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Peter Bauman: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special Le Random exhibition discussion on the Toledo Museum of Art's Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the editor in chief of Le Random. Today I'm joined, very luckily, by three of the artists exhibiting at Infinite Images. They are Sofia Crespo, Erick Calderon and Tyler Hobbs. Sofia Crespo is an artist whose practice explores the convergence of artificial intelligence and biological systems. Working as part of the artistic duo Entangled Others with Feileacan McCormick, she investigates how organic life and artificial intelligence simulate and evolve each other. Erick Calderon is an artist and the founder of Art Blocks, where he created the Chromie Squiggle. Tyler Hobbs is a visual artist who works primarily with algorithms, plotters and paint. Really, they don't need any introduction and I'm so excited to talk to them. Let's begin.
Again, thank you all for joining. I'm really excited about this chat and I'm really excited also about this exhibition. I'm doing basically four, almost five pieces of content about it. So we bring it from every angle. I think it's a really important show, especially this year. One of those pieces that's been out about it already is a discussion I had with the curator of the show, Infinite Images. I talked to Julia Kaganskiy. That piece is out on Le Random if anybody wants to check that out. She described the show as showing the breadth of generative processes and generative outputs. That spans historical to contemporary works. I mean, of course, that's why you're all in it and why we're talking today. I think what she means by that is that as a whole, the artists and the show together demonstrate that depth and that breadth. But I'm wondering if you also see your individual practices as showcasing that depth.
Tyler Hobbs: My work that's being shown as part of this exhibition covers mostly two works, Fidenza and QQL. And I think if I was going to pick any two works from my body of work, those would be the two that really do have the highest breadth and the most depth to them. QQL, honestly, even compared to Fidenza, is a wildly extravagant algorithm in some ways. I think that to date, there's been somewhere between 50 and 100 million images generated with the algorithm. People are continuing to do that. So the fact that it's interesting to people to continue generating after that many is, I think, just a sign of the depth that can be there in a generative work and how it can continue to be compelling even after years of careful examination. And that's maybe one way in which my own work, I think, touches on that breadth and depth of generative art.
Sofia Crespo: In my case, I'm showing two works done with different people. So I'm showing one work done together with Anna Ridler as part of our collaborations and another one done with Feileacan McCormick as part of our dual practice Entangled Others. For some reason, I really like artist collaborations and this show has made me realize that because it's the first time I get to exhibit two works done with two different people. So that's really amazing for me. Even though the works are very different, just because of the way we did them, I wouldn't think of them directly as outputs. The way that we work, especially with Anna, we do a lot of manual work on the pieces. So even if we train an algorithm to generate outputs, then we manually collage them, and then there's a feedback loop. So it becomes hard to think of the work itself as an output. And I guess maybe that's part of Julia's intent of showcasing diversity, showcasing that generative practices don't all have to have the same shape and process, right? That there's room for approaching it from different angles and different perspectives.
Erick Calderon: I'll add also, I think what's really interesting is the breadth of each algorithm that's being shown. This is now my fifth year of visiting not just museum shows but also just things organized by the crypto community or the digital art community. In general, you want to show as many artists and as many projects as possible because everyone feels that connection with their work. So they show up and they're like, "I have one of those," or "I know that artist," and that feels really special. And we're also trying to make these things generally appear on screens because they're native, most of the time, to a screen, not always. Screens are difficult and complicated. I think the idea is that this is an exhibition of grids and I'm really excited about that. My wife and I joke about it because we moved into a house and we put grids all over our house. She was like, "Oh, it's too many grids." I'm like, "Yeah, but this is how you actually get to share the breadth of the work." I'm really excited that my work is going to be shown as a grid. I think most of the artworks will be shown as some sort of grid that shows the idea of the artwork.
Early in this whole weird journey, I was working with a gallery called Venus Over Manhattan, and they did a show that traveled from Art Basel Miami, Art Basel Switzerland and New York, and they showed 100 Chromie Squiggles at every single show. And to this day, I don't know that I've seen an exhibition that shows that much variety of any individual project, and very few have. I think the Museum of Art and Light did a really good job of that, especially, Tyler, with your work with QQL, because they just concentrated on that one project and they showed a vast number of those pieces. But if you look at, for example, what LACMA has up right now in their exhibition, I'm incredibly honored to have a Chromie Squiggle in there, but it's one Chromie Squiggle. So if you don't know about this technology, if you don't know about this work, it's really hard to understand exactly how deep it goes. So I'm very grateful that they're showing grids and the variety of each of these algorithms. I think that's maybe one of the things I'm most excited about for this exhibition.
