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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast at the end of 2025. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the editor in chief at Le Random. And today, very luckily, joined by thefunnyguys, the CEO of Le Random, and our collection lead, Conrad House. And today we're discussing the year that was 2025 live.
We're going to be looking back on some of the highlights of the year, some of the big events, some of the big story lines of the year that we want to chat about. Then we are going to look back at some of our favorites, some of our favorite shows, our favorite releases and our favorite artist. Then at the very end, we'll maybe take a quick sneak peek into 2026. But yeah, it was a big year, and we have plenty to talk about. We are all very keen. Let's begin.
I guess we can start with some of the big picture takeaways. What do you think was the biggest news or the biggest takeaway from this year, Conrad?
Conrad House: I think the biggest takeaway, and we have it in some of our notes we're going to talk about in a bit more detail, but what we focused on last year was this beginning of institutionalization, or beginning to become more rooted in the institutionalized art world. I think it's really true that we're starting to see the fruits of that labor bear a bit, it seems like at least, where it's more often that we're seeing digital art appear in these larger scale and important places.
And it seems that it's becoming less of, Oh, wow, this is such a rare thing, whereas we're seeing these pretty commonly every quarter, which is really exciting. So it's maybe hoping that this transition to more institutional awareness is really helping us grow the digital art world and maybe trying to bleed its edges into the traditional spaces a bit more. That's hopefully the takeaway. So maybe bearing the fruits of all this work that's been going on the past couple of years of institutionalization.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it's one of the things that was on our list, which was looking at the differences between 2024 and 2025. And you hit a few of those points that I was thinking about, too, which is that I was thinking, well, which one had better vibes, I guess. Is that maybe the right way to put it?
When I was thinking about that, I was thinking about all the institutionalization that did take place last year. That's a lot of what we covered at the call last year that looked back on 2024. It was about all these shows like Electric Dreams and Electric Op and the PST shows, all those shows in Southern California because of PST. There was the Whitney show and LACMA's Digital Witness, and there was the Molnár show at the Pompidou. There was a lot. There was also the V&A had their digital art week or month or season.
There was a lot in 2024, and I would say there was probably a bit less of that in 2025. Part of that is just the conditions on which those shows appeared in 2024, which was a lot of what was happening based on 2021 and all of that. But I do think that 2025 saw some progression in that it did build off that momentum of 2024. And what did take place in 2025 was quite strong, but it maybe didn't match it pound for pound in terms of the big events. But I think those are cyclical in a way. Maybe 2026, when there's the Venice Biennale and that thing, maybe that will swing back. But yeah, Jan, do you have anything you wanted to add about any of that?
thefunnyguys: I think from my perspective, if we zoom out even maybe a little bit more, I think in 2021, '22, maybe also '23, it felt as if digital art was a really important part of the overall crypto space. Everybody was interacting with NFTs. There was thousands of collectors who just collected digitally online.
But then over the last, I would say, three years, I would say the pendulum swung and NFTs and digital art as a whole became very contrarian in crypto. It's not really a topic anymore. Everyone moved on to different things. And it was right at that time when digital art in crypto started to die off that its adoption in the traditional art worlds became very real. And I think that's where we are now.
Digital art doesn't really play a role in the broader crypto scene as much. I think in the a16z report on crypto from the last month, I believe they said that only 2% of developers active in crypto actually touch NFTs. All of them are focused on stablecoins and other stuff like that. But there's also this other report by UBS and Art Basel, which said that 51% of the 3,000 traditional art collectors they interviewed had collected digital art.
So that's for me, I guess, the broader trends of the last years, and 2025 has definitely been in that trend. Even less engagement from the crypto native people, even more engagement from the traditional art worlds. And yeah, I guess that's also what I wonder, looking ahead to 2026. Is that going to accelerate? Is that going to change? Is the pendulum going to swing back? Are we just going to see a merging of these worlds? Some of the reflections on the year on my end.
Conrad House: It's interesting. I think there's also just a possibility that those two worlds almost stay separate, where there's almost an NFT community that is more crypto-focused, and then there's an NFT community that is more traditionally focused, where there's almost two separate cliques within the NFT art world. One is more crypto native with maybe PFPs and utility within tokens and that type of nature of a thing, whereas the more traditional crowd cares more about the artistic form and the piece itself and the artist. And maybe these two camps never blend, but they also never go away. And it's just these two sides of NFTs that you can pick to be a part of, whether it's crypto or more artsy.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I think that's funny that you're talking about the contrarian stance of NFTs now, because I think all NFTs are down pretty bad. But I was interested in if any are outperforming on the downside. And it does seem like... So this is from NFTfloorprice.com. I don't know. Take this with a grain of salt, possibly. But it has categories of NFTs.
Over the last 90 days, the art category, which is out of seven, we'll call it six actual categories. One category only has one thing in it. But six categories: metaverse, gaming, utility, art, historical and PFP. The art side is doing the best, or it's doing the least worst.
I think that supports what you're saying, Jan, to a certain extent, that right as there was a bit of capitulation on the NFT side, that was coinciding with this institutionalization. We've talked so much about that mismatch across these calls now, over the years. But I think that it did take an interesting turn in 2025, in that the institutionalization has continued while the capitulation has basically continued as well. Maybe that's something that we can talk more about, this long term versus the short term sentiment and how to think about it.
Some of the long term signs of health that we're talking about, and maybe we can say more explicitly, are things like the fact that you can walk into MoMA, and you have been able to for years, and you can see artwork that's highly influenced by or that highly incorporates AI into it. We just had 010 at Art Basel. There was the Toledo Museum of Art's Infinite Images. And then there's also these large-scale space openings like Node and Canyon and the space in Madrid. They're maybe not all technically happening in 2025, but they're at least announced, or there's definitely chatter about them, or they're happening, I don't know, pretty soon. That's happening in a few weeks.
There's also been the revitalized gallery scene with Glenwa Head and Heft and Yeche Lange on top of a lot of other thriving spaces like bitforms. There are these long-term signs that actually the space is thriving or doing better than ever.
In contrast to that is some reality like the price action. So what's really rough is when you look at crypto price action in particular, because we're a niche within a niche within a niche. So if you zoom all the way out, the S&P 500, which is the benchmark, basically, for an asset that most people can agree is fairly safe, it has gone up 16% this year. So year to date, the S&P 500 is up 16%. There's a lot of talk about what's been driving that and how it's just really been one company. But still, if you had just invested in an S&P 500 ETF at the beginning of the year, you're up 16%.
So macro is actually good. If the S&P 500 is up 16% year to date, that means the macro is essentially positive, or at least the markets are telling us that. Then in addition to that, you have policy. Macro conditions are clearly as good as they've ever been in 2025 with Trump 2.0, his embrace of crypto pretty broadly. Then you also even have things like the mainstream art market rebounding. There's been a lot of doom and gloom about the mainstream art market. And then now, with these fall sales and some good news from Basel, that seems cheery again, too.
So one thing that's rough is that when there's all these positive macro signals, everything's still down pretty bad. The S&P 500 is up 16%, ETH is down 12%, Bitcoin is down 7%, Tezos is down around 70% year to date, and then floor prices on NFTs are probably, in general, worse than that. What do you guys think about that? How do you guys think about these contrasting signals, where it seems, in some ways, it's as good as things have ever been, and then in other ways, it's rough out there?
thefunnyguys: I'm quite surprised by that, to be honest. To add even one more layer, Peter, to your analysis: also within crypto, there have been positive stories about adoption. Stripe is doubling down on stablecoins. They acquired Bridge, they acquired Privy. They're really pushing that very, very far. And so are a lot of fintechs, a lot of companies. Stablecoins, that's a success story. These are really taking off in 2025. Prediction markets, Polymarket, Kalshi, these are also taking off. I think they're becoming consumer brands as we speak.
And yet ETH is below $3,000. It's quite far from its all-time high almost five years ago now. That to me is definitely a big question mark. It doesn't feel logical that it's so low, also with all the macro factors you described.
And for me, NFTs are just a consequence of that. Because yes, of course, there's some traditional art adoption happening, but the prices of NFTs and the prices of the digital art that lives on blockchains, I think it's super highly correlated still with crypto native wealth. If ETH is below $3,000, we're just not going to see any major moves there, I don't think. Or we have to onboard traditional art and maybe other types of wealth on mass, but that hasn't happened yet.
