13: Timeline Ch 9—AI Era (2010s) with Tyler Hobbs, Helena Sarin, Rhea Myers & Gene Kogan

[Music] Hello everyone and welcome to this Lerandum discussion about chapter nine of our Generative Art Timeline which covers the decade of the 2010s. I'm your host, Peter Vowman, or Monk Antony, the editor-in-chief at Lerandum. And joining us today are an incredible list of artists who created this art history that we're going to be discussing today. And they are Tyler Hobbs, Helena Saran, Rhea Myers, and Jean Kogan. Also joining us from the Lerandum team are our co-founder, the funny guys, and our collection lead Conrad House. So today we're looking at digital expression in the 2010s. We're taking a detailed look, and this is all part of the project I've been working on at Lerandum creating this Generative Art Timeline for the last about a year and a half. So it's already at about 100,000 words and 1,000 moments. And we are just releasing chapter nine of the timeline which covers the 2010s. So the timeline goes back to 70,000 years ago in chapter one, the pre-modern era. We've had a talk for every chapter except for chapter six. We had two. So this is our 10th talk on chapter nine. It covers broadly speaking to enormous shifts in technology and art. And they are the rise of AI and its capabilities in the decade and also the invention of NFTs. Blockchains started the decade before but they were and they really took off the decade after. But we are going to look at how this decade was instrumental in their development and of course the development of NFTs and the proto-NFTs that led to the tokens that we know of today. And on top of these huge AI developments like convolutional neural networks and GANS and deep dreams and diffusion models there was also broad trends in this decade like social media 2.0 becoming an even bigger deal and also mobile technology 2.0 becoming an even bigger deal. So it's a hugely important decade. So many themes, so many trends we can really get into. So I'm very excited to welcome our guests who you really want to hear from. And the first one is Tyler Hobbs. Tyler is a visual artist who works primarily with algorithms, plotters and paints. He began his generative practice in 2014. So 10 years ago and has been of course active in the space since then. His artwork focuses on computational aesthetics and we did a whole interview on algorithmic aesthetics that we put out last year. How they're shaped by the biases of modern computer hardware and software and how they relate to and interact with the natural world around us. His practice involves programming custom algorithms that are used to generate serial visual imagery. And like I said Tyler got his practice started more than 10 years ago. So really interesting to chat with him about that first part of his career that covered a lot and especially the theoretical foundation of his practice. And our next guest is Helena Saran. She is a visual artist and a software engineer who has worked with cutting edge technologies at places like belt labs and as an independent consultant developing computer vision software using deep learning. While primarily in tech she has also explored applied arts like fashion, food styling and photography. Her artwork remained mostly analog until she discovered gans in the second part of the decade that we're discussing today. And these offered an adventure, a new model of creation of employing her data sets and receiving inspired and surprising unpredictable results. These days she calls herself an engineering artist and her main interest is generative pottery. Our next guest is Rhea Myers who is an artist hacker and writer whose work places technology and culture and mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us. She began investigating blockchain as early as 2011 with a blog post striving to be the first Bitcoin artist. And in 2014 she started making conceptual blockchain art in the vein of Marcel Duchamp and crafting theory as well as narrative. And then our next guest is the incredible gene Cogin. Gene is an artist and programmer and educator exploring autonomous systems, our emergence, collective intelligence, generative art and computer science. He is interested in advancing scientific literacy through open source toolkits for creatives that stress creativity and play. This includes building educational spaces which are as open and inclusive as possible. Gene was one of the most influential figures in the decade in terms of reimagining machine learning for creative expression. Beyond demonstrating the power of the new tools himself through his work he was instrumental in teaching the world about these tools. So what an incredible lineup of people and artists and thinkers to talk to today. Our first set of questions are more for the group. So let's get started. What do you think the name for this decade should be? Like just to start out at a very basic level. The 80s I named that chapter the PC era the 90s I called the net era the 2000s I called the tooling era for processing and open frameworks and a lot of those instrumental tools. But what would best describe this era? Do you think it should be the AI era? Do you think it should be the on chain era? Is there something else? I'd call it the GPU era because sort of the things that people noticed as the decade went on were the things that we use in GPUs whether it's block train for hashing or AI for neural net simulation. So sort of if we fear it in terms of technology and there because that obviously absolutely was the PC era. It's tempting to call the 2010s the cloud era because that's what scaled all the apps that created the society we now have. But