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Alexandra: Hi everybody, thank you for joining us. We'll be starting pretty soon. Great to see some familiar faces in here. I see lots of familiar faces in the audience already. Great to see everyone. Yes, let's get started.
Okay, amazing. Thank you everyone for coming here today. It's an exciting impromptu space to celebrate what has been happening for the past month. So we have the Le Random team, we have the Joyn team, together with the Genuary community and everyone involved on stage.
For those that don't know me, my name is Alexandra. This is probably the third year that I've been supporting and super excited about Genuary. I think the first year we did an interview with Piter. Then the last two years we've been helping to capture all the artworks and turn them into a catalog. So this year we invited Monk Antony for this collaboration. I don't know if you guys have seen his article. If not, I highly recommend reading it. I'm going to pin it. Somebody already pinned it, so you can read it later.
So we have Peter with us, who's going to dive in a little bit more about what Genuary is. But in essence it's a generative art month during which artists create daily pieces according to 31 carefully selected prompts. And I don't know how to code, so first and foremost I want to say wow, guys. The art has been absolutely incredible. To me it feels like magic. I am really looking forward to it. I am looking forward to learning more about your experience today.
I also have with me Andrea. Andrea has been working with us at Joyn for a very long time. She leads our community. She's an active Twitter space host. So maybe, Andrea, I'm going to pass on the words to you for a brief introduction about yourself and Joyn, and then we can move along with everyone else.
Andrea: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Alex. And hello to everybody here. Hope everyone's having a great day so far. For those who don't know me, my name is Andrea. I'm grateful to be able to work alongside her. She is amazing. So on top of that, I'm also an artist in the space. I've been with Joyn since the beginning, since day one actually. And essentially, Joyn's mission is to empower creators first and foremost to earn a living doing what they love, while also having full control over their career. And so I'm really excited to be here. I very much look forward to the conversation that we have today.
thefunnyguys: But yeah, so Le Random. I co-founded Le Random last year together with my friend Zach, who is also in the audience. The goal of Le Random is to become a first of its kind digital generative art institution. All of us at Le Random are very passionate about the generative art movement, and we hope to propel it forward, or at least to contribute to the best that we can.
And on a daily basis I have the pleasure to work with Conrad, who is currently hosting from Le Random's account. Conrad also goes by Nemocake, and together with Conrad I'm building out our collection at Le Random. And Peter is our content person. But yeah, thanks everyone for being here, and I'm excited to talk about Genuary. A fantastic month for generative art. Thank you everybody for joining.
Peter Bauman: So I'm Peter Bauman, Monk Antony. I do the content at Le Random. And I also wrote a little piece earlier today that was put on Joyn, curating my 10 favorite prompts from Genuary and sharing a few thoughts on those 10 prompts.
So, great event, Genuary. It's one of my favorite parts of the year and one of my favorite months of the year because of it. It's perfect because now today is February 1st. We're out of it. We can finally take a step back and look over and reflect and pay homage to all the great art we've seen over the last 31 days.
Thank you, Joyn and Le Random, for explaining everything and for introducing yourselves so far. I think it's more than enough time that we hear from the artists. So maybe we can start with you, Piter. Piter is a generative artist. He started working in the demo scene in 1998. And he's also been the lead organizer of Genuary since 2021. So Piter, can you tell us any more about yourself and introduce yourself, please?
Piter Pasma: Well, sure. You already mentioned the most important parts. So I'm a generative artist from the Netherlands. And before I knew it was called generative art, a long time ago, I was involved in the demo scene, which is some sort of version of generative art, except it's a bit more competitive. And there are demo parties where competitions are held, live coding and size coding. It's a demonstration of the programmer's skills.
But this is not about the demo scene. This is about Genuary. Genuary is a concept that first happened in 2021. The idea sort of floated during October of 2020. There is this other yearly event called Inktober, which is for drawing and graphical artists, to follow 30 prompts because there's 30 days in October. And some other generative artists were trying to do these prompts, but with code art. They were having a bit of a hard time because a lot of the prompts were a little bit figurative. A prompt like clouds is cool for code art, but one of them was outpost. I mean, you can probably make something, but anyway.
So we thought, hey, what if we make Inktober, but for code art? And I figured it was about three months before January, and Genuary and January sound pretty much the same. So that was a pretty obvious name for it. I think some people already thought of this name some years before, but they didn't actually organize it.
