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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone and welcome to this Le Random podcast. It's our second as a team of 2025. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random. And today I'm joined by thefunnyguys, the co-founder and CEO of Le Random, and Conrad House, the Collection Lead. Today we're looking back at the first quarter of 2025. We're going to look at the big picture takeaways from the quarter, what some of our favorite artists and exhibitions were and basically what we enjoyed, but also what we noticed and what might need some more investigation from the quarter. It's a really interesting chat. We're really excited to share it. Let's begin.
Let's start with the first issue that we're going to discuss today. It's something that I think has been growing and getting louder in this first quarter of 2025. It's always been present, but the noise is getting louder. It's these visceral fears in this growing issue of ethics and AI. It's largely a response from artists, or at least framed on behalf of artists. It doesn't always seem to include the artists that are benefiting from the technology. At worst, the way it's presented is that generative AI is just insta-plagiarism. You press a button and out comes stolen copyrighted content. At best, some superficially appealing slop. It's really quick to dismiss when it's reduced to those terms.
Obviously there are some good points that they raise. Generative AI does rely on copyrighted material, pirated content in some circumstances. That's been proven. There are issues with scraping and artist consent, not only from images but from a tech standpoint. And there's a lot of legal gray areas that are being tested by these big companies. They're pushing these limits of these legal gray areas and it's being determined whether or not they've breached those limits from a legal perspective.
What's most worrying is that the ultimate winner seems to be Silicon Valley and these big tech companies like OpenAI. They're the winner when they're just extracting all of this data and content and talent from artists. It doesn't seem fair superficially, right? They also just say that things like fair use is essentially stealing. Their argument goes that it's so morally tainted that it shouldn't even be touched. Their argument mixes a lot of moral absolutism, a lot of loaded language. Again, they call it just this insta-plagiarism machine and it removes a lot of the nuance from the discussion.
Then there's also this conflation of legal and ethical claims. That's when they make a jump between something that they find maybe morally unpleasant. They equate that with something with legal certainty. What we do know, if anything, in regards to legality, is that there's only uncertainty, in that we don't know whether or not things like fair use can be constituted as theft at this point.
There's also just the generalization of the tech industry motives. Silicon Valley is this monolith, this extractive monolith. But what this does is ignore a lot of the history of the development of generative AI and these deep generative models that goes back to Canada and Montreal and Toronto and NYU. So there's this rich academic and foundational history with Hinton and LeCun, where all these big breakthroughs came, especially in deep generative learning in the last 20 years. They came far from Silicon Valley.
So the main point is that once you take care to start understanding the tech in a more deep way, some of the main arguments that they have, the transformative argument, when you're talking about n-degree latent space, it's almost impossible to really understand the degree to which a lot of this is transformed and it isn't just direct plagiarism. So, yeah, there's a lot of gray area. There's a lot of room for discussion and that's exactly what I want to hear from you guys. So what do you guys think about the louder and louder voicing of moral concerns and AI in this first quarter?
Conrad House: I think you hit it pretty on the dot, Peter, but it's something that's super complex. It's something that's super nuanced. And it's more than ever something that's more gray area than anything else, and specifically the legality of it all. But I think it's definitely coming to a rise with people like the New York Times coming out and suing OpenAI, and that's going to be hitting the courts and seeing what is resolved from that. I think that is going to start playing out.
Yeah, you're right. Some people that have arguments against AI can't really point to a specific penal code and be like, well, they're breaking this law right here. Are they using fair use wrongly due to this reasoning? I think a lot of arguments that they have will become more resolved in the next five to 10 years as court systems resolve some of these issues. Who knows, maybe even in five to 10 years there's a new tool or a new model that is using some type of new technology that arises new moral issues that they're going to have to fight against. It's almost like this issue that the technology is moving faster than the courts could ever move to resolve any of this debate, which is a big issue.
But at least to me, I think it always comes down to the way that the tool is being used. A lot of the debate is with regards to visual art and visual artists, but OpenAI is a lot more, and a lot of these AI models are a lot more than just text to image. It's text to text. So we have authors and writers being scraped and their copyrighted work being plagiarized to some degree, and programmers being plagiarized with their code being scraped. And anybody can be a coder now. Anybody can be an artist now. Anybody can be a writer now is the term.
And I think there's definitely arguments on both sides that I can agree with, but it's always tough to see what exactly is correct. But at least to me, it's always coming down to a determinant factor of how it's being used. And we see a lot of what the Christie's AI auction with artists being berated by people online, and maybe they aren't always berating the right people, because sometimes these artists that you're berating are artists that aren't even using these black boxed corporate models. They're actually training their own. So the complexity of the technology that you mentioned, Peter, you really have to dive into it to understand it, to understand the ways people are using it, to make a better, I think, informed decision on what you think is right and wrong. But yeah, I think that's what it's always going to come down to for me, is how it's being used.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, I want to totally echo what you say there, Conrad. I think a lot of the criticism talks about AI art, but it doesn't necessarily acknowledge all the nuances within the AI art category. Sure, some artists, they may be using these large text-to-image models, and maybe in their prompts they are referencing existing artists. That might be happening. We don't know for sure. But I think specifically with this Christie's auction, the curation was actually done really well. I would say most of the artists, if not all of them, they use their own training data, they train their own models. There are no artists being ripped off by the artists in the Christie's auction, as far as I'm concerned.
There is a larger societal issue where big tech or companies like OpenAI reap all the benefits from generative AI and there's no value being redistributed to the creators of the training data. I think that is just a fact. And it would be really interesting to see these big companies at least try to redistribute some of the value, because they all talk about AGI and how AI will be able to do anything for humans and human labor as it exists today and knowledge work will be a thing of the past. But to get people excited by this future, I think you also need to paint a picture of how humans will still manage to survive. At the moment, none of that is being done by big tech.
But I do think there's some really interesting experiments that are being done by artists. Earlier this quarter I went to The Call by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. And there was some super interesting discussions between lawyers, between the curator, between someone from the company of Holly and Mat, Spawning, where they discussed a number of experiments to redistribute some of this created value to the creators of the original training data. Art can really be a fantastic playground for these new models of social coordination. In an artistic practice you can show it as a one-off. You can try to go from zero to one and create this... The way they did it was create this data trust that basically aggregates the rights. If someone wants to use that training data, value would be redistributed to this collective. I think what they were doing is really fascinating. They try it out on a one-off basis. If it works, if it has potential, they can try to scale it through the company, Spawning.ai.
To me it's interesting that Mat Dryhurst is being attacked by some of these people, while he's one of the very few in the world who is actually trying to create new social coordination mechanisms. We need more of these experiments. A lot of the critique doesn't necessarily come forward with alternatives for social coordination.
