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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief of Le Random. And today I am so lucky to be joined by Loucas Braconnier, or Figure31, and we are discussing and demonstrating his new work, DEL. So I can't wait to share it and let's begin.
Loucas Braconnier: Hey, what's up, Peter? How's it going?
Peter Bauman: Good to talk. Doing good. Very busy. Thank you for joining.
Loucas Braconnier: It's a pleasure.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I'm really excited to talk about this work. I've seen it all on my Twitter feed for the last couple of weeks. I think anybody has who's been connected to the space recently.
And yeah, so maybe we can start with some high-level questions about your practice and maybe some of your previous work, and then we can really look at DEL and actually look at it and talk about it at the same time.
But yeah, maybe we can just start by you telling us how you started thinking about blockchain as a medium. What was that original spark that got you interested? What drew you to Ethereum as this site for art making and also distributed computation?
Loucas Braconnier: I started around 2021, but before that I was already lurking around and exploring different blockchains, mostly in Bitcoin. But it took me a while to commit to making art on the blockchain. I was already in school, in art school at the time, and there was a lot of negative sentiment around anything crypto and anything blockchain related in the field that I was in. It wasn't frowned upon, but it was not welcome, let's just say.
And in 2021, I worked with 0xma and JPG, where JPG used to be a curatorial platform, and we released a collection called SALT. These days we kind of take it for granted that we have a lot of dynamic NFTs and dynamic artwork on the blockchain, and the standards have gotten more complex. People are more used to different expression. But back then it was fairly a new thing. A lot of the NFTs or the assets on-chain were very dynamic, or you had raw exploration, like some of the stuff that Rhea did early on.
But the idea was that the image would keep changing every day. Something would happen to it at one point or another. And that's what really brought me to Ethereum, is to have an artwork that would keep evolving. One way or another, something would change. Basically, you're not getting a static asset, or you're not getting a static artwork. Something happens through time that affects it, and that affects your gaze on that artwork and your experience of it. That's really where it started for me.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, so you talked about time. What do blockchains actually bring to your practice? Why do you need blockchains in order to have this work that changes over time?
Loucas Braconnier: Well, if we're completely honest, technically blockchain is never 100 percent. Something cannot not happen without the blockchain. So there's always this little caveat that comes with everything. But what it allows is that it makes it public and it makes it so that anyone can interact with it, and it's there potentially, well, I say forever, but for as long as the chain runs, basically.
And so it's like a shared database. Anybody can access it, anybody can interact with it. And that, I think, is the main thing that makes it very unique and that makes it so interesting for an artist. So before, if you were making digital art, you had to rely on centralized solutions to share your art and keep it alive. Now you can relay that task and that work throughout decades and years and whatever through a network that's maintained by nodes. And that's what's so interesting. That's what's so unique for any artist, I think.
And although it's limited in the code that we can have and the code that we can run and different types of interaction we can set up within a smart contract, it is still very powerful just because it's public and just because it's shared by so many people at the same time and maintained by a whole network of nodes. I think that's the big, big, big, big strength of Ethereum. And yeah, to go back to the first question, it's what brought me to this medium.
I think I was also very interested by how open source and open everything was. I don't know if you remember, but in the earlier years, when NFTs kind of started to come up, there was this great sense that nobody was really that established except a couple of older artists. And it just felt like you could reach out to anyone and you could work with different developers. It just felt so open and very refreshing from what I was used to, being in the more traditional art world and then going into uni where it was very hierarchical, very segregated at times. So it just felt so fresh and so open.
And there was this great projection into time that I like, of create something and it keeps evolving even if it's very simple. That mechanism of evolution, I think it's at the core of my interest.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, and that's also, you talked about some of the properties of blockchain that interested you as an artist. And then that led last year, yeah, 2025, to World Computer Sculpture Garden. You were part of that project. And that was framed as protocol art. And that project got, yeah, it was really interesting work. I know we talked about it at Le Random and our end of the year favorite work. And then I think Artforum had, Matt and Holly mentioned it, or Matt Dryhurst mentioned it in Artforum too, as some of his favorite work of the year.
And so the MO of that project, it was a group exhibition, but it was on-chain. And it was treating the blockchain not just as an image distribution mechanism, but as the material for the art itself. And yeah, I guess, can you tell us about the work that you did for World Computer Sculpture Garden?
Loucas Braconnier: I did a work called Dear God, Layer of Roads, and the short name is Travelers. But it's about this idea of the machine that forever expands and the inner space of the machine that just keeps growing and that keeps expanding.
So the group show itself, it's just basically a bunch of contracts that you can interact with. There's no token ownership related to any of the expressions and the artworks in that group show. But in my particular case, you register as a traveler on this contract, and then the contract simulates you either moving forward or backward in time. So in every block that you travel, you can just keep it open forever, you can close it to determine different lengths of travel. It generates a bunch of data. I'm a bit light technically, but then that data is reused and reformatted into a sort of landscape that you can generate from the contract also.