Tyler Hobbs: Yeah, it feels like they actually understand the art form and how it works and how to show it, which is nice.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that was something that was exciting when I spoke to Julia. And I spoke to Dmitri, too, about the project, which is about the show, which is why it's four and a half. He was talking about just the original… He was quite early in Art Blocks, and just the original intent, or his original intent, was that you could mint enough Ringers that you could create a grid. It was meant to be always basically shown as a grid. I think Julia has done a good job of maintaining, I guess, that early philosophy of Art Blocks that, I guess, over time, just due to the supply and demand economics, didn't quite come to fruition. But now it's nice that it is. I'm also interested in the show that Julia is… She's using these two big collections, but she also has the TMA's collection at her disposal, artists like Max Bill, the Alberses and Vera Molnar. In terms of these historical figures, it doesn't even need to be those that are in the TMA's collection in the show. But do you want to talk about how any of them have impacted, specifically, this work that you're showing at the TMA?
Tyler Hobbs: For me, it's not a specific impact to this work, but I've always been a huge fan of Anni Albers. I think her textile work is what she's really known for. And textile work is often basically algorithmic work carried out mechanically. And so for me, it's really fascinating seeing how she thought about and worked with patterns, very different kinds of materials. But there's a huge connection between Anni Albers and generative art. So that's an artist that I've always found to be really inspiring.
Erick Calderon: I can also just say that it's really interesting to see the interweaving of the past and the current and whatever the future is bringing. I think it feels very divisive sometimes between this is digital art, this is non-digital art, even if you want to call it crypto art and non-crypto art, this is generative art and not generative, this is AI, whatever. It just feels really nice to have everything in one place and see a journey from people like Josef and Anni Albers. To me, Vera Molnar has been a huge inspiration for the work that I did. A lot of us discovered a lot of these people after the fact. I don't claim to have had a strong history in even knowing much about art until starting Art Blocks because Art Blocks was this hobby thing. It's really interesting how much they've not just impacted work that's come after that but also validated the work that came out of a complete isolation. The work that originally happened in Art Blocks, a lot of the artists had no idea who these original greats were, and yet they were speaking that language half a century later. I think there's something really powerful about that.
Peter Bauman: I do think it's interesting that some of these shows are being brought to the present and some of them haven't been, like Tate's Electric Dreams. It was only brought up until the Internet age, so I guess around the early '90s. A lot of the connections weren't made explicitly to anything that's happening in the present. I do think that shows like this that do make those explicit connections to the present are important, or they're at least saying something different than Electric Dreams was saying.
Tyler Hobbs: Definitely. Some of these names that people throw out, some of these historical names, I think especially people like Molnar, they've started almost having this negative effect of people seeming to just be throwing them out for more hollow or shallow reasons. The way they did this show, by using actual work from the TMA's collection and also making that connection to Bill and the Alberses, and also, of course, people like Sol LeWitt, I think definitely avoids any of that.
Peter Bauman: One thing that's really exciting about this show is that it's communicating what we all love, generativity and systems art, to a museum audience that very likely has not heard of these things before, is not familiar with the artists that are going to be presented. I mean, of course, some of them will be. But for the most part, this is being presented to a general museum-going audience in Ohio and from a museum that has not traditionally emphasized the digital much in the past. What do you hope that your work is saying to some of these new faces in this new audience?
Erick Calderon: The Buffalo AKG show was a really special show. They did that last year and now it's in Nantes, France. And what was really interesting to me is showing up there and talking to board members and talking to them as if I was going to have to explain everything. And they totally understood everything about op and digital and generative. And then for the opening night, talking to just total random strangers, and they got it. But the Buffalo AKG has a history of that. They have a history of support. I think they're some of the earliest collectors of digital art. Ohio, to your point, is very different than that. I think it's really interesting to see how people will react, not with a background like the AKG that has such a strong history in that, but what's going to feel like a pretty fresh and completely new experience for a lot of people. I can't wait to see that. I think it's going to be very unique to what we've experienced at LACMA, even, because LACMA had the Coded show a couple of years ago. I wish I was there next week or in a couple of weeks to experience it, but it should be really interesting to see how people react.
