About us
Stay in touch
Peter Bauman: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random. We're doing things a little different this week. We are releasing our podcast on Monday, and that's because we have an extra special guest this week, and that is Mike Winkelmann, or Beeple.
And also we're releasing this conversation on Monday because this Monday, December 1st, kicks off Art Basel Miami Beach week, and we wanted to start the week with this conversation. Beeple will be showing there at Zero 10 this really interesting work that is robotic and generative and performative and AI and participative, called Regular Animals.
So we talk about that work, but also we talk about this year of institutionalization for the artist, from LACMA to Mori in Japan, and how that's shifted his sense of where digital art sits in the canon. We also talk about his studio in Charleston and how he's turned that into this public laboratory for digital art. And then we get into a conversation about his recent work and how robot dogs and AI and crypto and markets all combine to make the artist think that we are wildly unprepared for our very near future.
It's a really interesting conversation. I think it's very valuable to get the perspective of somebody like Mike, who has just so much sway in the overall directionality of where this is all going, from his singular combination of this immense talent, but also conviction in the digital and then just his popularity and his stature. This chat I found endlessly fascinating and it opened my eyes a lot, so I can't wait to share. So let's begin.
I do definitely want to talk about Art Basel and what you're showing there. That's the bulk of these questions. I also am curious about just if you have any reflections after this year, because you have this upcoming Art Basel Miami Beach show, but it's also been quite a bit of institutionalization this year. Diffuse Control has been at LACMA and The Shed, and then Transient Bloom has been at Toledo. You've had all these events at your studio, but then now this Basel Zero 10, their digital section. So as we're getting towards the end, what have been your takeaways of this year from your practice, and how has it evolved? And what are your thoughts on this institutionalization that's occurred this year?
Mike Winkelmann: Yeah, we definitely had a number of shows. We also had Mori Art Museum in Tokyo with HUMAN ONE. We had a show in South by Southwest London with Tree of Knowledge.
To me, I think it's inevitable that there be more of an embrace of digital art as its own medium and not just lumped in with mixed media, because I think it definitely warrants its own full category and full consideration as a medium that has nothing to do with VHS tapes in the '80s. I think it's really cool to see, and I think it's something that will also help demystify for broader audiences what digital art can be, what it can say, how it can be a medium just like any other medium, with craft and intention and evoking an emotional response.
To me, in my own practice, I think doing things like this helps get outside of the thinking of the bubble and forces me to stretch and be like, okay, how would somebody look at this, or how interesting would they find this? If they don't know anything about NFTs, they don't know anything about digital art, is this something that could still pull them in and be like, wait, what is this? Because that, to me, is the bar we should be shooting for. If we're just shooting for what's going to be interesting to our own echo chamber, the space is never going to grow.
I personally would love to see the space grow and affect more people, because I think digital art is such a massive part of the overall visual language of society today. I think the things that we're talking about in this realm in terms of digital identity and decentralization and data privacy and AI and all these things, these are massively important topics to society as a whole. I think they do warrant a wider audience.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I think in terms of growing the space, although these events are often open to the public, I think your studio does a really good job of that growth and that outreach. I think you have an event in December that's focused on Charleston, the local artists. You also had that Synthetic Theater, which I thought was really interesting. It reminds me of Fluxus events that were really multidimensional and had a lot of different media and multimedia. They were performance and they were live.
I'm curious, how do you see your studio as part of that public outreach? And then your studio events this year, what have you learned from them?
Mike Winkelmann: I think we're trying to make the events at the studio walk both lines, but I think the ones that I'm increasingly more interested in are the ones that do reach a bigger audience. We did a CryptoPunks event, and I think that's fun. And obviously, I love CryptoPunks, and I think it warrants an even deeper look, because I think it is such an absolute masterpiece.
But the video game event we did had a much broader appeal and showed people a bunch of different artistic video games, but then also just had a crazy video game tournament in this experiential space. That, to me, is exciting because you do get a lot of people who I don't think would really consider themselves fans of digital art, but they really enjoy this stuff. I think it really helps normalize that.
With the events, we're really trying to do things that make them very accessible to outside people, because I honestly love when people come in and they're like, what the fuck is this? Seeing their reaction, they have no idea what this is. You can see on their face, they're visibly like, where the fuck am I? To me, that's sometimes more fun than people who have seen this stuff before and they're harder to impress a bit, or just they've been around the block a bit more.
Peter Bauman: What has the feedback been from the general public? Has it been mostly positive? Have they been impressed? Have you seen increasing demand for these shows? What does that look like?
