GM Farcaster | Here for the Art | with @ccarella

i may or may not still be working on that piece

that's fine that's it's all like you know you you're a professor in your other life it's always like when is the homework too that's when that's when i'll do it yep but life is good i'm i'm super happy to be doing this with you guys i was super excited when when you first asked big fan of what you guys have been doing i think this is going my 2nd time sitting behind the microphone with you

yeah these are my paintings behind me amazing so so i'll talk through the journey i will say this just just as a maybe a a point of reference which is i've been minting since 2020 into creating enough teas for 4 years now that's about how long it took for anyone to care about my art and so i feel like i'm in a good spot now things are minting i have a a good collective base i have a good thesis on what i'm trying to do but it's one thing i just wanted to like tell all of the artists it's like you know i've been grinding for 4 years and now my artists starting to get discussed but my journey starts of course long ago when i was primarily a physical artist and even my very first entry into art was around street art and graffiti at first cool mostly yeah cool i mean i grew up in new york went to college moved back to new york and then in my early twenties was in the in the street art and graffiti scene first i was a photographer

and a and a collector

and then and then i started meeting the artists and then the artists started handing me over into their studio and so i was hanging out in these kind of brooklyn studios in the o o's and hanging out with the street artists and watching them create and then through watching them create sort of getting involved in creating myself and so just became you know an artist a physical artist and i i you know i got up with guys who did street art but mostly i was making paintings and so i was a fine artist in new york for a while this is this is kind of an evolved version of that early style but these are what my paintings look like and and i was doing pretty great and it's i you know i i'd love to paint i still love to paint i was showing in in galleries on occasion or joining group shows and then the for me like the peak of physical art was i had a art studio in long island city my own studio separate from home and i realized that as i brought collectors and you know people who found me on instagram through the studio they would always buy and so i had this moment where i had a studio i painted it all the time i had visitors come by all the time they would buy the art off the walls and and that was a pretty good moment of art for me it's super fun it's like i think one thing we do lose in digital is like seeing someone's face when they see your piece that was always really cool when people were looking around my studio and one piece would resonate with them so i was doing that separately my instagram account grew pretty large and then people were in dms commissioning me and so there's this whole other life of like a physical artist that i was starting to succeed at i never really loved the gallery system sort of thought that was the only way so i was trying to play into that a little bit we also just learned from like the street art and graffiti guys that it's like yeah forget the gallery just sell the art off the walls and so that was kind of for me then the pandemic hit yeah i was actually not i mean i my crypto story is like it's disconnected from that and i like had these starts and stops but i think like when the pandemic hit i was not deep into crypto well i did have this art studio the whole world was shut down and i had this cool art studio that i was allowed to go to new york was like really bad in the pandemic and you know you couldn't really leave very shut down even me so none of the artists none of the other artists showed up to the studio because everyone was just so terrified so it was cool so i showed up i would be in the studio alone and then a few things happened 1 i started thinking about authenticating my paintings and that led me to nfts as a technology to potentially do that i ultimately decided nfts are not great at authenticating real life stuff memorabilia or or or there's ways to do it but it wasn't really working out for me but through that process discovered nfts and then and also like no one was visiting my studio anymore because we were shut down i had my ipad pro with a pencil or just whatever i don't even know what version it was i had the pencil and so i just started doing some digital art and then i started minting nfts first on the network in fact part of the story is that

part of the story is i like right when the pandemic happened i was working at a start up studio where i was head of product of all of the start ups and we have really found a groove in consumer packaged goods and setting things up on shopify and it just got super boring for me like i love software i love art i did never really intended on being an expert in shopify and so i left to go see what was next found nfts through my art practice started tweeting a lot about it and then tezos reached out to me and at the time there was a company in new york called tq tezos and they said like hey well all of the stuff you're tweeting about we wanna work on and we need someone here to come help and so i joined tq tezos and i joined early enough in that process that i got to provide a little bit of feedback on the feet spec like the spec was not even fully developed yet and then we built the first tools i was on a team that like built the first tool where you could like mint it all it was called and cool it occurred to me at some point that no one had even tried this thing on test net it was premature we were we were we were on test net no one had tried it on main net and so i i just minted my first artwork on tezos main net and then it turns out that is the first artwork minted on tezos main net and so wild did that for a little bit left his