in terms of the focus of the art it's very much on what you can misuse GPUs for. Yeah for me a couple of things that really stood out as big changes in that time period are social media and in particular for visual artwork, generative artwork, I'd say Instagram and Reddit were the two biggest changes for me. They were very influential for me in terms of what art I was exposed to. In terms of how I was sharing my art and eventually how I started to make my living from artwork. And I think digital artists very natively adopted these formats and locations. And so I think those had a massive massive effect. So potentially there's an argument that that you could call it sort of a social network decade as well. Maybe concurrent social media it feels like it really just impacted how also for me just how I got exposed to things. So like for machine learning and AI before that it was really you had to be kind of part of a you know an institution. Maybe the institutionalization is also something I would kind of associate with it. So suddenly there was kind of this you know AI Twitter you know that's sprang up in the 2010s and it was possible to kind of be you know not affiliated with any specific you know research institution or grad school and keep up with with what was going on. And you know I would also maybe open source code is a big part of it too that also I mean it's been around for longer than that but but it really grew a lot in the 2010s and so those are the things I think that the find it for me. For me things around MOOCs and online massive learning was really instrumental on how I progressed from like on my own essentially. And genius is a perfect example because he's in a U class on machine learning for artists was like fundamental for for my development so I think it's like really kind of game changer. Does anybody else have any or want to share have any of you met in person before or are you friends or yeah does anybody know each other in this chat? So I will continue with the if I may because the gene actually besides his more click he was instrumental in many cases I mean I gave my public talk at the NYU on his invitation and also then it was like 2018 and I tested like waters with my approach to working with against and this actually became a foundation for the article that Jason Bailey and I wrote in end of that year so yeah I mean Jim is I consider Jim is a front-end like mentor and really kind of influence her. I know from our social media I know parosocial relationships get about rep but it's like it's nepastolary era it's a sort of a network of all kingdom of letters that we live in just electronically and I have met groups of people that I know online for me notably the gray area blockchain show 2018-2019 I met lots of people I'd previously going in on line to the point where I was confused why we were sort of fighting each other like we haven't seen each other for ages and I was like oh we haven't actually met physically before okay that makes sense to us. Yeah maybe more evidence for this decade being the social media era and yeah I think Jean has had that I'm sure similar effect on on countless coders today and over the last 15 or 20 years we might have touched on many of those already but does anybody want to include or mention any lesser known themes from the decade? I mean I don't know that it's non-obvious it's pretty obvious but the rise of mobile devices phones as well obviously this pretty quickly became the most common viewing format for a lot of what we do and so yeah that has a big impact on what kind of work is successful and especially if you're doing something live generated for example you have now particular hardware requirements that you have to be able to work with so yeah there's big big impact from the rise of mobile phones. Yeah I mean from creation of the work to how people procure it and consume it yeah everything has been affected by mobile and also this decade saw mobile phones really go completely mainstream and global and then also things like the iPad 2 and and and its effects the third question is about everybody in this calls I think fascination with randomness and chance so Rhea your early work explored cybernetic principles and you were in some of your early blockchain work like face coin you were I mean literally searching for in randomness you were searching for human elements like faces Helena you've said Gans possess and I quote a certain unpredictability that inspires unblocks and creates something special. Tyler randomness was the topic of the very first essay that you wrote in 2014 and Jean you've long studied and taught and devoted your career essentially to processes like randomness and emergence so how do you think the continued secularization of society has impacted your views on randomness is there a connection between your interest and randomness and secularization in general. In turn to your randomness is obviously one of the touchstones that the other is rules and sort of you know the creates the title of all based or sort of largely random with a few rules to interpret them or sort of interleave them however you want and sort of it looks like a craft or like a failure to really get to grips what one is dealing with when one makes generative answers hey look at this amazing at an all structure all this things I've found and you're not dealing with the question of randomness and sort of paintings don't all have to be about pigment pigment that's what I'm saying I'm saying that you have the question of why randomness at this time in opposition to concepts of order does seem to have more of an impact post financial crisis I mean for me personally