“Art can really be a fantastic playground for these new models of social coordination.” — thefunnyguys 8:24
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think what both of you bring up is that equating generative AI with only these large commercial models is just an oversimplification. And there are things going back to VAEs, variational autoencoders and GANs. More than 10 years ago, artists started using these deep generative models that had, again, nothing to do with Silicon Valley, nothing to do with pressing a button and plagiarism. These were all bespokenly trained models.
And then also, Conrad, I think what you were talking about, artists are not only using text to image. I think that's a really big point, that this is coming for everything. It's text to image, it's text to text, it's text to video, it's text to audio. Because of that, Le Random has been pulled into that, because our content has been scraped. We can say with some degree of likelihood, I think, that our content has been scraped. We know how it feels. It doesn't always feel right to have that done without having any say, and that it just happens and you can't really stop it. Yeah, it doesn't feel right. We definitely understand that having your work scraped in a non-consensual way feels invasive and it feels wrong. It can feel morally wrong. We understand that perspective literally from a first-hand stance.
That's why it's important to think about this more from a place of moving forward. That's what Jan talked about, and people that we really respect in this space, like Mat Dryhurst. What are the actual solutions? How can we actually fix this? Is that going to be some compensation model? Is that going to be some opt-out framework? What are the actual steps that can be taken, as opposed to just saying we cannot and will not use it? I don't know. I think that would be, in 1995, saying, okay, we are never going to use the internet, or in 1965 saying, I'm never going to use a computer. It might not just be possible in the future. It's hard to say. I think a more practical stance is thinking about not just shutting them off, therefore also not realizing any of their benefits, but thinking about how to most ethically and morally work with them moving forward.
Conrad House: Yeah, I think you're completely right. People have the right to feel angry at this non-consensual scraping of their work. It doesn't just hurt when your work is getting scraped. It hurts even more when that scraped data is being used to then have somebody else create some product that they are in some ways claiming as their own, when in reality the basis of that work is yours.
It's interesting to see, or it's pretty telling to see, OpenAI's response to this happening to themselves, when back in November there was the group of AI artists that were invited to work with OpenAI when Sora and newer models came out. In a way they fought back with their manifesto that was entitled "Art in the Cage of Digital Reproduction," where they took this new private model that they had access to with OpenAI and they publicized it. They open-sourced it to Hugging Face and they allowed anybody to come in and start using this model. We saw how fast OpenAI was to attack that and get that taken off the internet and have no access to it anymore. It's in a way almost hypocritical of them to be like, well, we can play by our own rules, and when you try to follow the same rules that we're following, we're going to attack you for it and we're going to take it down, because that just really doesn't make much sense.
I think it also goes to show the power that OpenAI has to be able to enforce these type of restrictions on this technology. If only artists themselves could also, or writers themselves could also, enforce that same type of practicality of taking power in your own work and going to maybe OpenAI and being like, hey, don't scrape Le Random. Having the power to do that, the same power as OpenAI had to go to Hugging Face and be like, hey, take this model off. You don't have rights to this.
I think this goes back to when we talk about the legality issues of this all. It's like, even when these do hit the court or when these do hit maybe political realms, who is going to be lobbying the politicians to decide on what is right and what is wrong? OpenAI has such a huge amount of capital that they could really influence in a lot of ways and probably pave a path that's going to be best for them. The smaller guys that are getting scraped and exploited aren't going to have a say in it all. And I think that's what makes it a bit more scary too, to some degree, and really just trying to find the best path to do this in the morally best way is a very tricky avenue.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think it's important to separate the broader technology like the internet or deep learning with some of the bad actors who might use or leverage that technology for maybe sometimes positive events, but also sometimes negative events, like OpenAI. Yeah, there's obviously lots of issues. I mean, there's been a mass exodus of employees. There's been an employee letter that was signed by hundreds of OpenAI employees, including Alec Radford, who we've written about. So we are certainly not advocating for this work to not be critically examined, but to just lump it all together is lazy.
thefunnyguys: I think what makes it so difficult, also for creators, to take a stance on this is that AI is so polyvalent. It can do so many things. Sure, it can maybe recreate art or images in your style as an artist. But at the same time, it might also help a collector or a visitor to a museum to take a picture of your work and recognize that it's yours. For example, for you, Peter, when you write an article, AI can also distribute your content and it can acknowledge that you are the creator of this article. Yeah, that's, I think, also the issue that some creators have to deal with. Yes, there's some cons, but there's also pros, and which ones outweigh others. It's not always easy to determine.
And there are some writers, like Tyler Cowen, the economist, who explicitly says that he is writing for the machines. He wants LLMs to train on his work. He wants to be very present in these networks. He wants these ideas to be redirected to him as a person. And I think he's afraid that if he doesn't do that, that he will be to some extent forgotten. He wants his name to show up in the ChatGPT responses. Yeah, I wonder, Peter, for you, as a writer, how do you think about that? Do you also want to be in the training data for these LLMs, or do you prefer to not be scraped?
Peter Bauman: I think that's that important issue of consent. It's important just to be part of the conversation and to be asked. I don't think it's that difficult to envision a scenario in the future where there's optimization, there's SEO for these LLMs and for getting your content higher in terms of the neural network and optimizing for promoting your voice and promoting your influence in the algorithm. So, yeah, I certainly think that that is coming.
And the overall broad point is that the cat is out of the bag to a certain extent. I think we can all agree on that. And so it's more about shaping the future direction of that ball rolling down the hill, or that, I don't know, the cat outside of the bag or whatever, than putting it back in. It's a more practical standpoint to begin the conversation at than cutting it off and never using it, because there might be any number of reasons why that could backfire.
But one area that AI maybe did fall back on, and it helps to point these out too, because this isn't just continual up only. Everything is always just getting better and better every day. But there are some things that have fallen off a bit in AI, and one of those trends is in AI agents. I know that this quarter especially, it seemed like at the beginning of last year they were really gaining and rising in popularity. And then that seems to have crashed this quarter. Or what we've at the very least learned is that they're not ready. What do you guys think about these generative AI agents and their penchant for things like just giving wrong information? Is it that they died this quarter, or is it just that they weren't ready yet?
Conrad House: I don't know if they've died or if they're not ready yet, but I do agree that they are... At least everyone that I've seen has been very low quality. I mean, it comes down to just pure large language model slop that they're producing to some degree nowadays, and misinformation directly, where sometimes you have these market bots that are tweeting these recaps of things, and you look deeper into the actual market data instead of just taking the tweet as 100 percent factual, and you realize, well, how are they even tweeting this? This never happened. This sale never happened. This project never saw this much volume. How is it getting these figures? It makes it really tough to even become trusting of them.