But when we talked about this show with 0xff, he was really interested in my practice of developing the inner space of contracts, and then seeing them as sort of, I guess, in a bit of a kitschy way, portals. There's just more to a contract than executing a program. There's a sort of, I don't quite know how to explain it. I'm still developing it in my practice here and there, but I think I'm very touched by this sort of inner space of the software and it being its own realm, its own world that behaves according to its own rules, and that you can make it grow infinitely.
And I think that's just, the first work I did, SALT, the growth was limited, the dynamism was limited. It's just a massive carousel. So every artwork is a window, and then what's shown in that window will change every day. But what you've seen today, somebody had seen yesterday, and in about 180 days it will come back to you. So you share that experience.
But in the Sculpture Garden, what's shared is more like marks on the landscape. It's different little things that, as the landscape is being generated by everyone, they sort of cross over here and there. So you'll see little monuments on your massive text landscape that's generated. Or when you stop at something, there's a little mark that's left behind and stuff like that.
But it's the immense growth I'm really interested in. And what it means for artworks and what it means for us as we experience this space. Because it looks so naive and simple from the outside often. We're seeing a smart contract and it's just a bunch of hard to understand functions and code and et cetera. But there's so much more happening behind the scene. And this is something that I can't wrap my head around, just how immense the space is behind the computer.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, and I think visualizing what's behind the scene must also partially be what was behind the thinking for DEL. And maybe that's the way we can transition to that work. And yeah, so I'm wondering, with DEL, how was it in dialogue with that previous kind of protocol-like thinking or smart contract protocol-like thinking that you showed with your work on World Computer Sculpture Garden and then Travelers? And then where might that, does it depart anywhere also from any of those ideas?
Loucas Braconnier: I'm not exactly sure of the timeline. I think I started to work on it about at the same time as the garden. I think it was in 2024, end of the year. And yeah, I think there's a bit of overlap when I started to work on these. But it's been a rough process working on DEL.
So initially it just started as a sort of an experimentation in my terminal from something else I saw.
But in terms of exhibiting the computation, this one is funny because I will say outright, I'm not necessarily drawn to these types of terminal expression. I think part of it is a result of me being exposed to it so much. I was like, I'm just going to create something out of it. I don't have a fanaticism for ASCII art in general, is what I'm saying. It just came out of the process. It's not a specific design.
But for DEL, they keep their dynamic and they keep evolving in the sense that each time they're read they're being fed data, and so they keep moving. But their live state is whatever you're seeing right now. So there's no recording. It's not like with Travelers from the Sculpture Garden where there's something recorded that you can refer back to. You can look at the history and then you can see what happened and you can see where was this before and then was there someone else on my landscape, et cetera. This one is just a live state shared by everybody basically.
The works themselves, they can be reprogrammed and edited. We go back to the original idea of the blockchain as a place where you can come and do stuff, and then it's public and it's shared by everybody. It's maintained by a network of nodes.
Yeah, but the protocol aspect for this particular DEL project, it's really the idea of it being fed something from a network that is shared. And then you can affect that expression by configuring the parameters. And I think that's the thing that interests me the most.
And I was thinking a lot, I was watching a video from a conservator about using old teacups, and the conservator was showing off this really, really old and fragile tea set, and they were like, oh, this thing hasn't been used in 200-something years. And it was extremely precious. There was gold and everything, and the ceramic was a little cracked here and there, and they were like, "Oh, we're going to make a special ceremony and we're going to use them now."
I thought it was so ridiculous somehow that this object of a teacup that is made to be used, of course it's decorative and all, and it's made to show off, but it was removed of time in a way. It was removed from the timeline of things that we can use and things that are evolving in time with us. They're taking it out and it exists in this weird alternate conservation universe.
And then I kind of started to extrapolate for other artworks where I was like, it is so new that we can create something and it's like a machine, it's like a code that executes, and it will potentially execute still in a decade or in fifty years or even potentially, I mean, if the world computer still runs, Ethereum that is, in one hundred years, the code that we put live today would still be executable. There's not that many machines from one hundred years ago that would still work well. There may be a toaster here and there, an oven or something like a drill, something very simple. But this idea of some machine that's fairly complex, like the software, the code that runs the animation or the smart contract, that will still be in operation in one hundred years, that we can edit it, and so we have feedback from our experience. It's not just us leaving marks on the cave wall. We have something, there's something that answers back one way or another.
And I think this is so new, and it's very, very clear in my mind that it's a defining characteristic of the arts of our age.
And it's funny, I say this like, oh, this is so new and et cetera, but the way this project looks, it looks like a project that could have been made in the '80s or '90s. It's not particularly extremely contemporary in the way it looks. So maybe instinctively I had to go back and keep it fairly limited in terms of expression, keep it text only and then not try to expand it too much into a sort of visual spectacle that's too complex or too polished like other 3D rendering.