I sort of always found the world very random and confusing so sort of using a randomness so the way to tie controlled was kind of therapeutic or at least help me theorize in my experience with the world and sort of people get very upset when we talk about randomness and computers because computers cannot generate actually random numbers they can just fool us with patterns we can't guess unless you plug in a hardware key to get actual quantum noise or something but yeah I mean I don't think the absence of broader religious or economic narratives requires a concept of randomness because randomness still brings in the concept of variety which we also see in cybernetics and we're still in a sort of very singular politically Arab with the sort of less and less variety and the options that we're faced with and sort of randomness where it sort of profoundly embraced can be an escape from the distraction from that yeah thank you I mean I think you very elegantly rephrase the question as why randomness at this time and much better than my wordy one but yeah I think that's an excellent rephrasing yeah from the personal experience I'll start with the quote by Richter chance doesn't better than I can but I have to prepare the conditions to allow randomness to do its work and in my case like to sort of delineate this randomness I used my own data sets so kind of like the divided conquer in the sense so in tandem with randomness that can't brought I used like the limited data sets to kind of work with this randomness to like these conditions for me randomness is really just a necessary ingredient and exploring things systematically so for me it's really like the things that I found most interesting in nature were sort of systematic so by biological systems or geological systems and of course those those those involved randomness because if there was no randomness involved then it would always do exactly the same thing and so it wouldn't be anything very interesting to it so really to to have a something systematic that also has variety and depth to it you have to have that random ingredient so for me in my artwork randomness is sort of the the fuel that powers the exploration of the systems that I develop so yeah it's a really curious relationship with with randomness I've never really thought about it in spiritual terms I don't have that kind of connection to it for me it's just really a necessary part of doing anything systematically I would maybe emphasize the emergence that was always kind of the thing that that drove me so you know a lot of small things which you know in the sense random just means kind of uncoordinated you know doing their own thing but then something emerges from all of those small parts like something bigger that's not explicitly there but is but really seems to be there is always kind of I think like at the heart of alternative systems more so than than randomness itself part of asking that question is I think globally in the US or a lot of developed economies globally you saw secularization really increase over the last 10 or 15 years I'm wondering if that's coincided with this growth and technology how our relationship with tech is changing but Conrad I think did you want yeah I think we kind of hit the halfway point we can maybe start jumping into some direct artist questions and can I hand it over to Jan. Helena your practice was was entirely analog and he discovered against at some point between 2014 and 2018 we believe after which like narrative models and begin your primary medium and when how to first like discover these games and what about them like prompted such a such a transformative artist issues. This is so hip randomness. since I was doing some training of object recognition. And at the time, the papers specifically about like cycle gun paper appeared about synthetic data. And actually, this is what I did like for my consulting gig. And I mean, the results were outstanding. I was so surprised how well I back in 2016, neural networks could generate pretty much plausible data, which was good for kind of augmenting the datasets and also kind of like even surprised the customers. And then because I had like so much digital work of my own, I decided I should try to give it a try like cycle game to do this domain translation. So it's basically a cycle again is style transfer on steroids. So if you're familiar with style transfer, I never did it. I mean, I kind of like was oblivious to the whole machine learning kind of art community. So and that was actually blessing because I kind of achieved something being like an idiot. But I didn't have any post office syndrome or anything because I didn't know people even do such stuff. And then like one of my watercolour methods, she told me she doesn't know anything about like computers or anything, but she felt there is something in it. And then I kind of like decided to help with it. I also told glitter. And this is how the story began. Were your first post those ones that I think are from February or March 2018? Were those your first works? No, I mean, originally all my art was posted on Flickr. And this is like end of 2017 when I kind of like there to post stuff. And then when I kind of like started searching for, like if people doing these things, I discovered this small at the time community. Again, Jean and Claude and Jean actually like retweeted one of my stuff. And at the time I did this kind of like food related things because most of my photography was around stills and food. Like a lot of Instagram today. Maybe we can move to re-antilare about your beginnings in this decade as well. So, Rhea, I know you began investigating