So yeah, I think for NFTs to rebound and digital art to really rebound, we would first have to see Ether go up maybe 50% or 2x sometime next year. Why that isn't happening? I'm honestly not sure. I think all those positive global or macroeconomic...
Conrad House: I think the things that you listed off, Peter, can almost, in some ways, feel like a façade of what's actually happening with real people in the world. We can look on paper and S&P is up and all this, but when you talk to a real human living in the world, I don't think many of them are that positive on the state of the economy and the outlook of the economy. I think a lot of them are worried. I think there's a lot of fence sitting. They don't know if they should be bullish. They don't know if they should be bearish. They're very uncertain.
I think you mentioned it, Peter, but the S&P growth has been growing for years. I think it's always been the talk of, when is this going to stop? It can't just keep growing forever. We can't be in the super cycle, the S&P growing forever. It has to have a downturn at some point.
And you talk about that one company holding a big share, NVIDIA, and this AI bubble that everyone's worried about. And I think just this morning, NVIDIA announced that they're going to be cutting back their GPU production by 30 to 40%. There's a huge RAM shortage in the world. The entry and mid-level GPUs are going to drastically cut down. That's going to have some impact on their sales. Who knows how that's going to affect it?
So I think with all that, there's a huge uncertainty. Yes, we can look at the paper. There's a bunch of green bars looking over the place. But when you talk to real people that are outside of the economy and maybe not looking at just those things, they're like, I don't know what's going to happen in the economy. I'm hearing we're going to a recession.
So I think these uncertainty factors, no matter how good the markets look just by fundamentals, man, your emotional state plays a big factor. And like what Jan said, when ETH is down any bit, that plays a huge emotional factor into all the crypto native collectors.
And maybe if something in the future that I could wish the most for is that emotional connection diminishes as much as possible, where the emotional connection is only related to the art, and that's the only thing that affects it. The currency that is denominating the art has no effect into how a collector is going to appreciate it. Because it is a bit of a bummer when great work is being released, but because Tezos looks so bad at 55 cents, nobody wants to buy it, for example. But who knows? If that same piece came up when Tezos was a dollar fifty, a collector's emotional state of spending money on it might be completely different. So you can't blame them. It's a tough thing to lose.
thefunnyguys: Yeah. I think the estimate is that I believe around 80% of the S&P growth in the last year is actually linked to AI or to AI linked shares. And that's maybe 10, maybe 15 companies, if you go a bit broader. If you take that 80% away, then it's not 16% growth, but it's actually maybe like 3% growth. And that's barely beating inflation.
There's not that many people who are working for these companies. There's not that many people who have exposure to the shares of these companies. For most people, life is getting more expensive and the economy is not really booming, I guess, outside of the concentrated AI boom.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Conrad. And yeah, what you're saying adds to that.
And one thing that I think about is how the traditional art market and the digital space, they both seem to be a bit separate, but they both seem to be also coming together, emblematic of this institutionalization that we've been talking about that happened last year. This year, it's been happening. It happened with 010.
Maybe we're getting a little in the weeds here, but something in philosophy that Hegel talks about is called dialectical negation. It's that for something really new to be created, if it comes from two different things, the two different things need to both die for that new thing to be created. I wonder, are we seeing that? I mean, are we seeing both of these spaces struggle at the moment, but then at the same time, this new thing is being created, and we're all part of that as well, and we're all going to be part of it moving forward? But while that's happening, these other two things are dying. Does that make sense? Is that happening?
Conrad House: I wouldn't use the word dying. I think that's a bit doom and gloom. I would say it's more of an evolution, if anything, where you're not dying and forgetting about your past completely and having a new complete form. Your evolution is still being affected by your past circumstances. I think that's what's happening here a lot. The past things that have happened have come together to create something new. This new thing is like an evolution of these two separate things, creating a symbiotic relationship with each other. But I wouldn't necessarily say it was dying. But maybe that's just because it sounds like a sad term and I don't want to forget the past.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, there's a big bit of cognitive dissonance in terms of how we are processing something that seems to be struggling, but also something else is forming before our very eyes, seemingly, too. So that's a bit what reminded me of Hegel. But yeah, I do think that's maybe a bit dramatic.
But one thing that's definitely not ending or dying is just human creativity, basically. I think one thing that 2025 showed us is that that spirit is just as alive. I mean, well, you could debate maybe that, too. But I think probably that that spirit is at least as alive as ever. It's just difficult to say exactly where that's always manifesting, and maybe that's not always the public side of creativity.
Conrad House: Something that we noted down, but I think the growth of VVV in general and just the evolution of platforms throughout the year is interesting, to look at how Art Blocks has changed throughout the year, how fxhash adjusted throughout the year. Then I think we wrote down VVV being the newcomer of the year when it came to platforms within the space.
They were really fun to watch. The whole Solana avant scene, that whole evolution of adoption throughout the year was really cool to see. Just the flood of new work that was coming around that time on VVV, because it was maybe getting more traction, was really interesting, because it was a very niche pocketed corner of these weird avant NFT enjoyers. And then it got a bit bigger and we started to see whole new projects pop up on VVV from artists we hadn't seen. So it felt very similar to fxhash in a way. It fostered a new creative environment that was very fulfilling and accessible, which is great. And that's something that I think I'm always looking for in the space, is open inclusivity and a lot of work being shared, because you never know what you might find.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. So I think, Conrad, what you're talking about or what you're hinting at, too, is how the ecosystem, some of the mainstays in the ecosystem, has changed a bit this year, the mainstay players in the ecosystem. And so that's something that I think we could chat about. And yeah, definitely, I think part of that has been the emergence or the rise of VVV, especially this year.
I'm also interested in how some of the other, again, the mainstays, the blue chippers in the space, how they've seen 2025. So for instance, one perhaps positive example is that Verse seems to have had a good year. They seem to be thriving, or at least they're able to stay alive, because I don't think they're as well capitalized, perhaps, as some of the other galleries. And so the fact that they're just able to put out these releases, and it feels sustainable, or at least as sustainable as other models that I've seen. But yeah, anything you wanted to add about that?
thefunnyguys: That's actually quite interesting. I think VVV in itself, that to me feels a bit like an outlier. It's a new platform. They're actually doing well. I literally can only think of VVV. I don't know any other example in 2025.
And then with Verse, what I think is really interesting: I think they're really playing well to an overall shift we've seen over the last years. Because at first, platforms dominated everything. There was Nifty Gateway, it was MakersPlace, Art Blocks, fxhash. Everybody was driving. All the main artists, they were all using these platforms to bring their projects to life.
And now we're in an entirely different world, where most artists don't even use a platform. They self-host their releases, or they work with one developer to create a smart contract. They bring it to a gallery. This gallery either presents it online, often on a dedicated website, and sometimes also takes it to art fairs.
And I believe Verse is playing really well to that shift. At Art Basel, they're providing the minting technology for Colección Solo, I think also for someone else. I'm not sure. But a few galleries were using their technology, and I think that's probably something they're going to do even more.
I think that makes sense, because I'm not sure if we will see a full-blown return to the platform model. I think we'll probably end up in a future where there's hopefully hundreds of galleries, and they all run very lean operations, and they all work with maybe 5 to 10 artists. I don't know if we're going to go back to the digital art platform as a startup, as a technology company with 10 employees, because the business model has proven out to be, at least, very frail. I think most of them are basically out of business now.
But yeah, if Verse can position itself to be the provider of the technology to hundreds of galleries, that might be super interesting for them. And they definitely have a lot of persistence. These guys are not going to go away anytime soon. They keep adapting to whatever happens to them.
Peter Bauman: I think what you're speaking to is something like the atomization of the space, where it used to be, if you were a platform, it was like, to use a very dated reference, if you build it, they will come. The artist and the community will come to you. But that switched maybe already even back in 2022 to, you need to go out and find those motherfuckers, or you need to go out and find those people, because just relying on them to come to you may not work. I think Verse was a bit early to recognize that, and that gave them some advantages.
“I think we'll probably end up in a future where there's hopefully hundreds of galleries, and they all run very lean operations, and they all work with maybe 5 to 10 artists.” — thefunnyguys 23:23
They're also just a good team. They used to have Leila, Jamie and Mimi. They started off strong, and they are continuing to do well.