Sofia Crespo: I'm really excited about it because I feel in general, there's still a lot of... Somehow it still feels like we're at the early stages of this, of getting digital work legitimized by institutions, even though artists have been making digital work for decades now, several decades. But still it feels like a huge milestone somehow whenever traditional institutions make space for it. So, yeah, that's something that I personally find really exciting. And also, well, I love Julia. I worked with her some years ago already on a show that she curated for Feral as well. It's something that I think is really exciting, and the curator in this case is also really good.
Peter Bauman: It's a good point that we are in these early stages. I mean, these movements tend to get institutionalized in processes. Again, looking at Electric Op and Electric Dreams the last couple of years, they only looked at a specific period and they stopped again in the early '90s. It happens in chunks and it feels like it's always happening because I guess it is. It's like in 2025, we're still institutionalizing what happened in the '60s and '70s and '80s. It demonstrates that it takes time but also that it's why we should be excited about this show, because to a certain extent, it is also happening right now.
One thing that I think is interesting about this show, Sofia, you mentioned how not all generative work has to have the same shape and the same process. That's something that we spoke about in Basel with Feili, about how you two work so well collaboratively because he thinks very differently than you do. Going back to maybe the theme of the show to showcase the depth and breadth of the generative community, I think also a recurring tension there is between figuration and abstraction and also the audience's expectation for something more abstract and maybe even the surprise of something more figurative. How do you navigate that spectrum? Especially in this work, for your work at this show, what draws you to those collaborations?
Sofia Crespo: I love this because I get to show works done with very different people. Obviously, when you collaborate with someone for a while, you start to establish your own dynamic. With Feili, we are just completely different minds. So he thinks systematically. He needs to design a system and be performative about the rules we choose for the system. But I would be more like, who cares? We can throw the rules out of the window if they don't meet what we're trying to do. So I'm all about orienting back to what are we trying to do with this? And that's the tension in a good way, the tension of negotiating between what each of us wants in the collaboration and what we're trying to get.
With Anna, it's very different than with Feili because Anna is more like me in the sense that we are very chaotic. But also our collaborations, they're always done in a very short period of time and very intensive. With Feili, because we have the studio, I get to have a collaboration that spans over several months and we work at it slowly. With Anna, it's more like, okay, we're together in the same place and we're working all the time while babysitting her babies, and we are brainstorming and we are putting together materials. It's more about responding in the moment to something, making our own data sets. It has this craft element to it, which I really like, which is always about making something by hand as well. The way we've done that is in our collaborations, we work in one or another way with analog photography. In the one that we are showing at the show, the work itself, we are showcasing the digital part, but the work has another part that is completely analog and that was printed in toned cyanotype. I think that's something that I really enjoy, this part of the practice that gets me out of the computer and into making something by hand. Also getting to show that digital art doesn't have to just be shown on the screen, that it can be shown in different ways. I think that's also something that this show highlights, all the different ways that digital art can manifest itself.
Peter Bauman: No, I think that's really interesting, what draws you to those collaborations and then how also that leads to some of the navigation between the digital and the analog and the figurative and the abstract.
Erick Calderon: To me, there's this really powerful thing where your art can be viewed by someone, and someone can know it, as long as they know enough about the cohort of people that are making art, that they know immediately that it's yours. The Chromie Squiggle was a happy accident in many ways, and that's something that I've talked about in various different contexts. But to me, when I think back at that project, I think about the idea that I was just trying to demonstrate great variety, and thinking back to, for example, one of my favorite artists still alive today, Manfred Mohr, who was also just demonstrating different views on the cube and whatever. To me, abstract lends itself to that really well. I've always been drawn to that. I've always been drawn to fun. How can I make something that's abstract look compelling and interesting and recognizable? That seems to drive a lot of...
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, something that I can add about that is I love the space of ambiguity, when a thing looks like something that you can recognize, but upon closer inspection, it doesn't look like anything directly recognizable. I think that's the case with the work we did with Feili, Sediment Nodes, that looks like, I guess you could call it organic abstraction in some ways, but it's very textural as well, where it looks like organic shapes, but it doesn't look like any particular shape that's easily recognizable. Whereas the work with Anna is more figurative in the sense that they are flowers. None of them really exist, but it's very clear that it's flowers.