you know it's it's something that like it's not that i like to be first i just am often first and i think it's like i don't have the filter that makes people afraid to do something so you know like i was in this tezos organization was like so much bigger than me right i never like thought to ask anyone hey should i try this thing on mainnet i just did it right and then after i did it people told me like hey you're the first one to do that it's like oh okay cool it never occurred to me that that that would be the case so so those early days of tezos were really fun hicconnunc was the site of the what i did was pre hicconnunc but then wow then very quickly jumped on i was an early mentor there and user and it was a really fun vibe and cheap gas prices won ethereum gas prices were pretty crazy at the time so did that then eventually i just loved it right like like so back in the story arc of it was the pandemic i had joined tezos i put out my first nft all of a sudden i could reach people who could who after having people come through my studio constantly it was like i went months without anyone seeing my art and so i really just sort of bought into digital art nfts having massive reach and so that that's kinda how i got started then from tezos went to ethereum and then kind of went down deep down this rabbit hole

that yeah sure so pda 2 is because this is my second proper studio and so i talk about my studio in long island city which was like my studio for a long time and really great and then you know through covid and then life and all of this stuff i wound up painting in the corner of a bedroom or you know doing artwork from wherever and so 6 months ago moved down to honduras and live in a house here with like a real proper studio and so immediately in my head it was just studio 2 because this is the 2nd studio before i have any sort of ambitions for hypersub or anything it was like studio 2 in my head and so then so then i came across hypersub like very early i think optum had the first one i saw this i felt like oh this is cool and something i wanna experiment with and i wanna support fabric team and see what this is all about there there was no master plan here although i think it turned out really well and so then i really kind of overthought it like what should these subscriptions be and in fact this i would like to simplify some more too and so at first it was like this which is

you know basically like get everything i meant actually that wasn't even in the first version i didn't quite know how to use it right so it was like get one one addition a month and then anything i do in between that was sort of my plan and then get access to this token gave it space and this token gave it this and like i i made it like pretty complicated on here it still says like get early access to my essays which is still simple i haven't i haven't written an essay

what i've ultimately decided is that like everything i meant i wanna send to my amazing microsoft and so i would simplify that a lot to like sign up and get everything i meant and that's effectively how i've been operating so so that's that's how i started right i set the price very very low i think it's like actually to sign up for a month i think is less than one free mint on zuora and so i intentionally was not optimizing for revenue i was just wanted to get a collective base you know and so that's how i started i got about a 100 subscriptions really quickly then i kinda went into this kind of hypermimetic art mode partially because of hyper sub and you know like before hypersub or like when you're just getting started as an artist or before anyone's taking notice you'll like mint an nft and like 3 or 4 people mint it and it's cool and it's and i'm grateful and and but it was not like super motivating you know like like just in my instagram account was so much bigger that like if i post posted art there like more people saw it but then once i got a 100 people in my hyper sub and everything i minted went to a 100 people who like my artwork that was like super rewarding to me and then was just encouraging and then i like just picked up the pace we can talk separately

what is the kind of what would

yeah so in my head it's animated bauhaus so it's like inspired by the bauhaus movement but it's animated and oh cool okay not what i think of when i think of bauhaus and i can't say i'm you know for so long ago animation was was a whole different beast right but i don't know if there were animators back then but that was what i was trying to do here i've i've long been obsessed with like bauhaus or geometric art and then every time i do it and i and i can do some what stuff i really like it feels very derivative and so i never really released my kind of bauhaus stuff or my geometric stuff which is like what i really love but then once i started animating them i started to realize like oh cool this is the essence of what i love about this kind of art and it doesn't feel derivative and so that's