blockchain. I've read in a post where you said you wanted to be the first Bitcoin artist, but it wasn't until you moved to Vancouver in 2013. And then working with I think blockchain more closely in 2014 that your interest and the work really took off. So I'm wondering what was what was it about Vancouver that made blockchain and Bitcoin and not seen so appealing. And how was it different than from what I would imagine is quite a different community today with the laser eyes and some different leaders of the community more recently as well. So yeah, I'm curious what was it like 10 years ago? The Vancouver hat and has a curiously large blockchain community. It's sort of, it's a Cascadian city. It sort of has Canadian healthcare, but sort of West Coast, Libertarian leanings to some of its inhabitants politics. And that makes for an interesting mix. And it means that the tech scene and the culture scene here were both very interested in cryptocurrency from very early on. And it's the combination of those two of sort of companies like O'dapper, who I later worked for, who created the RC-721 standard in cryptocurrencies for NFTs and cultural spaces like the control, which were much more community and sort of hacker oriented, sort of mixing with our differentiation between sort of their objectives or their social scenes meant that you had a very fertile ground, both for the ideas being pursued in the technological infrastructure and for them being pursued, not almost, but actually, you'd hope, and within society, and that completely fascinated me because I hadn't seen anything like that since the early way I've been in the mid 1990s. And so that was irresistible for someone who really hadn't copped the early web or early net art to sort of be faced with almost a second chance to sort of observe a technological phenomenon like this, that's it was growing. And the things that people were interested in of rules and ownership and belonging and value had been key to my art since I was at art school. So it was a very, very easy decision to make, to sort of switch my primary focus from bots and 3D printing and other early 2010s tech to the blockchain as something that became, as it does for many people, a rabbit hole that I disappeared down and haven't really emerged from again yet. Yeah, like I mentioned that it kind of gave you a second chance to experience a new form of media art with having this new whole emergence that you can kind of forefront. And maybe we can move on to Tyler now, maybe we can kind of have a question for you on your introduction into the 2010s. You really started to become a generative artist around 2014. And you had a lot of your very early essays around this time kind of talking about how random this is a fundamental part of your practice. You mentioned a lot of things by John Cage and Solowit and a lot of these early essays like what programming brings art and how that kind of highlights the new artistic possibilities within kind of generative art. And maybe can you touch on how these early essays and early concepts became so foundational to your practice and then kind of how you practice evolved within the 2010s going into the 2020s. Absolutely. So just for context, you know, prior to making generative art, I was a traditional artist doing drawing and painting and I had been doing that since I was young. And 2014 is when I really just the first time I started trying to create our work through programming. And I've benefited a little bit like Helena mentioned of not being really aware of the cooling at that time or the style or the existing body of work. And so I was able to kind of come into it in a fresh way with with my own ideas. But what was really fascinating and what kind of prompted me to write those early essays is how big of a shift it is mentally going from creating a drawing or painting to working systematically and through generative art. It really changes everything about how you approach the work sometimes in very frustrating ways and sometimes in very empowering and intriguing ways. And to me, it was, you know, I just, I felt like I had stumbled upon something that just had an immense potential and I hadn't really seen people fully tap what it was capable of. At least to me and I wasn't super up to date on what, for example, Casey Reese had been doing up to then. But to me, it felt like there was so much potential for kind of moving up the level of abstraction and starting to not just make a specific work, but to think about what makes work good in general, what, what, how can you make a body of work in kind of one go or, you know, a series. Obviously, there's some historical precedent for some of those things like John Cage obviously worked with randomness, solowit obviously worked with rules. But neither of them, I could be wrong, but I don't think either of them really zoomed out quite so much to the systems level about what how far could potentially go. And I think computers are part of what makes that possible. You can create so much more complex systems, so much more specific systems. And of course, they take care of all the labor for you. And so I was at the same time, both really fascinated in what does it mean to work generatively? How does that change the artistic practice and the potential goals? And also with the computer as a medium and specifically programming as a medium, I had seen a lot of digital painting, you know, that's super common. Even I wasn't particularly interested in digital painting, but I'd still seen lots of it. But I really hadn't seen people working through programming. I had never made its way to me and there's so many unique and particular and