On top of that, at the very surface level, they aren't really providing any additional dialog within the space that's actually beneficial and hasn't been talked about for months or even years already in the space. I think one reference to it is the fxhash price discussion channel, or fxchat, is a better, I think, indicator of market than an AI bot could ever do, because it's just going to spew the same top-of-the-line talking points or top-of-the-line artists that everyone already knows about. And this idea that you could have an AI agent that could do really deep research for you is really enticing. Having something that's super efficient with recognizing data points or recognizing emerging artists or whatever it may be. At this point it seems like we're sacrificing quality for this efficiency, and we're sacrificing a lot of quality in a lot of ways.
And it's also just this idea that these AI agents or even autonomous artists are facades for really poor tech or really poor token hype. They aren't really even in it for the technology. They're in it to pretend to be something that they're not in a lot of ways. And it's a big question that's been brought up, especially around the Botto auction that happens, but not just with Botto, but with all these other autonomous artists, which is really, what is the degree of autonomy with these agents? There's always going to be the analogy of a man behind the curtain that's controlling these levers and pedals and really guiding these agents in a way.
Flynn, for example, was this autonomous artist that was accepted into a university arts program. But what does that even entail? Is this bot agent going to sit in on these university Zoom calls and classes? Then is it going to, after that class, take notes and study those notes and then sign into some university online whiteboard where it has assignments that it has to finish, and it's able to take a final exam? All of that doesn't seem doable in the infrastructure of agents that we have. It still seems like at the end of the day Flynn is going to have to have some human controlling it and guiding it, or maybe uploading an assignment to a ChatGPT thing and asking for the response to that assignment, or giving it some prompt to do some type of artistic project that it has to do.
To me it all seems like what I said before, a big facade to really poor tech, or sometimes even just used to induce a token hype that they can release and create some revenue on some DEXs with it. And it's this idea that the attention spans of the space that we're in are short and everyone is just trying to grasp for the next big thing. Everyone is trying to grasp for the next thing that they can make a few bucks on and not really looking back on, well, what is this actually doing? Is this actually beneficial to what we're trying to create or trying to push forward in the space?
thefunnyguys: Yeah, I'll take the other side of the discussion here. I do agree with you guys. The social agents, the agents that are basically connected to Twitter accounts, they're quite annoying. They're not factually correct. They make way too many mistakes for us to trust them in any regard. I also think a lot of the AI artists being autonomous, I also think that narrative was not actually correct. It was way too early to really claim, in my opinion, that this artist is fully autonomous.
But I do think there are a lot of interesting AI agent applications that do already create value. There's these functional AI agents. For example, all the deep research tools like OpenAI's or Gemini's. I think these are already super useful. They crawl the web, they find information on so many different sources and they aggregate it really nicely in a very insightful way. And even preparing for this podcast, I did ask some of these research tools to summarize the main happenings in digital art in the first quarter of 2025. And I would say maybe half of it was actually interesting. The other half was, I would say, maybe some noise that it picked up on from the internet that wasn't really insightful. But still, it saved me a lot of time. It did bring some interesting talking points forward.
And there's also this company called Sierra AI, which is being helmed by Bret Taylor, the chairman of the board at OpenAI. And they create agents for companies, specifically agents to help with customer service. And I think that's definitely going to be really big. Bret says himself that in 1995 every company needed some type of website strategy. And he believes that now every company needs some type of agent strategy just to assist customers without necessarily requiring human capital. I think that's already quite interesting as of today. That will only get better in the future.
And maybe as a final point, I think agents are also interesting in the context of DAOs. When Vitalik coined the term DAO, I think from the start he talked about automation being at the center and humans being at the edges. But I believe in 2015 that was not really possible. There were still a lot of humans involved, even at the center of the DAO. But now with AI agents, it might actually be possible to automate the center of the DAO to some extent, but still have the humans in charge of the DAO.
And there's one really interesting experiment called Aiden that was launched by Tribute Labs, I think one or two months ago, where basically humans submit projects, like new companies, like new startups that the DAO could potentially invest in. All of this information is then being analyzed by a swarm of agents. And then all of these agents, they also vote on the proposal. And every agent votes from a different perspective. Like one of them may be a marketing expert, another one may be more focused on the financials, or maybe a value investor. But then all of these votes of all these different agents get aggregated for the DAO members. They can use all of this input to then decide, are we actually going to invest in this project or not? And to me it's super interesting. These orchestration layers will only get better over time as the models improve. And as long as the orchestration is there, the models just need to be updated, basically, for the product to become better. I'm actually quite excited about agents, but agreed. At the moment there's a lot of slop.
Peter Bauman: I think your point highlights that integration with protocol art and deep learning systems. And again, it's such a compelling use case for creativity that it's hard to see it going away, or ignoring it being really the solution.
Maybe we can go to that third broad topic that we as a team together wanted to discuss regarding the first quarter of 2025. And we touched on a lot of these things, the negative connotations with AI. A lot of those similar things can be said about NFTs. NFTs was the original scam, the insta-scam, and AI in a lot of ways has taken on the mantle. I'm wondering, we've seen through various moments in 2025 this relationship between NFTs and digital art challenged a bit. And this goes back to this unfinished article that I hope I finish someday called "The Three Body Problem for Art," that is based on Sam Hart's "Three Body Problem for Crypto," which basically just refers to this unstable relationship between technology and markets and crypto due to the lack of regulation. And so I just extend that to the art field.
And it talks about some of the benefits of NFTs. They offer ownership and provenance and autonomy and things like that, but they can also be entangled in speculation and hype. And so focusing on NFTs in general may detract from more meaningful artistic explorations of digital media and networked culture. And so ultimately that piece advocates for more of a stance of integration with institutions rather than this NFT exceptionalism and NFT separatism. And so, yeah, I just wonder what you guys think about that. I think, if anything, this quarter has offered a lot of interesting data points for how you feel about that one way or the other.
thefunnyguys: How I think about it at the moment is that it should definitely never be the start of a conversation. You shouldn't introduce yourself as an NFT artist, or if you're a curator you shouldn't curate a show of NFTs. I think that really typically creates a barrier between the listener or the spectator and the artist or the curator, because people still have a lot of negative connotations to the word NFT. Most people in society, when they think of the word NFT, they think of 2021, when cartoon monkeys were going for millions of dollars.
But as an artist, if you start by introducing your practice by talking about the art and the message, maybe by showing the visual works you're creating, then I do think that if the listener is still interested and you're having a good conversation, you shouldn't shy away from using the word NFT necessarily. Because in the end, if someone is really interested and they want to potentially acquire the work, they need to know it's an NFT. It comes with certain difficulties. They will have to create a crypto wallet. They might have to buy some cryptocurrency. They need to protect their crypto wallet. It's important to acknowledge that it is an NFT in the end, I think. And maybe right now, because there's not much speculation going on, there's not many PFP projects being successful, maybe it's also a good moment to try to reclaim the word to some extent and try to create some positive connotations. But yeah, I'm curious what you guys think about it.
