, I mean, I can't actually remember the exact date that Instagram was a thing. It's maybe only seven years old or something along those lines eight years old. I wish it was just die already. Sure. We definitely get to that. But, but there's also I think like a, you know, there was certainly a transition point where of course album artworks did bring or attract a lot of attention to, you know, a piece of music. But there was this kind of like, there was definitely this kind of like transitional phase in which very kind of dynamic, very dynamic, beautiful kind of tokens of like future or whatever in the shape of graphic design kind of became slowly a standard. As a result of the fact that, you know, the web, for at least that period of time was was was was so visual. And I think that as you say with with NFTs and the kind of a lot of the presentation of NFTs now, it seems to be in a sense kind of like echoing a lot of the familiar, the familiar kind of experience of that last while. But it is quite true. I mean, there's there's certain circumstances and this is maybe as old as time in some ways. But like, there are many circumstances where I feel like that, that emphasis on the visual, the emphasis on the object when it comes to a piece of music. The visual as always kind of, as always had some kind of an advantage. I don't know. Music has kind of enjoyed this strange paradox of the kind of moving from the physical to the digital in that it was perfectly primed like when the the MP3 compression algorithm came around, it became so insanely portable. I mean, it was like, if you compare that to like a sculptor or like other art forms, it's like an MP3 could go anywhere and could go fast immediately. It could be there. The monetization part totally failed. That part just made no sense. But as a medium, it was perfectly primed for this actually. Yeah. I think that's really, I think that's totally like an important thing to note. And it's also like now in this moment, I think one of the reasons why let's talk about this like kind of myth-making value or this, this like, if you look at the MFT again as a kind of, as potentially a moment where you are offering something. And so in the traditional art space, it's the idea that what I would say, the vast, the most valuable thing that you can offer, the thing that most closely aligns with value, social value, cultural value, I don't give a shit about capital value, but those two things tend to human history to be conflated with capital value. And so if you can guarantee social and cultural value with the thing that you offer, it is likely that people will ascribe a high capital value to it as long as they live in a social or cultural paradigm. And there's really some people at the moment who don't. That's not the, you know, that's not the main content of what I'm going to say here. Music has the capacity to be a bridge object. The problem is, and why images became valuable is what it is a bridge too is kind of, there's multiple things. One of them is a scene or a space and dance music is really interesting for this because it's like, it's literally an activation object inside a physical space. This is a very real side activation of music. You play it and people dance. They come together and they have a feeling. They have a kind of, and a physical reaction and a physical experience that can kind of only happen when music is playing. And so music is an essential activation token in that. That's one aspect. Fortunately. Activation token, I like that. But that's, that's, it's really obvious to say, that is a very real physical prime activation. And so that value is horrible to translate into an NFT. As, you know, like a lot of musicians are struggling with this, that like the whole music industry, due to the actions of some incredibly malicious pirates like Daniel Eck had been forced to re-engineer its entire profit model and entire survival model around physical prime activations, concerts touring, nightclub spaces, etc, etc, etc. Now because of a global pandemic, you cannot access those spaces. And now NFTs are seemingly disinterested in kind of like, or the audience currently buying NFTs because they're crypto-liquid and a lot of them are digital prime, place no value on a real side prime activation component of a token. So there's that. Then there's the, there's the other things which music can do, which I think really, really important, which is, is for a lot of people are a, this, LJ-ic effector of meaning of an emotional inner life, a catalog in the inner life of the artist or the inner life of the listener. And this is, I think as far as music's future survival, I would say that actually, it's quite interesting, but the music which could potentially be valuable in an NFT space would be, one possible way is that which is consistently affecting, but this is where I come back to something which maybe will hopefully find a way to kind of segue into at some point, but one of the ways in which that might usually do it is through, again, if we want to talk about present narratives, what, what, of course, multiple listeners, they recognize the shared value, is not the images of the cover necessarily because those can be separated and now, can be, you know, solder standalone objects. But I do think one thing that an artist can own is titles or lyrics or text components, which form ciphers of shared meaning. And the music can be seen as a vehicle in the same way that images in my graphic design practice were vehicles for embedding things which are much close to code components, consistent components. And that is the stuff which I'm not going to speak about value in the empty space, but I think there are certain objects that from my body of work, which because they have been so consistently presented, to reviewer, I think it would be fair to say that they might consider them as having meaning. And similarly as well, I think, text and lyrics may be one space in which I think we might see a return or splitting in the music space between one which this hasn't been a distinction that's ever been important. There's no value in the last 20 or 30 years since the emergence of popular electronic dance music. This has never been a kind of, there's never been an necessity to make this distinction, but it's fair to say that electronic dance music's affect is physical prime. And the songwriting and a kind of more intimate poetic space that also generates code objects, so byproduct of musical production is I think we'll see a greater genre divergence than we have. And it's fair to say that kind of the genre is merged into like a market space, but even Holly, for example, your work, simultaneously you have components of what might be seen as dance music of traditional compositional craft, of songwriting, of poetry, all happening at once. And I would say that like if you were to ask about like kind of what one response people might make to this would be that those components may begin to separate again and even be like almost like in the lab, like in the centrifuge, pulled apart again that you may see lyrics being offered separately from song as an object in and of themselves. And the components of a musical experience will become more important to a creator than the melange. And that's literally a complete inversion of value from three weeks ago, like that the for ten years the industry has tried to bake everything together to maximize its algorithm potential to maximize the extent of it, hitting as many notes as possible in one. The idea of culture was the melange and I think that one very interesting thing about again I use this word interesting and I can't help but like qualify it by saying like it's a very detached privilege thing to call something interesting which can hurt a lot of people. It's a very concerning thing and that some people will make a lot of cultural capital and money out of it but I'm much more concerned with the enormous numbers of people for whom this is going to be a very alienating time, a very confusing time, a time of transformation and change in which they feel they have not a great deal of agency in and you know changes in things that they loved that they didn't ask for at a time when they're already very vulnerable will happen. And again it's another reason why I wanted to reengage with the conversation even though it's not the natural way I like to work at this moment and find better ways to see if there are ways that we can talk about what the front line of this change is. I think even in this conversation by interjecting this tool primacy, talking about how value is created in these two spaces maybe it's even giving people a different way of looking at this moment than Trevah's art was all stonks anyway, read on what an NFT is. I think on that I mean I suspect also Trevah doesn't mean that. I suspect that that. No I think he was just meaming. It's meaming but it's also I suspect that in that particular context this happens on Twitter often right like when he was thinking or he was thinking about a very specific application of like Christie's or you know and then you write it and you end up saying ridiculous you know. I don't think it matters if you didn't mean it. The point is Trevah I think is an intelligent and savvy enough person that he already sits in the complex value space between these two spaces. An enormous amount of Trevah's audience want to believe the latter because that feels to them like the emerging value system of what digital prime looks like. Everything is intangible, financialized and that value is realizable. So I totally take your point but I think it's really important to say what Trevah has articulated whether it's just for a joke or not is a very real philosophy that drives very I'm sorry but like if you look at the current state of NFT offerings in the art being made I would say greater than 90% of artists certainly are looking at this moment as a financialisation of the image as a creation of stocks and the creation of phenomenal value which they can take apart in by simply offering short-hand art tokens to the market and I don't need to interrupt but I think it's important to say that like kind of it's not Trevah I'm attacking when I when I talk about that. It's just it was a useful short-hand for an idea that's actually already present in that market. That's true I mean it's something that we've been frustrated with in some sense too particularly on around the topic of and for those who don't know what this is I'll try and do a crappy explanation but you know the topic of what you describe as like digital prime is often an art is often an opinion articulated around the metaverse right. So this this idea. A horrible term. A very common term right. Very very like a fastly fastly like common common term in conversations about the future of music and culture and technology right this is something that's. Well just the future of leisure life as well. Well exactly and so the idea of the metaverse for those who aren't familiar is it's kind of simple basically you're familiar with it with that maybe knowing it it's just this idea of like digitizing life right that in the future you know we will all be and now this is an idea as all this time but it's like we'll all be walking around as avatars in some virtual world that can be of us you know of a of a of a fidelity not dissimilar to the one of our own etc. I just always have to think about the second life dancers how they're always kind of just like awkward dancers. I am the sexy dancers. I wish you could see us. But of course which I think is it is interesting right and like my position on it in a sense is that I've always been maybe maybe closer to your position in reconciling worlds is saying that actually yeah there you know there are many great advantages to this idea of digital life like digital dualism I reject like digital relationships I believe are very real and very powerful very transnational which is a component that I see rarely discussed but of course the metaverse goes two ways right and so that the discussion and the bias is often that you know the future must be skewomorphic 3d model representations of you existing in fortnite whereas the exact you know you can go you can reverse the direction there where my emphasis in bias is to say well no actually you have these insane new coordination technologies music being one of the music itself being a coordination technology that you know why can't we use those to augment real experience with all of the sensors and the you know well with all of the joy and beauty that can come from real experience why does it always have to be pushing in one direction and of course part of that is the cheaper so you have kind of somewhere in between you know there's on probably on one side you have maybe on your left like a romantic humanism that rejects anything right which I reject also which is just this kind of digital dualistic thing oh these things are just gonna corrupt us etc etc but it is important to listen to but fundamentally I don't believe to be true on the right of you you have you know this kind of fetish or you know a thirst for digitization a thirst for kind of transcending transcending the human and then somewhere in the middle you like well actually you know a purely digital experience is an impoverished experience a physical experience augmented by certain digital ciphers or coordination is an augmented experience and I feel like we likely all kind of fall in the middle here I mean Holly you have I'm sure hell of a lot to say others but like we all kind