powerful capabilities that come from programming. And I also worked as a programmer, so I was very aware of just how much you can accomplish through programming. And so those are the things that I wanted to do. essays were a bit of a thought of experiment for me of, you know, really what is programming unlocking that somebody who's working with a pen or a paintbrush doesn't have access to. And that's what really compelled me to create a lot of my early work and to write about those ideas. I believe that in the 2000s, that you have been focused all along the century, like on procedural charity parts, while Jean Helena, like they were exploring AI arts, Ria was exploring blockchain technology where these technological developments on your radar at all and did you consider exploring them? Yeah, I did a little bit. I actually did a move where I wrote early neural net implementations like a little convolutional network and things like that. So I was familiar with those technologies, but they never, they didn't interest me quite so much as a potential artistic medium. And in fact, I had played with those well before I started making a generative art maybe by three or four years. To me, I love programming and working through GANS and neural nets and things like that. It removes you from the creation a certain distance that programming to me at least feels like a much more direct relationship with what's being created. Obviously, I'm greatly generalizing here and there's a lot more nuance to it than that, but I really loved working directly with the code and trying to try not to just make fuzzy tools, but to make very specific rules that my artwork would follow. And so programming is what allowed me to do that. That's why I think it was more attractive to me. It's actually interesting, because I'm the other quite opposite to this, because maybe because I was programming for a living. And actually, I got in, I mean, for me, the whole decade was about like generative art. And I started with like a serious book, his first book published in 2010, exactly. And then I learned about generative art. I took a workshop with KC in 2013. And I tried to kind of convince myself that I can be good in that, and I didn't like it at all. And that's why GANS was kind of like a savior, because I got against whatever, like this fussiness that attracted me. So yeah, it's funny. That's amazing. Yeah. Like you kind of we had mentioned, and Tyler you mentioned Moogs, and we talked about one of the potential themes of this decade being open source code. And I wanted to ask Eugene about your book, Machine Learning for Art, this educational resource for artists who want to explore with a lot of the tools that we've been talking about today. I just wonder what inspired you to first create those resources? And how do you see them impacting the future of AI art? I've been really great workshop and teaching culture in generative art. And NYU people, they've sort of creative technology world. There was a lot of workshopping. And so it's just kind of pointing into that at the time. I was coming at it from this. I had a little bit of background. I studied machine learning. So I was kind of coming from this engineering world. And I found that there was more and more interest from people, you know, in creative technologists, generative artists in AI that there wasn't really a whole lot of materials out. There wasn't a lot of materials out of all the in general, but certainly not the kind that were focused on a kind of, you know, an application level, you know, creative explorers, level view of the technology. And so it just kind of naturally felt like something I could do that with people who respond to. It was also a way of kind of, you know, integrating myself into into this scene. I could go and give classes and meet people. It was really just like a big part of my way of actually like making this my life. So because you know, otherwise it was kind of just, you know, in front of the screen for or reading papers or something. And it wasn't really, you know, there were that. And I would also add that there was just a lot of invitations started getting invitations because there was just kind of this desire. So I just kind of responded to that and yeah, it was a big part of what I did for a long time still is. I'm not giving as many workshops as I used to, but still it's been kind of a long time coming to making those. And I think Helena has talked about previously in the chat some of these early workshops. Just wondering if Helena had any follow up for, I guess machine learning for our or any of these kind of other workshops, but there's any other kind of expansive inspirations that came from this at the time. The community. I mean, that was like, I mean, this is what I'm missing these days. And because I mean, I'm not against like people coming like in this avalanche of where I are. But at the time, there was really kind of like we knew each other. We were bad like at the excellent your festival, which is not anymore killed by COVID or whatever. So yeah, I mean, I definitely was like something transformative for me as well. Like I met like so many people there. So big like the field and Mario, Cleengherman. So it kind of like when you know people, you kind of like inspired by them, you make better in the sense. I mean, inspiration, not in terms of copying because like you at least myself, you basically try to do something different. And it's kind of like a bit of like friendly competition. So yeah, I mean, it's something kind of like I'm really nostalgic for. Yeah, that sense of community really kind of I think is a driving force for a lot of these