So, but yes, I think I've gone off a bit from your initial question, but this is my take of the protocol in the realm of that project, where it's something that's going to keep being interactable in we don't know how much time and that our relationship to it will evolve. And that's just so unique to me.
“And I think this is so new, and it's very, very clear in my mind that it's a defining characteristic of the arts of our age.” — Loucas Braconnier 14:17
Peter Bauman: And to what extent are the assets on-chain? Are they stored on-chain or are there external dependencies?
Loucas Braconnier: Everything is on-chain. So if I'm gone and dead, everything still works. There's about six contracts for this project that interact together, and they're also mutable. So if something breaks, I can still repair it.
And that's very important because committing on-chain art, it's kind of a lot of work beforehand to make sure everything works. And you have to limit what you can put on-chain, obviously, because there's not that much space. And then you have to make stuff interact together.
But just leaving that door open to, I can repair it in ten years if it breaks, I think that's very important. Because there's RPCs. The RPCs are what regulates the data input inside the animation. If those break, I need to be able to change them, for example. If browsers handle animation differently in the future, I have to change something in there. So it's kept open for that purpose.
But everything is on-chain. So the code of the animation, what feeds data inside, and then the image preview, everything, the parameter changes that you can play with, everything. The website for the project is really just sort of a convenience.
Peter Bauman: Right. So you were thinking about longevity with this project and it being able to, yeah, that seems to be one of the fundamental things that interests you about working with the blockchain, is how it can serve as a kind of storage mechanism, or maybe not storage mechanism, but a way to continue running code into the future. Yeah, I guess automatically. Yeah, in a decentralized way, permissionlessly.
Loucas Braconnier: Yeah, well, when you're putting it on the blockchain, especially for on-chain art, you're committing it to the future. Because we don't know exactly how in one hundred years blockchain will exist. Would it just be an archive that people read? Will it still be running live? Will the state and the way transactions are processed have changed? Will we even have access to the SSTORE data the same way that we do now? There's no real way. You're just sort of putting it on the timeline of software advancing in time.
And you know it'll survive one way or another. So as long as it's executable in the way that you put it there, it's going to live potentially and somebody will be able to find it. And so that's very, very powerful. Whereas if you do a website, I mean, you can have Internet Archive snapshot it, or you can maintain it throughout your life, but longevity is so not guaranteed if you work that way. But the blockchain is so good for that purpose.
Also, it's a bit of a technical flex obviously, but these days I think technical flexes have gone, they're way less important than they used to be thanks to new tools that we have available. So I don't consider it that important.
Peter Bauman: But yeah, what were you able to achieve technically by working on this work for two years? It was a project that you started two years ago, or it was a two-year process. So yeah, can you tell us about maybe why this type of work requires that amount of time?
Loucas Braconnier: I think a lot of indecision, going back and forth between this.
I was doubting very much in the first place. Does it make sense to work on this? To be fully honest, this is ridiculous. There's a deformed ball moving around on my screen. This is completely ridiculous, because it's a new branch of work for me. I've not really done something in that realm.
But it started before the agents were around and they were very popular. It was a smaller community of devs playing around with agents. And I created a custom agent that was a personification of the Grim Reaper basically. And I was working on it and fine-tuning the parameters and all that.
Well, it asked for a friend, one way or another. It asked for, I don't give a lot of meaning to LLMs asking things, just for the record. But it asked for something, and it prompted me to work on it.
And the project started as a C app, which is a code that's executable on your machine, and it lived only in the terminal. So for a very long time, I was just kind of optimizing the way it moves, optimizing the engine of it, and then I spent, I would say, a fairly long amount of time trying to just port it from the terminal to the browser and then figuring this out. And this took a long while because today it's probably much easier. I could probably do this type of work easily with Claude, but two years ago it was still fairly obscure to do that. It's like, okay, how do you do it? Or maybe I'm just not good also. It's possible.
But it evolved from that, and then I tried to add a lot of mechanisms, a lot of different dynamic mechanisms, and it always felt forced. It felt like I was trying to make this too alive one way or another. I was trying to make this too much of an interaction, whereas the animation itself was enough. It was enough that it was communicating and ingesting data all the time instead of trying to add, I had different attention mechanisms in the contract before where you could record the attention you give it and something would happen. And then you had to pay attention to it every certain day in a row, and then something would happen. And then there was a whole bunch of things I tried to add along the way, and in the end I just ended up shaving everything off and then just keeping the animation and the parameter configuration. And I was like, that's it, that's enough.