of fall in the middle there and I agree with you that that statement about art just being stalked or whatever it is for force it falls it falls a little outside the remit of something I would I would say yeah but I think that that reconciling those two worlds it is like a it's a really sticky place to be right well yeah that's why when I say I make primacist work or for 10 years really since 2012 I've been making primacist work I've been trying to draw attention to it's work about the struggle it's work it's it's it's work that tries to be honest about the difficulties of this moment it stakes and its possibilities without privileging either side and and tries to the only thing it's trying to offer is not an answer not a dogman not some like heroic I've solved it. I'm the champion of this moment. I have the answer to say, like, here are some shared symbols or Consistent things I'm going to be consistent with. Can these tropes become useful devices for you to make sense of this moment or to build meaning and value that Possibly survive this transition, but also allow us to create a bridge to things that we don't want to lose And I have to say, okay No go go no, I want I wanted to jump in because because eventually I think we're gonna But on this particular bridge point, I remember talking to you not long ago I can cut this out so it sounds like you decided to go this place go this direction Because this direction of your evolution, but I remember you telling me a really cool story about reading a Chinese evil boy Yeah, sure sure And I think that I really like that story because I think it raises It's one like very funny, but it also does raise kind of you know This issue of like people living in parallel worlds and and also the desire to kind of reconcile those In a responsible, but also kind of a progressive and and kind of Promethean wave and Yeah, so so maybe I would love to hear that story because I know Holly has a lot to say about trying to be able to Be happy to Maybe let me then kind of relate an anecdote about A little bit about this idea of This struggle or this space finding oneself in In the gap or also in the overlap Between these two spaces and I think in some ways it is a gap and in other ways It's an overlap and and those it's really really important I think for us to build better ways of talking about the difference between those two things But we don't have good terms currently, but weirdly one as I was kind of enduring trying to figure out these things in my life I happened upon Probably because I was looking for it a text which I felt articulated in a really interesting way in the summer of 2011 So while I was writing the one of the texts the poem cycle that I ended up finishing in 2012 And just as a tiny aside it people listening like I know that I'm well well aware that me even talking about writing poetry Sounds like like the most horrendous pretentious retrograde thing in the world, but hopefully By the end of the conversation today or at least in time people will understand how I hopefully I'm I feel that through these ideas one of the spaces that is really really clear to me that I believe there's The nominal value in in the same way identified like lyrics potentially as being a value of music in text And I think poetry is perhaps the most exciting space that NFTs might add value to more so than images poems have been the absolute Dregs and neglected bastards of literature for For centuries in the sense that like it's almost impossible to sell a poem and that the value or the use of a poem has become I think totally degraded and and yet as we're going to talk about in a world of code in a world of text The smallest unit of text that produces meaning just the poem is an object that may be a phenomenal value, but But it was another text me in my friends in summer 2011 when I was still like kind of in New York and kind of back and forth in London in New York trying to Make some kind of sense of this world and of my life. I had a Me and a couple of friends we decided we would start a little reading group for the summer and that we would read Again in the context of some of these those days we would revisit some science fiction both like kind of Some canonical stuff from like kind of mid-century science fiction and also try and read some contemporary science fiction to see if the ideas had changed Like kind of what the like there were any interesting evolutions of of these ideas of what the content of science fiction might be and You know we read some Philip K. Dick and a few other little things but One book which I I had seen a kind of synopsis of and I was really keen for us to read was a book by China I say me Aville you guys are saying meville and you're probably completely correct I have no no confidence whatsoever I'm really interested to hear all these thoughts and just go no holy is a big fan or at least an avid reader It's a book called the city and the city by China and this is a book which it's it the kind of conceit of this book Is it's an narrative that takes place in a kind of fictional near future kind of boss first states are kind of like kind of you know Turkey kind of Istanbul like kind of Levantine But it's it's a slightly like kind of post Gibson You know metropolitan sprawl that has some degree of like kind of Very big verticality even in kind of class and technological distribution So there's kind of like the mega towers of capital, but there's also the street level neighborhoods of the kind of you know almost The old world that have had to become compatible as with this but the principle can see is that there are two states I think they're called Bezel and all coma that are They're territoryly The city has sprawled it enough that the states have overlapped and that they're there are parts of Bezel That overlap on the map in the vendor diagram with all coma and parts of all coma that overlap with Bezel and That a state has emerged like the kind of the political state that has emerged is it is a kind of enforced paradigm where citizens of all coma Retain sovereignty like when they are in the parts that overlap with Bezel They do not acknowledge that the Bezel part exists and they operate as if they are still just in all coma and They wear their all coma Clothes and they don't talk to someone wearing the Bezel clothes They don't make eye contact with them. You're not meant to recognize them You go to the shop on the street that sells the all coma food you don't eat the Bezel food etc And this is this is a mutual state of affairs where simultaneously as well People who are in in Bezel cannot recognize the all coma part as far as they are concerned mentally and physically Like they they learn to like not they learn it's become second nature So it's not even a state of denial they do not recognize the existence of the other while they are while they are in it and that there is a enforcing kind of police force or state of affairs That enforces the crime of of breaking this boundary which is called breach if you're in breach It's when you've you know kind of like you've used a Bezel word in the ill-con't Your all-conver space or something and It's a kind of strange context for writing a novel But I immediately just I couldn't believe it reading this I I thought this was the most remarkable thing that I'd read and kind of what I'd hoped for in this whole like Let's read some science fiction kind of project where it was like this to me felt like China me evil had had articulated for the first time that I had seen it in Contemporary writing the meaningful ontological Kind of trauma that the subject of the contemporary age must and has conditioned themselves to endure of the struggle for primacy where you You Exist in the real world and simultaneously there is a you that exists in the digital realm Has social media profile has has you know intangible and that the more a is of one the laws of one the rules of value in one are completely incompatible with the other and your brain just learns to completely like separate those two states and and you know You become a good citizen of this of this gap space and you don't perform breach by kind of keeping up The conditions of one seamlessly when in one space and the other and the other and kind of like learning not to you know Learning to live with the what would be crazy cognitive distance of thinking that you're in two states at once That is the kind of like the gap which we fall into I was I was Was fascinated by this exhilarated by it because it was like yes Here's someone really thinking about the the social conditioning the political conditioning the violence the authoritarial conditioning That that is required to enforce this state of affairs and how unnatural it feels to read it to read about people enjoying a stay of it But look at us every day Trying to reconcile you know like kind of this is just just the period 2011 I think where you know just starting to businesses starting to understand that the value of like making their Their cupcake more Instagramable or something you know like no liabaker here things like that so The the way that they are beginning to realize that two completely different sets of value exist and that the rules of one one space are different to the rules of another Anyway, I I went back to to London later that that autumn having read this and you know when these are just my in China, me Aval was doing a book signing. I think in I can't remember it in And foils or something in Holden and I thought I have to go I have to go I have to tell him that I thought this idea was And to be fair like kind of like I read the rest of the book and I thought the rest of the book was was simply like not very good Not just not very interesting it just became kind of like a quite generic narrative as far as I understood it of you know Like kind of Someone trying to use a per you know a powerful figure and steal something from them similar to Neuromancer You know kind of some kind of like artifact theft idea and I was like I'm not interested in any of these aspects of the plot the premise is super interesting but that But you know I went there and I queued up and I kind of nervously went with my book for trying to be able to sign and You know we had an opportunity to talk for a moment after the signing and I kind of said you know I have to say I just thought I was really quite taken aback by this novel because I think that This is the first time I've seen anyone be able to treat articulate this this kind of ontological splitting that's caused by living in a world with a persistent digital realm with the internet and I was like this is for me one of the most interesting content group books I've read about the internet and China who's this you know he's this big like kind of strong ball-tetted like kind of you know like kind of very like kind of like powerful ego look at the kind of a little bit like a you know it's like a punk rock Foucault you know so I kind of like fixes me with this kind of like withering look and it just goes it's not about the internet it's about communism oh that's nice like my Twitter okay you know what like you know massive fair play to to to China like I I I choose to still view like I think for him he was right story about the ludicrous infighting of the left and then to reconcile each other's ideological positions and I just still insist and this was also a moment that fundamentally this was a big moment in my life like kind of it helped me this was that this was truly like the death of the author this was the like the kundagrass where I was like whether or not you think you wrote a book about the internet you wrote a book about the internet like that's that's more has its meaning to me and you can't change its value by telling me that that wasn't even your intention as an author and you know that that was an important moment in in my life and like kind of I don't mean I just respect to to to China when you know kind of like the point of view and I say that that like from that point on and I think it's a position that had always been you know I've been on the precipice of from learning reading Christopher word and the way in which he he also was the author's intention of a symbol is is not the meaning of a symbol the meaning is is this this token value at a cruise in what people use it to access and on mass that is the meaning like if you want to talk about if we had any tools to talk about meaning in art that is it certainly not you know the author can attempt to kind of cajol corral that by by stating publicly what their intention of the work was and that's a quite compelling thing for a lot of people to follow it but you know the fact is that like there are myriad examples from the history of art where things have accrued even totally unintended accidental you look at memes you look at some of the value it's being approved today to things like Niancat they come to take on a tokenistic value for myth making for accessing for activating feelings and they become a kind of shared cypher for community and now we're watching that that value suddenly terrifyingly be translated into phenomenal real world sums but yeah that's that's my trying to me a real story I think like it's important to say like at this point in my life I was doing graphic design but I didn't feel like I had my work I people weren't really no I don't expect anyone to remember this but like that then I hadn't made my current presentation format I didn't have my black background site I didn't have void which turned nine two days ago by the way I got that email