Then I think we also mentioned VVV, and we're all impressed by it, and have all used it, I think, and like it. Although I also think it probably, if I had to guess, experienced a bit of a peak, and then probably a bit of a decline as well in the later part of this year, from maybe the middle-ish part.
Then also interestingly, this year, we saw Art Blocks go and announce that it was ending its curated project with Quine by Larva Labs. And then now the Art Blocks 500 is coming to a close with the last three projects by Jeff and Eric and Daniel. That's coming to an end with some interesting projects. It's happening right now. I think this week is when some of them have been coming out. So Art Blocks is definitely repositioning. It seems like these releases are no longer going to be a big part of what they're doing moving forward. So it'll be interesting to see how they respond to some of these new realities and new conditions.
One thing I thought was interesting was how fxhash has responded. I think this year, it seems like they were focusing more on the tooling side and the building it side. It seems like they've maybe shifted over the last few months to be maybe a bit more aggressive with some of the promotion of their releases and some of the artists that they have release on their platform, and also just promoting them. Or maybe they're just lucky with a couple of quality releases. But yeah, what do you guys think about how things are shifting with some of these blue-chip players, Art Blocks, fxhash, Verse?
Conrad House: I think the Art Blocks one is nice to see. I think it was always a matter of time before they had to put a period on the Art Blocks Curated list.
What was that term that you used before? I'm already forgetting it, Peter, but the idea that something has to die before something's born again. I would think maybe that's a bit more related to what Art Blocks has to do. They have to kill off ABC and then start focusing on something new.
But I feel like my sentiment with Art Blocks has been the same for a while now. It's this idea of, well, what's next? What's going to happen now? I feel like that's what I've been thinking for a while now with Art Blocks. They've had these new changes, these structural readjustments, whether that's with Studios and how they're minting. But I'm still just thinking, what's next? It doesn't seem like they've taken a concrete next step of, this is what we're going to be trying to do next, just yet. So that's what I'm waiting for. I'm waiting for some type of concrete evolutionary next thing that they're going to really try to push forward. Or maybe that doesn't happen. Maybe they're happy with where they're at, and the systems and structures they have in place right now is what they've always wanted. So we'll see how they evolve.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, I have a similar feeling with fxhash as well. We know they're experimenting with art coins. They're still releasing generative art projects. They introduced this open form model of releasing generative art projects. But these guys are definitely... They also keep pushing. They keep reinventing themselves. They keep experimenting. Just really awesome to see. But I'm not sure if anything of it has stuck so far.
I think recently, they also announced that they want to go beyond generative art. They want to have support for other types of digital art and photography. They want to expand beyond this niche, I guess. Also AI art, things like that. But I don't think we have seen the final form of that. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do there.
But I think that's basically with all platforms. I guess there's this feeling of, what's their next move going to be? Because we know that almost none of them are currently financially successful. So just doing more of what they're already doing doesn't seem to be a winning strategy. Which maybe that's wrong. Maybe people look back and would be like, Oh, if only they just waited and they kept doing what they already were doing. They were just missing this new user influx, which is about to happen. But of course, that's maybe a bit of wishful thinking. And in the moment, all you can do is really try new things.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think that is a good point. I think 2026, we're going to be able to continue monitoring how these different platforms are adapting. And I think it'll be fascinating to continue to watch.
So one thing that I do think is interesting about what fxhash is doing, and that their open form does seem to speak to, is something that I think is interesting or that stood out to me this year. If I had to sum up the year, at least for me, in terms of what I think the main takeaway was, is something I think for right now is a bit more obscure, but I think it's this concept of worlds. That was the takeaway for me for this year.
I guess the way that I think about worlds is I'm starting to think about them from a higher level as these complex protocol stacks. So if 2024, there was a lot of talk, especially at the end of 2024 and maybe the beginning of 2025, about protocol art with things like World Computer Sculpture Garden and Cycles and Infinite Garden and PXLDEX. And then I think what we'll see maybe more next year is that these protocol stacks are going to become more complicated and build on each other more in ways that are not only physical and digital, but they'll be including AI, too.
I think it's also interesting because it's corresponding with world models that are also coming out in terms of frontier research, AI research, like what Google is doing at Gemini with its world models. And then I think there's a company called Odyssey. And then what Fei-Fei Li is doing, the ability to create an entire infinite world from text or a picture or video. I think that's going to be bigger in 2026.
And so, yeah, I'm interested in how those world models that are coming out this year at the very forefront of AI research, what they have to do with protocol art and 2024's protocol art, and then also simulated worlds like Ayoung Kim and Lu Yang or even Ian Cheng and artists like that. And so that's something that I'm thinking about a lot, how all those three things are related, because I think they are related.
One way that you can think about their relationship is that it's essentially the complexity of protocols just increasing. I think that's interesting, that we're starting to see that and already take place, from 2024 at the beginning of 2025 to now the end. Yeah, does that make sense?
thefunnyguys: Yeah, that's very interesting. The artists that you just mentioned, Peter, are they artists who already experiment with AI to generate worlds? Or is this more like procedural or manual world creation, that you're looking forward to the next iteration of maybe these worlds itself being AI generated?
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it's a really good question. I think it's interesting how it's all coming together. Material worlds, digital worlds that are procedurally created or generated using game engines, and then now these AI real-time engine worlds.
I think what is going to happen at the end game and where this is all headed is that artists are just all going to be using all three of them in really complex and interesting ways that we can't even imagine. I think things like Primavera De Filippi's Plantoid, and things like Holly and Mat's The Call and now Star Mirror, I think are already showing what you can do with stacking complex protocol layers on top of each other, and some of the weirdness that can come out of that.
Artists are going to be increasingly thinking about what they create as worlds, because they're just going to get richer and richer and richer in terms of the in-world cultural detail that is achievable. And then now with new technology, it seems like there's this impulse to make them more autonomous and give these worlds more agency. And then also with the technology, it seems like there's an impulse to make them living, to make them reproduce and to make them create other outputs. And I know that's what Primavera talks about when she talks about protocols a lot.
And so that's, to very circuitously bring that back to fxhash, why I first brought that up in relation to them. Because I think they're hinting at that or pointing at that with open form and what they're thinking about there.
Conrad House: I like the evolution towards building worlds, I think, as these protocol tools get layered with procedural scripts, get layered with AI generational tools or machine learning. The complexities between all these systems become so immersed. And you mentioned, Peter, this constant strive for autonomous systems. At some point, you're building an autonomous human, and that autonomous human is acting within a protocol, and that's essentially a worker within a system. And then, yeah, the more you look at it, the more parallel lines you can relate to these with a real life, real-world system and how they're interacting. And yeah, I hope we see the complexity keep advancing.
And maybe it's funny, because you mentioned all those projects like PXLDEX, Cycles, Infinite Garden. And when I think about it, I'm like, man, those came so early in the year relatively. We hinted at this almost in quarter one and quarter two. We were like, Man, these projects were so good. We had this feeling like, Is this going to be the best that we see this year? It was almost like a bittersweet feeling. We're like, Okay, we just have to wait for the rest of the year, because we're not going to get anything better than these things.
I think obviously, as artists continue to work within protocol systems, they get ideas. I'm sure when Lenny was building out Infinite Garden and while Kim was building out PXLDEX, they probably thought of a gazillion things that they wanted to try and new mechanics that they can implement. So I think just throughout time, throughout tinkering... It's a tough new field. Solidity is not easy to program. So I think throughout time, we'll see these protocols advance a bit more intertwined with different APIs and different other systems. And then at some point, you're going to have a whole art world that is just autonomously creating itself and running. And that's the goal for a lot of people.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think that's an interesting point that you brought up. I think a lot of that would be that you mentioned that happened at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025, like World Computer Sculpture Garden and PXLDEX. I would call that a type of protocol art that's more like smart contract art. And then, yeah, the ones that are getting more complicated, they can use smart contracts, they can use DAOs like Plantoids, but they can also use additional protocols as well.
So that's what I'm looking for, is how artists... In 2024, the end of 2024, we were looking at, Oh, yeah, how are artists going to continue using protocols? I think now at the end of 2025, I think we have a bit of an answer, that they're going to be using them in ways that are a bit modular, and stacking them and using them in ever complex arrangements of themselves. I think that that's interesting, how that's developed over the year.