movements being so helpful for really I guess igniting a fire under everybody. I wanted to transition to Rhea. You mentioned it in your start of kind of blockchain explorations that it was an easy aspect to jump into because you're so fascinated with kind of the ownership of art and the multiple aspects of ownership within art, whether that's provenance and other things. And then you've recently said that all the early stuff I did was very intentionally made so you couldn't buy it, you couldn't sell it, you couldn't control it. That was the point of the work. How is your approach to creating art that resist commercialization evolved over time? I guess especially with the even more recent rise of NFTs? From a career perspective, being so committed to our European, hey, that's good-sized capitalism. My work with the early work which people would repeatedly ask me if they can buy and I have to say no, it's physically not possible. But on a level of more integrity, I had to work through that to realise that the core proposition of the world is not the right thing. And then what I did was to realise that the ownership of the blockchain is the ownership and control of digit assets and sort of having realised that and having sort of been kind of blown aside by the emergence of Ethereum, NFTs, post crypto punks, I had to really rethink how do I maintain a critical position to making things to sell. And the way that turned out to be possible was I'd already worked through that with the 3D printing work where I was sort of taking on the role of a post-conceptual artist sort of hiring some artisans to make objects, but sort of actually revealing who these people were and creating them as artists in their own right, which they were, I must make it clear. And sort of playing with the ownership mechanisms of creative commons licenses to sort of find the void making myself the villain was maintaining the role of the sort of name artist in that system. And so, yeah, the way things really came through were with a certificate of inauthenticity, which sort of takes that previously unownable work that I made where I had already worked through being the bad guy and sort of ironised that the anxieties of ownership and provenance that we're emerging in NFT markets at the time into some art that I was perfectly happy. [BLANK_AUDIO] firstly putting my name to, secondly taking money for and then thirdly having sort of people get something useful from as art. But yeah, that the sort of the dirty secret of the art world wherever you are is where the money comes from. And the thing that made a lot of people very uncomfortable about cryptocurrency and blockchain was you could see where the money was coming from. You couldn't sort of pretend that you lived in this carefree world of imagination and information and aesthetics and art unsullied by the current of capital. Now you could see where the money comes from and how much effort goes into securing the products of your imagination. And so you get to buy my hands dirty with that was and continues to be a fantastic useful moral and intellectual access science definitely. Yeah, that's that's very interesting, Rhea. I believe with your release just earlier this week like a 10k drop once again, you're also yeah playing into these questions. Yes, yeah, I mean 10k drop obviously it's a bad joke but it's also and lots of the projects are bad jokes but that's just the the gateway or the lure or the candy shell or the protein shell of your virus. Yeah, it's sort of that whole era of the obsessive owning and promotion and emotional and social and economic investment in in generative on PFPs on the blockchain and trying to give people you know a history painting in very strange form of that era and its ambitions. We think it's a fantastic election but yeah, we're now approaching the end of the hour and maybe one like general question. I will point it first to to you Tyler but please like all of you like jump in, reduce here all of your thoughts, threats in generative art history is that a lot of criticism is focused on the use of computers and the coldness of computers and that's yeah, computer art is kind of like a contradiction in terms because art is human computers are our goals, they're no human like how can they even go together and so a question that we have for you Tyler, like how does technology in your opinion reveal what makes this human? That's a good question. It's definitely one that I think about a lot I don't know that I have the answer to it per se but obviously a lot of what the computer reveals about us is via contrast right it's all the things that all the ways that the computer is different from us it's in fact quite alien what motivates a lot of my work today is exploring the ways in which it is strange and the ways in which it is different from everything that we evolved to to to to expect and to enjoy in the world and it's quite obvious to me that computers aren't going anywhere you know our lives are getting more and more entangled with computers and so I'm kind of interested in this question of you know with that shift to a more digital life like what what really is changing what are we maybe losing or gaining I'm not kind of strangely I'm not like pro or anti computer I just find it really fascinating just really ripe for artistic exploration and computers do everything you know they do everything perfectly exactly the way that you you ask them to they never they never deviate from that at all you ask for a straight line and you get a perfectly straight line and in fact you have to work to get the opposite of that you want anything that has any complexity or richness to it