Conrad House: Yeah, I think in general it's still something that... It's a term, at least the term NFT, is something I still try to distance myself from. A direct storyline is whenever we talk to artists that are not within the NFT space, and we're maybe trying to commission work from them that we want tokenized on the blockchain, there's always this split second hesitation or self cringe when I have to bring up the term NFT. So there's a lot of ways you try to avoid it and just maybe refer to it as tokenized art. We're trying to tokenize the art in some ways, because there is a stigma to it.
And I think my distancing from that term is not just from the stigma standpoint, but also I think to some degree that it just doesn't always make sense. I think Dan and Yosi brought this up in a Metaversal podcast recently that I really liked. But the NFT is just the vehicle at which the medium is being presented and shown and transferred in a way. And you wouldn't apply that same concept to other medias. If I wanted to recommend a song or an album to Peter, I wouldn't be like, hey, go listen to this MP3, it's really fantastic. Or if I wanted to show you an image, I wouldn't say, hey, look at this awesome JPEG that I saw. Or even a painting, I wouldn't go to Jan and be like, hey, look at this awesome linen canvas that I saw. It just doesn't make sense when the NFT really isn't a core part of the work. It's just the vehicle at which the work is being presented, or at least transferred within the infrastructure that it lives.
Trying to create a term that better describes the piece of media that you're working with, whether that's, oh, it's a digital tokenized art, and not reducing it down to something that's as simple as NFTs, because even work that we see within the space can't be reduced to that term of just an NFT. It's the idea that the contract is the art sometimes, and the contract is not the art piece in and of itself. It's a contract. It's a blockchain tool that you're using. For example, we talk about maybe like PXLDEX or Infinite Garden by Leander Herzog, where the contract is a tool and the NFTs that are coming from this contract are a part of the greater art piece. It's not the art piece in and of itself. So I think trying to maybe think of a better way of not over-focusing on the tech aspect of it and just calling digital art for what it is. And that's art at the end of the day.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, exactly. I think that wraps up my quarter one takeaways of where my thought has developed on this. My sense is more that I don't feel the need to use the term very much. It feels mostly perfunctory. If you're in the space, you know their uses and their benefits and how easy it is to collect. They can still be interesting on a conceptual level, things like art that take advantage of the certain unique characteristics of Ethereum or blockchains, and work that engages with broader aesthetics or social or political questions that use the blockchain. That is great.
“But the NFT is just the vehicle at which the medium is being presented and shown and transferred in a way.” — Conrad House 30:14
If you're bringing up blockchain, typically how I see it is when it's brought up as a proxy for the market or sales. When that becomes what anybody, and it doesn't even have to be artists, just thought leaders or whatever in the space, tweet about NFTs a lot. I wish they would just move on and talk about something else. Which, hey, maybe that is also what we should do.
thefunnyguys: I do think one issue with using the word NFT too much is also that maybe people will think that when an artist uses blockchain technology, that is the only thing they do. They use an NFT to sell one visual image. With many artists who use blockchain technology, that's not the case. We're going to talk about it later, but PXLDEX by Kim Asendorf, or Cycles by Material Protocol Arts, or Terraforms. If you would just say this artist is creating NFTs, it would only touch maybe 10 percent of the entire project, and you would lose so much conceptual depth by just reducing it to NFTs. So maybe in general it's just better as an artist to say that you use blockchain technology, not necessarily reducing it to NFTs. The term blockchain technology might also have less negative connotations. It might be less of a conversation killer.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it reminds me of something that William Mapan recently said to Leila at Verse. Basically he brings up first that he's a multidisciplinary artist and emphasizes color. Then maybe the very last thing he says is that maybe if they're interested in purchasing the work, even that is when he might mention the NFT. But other than that it's basically perfunctory. I think that is a healthy way to think about it at the end of the first quarter in 2025.
One really interesting example is this exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art called Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms, and it is including some artists who we don't traditionally associate with algorithms. What do you guys think about this really interesting, I think, showcase of artists who typically work with NFTs in an institutional setting?
thefunnyguys: Yeah, it's definitely a very interesting choice for Sam Spratt. First of all, it was really fantastic to see how many collectors, how many spectators deeply connected with Sam's new body of work. I think it was so far in this year definitely one of the big successes, one of the projects that got the most attention. And a lot of people seem to have found deep meaning in the project. And I guess as an artist that's all you can really wish for.
But it was quite surprising, to say the least, to see Sam Spratt being curated in this exhibition, because the title of the exhibition is literally Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms. It's really about algorithms. A lot of the other artists that will be part of the exhibition, like Operator or Sofia Crespo, Vera Molnár, all of them have a very intimate connection with algorithms. They've been using them for a very long time. It's integral to their practice. It's how they express themselves as an artist. They create algorithms.
When Sam speaks, when he talks about this project, I think he really deemphasizes the use of algorithms. He literally says that the project is not... There's no randomness in the project. It's not about algorithms, it's about human connection. Then I do find it quite strange, from a curatorial perspective, to put his art in an exhibition solely dedicated to algorithms, because there's so many artists, hundreds, if not thousands, that have been creating interesting work with algorithms. All of them could have had this spot in this exhibition. But for some reason the curator did land on Sam Spratt. I'm really curious to see why they decided to curate Sam Spratt into the show.
Conrad House: Yeah, I agree. The curatorial vision may... It seems at least a bit confusing, or maybe even a bit misaligned, to include Spratt in that exhibition. But I think a lot of this can mirror what we see in the traditional art world. And at least it's something that's, I think, a bit humorous to me is when NFTs or this entire digital art on the blockchain started taking off, one of the big positive components that everyone kept reiterating was that we can build a new landscape for art. We can build a new landscape in which artists are represented and showcased in a lot of ways. It was really exciting that we can break out of these traditional barriers and traditional rules.
But the more and more the space has developed, the more and more we just gravitated towards those traditional norms, and specifically the cabal influence that the space has, where the powers that can't be seen are really guiding and pushing the space in directions that they see fit, or that the market even sees fit. And it's maybe not always the greatest historical or most fitting exhibitions or artists that we see getting represented all the time. And I think that's also not just a gripe on the space in general, but maybe a gripe we have on the people that are within the space, the collectors that we have, and them falling into this mentality where they have a set of people on Twitter that they really respect, and that anything that these five or 10 Twitter people post about is something that they have to instantly respect, and it's warranted as the greatest thing at that time.