And together with the help from lots of people from the GenArt Club and artists in general, I put together a website and 31 of the prompts for 2021, and promoted it all over several social media. And it was a success. The next year it was an even bigger success. And the third year, even Daniel Shiffman did Genuary. And this year it's just continuing to be, like you say, a celebration of generative art.
And I'm really happy to hear that this is one of your favorites. I'm really always surprised by the feedback I get. I've heard from a lot of people who literally told me, I started generative art during Genuary '21 or '22, or probably '23 and '24 as well. But I haven't heard as much from them yet. And just people who tell me it's inspiring, or how they got to know the generative art community. It's a bit of work putting it together every year, but definitely worth it.
Peter Bauman: Thank you. Thank you so much, Piter. And maybe we can move on to Ella. Could you please tell us a bit about yourself? I mean, I think your outputs really stood out to me when I was curating some of these. I think you were really good at writing code art for the article. So could you please tell us more about yourself?
Ella: Yeah, of course. That is so sweet. That's really great to hear. I mean, I'm not really sure what to say. I'm a generative artist. I've been doing generative art for like a decade, since I was a teenager. And yeah, I just have always loved code art. And I've participated in Genuary. I think this is my third. I think I participated in the first year, but only in a very minimal way. This is always such a joy.
And I am a big fan of just working under restrictions, just as a general artistic practice. I think it's a really great way to spur new ideas, to just arbitrarily adopt some restriction. And so I think having prompts for an entire month is just such a fantastic creative tool. And it's so, so wonderful to see all the stuff that everybody else creates.
Peter Bauman: Thank you. And yeah, I love that point about the power of restrictions. I mean, people like Harvey Rayner and lots of really interesting people have talked about that before. But maybe we could bring on Darien. Darien, can you please tell us a bit about yourself? I honestly, Darien, probably could have included your work for every day that I talked about, for all 10. I really liked your outputs this month as well. So can you tell us a bit more about maybe your journey this month and yourself?
Darien Brito: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the invite. Happy to be here with fellow artists and you all, guys and girls and people and everybody.
Well, a little bit about myself. I'm a creative coder and audiovisual artist. I have a background in music, so I started doing algorithmic art for music, for sound, sound synthesis and algorithmic composition. And since then I have been using algorithms to make my work. And I work as a freelancer as well, doing all sorts of technical and artistic work for different media, mostly in the artistic sector. That is theater, opera, music related things, or it could be also just visual art.
And my journey this month was quite difficult to be able to do all the prompts, because I had family visiting. So I had to really restrict the hours I could work on every prompt. I had a bit more time last year, but it was quite a nice challenge to kick off this year, as probably most of you know. Usually after holidays most of you feel it's very hard to get back right into work. So this practice helps a lot to do that.
And indeed, like Ella mentioned, I think it's a great way to trigger ideas, to get a bit out of the comfort zone and to just play with things you normally wouldn't put out there because they are not polished enough, or you didn't have enough time to finish them or work on them. I think it's quite liberating for us to work a little bit in the same way that we used to work before this whole NFT thing started. A lot of the fellow creative coders I know, we used to do things like these just for fun, posting things randomly, sketches. Now it became a bit more serious because there's a bit more pressure, I guess, or more eyes on us as artists as to what we're supposed to be doing. So it's quite liberating and fun to get back into that.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, and I think that joy really comes across, and getting the insight into that process is something that I also really love about Genuary. And then the last artist that is joining us today as a speaker, for now, but again we'd love to hear from more, is Ahmad Moussa, or Gorilla Sun. He is a community leader in the space. He does a lot of videos and newsletters. And he was around for every day in Genuary, even if he had to make it up later. And I really enjoyed lots of his outputs as well. Ahmad, please tell us a bit more about yourself.
Ahmad Moussa: Hey everyone, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, thanks for the really nice introduction. So my name is Ahmad and I make generative art and write about it under the alias Gorilla Sun. I haven't been doing it as long as some others, but it's quickly become the main thing that I love and occupy my time with over the past years, and it's my main interest in life right now.