from cumble with a birthday cake in it void is nine today I think we'll be able to celebrate hopefully in space with people when it turns a decade old right we'll see about that I don't want to talk too much about it but I don't know if I do have a tenth birthday but we'll see oh and you know what you can do sorry this is me coming in as like a totally you could switch the eye and the oh and then it would be like void with a ten in the middle there's my genius graphic design suggestion tree wow that's definitely what they would do at some kind of like marvel con yeah I like let's face I'm not one for celebrating anniversaries that much anyway but I just thought it was interesting the crazy it's really interesting to hear you talk about that because I didn't I didn't think of it as like a metaphor for the physical versus the digital world but now that I'm kind of revisiting that novel in my mind I completely understand why you would think that it actually makes it even more beautiful I mean sometimes like you know some of the best works of art can be kind of like interpreted in these many different ways I think that's probably my favorite book by him just because the world is so compelling I think for me I was thinking more about it from like you know geopolitical viewpoint thinking about you know because you know spending so much time in Berlin or having spent some time in Cairo and thinking about these kind of like very separate but kind of like cram together worlds that were living completely different realities but I'd really like to think about through this lens of the digital and the physical I think what Holly the good news for you is I'm wrong China is already set your interpretation is very beautiful I like it's also funny to actually did come to mind because I saw a holly right Cairo under a little envelope there and it did make me think of a similar story that we have actually where from Cairo no so you'll remember this when I when I oh gosh yeah that's it's actually kind of not a dissimilar kind of moment but so basically actually when Holly and I met this is quite a while ago we had saved up to go on a trip I made the call that we wanted to go to Cairo because we wanted to see the pyramids and I wanted to meet Matt's parents as well it's true that they were in Cairo yeah that was that was kind of like in the area but the so anyway so we saved up this money and we went and spent I think we ended up spending like three to four weeks in Egypt it was incredible and an old friend of mine Peter Peter's a career is a honestly a saint he's a doctor but he's also a coppedic Christian because of course there's a large coppedic Christian minority in Egypt and as a result of hanging out with him we got to check out a lot of coppedic monasteries we went to a lot of like the the coptics believe in miracles take that how you will but it's very beautiful like they have like there's like a floating church that you can go to and you go there and you know it's not really floating but it's a miracle it's a symbol as you describe and so while we're there you know of course they have the most incredible gift shops you could possibly imagine right like it's these incredible like tapes of coptic chance like specific coptic songs coptic pop music that being recorded back from like the 60s 70s all on these tapes and so you were buying music all over Egypt I mean but yeah specifically like the gift stores had these amazing tape collections and exactly and so and so while we're there we were listening to this one and it sounded so good but it kind of like sounded like John Maus kind of in that kind of like like warped kind of like as it like almost like a warped cassette from like the the beach boys or something totally was almost like the the master recording that made its way onto this boot like tape that was being sold in the churches that was warped or something and we listen to this thing and it's like really deep voice with like crazy ambiance around it and we're there and we're like you know what we should probably buy a couple of these because we knew that John Maus when we got back to Berlin we'll be playing a show we're like we're just giving one because it's kind of a bit crazy that we don't know John Maus we've never met him before so it was a bit weird that we're a bit bit bit but he was like he was coming to play a show we've heard that record and we're like he's really into liturgical music you know this kind of sends a bit like him it's a bit unusual you know anyway so long story short we ended up taking the tape and went to the show sort of the show whatever and after it's like well I'm saying and we're like hey you know like we were actually just in Egypt and you know we we got this music and it actually it reminded us of you we thought you might enjoy it because there's no way in hell particularly that time there's no way in hell you would ever hear that I mean to be quite honest I think it would be really I don't know if that that recording has ever been digitized I still have the tape but anyway so he took it and he was very gracious or whatever and then I got like this was my space days I got a my space message from him like a month later and he was like fucking hate it he's like I don't know why did you why did you give this to me if you heard it if you heard it like you know we've got decent ears you know I'm saying like it's really not that much of a stretch but he was like he wasn't just like he wasn't into it he was like I know it he was a little bit to my China man there's the bridge because Holy Rock Cairo then I was like fuck that was totally literally sounds like him I'll have to I'll have to try and dig it out and digitize it is beautiful yeah I think I think a similar thing was maybe happy now we were looking for something we found it the artist wasn't looking for it we kind of shared it with the artist but like we'd or you know we'd seen our idea in the work maybe rather than that but they were quite offended at that but it's so weird that is that is amazing I mean it's also really nice because I mean the world opens up and becomes so much bigger when you get to have that subjectivity and then there's this whole other subjectivity that like crashes and smashes into you really quickly where you're like oh holy shit yeah it's funny we we always end up kind of meandering and speaking of parallel parallel threads there's like four or five threads that hopefully are going to braid together again. But we actually left off, you know, we were talking about your background in our history, you're interested in language and symbols. And you know, your work in my mind is perhaps not best known because I don't think you could limit it to this, but is largely known for making like very, very distinctive type, right? Like, if one were to, it's funny, we were talking to a friend earlier. Well, also always custom, but just something that we think we relate to, like we never release other people's samples. It's always like our own and custom made. Absolutely. Yeah, we were talking to a friend earlier who's a younger person and we were saying, "Oh yeah, we got it. We got a jet off later because we're doing a podcast." You know, and they're like, "Well, who's the podcast with them?" Like, "Oh, it's a friend of us, David Rudnick. He's a designer." And he was like, "Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I'm familiar." And I was like, "Well, we'll search it." And the first, you know, the first images that came up were typy. He was like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, oh, yeah." And it's like, yeah, which is, which is, I have to say like a remarkable accomplishment that someone could like be on Google images and see some type faces emerge. And then immediately be like, "Yeah, wow, you know, this is, I understand, I understand, who this person is." And so, I guess the right question to ask in order to add some continuity to the discussion earlier is, you know, how do you go from this kind of historical context, this interesting interest in symbols to focusing specifically on type? And I've got a feeling that some of the emphasis that you placed on poetry and writing earlier, which might be, might be news to some people. I've got a feeling that that plays a role. I think it's fair to say that my graphic design, the moment in my life where I'm like, I am a graphic designer, I understand that's what I do. This is my medium. And that type became absolutely foundational to that and drawing type. It emerged almost entirely out of the culmination of some of the work I've been trying to do, not just kind of reading and understanding my relationship to poetry and particularly the poetry of Shelley, which I'll come back to, I think, because I think it's fair to say that Shelley's project in poetry is the one that really kind of overwhelmed me with, felt so relevant. I really do feel like Shelley is the first real person who writes about the internet. And I'll try and explain that later. I worked for almost two years on a body of work of my own that was, and I didn't really even know why I was doing it first. That time in 2011 when I saw this thing and trying to be able to work with it, I mean, partly because my head was so deep in this poetic cycle that I was writing. I totally understand, the outer body experience of what's myself talking to Riemann, someone in 2021, hearing me talk about writing a poetic cycle, writing poetry and just thinking, you know, it's my typical kind of pretentious, like, off his own arse. I think you too self-conscious about this. I want to give you some, I want to boost your confidence on this a little bit, because I think you're, I think it's actually quite refreshing, but please continue. People don't see me as a writer, and I don't see myself as a writer in the sense that I always feel like when I write, even when I talk, I'm maybe unnecessarily verbose, I, I, you know, will overexplain things. This one cycle that I wrote, I think, was an attempt, and I think the only time that I really feel like I've succeeded, I think it's, and because of its content, I would like to publish it now, in that I feel like it directly talks about, it's about everything that's covered in this conversation. But I wrote some poetry with constraints that forced me to abandon writing as an expression of myself, of my ego, of, you know, like, kind of this, this kind of demonstration of, of my mind, and really have to write something that was entirely about how it related to the reader. I wrote a series of poems that, that, that, that, they're called the new Jews, which I know as well as like kind of like probably shop and take breath from some readers and that like kind of a. Did you say juice or juice? Juice, J-E-W-S-J-E-D-W. The new juice would be much less gone around to the movie juice, it's all about juice. That would probably end up at it. Sorry we can cut all of this out my idiot. No, no, no, I like it. It's good. I mean it's because phrase to say this is the three words sound really ridiculous together but I you know that experience that I was having of again like being trapped in the gap between these two states and realizing that the gap won't close for quite some period of time that we're like marooned in a world which is going to go through an awful struggle between how it reconciles physical prime and digital prime and it reminded me I kept identifying within reading about the 40 years the Israelites are condemned to spend in the wilderness. They see a glimpse of Zion and like they they make the golden calf which is like totally interesting in terms of like obviously like kind of symbols of greed and object worship in this moment and God punishes them and basically says none of you will live to see Israel, none of you will live to see Zion. You're going to you will wonder in the desert for for 40 years I think for three generations and you know only those who come after you will see will see Zion and this this idea of being condemned to have to wonder in the gap was like that was I identified but it's so strongly that is our generation we are the new Jews like we are we are stuck in this space where the world we're going to have to go through this ordeal where the you know that whatever the world to come is we don't get to go straight there and we have to live through and possibly we you know our generation has to kind of try and carry the traditions so that they can maybe survive for the next generations who will get there it's on us and the Jews literally walk in circles in a featureless desert carrying a book carrying a text and that text is God and it's and it's like I cannot I was I was overwhelmed with how much this described to you know to a ridiculous degree the condition of our age where you know like I mean people this is why like I'm Jewish myself and it was in some ways like kind of I think it this this this way of maybe being able to displace my ego from the work because there was an aspect of my identity that had led me to this point so I didn't have to talk about myself anymore when I wrote this but you know Judaism is a hypertext protocol is for myth making you know like the religions of books are and Islam is the same into a degree Christianity is the same although like Christianity invents all kinds of interesting oral elements which you know like I'm not going to go into religion here but point taken though you know that this is it's it's it's absolutely like if you want to talk about decentralized structures for social organization I think that interesting to go back and read the