It's a bit, I guess, immature of the space to not spend more time with work and really understand, well, who should be pedestaled at this time and who has been the person that deserves the spot. It's a tricky thing that I find myself grappling with and trying to understand more emotionally why this is happening and exploring it in different ways.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. To sum up, I think what we all have in common in terms of what we think about the show is that it's not a comment on the quality of the work or whether anybody's work should be included in that respect. It's, does the work align with the curatorial thesis? And that's where we feel there might be a disconnect.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, totally. That's a great summary. And I think if that disconnect exists, then his work being included in the show is basically a negative for everyone. It doesn't make sense for the artist to be contextualized in a theme that doesn't fit their practice. The museum probably loses some credibility as well. There's maybe one deserving artist who could have been there who misses out on this opportunity. Yeah.
Peter Bauman: And one more interesting intersection with institutions and blockchains in this quarter that came out is the Metz ArtLynx, which is a really interesting blockchain-based game that didn't really get a lot of hype. They didn't really communicate it very well to the people in the blockchain space. I hope it was communicated better to people outside the space. I'm not sure if it's actually effective and what it's trying to achieve, but at least in terms of that three body problem in art, working towards integrating NFTs in institutions as part of larger long-term solutions where they make sense, I think this is a really interesting example and use case. So happy to see that as a positive example.
And then another positive development that we've seen in 2025 is the reemergence of Manolo. So do you guys want to talk about how exciting that's been?
thefunnyguys: Yeah, sure. So I think Manolo, if I'm correct, he shared his last generative output on December first, 2022, and now he reentered the arena on March first, 2025. So that's more than two years of him not being present. It seems like that was mostly because of how the generative art scene really changed in 2021 and 2022. All the hype and the market noise, it really overwhelmed the generative art community to some extent.
And I think for Manolo, the space having cooled off, there being less hype, is probably a reason that he feels like it's okay again to create generative art. So yeah, that's maybe a positive. Even though the market has been, I guess, mid for a few years, someone like Manolo feels like it's more natural again to create generative art. It's really, really terrific to see him create fantastic outputs like he always did.
Conrad House: Yeah, maybe just to add on that shortly, but yeah, it's great to see him back. And it's always a little treat every morning to wake up and see a new Processing sketch from, I think, one of the greatest people that ever used this system, just on a broad scale and just aesthetic skills. He's always been top of the line and his work is so incredibly pleasing on the eye. Even when he was taking this break of uploading Processing sketches to Twitter, he was still a very creative spirit for anyone that is familiar with his lesser-followed Instagram pages, where he maybe shares a lot of his musical talent, where he plays guitar and sings, or does these hand-drawn sketches, or even is building these little knick-knack machines that he likes to mess with, little plotting machines that he's posted about. But it's just really amazing seeing him go back to the Processing side of his creative spirit and showcase this, because it's always something that's really refreshing to see.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. So one of the other major trends we've seen so far in 2025 is platforms seem to be, the major platforms, the lifeblood of this ecosystem, to a certain extent the gallery world of the space, they seem to be, in general, in a state of flux. And this is something that we talked about in our 2024 and 2025 chat. But it just seems like, if anything, that state of flux has only continued into this first quarter of 2025. Jan, do you want to tell us more about what you've observed from the platform space so far this year?
thefunnyguys: I think for me, maybe the overarching theme is one of anticipation. I think a lot of the main players, they really have come out with big announcements. For example, OpenSea, they announced that an OpenSea token will be coming. fxhash announced the same thing. They also announced that the token will be coming, and also that they will help artists create their own tokens, which I think could be super interesting. But it's now the end of the quarter and we haven't really seen any progress yet. When the announcements were initially made, I think we expected to have seen something a lot earlier than the end of Q1 2025.
There's also been this new collaboration between Transient Labs and SuperRare. At the moment I think it's still a bit unclear what it actually entails in practice. I believe that the team calls it an end-to-end network and creative pipeline for artists, not gamblers. It sounds really interesting. I don't know exactly what it means at the moment, but these are definitely two teams that have always been dedicated to crypto art. They've been doing interesting things for many years now. So if they put their heads together, that should lead to interesting things.
And then maybe finally, there also has been a trend towards the secondary markets. I think Verse has announced that they want to have a more performant secondary market. I believe so far we haven't really seen major changes yet. Highlight just launched a version two of their secondary market. I need to spend a little bit more time with the platform to really make... I don't exactly know what changed, but in general I think that's quite good, that secondary marketplaces are becoming... That people are focusing on a better secondary market experience.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it will be interesting to see how that landscape continues shifting the rest of the year. Another really transformative or noteworthy thing that we've observed in 2025 is how January really seemed to highlight the role of protocol art and its increasing importance in this space, and the artists who are engaging with it, like Mat Dryhurst and matto, and even, though he wouldn't identify himself as such, Kim Asendorf. It's something that is starting to coalesce into, I think, a movement that has some personality and has something to say. I think that's really interesting and an important development in this space.
I think something like Genuary, Piter Pasma's every January, his daily sketch event that he does, I think it's a really interesting and compelling example of protocol art, by leveraging social media and blockchain protocols to coordinate this global art event that really couldn't be done in any other way. So, yeah, I think, ironically enough, in January, the month, protocol art came to the foreground. And then that also highlighted the interesting role that Genuary plays as an example of protocol art.
Conrad House: But yeah, I think you hit it right on the nail. This idea of more protocol-based art forms and art experiments taking a bigger standing in the space. And I think it's something that's only gaining more traction. It's getting its feet on the ground a bit more, and seeing more artists experiment with it is really awesome. And I think we'll dive into some of those specific projects in a bit more detail later, when we talk about our favorites of the quarter. But it's really exciting to see. And I think so far everything that's emerged from this protocol art environment has been some of the most exciting work in the space lately.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I agree. Well, yeah, certainly when you consider work like The Call as quintessential protocol art. If in January protocol art was foregrounded, I think February was really interesting because we saw the rise of semi-autonomous artists. It was even mentioned in The Art Newspaper, which even mentioned Le Random as somebody who is participating, at least in this conversation. February really saw AI, and specifically really autonomy. As a huge nerd in the space who's been writing about autonomy for years, I was very excited to see autonomy finally get its special month. But yeah, anything you guys want to add about February and that increasing interest in semi-autonomous artists that month?
thefunnyguys: It was definitely quite interesting to see so many different events come together in one month. I think it was actually one week where there was the Augmented Intelligence auction at Christie's. Then there was also the Botto p5.js exhibition at Verse, and also the first release by Keke, or Keke, I don't know how to pronounce it, at Fellowship.