“I think it's quite liberating for us to work a little bit in the same way that we used to work before this whole NFT thing started.” — Darien Brito 12:12
And this is the third Genuary that I participate in, and every year it's just become more and more fun, and seeing that the community is growing quickly. And it's just such a great opportunity to learn new things and of course connect with other people in the community. And to me, what I love about Genuary is that it's more about the creative interpretation of the individual prompts rather than the technical or aesthetic aspects of the artworks. Of course those are bonuses and can impress as well, but to me at least they're not in the foreground.
Some of the prompts are very specific, some are kind of open ended, and it's always surprising to see how people interpret them and what they create and do with them. Sometimes after I finish my stuff and post it and look at some of the other creations, I think to myself, oh, I could have interpreted that way. And that's always really nice. I mean, I made an entire list of things, a list of reasons why I love Genuary, but I'm going to keep it brief for now. And yeah, thank you for having me, and thanks for hosting this space.
Alexandra: Thank you all, guys, for joining us. It's a pleasure to have you here. Maybe we can start by asking you guys some questions. First of all, maybe for you, Piter. How has Genuary changed over the last few years, especially with the introduction of NFTs? It seems like the generative art space has changed a lot in the last years. Do you also feel a very explicit impact on Genuary as a project?
Piter Pasma: That's a great question. Well, apart from the impact of NFTs, I was just thinking about what Ahmad described about the prompts being open to interpretation. I remember that the first year some of the prompts were a bit more cryptic and code-based. And for me, the surprising thing happened when I started asking other people for prompts, because I only could come up with like three or something at first, at least. And my idea was, it's going to be Inktober, but for code. So the prompts have got to be code and code-based and stuff like that.
And then people started suggesting all sorts of different types of prompts, like very vague ones, or about generative artists, or even non-generative artists. And I did make a new rule that if we're going to do in the style of some artist, I don't want to do that with living artists, because I feel like I would have to ask them if it was all right if suddenly a whole generative art scene starts doing their style.
And yeah, so that's a few things. And I'm really happy for this variety, because it automatically was clear to me that, oh yeah, Genuary should be about all these things and not just my ideas about code art, because that's just going to limit whoever gets to enjoy it.
And as far as the NFT space goes, well, I've always tried to get Genuary open for people who like NFTs and don't like NFTs, because there are still a bunch of people that don't like NFTs and still like Genuary. Especially the Reddit community, r/generative. They really don't like NFTs. But we still post about Genuary there.
Yeah, it was a funny thing, because the first Genuary was just before NFTs really started kicking off with Art Blocks and Hic et Nunc. And it felt like it came just in time to pull the generative art communities together, to get to know each other before this kind of huge thing started to happen. Yeah, because I think that with NFTs thrown in the mix, it's become increasingly important for artists to talk to each other and share their experiences, and not in particular publicly on Twitter, but just as a business practice. I don't say that Genuary is for that, but in hindsight I was happy that the first Genuary happened and I got to know a lot more generative artists through that just before NFTs took off.
And yeah, apart from that, I don't think that, actually the second Genuary NFTs were already there. And we did something with fxhash, I think, or not. No, no, no. That was the year after that. Yeah, last year we had a special thing with fxhash, and I didn't ask them about it this year. I think we were all busy with other things. But yeah, so NFTs exist and Genuary exists.
Alexandra: Yeah, that's really, I know the challenge. And I think we saw that in the last couple of years, like all the hate people are sharing, but one step at a time, one step at a time. And I think everyone is doing such a great job at showing how much creativity there is, and it's not like a cash grab. And we've seen so much experimentation enabled by blockchain that I hope we will see more really creative and talented coders coming into the space.
Fun fact, there were almost 5,000 artworks made for this edition of Genuary, which is insane. I don't know. Has anyone on stage completed every day? I don't know if Piter counts.
Darien Brito: Oh, I think I did. I think I did.
Piter Pasma: Half of them.
Alexandra: Oh, Darien, you have? Really?
Piter Pasma: Yeah, there's definitely people.
Darien Brito: Yeah, yeah. I did all of them.
Alexandra: That's crazy. I see Ahmad did as well. Well, hey, guys, among the speakers who participated, I would love for you to share which ones were your favorite. It's a challenge. But maybe, Ella, we start with you, and then Darien, Piter and Ahmad.
Ella: Yeah, sure. I think I had a couple favorites. Day one, lots and lots of particles, was a super fun prompt. There's a special place in my heart for particle systems. I've always loved those as a medium. And it was a really, really fun opportunity to try out something I'd had on my mind for a while. So that was super cool.