One quick game maybe I wanted to play was if we look back on the earlier quarters of the year and just give our thoughts as to what we thought about it then versus what we thought about it now.
Even going back to the first quarter, I think the big things that we were thinking about and talking about then was AI art was all the rage at the beginning of the year, in addition to those protocol arts that we were talking about. If you remember, at the beginning of the year is when that Christie's sale happened and Botto, and Verse, and Kiki, and Fellowship, and Mario had his ICA work. Then in the backdrop of all that, mainly because of the Christie's show, was that big open letter protest and all of that. But yeah, it seems like that interest in AI, has that shifted at all over the year? What do you guys think about that?
Conrad House: I think the pocketed interests have definitely shifted, but I think that's always going to happen with a very emerging technology. Like you mentioned, early in the year, it was like autonomous artists were all the hot craze. Everybody and their mother was creating a new AI artist that had some generic name to it and created art and tried to sell it.
I do think the overall interest in AI art throughout the year has been quite pivotal. I think we'll touch it a bit later, but we had a very cherry on top moment with the Ian Goodfellow article that we had at the end of the year, and how that relates back to what Peter was tweeting about at the very start of the year with all these... He had a lot of these little sneak peek research deep dives into early AI stuff. And I thought it was really neat. I was going to add on it later in the talk, but I can talk on it now. It was very cool how it all wrapped up in one way.
On the collection side, too, as well, we were able to collect from people like Murdock and Harshit and Tyka and these early artists. At the same time, Peter was doing these deep dives into the early AI field. And then being able to put the cherry on top of that at the end of the year with the Goodfellow article was quite cool.
But within the specific interests, it's hard to see how they shift, specifically right now. I don't know what the big craze is with AI right now. I know people like it, but whether it's image generation, video generation or agent generation, I don't know where the peak is. It doesn't seem like there really is one right now.
Peter Bauman: I think it's world models. I think that's where the moneyed interest is right now, to develop those. But yeah, sorry. I think that makes sense.
thefunnyguys: I would also say that at the start of the year, it was maybe even a bit of an AI art hype. I even think I like to remember some tweets of people saying how AI art was going to overtake all the other types of digital art. Generative art was basically going to become a small section within AI art, which is going to be this really huge all-encompassing genre. I don't think that has played out at all. I think it's also a big takeaway of the year.
If we look at the list of the top projects, and not only art or projects, but also of other people in the space who like to make lists, who like to look back on the year, generative art is there. It's very much alive. Maybe the forms are a little bit different, and maybe the projects have become a little bit more complex, and we also have some protocol art aspects, but it's all in some way, almost all of it is somewhat generative in nature.
I think with AI art, we're now maybe in a phase, it feels to me a bit like the phase of 2021, '22 for procedural generative art, where the community did a lot of digging into the history of the movement. All of the pioneers were being interviewed. Some of them are being invited to mint NFTs. Vera Molnár minted her NFTs. We had to go through that period to make sense of what was happening in the present.
And with AI art, maybe we're going to a similar phase. I think back, for example, on Mario Klingemann, his presentation at Fellowship of all his early works, where he really dug through the archive and he presented a lot of works from before the NFT period. Same thing with Gene Kogan at Fellowship. Our interview with Goodfellow, I think it's also part of that. We're really trying to understand AI art and trying to understand where it comes from. Then it hopefully brings the genre to its next maturity phase.
This idea of AI art being this unstoppable wave that is going to take over, that hasn't played out. I don't think it will. I don't think it will in the next year either.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think what you said about maturity is the key, is that it's moving on to something different. It's this next phase of maturity. I mean, you could call that post-AI, and the differences and the interests are so different. But I think what's happening now is that AI is just becoming diffused in practices. It's filling in the gaps in spaces and practices. Mostly, it's doing that in a way where it's not the focus as much as it was even at the beginning of the year. So yeah, I do think that's interesting.
I don't think agentic work and what people like Seth and Amicia are doing with Automatic, I don't think that that is going away. And I think that they're doing really interesting stuff. I do think that the diffusion of AI within almost or most digital practices is something that we're going to continue to see, and it's going to end up and result in some really weird stuff being made that I'm interested to see.
From the second quarter, that's when a lot of the big announcements were these new spaces that were opening up. That's when there was a lot of buzz about the new gallery spaces. It seems like we've covered that. Third quarter, TMA, Infinite Images, Sasha. We talked about that with the differences between sentiment and everything.
One quick thing before we do hop into the favorites. Do we want to just say a quick thing, maybe a few seconds each, in terms of Le Random, how we felt that the year went for what we were doing at Le Random or Le Random adjacent in terms of Raster this year? Jan, do you want to talk about your year that way?
thefunnyguys: Yeah, sure. As you guys know, for me, the main goal, the main objective of the year has been to create and position Raster. We talked earlier in this discussion about sustainability, and how a lot of platforms didn't find a way to make money and they had to leave the space. For us at Le Random, we have similar realities to deal with, of course.
I hope that in 2025 I managed to launch an interesting product, which hopefully sets us on a way to also become a self-sustaining art institution in the future. On what time frame that will play out, I'm not sure, but that's definitely why my focus has been on Raster.
With Raster, we're trying to make digital art collecting delightful. We're trying to make it easier for new collectors to come in and explore the digital art space, to start collecting. If we can do that, then that will also have, hopefully, a huge impact on the markets of all these different artists. And hopefully, we can go from, I don't know what the number is right now, maybe like 100 financially successful digital artists. Hopefully, we can go to 2,000 over the next years. And hopefully, Raster can play a positive role in that as better market infrastructure for the digital art space. So that was definitely my biggest focus of the year.
Peter Bauman: I think it was a big development, the emergence of Raster this year. I mean, it was definitely something that I think has already begun to impact different artists in the way that they share their work and also just think about their whole practice.
Yeah, Conrad, you already mentioned a bit of your high-level overview of the year. Is there anything else you wanted to say about it?
Conrad House: Yeah, I was probably going to expand on it when we started talking about the acquisitions and an overview of the year a bit more, but just the broader overview of focusing on commissions.
I think one interesting thing about 2025 was, I mean, as the years have progressed from 2021, I think the rate of primary releases has slowed from platforms and galleries. And then with that, the amount of very interesting releases is even smaller at that point. So I think a lot of it is just being patient, seeing what's released. We mentioned the early start of the year, I think, was super exciting with a lot of really incredible primary releases, and we've had great ones throughout the year.
But a lot of, I think, the year was focusing on those commissions directly with artists. Not having to wait for a platform or a gallery to come to you with a piece that you really want, go directly to the artist. You know the work that they have. You know what you want. Try to come to a conclusion or a deal that you can work with them on, and always getting a better insight on how that artist works, how the artist thinks about the work that you're acquiring. So that was a big high level focus.
There's also, I think, a lot of crossing T's, dotting I's this year with looking back and making sure certain artists that we had collected previously were well-rounded. That's something that we're always trying to do, make sure sets that we really enjoy from certain artists are all well thought out. If we have certain triptychs that we've been trying to acquire or hunt down for the collection, finishing those off.
And I think another big focus this year was the early AI hunt was a lot of fun. I think doing that coinciding with Peter, as Peter was doing these deep dives into research and looking back at people, like we mentioned, Mike Tyka, Ryan Murdock, and Tom White, and Gene Kogan. Being able to acquire, I think, a bit more, not pioneering work, but a bit more historical work in the context of their broader careers was really fun. I think a fun focus alongside the commissions for acquisitions.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it was funny. When I did the Glitch residency in November, Gene Kogan's there and the people that are building Eden are there. And they're really big AI... Gene is the OG machine learning art guy, really. And they're really interested in people like Katherine Crowson and Ryan Murdock, and these people that really packed together these text to image tools, made them publicly available. And those people came up over and over again at Glitch, and I thought that was really interesting.
I definitely think that the pioneers, it's only maybe a few people that really know who the actual pioneers in this space are, like those proper nerds. And yeah, all of that information has not necessarily, I think, reached the collector base as of the end of 2025.