“I love the space of ambiguity, when a thing looks like something that you can recognize, but upon closer inspection, it doesn't look like anything directly recognizable.” — Sofia Crespo 17:51
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think there's also that similar tension, I think, just within this show, and I think also within this call, and it's something we can talk a bit more about. I have a couple of questions on it, but about how you all see generative systems and AI technologies as sharing any of the same genealogy. The way I tend to think of it is that generative art that's procedural and code-based is part of a bigger umbrella of generativity, and that's part of a bigger umbrella of systems-based art. And then deep learning is basically part of AI, which is also a form of generative art and also a form of systems-based art. They're siblings, at least how I think about them. And that seems to be how this show presents them, too, with deep learning work presented side by side with procedural code-based work. Do you see them as fundamentally related? And do you agree that their genealogy is related and that they should be shown side by side in this context?
Tyler Hobbs: I think it's a really useful and interesting comparison to make because there certainly is a lot that the two have in common. I mean, in both, basically, the artist is turning over some of the agency to the tool or to randomness, however you want to put it. And they're taking a bit of a step back. And their generativity is what allows the work, the process, to produce something new and exciting and surprising. And that's ultimately the power of the generative approach. And both in a code-based system and an AI-based system, you're able to achieve that. And in both cases, the role of selection and curation is incredibly important. So looking at the results of these systems and making a reaction-based choice about what is meaningful to you, that's an important step often in both of these.
The main difference between the two practices is the degree of specificity and control that the artist has over the system. This is going to be generalizing, but generally speaking, a code-based algorithm system, like something that I or Erick would make, is going to be quite specific in some ways. There's randomness in the algorithm, but the randomness is placed there in a very precise way. So we know the ways that it's going to diverge from the norm. Whereas I think an AI-based system is going to have a bit of a looser direction, a looser hold on the algorithm. It depends on the artist. Sofia could talk about this better than I could. But oftentimes, artists are working with a lot of tools and algorithms that have been crafted elsewhere. So they don't have quite the same high degree of control over every little aspect of what's happening. But these are incredibly powerful algorithms that can generate a massive range of different types of results. So there's a bit of a trade-off there. You get lower specificity but a greater range. So I think both art forms are able to address pretty unique spaces and do things very differently. Sofia was talking about generating these flowers that don't exist but look realistic, and I couldn't code an algorithm to do that. And it would be hard for an AI system to make something that looked like a good Fidenza. So there's a trade-off. And fortunately, both forms of art making exist. I think they're very complementary in some ways.
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, I agree with what you said, Tyler. And what's fun for me is finding these spaces of weirdness. Most of the time, the extreme, extreme realism isn't what's interesting. In the work with Anna, it was fun because we collage them by hand. But most of the time in our work, what we try to look for is these places where the algorithms generate something weird. There is a process of getting used to what a certain algorithm produces. So if you're running the same neural net on different data sets over and over again, you start to build an idea of how your data set affects the output somehow. But there's still a huge room for unexpected stuff. And that's what makes me still be excited to work with the same algorithms that I started working with in 2018. And I think that's fun because there's still a lot to be done and to be explored there.
Erick Calderon: Oh, I do that, too. I have a couple of things. First of all, I do think there's a very clean cut. One is deterministic and one is not, generally. I mean, yes, generative code-based art doesn't have to be deterministic, but even every output could be reproduced exactly. And obviously with AI, generally, it's not deterministic. It's a bit of a surprise. And I think that is a distinguishing factor that is really important to consider. We spend a lot of time when we're coding to achieve an exact effect within a certain level of constraint, but then we're happy for the algorithm to take it from there.
This is maybe the blockchain nerd in me. Gen art and GAN art and all these things existed pre-blockchain. I think one of the things that's most exciting about this is that the blockchain's distribution mechanism, as an artist working with the tools available at our time, is what feels like the strongest Venn diagram between these two art forms, in that especially when variety is at play, when variety is interesting, both art forms are able to be documented in a way that can establish and document and give provenance for the variety of the algorithm, whether it's deterministic or non-deterministic. And I think that's really powerful because this technology has facilitated so much of us to be able to express ourselves just in a different way.