And then also the one kilobyte day. I'm normally pretty resistant to minifying code. I don't like that particular restriction a lot of the time. But for this day, I decided it'd be worth a shot. And I tried to squeeze as much as I possibly could out of that one kilobyte. And it was pretty fun. So I think those are my two favorite days.
Darien Brito: Okay, I can go next. Well, there's two ways I could say it. There are the ones I liked to do the most, and the ones I liked more as a guideline, because sometimes I like the guideline but my experiment was not successful, so I didn't like to make it. But maybe I'll say the ones I liked to make. So it was particles as well. I also enjoyed pretty much to do the screensaver one. I enjoyed pretty much to do skeuomorphism, because it's something that was quite hot in the generative art talk, everybody talking about skeuomorphism and its value from the artistic point of view. And I also liked a lot the one about signed distance functions, although most of the things I did already use signed distance functions and the other shaders, because I use that the most, so it felt pretty natural.
Ahmad Moussa: For me it was the prompt number 26, grow a seed. And that's because it was an idea that evolved over the course of Genuary. One big topic that I was interested in exploring was these pixelized artworks. I started the first prompt reinterpreting Pixelfool's style, and then I did a lot of stuff with pixels. And then I discovered that something that I wasn't doing before, I could do it in a different way. And that was in grow a seed, where I did these kind of pixelized plants that grow and occupy the canvas. Yeah, it got shared. I wanted to share it but I had no idea how to do it. But if you watch the video you can see those kinds of plants grow. And I was so happy when I saw these shapes on the canvas. And yeah, that's my favorite one.
Piter Pasma: So yeah, my favorite Genuary prompts. Well, I didn't do all of them, because I did all of them last year and it felt like a bit much. I think half of them is a little bit not so many, so we'll go in between next year.
The one I liked, yeah, I liked the day four, pixels, a lot, because I thought to myself, let's make pixels from something that isn't pixels. And I created the Genuary logo using scribbles on my plotter. All the scribbles were squares so they would look pixelated. And I had a lot of fun with that. And I don't use my plotter often enough for the amount of SVG outputs that I generate. Definitely not.
Another one of my favorites was Islamic art, which was super cool. When we were talking about the prompts, this one already stood out to me, because Melissa Wiederrecht shared a lot of really, really cool articles and books and theory about the shapes of how Islamic art is designed. And there's so much theory to it. I really look forward to diving back into that someday, because the one that I made, at first sight it kind of looked like one, but if you read all those papers it's not really proper, correct everywhere. But that doesn't matter. I had a lot of fun that day. I think those were my favorites.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that's a great point to bring up, Melissa, because she was somebody who had a lot of great prompts this month and I invited her to join me on the...
thefunnyguys: I have a question for the artists. You just mentioned, Peter, that Melissa contributed some really good prompts to Genuary. When I look at the prompts, it really stands out to me that there's so much variety between them. Some are really short, some are really long, some are very descriptive, others are not. And I do wonder if any of the artists has a theory on what makes a good prompt for Genuary.
Piter Pasma: Well, I did actually, I had one. So I threw out a call for prompts within the GenArt Club community, and I got about 260 or something suggestions. And after that, someone helped me. I don't know if he's on Twitter, but he made a voting website so everybody could vote. And I picked the top 31. And so that is the process. And also the reason why the prompts came a bit last minute, because it's always a bit more work than you think it would be.
So, the other thing is I had one request, mainly for both when suggesting prompts and when voting for them. I asked people to vote for something that they would like to explore on a day in Genuary, even if they wouldn't have time. Just imagine that you have time. But don't vote for something just because you'd like to see somebody else do it. Like, oh, it would be cool thing or this hilarious thing. Those wouldn't be the best prompts, in my opinion. So that was my only suggestion, as far as I remember.
Conrad House: I think I have one question. And I think it's going to be applied to anybody. And it's kind of a tangential question to what we've already talked about. But we always mentioned constraints. In general with generative and computer art, there's already a lot of constraints you have to deal with when developing software. And then with Genuary, we just stack on these constraints even more. Was there any particular prompt that was exciting in terms of emergence, where you went in not expecting much, or something that you weren't too familiar with, but after you messed with it for a few hours you came out the other end with something that you're really surprised with? This is kind of open ended to anybody that might have an experience with one of these prompts.