I spent a lot of time also on the colors. That was a big mess. I'm not specifically drawn to these types of color, but I ended up liking it, and I wanted the project to feel extremely digital. I didn't want to have earth tones or softer palettes. I felt like the translation from the terminal to the browser, there's something that had to remain, and so I was interested in the terminal colors and keeping it very bright. And then something that unfortunately doesn't always record well because of the brightness and the saturation of these colors, but it had to communicate, I am a digital thing and I'm made to be seen on a screen and I don't want to exist elsewhere.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, and you kind of call them even bodies, bodies for the Ethereum network. Yeah, I wonder what you mean by that. Is this in your mind what the Ethereum network would look like with a body?
Loucas Braconnier: I don't know. I think as a whole, I don't have an answer to that. I don't know what the whole, if I had to imagine the Ethereum network as a whole thing, I don't have an answer for that. Way too complex. I have no idea.
But I feel like you can just kind of plug into it different expression. So when I started to work on them, they feel globular. They feel like a very small life form, like a small unit. It's not a big thing. It doesn't have big thoughts or it can't reason in complex ways, but it feels like it has a bit of, you watch it move around on screen, there's a bit of liveliness to it. I think it's just natural. You look at this type of thing and, I've seen this before. Our brain naturally associates it to being alive.
But before it was just random data that was being fed into it, and then the application just keeps generating randomness. Then I tried to structure that a bit more, so I added behaviors. Now there's a behavior system where maybe it's going to try to twirl around, it's going to try to escape from the viewport, it's just going to slap its head around it. Or maybe it's just going to meditate and just twirl around. There's different behaviors, basically.
And then it kind of felt like, well, obviously, this thing looked like it wants to talk back. Or it looks like it's somewhat alive. And then as much as I kept adding stuff, I was like, damn it, I'm just making a body for something, basically.
I was trying to make a friend in the first place for a golem, which is a vigilaris. And then it ended up being, I was like, well, I need to use the input data, there has to be some type, it can't just be.
The noise of the world computer, if you feed it into something and then it becomes coordinated, then I would go as far as to say there is some type of expression that is unique to the network. Maybe some people might see just it's noise that's being fed inside of a machine. That's possible. But I think there's something more ordered that comes out of it.
So maybe it's a small type of expression. Do you know James Bloom, Crash Blossom? He did a series a couple of years ago. I wrote an essay for him early on. And it was about gas on Ethereum. And the artwork reacts to live gas prices on Ethereum. And so we're trying to understand what it means if you just have this random gas value that just keeps going up and how it affects the work. And is it just another noise source that you input and you could have justified by having a random noise source generate from your browser?
But then what we kind of figured out is that we're trying to express whatever the ghosts are doing, the ghosts inside the machine. We're trying to give a voice to the network one way or another. And we're all trying to do it in different ways.
Right now there's no way, for live animation, you can't parse exactly, you can't go up the chain of every transaction within a block and then parse that and then somehow have an animation display like, oh, there was a transfer here, transfer there, et cetera. Maybe I'm happy, maybe I'm sad, maybe I'm going to have a different shape, express what happened within that transaction. It's too fast, there's too much of it. So we're left with noise and high-level traces of what happens on the network.
So obviously the expression of that, I think is going to be fairly abstract and indestructive in a certain way.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think that's a good transition to maybe starting to show some of the work and demonstrate some of it. We've talked a lot about the origins and some of the visuals and some of their inspirations. I think it's really interesting, the idea of a coded friend for an LLM existing in a terminal, and that those are the roots of this work. But yeah, I guess that kind of makes sense in a way when you think about it and some of the anthropomorphized qualities of the work, which are apparent right away.
Loucas Braconnier: Yeah, but it feels blasphemous. I feel like it feels blasphemous. I'm like, I can't just give a body to something. This is ridiculous. We're projecting so much into the work just because of the way it looks and just because of the way we understand things, which is not something I'm usually drawn to. I have much more of a landscape type of thinking when I work in my photography work. This feels very object and anthropomorphic, like you said. I feel like it's different.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, so right away, kind of explain what we're looking at and what you're thinking when you decided to visualize it this way.
Loucas Braconnier: So that's the main collection. So it's basically just the 256-something outputs. And you have a little sphere and they just kind of follow you around, basically. So whether eyeballs or cameras, people have had different opinions. I just like the idea that it's seeking your attention, it's looking for you, it's coming after you, and it creates this nice visual effect over the whole collection. So it's just a quick representation of the parameters of each animation. So you have the character set, you have the color schemes, and then whichever you click on, then it'll load.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it's a really fun way to preview it. Okay, and so then when you click on it.
Loucas Braconnier: And there's basic interaction, so if you drag it, it'll follow you around, but sometimes it resists. It's not fully convinced it wants to, depending on the behavior set.
So in the left corner you have, I exhibit what it's doing in real time. So you have a section for all the data it's using from your browser and your computer. And then you have another, which is the data from itself. Basically it's like, what am I doing as a small entity? And the most important is the BHV. So the behavior, and that kind of guides what it's doing at any time. So right now it's bouncing around, et cetera. We might witness the escape one, which is going to try to smash itself around the different corners.