And then the last thing I just want to say, because you mentioned the flowers, too. Kevin Abosch's work comes to mind as one of these where you look at the work and immediately your brain thinks it recognizes everything in there, but then you look a little bit longer and you're like... It's like you're jumping on a memory foam bed and you lay down and then your body starts sinking. It's like there's a second layer that happens with this unexpected behavior that you get with AI. That's the dopamine. That's the little endorphin, at least for me. Everybody has a different way that they experience art and that they explore art. And for me, that's the little endorphin that goes off. I think it's really interesting because your brain immediately says, that's a flower. But then you look at it and you're like, wait a minute. You're messing with me. I think there's something really powerful about that and really exciting about that. Whereas on the other side, the deterministic algorithm, as a code-based artist, every now and then you'll see an output and you're like, oh, crap, I did not expect that. We call that emergence, I guess, some say. I really did not in any world think that that output could come out. But 99.9% of the outputs, you immediately know that's that combination of starting color, ending color, whatever it might be. You know how it happened. Whereas with AI, I mean, yes, you can train and you can have an expectation or an idea, but you can still be just completely shocked and surprised about what can come out. The tension between those two, I think, is really interesting. The fact that they can all be documented with this technology and distributed with this technology in this way really brings them together.
Peter Bauman: I've been thinking about something similar and wanting to write a piece because there's this theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote about the carnival, and then he wrote about something called subversive aesthetics. He describes the carnival as a time when power is inverted and there's a lot of collectivization, collective ritual. But it's also a time when the body is presented in this grotesque and exaggerated way. I think there's a lot of similarities between those ideas and AI and some of the uncanniness or the surprise of it that you were talking about. I think everybody mentioned it, but you specifically, Erick. I guess with AI tools, we were talking about how for artists, they can be a bit more of a black box. But I wonder how you see art. How do you see it evolving along with these tools?
“It's like you're jumping on a memory foam bed and you lay down and then your body starts sinking. It's like there's a second layer that happens with this unexpected behavior that you get with AI.” — Erick Calderon 24:22
So Andrej Karpathy, who I guess used to be at OpenAI, sees software as evolving from software 1.0, which is basically hard programming on a computer, to software 2.0, which is the weights of a neural network, to now, and he was just talking about this in June of this year, what he calls software 3.0, which is prompts in an LLM. He talks about how 2.0 eventually over time started eating 1.0. Neural networks at Tesla for self-driving cars started becoming just a bigger part of the code base, literally, than the hard programming code. He hypothesizes that that will happen with 3.0. I guess, do you agree with that hypothesis? And then, if that's true or if it's not true, how do you see that impacting art? Do you see this trend from hard programming to neural networks and deep learning as cannibalizing?
Sofia Crespo: One thing to consider is, in the tech industry, what are the new developments and what's happening? And those things are really cool and exciting, but they're not always necessarily relevant to artists. There's not always the same alignment on incentives necessarily. I think for me, and I'm speaking just for myself but also for Feileacan, and I think Anna as well, it's about agency, being able to train our own models. It's about being able to learn about the code and how the code works as much as we can, knowing that we're not engineers, but that's our way of gaining agency. And I think that having a tool that simplifies all of that interface somehow would remove a part of that, which is important. Maybe that's because we are from one particular generation and we're just being stubborn to relinquish that, because AI has been moving so quickly that maybe we're all in that way. That's how we learned to use it and that's how we want to continue using it. I can't imagine having to write a prompt to make an artwork. But I know that if I step out of that, I know that these tools can be really empowering to a lot of people. It's also important to know that they can be empowering to a lot of people but not necessarily to everyone. Not necessarily everybody wants to relinquish that control.
Tyler Hobbs: I think Sofia framed it in a really great way, about it being about agency. It makes me think, suppose you're an artist and you have a team of expert painters at your disposal, and you can ask them to make any painting that you want. Just because the artist has that doesn't mean that's the only way they want to make a painting. Sometimes you want to be the one making the painting. There's a different meaning that happens that way. Having a team of painters at your disposal, obviously it can be empowering. It allows you to do things, but it may not be what you want to do. I think it depends a lot on the artist's intent, on what they're hoping to get out of the work and what they're hoping to do with the work. It's hard to make general statements about it. Also, I hope that... I think all of us here are probably pretty open-minded about exactly what way that could go. I think we can see how artists could use it in amazing ways, and artists could also maybe use it to their detriment. I think it's just one more complicated choice that artists will have to navigate as they think about what work they want to make and how they want to make it.