Bible again how and there's there's I've shared with Matt some of the texts I wrote in this time the poem cycle the new Jews and also like a gallery text I wrote for a show that Roman Lysker did in Berlin in 2013 which also was an attempt for me to explore some of these ideas of how actually these these kind of protocol-based societies have existed for a very long time and that we can also kind of it's interesting that some of the analogies for our present day have actually existed and been embedded in quite plain sight in popular culture for for thousands of years but I wrote this text cycle the new Jews where every stanza of the new it was about this moment it's about trying to express his feelings but but every stanza of the poem is is a haiku so it was forced to be very short 575 on the syllables and it's also a pangram it's a pangram so it's a pangram is a sentence which contains every letter of the alphabet and the reason I forced myself to try and reckon with this with this format which I I wasn't initially trying to write a poem it was about a code that contains every component of the code so every every everything I can express in language every myth everything that can be conjured by it if you're seeing images in your head now if I talk about a flat and featureless desert if I talk about a blue sky and in your your mind is now running the software to generate that like image from the language and the idea that like actually that we can express the infinitesimal multitude of all images in human thought to some degree from a code of 26 letters in the Western character forms is just a remarkably sophisticated like you know we talk about the the massive 128 the integers of of like cryptographic hashes and stuff but like look at what we have generated out of this tiny cryptographic example that that all human experience is potentially locked in this tiny character set and to write to write in a format which both simultaneously runs the software which shows the image but shows the reader the code and that because it's obvious that the pangram is present in such a small space it's hard not to suddenly see things like the rare letters of the cue or the j or the z or the X that keep appearing in these strange assemblies of language, as again, it's almost becomes like a community and ecology, like a protocol on its product. But I wrote in that way, and at that moment, when I finished those poems, when that cycle was complete, I also realized that it was like, "Okay, language is the means by which I can engage with something which is going to be the firmament of digital space, code, text, protocol, and still feel like I can relate to some of the things which are in physical prime that are incredibly dear to me, the mystery and the romance of the infinite and the divine and of nature and of all of these things which they crop up in Shelley's work as well, this terror of how to reconcile these two spaces. The thing which jumped out at me, the thing which I began to realize was every reader, every speaker who approaches a text, the text never changes, the approach to one of a changes, but the voice of the speaker is unique, and the voice is the trace of the physical when this is attached to the permanent code of the text, and that text, and that's like, "Okay, that's fine, but that only exists in performance, that only exists in recitation." No, not necessarily, and that text always has a carrier, has a voice itself by changing the font, you change the voice of the text, you change the cadence, you change the positive, you change the historical reference, and that is why I was like, "I understand, I make texts and I make voice at the same time when I make type." I had found the first moment in my practice where I was like, "That is a primacist medium, that is a tool that exists between both states, drawing a typeface, simultaneously affects the voice whilst being able to be carried by the text." And so, from that point on, any instance of text in my work became phenomenally important to me, I think, probably important and resonant or interesting than it was to my audience at the time, but for me, that's why I was compelled, I was fascinated, it felt incredibly precious, that every instance of a work was also an instance of a possibility to create a voice, not as an either statistical act, but look at me, I can draw type, I'm going to make crazy stuff. Like, I've tried to say this every time I went to a bit of drawing type, the boring, the invisible type in my work as well, I feel like morally, that for every project it is suggesting a unique historical footprint, a unique conflation of actors that came together to provide it, a unique set of perspectives and experiences, and therefore a unique set of voices, it does not. The text is permanent, the voice is infinite, and that those two things are suggest, therefore, that the logical product of that is that drawing type is incredibly important, more important than it, and completely different to the 20th century context that drawing type was seen in creating a tool for industry or for expression, also a commercial component that could be solved. And that's another reason why, like, when I started doing this one, it was very rare for designers to draw type. Now, type designer was kind of a separate category, and secondly, the only reason you really draw type for the most part was that you were creating an object for distribution, and the idea that you would create something deliberately, not for distribution, and that you wouldn't even sell it and realize its value, was seen as obstinate, like, kind of either stupid or willfully, like, kind of, like, tricksy by me, but it was never intended that way. That's why it came entirely out of this moment of realization from the poems that was like, "Okay, this inquiry doesn't have to stop here, I can continue to do this," and I think that that's where type had that role, and then I would say that very, very quickly to run through, like, kind of the other primacist elements of my practice that emerged at that moment. Again, trying to see this moment of how I presented works became very important to me, and I realized, again, that, like, kind of, I needed a presentation or I needed an articulation of what the work was that spoke to, in a similar way, to doing the typeface, like, kind of, text and voice at the same time, the footprint in both of these realms. And that's why I started documenting my work as a kind of, as a skewer-morphic object, like, front onto the camera in a state of permanent preservation that had, that spoke to textural physical qualities on a black void, like, a null field, and no information space where the light of the, pardon me, the light of the screen isn't even turned on. To contextualize that, and that's, again, like, a kind of a primacist presentation where you're trying to privilege neither, if that makes sense. Like, an Instagram, like, an NFT of a looping Instagram video that's entire, it's all image and doesn't create, attempt to create any, like, image void boundary is just attempting to speak it a language, a digital language, you know, a language that will ensure it goes for a much higher price to someone who's a digital prime consumer, but I'm not interested in validating digital prime. I'm interested in making primacist work that draws attention to both sides and creates and preserves value in both spaces. You can't eliminate either, like, now, they both exist. So there's Void and Object, and just to very, very quickly append that, I know that I know it's a long digression, but, like, I've tried this really, really quickly. You know, studying art history and studying graphic, historiographic design, you know, I know that, like, in the moment of the Bauhaus, for example, these, some of the visual innovations of the Bauhaus in terms of deciding to work with sans-serif typography, deciding to work with certain modernist layouts to remove unnecessary ornamentation. When one decides to remove unnecessary ornamentation and one reverts to an attempt to present pure text, code, medium, which obviously I don't think is possible, and that's why my work isn't modernist. As you've seen from what I just described without voice, voices never absent, there is no things in neutral typeface. What became increasingly important to the first modernists was their realization of the plane on which information was placed as being as important a part of the work as the information itself, and that's where the whiteness of the page starts to take presence in modernism and modernist layouts, where negative space is deliberately created and used as an active element of composition against the, you know, often they would try and revert to, like, to monochrome layouts, white, that the information we added is black, the page is white, that it's the dialogue between those two that creates the product. Very, very simple. If you think about that, it's very, very logical. I'm looking at myself as working in, again, in a medium that is forced to reconcile with the digital for the first time in the way that modernists didn't. That I know that the work will exist on a screen. My page is a light emitting diode array. Therefore, how do I create the whiteness of the page? I must turn off the lights. I print with light. It's inverted principle to the modernists. That's why my type's specimens are white on black. Like, the substrate, the medium, the pure medium, a white, unprinted page, to me, like, is an analog to a screen with its lights turned off. That is why the backgrounds are black, not because it's cool. I know that this has, like, it's got an enormous footprint of influence in the visual community that kind of black background became a default for presentation. I just want to explain why some of these principles I use in my presentation and use in my work are intimately and directly wedded to the thoughts I have about this moment where we're going, trying to create, again, a system of communication that can continue to have use value, myth making value, or value, if you will, meaning through and beyond this transition. And so then that's the final dialectic, I think, of the two spaces, light and dark. And I only want to draw attention to that. And I know we've got some of our inclusion and it's already gone along. You guys are saints of putting up with me. No, no, no, no. I'm actually happy because you can't say something. You can't drop Shelley wrote some of the first texts on the internet and not elaborate on that. I've been sitting here on the edge of my seat waiting. So let's go with this. Light and dark, my entire understanding of light and dark. And there's a text I wrote in my thesis book which I have shared online. One of the little passages is called Disorientalism. So a turning away from the light or a philosophy of turning from the light, which speaks to the idea that the catastrophe of the destruction of information by autocratic power in history in the kind of 10th through like 15th centuries is often referred to as the dark ages. And the demolition of the real world value of a physical prime value by suddenly the super abundance of digital information and the propagation of digital prime power. I said, like, perhaps this catastrophe, this coming catastrophe will be referred to as the light ages. But this image of light as a destructive force, not an illuminating force, is not mine. It's invented by Shelley. It is a terror which abides in his work. Even that the, I think some people will be familiar with the work I did where I have a kind of a tricodon, these three little kind of epigrams from the common phrases. The first is power corrupts. And I have absolute power corrupts, absolutely. And then I have knowledge as power. And this is for me like kind of just a rearticular of I think one of the fundamental thesis that's at the heart of Shelley's poetry, which is he's absolutely terrified of what he's doing when someone reads his poem, he's programming, he's placing information into a mind and he doesn't know and I think for all his life he wrestles with the morality of the idea, is he really illuminating or is he destroying a mind? Is he replacing thought with something that he created? Is it a tyrannical force that he's creating in poetry or an image? And I think that responsibility that creators must should deal with, of the idea of light as a destructive force, of knowledge as a destructive force, for anyone who propagates work, is if you really respect the mind of your viewer, you would be desperately careful to only try and offer things which have been reduced to as much as you think a responsible carries of meaning, carries of meaning which are desperately attempting not to harm the viewer, not to override them, not to control them. It's why I've railed against, if I'll stick a little bit of a troll online, but against dark UX, against Instagram, against patterns of utilizing visual transmission, image transmission for user control. Well that still goes back to political project, which I think finds its most interesting exponent in Shelley, who is simultaneously thinks poetry is one of the most remarkable things that mankind have ever created, like a perfectly, like incredibly well-compressed algorithm for transferring meaning between two subjects in the form of language, and yet also like sees something terrible in that. And I wanted to say like about the idea of Shelley as the first part of the internet. There are a number of poems I think way explicitly talks about, basically poetry is programming, and the world of the creates