yeah so i love

yeah

you can scroll down to first kiss which is probably when i started this

so one thing i'll say these purple energies if you find purple energy number 1 which which you don't have to

yeah

number 2

so cute and let me just say when you if you go all the way back to and i'm not asking you to scroll because it might take you a while but energy number 1 was created like when i think when frames came up and then the that's great and the growth of farcaster was like crazy you know and like i've been at farcaster forever now so that was like a real moment for a lot of us who you know were used

i wanna do more of these sketchbooks this is kind of before i animate what what these things might look like wow

so purple letter number 1 was literally that's 4 cool 3 i love this one that was for valentine's day

and here is 1 right this is 1 this is 1 yeah that's number 1 and so that was like i was really trying to harness that energy it was like just such a crazy moment and that's what this is all about and through that learn this animation technique and then people really liked it and asked for more and then i started doing 23 and in my head it was like okay cool i've done 4 i'm done and then people kept asking me for more and so i just continued the series but through that i kind of learned how to animate with ai and so then was doing this work and then from that started to explore other animations you know if you go back up and you see my valentine's day piece that was like the first time i like tried something different can we do a heart can we animate in a similar style that i just started

yeah

that's right and actually before i was doing my studio 2 work and so i think some of this is just the influence of your environment like the art i made when i was living in new york was different thank you

yeah and i plan to maybe plan on releasing a lot more sketchbook ones but i just i'm just i'm just creating art so quickly now that it doesn't stay in the sketch very very long

so this one i created in so the park came to visit me in honduras yes we did fridays at the park and so fridays at the park it was a friday we rented a music studio here in tagusicapa we brought in honduran artists to collaborate with the park they all made a song together we brought in a honduran chef to cook us food and this i made from what and i'm chilling in the studio they're all working i'm like just chilling listening to the music like you know sipping in the vibes and then i was like oh i should make art while i'm here they're all making art and so this one was actually made in in the studio and so it has like some piano vibes and it will scroll to like some you could find some guitar looking stuff

so that was particularly like the energy of the studio which is what i was trying to capture

it's a story behind that one then i started going back to it's obviously not animated but

my work before studio too was heavily focused on women yep i think my art has changed based on where i live seems kinda normal but my new york art was one thing in miami i started doing these these series around women but it's still abstract art yeah she's she's left

i appreciate that she she clicked in one of my early pieces when i was in miami and that's actually how i connected with her in the first place and so so from here right i've like now kind of learned animation and then this was like a throwback to like well what was the art i made in new york in new york i made a lot of art about new york and so i started thinking about like one of the places i live and the the window outdoors and i really love this and then i just felt like it didn't resonate with people but i have since have gotten some feedback from people who like really love this piece you know so maybe i

that's maybe a

perfection i i'm trying to like remember there was a moment that made me do this which was obviously degen all of the tokens that degen was mooning i think maybe this is claim day

they all say higher because that's just my thing but that is that did mint for degen okay so

yeah it totally was yeah yeah love it that alone has been an amazing experience that i would love to talk to more artists about because i have another piece the one you scrolled with the arch and the woman with the purple hat which which kinda it goes up it's awesome this is all a part part of the larger story here

it's it's up above so more recent

this this one i yep that's the one so that one is available for 1 djing right so it's like a very small amount of money a a practical freak but the djing community is like like i learned a lot first of all from that last piece but then from this piece it's like a lot of people collected it yep and what what's really cool for me is it's different collectors like a lot of my other work gets kinda like the zor versus zor collectors but the collectors are just different than my other collectors and so i sort of then realized like oh you can mint into these other token communities obviously authentically and if it connects it's like you get a whole new collector base which is super interesting so i really love that when i say these things minting still today they mint like like today my interface blows up all day but when i say them it's always from emss that like i've never seen before collecting my heart so i think that's really cool