And then, yeah, in terms of the editorial, I guess I'll talk more about the difference in the fourth quarter. So one thing that we changed in the fourth quarter is that we started to focus more on being a bit more nimble in terms of our coverage. And one of the ways we did that was with having the Friday podcast episodes. So that was a way to be able to look at what was happening with a bit more agility and to be able to maybe talk to somebody, oh, tomorrow or in a few days, whereas a lot of the editorials take about... They take more like weeks, typically, to prepare and to get together. So, yeah, giving ourselves a bit more agility with our coverage, I thought, was one thing that we wanted to look at this year.
And part of that is our focus is a lot on history and the philosophy of computation. And that's something that I'm really interested in, these high-level, head in the cloud topics. But then I wanted to make sure that that was also attached to reality as well. And I'm really excited. There's a huge backlog for the rest of this year. And beginning of 2026, we're going to have some cool pieces coming up with some contributors that I'm excited about. So, yeah, good stuff coming up.
But I think we can move on to our favorites of the year. This is maybe the fun part. Maybe we can start with our favorite group exhibitions or group shows of the year. How about Jan? Did you want to tell us what your favorite group exhibition or show of the year was, or release?
thefunnyguys: I'm actually not 100% sure it's my favorite of the entire year. I'm not sure if I remember every single group exhibition I looked at. But one that caught my eye just this week, I think, or two weeks ago, is a really great group exhibition that happened in Japan. I think we give these guys a shout-out almost every time we do a recording. But NEORT, again, that's a really good exhibition.
Matt DesLauriers presented five new works. The series is called Latent Dispatch, I believe, which is a research project that he's also installing at the V&A. He basically created this machine learning model. You can prompt it, and then it makes a one-line drawing of how it interprets your prompt, which is then contrasted with more interesting drawings by humans, because the machine always gravitates towards the average that it learns. I thought that was really interesting and really cool that Matt collaborated with them to present this new body of work.
In 2022, '23, everybody would have lost their heads. Matt DesLauriers released some new NFTs. I think I know barely anyone noticed, which is also just an absurd observation.
But then there was also some other artists. There was Libby Heaney. She presented some work that had to do with quantum computing, I believe. Then there was a whole list of, I guess, more regional artists, Katsuhiro Tanimoto, Yoshi Sodeoka. So overall, a really high-quality digital art exhibition that deserves more attention than what it has received so far.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, just really quickly about Matt DesLauriers and this AI work that he's doing. We talked about how AI is impacting his practice earlier this year, or sorry, last year. It reminds me of something Dmitri said in our standout artwork of 2025 piece. He said, The technology has so rapidly redefined the landscape around my practice that it forces me to reconsider where my work fits in the future. And I thought that was a really telling and revealing and honest thing to say. And I think a lot of artists are thinking about that. And I think Matt is, too. And I think maybe this new work is an indication of that. But yeah.
What about you, Conrad? What were your favorite group shows of the year? Or releases?
Conrad House: Yeah. One, I think I had actually mentioned on a previous... I think it was one of my quarterly favorites at the time. But Yeche Lange's One of Us Is Real and It's Not You, the Super Metal Bosch and Evil Biscuit. Just very fun show, very small space. But I think the overall whole esthetic of it was very fun. The Mons chess board in the middle, the Drifella 3 physical triptych that they had there was really great, and the frame that they had around it.
I don't know. It was something that I think we'd always had this fascination with VVV, and we talked to Jared earlier in the year and heard them talk about the work, and them being this very odd niche little corner room exhibition that was showcasing this very neat work was really fun to see. Again, I think a lot of things that Yeche Lange is doing, they have a very, almost better than anyone else, an IV line directly into the culture of the internet and the people that are around it. I don't think anyone does it better than them. So it's really cool to see how they showcase that in a physical exhibition.
But when we think of more of generative, more of code, procedural script generation, the Museum of the Moving Image p5.js show was really great. They had a lot of standout community figures from the p5.js space that were representing and showcasing work. And I've always had a love for p5.js, obviously. I think when I first got into procedural and generative art, it was always the standout community and everything that has come from Processing. And what Lauren has done with Processing and converting it to JavaScript is really incredible. And seeing an exhibition focus around that, I think, is really important. And it's been something I think has been missing for some time now.
The impact of Processing and p5.js is so impactful that I think there needs to be more said about it constantly. I don't think it's something that can just be ignored. I think it's something that has to be celebrated and reiterated almost every year. So if we saw more of these type of shows celebrating the systems that have brought us here rather than the artist necessarily, I think it's a lot cooler to see.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that was a cool show. And of course, that was organized by Regina Harsanyi at MoMI there. I really like both those choices, or yeah, all three of those choices.
A few that stood out for me. The most memorable for me was probably the Glitch residency, too, that I was talking about earlier. It's about a two-week thing. Then the very last night, really, is this group art show called Room Service, where all the participants, which is usually around 50 or 60 people, they participate in this group show where the whole chateau in France becomes a space for art in this group exhibition.
It's very collaborative. Everybody gets a partner, usually, organically, and chooses a space and then puts on a small exhibition. And it's typically related to what they had been working on or thinking about over the course of that two weeks. And, yeah, it was a really awesome experience to look at everybody's, go through everybody's rooms.
There were glitch box performances. It was a lot of art and technology. So it was a lot of, again, people's performances. I would say those are more experiments with art and technology, 9 Evenings type scale events that were more the higher end. Which actually it's a perfect analogy, because those were also the biggest artists of the day, Cage and Rauschenberg and Childs. Whereas Glitch is a lot more of an experimental underground scene, so a bit more like Fluxus and happenings. I thought the show was literally something I'll never forget in my life. A really cool experience.
Then similar with Basel Social Club, which is also a big group of artists taking over an unorthodox space and making every little nook and cranny into part of the exhibition space and part of the art. I think that's really cool.
A really similar show was something that Luba Elliott talked about, the Minor Attractions art fair. She talked about that for our 2025 standout artwork piece. I think that show, and I think even the Yeche show you were talking about, Conrad, fits to a certain extent, where they're putting artwork on windowsills and that thing. It's a bit more informal. There's also a digital twist to it. I think that those shows were the ones that stood out to me this year.
Then one more thing I'll mention, and slightly controversial take, is I think some interesting group art of this year was also Claude Opus and Gemini 3, and then what World Labs did with Marble.
Maybe, Jan, you can even talk about this yourself. This was really the year of vibe coding taking off. Vibe coding had been a thing before 2025, but it seems like, especially with Claude and Claude Opus, this was the year that it really started impacting people more at large. Then I think it's also had a really big impact on art. I think Beeple was talking to me about how he vibe codes and how that was part of the process with Regular Animals. It's touching everywhere. Did you want to say anything about that impact on you this year, Jan?
thefunnyguys: For me, it was definitely the year that this became more real, that you can actually do it reliably and you can do it for production applications and not just for something you throw away right away.
For me, it was actually really inspiring to see some other people in the digital art space, how they use AI models to speed up product development. I would say two people that really stood out were, on one hand, Seth Goldstein. He is really into it. He's really proficient with all the AI tools. I think he's always talking to at least a few agents at the same time. He vibe codes almost everything, I think, for Eden, the agentic art platform he's working on. He also does a lot of vibe coding for No Translation, to help them with their programming and help them create proofs of concepts.
So for us at Raster, it has also become a really important part of the workflow. I'm not technical myself. I'm not a software engineer. I'm now also pushing a lot of code to the repository. It gets reviewed by my co-founder, Michael. Initially, I think a lot of it... Well, when we first tried this, it didn't work that well. But now, the last few months, especially with the new Claude model, Claude Opus 4.5, it just works really well. It has totally shifted how we collaborate.
And that's something, I think, in general, that I would love to also see. I would love to see even more of it in the digital art space, artists, collectors to engage with this. Because for me, that was also maybe a takeaway from this year, that there were more collectors who are also building their own websites to show their collection. I think a lot of them were very, I would say, tasteful presentations. You could see that was also a way for them to express themselves. The interface, I think, said a lot about the collector and their intentions.
And if vibe coding can bring us closer to that and can help every collector maybe create a really beautiful personalized collection website, that would be a really cool future to live in. Because before vibe coding, the only way you could do this was to use a cookie cutter template from WordPress, and everything looks really boring and the same. There was not much point to it. But nowadays, they're getting quite good at design and stuff like that.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. The ramifications of everybody basically being able to have their own personal dev. We're just seeing what's possible with that, I think, now at the end of 2025, and we've seen sprinkles of it. But yeah, I totally agree that it's only the beginning.