For me, I guess one of the main figures for me in that regard is definitely Mario Klingemann. He is the instigator of Botto. Then in March there was also attention for AICCA, which is his dog that functions as an art critic that can look at paintings, look at artworks and produce a critique of the artwork. For me, so far in Q1 2025, Mario Klingemann is definitely one of the figures that is getting a lot of attention, and very deservedly so, because he has been thinking and experimenting with these themes for many, many years. And all of a sudden it seems that the entire world is starting to care.
Peter Bauman: And then March, we saw a couple of interesting things this month. One was how technology in the digital and blockchain and machine learning were ignored by this Artnet talk and report about attracting new and younger investors, which I thought was a bit rich. It seemed intentional.
Again, I think what we talked about at the top, the exacerbated ethical issues with AI, I think with that recent update of ChatGPT 4o with its enhanced image abilities, which again highlights another trend of this quarter, which is that these language models are not only going to be LLMs moving forward, they're going to be multimodal models that can do everything. That's text to text, text to image. It's all going to be at one place. I thought that was an interesting... That update was a big step in that multimodal world which is coming. Really interesting first few months of the space. Really, really interesting.
I think we can move on to some of our favorites from the first three months. We can begin with some exhibitions that we either really liked or that we thought stood out in this first quarter. Conrad, do you want to talk about what exhibition stood out to you this first quarter?
Conrad House: I think things like NEORT's BYOD, or Bring Your Own Display, it was a really exciting exhibition. Just everything that NEORT has been doing in Japan has been really awesome to see, and the artists that they bring together and the work that they have come out with has been something I've always really looked forward to. And they seem like a force that isn't slowing down anytime soon. Always coming out with new physical installations. They recently had okazz, a really awesome physical installation in Japan.
And just really paying attention to what they do. In the most recent, and maybe not really an exhibition but more of an event, is Beeple's Select Start show that just happened with people like Mitchell F Chan and Tale of Tales and Cory Arcangel. It's really awesome to see. And I think it's even more awesome to see that it's coming from somebody like Beeple, who is obviously one of the grandest figures in the space and probably one of the most recognizable names, and seeing him stepping outside of the NFT zone and showcasing and representing something that is so hugely impactful to the space that we are in today, and exposing people that are probably widely unknown to this area in a new light, and really educating the space in really awesome ways.
And just the presentation of it is really awesome. And his gallery space is really incredible. I saw a picture of him having little Koopa shells driving around the space. It was really cool and just exciting to see. Exciting to see that Beeple has really become a figure that I've appreciated more over time with what he's been doing and really advocating for, I think, some of the right things that we should see in the space.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, I totally agree with that. It's quite admirable to see how he's reinvesting his resources into the digital art space, with this physical space but also with this show. To me, of the interesting exhibitions of this quarter, there is one, technically, that already started before this quarter, but Electric Dreams at the Tate. That's still going on. So if any of our listeners make it to London in the next month, I would definitely recommend going to Electric Dreams at the Tate, because I think it's a really impressive effort by the curator to really contextualize historically what has happened over the last decades in digital art. I think it basically sets the picture for the Tate to now engage with more contemporary forms of digital art.
Peter Bauman: I'll mention a couple. So one is just the continuation of Electric Op. I recently spoke to Tina Rivers Ryan about Electric Op and how it's going from Buffalo to Nantes in France. And so that opens in April, the second iteration. So the show is going to be pretty different. It's going to be, instead of Buffalo's Molnár, it's going to be the Nantes museum's Molnár. So it won't be an identical show for sure. So if you've seen the Buffalo show, still worthwhile to go to the Nantes one. I hope I can make the Nantes one.
And then another show that's pretty interesting that is also taking place in my neck of the woods in Portugal is Avery Singer at Serralves. She's a really interesting figure. I mean, this is a solo show at a pretty big museum. She gets a lot of attention in the space, very rightfully so. Institutional attention and recognition. She gets exhibitions and shows, and her work also is generally in the highest tier in terms of the ultra-contemporary market. Avery Singer is a really interesting artist in terms of somebody who talks about and engages with blockchain, especially this new exhibition, but it's quite often overlooked, I think, in this space, despite this intense institutional recognition. I would put her on par with somebody in our space like XCOPY, but he has hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers or whatever, and I think she has literally hundreds. So quite different spaces. But here on digital art Twitter, institutionally, very different places. I think in a lot of ways XCOPY would be looking forward to maybe developments in his career that Singer has already achieved. So quite an interesting juxtaposition, those two artists.
We spoke a bit about some of the standout exhibitions. Is there any standout work or standout projects that you guys want to highlight from this first quarter of the year?
Conrad House: Yeah, I think the big standout projects or releases this year, I think obviously to start, that we mentioned slightly, is Cycles by Material Protocol Arts with matto and his team. It was a really awesome project to see. I think just aesthetically it was really pleasing, but it's just also really interesting to explore the project on its sculptural viewpoint, where it's this living 3D sculpture, where your piece is traveling through this digital space environment and you can view your work through different lenses at different times and see how it's changing and adapting. It being a work that you really live with is really exciting. I think something that is only the next step in the right direction for the space that we live in.
It always makes me think of the very iconic, I guess, or maybe memorable statement from Herbert W. Franke, where it's like the biggest component of digital art is that it can be dynamic. And so leaning into the dynamic features of digital art is the most exciting thing to me. And the more dynamic that work can be, the more interesting it makes it to me. And you find ways to experience and interact with art in ways that you never thought you could before. So Cycles is a big standout to me on that.
And I think that a lot of those same characteristics that I just talked about can be applied to Infinite Garden by Leander Herzog, which is also just another fantastic project, and I think a really good project that brings together the community in some ways, where you can create this digital garden yourself and you can grow it by adding more seeds to it, or you can mint multiple gardens and merge them all together and have this collage of a garden and really live with that in real time and experience that, how it changes. Leander has mentioned that there's going to be seasonal changes to your garden as you go through the months. And there's also just timely changes, where when you experience it at night it becomes just a black and white garden. And it's really just an incredible piece. And it's really awesome to see how the community has interacted with it, and seeing people that have shared, like, hey, I'll send you some flowers and you can send me flowers. It's an embracing experience for the community to interact with.
And maybe the last one I'll touch on is Helena Sarin and her Bands release that she did with ArtxCode. Helena Sarin has always been someone that I've really enjoyed for their pure aesthetics from an AI standpoint. And this project, I think, is some of her best work that she's had to date, coming from this large data set that she created from her hand drawings that she had when visiting certain jazz clubs. And then her running this through her own models and creating these outputs was really fantastic to see. And just the, I guess the vibe is a bad way to put it, but the vibe that these pieces give in the compositional forms you see of these bands that are being displayed in these figures that you see, and some pieces are more chaotic and some pieces are more sublime. It's a really fantastic collection, and I was very happy to see that it got, I think, the recognition that it deserved. But yeah, I think that highlights a few of my favorites that we saw this quarter.