Mike Winkelmann: Definitely. Every show, we have more and more people, and now we're engaged with other local arts groups. There's a big performance festival, Spoleto Festival, in the area, and we're engaged with them now, and engaged with other dance groups and theater groups and artist studios, none of which are digital at all. I would say the amount that the arts community in Charleston has embraced this is quite massive, given that, again, this is not a digital art town by any stretch of the imagination. That's been really cool to see.
But I think even more broadly, we have people come in from all over the world to the studio and events. I think there's still room to bring people together around this stuff. I think it just is a very different experience. I think it is a much more intense, spending an hour talking to somebody face-to-face about digital art, or experiencing digital art together, is such a higher signal, higher fidelity experience. That's equivalent to five years of talking to somebody on Twitter DMs. Paradoxically, or ironically, or I don't know what the word is, in real life, in person is still the best place to experience digital art.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I guess that'll also be an opportunity in Miami.
Also, before we talk more about your work at the show, or at the fair, you mentioned the inevitability of digital art. I'm curious, because we also talked about your institutionalization, or further institutionalization, this year with South by Southwest London and Mori and LACMA and The Shed and now Art Basel. But also some of your recent Everydays, by contrast, are aware of and speaking to the more bleak tone on Twitter recently because of things like falling crypto prices and maybe, in general, falling floor prices. Your Everydays like Burn Address Vibes and Timeline Vibes, some pretty recent ones.
How do you think about these contrasting signals? On one hand, everybody thinks the sky is falling, but then on the other hand, there's all this really great institutionalization that's happening with your practice, but also, I think, around the space, which the Basel show demonstrates. How do you think about this in your head, this cognitive dissonance or these contrasting signals?
Mike Winkelmann: I think one of the signals is a very temporary signal, and one of the signals is a very long-term signal. I don't know if you saw the post. I like to play in both areas. I obviously realize when I post something on social media about some hyper-specific thing to our space, that 90% of the traditional art world or whatever, they're not going to know what the fuck that is. They're not going to have any... it's like, where do you even begin with explaining XYZ meme thing or NFT thing or whatever. To me, I like playing both sides there.
But I think so much of the sentiment is because of the fact that this is a market within a market. The art market is affected by the global market, but the digital art market is affected by the global market, then the crypto market, then it goes down to the like thing. If ETH was at an all-time high and Bitcoin was at an all-time high, I honestly think you would see drastically different vibes all around.
I also think it's really hard to step back and look at some of these things, because I think there's some people who think there's going to be this second boom, and I do not believe that is going to happen. I believe it is going to be a slow march towards acceptance over the next 10, 20 years for this to be fully canonized. But I believe that's completely inevitable. But I just don't see this boom change.
I think the duality happens because the timeline is focused on one thing: what is the price? The broader acceptance of this is a completely separate thing that will, over time, translate to a more stable price. But we're still, with a lot of this stuff, in price discovery of what is the price?
I think one of the things that I recently recognized is that our market is unique in that you can immediately see the price of something. Not something, almost everything. Versus the traditional art market is very opaque. Their prices could actually be zero on something, but you just can't see it. It's just like, you don't know. It's like, well, what if you had to sell that right now? What would it actually be?
“I believe it is going to be a slow march towards acceptance over the next 10, 20 years for this to be fully canonized.” — Mike Winkelmann 12:52
In the traditional art world, almost all art goes to zero immediately. If you go into a gallery and you buy a physical painting and you spend $10,000, almost immediately, that is worth zero. No one will ever pay you anywhere close to $10,000 for that. They will pay nothing. You will be able to sell that in a garage sale, maybe, in the future for a hundred bucks, maybe. Otherwise, it is immediately worth nothing. That's not really talked about that much in the traditional art world, that almost no work has any secondary value at all.
But because you can see that in our space, it's much more of a talking point. It's like, oh, see, the prices went down. That's something that I just recently realized that I think is an unfair comparison. But yeah, I think people's timelines need to adjust to the reality of the situation.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, definitely. Traditional galleries. I guess that's part of the reason why that information is usually quite opaque. They go out of their way to protect, especially the artists that they represent, in their markets. You wonder if that sophistication will get to this space at any point, or sophisticated manipulation.
Yeah, we've been talking about canonization. Well, obviously, I think that this Art Basel Zero 10 show has the potential, at least, to be quite a big step in some of this canonization and institutionalization. I'm curious about the work that you're showing at it, or the performance that you're going to be showing at it. You also mentioned that video game show at your studio, which also had the dogs and with the Mario heads, if I remember. When you were approached to present work at Art Basel, what was your thought process? How did you come up with the dog idea? How did that all come about?