Peter Bauman: Just to add to that, if anyone in the audience wants to speak or has a thought about this. I see Ivan puts his hand up.
Ivan: Yeah, hello, folks. And thank you for this wonderful event. My favorite prompt was eight by eight. Well, there were different numbers for each person, and that was a fun joke. But I decided to make it using Chladni patterns, and I had a lot of experience. And yeah, it was really interesting to simulate waves spreading from the center using cellular automata. Then I used particles that were jumping on the surface according to waves. So I made a kind of eight by eight grid. And I didn't expect...
We had a call with Ella and Piter and we were playing with this result. Piter suggested using a non-linear function for the coefficient of springs of this cellular automata. So it led to an unexpected result, and we saw unusual particles emerging from these jumping particles. And yes, it was quite interesting and inspiring.
Conrad House: Yeah, thanks for jumping in, Ivan. I think that speaks to that communal effect of sharing ideas and building on what you never even knew you could experiment with, until you hear some other input. And then Darien, I think you had some response you wanted to add for maybe the emergence of an algorithm or a prompt.
Darien Brito: Oh yeah, yeah. I wanted to say that it was pretty common for me that I would usually start with a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. I usually did all the prompts like this, thinking and deciding and sticking to the plan. Absolutely. Even if it will lead to nowhere at the beginning, I stick to this idea.
But one that went completely tangential to what I started with, and just kind of happened, is the one I did for day 23, which also happens to be 16 by 16, the same that Ivan mentioned. For me it was about, yeah, I was trying to do something with grids that will not look like a grid, but still was quite obviously based on it. And I came up with something that became like a super-serial. And it just clicked, and then I started to do these beautiful patterns that I quite enjoy. So I wouldn't say emergence in the same sense as it is with cellular automata, or even with flocking, which we also did on day 19, but it's more like an unexpected result that happened.
thefunnyguys: Thank you, Darien. And Ivan, thanks for sharing this. I do have another question. Maybe I can point this one at Ahmad and Ella. I do wonder, as an artist, when you go into Genuary and you execute all these prompts for an entire month, at the end of the month does it have a lasting impact on your practice? Do you take away certain ideas you want to explore further down the road? Or is it just at the end of the month you forget about what you did during Genuary and you go back to your old routine?
Ella: For me, it certainly doesn't just go away at the end of the month. Several of the things that I made during Genuary I've continued to explore, and I think probably will turn into a long form piece at some point. And even the second prompt, the no palette day, that was actually something like doing fully generative palettes. That was a problem I'd been interested in for a long time. And so I integrated that prompt into a project I was already working on, and used the day to explore something I was already super interested in. So for me, Genuary is definitely not just a one month thing that I do and then forget about. It really, really fits into my whole artistic practice, I think.
Ahmad Moussa: Yeah, I'm just going to piggyback onto that. It's the same for me. All of the ideas that I work on throughout Genuary, they're something that I want to explore further in the coming weeks. And I actually still have those folders from Genuary '22 and '21. And some of those then later turned into bigger projects. And yeah, some of the ideas, I don't know, you surprise yourself with how well they turn out, even when you didn't expect it in the first place. And yeah, definitely I will work on them more in the coming weeks.
thefunnyguys: Okay, nice. I'm excited to see what's coming. I'm excited to see what comes out of the Genuary inspiration.
“So for me, Genuary is definitely not just a one month thing that I do and then forget about.” — Ella 34:33
Yeah, maybe I can ask another question. In the last year, AI art creation tools have really gained notoriety and have had a bigger impact on the generative art space. And I do wonder, because it seems very focused on procedural generative art in Genuary, maybe this is something for you, Piter. As one of the organizers, where do you fit AI within Genuary? Do you think there's a significant role for it? Do you want to see more prompts in the future that also talk about AI? Yeah, just curious to hear your thoughts here.
Piter Pasma: Well, AI is a very broad thing, of course, what you can do. There are a few. Well, one notable mention has to be, of course, Claus Wilke, who I think completed every Genuary prompt this year using some kind of AI, mostly image generating. He asked me before the month if it was okay if he was going to do that, not taking Genuary entirely seriously.