in the mind, but also the he then expresses, "Serious and dangerous doubt about that." Look, if I wanted to make a case for Shelley as a part of the internet, I feel like, can you forgive me, I hope your listeners will forgive me, please forgive me, but I'd like to read the first two stanzas of Mont Blanc, which is a poem from 1816, written by Shelley, which he writes on location in the veil of Chamony, sitting there gazing at the majestic mountain, this enormous terrifying, beautiful, superhuman pile in front of him, as one might glimpse the enormity of the stack or a trove of data, but actually the analogy that I tried to draw when I first engaged with this in my practice was the homepage of my site before I moved to to black background while I was kind of working through these things and discovering these ideas used to be the homepage of Google images, used to be the Google search screen with the Google search and I'm feeling lucky, but typed into the search bar was the first line of Shelley's Mont Blanc, and it's like the moment for you click search, and the first line of Shelley's Mont Blanc is the everlasting universe of things. You know, it's wild, I for some reason I think I remember that, I don't know why. I might, I wonder if it will be interesting for people to see that image again now, but if it's okay, and again, like I do feel strangely like kind of, I'm not trying to like wrestle this moment back to some like fussy white historical canon or to like, verify some kind of like Ivy League perspective on this is the correct one. I just, I desperately wish more people were actually, I wasn't introduced to him at school, I kind of encountered him independently and and was was was was blown away by by what he was, I think, trying to talk about, which I think is really value and he doesn't succeed in talking, he tries. I think that that's the most amazing, I think I will always love Shelley forever for that, for trying, but I would just say this, if you give me, I'd like to read these two stanzas, and I would just like to say just like imagine that somebody is writing this today about the internet. He's looking at a white mountain, but just imagine you're sitting at the homepage of the image, you're staring at your Twitter feed when you're when you're hearing this, and I'll read it now, Mont Blanc. The everlasting universe of things flows through the mind and rolls its rapid waves, now dark, now glittering, now reflecting gloom, now lending splendor, where from secret springs the source of human thought its tribute brings, of waters with a sound but half its own, such as a feeble brook will often assume in the wild woods among the mountains alone, where waterfalls around it leap forever, where woods and winds contend and of vast river over its rocks, ceaselessly bursts and raves. Thus thou, ravine of arv, dark, deep ravine, thou many coloured, many voiced veil, over whose pines and crags and caverns sail, vast cloud shadows and sunbeams, awful scene, where power and likeness of the arv comes down from the ice-coffs that gird its secret throne, bursting through these dark mountains like the flame, of lightning through the tempest, thou dost lie thy giant prude of pines around the clinging, children of elder time, in whose devotion the chainless winds still come and ever came, to drink their odors, and their mighty swinging to hear an old and solemn harmony. Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil robes some unscultured image, the strange sleep which, when the voices of the desert fail, wraps all in its own deep eternity, thy caverns echoing to the arvs commotion, a lulled lone sound no other sound can tame, thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, thou art the path of that unresting sound, dizzy ravine, and when I gaze on the, I see as in a trance sublime and strange to muse on my own separate fantasy, my own, my human mind, which passively now renders and receives fast influencing, holding an unremitting interchange with the clear universe of things around, one legion of wild thoughts whose wandering wings now float above their darkness, and now rest, where that or thou art no unbidden guest in the still cave of the witch posee, speaking amongst the shadows that pass by ghosts of all things that are some shade of thee, some phantom, some faint image, till the breast from which they fled recalls them, thou art there. Wow, honestly, that was beautiful. Yeah, I'm not even messing around like, because obviously this is, this is kind of like, it isn't familiar territory. You a few times have said in this conversation, and I think you were unfair to yourself, but I understand that I understand the the preclevity to do it. You've apologized for bringing poetry in. That was fucking remarkable. I actually kind of like, I kind of like shook a little bit when it went back to his subjectivity. You know, there's a kind of a point about 75% in where all of a sudden he's he's talking about himself witnessing. Yes. And at that point, it got a little eerie for me, because I was like, not not to, and I mean this with the best of intentions, you know, people often do create analogies between saying, oh, well, there's this thing and it's about the internet or whatever. And I was kind of expecting that to be one of these where I was like, oh, I'm going to kind of enjoy it, you know. And then I'm going to find something clever to say. And I'm like, but no, but actually at that point, I completely got it. I like it kind of fuck with me a little bit. Thank you for it. You also read really well. I hope you don't mind if I make an NFT of you reading the first two standards to Shelley's more blank. Can you tell me what year that was written 1816? Holy shit. Wow. That was really good. You know, the red so politely damn it. That is the poetry all of a sudden. I really mean it. I really mean it. I've had the secret privilege and kind of code of having these things helped me through the last 10 years. I wish more people had them. I wish that there was a context to share them in a better way. I think that maybe the technology is there now where maybe this is a moment where we may talk about them again in a different way. This has been the firmament of my practice. This has been so grateful to Shelley. There is so much in his writing and I didn't even read Julian and Madelo, which is equally remarkable. Also, I want to point out as well that's only the first two standards. The poem kind of loses its way from there. This is what I mean where I love Shelley for trying. Like he is, I think his project is he completely understands his moment. He has nowhere, I've had no idea where to go from it. And it's such a powerful cautionary tale that he does such a noble, I think, thing to relate to people by failing in this way that the openings of Shelley poems are almost always remarkable and they get worse as they go on. My artistic act there was just saying, I'm going to read the first two standards, not I'm going to read the poem. I think everything he needs to say is in those two standards. Shelley, he knew it himself. He once said, I go on until I am stopped and I am never stopped. She's a beautiful and tragic thing to say, but it's like someone just needed, all Shelley needed was someone just to tell him to stop. He'd done enough. But that one line, that one line, if I can just bring it back again, the sweep of the ethereal waterfall whose veil robes some unscoltured image. I've never read a better description of the world we must live in, of where phenomenology, the miracle of the image must live above a surface of something that is the invisible surface of the real beneath the waterfall, like the world of code, the kind of like the stack, the service face, the protocol world, the text. You know, Shelley's describing poetry there. The water for whose veil robes someone's sculpture image. That image, the unscultured image is the text. This incredible pure object that exists outside of our realm, and that we only see the image. We only kind of, we see this sweep above it. But, and that's where, like, again, like, kind of this, this Shelley was able to illuminate these moments where these two worlds are bridged by technologies, by, by, by, by these conventions, by mediums, and that we react to them. And that, that you can kind of start to see the genesis of my whole practice there. And it's really beautiful that you pulled out that moment map, because you know, unfortunately, because I, I did share with Matt the new juice. It's a cycle, but I am intending, I think, to try and share it publicly again in the next few weeks. But, how that poem ends, and, and what word it ends on. And, you described exactly the terminal point. That, that poem is also, I think, identifying. It's, it's, it's a, it's a kind of made up word. It's Selbes für Selbes Le Hung, which is a kind of. a perversion of a German word that was used in the Hyromantic era about artists like Caspé David Friedrich and contemporaries of Shelley, Selbes für Geiss Le Hung, which is the Self-Seeing of the Spirit. This is meant to be the high ideal of Romantic art, the moment where you glimpse the sublime, and the terrifying sublime, which we're so familiar with on the internet, is the shattering moment where the sublime falls away and the Self sees the Self. This thing that Shelley describes where he's seeing the mountain, the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, and suddenly he's watching himself look at his own Twitter feed. He's watching himself sitting in front of the infinite, and it's this terrifying juncture that he arrives at, and that poetry kind of takes him to, from which he doesn't really have an adequate answer or resolution. I felt like in my practice, if I could try and find ways to at least share that moment, articulate it better for others, who were also finding themselves at that point, that maybe what strategies or reactions that we built as a community, as a generation, as you know, the current wonder is in that desert to take us on from that point, rather than saying, "I have solved it myself." At least my poem stops there, that's maybe what Shelley taught me. But stop at that point. That was the arresting aspect of it. I hope this doesn't sound cheap or something, but at that point it kind of felt to me listening to you talk and following the text. You know, sometimes you can kind of catch yourself in a day's, "I'll have this, like you can catch yourself in the days like looking in a window or something," or, and then at some point, the subject that you're looking at that isn't very real, like we'll look back at you. And you get like a little jump. That's what I had at that moment, actually. And I don't know if that, if that cancels, let me try and read the words, as helps. Oh, you have a copy over here. Yeah, of course I do. Oh, I didn't get that. I'll share it with you. Some things are kept private between David and me. And the other thing, it's funny, when you finished, I kind of was compelled. My initial plan was to say, "Okay, well, like what does Shelley have to say about NFTs?" And now I'm like, "I don't want to talk about NFTs." No, genuinely, actually, because I feel like the poem was very beautiful, and I feel like it was, yeah, I don't know. I mean, we care about this. No, it's okay. I mean, I still want to keep an eye on it. Actually, it was really cool. I think he can speak to it, actually. Well, I think that that's, again, part of why this is a terrifying moment, but it's also a moment where I think there is an urgency and an impetus that we must act in that. There is knowledge, there is wisdom, there is already existing in the past, in mediums that are totally unfashionable and that have no stonk value, no capital excitement attributed to them, remarkable, powerful things that exist that could be shared amongst ourselves, which could be enormously meaningful right now. I mean, my journey into this was in a combination of things that, you know, like we're already there in the Bible, which is pretty much one of the oldest circulating texts that currently exists. And in Shelley's poetry, which, okay, it's only 200 years old, but that is phenomenally old. For something that is, I think, some of the most advanced writing about the internet, about the experience of living in a world of code that has yet been written. And there is more of it, that's obviously, that's just one example, but I really, part of it is, I try to make some of my own work, but I'm way more comfortable with the idea that if it means that people start to discuss and talk about Shelley or to analyze some of these texts and use them to create shared meaning, that's very beautiful. And the fact that it resonated with you means a lot, it really does. I've really, it's one of the great regrets of my life and my practice. I've been desperate to find ways to try and find a way to have this conversation with other people, because it's never been something that I've found an easy way to do. I know it's really alienating. I know that even the language, even when I try and recite it there, and that's what that word, it's, you know, again, it's one of those words. It sounds verbose, it sounds academic, prosody, but it's so important, the way you say something, to help convey its meaning, something which maybe didn't sound modern, if you hear a modern reader read it, and that they can convey, that they understand it, that it will make it suddenly, immediately, much more, that you don't hear Shelley's voice, you heard my voice. And that's 100% like one-to-one analogy with what I do