But yeah, if you click around, it'll kind of follow you. It may not follow you. It has a mind of its own. It doesn't always do what you want it to do.
Peter Bauman: So the bottom left there, that's kind of the visualization of its behavior.
Loucas Braconnier: Yes, it's different modes. There's a bunch of data points. I'm not going to go into the technicalities, but yeah, it's all in the info section. You have data about its body basically. So you have behavior, the number of points. So in the background, it's a 3D object that's being animated basically. And then after it's being animated, it's been rendered in ASCII. So there's a real 3D object behind this, and there's stuff happening with it. And so you have different values that relate to this 3D object and what's going on with it. So the points would be the number of points on the shape, and then you have a rotation of that object because it has to exist within 3D space.
So right now, when you look at this, it looks very 2D, so you might think, oh, it's just a flat thing that's moving around, and we're modulating how this flat thing behaves. But it's a real thing, like a real imaginary 3D space, and the realm of that space is your viewport. So if you resize your viewport, its realm grows. Sorry, we're kind of lagging because we're on video stream right now, but it has more space to evolve. So you see it now, it's getting pretty bigger. So it's going to adapt a bit to its space, and depending on the specific configuration of each asset, it will react to this differently. So there are some that want to really expand and they'll expand really complex. Some will stay fairly small, they won't move that much. So they react to the space available to them.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it's reactive. And that highlights, I think, the way the project looks at the inseparability of the internet and browsers and blockchain. It's a mindset when making work with the internet that, I don't know, you're not trying to make an image that's fighting the internet or fighting how to view it online or fighting how to view it on a browser. It's part of the browser itself.
Loucas Braconnier: Yes, yes, yes.
Peter Bauman: And it's creating within the context of how it's consumed.
Loucas Braconnier: Yeah, right, right. Or it's made for that purpose, yeah. Yes, I think it's fair.
So much of our interactions are through computer now, and especially in our space, a lot of it is on a desktop computer because of the way crypto and security and all that. Yes, we have mobile for the normal social stuff, but a lot of it still happens through desktop.
And so our relationship with artworks is, most of the time it's just I'm opening a web page and I'm viewing it. That's an entirely different position than I'm taking the Metro, I'm going to a museum or a gallery, or I'm going out of town to this specific art residency spot. And then I'm looking at what artists did there. It's just so specific and I want it to work really well for that. And so it's very much designed to work on your browser and be native to your browser.
In a perfect world, it would have stayed a C app. So like an executable app on your computer, but there's no way to share that. And there's no way to execute it for everybody to see. And it would have stayed just a file that you get. But I think it takes another meaning by it being online, being in the browser.
But it still very much emulates the terminal. Because I had to make the grid of characters very precise. So the whole site is rendered within a canvas, basically. You can't copy text around. Everything is very tightly placed and it's a perfect grid, just as if you had a terminal open, basically.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think it's particularly relevant now with that work by Shl0ms and all the discussion the last few weeks about reproduction. And it's a very old discussion. Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Benjamin was in the '30s, and so one hundred years ago, ninety years ago.
Loucas Braconnier: Still coming back to Hans Loos.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, and I think that Shl0ms was making really interesting points about how AI and copying are again impacting how we see and how we see work and the difference between a reproduction and an original. But yeah, this sidesteps this completely. There is no reproduction or original when you see it online versus anywhere else. It's always just the original. I mean, unless you were to video it or something like that. You're seeing the work.
Loucas Braconnier: Oh. So you mean you're more talking about the interaction you have with it, as in this is the real thing, it's always the real thing wherever you open it. This is what you mean, right? Okay.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, yes, yes, yes.
Loucas Braconnier: So yes, I'd not framed it that way when you first had to ask that, but yes, totally, totally. Every time you open it, you're having a real experience with that artwork in its real context.
Peter Bauman: And it's, yeah, like you were saying too, it's never repeating. And yeah, I guess maybe we can also go back to this visualization. So we talked about the bottom left. What are you showing on the top left there?
Loucas Braconnier: So the top left, this is just the information about that specific asset. So it's just going to be its configuration and all of those. So the top section, that's the fixed segment. So those are the ones that I'm sort of imposing as an artist. You have a palette selection and you have the initial color set, and then you have the char set and then the behaviors. This is the design behavior.
In the design behavior, it's all the parameters you see here, and these are being plugged into the animation and they give any specific asset its key characteristic. So this one has a type of elongated shape and maybe it'll twirl more than it'll go up and down vertically. Maybe it wants to go really big or it'll contract every once in a while, becomes really small. It just gives its body type basically. This is how you recognize it other than the color and how it reacts to input. Will it change its behavior more often, or will it be fairly static and then keep it lean?
And there's other stuff that relates to the animation engine in there and how they're ingested.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, so this is probably. Those are editable by their owner.