And then Sable Raph, who did a speed run of Genuary on Twitch a couple days ago, I believe. And he used ChatGPT broadly to generate code for him, just to complete the prompts, or at least something that technically satisfies the prompts, as quickly as possible. So I think those two approaches are a lot of fun.
When it comes to purely image generation AI, I think, well, people have to do what they like. If they want to do Genuary prompts with image generation, have at it. But I don't think I'm going to accommodate less procedural types of prompts in the coming years, because, well, first of all, it's just not where my interest lies. And also, I believe that if you're looking for imagery prompts, Inktober already exists, and they're great prompts. And you can do those, and they'd be a lot more suitable for image generation. Maybe not quite as interesting, but that just depends what you, yeah, what you make. It's a challenge to set for yourself.
And yeah, who knows where AI is going? It's still getting better at code, so I'm still at the point where, well, I haven't really tried Copilot myself yet, but it seems, I don't know. I don't use AI to help me code, but I'm thinking about it, though. I'm not against it. And at some point it will get even better at coding. And who knows what strange stuff will lie ahead in the future. But that's for everything and not just Genuary, I think.
Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah. It's so unpredictable these days. And I think that is, I guess, part of the beauty of it all.
I wanted to see also, this is, I guess, a question to everyone, but it's curious. With Genuary, most of the focus is on artists. Do collectors have a role, or any role, or should they get out of the way? Have they tried to approach you or participate themselves? Is it a consideration you ever thought of, to get them involved?
Darien Brito: I personally, like I mentioned at the beginning, I really like that there's no involvement whatsoever from anybody except from us just having fun, just sharing stuff, commenting, taking it really chill, not so serious. I think that's what makes it so liberating and so much fun to follow. If there start to be this idea of collectors, and you start to have second thoughts of what you have to put out, that blocks creativity a lot. And I think the limitations of the prompts is already liberation enough for us to explore within a bound that we usually don't have. So I think it's way better to not have anything inside than just the creativity we can come up with on the month.
Conrad House: Yeah, I think, I guess coming from more of a collector standpoint, I agree with what Darien says a lot. I think it's really important that artists have this kind of free experimentation, to not have to worry about if it's going to sell or not. And I think, as a collector, it can still be a really useful resource to learn a lot about algorithms and different types of algorithms that different artists use, and different ways they implement them.
And if you really are super adventurous, maybe even try some yourself, look up some coding tutorials. If there's a prompt that you think you have an idea for, go and try it. I think it can teach you a lot about programming, and can teach you a lot about how you want to collect and what you want to collect. So I think it's hugely educational to collectors to maybe dive into it, not just for collecting, but just for educational purposes.
“If there start to be this idea of collectors, and you start to have second thoughts of what you have to put out, that blocks creativity a lot.” — Darien Brito 40:54
Alexandra: Yeah, no, definitely. For me as an individual, Genuary really helps me to find new emerging talents in the generative art space. And I'm actually curious if any of you have discovered a new artist during last month, someone that you didn't know about before, but that did impress you during this month.
Ahmad Moussa: I'll jump in on that. He's not new to me, but someone that really impressed me was Nicholas Daniel, I think. He made all of the prompts, like 31 for 31. And there was this one prompt, the also number 23, I think, I'm not sure, but it was these dueling ping pong balls. And that entire thing escalated quickly, with a lot of other people covering the idea as well. And that's sort of this entire backstory to the prompt. So he was definitely an inspiration and I'm going to have a closer eye on him in the future.
Conrad House: Yeah, I like that. Sorry, I said Adam. Maybe on top of that, this is also not a new artist, but I think someone that did Genuary in a cool way was Raphaël. He's very often a Twitch streamer that showcases technical deep dives into algorithms. And he did a Genuary speed run where he spent about an hour and a half going through each of the prompts and creating something as fast as he can. And I think it's really interesting just to see the insight of how some of these coders think, and different tools that they use to speed up processes. And it really gives you a quick overview of every algorithm and every prompt in a short manner. So if anyone has a chance, it's really worth a watch to go look back at it.
Alexandra: Is it something we can pin to the space?
Conrad House: Yeah, let me find it. I'll pin it to the top of the tweet.
Alexandra: Yeah, sounds great. For people joining, I think I ended on Gorilla Sun, but I've been sort of trying to pin. And if any other speakers would like to pin some of the creations you're proud of or some of your favorites. The thing is, unfortunately hashtags on Twitter, they disappear after some time. So that was another motivation for us to start recording them. So you can actually check out the 2023 catalog as well. So there's 2024, but there's also 2023.