“And so leaning into the dynamic features of digital art is the most exciting thing to me. And the more dynamic that work can be, the more interesting it makes it to me.” — Conrad House 56:40
thefunnyguys: Maybe just to add to your comments, I think one thing that was really interesting is to see Kim Asendorf and Leander Herzog use the blockchain more and more as an artistic medium. We've always known them as artists who are very digitally native. They've never tried to emulate physical media. They've always embraced the digital nature of their art. But I think for me, this is maybe not so for Kim Asendorf. He has used smart contract functions before, like in Sabotage, for example. But in general, I think this group of artists, the AGH collective, it feels like they're moving closer and closer to blockchain as an artistic medium.
One detail that I found really interesting in Infinite Garden is that, as you mentioned, Lenny lets collectors send flowers to other collectors. I noticed that he uses the same Unicode character or symbol for the flower that was used in the World Computer Sculpture Garden exhibition last year. So I think that's probably him paying an indirect homage to that exhibition.
And yeah, with PXLDEX, there's a lot to discuss about the project. I think it's interesting for a variety of reasons. So I would really recommend anyone who wants to learn more about the project to read Peter's interview with Kim Asendorf on Le Random's editorials. But maybe very briefly. This was basically Kim entering the 3D realm. We know him because he creates very interesting 2D pixel grids. Now he created this 3D pixelscape structure, let's say, that was really presented in an incredible way. But we also know him as an artist who really plays with pixels. He's the inventor of the pixel-sorting algorithm. Everything he does is a pixelated aesthetic. And yeah, it's always a pixel as the atomic unit. And in this project he tokenized that atomic unit. The number of tokens that you deposit into your artwork determines how many pixels are actually being rendered. And to me that was really a fantastic moment in blockchain art. And I think at the end of this year there's a very high likelihood that PXLDEX by Kim Asendorf will still be one of my favorite projects.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think what both of you said about the AGH artists, him and Lenny, with their deeper engagement with protocols. I think that is some progression. That is some difference between what they're doing now and their previous work. I think that's really important to highlight.
I think you guys mentioned a lot of great work. I thought, just in terms of what this technology can allow artists to achieve, just something like, we talked about Mario Klingemann, but Mario Klingemann's AICCA, that is this canine dog critic that can critique other work of his, like his Botto work, which he also released this year. That layered meta work of Klingemann's critique, critiquing his autonomous artist. Again, I think it shows what's possible with this art. It just shows how weird and exciting it can be, especially when it overlaps, and it certainly is engaging with deep learning and things like that instead of turning a blind eye to it.
It seems like a lot of the work that we highlighted this quarter also demonstrates the artists that we think had particularly strong quarters. To look internally before we wrap up, what are some of the things that you're proud about achieving in terms of the collection and the acquisitions for this quarter? What stood out? What was important for you that Le Random collected this quarter that you want to highlight?
Conrad House: One we already touched on with Cycles. I was really happy with what we were able to acquire with our set of Cycles. But I think on top of this, I think the highlight for me was maybe our commission that we were able to do with Sasha Stiles, an artist that we had always really wanted in the collection since the conception of Le Random, really. And then just in general, generative text being something that we've really wanted to highlight in a better way.
So getting the three poems, the Cursive Binary variations that we were able to acquire, were really awesome to see. And listening to Sasha talk about her work and each of the variations and how they were interpreted, and how the visual element to these interpretations was created, was really awesome to see. Almost like a weight off our shoulders to finally have Sasha in the collection. It was just something that was always bugging us. It was like, what work do we want from her? And how can we acquire this work? And I think it was really awesome to just come to her directly with the idea of the work that we wanted to have, and her coming back to us with this incredible triptych of Cursive Binary variations. And that really stands out to me as one of the highlights from this quarter in terms of acquisitions.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, maybe on my end, one thing that really stood out to me this quarter was, this was, of course, very heavily influenced by your research, Peter. We really brought some artists into the collection that I wasn't necessarily super familiar with at the start of the year. For example, Ryan Murdock. We have collected some very interesting pieces by him. I honestly didn't know the name Ryan Murdock before entering this year. That's always quite exciting, to get to know new artists, get to learn about their contributions, bringing them in the collection if we see fit in line with that. Because I guess we're talking about the pioneers of AI art.
I'm also really happy that we managed to expand our Mike Tyka collection, our Gene Kogan collection. We brought some new Tom White artworks into the collection. And that's also a takeaway for 2025 for me, is that Tom White really has been ahead of the curve for so many years. He was there at MIT in the Media Lab before Processing existed. Yeah, he was one of the first artists to create interesting work with GANs, with deep generative models. So in general, if you don't know about Tom, go Google his name, Tom White, Dribnet. He really has created so many interesting, fascinating AI projects, and not many people seem to know about him. I definitely think he deserves a lot more recognition than he has gotten so far.
Peter Bauman: Definitely echo everything you said about Tom. Yeah, and it was a lot of fun this quarter to dig more into this history of deep generative models, especially from VAEs onward. I uncovered a lot of really interesting stuff. I learned a lot too. A lot of that was just how Tom White kept popping up. A lot of that research started from reading the books that are available on AI art and its history and just realizing that a lot of the current scholarship is superficial or inadequate to a certain extent. A lot of it is. I wanted to go a little bit deeper. Then you discover. It's like going diving for the first time in this whole new world. It was really interesting. I think that it was a whole new world for me. I think other people were certainly aware of this.
In terms of collection highlights, I really enjoyed what you guys did, getting a couple more of those Portraits of Imaginary People, getting those commissioned by Mike. That's work that is in every AI and art textbook that exists already. That work is in there. I think any book that covers AI art and its history will include Portraits of Imaginary People. I think that is substantial work.
Then anything content-wise that you guys thought was interesting this quarter. For me, it was the capstone of a lot of the research that I had done this quarter on deep generative models. It was the article that we put out about Alec Radford, "The People Are in the Computer, Part I." That piece took a lot to write. It was one of the longest pieces I've ever published, and it was just part one. There's so much to that story that I'm excited to tell moving forward in 2025. And then I also really enjoyed that blockchain formalism and protocol art chat. But yeah, anything that stood out to you guys?
Conrad House: Yeah, I think one of my favorites is what you talked about a little bit before, Peter, but your deep diving on the early AI space. I think specifically those Twitter threads that you were sharing at the time were really exciting and really awesome to see the dialog that it created within the space. It was really cool. Then even just inspiring Jan and I to take deeper dives into those really significant contributors and seeing how the space has evolved, and really understanding, wow, specifically within maybe the Tezos community or the hic et nunc community, how many archival gems of the AI history were really just sitting there, and even at times acquired for pennies with respect to how much other AI artwork valued. But that was really incredible to see.