with type, and why my practice tries to work that way, why I do these historical and aquanisms, like wood, anachonic Renaissance, where black, letter, and modern stuff may appear side by side. Yeah, I get it, for some people they're just like, oh, that's a cool visual schema, I'll make a club flyer, and that's fine, but that's not what I'm doing it, and that's not what I was trying to do with the work, and it's like, I just had this thing, and that's kind of what I built void as a platform, but like this kind of means of expressing. It was like, I hope that in time, the consistency of these gestures maybe does add up to something, I hope that there is a way to revisit them. I'm terrified, but feel urgent, that I must act right now, and that's why I listed something on Zora, and like kind of like enter the NFT space, and that like, if this is a moment where extraordinary value is going to be confirmed some of these objects, I'm going to try and interfere in some way, to at least to be present, to maybe just try and do what I can to direct attention towards. Objects, dialogues, things which may be useful, meaningful in this moment, rather than the outrageous, like funeral pyre of physical prime capital that is people who are totally digital prime, believing that it's great, like with conquered art, we've turned it all into baseball cards, it's just capital now, and that is absolutely one possible future that we may find ourselves in almost immediately. If we don't take a primacy's perspective and force the uncanny value of some of these real side objects into digital world, using these strange breach strategies, using these strange tools for expression that sit between both states, like I think primary, like physical primary people in institutions of finding that like without those breach strategies as jack shit they can do. They can't just sell an NFT of the coons and suddenly it's like, or a Damien Hurst, and none of these crypto buyers give the slightest shit, and they're all losing their wigs over it, but it's like, no, I think you must try and I think that's why a primacy's perspective, one that recognizes the ways in which these two systems will privilege value differently and tries to build strategies between them is maybe kind of valuable right now. But anyway, maybe that's an opportunity for you to come back to some of the questions that conclude that you might be wanting to ask about this moment now. Yeah, I mean, I think it's. We haven't even mentioned my stroke talk, it's quite funny, it's probably a good point. The stroke talk was really useful, it was kind of a guide, but I feel like a lot of information that I would have wanted to come out. Came out anyway. Came out anyway, you know, I think that. And you're right, I mean, I think that my takeaway, at least from what you're describing with Shirley, I was Shirley. I was like, who's Shirley? Without Shirley, with Shirley, excuse me. It was again, the sense of primacy or a sense of like, immediateness and kind of urgency, right? And on this kind of NFT-ish universe or the way I was trying to describe it, some people online, it's kind of like a topic or an iceberg cresting. And a bunch of people are seeing one particular application of that, of this huge kind of behemoth. And my opinion, and I think this is very much one that you share, is that you know, you can't really. It's important at this particular point in time to not confuse these kind of often very crude kind of garish experiments in some cases, with the potential of the media and the medium itself. And I'm absolutely in the camp that you know, finding ways not only to present beauty in this new internet. And let me be clear, like I'm fairly resolute. This is the new internet. This isn't like some kind of speculative thing. This is, it's happening, right? And just as this topic is only just cresting into some public imagination, for me, it's absolutely not. I believe it will be a couple of years before people see, the tale of the Lochess monster, the part where this is absolutely the new internet will crest for people in a year or two. And so the sense of urgency around this topic is absolutely warranted. And the good news, I think, is that both, the challenge for everybody really is figuring out a way both to present this work so as to give it the weight that work warrants in this new environment. And also to think about different methods of support, to support work that takes a great deal of consideration, work that takes a lot of time to put together, work that isn't, for example, trading like the stock exchange for attention. I'm maybe more forgiving of it the most, because my skin's very thick, years deep into crypto world. But I think that it's a little bit of a hangover in some ways, the stuff that people are seeing right now. I word of caution, like a word of caution, like an economy doesn't require meaning to function. And the stuff that people are seeing right now, don't assume there's going to be a next market. If you try to enter with a Bitcoin competitor now, or launch a coin offering in 2021, they're good luck. And if it is taken as red by the people who are buying these assets, that they are not art, they are commodities, they are financial derivatives, which are to be traded, they don't need new ones. Once they've reached a kind of market exchange saturation point, the NFTs that were minted in the first six months, including a whole bunch of nonsense junk, like BaseballCod crap, will just be traded for the next eight years, or 10 years, or whatever. They don't, people buying NFTs on Nifty Gateway, are certainly not seeing these as ciphers of cultural meaning. I think that was hot storage value, they're seeing them as commodities. Well, someone's already, I don't know if you saw this about people. Somebody already created basically a fractionalized ownership of the people that they acquired, and is now selling tokens to speculate on the people that they acquired. Outside of people's profile, apparently he's not super happy about it. But yeah, exactly on your head. I can't express how little interest/respect I have for that approach to this, but I know that it will be the approach to this space. And that is why I'm like, actually we should, if we care about some of these, again, physical prime arbiters of meaning, which certainly mean a lot to me, and there is no given that they will mean anything to a generation that is growing up in a digital prime world. We're doing triage right now. We are running into the ground floor of the building after it has collapsed, and we're going to be pulling out survivors. We have to find ways to kind of like get them out and get them through. What's happening right now? I really do feel like it's unfortunately like a very, I'm glad, obviously, that a lot of 20th century nightmare-ish hyper-craftingism, like kind of bad art, late contemporary art. In fact, like the last 10 years, I had to get over my fury a contemporary art. I think in 2012, part of what made it very hard for me to offer this stuff was that I was offering it in an art world that I was very angry at. That was being so recklessly irresponsible with it just saw, everything was geared towards, obviously, inflating the commercial value of work, capital gain, brand value of artists, but that they were so disinterested in these ideas. These ideas, which literally were like the death of, like the stakes were death of their entire medium, not to mention like the value meaning of their audience, their viewers, but of course, they long since passed the point of giving a shit about the existence of a viewer, the existence of an audience, because all they needed was the existence of a buyer. And that is where I moved into the world of graphic design, because it was like, that is, I forced myself to make work that had an audience, because I could have made a living from art, selling work that no one ever saw, because all you have to do is find the right ways to grease the palm of a collector and shmuz and create capital and get a magazine editorial about yourself and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, again, very similar, I can under them, it's totally true. It's a yeah. I think there's a lot of people in our spaces in music, in design, et cetera, who have passed from the like the last stage of the dying contemporary art world and chose to leave and became something else, and those who stayed with that form, who will now be unbelievably salty and very, very disappointed with what comes next, because they're going to realize that like to complete that game, and not only that, but the new market, the liquidity in this market is utterly uninterested in the remote and arrogant signifiers with which they were composing their work. I do think that that's one of the journeys I had to overcome in my own life in this painful time, was that I think I was a really arrogant person. I think I was, you know, like kind of, I would say even a narcissist, I wanted to be an artist, to validate my position, my ego, and I think I had to go through the very painful and difficult and lonely process of having to dismantle that ego and make work for other people and make work for an audience, and I couldn't be more grateful for that journey, I think it's one of the greatest gifts that life has given me, forcing me to kind of like become a graphic designer, work with other people's creative ideas and still try and find a way to make meaningful for an audience, so I could really learn what that position of responsibility was. And here's the craziest conclusion I can possibly give to our talk, the craziest one I never, ever imagined coming, but has come to me in the course of saying that, which is, part of what led me to the point of writing poems was understanding that like kind of my background, my Jewish background, like kind of gave me this accidental grounding in the Old Testament as a text, which gave me this set of ideas, which had already been placed in my purview that had meaning, and that another bizarre accident, which only became more meaningful to me later in life, is that I'm Jewish, but everyone who's Jewish, it's also like kind of because of the insane, like kind of blockchain-like sequence of it being genetically inherited, also have, if you're Jewish, you have a tribal identity, which goes back to the 12 tribes that were the ones who originally like kind of walked the desert and built the temple. It's in your name, and I'm a lavy, that's my tribe, and the role of the lavy is there's two, there's two tribes that have special responsibilities. There's the Kohanim or the High Priest, and if you see someone with Kohan as their last name, they're probably Kohan, but you don't necessarily have to have the, the kind of surname Kohan to be a Kohan, and they lead the services of the priestly class, they're like the elite class. It confers special responsibilities to them on festivals and stuff. They're the first to read from the Torah when the Torah is read, etc. That's an inherited privilege within Judaism. The lavy and inherit responsibilities, the lavy's job is to clean the temple. We have to clean up after people, the celebration, and we have to take care of the temple. And I think that it's quite remarkable to me that like the identity I ended up coming to embrace was that of something like custodian, and also someone who is acknowledges that they have a secondary role to a class that may outrank them, but that actually, I believe there's enormous value in that role, and I've come to really embrace it as an artistic identity, as a mode of practice and practice, where it's like, I do think the imperative in these moments is to carry the temple, to carry these protocols across this boundary through this desert, so that wherever we may end up, they may continue to have meaning and relevance in our lives. I'm curious what you think about the reception of your NFT that you released. I mean, it's a bit terrifying in one respect, and that to enter into a place where suddenly such phenomenal value can be described to a work is, it feels really uneasy because it's such a huge amount of money, kind of life-changing, that of currency, but in the digital prime, it's just a unit of eth, you know what I mean, like they're not even thinking about, it's real and fear, but I'm really heartened, moved, I have to say like kind of, I, the fact that it did create an impact, it did create an audience, that people have latched onto the flower as a symbol of something that they've mean, did, that they've kind of tried to pass it in some senses, give me an enormous amount of hope. I wanted a position of responsibility, now I felt I had to take one, that visibility, if I hadn't got that, if it had just bombed, I think it would be even more alienating right now, not because of the money, I don't care about the money, it's the fact that like, I mean, obviously, that's the horrible thing to say, I'm not dismissive of the money, it's remarkable, and I'm grateful to him, but that I'm not doing this as a form of personal enrichment. I know that to have some sort of agency in this space, I will have to create work that I think is seen as desirable by the audience, or the idea that will not be proven to have some kind of salient value. I'm trying, I hope, to make work as well, because it's just from a personal moral perspective. I just know this as, you know, like kind of from my life experience. I am deeply, deeply, deeply unhappy. It just makes me very depressed if I feel I've ripped anyone off. I've taken money for something that was sold, and