It's only people that are quite plugged into it that are really taking advantage of it at this time. And I keep bringing it up, but at Glitch, everybody was vibe coding everything. It was just baked into everything that everybody was doing. Again, these are the nerdiest nerds of the art and technology space, I'd argue, the most experimental, the most interesting, and everybody was vibe coding there. I mean, come on. What do you mean you're not? It was the air that was breathed in the castle.
One of my favorite works that was part of Room Service, that we were talking about earlier with our favorite group shows, was something that 0xfff, who we all know and like his work, and Stevie P, and this really interesting artist, Wendy Yen. So basically, they vibe coded this infinite world model game. So that was the stuff that was happening at Glitch. I thought that that was...
Yeah, there's no question that we couldn't have had this talk without talking about the impact of vibe coding this year. And yeah, especially in art, and how, man, that is something. We'll be talking about it next year, too. It's not going away.
thefunnyguys: No, absolutely. I think also maybe for people listening to the podcast, I think a lot of people probably listen and they think, Oh, it has the word coding in it. That's not something I do. I'm not a coder. Even though it's becoming easier, I think it's still a bit daunting to make the first step and to just try it.
But I would really encourage people to just give it 10 minutes of your time. Just give it a try for 10 minutes, where you say, Okay, I'm really going to just try to experience this in the next 10 minutes. I believe within 10 minutes, you're going to feel some of the magic of it.
Because before, starting to code, it was daunting. You had to set up all these libraries and your environment. Just to get started took hours. But I would go to Google AI Studio, I would vibe code over there. I think it's super easy. Or alternatively, I would do it with Claude Code in your terminal. I think both of these options, you should be able to get them set up within a few minutes and experiment and feel where AI is nowadays, because it's a lot better than maybe two years ago when you maybe first tried it.
Conrad House: What makes me so hopeful about vibe coding is the idea that digital programming literacy is probably going to increase. There is probably going to be some idiocracy effects that AI has on some small group where things do get maybe dumber or more simple. But I think in general, in the broader macro, the sea levels will rise with more people being more literate with how computers and programming work. And I think that's really cool.
I mean, as I've grown up, computers are so incredible. Computers are some of the most powerful inventions we've ever seen in the last thousands of years on our world. And the fact that the majority of us people have no idea how they work, and we don't know how to actually use them to create them, to have a function that really suits our needs, and we can't create something that's bespoke to our own thing. I think the idea that vibe coding might make the tools of a computer more accessible to everyday people is really exciting.
I think that's what I'm looking forward to most. Computers are such an incredible machine that we cannot use to our full potential, because not everybody knows how to use them to the full potential. So as vibe coding becomes more accessible, everybody is going to be able to use these machines to better their capabilities. And I think that's just going to go forward to have such compounding effects on the world and how we see technology.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. One way to think about it, too, is that basically for the first... I don't know. Since the beginning of computation, so the first 60, 70 years of computation, computers and humans have not spoken the same language, and it's been very difficult for them to speak to each other. Like, Jan, you were saying, Oh, it might take you hours in 2022. Well, I don't know. A year before that, it would have taken you years or decades to learn coding. Now, and increasingly so, humans and computers do speak the same language. Oh, and it happens to be English or whatever the one that you happen to speak natively. And the impact that that's going to have on creativity is so exciting, and I think that's something that we have to look forward to this coming year.
“I think the idea that vibe coding might make the tools of a computer more accessible to everyday people is really exciting.” — Conrad House 1:06:08
Anything else about that? Or we can move on to our solo favorites of the year. Yeah, Conrad, did you want to say what your solo favorite work of the year was?
Conrad House: Yeah, I got two here. One's more physical, one's more digital. Again, I believe these might have been mentioned on past quarters, but that's only going to make sense since they stuck with me throughout the year.
But on the more physical side, it is Copper Giloth's solo exhibition with Microscope Gallery. As I said, a great cohesive career catalog of Giloth's work. This show just happened to start around the same time that we were diving deeper into Copper's work and starting commissioning directly with her. So the idea that this exhibition happened coinciding that same time was really fun, and was really insightful to see this broader view of all of Copper's work, because it's not always accessible. She's been a large educator in the space and maybe not triumphed as the artist as she should be. So she never really got to showcase all of her work in the most public spaces. So seeing it cataloged together is really great.
And then on the digital side of things, it would be Harm van den Dorpel's Quantizer, which was released with Verse Solos. This was an extension of his previous Solos project, which was Struggle for Pleasure, which is another project I really liked esthetically. They share a lot of esthetic similarities, but the way that the systems run is quite different, whereas Struggle for Pleasure starts from a blank point and then grows to this final composition endpoint, whereas Quantizer is a never-ending real-time animation that is going to constantly cycle through animations. And just great work, great extension from Struggle for Pleasure.
Again, similar to Cycles, which is the project that I'd mentioned in the standout project of the year, another piece that I was able to sit with for a long time. Great living presence with the piece. Overall, always loved van den Dorpel's work, so this was a standout. And another great job by Verse Solos, having another great, fantastic release.
thefunnyguys: For me, it's also a project that we talked about earlier in the year. I think when we discussed it, we already said that, yeah, this is probably going to be up there by the end of the year. A lot has to happen for it not to be the case. The project I remember most of 2025 will probably be PXLDEX by Kim Asendorf.
Most of our listeners probably already know about it and know why it's so interesting. I think it's a project that has it all. It's competing on many different levels. Protocols. It's a very interesting visual experience. It's conceptually very, I would say, refreshing and innovative. It's very complex and interesting, but in a way that just makes sense. It's a really beautiful system that Kim created there. So PXLDEX is definitely the number one.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think it's a really good example of, again, how artists are starting to use more complex layers of protocols and rules in their work and experimenting in that direction.
And speaking of that, one of my favorite works of the year was DX Terminal by DX Research Group, which I think was also a part of that tradition of, I think, early explorations of artists. I mean, artists building worlds has been around for a very long time. But I think using the latest and most emerging technologies like AI and AI agents to create self-sustaining worlds and autonomous worlds is, again, I think, increasingly where I see art heading.
DX Terminal was a really interesting early experiment. And it's funny, because the graphics are quite simple, but I think that's in a lot of ways where it is in that step of artists creating these really rich, interactive and self-sustaining worlds. I'm really interested in how that's just going to get even weirder and even more interactive, even more productive as we head into 2026, and even more detailed and rich.
Another one for me, I'm cheating a little, saying more than one, was Drifella 3. I wrote a lot about it. I wrote a big piece about it, so I won't say that much about it. You can read my 4,000 or 4,500 words about Drifella 3 by Evil Biscuit. It's part of that VVV, Remilia, Solana, avant NFT scene. The work, I think, is... To be fair, to DX Terminal, Drifella 3 is actually my favorite work of the year.
Then another really big standout for me was Holly and Mat's Star Mirror. Again, because of, I think, the steps that it's taking and how they're thinking about the complex protocol stacks and incorporating AI in physical space and audiences. They're some of the leading people shaping the weirdness of where this is all heading. They're talking about making AI psychedelic. I think a lot of that is really interesting. Just making all this weirder and more experimental and less corporate-y, I think in general, is all positive.
And then maybe we can head to who we felt were the artist of the year. And Conrad, did you want to tell us yours?
Conrad House: Yeah. So when I was thinking about this, I was trying to take the same thought approach I took when you asked about the standout projects for the article. And I was trying to think of, what artist was I thinking a lot about this year? What artist was I constantly looking back and spending time with? And the one that really stood out was Parker Ito.
I think Parker, in general, had a really busy year, so he was always on the timeline in a sense. I had known of Parker's work before the year, obviously, but I never really dove into it. But as I think the avant scene grew a bit more, I was spending more time with his work, whether that was Mona Lisa's Hyper Gamble, Dry Lady, or even more recently, Profile Picture, which he just released. Spent a lot of time learning more about his influences and career as an artist and really trying to understand... He's been here for some time. He's been in this field for some time now. He's been doing this esthetic for some time now. It's been really cool to see how he's almost perfected this maximalistic trait-maxing composition form. But he's definitely been the one that's at the top of the head.