But coming back to what Darien was saying, it's about discovery. And I think Jan made a similar point, that maybe for collectors it's not just a monetary incentive. It's also a discovery incentive. And I think, Monk, you also felt that and wrote about this, that even through writing this article you discovered some new artists that maybe before you haven't seen. And sadly, I don't see similar initiatives of this scale. I think as close as it felt was when objkt was doing all these different OBJKT4OBJKT things. So that was the last time I remember discovering so much and being able to, I guess, also collect it.
But I was wondering, though, I think we're also approaching the end of the hour. So, final questions. Final question for me. I know this is your third edition, Piter. But if you could do things differently, or if you could introduce something new for next year, and I mean anything, like, I don't know, having Vitalik join for a hackathon, or have an in-person hackathon, or absolutely anything, what would your ideal Genuary 2025 be?
Piter Pasma: Oh, that's an awesome question. I have literally never thought about this. I was always happy that Genuary is just getting the prompts and the website ready and tweeting about it. But if I could do anything, doing it, and that would be fun. I don't know what Vitalik would add to Genuary, but he's definitely welcome. Promote it, I don't know. It'll probably do some good if he pointed at it.
But yeah, I was thinking for myself, maybe I keep thinking this way, and also when I see other people stream, I should just record more videos. Like I've done a couple last year. This year I wrote an article for the Wobbly Function Day. But I figure I can just hit record when I'm coding and talk about it. It's not that hard. But I never really get around to it, because I'm too busy coding and then I forget.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, thank you so much for that, Piter. And one maybe last thought I wanted to close with was, how can we build momentum from this month and continue it for the rest of the year? So we've had this amazing month. We've had all this discovery. We've had all these artists making this great work. And this is open for anybody. How can we continue this forward through the rest of 2024 and carry forward this great momentum from this month?
Piter Pasma: Well, if I can say one thing one more time, I think a lot of people are already doing that, in the sense that, I think Ella mentioned it already, but I've heard from at least 10 different people, like, this project started during Genuary. So if you do Genuary, one of the prompts is bound to inspire you to an extent that you can just continue working on it and turn it into a finished project, be it long form, or maybe one-of-ones, or something entirely different.
Darien Brito: Yeah, I would like to think, besides the obvious, obviously putting it into a productive way, putting a collection out or something like that, I would like to think that part of the charm of it would be that we as creatives also reflect, after resting of course, because it has been quite exhausting, and reflect a bit on the technique we use. Maybe spread out a little bit of the knowledge that we develop doing the things. Perhaps it's good to write a little blog or something. I think that could be very helpful also for people who maybe feel a bit intimidated to start with. Or even for us, it's very handy to remember what we did and to build on that.
Alexandra: I think that's a wonderful ending, because that's exactly what Monk has been doing this week. I mean, by the way, everyone is welcome. If you want to write a blog, you can actually do the same thing as Monk. The benefit was that on Joyn you can bookmark pieces. So instead of having to add every time a reference, like a link to the piece, tag the artist, upload the image to your blog, you can just save it and drag and drop when you're writing. So if you see anything in the catalog that you like, just hit save. Click compose and you can create your showcase as well. Happy to help anyone. I think there's no fees involved. Obviously, this is just for us to document. Hopefully for next year, a reference point, if we want to attract more artists trying this.
Before we wrap up, then, I'll also pass on the words to you, Monk.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I can. Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody, for listening. I mean, this has been such a great month. We love it. Le Random loves it. Thank you, Joyn, for co-hosting this space with us, and for all the great artists. Piter, all that you do, your work leading this month and the rest of the 11 months of the year, is amazing. All you artists out there who spent the last 31 days frantically finishing prompts, take a break. Have a rest in February. And thank you all so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.
Piter Pasma: And Joyn and Alexandra and Jan and Monk Antony, because your questions and hosting this was absolutely great. It's wonderful that you put this together. Thanks so much.
Alexandra: Thanks, Piter. Looking forward to next year.
Piter Pasma: Thank you, guys.
Alexandra: Thanks, everyone, for participating. See you soon.
Peter Bauman: See you soon. Awesome. Thank you, everybody.