it wasn't worth it. And it's very hard living in this world right now, which is so optimized for grifting and so optimized for, like, you can easily win if you take the opposite of that approach if you try and find a way to engineer like the highest price itself or the highest value. But I think that it's a complex thing because I think like the, I think I want to try and accrue some sort of visibility and responsibility and also put work in this moment, which can further that conversation. There's other things I want to publish. Obviously, I've now alluded to the poems and some of these texts. And there's other objects that are kind of components of this primacist view that I think I want them to be there at origin now. I want them to be present in the conversation at the beginning. So I think I should put them out there holding onto them, you know, like I held onto the poems essentially. I did distribute them in 2012 to a few friends and obviously I'll share them with Matt prior to this call. But I do think that now it just grabs a state of affairs in the same way that that Shelley poem describes a state of affairs where I don't sound like a lunatic reading it anymore. I think people identify absolutely with, with exactly where the place it puts the reader because it's the place that they've been living their lives day to day now for quite some time and that we don't have any tools to really talk about that in art. I mean, that was one of my frustrations and disappointments with that where, you know, like kind of quote unquote, it's not a problem with net art, but where the contemporary art scene was at the point where I was involved in it like 10 years ago, and it felt hopelessly indifferent to trying to create a sense of shared observation of this moment. And there were people writing poetry and it was actually kind of an important moment at the time for new poetry and people like Steve Roggenbach were kind of coming to prominence in that movement. And all they wrote about was themselves. It was like a live journal entry where there was nothing of that Shelley in scope where they couldn't see the mountain. Like they were, it was just about their feelings and their moment and it's like, I hate to tell you this guys, but what you're doing right now is only interesting because just within three years our entire life will be this. All you will see are poems about people's selves. It will be their Instagram feed, it will be their Twitter. That is what the entire like universe that people live in will be. What you're writing now has almost negative value in that you're fetishizing something which is going to already be abundant. You don't need to do this. Like what's desperately required is some sort of tool to help people make sense of the perspective or the context in which those things are emerging in as we all politically rounded on. And we started to talk about the stack or the nature of the feed or the nature of these organizations, why they need to be decentralized. But this was always in such macro political language. There was never a way to bring it back to a realm of experience and meaning. So it was almost impossible to reify it. And art became so hopelessly critical, hopelessly like kind of just, you know, almost operating on the level of the institutions it critiqued in that it was still attempting a macro perspective. And I just found it really sad that actually Shelley 200 years ago had made four A's into and I know that there are many, many others. And I have very, very surface level knowledge of poetry. And I want that to be more conversations around the stuff. I would love to see more writers and more brilliant voices have also done the same. But I found the same way about a lot of the kind of like selfie art that was emerging at that time. Like people taking photographs of themselves in a way that kind of was happening on Instagram anyways. It was just because of the person who was taking the photograph and the context and which it was shown that was given this value. It's found so. I don't want to, I don't want to like kind of, I'm not going to name names and I don't want to critique individual work specifically. But you know, NetArt, it's quite an ironic term because you know, it's really a contraction actually of the artist saw it as being internet art, but it's like network art. It's art that actually, all they were, they were like prescient trend forecasters of network value, like kind of minting early essentially. It was the opposite of critical work. You know, again, I don't want to name names. There was an artist who was doing like kind of staged that kind of mass performances on Facebook, of course with unpaid performers appropriating their emotional labor. And it's like, aha, you've success, it's true. You've successfully predicted the mass economic opportunity of the next 10 years. Like you are identifying the horrendously exploitative mode of capital and you're getting an early and making a little bit of social capture for yourself doing it. But this is, it's like, again, I think because it's exactly the same way that these are basically like kind of early stage digital primes. But basically like, I'm going in on the value of this one space, even if it fucks the real world, even if it makes your life harder in physical space, like kind of, they, they correctly identified an emergent market for capital. And I think that if we are to survive the next few generations, it's like a, as a, you know, as a global race, as an ecology, as a biosphere, we need to stop giving any respect whatsoever for someone for merely identifying a capital opportunity. It's like, that's, that's, that is literally like without some sort of framework for a wider framework for how one builds value and meaning over time shares that amongst communities and future generations. It's, I mean, these, it's, it's, how long are we going to encourage like kind of the first adopters of everything to be the predators? My relationships, that stuff was always that if you are following or you're kind of in some ways living in, like living with your feet between these two worlds, you are really presented with the fork in the road, right? Like, your one fork in the road is saying, okay, within these kind of legacy systems of culture, there's a great advantage to anticipating that at some point in time, you know, the proliferation of like selfies on Instagram or whatever will be acknowledged by this art world and media world that is really, really slow to catch up. Let's be, let's be frank with, with the digital realm, right? I think it's dead. I mean, I mean, I made that observation last year, but I think it's gone. I think. Yeah. But there's still, but there's still status to be conveyed. And when you're talking about like selling a painting to somebody, you're also talking about, you know, kind of trying to embody some of the futurity of a world that they're completely aloof to, right? Like with like a 60 year old wealthy person in New York buying photographs or something like that is very, very removed from, from this politic, right? So, so when you're standing there and you're kind of like, okay, well, this is going to happen. There's two choices, right? The one choice is to attempt to time things like time a gesture and capitalize on that moment and kind of be the canonical example. And then the other more difficult thing is to say, okay, well, this is going to happen. So assuming that this is going to happen, what is it? Create gesture to put forward? Hopefully, if anyone's paying attention to diverse from the inevitable, right? And that second job is, is, is very, very difficult. It's particularly difficult because it's also very cryptic because you're talking about anticipating something that people don't know is going to happen yet. But it's the work. And then and the and the and the great long term investment that you put into that requires more imagination. Absolutely. Shelley offers a really, I think, a really amazing help for just like, which it's true, like kind of talking about things that haven't happened yet is really difficult because you can't talk about the thing because it hasn't happened yet. You can talk about your concern about the thing because the concern is happening right now. And that might be a bridge for you to place into a realm of shared concern where the viewer identifies with you, images of the thing itself. And so I didn't mean to interrupt just to say like again, like, that's part of where, you know, I felt comfort or resolved in my practice over the last 10 years of how I might continue to do work and yet feel like I was able to continue to explore these things which felt for me like the absolutely dominant context of anything I made is first and foremost, to stop trying to talk about the world to come because I knew that every time I did that, I sounded like a ranting prophet or a lunatic and start like just both trying to embed concern, but also an identification of existing value and and to try and find some ways to build that value over time and preserve it in the work itself, safeguarding against that future. Well, I think honestly you do beautifully. I've very much enjoyed following your work. I very much enjoyed being your friend, David. Oh, that's some beautiful thing to say. No, it's true. I also love this. I feel like I know I know you so much better for this emphasis in poetry. I'm not joking. I actually, you know, Holly knows me better than anyone on earth. In a in a in a private scenario, I will sometimes laugh at poetry because I never I never got it, you know. And fact, I think you told me the other day that you hate poetry. No. No. I totally empathize with you. I, like, nothing frustrates me more than the current custodians of poetry, what they think poetry is. - Yeah, yeah. - What they, what they arrogantly and, you know, with snobbery withhold from readers by making this arbiter of like, you know, I didn't want to interject when you were talking earlier but you talked about making beauty and I just wanted to say like, I'd never used that word in my work. I always, I always try and think about making meaning and I always try and emphasize when I talk about narrative that meaning is not something that's objective. It's accumulated through experience and that's also where visibility is so important and that's also why formats that recur. The things you do every day, the UX design of an app that will frame your entire life has more meaning and like kind of, incursive meaning value to a viewer than like it has a jump start on almost all art. (laughing) And, you know, that's why I think that poetry, something that even, okay, the miracle, this beautiful thing, like, here we get to talk about it, it's so refreshing to talk about these things, it's so beautiful, it's so unclaimed, it's so raw. If you're interested in crypto and it's like, you've come to like kind of your life as about like, finding the miracle of a space that has enormous, untapped or unrecognized value, look at poetry. Like the idea that what it means to memorize a line from a poem and that you can carry that with you as invisible software that you can deploy at any moment to help you understand or articulate meaning and why you might read poetry, poetry, which has been engineered to create the line or to create the, the, the, like, dematerialized unit of meaning that you can carry with you. And that's why like again, the standards of this poem, like being so short as to be high coups but also ideally memorable as individual units of meaning for a user that you, you know, is 20 of them and like little, little bag of gems that you can kind of, you can maybe carry around with you in your life that like maybe one might, might occur to you, you recognize it's something you've seen and it's just like what we're all losing out on as a, as a community as a generation right now for having none of that in our lives where these is, and look to conclude like kind of, because a lot of people may be listening to this podcast from a perspective being, you know, investors or people interested in the crypto space or NFT space when I talk about it like that, the ridiculous value of an outstanding line of poetry or a two line phrase or a simple epigram that an entire generation can remember. I'm sorry, but that's, that's just like, that puts any bullshit spinning Instagram eight second looping video in a square in the dust. And if you're investing now, find whatever, if you know, kind of like, you're right, the market can just, the market can gas itself. So they can just create fake value in many, many ways from the world, but if you're interested in what comes next and if you're interested in investing in things that preserve value, I think that that's, you may be able to get a block on a chain of something that will be remembered by generations and, and used by generations, which you can't really even say about images themselves. And I say that as an image maker. It's extraordinary, it's totally untapped, it's totally unrealized. And I think that once that door opens and maybe it requires different people to talk about poetry and definitely maybe even different voices to mine, I still think I sound like, you know, like the context is too close. I'm a, you know, an Ivy League educated, posh English kid, there's no like, there's no two ways around it like, it's not enough in terms of making the voice recognizable, but I think I still like, I just wanna say like, Matt, like to hear that you say that you're alienated from poetry. I was completely alienated from