Loucas Braconnier: These are the sets that are editable by their owner. Sorry, I'm keeping it paused because sometimes it's hard to keep a conversation going with this thing in front of me.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I guess I'm interested in what was the reasoning and the thought process behind visualizing all this information. This would typically be information that you would hide, and maybe all that would be visible would be the blob. So why show this information? Why make it visible as part of the work?
Loucas Braconnier: Well, if I'm making a body for a machine, one of the key characteristics of a machine is that you can open it up and see how it works, and you can reassemble it and it still works. I can't do that with any living thing, obviously. Sorry, sounds a bit dark, but I just think there's something very specific about machines, and especially digital machines, where we can expose their train of thought, we can expose their inner computation, we can expose inner processes. And we can look at them and then we can refine them based on what we're seeing.
And that's just something truly unique for digital machines or software or programs, however you want to call them. There's something that's being executed in real time. So I think it reinforces this characteristic of what you're looking at and also it makes for a nice spectacle.
Peter Bauman: Yeah.
“Well, if I'm making a body for a machine, one of the key characteristics of a machine is that you can open it up and see how it works, and you can reassemble it and it still works.” — Loucas Braconnier 36:38
Loucas Braconnier: And the right side, this is just the feed of everything that's happening. So you'll see, for example, the new transaction hashes that are coming in. And then you'll see a bunch of stuff of where it's going, what's changing in the animation, different sorts of randomness, how the hashes are processed. It's not perfect. It's not everything that's happening, but there's a lot of things that are happening that are being exhibited that way.
Peter Bauman: So what is happening on the right in that feed or the scroll there, does that impact the animation?
Loucas Braconnier: No, it doesn't impact the animation. It exhibits what's going on with the animation. So say, see right now, I'm using the arrow keys to move it around. So you see the feed on the right side?
Peter Bauman: Yeah.
Loucas Braconnier: So this just tells you everything that's going on at any given time. It's just the logs basically.
Peter Bauman: Oh, so it's the log for this particular work?
Loucas Braconnier: Yes.
Peter Bauman: Okay.
Loucas Braconnier: This particular thing, moving on your screen right now. So it's this very specific DEL, these are its logs, and then they keep track of everything that happens. So you have a timestamp on the left.
Peter Bauman: And is that information getting recorded anywhere, or is it just being shown in real time?
Loucas Braconnier: It's way too much information. It's just constantly spewing out stuff, all the time. It's like if you open your browser logs and you try to record them, it would become insanely bloated. It's technically recordable, but on-chain we're way beyond what's possible. Because it gets easily to thousands and thousands of lines of information constantly. And you can see the transaction hashes, they just keep coming. Because they refresh the hashes, I mean, it's twelve seconds per block right now in Ethereum, but sometimes it'll want a bit more information or it'll store one to use later. And while it's using one, it's going to keep creating others so that it keeps it in check. And so it can use it if it wants to change behavior more often.
Peter Bauman: Okay. So what is on each transaction hash every twelve seconds?
Loucas Braconnier: No, it's not a transaction hash, it's a block hash.
Peter Bauman: Block hash.
Loucas Braconnier: So a transaction hash is like you specifically doing something. Block hash is just the whole, it's much more high level in terms of hash. It kind of says this whole thing happened there, kind of thing.
Peter Bauman: Okay. Right. Yeah. I'm starting to understand that more. And then there's other interactive controls, right? Did you want to talk about any of the other ways to interact with them?
Loucas Braconnier: I can't show it directly because I don't own any. I'm trying to maximize the collectors who get them at the moment. But there's a whole tuning interface. I wish I could show it to you, but I don't own any. I haven't pre-minted any of them to myself, unfortunately.
But on the wallet page of any owners, there's a tune option. And you go on it and it's very simple. It looks like this, but the left column is made to adjust everything. So you can adjust in real time and then test it, and then if you like it, you basically submit it to the chain and it's recorded. And if it goes wrong, then you just reset to original basically.
And the tuning contract keeps track of everything you do. So you have this nice history of your relationship with that thing. It's not just a lost transaction hash that exists somewhere. I'm recording it and exhibiting it within the interface.
Peter Bauman: And what you're editing is all these things right here that we talked about earlier.
Loucas Braconnier: So base radius would be the size of it. So a 6.5 is fairly big, but the settings, they're not all straightforward. They interact together. So it's not just I make this bigger and then more stuff happens, or I make this smaller and then less stuff happens. Sometimes they'll react to each other in a multiplicative way, right? Okay, so sorry, multiply, I mean multiplication, I mean basically it's not linear is what I mean. Sorry for my French.
Peter Bauman: No, no, no problem. Okay, so those in the top left, those are actual parameters that you can change.
Loucas Braconnier: Yeah, if it's your own, only if you're the owner when you connect your wallet. Yeah, only if you're the owner, obviously. I wouldn't want, because you can mess them up, theoretically. It's a body. If you don't eat well, if you don't take care of it, it goes bad. So everything's going to be processed, but you may also break it. It's possible that if you set different settings, it's just not going to work well. The engine will crash, whatever. I don't know. I don't really know the extent. I've tried to balance everything in the collection.