And I think another one, I think in terms of the actual editorial side, is the Kim Asendorf piece obviously, "Kim Asendorf on Elegant Symbiosis," and just understanding more of the technical side of the project and how Kim really thought of it conceptually was really interesting to hear about. It's always great to, I think, learn more directly from the artist what they think about their work and maybe how they want their work to be viewed. Those were really standouts from this quarter for me.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, for me, my number one standout is actually a chat that you also highlighted, Peter, the blockchain formalism one, because I really thought that conversation felt super effortless. There were so many interesting, different points of view. It was just a super insightful discussion, especially also because for me the term protocol art, to some extent, is still something quite abstract. There's multiple ways to look at it. It's sometimes hard to know what an artist exactly means when they say protocol art. I thought that discussion was very enlightening. I thought it was a super insightful discussion.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it was. Especially for that discussion, I let go of the reins a bit. We got to, I think, question two on my list, because it just went down these other rabbit holes and I just let it go. I like to only interrupt if what's happening is, I don't know, irrelevant or maybe off-topic. But that went into these different rabbit holes of conversation that I didn't predict or expect, but that ended up probably being better than where my questions took it. So, yeah, definitely happy with how that went.
And we've looked back at the first three months of 2025, but now maybe we can just take, for the very last thing that we do, a couple of minutes to look forward. April 8th, William Mapan has an opening with Verse in London, and I'll be chatting to William at the opening. So if you're in London on April 8th, come up for that. Leila invited me to speak, and I spoke to William last year, or a year and a half ago, for Sketchbook A. So it's really cool to then come to London and speak to him in person about Sketchbook B. And then you guys are doing some really cool stuff with Rhizome. So do you want to talk about that?
Conrad House: Yeah, it's just working with Rhizome and their idea of what they plan on doing in the next couple of months, event-wise, and really us just having, I think, more of a smaller contribution of curating a small selection of works within the Processing and p5.js era, and highlighting some of the significant figures or even works from those two systems in a fun way. But yes, it's been fun to work with them. And I think Rhizome is such an outstanding figure and maybe underappreciated in a lot of degrees. Anything that we can do to help them with any event or exhibition is fun to see. It's so exciting to see what comes from that and hopefully be able to announce more of those details as they emerge.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, 100 percent. I'm personally also quite excited about the Digital Art Mile in June 2025. We were present last year. We helped Georg Bak with the organization of the Generative Art Conference, and we will be doing that again this year. I think this year the focus will be a bit more on AI art, not so much on procedural generative art. But it's also quite interesting to see that, I would say, more traditional art publications are taking an interest in the Digital Art Mile. I think last year there were already a few publications that summarized what happened there. I think The Art Newspaper did quite an extensive record on the event. But it seems like this year Dickenmann is managing to bring some of these traditional art publications on board as media partners. That's quite a good progression to see.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, really looking forward to that as well. Then there's also the Digital Silk Road that's coming up in Bali in May. I'll be going to that and speaking there as well. It's a bit undetermined what exactly I'll be speaking about, but probably it'll be about Radford, I don't know. It'll probably be something related to the research that I've done over the last month. And then shortly after that, at the beginning of June, is NFC in Lisbon. I live in Lisbon, so that's easy enough for me to attend that. I'll be speaking there. So I'll also be speaking there about the history of deep generative models. And then Alex Estorick from Right Click Save and I will be doing some panel. We are not sure exactly about the details of that. But really looking forward to some of those events next quarter.
And then what about any shows? Those are the events. What about any shows or art that you guys are looking forward to for the rest of the next few months?
Conrad House: Yeah, maybe just a few things to touch on, specifically acquisition-wise, but we can maybe hint at it a bit here. We have a commission with Juan Rodriguez Garcia happening at the moment that I am extremely excited for and really can't wait to share with the public, this really extensive level of work that we have coming into the collection. So that's something I'm very excited for and can't wait to get over the finish line.
In terms of exhibitions, I think MuDA, or the Museum of Digital Art, is coming back this year, which is awesome to see, a breath of fresh air. They were a figure that was almost a bit too early to the party. They were already doing really incredible events prior to 2020, showcasing a lot of artists that we love today, but then obviously fell out right before the big hype train arrived in 2021. It's really cool to see them coming back, them having a show with Dirk Koy this summer. It's going to be really awesome to see and something I'm looking forward to a lot.
And then maybe lastly is HEFT, or the Tender rebrand, that Adam is pushing in New York. Really just excited to see what he's going to be able to do in that space. I think he has a good team behind him. Just, yeah, really pushing forward the digital art space within the New York community, and excited to see how that first show goes for them.
thefunnyguys: Maybe just one commission that I'm quite excited about. I'm not sure if anyone knows this, but I'm from Belgium, and we do have a Belgian generative art pioneer, the artist Peter Beyls, who is also part of the Algorists group, with artists such as Jean-Pierre Hébert, Roman Verostko and so many others. I'm quite excited to be working on a commission with Peter, and hopefully soon we can bring one of his algorithms into the collection. It's always nice to expand the collection with some pioneering work, with some art from an artist who has been creating art with computers since the '70s.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, definitely. What Mimi and Adam are doing in New York is really exciting and maybe gives credence to New York being the digital art hub. Although I don't know where that actually is, or if it even makes sense to try to limit it to a single place. But Peter Beyls is also such an important figure here, and it's really exciting to bring him into the Le Random collection. He also organized just some of the very first electronic music exhibitions ever. He's also this really important electronic music pioneer and played a big role in the development of digital art, and a bit of that lost or forgotten generation in the '80s onward.
thefunnyguys: I think, Peter, you're being quite humble by leaving out that in 2025 you've been appointed to be a juror for the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Awards. I actually think that's quite big. Huge congrats on joining the jury. This award has been around for decades. It celebrates the most impactful digital artists. And there's only a few jury members, right? It's you and a handful of other people. Five people in total. So, yeah, huge congrats. It's really awesome to have you as part of the jury.
Peter Bauman: Thank you. Yeah, I was not expecting that at all, to be invited to be on it, but it's a really big honor to lend my voice to that selection process. And so, yeah, actually that is going to be happening soon. And so we'll be selecting the 2025 winner soon, and that will be announced soon. And then I'll be on the jury next year for 2026 too. Really exciting, really fun, really humbling to be part of it. It was such an interesting group of people too. Yeah, and really exciting to see who has been nominated, and I'm looking forward to seeing who wins. But yeah, well, thanks, guys. I mean, great chat. It was really fun to go over all this.
Conrad House: Thanks, everybody, for having this talk. And thanks for anybody that's listening in and stuck with us throughout this entire time.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, definitely. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Conrad. This was fun. And, yeah, thanks to the listeners.
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