you have to really really work for it whereas you know we're used to in the natural world you try and draw a straight line by hand and it's never going to be straight it's always going to be flawed you have to work really really hard to try to make it perfect so it's quite it's quite the opposite end of the spectrum and that means there's a lot of really interesting phenomena to to investigate I think there and that's a big focus of my artwork. I kind of a lot of things I could say that there's something about what computers can do that that you know the class needs me but I'll just take one angle which is that you know if there's a lot of dialogue debate about what you know AI has to say about this you know and so a lot of it is like to me the if you if you view AI as a tool you know something that can that can be used to to just you know amplify an artist and existing artist work you know can turn I just saw a friend who was an illustrator and he was able to turn his illustrations into basically a style of animation you know you can turn every illustrator into an animator and it's not something that you know that just takes a few seconds like it's not something that you you can work just this hard and just as long at these you know because people often say oh now it's easy to make pictures and that's true it's easy to make pictures but but you can work really long and hard to get better results and and you can just do more you're it sort of adds this extra sort of dimension or multiplication of your work and so in that sense like maybe you know seeing computers as just kind of supporting and amplifying artists is is one way of maybe resolving that tension I would I would go further and talk about you know certain things that computers can do that's that are fascinating in and of themselves but but maybe that's kind of uh it's just a bigger can of worms so I'm gonna leave it there I mean the 30 secretive contemporary artist everyone uses computers um sort of I've seen painters sort of working out compositions in Photoshop and even if you never touch a computer in the studio you're on social media and if you're not on social media you're emailing your your uh gallery and if you're not emailing your gallery then you've probably got to spreadsheet somewhere with all your work and the moment I remember fairly the moment that there's this phase transition from you can't make computer you can't make art with computers so there's nothing interesting about computer art to everyone makes art using computers so there's nothing interesting about computer art in the mid 2000s and that was a really really uh I'm going to say interesting but I mean in the bad sense moment to live through but computers are for all their obsessive raw following and yeah if you if you telecomputer to do something it will happily boil the oceans or turn the world into paper clips in order to do what you think you've told it to do for their raw following they do acture and propagate that the warmth and the noise of signs of human activity I learned this again way back in the early 90s when I first scanning photographs and getting all the photographic grain and scanner noise on the screen and thinking I'm going to keep this I'm not going to try and hide this and sort of morphing images together and getting this wonderful unexpected literal sort of reddish warmth to the image that that didn't fight with the patterns of pixels but brought something extra to it I think what we imagined to be the sort of cold hard rule based world of the computer is as much a product of the human imagination as anything else and blockchain has been very useful for the sort of vanguard and the absolute of that view of the obsession of the incorruptible perfect rules versus messy human decision making seeing that you know that hit reality and the rules haven't won so yeah that's been a very interesting outcome of the blockchain era in terms of how we see a relationship to computing machinery. Interesting to think about how yeah a lot of the coldness of computers came from our human input but Helena was there anything that you wanted to? No for me is just again I mean I never considered computers being cold or whatever it was like cold it's a butt of my like again job and actually by my birthpeaf right now that we have like nothing bad about like a lot of art but it kind of like does the eye for me personally so I basically kind of like pretty much stop doing like digital art and move to generatives pottery so this is my contribution to future artifacts to kind of like giving, but I'm produced it essentially through designs with guns to back to humans. Yeah, thank you. And I think even just that last comment about guns back to humans. I mean, it highlights why we do these talks and what Tyler was saying about the power of thinking about contrast. I mean, I think it's helpful to look back, even if it's looking back just a few years. I think you can already see that this decade did have a personality in it, and it had an increasing number of developments that have affected and seemingly will continue to affect our lives. And you were all in the middle of it and in the middle of it, especially intervening creatively with these technologies. So thank you so much for not only joining us today, but also for for being there and thinking ahead at that time. And it's been, I mean, what a pleasure for us to have you. Thank you so much for joining us. Really been a great talk and I only wish genuinely that we could keep going. So thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. It's been wonderful. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, everyone. Yeah.