poetry and myself, I still am. And yeah, I was able to find a home in some of the works of some of these poets. Shelley isn't alienating me. Shelley didn't alienate me either. There's remarkable writers out there. His custodians, I can't talk to any scholar of Shelley about Shelley. And they think that they're completely, it's like trying to be able, it's about communism, like, it's about romanticism, like, it's not about the internet, et cetera. It doesn't matter though. They are, how can I put this? They're physical primes. And that world, we are in the twilight of that world. That horizon on void, on my tumblr, that's based on Memelings Last Judgment. That's meant to be the last sunset. And clinging to that moment of the last light for as long as we can, forever. Like, that's what frames my work. - What? - But, their monopoly of meaning is ending. What comes next is something that can be built. I'm very interested in being part of the generation that builds that. - We recently had Hugh Limmy on to discuss his book, Unknown Language, which was a collaboration with the dead Hildegard Funbyan. And there's a kind of, it's not really an intro, but it's kind of, I guess it's an introductory story written by Banu Kapil. I don't know if that's how you say her name, but it's a poem essentially. And I just, I hadn't really encountered poetry very much. And that just the feeling that that, that her language evoked was just so like crystalline and sparkly in a way that I usually only have that reaction to music. So yeah, there's a kind of recurring poetry theme. - I also love these things too. I love being like, we were actually talking to our good friend Roman earlier, who recognized your type from Google Images. And we were talking about musicals, because musicals is also something, another example where I have been a musical skeptic, my entire life. And then recently I watched about a year ago, our dear neighbor was like, you guys used to watch all that jazz. - Yeah, all that, no. - And if you've ever seen all that jazz, it's remarkable. - And that was like, I love musicals. - The Bob Foss. And from then on, I was like, oh yeah, that actually, the great shame is that I've never been exposed to great poetry or in that particular time, a great musical. And of course, there's something more to it. And of course, I'm an idiot. That's, no, no, that comes back to Holly's point earlier, like kind of asking about music, and I kind of answered with lyrics. But like one of the original functions of music, like kind of like we go back to like, kind of literally around the campfire is, it allows individuals to participate in a ritual in unison. And it also allows for the memorization of a myth, of an oral myth or a recitation of a myth or a line, where the cadence helps you, it's a mnemonic aid, and you have the cashatism, which is something which is repeated. And so the, again, it comes back to like kind of this idea of poetry or the line or the information or myth, and the music is also deeply wedded to this medium, where it's like a great lyric. For example, the song helps fix the lyric in the mind of the reader. And that this becomes another means of distributing the line, kind of like the purest unit of code. I'm really interested. Hollywood, would you be willing to read the poem from Hugh's book? Actually, by the way, I just want to say, remarkable, incredible writer, and a really important voice, I think, in our generation. Certainly someone who's had a very deep impact on me, and was a very good and caring guide during this period of my life, where I was really struggling, and was probably a very, very difficult person to help guide. And him and Mikey and a few other people, you know, from around Lee Musulio, and people like Mark Fisher, who was daily missed, I think by everyone, you know, they were, they were incredibly patient and helpful. I'm so happy that Hugh's writing is, is finding an audience. And I wanted to ask, Holly, is it possible to, could we hear the poem? Like it would take me, you know, like 30 minutes to read the poem. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna read anything. That sounds like, sounds like a classical, like an epic, a lyric epic. Like, right, but it's not, it's not like, lyrical in that way. And maybe I just don't know enough about poetry. Maybe this is just a thing, but I feel like she is kind of, yeah, experimenting with the form in an interesting way. It's often, it's often kind of, there's one of the first non-religious stories, I think, that we have access to, that was written is the epic of Gilgamesh, which is also kind of, there's a story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, which is, again, like kind of the stings, it's this remarkably affecting, very beautiful work, that I think is something ludicrous, like almost 4,000 years old or something, I'm just, his story is shaking their heads and touching my miscoding of the actual age of the Akkadian period, so I'm sorry. I cannot remember the actual age of it, please forgive me. But, you know, this, certainly this form of, like kind of the link between orality and myth and meaning and lyric and then to a wider extent, song. These are, just to come back again to that point, about misidentifying art as like, looking at the tiny fraction of art made in the last 30 years, which is just horrendously greedy, total dog shit crap that's designed to just try and, you know, pass very, very blatant ciphers of megal wealth and capital, just to give like a, oh, sorry, and we're a long way into this podcast already, but like, just a really quick, like aside, like kind of very, very simple calculation. Some of the things that define contemporary art, one of them is its scale, like, a lot of gestures like Coons of Blowing a Toy Up to a very large scale. Why is scale useful? Scale requires real estate and bespoke surroundings order to install who has that billion as very large paintings to have a very large painting. One requires a very large wall. Again, real estate is a market value. - Also cost a lot to send that stuff back. - Yeah, it's shipping, like high carbon cost, et cetera, like kind of all these things, but it's like a really simple calculation where it's like, if you're physical prime and you believe physical capital is basically Fiat plus real estate, you could run that calculation if you're like an AI bot and you'd end up with what objects do I make that will be a square-type valuations in the system. It's like, they're made out of like precious materials. They're physically very large. They require you to have access to like a high asset class in order to display or to own them. And it's like the new end up with that dog shit crap. And it's, you can do the same thing. That's why I think like kind of what's really interesting to me is like the bad art of Nifty Gateway, the bad art of, I think it's just as dog shit, it's contemporary art. It's just as like kind of vinyl and crap is running exactly the same calculation for a physical prime. And to say, all right, you have a dematerialized space that with no physical arbiters of value, nothing about it should link back to the physical world. Nothing about, you know, like kind of, it should, so ideally should be digital native, it should be looping, you know, like here, we didn't talk about Strayalpper, but all the principles of ultra reality. It's basically like a toolkit for like, what visual signifiers do you need to put in your NFT to make a physical prime feel like it's from this new reality, this new world. It's like you could read those five rules of like, shouldn't have a horizon, it should be constantly looping, no cuts, you know, like kind of, camera into file, so like kind of high pixel density, high render quality, like super processor intensive, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. And it's like, bake that into a recipe and you get just as dog shit art as coons in her is from making for their age. Nothing has changed, nothing actually really radical, what's happened, what's just stepped across the paradigm into an equally crap, hyper contemporary scene. What is necessary now is I think like kind of, that's where, again, like I've used this term a few times through a talk about this prime, assist worldview, where you are attempting to work in a space between those two mediums and to essentially like kind of build carriers of meaning around things of value that can survive in both spaces is rather than engineering capital from the principles of one is I think an interesting strategy at least to discuss that has relevance in many mediums and as I already identified in, you know, over the course of this talk, not just image making. That was one of my favorite rants, sorry to call it a rant, that was one of my favorite passages from this entire conversation, specifically contextualizing the kind of comparison that's kind of like value that's associated with certain artistic decisions in both realms. That was super interesting. - Yeah, no, it definitely, it kind of flatters. I mean, we talked at least actually, Holly didn't join on that one, but I had a really long conversation with Dan Keller about we were kind of like trying to have it, it was kind of like an introduction to NFTs or whatever and then like a broader kind of critical discussion about it. And you're absolutely right that this, the kind of metaverse like skew morphing kitsch of these kind of very, of these like super digital objects, they are exactly, it's like, it's like signalling futurity, whereas in actuality my interpretation for this is that, it's kind of like an old idea that the oozes, the oozes are rupture. And of course, that would be the artwork that is attached to the kind of rupture that the Winkle Voss twins want to put forward into the world, that the Winkle Voss twins want to signal, look, like we're not year old, you know. - Of course, patrons have always kind of steered, whatever flatters the patron. That's kind of steered. - It's ideal marketing, 'cause it's kind of like, it's simultaneously kind of like a very amateurish, so it contains all that kind of like, you know, the shock of like, here comes everybody. - Anzia institutional, right? - Very institutional, yeah, like skew morphing can easily understandable, right? 'Cause like many things just kind of look like video games, you know? And then you have like, you know, it is tragic, 'cause then you have the other side of things where it's like, you know, actually, you know, grappling with new ideas, very few of which are present in this space, or let's face it any other. Actually, grappling with new ideas, you run into that Shelley problem, right? Where people don't know, like, people can't identify it as the future, because that new idea hasn't happened yet, you know? So you end up with a lot of very kitsch, kitsch kind of kitsch objects, or kitsch images that signal future, but in actuality to me, look quite reactionary. No, at that point, I think we should close soon, because we've been on for almost three hours, and the editing's gonna be insane. So please, please finish the point. No, no, I think it's fine. I think I've said a number of things in this talk, which would suffice as a conclusion. So I don't think I need to, like, kind of come back to it. Well, you thought you did. That's what you thought, but there is one kind of. You thought you could see the future, David. This? They see this coming. Hello. There's one thread that connects all of our podcasts, and that is one final question that we ask to all of our guests, which is, what does the word "interdependence" mean to you? I think, for me, like I said, if one starts to see the world, not just in this contemporary moment, but across time, both in the past and in the future, as a space in which every individual will recover from that space, narratives, experiences, from which they build meaning. It's in the space in which we choose to redeploy that meaning and share it with one another, so that when we protect it going forward, or build vehicles to activating it, be that in the spaces we expect now, or in the spaces we expect in the future, so that we may protect one another, protect meaning, protect institutions of value and support, one another that, I think, interdependence is at the heart of, I think, the urge to both communicate and to verify to protect something so that it may continue to be seen, whether it's language, whether it's image, whether it's form, whether it's music, or whether it's in code. And the decision to do that in the interests of the viewer, or of the other, that's interdependence. - Nice. - That's really good. - Beautiful. - Well look, David, thank you for joining us. We're gonna get you back on. That's the only problem. You can't, I know that you wait years between public appearances, but now that you've started this, we'll have to call back on you at some point. - Yeah, thank you for being so generous with your time. - It's always lovely to catch up with you guys. I'm sorry that we can't do it more often in this crazy world. It was thanks for giving me the time to explain some of those things, which as you said, I don't share that often. And I'm really grateful for it. It's like I, as I said in my estimation of interdependence, I don't think I can ask for anything more than if I feel like we're able to actually share ideas. I can't say how much that means to me. It really does mean the world. So thank you. - All right, bye. - Yeah, David. - Ciao. - Ciao. - Ciao. - Ciao. (upbeat music) ♪ We're the best ♪ ♪ We're the best ♪ ♪ We're the best ♪