that's so cute

yeah totally

you're a piece this was like the story here is that like okay so now

my next one will be kissing in paris oh beautiful i'm in post on that but but not for you guys but the so so i had so anyway 3 different styles of art based in new york and then miami i started doing women and then in tegu i'm just sort of channeling this new energy then i perfected not that i perfected but i started to craft around animation and so then it was like how do i bring these things all back together and how do i like focus back on women as as a subject here and and yeah i just sort of found this fifties sixties

magazine style cigarette ad style actually

is yeah and here's the other if you scroll all the way almost like the beginning of studio too then the other direction

started this is actually more similar to my older art featuring women and i was different super focused cool i was super focused on literally cigarette ads french 50 60 70 cigarette ads

so then i like to i created a series i dropped them all to my hyperslips i think it was like 11 pieces just dropped them all one night to to them and so then i just started bringing all the strings together yeah these pieces actually so good

yeah and so the topic here is is creativity this is like what i was feeling and thinking but like it was actually a very good one like she is very like french cigarette ed 19 fifties 19 sixties looking as are a lot of i i wound up like that that's yeah so these that's like the so then when i had so then it was like how do i bring it all together i've got this glitchy animation i've got these women that i've been working on my whole life i've got this kind of time period of 50 sixties that i'm trying to play with and that sort of resulted in 1st kiss this yeah

really look so good

to me

yeah

feel good when i this is when i thought that every month you will sign up for my hyper slab and every month you'll get like an official stadia 2 piece and i mostly did that for myself so that i wouldn't go a month you know my art is like very i'll make a lot of it and then i'll go months without making any but i wanted to have like a commitment and so the zorb in the middle is in fact if you scroll up one more maybe is a painting i made so these are paintings not the ones behind me this is the painting right i made this painting down here in studio 2 and then the the digital representation of that is the zorb and so i was trying to do one of these each month this is january and the middle of february and then by the time i hit march i'm just creating so much art that i didn't wanna go back to this style i just like well you know i just wanna keep just the value prop has changed for me

the

yeah

yeah

different like

probably yeah because of yeah yeah i mean you have different feelings when you make things

but i always thought like in that traditional skeuomorphic gallery mentality that you had like a style and you had to stick to that style and people like would recognize your style and then

then like last year i was inspired by like some of like the prolific outputters and so you know jacob was telling me he just mints every day lights every time

mints every day gammie mints all the time and i was like buying what they were selling like yeah i should be minting everything all the time and then it's still one of practice and then 2 it still looks like intimidating at first and then i started doing it and that sort of studio 2 is sort of the representation of me doing that and and now i'm just cranking out stuff all of the time you know and so even if it's i'm trying something new i want my collectors to have it right so that's what the sketchbook the sketchbook was an idea of like you know as an artist i think all artists feel this way it's like there's so much stuff you don't release because you don't feel it's good enough and that's what i consider like a mimetic artist i think that's just not you just have to release stuff like show

and so

i mean one so

i'm like on one hand there's just so much going on that of course you missed stuff like i missed my friends drop new products that yes i find out about later right because there's just so much going on now so much the one thing i'll say is a bummer is that opensea hides everything that's air dropped right as like a state of prevention

so i often like will go in like it'll be a couple of weeks and i'll go looking for something specific like you mentioned in my hidden folder and then i see all of the the hyperslabs i'm i'm signed up to

i love the my hyper sub page my zoho profile they're almost the same you know but but hyper this hyper subpage is like such a good way to like go through my my portfolio and typically we can start at the beginning and as i was starting to tell this story it really tells a story of of what i'm thinking and the evolution of my work