Mike Winkelmann: Sure. The dogs, we've actually had these dogs for four years. We got them in spring of 2021. We did some experiments and stuff with them in 2021, 2022, and then it went dormant for a while. Then in 2024, my brother finally convinced me. He was like, let's just start doing some stuff with the dogs or whatever. Because I was like, it's not a fully finished idea. I don't want to show anything.
Then we started using the dogs. When we did the Pepe thing, we had Pepe dogs. When we did the election night, we had these Donald Trump dogs walking around. When we did the video game thing, we had Mario dogs. When we did the CryptoPunk thing, we had CryptoPunk dogs. We started just using them more and developing them as a medium.
For this show, Eli reached out and was like, oh, we've got this opportunity. We love you. What about bringing a box or something? I was like, you know what I'd really rather do besides the boxes? These dogs we've been kicking around. We had a much more fully formed idea that we had, to be honest, tried to take to Basel in Switzerland, and it was kindly rejected. We were like, oh, could they do it now? Luckily, they were able to get it across the finish line this time, which I'm glad about. Again, logistics-wise, doing this in Switzerland would have been pretty tough.
It's basically, I look at this as really a mix of a lot of different mediums, in a way, to create a sculpture that feels alive. Because I think robots in general are going to be this massive canvas combined with AI to express many different things. I think art in general is about this act of creation. The creation of life itself, to me, is the purest form of creation. I think it's almost where art is driving back towards. These robots and trying to make them feel as alive as possible is something that, to me, is really interesting.
The robots will basically be moving around autonomously in this space, trying not to bump into each other. Then they also take pictures and basically reinterpret those pictures based on which robot they are and their personality. Then they poop out prints of those pictures. Again, this all happens just automatically. Then some of those pictures have QR codes with NFTs for people to scan and claim those.
It's actually a long-form generative work in that it will, in the end, produce 1,000 prints over the course of Art Basel and 256 NFTs. Again, it will be whatever the pictures are that the dogs take during Art Basel and then reinterpret. We don't really know what those are going to be. It's all completely autonomous.
“I think art in general is about this act of creation. The creation of life itself, to me, is the purest form of creation. I think it's almost where art is driving back towards.” — Mike Winkelmann 18:34
To me, I think that's really interesting, too, because I think it speaks to what I see as the future of generative work, in that you're not writing a finite, okay, I wrote these 100 lines of code in JavaScript or whatever. To me, and again, that's not going away and nothing against that, but what I'm more interested in is building atop these systems of code to build very complex things that take advantage of the latest technologies to make generative works that couldn't have been done before.
Because I think, again, I love the Art Blocks stuff. I think the way it was done is super groundbreaking. But a lot of the types of algorithms are algorithms that somewhat potentially, in some cases, could have been written 50 or 70 years ago, sometimes. Versus these robot dogs taking pictures and translating them through Seedream 4 to make an AI image out of that picture and then poop out a fucking thing. That could have only been done in the last literal year. Those are the things that I'm interested in making generatively.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that's really interesting. We did talk about your interest in infinite creation with HUMAN ONE and Diffuse Control when we spoke last time. But that's something that I'm writing a piece about now, especially after doing this GLITCH residency in France last month. I think the big idea to come out of 2025 is basically the idea of worlds. Worlds are, I think, what you describe, these autonomous living systems that come from these complex protocols. They can be literal AI simulated worlds, like what Dr. Fei-Fei Li is making. But they can also be these complex cybernetic systems that you're talking about, and they carry on these artificial life traditions from decades ago. I think that's a really interesting idea that's come out of this year.
I'm curious also, when you were approached by Eli and by Art Basel, you're approached as an artist, but also as a studio. Was there any difference there? Did you have to think about it differently or separate them in any ways?
Mike Winkelmann: Not really, because to be quite honest, we've worked with galleries in the past on very specific one-off things. But the studio has always acted like a gallery pretty much from the beginning, in terms of we're producing the work. We're not finding fabricators. I mean, sometimes we find fabricators for certain pieces of it, but we're producing the work. We're funding the production of the work. I'm marketing the work through social media. I'm producing all the marketing materials, and how are we going to brand this and how are we going to blah, blah, blah. We're figuring out how much to sell it for. We contact collectors or collectors come to us, and we manage all of that and all the contracts. We're making sure we're selling it to people who are not just going to put it up for sale and flip it, that they seem like good stewards of the work. We're vetting the things. We're already doing all the functions of a gallery.