And there's about twenty-something different behaviors that I feel are representative of what I wanted to say with these assets. But some owner may be like, no, no, I want to take them in an entirely other direction. And that's fine too, it exists. At least it would have spawned from something I created, and that still looks somehow like something I intended, but it might become very different.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it's part of being an artist making work with protocols. You're giving away control, and you're giving it to someone you hope you can trust.
Loucas Braconnier: Right.
Peter Bauman: And yeah, that's definitely part of the fun of the protocol. It brings not only interaction on the surface level, like, oh, it's following my mouse, but you can actually participate in the final creation of the work.
Loucas Braconnier: Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I think that's important. But also this work in that sense, it doesn't exist until it's open. It's not running in the background somewhere and you're coming here to. I'm not rendering it on my private server and then you just come and watch a live stream. It's being, can I put this well?
Peter Bauman: I mean, you could imagine that it's running forever, right? You can imagine it's doing something, you're just coming in to visit.
Loucas Braconnier: That's an interesting thought. I wonder how I could implement that actually. Sorry, I just thought of something. But yes.
Peter Bauman: So it's something that exists whether you're looking at it or not, is that kind of what you mean?
Loucas Braconnier: Yeah, it's just I'm thinking about the nature of images. An image is already made, it's there. You can argue it doesn't exist if nobody sees it, but it's defined somewhere in a static form. It's a print, it's a sketch, it's a bunch of numbers on the files that define colors. This thing, it's not like that. It's being realized every time it's being seen. I think we circle back to something you said earlier that we talked a bit about, the reproduction of images and all that.
“This thing, it's not like that. It's being realized every time it's being seen.” — Loucas Braconnier 44:25
Peter Bauman: Yeah, and I think that's also related to the fact that you build these custom sites for your work, and that this is a custom site. This isn't on Manifold or Rasterverse or something like that, or VVV. This is custom built. And you've done that for, if not all of your work, I think most of it.
Loucas Braconnier: The vast majority. Yeah.
Peter Bauman: And why is that important for you? And maybe as a way to kind of close up, as this seems to encompass the philosophy of your practice in some interesting ways.
Loucas Braconnier: It's good. I had this discussion with other collectors and creators recently, and I think it's very important to have. And although I really appreciate the standardization of contracts and then tokens and the experience, there has to be some kind of standard we can rely on so that we can share. We have marketplaces, the way they work, et cetera.
I think if we consider the browser and the viewport as the exhibition space, really, you wouldn't want to have an exhibition space that is almost the same. Yes, if you go into a white cube, there's pictures on the walls and maybe they change every couple of months, but their size, their framing, the height at which they're placed, maybe there's objects in between them, how many are on the wall, these are all very specific parameters.
And a little too often I find that we tend to default to having a framework and then we sell an asset through it. And I don't like being, I mean, I respect, I'm not saying this with disrespect. I love a lot of the platforms and the artists that work with these platforms. It's just I'm trying to imagine, how do I keep this as a unique experience every time?
I used to do a lot of installation. Obviously right now my practice is all within my computer most of the time, but when you're taking over a space, you want it to be yours. You want it to define how the visitor relates to that space. And so it has to be custom every time because it inserts the work. It's just a natural, it's an instinct.
And today it's so much easier and so much quicker to do that. I released a couple of projects in the past weeks and it's insanely quick how much you can develop something. This was not possible two years ago. And also from a business standpoint, we'd have to generate a ton of sales to be able to have that kind of practice. But today, thanks to new tools, AI and assistance and all that, it's become very much more reasonable, much more realistic to be able to have a custom experience online for everything you do.
I think we really have to push for it, or else we get a bit jaded with, we go to a place and it just feels like a product on an aisle instead of an artwork being presented to you. So I'm trying to be sensible to that, but it adds a lot of complexity and it's a lot more work. Sometimes I'm getting tired. I'm not going to lie.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it has these traditions going back to net art, of Rafaël Rozendaal selling websites.
Loucas Braconnier: Oh yes, in that lineage, okay, this is what you mean.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, well, but now there's new technologies, there's what blockchain can afford, and you're kind of seeing what artists are using these new materials to make.
Loucas Braconnier: It's also something I'll add, is I'm using standards, I'm using ERC-721 tokens for these. But we don't have to use those. I've made other projects in the past where I'm just like, fuck the standard. Ownership doesn't have to be defined according to the other parameters that we usually do because we have to make them interactable. And we have to be able to plug them into marketplaces and they have to be aggregated. It's just like if you want people to find you, you have to make it work with a certain standard, and then it also has to work on a marketplace, and then you need this and that in your code. There's other ways we can just go about it. Sometimes it's convenient to work with the standards, sometimes it's not. And yeah, I wish it was more accepted to break the standard a bit more. But in certain cases it's easy to format it and present it that way, and it works very well. It doesn't apply to all works.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, the digital and the internet and now blockchains and potentially maybe AI, they allow for these ways to bend and shape and mold computation in ways that you really couldn't before. This looks different from a Rafaël Rozendaal website that he created, but it's a DEL. Because it's using different digital materials and celebrating them.