Erick Calderon: I think if it helps you achieve your goals, to learn faster. When we talk about agency, my goal in life is to get as much of my work into as many people's hands as possible. I want to touch as many humans on the planet and share the way that I look at the world with as many people. The last thing I'd want to do is be like, "Hey, ChatGPT, give me a full algorithm," and release it. That is really not interesting. But there's some complicated geometry that I've always been very curious about, very interested in understanding how to implement and work with to communicate or to send a message out there, and the ability to use that to teach you or educate. I'm working on a project where I literally had no idea what I was doing when I got into it and asked for a 25-page research paper on this Venn diagram between two different, very divergent things, and it gave it to me. And then being able to study that allowed me to create this work. And so it just depends on how you use it. And so some people will use it in ways that feel hollow and empty, but that's okay. They're also expressing themselves. And some people will avoid it entirely, and that's okay.
When I go and get coffee out of a cupboard, the most awkward coffee cup to drink from is the one I pick because it was made by a human. We have dozens of coffee mugs in there that are all made by machines and whatever, and they're great and they're functional. But just because that technology exists doesn't draw us to or make a connection to that thing. And so I think we're going to see a hybrid end result. I started doing ceramics a few years ago, and I was looking on the internet and looking at websites from the late '90s, really, that had not been updated yet. Now it's been a while. So anytime you do any craft, you forget some things, like what temperature to put the kiln at or whatever. And now I can go to this tool, and it literally saved me eight hours to remember, again, how to do some of these ceramic things and get out there and make stuff again. And so, yeah, there's just a huge, huge spectrum of how it can be used. And ultimately everyone is entitled to do it however they want to do it. And I'm here for it.
“Sometimes you want to be the one making the painting. There's a different meaning that happens that way.” — Tyler Hobbs 29:21
I'm excited for how it affects our ability to understand our processes better. And I think it's really good at that sometimes, just to help us even understand ourselves and what we're trying to do. It gets to know you. I've been sharing this lately, but there's a prompt that I saw on Twitter one time. It said, ask ChatGPT, based on everything it knows about you, what your life is going to be like for the next 30 years. It's inspiring. It's interesting. It's crazy, but it's also introspective. It makes you think. But I'm really excited about it in so many different ways. I just hope that, really, what matters is that artists can maintain their authenticity. Because the only thing that AI cannot replace right now is authenticity. I think that's our heart. That's why we make these things. That's why we communicate via these visual or audio things. We need to fight really hard to make sure that it does not ever overshadow who we are as an artist and our authenticity. That's going to be a struggle, I think, for a lot of people. The more it makes things easier to do in life, the more that line gets blurred between what's you and what's the machine. But it's also exciting to see that evolve over time. This is a crazy time to be alive.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, you all mentioned agency, and then I think authenticity is part of that, and authorship. A lot of the narrative about agency in AI seems to be premature: the demise of the human artist and taking the human out of the loop. It seems like people are already wanting to get to that point, but we're not there yet. I mean, even Andrej said that 2025 isn't the year of AI agents. This is going to be the decade of AI agents, and we still have 10 years to go. And humans are still such a crucial part of every step in the loop.
Tyler Hobbs: I definitely agree. Whenever I hear talks about, is the human artist going away? It's eye-rollingly boring, I think.
Peter Bauman: One thing that's really interesting that might spur new conversations is there are these new institutions that are being built really all over the world. So I'm talking about Canyon that's opening up on the Lower East Side in New York. There's Node, which is opening a facility on the West Coast, Northern California, near Silicon Valley or in Silicon Valley. There's Colección Solo's new space in Madrid. And then there's other spaces, too, Beeple Studios and even things like Dataland and the Museum of Art and Light. So there seems to be a newer generation of institution that is digital native or digital-focused, at least, that's all coming up right around these next 12 months or so, plus or minus. How do you reconcile, as artists and participants in the space, all of this exciting momentum about institutional news but also realities of some of the difficulties that we're facing in the current market, maybe more micro-market conditions?
Tyler Hobbs: Institutions are some of the slowest-moving players in the space. And so the fact that there's starting to be institutional appreciation of digital art is a good sign of the long-term trends, right? Those things don't just pop up unless there's sustained interest in something. And so that means it's been decades leading up to some of these things. And so the market's a short-term fickle signal about one aspect of art, which is how much money you can make buying and selling it. And so it really has a pretty minor bearing on the importance of the art form. And I view those as pretty different signals on different axes. And I do my best not to be worried about the day-to-day and just keep trying to make the best art I can. And fortunately, it seems like the rest of the world is catching up on appreciating that art, too.