It was purely because of the speed of how fast we needed to move on this. It didn't really make sense to try and engage a gallery with it. It wasn't that much of a consideration. It was just timing-wise, it was just like, okay, we got to just fucking do this thing. Because we had the idea fairly fleshed out. Systems-wise, programming-wise, we definitely... this only came about six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, maybe. This wasn't like, oh, man, we've been fucking smashing on this for six months. The Synthetic Theater thing was only early October, less than two months ago. One hundred percent of our time and focus was on that up until then.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, you did get the sense that there was a bit of a tight timeline, but I guess that's just how it works sometimes. Do you want to say anything else about the logistical or technical challenges with the dogs and setting them up and coordinating them and that thing?
Mike Winkelmann: It's definitely been a challenge, because this is the first time we've... again, we've used the dogs, but not in a, okay, let's have them autonomously move around. How are we going to switch them out during the course of the day? Then all this printing and pooping NFTs and style transfers and all of that. Logistics was definitely quite a bit.
But I think, to me, AI and all these things have just increased our capacity to build systems faster in a way that, to me, is just absolutely mind-blowing, how fast we're able to develop these things now. It's so inspiring and so fun. Even just in the last three days, Nano Banana Pro came out and it's like, oh, shit, should we change it so that it... actually, one piece of it, the Elon dog actually makes the things that look like blueprints. We were using Seedream for it, and I thought the output looked really cool, and it would just make things and the text would look garbled, to be honest. It looks like AI or whatever. Now it's like, oh, shit, should we change it to this model? It's like, no, it could look super fucking crazy, these pristine things.
To me, it's so inspiring. It's exciting, because I've always really been drawn to using the leading edge, most advanced technologies. What can that say, and what more granularity can that give me to express ideas? Those shiny new tools now come out literally every two weeks, and they're massive step change improvements over the last thing. It's been a very exciting, inspiring time to create.
Peter Bauman: I'm curious how you'll continue to work with robots as a canvas, because there's obviously so much potential there. That's coming fast, too. The advancements there are getting crazy. You've done other work with your studio shows, too. I know at the punk show, you had more of the humanoid robots.
Mike Winkelmann: Yeah, there's a lot. Matt and John were on iPads on FaceTime on the robots. They were walking around and interacting with people. Yeah, the robotics thing, too, to me, it's moving so fast, and I think it's going to get so fun and so exciting. When you look at that as a sculpture, for these living, dynamic platforms that now have so much agency and intelligence that you're going to embed in them, it is about to get crazy. So yeah, I think it's going to be fun.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that sounds exciting. And I guess for the dogs, the faces that you chose to put on the dogs are Andy Warhol and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Picasso and yourself, you're one of them. Can you talk about those choices? Why those people? And what went into those choices? What's that part of the artwork saying?
Mike Winkelmann: So part of that is those faces and heads on the dogs were actually masks that we bought, again, years ago. And so we've had these masks, and we've had them be part of events at the space, with people dressed up like Andy Warhol, wearing the Andy Warhol mask, handing out Polaroids, and this guy dressed up as Picasso, and he's grumping at the pictures and very dismissive and things at the events. To me, I looked at it again as these living sculptures that could move and interact or whatever. Then at one point, we had the idea of putting the masks on the dogs and giving them this much more human feel.
I think, to me, it speaks to a couple of things. It speaks to this future of pop portraiture, but I also think it speaks to the ways in which humans will merge with robots in a probably slightly more, hopefully, distant future, and that our bodies will become this half technology, half biology thing.
Those characters, I think, each to me have an iconic status for many different reasons and have different meaning to each of them. Those were why we chose those people. Each of them has had a massively outsize impact on society. The first founder's edition of this series of robotic works that we're doing is, like you said, Elon, Zuckerberg, Picasso, Warhol and then there's one of me. Not that I'm at the level of those people. Each were people who, again, going back to what the dogs do, have changed the way we see the world. I think to have them be taking pictures of the world and reinterpreting it, how I see them seeing the world, is an interesting way to have an analogy to the way we will view the world increasingly through the lens of AI and these other machines, I guess.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. Are you also, in some ways, asking people to rethink who artists are? I mean, these are people who have changed the way we see the world. Are you trying to juxtapose Picasso and Elon Musk in any way?