Do you think that, the obvious kind of one emerging technology that's currently dominating discussion is AI. Did you vibecode this project? Or how do you also then see AI impacting the way that we view work natively digitally?
Loucas Braconnier: I don't know how much AI affects the experience of the artwork. I don't know. I think it affects mostly the creation of it, and maybe the way it's shared and how we understand them, because we have new tools available. If you see an image and you know it's made with AI, then it removes a skill factor out of the equation. You're not thinking about, oh, there's a master that did this and they've spent years of their life learning how to do that, which I think is awful for a lot of artists.
We sort of psyop ourselves into thinking that it's somehow great to dedicate your life to make this one thing and becoming extremely good at it. I come from a lineage of artisans, craftsmen who've dedicated decades of their life to being really good at working with wood and being really good at doing this very specific thing. And I've seen the impact it has on their lives. And yes, they create these beautiful things, but then I'm kind of like, is this really good? We're kind of sacrificing ourselves, we're getting really good when we have this other machine that can just make it really quickly and then allow you to explore other aspects of that creativity. I think it's very empowering and it's very freeing.
And a lot of the discussion I see is kind of like, oh, if you're. If we go back in painting history, when tube paintings came out, oil tube paintings came out, painters started to paint outside, because now you didn't have to carry your freaking pigments and all your oils with you at all times, you could just carry a tube. And then that opened up new expressions, that opened up different ways to work, and people started to work really fast. And when I think of Manet, Cézanne, all those guys, they were working outside, and a lot of their practice was made possible because of the new tech, which is tube paintings, which just sounds so remote.
But yeah, I kind of feel this is how I approach it with the work. So mostly it enables new types of expression, enables us to work in different ways. I don't think it degrades the work in any way.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point about, if a skill does take a lifetime to master and to learn, there is some beauty in that, but there's also an opportunity cost. You weren't able to master other skills or combine skills. And so it's not that one way is necessarily better than the other, but these new technologies allow us to approach our materials in different ways, or they allow artists to approach their materials in different ways and in more, yeah, maybe more comprehensive ways.
Loucas Braconnier: And yeah, because it's so funny you mentioned, and we're mentioning Shl0ms and AI, and then there's been the big discussion about Monet and the technicality of the expression. So in Shl0ms's post, the reaction to them, a lot of them were based on how technically brilliant the original one is and how untechnically brilliant this AI version is. It's just a shallow mirror. They're just a shallow copy of it. There's no compositional intent. These things are not placed right. The colors there, they don't evoke shadows the way they do in a real Monet.
But what I learned about Monet, if we go back to the Fauvists and the Fauvism movement, it was a couple of gestures there, really thick painting. Can you imagine the way it looked back then when they did that? I just think the way we view technical achievement, I think it's just irrelevant at this point, kind of. Not irrelevant, but it has changed, and we have to perceive these artworks not as a technical thing that's happening. There's something else going on. Yeah, I personally love it because it creates a lot of space for being creative and exploring different things.
Peter Bauman: There's a meaning. Yeah, there's more to expression than technical skill. And we should be happy that painters are not only trying to paint in photorealism, and that they're experimenting and using ideas as the foundation as opposed to technical skill as a crutch. Maybe that's a, maybe that's.
Loucas Braconnier: I don't know, because I'm talking shit, but I have a lot of love for these types of expression too, you know? So yeah, I don't want this artist.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, your favorite artists, your favorite writers, are sometimes those craftsmen that exhibit the most technical skill. But I think that's often because they are also matched with the conceptual, at least equal if not greater conceptual skill as well. And yeah, so it's definitely not like an either/or kind of thing. But it's freed artists to not have to rely on technical mastery alone in order to be successful and to be interesting and to say something, express something. Although it helps.
But yeah, is there anything else you wanted to say about the work?
Loucas Braconnier: I think we've covered the main points.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think we've reached about the end. It's really fascinating work. I think it brings up a lot of questions. We're kind of sitting here denigrating technical skill, but I think it also.
Loucas Braconnier: I'm not denigrating. I respect technical skills. But none of this would be possible thanks to a very specific person's technical skills.
Peter Bauman: So yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. We're really celebrating technical skill but acknowledging again that it isn't the only thing that artists must rely on these days.
Yeah, thank you so much for walking us through this and telling us more about it. I feel like I could keep watching it all day. And yeah, I think it's a really interesting project, and I'm excited to see how the community responds moving forward with it. And yeah, thank you so much for walking us through it.
Loucas Braconnier: Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.