I think there's honorable mentions, people like Frieder Nake, who we'd mentioned in previous quarters for the award, the SIGGRAPH Award that he had won this year. I think a lot of the other VVV adjacent artists that we'd mentioned, Bosch, Evil Biscuit, all up there. I think a lot of that VVV crowd in general could be the group artist of the year. But yeah, I think Parker Ito is the one that stands out, and Frieder Nake is an honorable mention for the SIGGRAPH Award.
thefunnyguys: For me, it would be pretty easy to go for the same artist as the artwork of the year, Kim Asendorf. But I'm not going to do that. An artist who has presented two really strong projects this year, and who I think is in general just a fantastic digital artist, is Jan Robert Leegte, the net artist.
I believe it was early this year, I think in January or February, that he presented Walled Garden. I thought that was maybe, again, Peter, talking about worlds, it was also some type of world. It's like this virtual digital garden. And what made it so interesting was that the collectors actually occupy the space, and everyone owns, let's say, a hole in the wall surrounding the garden. And you can see who is at the other side of the wall. You can interact with the piece, and it makes it visible that everything we do here in this on-chain digital art space is inherently social, and that we occupy these shared digital spaces together.
He also did another project later this year. I believe it was presented at Paris Photo. It was released on Pharma. I'm not sure if it got a lot of attention. It's called Wanderer. It's a piece where I think he calls it a digital flâneur. It's like an autonomous digital flâneur who basically explores the globe in a random way. It just always takes, at every intersection, it makes a random decision. And by doing so, over time, it explores the entire world. People can collect the intersections as NFTs on Pharma, and everything is recorded on chain.
In general, I think two really great projects, beautiful concepts, executed in a really amazing way. I think Robert Leegte had another strong year and did really good work.
Peter Bauman: I did some decoration behind me, as you can see. You can't see the Jan Robert Leegte that I have hanging up by me, but this cozy fire is well worth it.
I guess for me, definitely all good choices. It's a little cheating, if Drifella 3 was my favorite, to say that Biscuit is then my favorite artist of the year, but I'm going to give a few. He's definitely one of them. Then that work that he did also with Parker, Heavy Liquid Graphic, earlier in the year, that we also wrote about, or that I interviewed him and Parker about, I also thought was really strong work. Yeah, what Biscuit did alone with Drifella 3 is already enough for me. Then whatever else this artist happened to do this year, I think, was also quite impressive.
A couple of other artists that I wanted to mention. So one of them is Beeple. Again, I just think that his practice is really interesting, how it's, I think, maturing. He gets a lot of flack, but I think that he's going from this image dominated everydays practice that a lot of people thought was cheesy and crude compared to, I don't know, maybe easy comparison, so pop art or even kitsch, even worse. But what he is showing this year with the emergence of his boxes, or these kinetic sculptures, these kinetic digital interactive sculptures, I think, was really interesting. And that along with these performances that he's having at his studio, I think you're seeing this really big, one of the most popular digital artists, his practice mature in a way that is quite exciting and I think healthy for the overall space.
And then also I wanted to just shout out Claudia Hart and Copper Giloth. So, Conrad, you've talked about Copper. I think they've both had some institutional success this year after decades of not so much of that. So congratulations to them. I think they're both hugely, hugely important digital and video and computer game... And just, well, they're just hugely important artists, period. And they've touched a lot of different things, like Claudia with AR and simulations. I have so much to do with this build up to worlds and what I've been talking about.
And then Copper, she's so curious and always reinventing her practice. Interestingly, Copper, and I think maybe Claudia, too, but Copper was also at Glitch. She was there for every presentation about Claude Opus, paying attention and taking notes. She absorbed a lot of slop that week or two. I thought it'll be interesting to see how that impacts her. But always somebody who has an open mind, and I think that's really important.
Yes. Okay. So we looked at the artist. Conrad, do you want to say anything about the acquisitions that you are particularly excited about this year?
Conrad House: We can maybe just highlight a couple of favorites. I think we already touched on it before, but the commissions in the year were really fulfilling. We had a lot of incredible ones. We talked about it also in previous quarters, I think, when we did the Sasha Stiles commission, and how impactful that was to finally have Sasha in the collection, how impactful it was to have a three-part series from Cursive Binary be that part of the work that we got from her was really incredible. Copper Giloth, as we touched on, being able to commission some of those original plotted works was really fun.
And then we have people like Juan Rodríguez García, who has been an artist that, I mean, prior to Le Random and prior to me ever becoming, I think, even a collector, was an artist I had always really appreciated. And this year we were able to commission a real time one of one unique software animation piece, which is just really incredible. It's an all encompassing representative piece of García's anatomical compositional practice that he's done over the past couple of years. And being able to get a real time algorithmic piece from him through that was really fulfilling.
But I think another big fun part of this year was hunting down old grails in a way, pieces that Jan and I or the team had discussed since the start of Le Random. I've always thought, Oh, man, it would be so cool if one day we could collect X or Y.
One of these pieces was Bloemenveiling by Anna Ridler. Still, I think a project that was so... It's almost like a joke to say it was so far ahead of its time. It's like that doesn't even do it justice for what Anna did with that project. We were able to finally acquire tokens, or essentially discontinued tokens, from that art performance, which was really incredible this year.
And in that same vein, we were also able to acquire three pieces from the original A2P exhibition, which was, again, an exhibition that was so far ahead of its time. Luckily, Feral File this year had a task of re-bringing those back to Ethereum, since they were originally on Bitmark. And reviving those old tokens and then being able to go and actually collect some of those old tokens from some of the artists that originally participated in the A2P performance was really awesome. And the other three pieces we got there were the Casey Reas piece, the Zach Lieberman piece and the Sougwen Chung piece, all really awesome.
And then maybe just the last acquisition thing I wanted to mention, which is related to Raster a bit, but the discoverability that Raster has provided for us. There have been times where it's hard to have a constant eye on every platform and every artist in the space. But there's times where you come across a piece that's listed and you're like, how the heck is this so cheap? Why is it listed for so cheap? Why is this on auction for such a low reserve?
This has happened previously to a couple of Zach Lieberman Foundation pieces, where Jan and I came across a brand new Zach's Foundation page. There's a really cheap auction that nobody was paying attention to. We were really happy to acquire two incredible works by Zach Lieberman. I believe this is like Woven Color Study in the collection.
A similar event happened with Andreas Gysin, when we were on Raster one day thinking about artists that we wanted to look at, the broader overview. And we happened to come across two pieces by Andreas that were Local Edit and Video Display Unit that we had really not seen before. And Raster really provided us a direct insight on, Hey, here's where it's listed. It was a great price for it. Instantly acquired it. And I think something like that was just fun, to see how Raster directly impacted the acquisition process throughout the year and made discoverability of pieces that we would have probably missed out on bringing them into the collection.
So I think that was a few of the focuses. The commissions were really fun, hunting down those past grails that we never thought we'd be able to get. And then how Raster has changed the collection process and discoverability a bit.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it was a really big year for acquisitions.
So maybe really fast, I'll give a bit of an overview of the content that I think stood out or I was excited for me this year. Over the last few months, a couple stood out. One was the Mr. Philip piece, just because that was a bit of a labor of love for me, and it nearly killed me to get it out. And so those I always feel are a little more precious to me. And so that was nice.
And then, yeah, I think that interview with Ian Goodfellow was really special. He's somebody who's really high on my list in terms of AI pioneers that I wanted to talk to, if not, basically, right up there. So getting able to talk to him. And I mean, just the impact of GANs was just so unquestionable and so cemented that talking to him was really valuable and really important to me, at least.
Again, the last time I bring up Glitch, but honestly, if there was one word that was brought up the most during that residency, I think it was the word GAN. Honestly, it was talked about so much. Just the fact that all these AI nerds, if they're not dealing with them currently, they at least have. And all that excitement about VQGAN and CLIP and the early text image, again, it all was based in GANs. So yeah, talking to Ian was really special.
And then just for the whole year, a piece stood out to me. So in terms of success or whatever, in terms of readers and sustained success over the year in our pieces, The People Are in the Computer, Part One, the piece that I wrote about Alec Radford, has been by far our most popular piece this year.