Mike Winkelmann: That's actually interesting. I'd honestly not really thought about the relationship of those people, the tech people, with the art people. But that's a pretty good line. I might use that in the future. I am now.
It's an interesting parallel that I never thought about, that those people as artists. But I think it is true in a way, especially for Zuckerberg, particularly. He's the ultimate curator of humanity right now in many, many ways. Honestly, actually, Elon, too, with X. Both of them have massive curatorial roles in society, and I think that really does lend themselves to being artists. But yeah, that's actually really... I didn't think of that parallel, but I will now.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. Some artists have talked about that. Mat Dryhurst has talked about protocols, the importance of protocols in art. He's talked about how some of these tech people, not necessarily naming names, could be considered creators of protocols and therefore artists.
Yeah, it is interesting to think about who is impacting our culture and who we want to be impacting our culture. I think this work could add to that conversation.
I'm also interested in something you said about humans merging with technology. I know in the trailer for Regular Animals, it says, you are not prepared for the future. You're doing this show in the context of quite maybe a traditional art market crowd. I wonder, what message do you want the people who, like you said, don't really know or might not know that much about the digital... what message are you hoping that they walk away with after engaging with this work?
Mike Winkelmann: I think, to me, that line is like, I think things are changing very fast. And I don't think we're prepared for how fast they're going to change. And that is the part of it that does worry me with AI, is how disruptive I believe it's going to be in a relatively short period of time, and how fast these things are advancing.
I just saw somebody posted a thing of DeepDream, and it was like, this is what AI was 10 years ago, which is like, oh, my God, that was just 10 years ago. What the fuck? Holy shit. Then you extrapolate that out 10 years, and it's like, it could be, I mean, yeah, insane.
I think, to me, the biggest thing I would like more general audiences to take away is just that things are changing very fast and that we need to start having more conversations. It shocks me that more of the conversations in the broader art world are not about the impact of technology on life. To me, that is the defining conversation of humanity right now, and there is nothing bigger.
The conversations that have been on the docket for the last decade in the traditional art world, to me, it's like, guys, a fucking alien is landing, and you guys are worried about what happened 200 years ago. It's like, Jesus Christ, man, what in the fuck are you talking about? Let's focus on right fucking now, and what is going on and what is going to go on in the next... this isn't 100 years away. When you talk about 100 years now, it's like, dude, I have no idea what the fuck that is now. That is some fucking Dune shit, fucking crazy shit that it's like, I have no idea. I'm talking 10 to 20 years. Things are going to look radically different, I think. I hope those are the conversations this work spurs.
Peter Bauman: Well, especially at Basel. I mean, the fair, I've been to several of them, and it's always upper 90 percentile in terms of what's plastic work compared to maybe new media work or screen-based work or digital work. I mean, it's the best way it could work. I would say 95%. Last Basel, there was literally maybe three screens that I saw in all of Basel.
“It shocks me that more of the conversations in the broader art world are not about the impact of technology on life. To me, that is the defining conversation of humanity right now, and there is nothing bigger.” — Mike Winkelmann 34:35
Mike Winkelmann: Right. Yeah.
Peter Bauman: And so maybe there's a bit of burying the head in the sand with some of these galleries.
Mike Winkelmann: Yeah.
Peter Bauman: So it'll be funny when a dog strolls by. I'm assuming the dogs will be in a pen. And I guess, will the audience be able to just go and scoop one of the receipts up? Or how does that work?
Mike Winkelmann: No. We'll probably figure out a way to bring people in the pen on a very controlled basis, make sure these people are chill. Because the dogs, you can sit in the pen or whatever, and the dogs will not bump into you for the most part. People won't be able to get into the pen and scoop up the things. We'll basically collect up all of the prints. Then we've got some stickers and things that we put on them. They've got little doggy poop bags that they go into, too. We'll basically give them out once an hour. But otherwise, you'll just be able to see them sitting on the floor of the pen. They'll be part of the installation, that you'll see them collect over the hour or whatever.
Peter Bauman: Do you have any thoughts about the significance of, again, we were talking about this, now your work being shown right on the same fair floor as what's 95% painting and sculpture? What is the significance of that? When you heard the news, was this something that you thought might be maybe a long time away? What did you think about the impact of Zero 10?
Mike Winkelmann: We had actually had one of our pieces shown at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2023, one of the boxes, and that was with a gallery. It went really well. I think it was actually one of the most expensive things that sold at the fair that year. It went good.