Erick Calderon: I'll just say it really fast. You say it goes really slow, and it does go really slow, but this is happening at an alarmingly fast rate, too, five years. And so there's a balance there, too. And sometimes when things happen really fast in the context of things that normally take a long time, it's also terrifying. Not all of these institutions or these organizations are going to do right for the art, do right for the artists. And that's okay. People are going to come and go. But ultimately, the fact that it almost feels like there's a rush toward this is very validating for what we do and really exciting.
Sofia Crespo: This is something that Feileacan and I talk about, and we have different views sometimes, because I would be like, "Oh, institutional stuff just goes very slow," and he would be like, "What are you talking about? There's so much happening. There's so many things being done at the moment. How much more are you expecting?" And so he's right that it is true that a lot is happening in a very short period of time. Tyler, as you're saying, I think for me as well, it's important to stay grounded in what I'm doing and not let the market define what art I make, and try my best to stay loyal to my journey as an artist and connected to that, because markets are cyclical. They aren't meant to be linear. So it's just the nature of how these systems work. For artists, I don't think it's under our control, really. And when we're making art, if we think about the market, that completely burns my creativity, at least for me. I need to stay focused on the things that I need in order to make my work.
Peter Bauman: Even though there are these really exciting institutional developments around the world, in the States there are these funding cuts that have been happening this year, and that might have even affected your practice. How are you also dealing with that other end of the institutional spectrum? What places in the world might be picking up the slack if the States seems to be pushing arts and culture away, at least at the federal level?
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, that's something that makes me really sad because I think that it's really important to fund culture. And very often, it's one of the first things to go. When the pandemic happened, one of the first things to happen was our galleries were struggling and a lot of cultural institutions were starting to shut down. It is really sad that that's happening in the US right now. And it has definitely affected us, because we spent on one of the projects half a year, and on another project, I think it was just three months, but still quite intensively working on a few projects. What we do under the umbrella of bigger museum institutions is new and experimental because we aren't established artists. That's also one of the first things to go, the more experimental and the more new media things. What we're starting to see is we're taking those projects to other parts of the world and looking for different opportunities. We have received interest from institutions in China, so that's something that we're exploring at the moment, because at the end of the day, we have these projects halfway developed, which we put a lot of work in, and we still want to see them through to the end. But obviously, that's not going to happen in the way that we were planning.
Peter Bauman: It's interesting. We have these institutions, but they're also, in a way, going to be a test of the appetite for this work around the world. People are going to need to show up to these shows and be excited about this work. Maybe that's the last thing we can close on, the very last closing thought. How do you think we can get people excited about this work and maybe leverage some of these new institutions, or leverage some of the institutional interest around the work now, to really get people in the public and a new audience excited? And Infinite Images is, of course, part of that.
Tyler Hobbs: I think Infinite Images is doing it perfectly, honestly. Gather some of the best work you can find, show it in the best quality way that you can, make it accessible and understandable to the public. That's the whole combo right there. I'd love to see more of this. I think this is basically the perfect exhibition. And it's really exciting to me. I hope that other places take notice and learn from that and build on that.
Erick Calderon: I'll second that by just saying also the network component of this is actually what I think will be appealing to potentially future generations that are going to be competing. Art competes with different culture as generations come about. And so we're competing with Minecraft and video games and TikTok. And I do think that the network nature of it really speaks the language of those cultures. And I think we don't spend enough time really thinking about how our artworks become a networked phenomenon of people that are all cheering and going for the success of the artist, the ecosystem, whatever it might be. And I think we'll see more of that as we get a response from younger generations that are excited about the interconnectivity of the work.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think those are really great answers. And I think you're right, Tyler, that Infinite Images is doing a really good job of being a model, and it's happening at the right time because all these institutions might be looking at it and looking at its potential success. So thank you all three so much for joining. I only wish, as always, we could chat for longer and go over more of this stuff. But I appreciate all the time that we did have together. And thank you so much for this brilliant chat.
Tyler Hobbs: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Sofia Crespo: Thank you for having us.
Erick Calderon: It's good to be on a call with you guys.
Peter Bauman: Absolutely. Yeah, likewise. All right. Thanks. Nice seeing you all. Bye-bye.
Sofia Crespo: Bye.