Then the piece that I'm probably the most proud of is the piece that Jasia Reichardt wrote for us for our 100th article, about the Gaberbocchus Common Room, which was not only super interesting original scholarship by Jasia fucking Reichardt, but also it was just really special that she took the time and wrote that for us.
thefunnyguys: I was going to echo what you said, Peter, about Ian and about Alec, so it doesn't add much value. But that, to me, was also the two editorial pieces that really stood out, the AI researchers, the most important ones, maybe, in recent history. But you articulated it really well, so we can maybe move on.
Peter Bauman: To wrap things up, I think the last thing that we can look at is looking ahead, peering up over the horizon to look ahead to 2026 a bit, especially maybe that first quarter. So are there any shows or exhibitions or events that you're looking forward to?
I would say that the obvious one, at least as far as this space is concerned, in the next month or so, is the Node opening on January 23rd. Yeah, but is there anything else that you guys wanted to talk about, especially in the first few months before we have our maybe quarter one talk?
Conrad House: I think, honestly, we didn't talk about it too much here, but the 010 initiative and where it goes from here is going to be really interesting. I think we discussed it before in some of our previous chats, but with their debut in Miami, they had arguably the strongest list of named artists you could put on a roster to garner the most interest. You're talking people, XCOPY, Dmitri, Kim Asendorf, Joe Pease, cream of the crop, freshest cream of the crop. I really don't think you can get any better than that. So they really knocked it out of the park in getting all those people there. The list is so legendary. It's an all-star roster that they picked, and they did such a good job of it.
But it makes me almost a bit worried of, how do they beat this? Do they even try to beat it? Do they need to beat it? I think we talked a bit more about maybe having a bit more regional focus on, okay, if we're going to Art Basel Hong Kong, having a bit more Asian artist-focused display might be needed.
But just where they go from here, I think, again, I keep saying it's such a big all-star roster, but it wasn't also just all-star roster. I think the execution of a lot of things went really well. A lot of the booths looked great. A lot of the interest from the Art Basel crowd looked incredible. I wasn't there, so I'm only seeing this vicariously through posts and videos I see. But it seemed like that digital section was booming compared to everything else.
So maybe they don't have nearly an all-star roster that they had at Miami, but the same type of interactiveness or maybe impactfulness with the general Art Basel crowd can still be that big, which I think is more important than anything else. Who cares if the crypto crowd is excited over Joe Pease and XCOPY being there? Maybe the traditional crowd doesn't know who they are. And as long as the installation and the booths are fun and interactive and new and refreshing, that's all that needs to be. It doesn't have to be the biggest names. So excited to see where they go from there. They really knocked it out of the park on the first one.
thefunnyguys: Maybe that's also an overall theme for 2025, looking ahead at 2026, that there have been quite a few, let's say, ambitious projects that have been initiated. You mentioned 010, Conrad. You mentioned Node Foundation, Peter. There's this Canyon opening in New York. Colección Solo opened its new building in Madrid. All of that happened in 2025.
That's probably the most exciting thing for '26. It's all of these people, they invested, yeah, some of them tens of millions of dollars, into just getting the project initiated. So I think for the next year, we can expect a lot of very ambitious programming from them. They're going to keep investing the resources they already have.
And Node Foundation, I'm quite excited about that one. Also specifically because it is being run by people who have experience with Bright Moments. And I think Bright Moments in 2021, '22, it was such an important organization in our space, and they did a lot of things extremely well. I think for Bright Moments, it was never just about working with the top names. They were always pretty, I would say, democratic, and they also always tried to make connections with the local artists who could be very emerging. And I expect them to bring a similar philosophy to Node. I think Node is going to be a really important connection point in the digital art space moving forward. That's probably what I'm most excited about in 2026, seeing how they execute on their very ambitious plans.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, there's going to be a lot of digital programming between Node and Solo or ONKAOS, and then Canyon, and even what Refik is doing. Yeah, that's interesting about Node.
One thing that was interesting that you were saying, Conrad, about Basel in Hong Kong that I agree with and wanted to echo. I was talking to a collector friend of mine about this earlier. It's like, are they just going to rerun the same programming? Is it going to be the same artist? Because the blue chippers don't change if it's Miami or Hong Kong. The blue chippers are still the blue chippers. In which case, is it just going to be the same thing again? That doesn't seem like it would generate the same amount of interest or buzz. And then, I'm sure there's going to be some regional focus. So I'm curious about that.
I'm also curious about how that will just continue to evolve, going then to Basel, and then how that's going to mix with the digital art with Artmeta's Digital Art Mile that they've done the last two years during Basel. I spoke to Georg. I spoke to him once, I went... It was at Glitch again. But I spoke to Georg, and he said that they're going... Georg and Roger, he said that they're going forward with it. So I'm curious what that's going to look like. I think they can coexist. I think it's probably good to have them. The more digital focus, the merrier, perhaps.
And then some other interesting shows that are pretty soon or have already opened are things like Hito Steyerl's. She has a new show in Milan at the Fondazione Prada. Looking ahead a little bit more, there's the Whitney Biennial this year, there's the Venice Biennale this year. I know Mat and Holly are going to do some interesting stuff in Venice that's going to coincide with the Biennale. I'm sure there's going to be some other interesting stuff that is also coordinated around the Biennale. It's like a fire that attracts. So looking forward to that.
And then also V&A has their digital art season. It's like a biennial as well. It skips a year. So they're going to have that this year, too. So looking forward to, yeah, some of these. I think plenty to look forward to in 2026. And of course, things will come up and pop up as well.
Yeah. Is there anything else that you guys wanted to add about anything else?
thefunnyguys: I was just going to say, maybe to leave it on a positive note, because I do think for a lot of people who are listening, it probably has been quite tough the last years. I think many of them probably would have hoped that economically, things are a bit better now at the end of 2025.
But maybe this is just me being an eternal optimist, but I do look at 2026, and I do think this could be the year that things turn around and change for the better. Because to me, it does feel like there is a really good setup right now. This is what I mentioned before, that crypto is becoming more and more mainstream. There's breakout applications happening there. The number of wallets is increasing a lot. Digital art is now being taken seriously by traditional art. Every fair, every institution almost has a digital art strategy and is executing on that.
I look at 2026, and I do think that it's going to be a good year. It's going to be better than the year that we had from that perspective. And also with Raster, we're going to try to make that happen and try to onboard new people to digital art and try to both broaden and deepen the collector base. And hopefully that has a positive impact on everyone in the space, makes it more viable for everyone to stick around and to spend time and energy in the digital art space.
Peter Bauman: I spoke to Beeple right before 010. I mean, honestly, Regular Animals could be the work. It might be the work of the year in just art, period, let alone digital art. I mean, the amount of attention that it got. I asked him how he saw this misalignment between sentiment and institutionalization. What he said was, I believe it's going to be a slow march towards acceptance over the next 10 to 20 years for this to be fully canonized. But I believe that that's completely inevitable.
“Digital art is now being taken seriously by traditional art. Every fair, every institution almost has a digital art strategy and is executing on that.” — thefunnyguys 1:34:58
So yeah, I think that rings true, that it feels, I mean, barring, I don't know, civilizational collapse or whatever, it feels pretty inevitable that we can see the direction that this is heading. So we're directionally correct. And it's just a matter of knowing that and being confident in that, which is essentially, yeah, again, barring civilizational collapse. Assured.
And so it's just about hanging on, maintaining your interest, and recognizing that it's going to be a long-term commitment and involvement. And you're part of it, and you're in it. And that should be exciting, that you're into this new thing. You're creating this new thing, or you're at least part of a new direction and a new turn in art. I think that that's hugely worth being involved in.
And all the interesting things in art are happening when nobody's paying attention to it and it's not making any money anyways. I think that that's definitely happening, and it's really exciting. So a lot to look forward to. Can't wait for it.
thefunnyguys: I think we have covered a lot of interesting stuff today.
Peter Bauman: No, well, yeah. Thank you guys so much. I mean, this was really great. I always really enjoy these chats. I mean, they're so similar to how I think we would chat just privately. And so, yeah, I really appreciate it. Thank you guys so much. And thank you all for listening.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, Kat, go say hi.
Peter Bauman: I love kids. Bye bye.
thefunnyguys: Bye bye.