But I think seeing the Zero 10 thing and seeing a whole section devoted to digital art, to me was just like, oh, man, this is such a step in the right direction. We've talked to Noah Horowitz a bunch of times. He's been out to the studio multiple times. He had expressed really wanting to embrace this space and bring the experience forward in terms of digital art. I thought this was amazing to see and so exciting to be a part of. I think it's going to be a really fun space, hearing what other people are doing as well, hearing what Jack is doing. It sounds awesome, and that copy thing, and seeing some of the other works that are going to be there. I think we're going to have a really good showing in the space, and I'm super excited to see the reception from general audiences about it.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, and I guess I'm also curious about general audiences. A lot of them are probably primed to be afraid of AI, or probably be opposed to AI in art making, I think, generally speaking, although maybe in Miami it's a bit different. How is your work playing with those fears of AI by presenting this absurd version of it, combining with robotics and, again, these complex systems? How are you playing with maybe people's expectations or fears of AI, especially the general public, who might not be as used to these technologies?
Mike Winkelmann: When people hear AI, I think they think of it as this binary thing, as either the work is AI or it's not AI. It's like, that's not how it's going to be. A lot of digital works will have some level of AI. I think AI will be so embedded into everything that we do. It will not be this binary thing. I think, to me, that's a very rudimentary understanding of what this technology is and what it allows. Hopefully, seeing this technology in which AI is one piece of it, but to say that this is an AI work... even like that, it's going to be such a more nuanced thing than work either being AI or not AI.
I think, hopefully, this work can push forward that conversation, that people see that, oh, a piece of it is AI. But there was a massive amount of direction in how the AI was used. The AI is actually just used as one tool in this broader project, which obviously had a massive amount of human intention and human craft and human decisions behind it. Oh, yeah, it uses AI for part of it. That, to me, is how AI is going to be used.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think it's a good point that a lot of these technologies are becoming ubiquitous, and now we're entering more of a post-AI art age, where making distinctions between what is and isn't is already becoming more pointless.
Did you want to say anything more about that human element and decision-making in the craft? You said that the dogs, in terms of how they produce the work, they take a photo of just what they see around them? How does that part of it work?
Mike Winkelmann: They basically have a number of things that they do in terms of walking around. Then they can sit and rest, or they can move around in different ways, and then taking pictures. Then they keep a log of these pictures and choose the best one out of the pictures that they've taken over, I forget how much time. They rank the pictures that they've taken. Then they autonomously poop one of those pictures out, which has traits built in. Then that picture may or may not, again, randomly be an NFT.
They will take pictures and you're basically going to be seeing the fair through the lens of these different characters. The Picasso one makes the pictures look like a Picasso painting of whatever it's seeing. The Warhol ones make them look like a Warhol screen print of whatever they're seeing. The Zuckerberg ones take and reinterpret what it's seeing into this metaverse look. The Elon ones make it look very analytical. Everything's charts and graphs and trying to understand the world from a more robotic, analytical standpoint. The ones with me remake it as this dystopian future. So whatever it sees, it will reinterpret as this dystopian future. You're really going to be seeing the fair itself reinterpreted through the lens of these characters.
Peter Bauman: Okay. That's what you mentioned earlier with the style transfer.
Mike Winkelmann: Yeah.
Peter Bauman: I won't keep you much longer, but did you want to say anything about maybe what you're working on now, or what your plans are for next year, the beginning of next year, or anything that you want to talk about?
Mike Winkelmann: Yeah. I mean, this is pretty much working on this. Then again, we have that other event a week later, too. We're pretty well set for the end of the year. Then next year, the Node is opening. Diffuse Control will be at the Node in January. Then the next event after this we're planning is going to be a show, actually, with Shepard Fairey, who is from Charleston here. We're going to be doing a street art-themed show with him, showcasing a bunch of his work and doing a bunch of interactive installations with that. The next couple of months, that's what we'll be smashing on here.
Peter Bauman: Oh, cool. So Diffuse Control will be part of the Node opening in the first part of January.
Mike Winkelmann: Yeah.
Peter Bauman: Okay. Exciting.
Mike Winkelmann: Yeah.
Peter Bauman: No, I appreciate you taking the time.
Mike Winkelmann: If you have any other questions, definitely feel free to give me a shout here.
Peter Bauman: I appreciate it. And good luck. Enjoy the show. Hope it all goes well. And, yeah, thanks again for your time.
Mike Winkelmann: Awesome. Thank you, sir. We'll talk soon.
Peter Bauman: All right. Thanks, Mike. Bye.
Mike Winkelmann: Bye.