yeah i'm a big fan of hypersite but like my little alpha here which i don't think is a secret anymore but it was like once you yeah mint an artwork and then drop on a 100 people and then you make it available for sale and for me it's always a pre mint then people come to that site and a 100 yep you already have a 100 people collecting and i've noticed that just drives more mints than if you start at 0 i mean it's like and it's i think it's just human psychology which if you come to a page and there are 3 mints you might not mint it if you come to a page and you see there's already 300 mints you're more likely to mint it you know and so absolutely it serves like 2 different things for me 1 i have true collectors who i can get my work into their hands everything i do that's first and foremost and then second of all i think it has this amplification effect both my collective sharing the work but also when you come to zuora you see that there are people who care already

enjoy

yeah it's somewhere in that range yeah so one i think it's super fun i'm like i'm a big supporter of enjoy and primarily because it's rewarding behaviors i was already doing and so many of us were already minting on zuora collecting on zuora and like if you probably like 90% of my mints have a comment so you know coming from nouns or we have vote with reason as soon as zora had mint with reason i was like this is it and so commenting

and i think in all of the ways that's like the

behavior we wanna encourage right like collect my work leave something on chain about it right like these comments are on chain right so like say something on chain about it so that was already happening right and and there was spoken chat where you could see a stream of all of the chats being left on chain so so when enjoy came out it was like okay number 1 i got a big airdrop and tip allowance because i was like i started number 12 on their leaderboard and then this week i'm number 6 on their leaderboard i think it's just i meant a lot both ways you know i meant and i collect and i comment on everything i think there's all kind of factors in and also you know clearly standing on the shoulders of dgen which has been really interesting and like an interesting positive sum gain to reward content creators and people who are adding value to forecaster and so now i felt like oh this is cool we're already doing this stuff we're now encouraging more people to do this stuff and we're supporting artists by tipping by tipping tokens to them and so i've just had a lot of fun with it i meant i yeah my my numbers are big and so i give a lot my tips are now typically 111333 which is like a 111,000 in joy and i just do that all week long

so i just

like that so yeah so i've so we're gonna get into a little bit of doubt talk now so i i just like enjoy as a concept i like the notion of different ways we can support artists i like kinda using this new technology to experiment with new ways to do things and so so i'm interested in seeing where enjoy can go and then one of the 1,000 part of is called energy

yeah and so energy is i don't know how old it is now it's it's it actually came out like a week after zuora network went live so so august

something like august and our goal was always it's a namish dao of course and then the goal was to support the arts on zuora network we've done a couple of projects and we kinda were off to a slow start but then this year came around and we're funding tons of stuff and it's really cool seeing tons of artwork come out and we're doing what the the only prop i think i've ever put up with nrg was to buy 1 eth worth of enjoy which oh cool passed and it turned into i think 7,600,000 enjoy which is quite quite a lot and so nrg is holding this enjoy and we are now running a rounds you know rounds dot wtf in a channel called enjoy art and every week we're giving out a 1,000,000 enjoy to people who post in that channel specifically to qualify you have to post your zuora link and made some changes 1 to support zuora network and then 2 to only count zuora links and so now we have this channel enjoy that art people are posting their art there it's high quality stuff i expected like a lot of spammy stuff but it's actually been really high quality and and so now we're kinda running this micro fund micro grants for artists love it the way rounds works is you have some allocation we're doing a $1,000,000 a week and that gets split amongst the pieces that get likes on that test and then more specifically for us it's the top 500 enjoy holders their likes count and other people's likes don't count and you do this as a kind of spam detection civil thing bot thing i have top 500 in joy that's got a

a lot of the community

yeah we'll do that yeah yeah

just launched it yesterday

just more involved and they enjoy community and

it's just been pretty cool

i don't know if you've if you've seen stats of like like you know this is 1 enjoy launched minting in zuora exploding yeah huge and so one can only assume this is a a primary cause of it but that's it's been really cool like enjoy has been encouraging more people to mint and what i don't see which is like some of the early concern was like oh people are just gonna spam zuora but like it kinda doesn't work that way right like if you don't have good quality stuff people don't mint your stuff it costs money to mint right so you already have that one level of like you have to mint and then decide to tip on top of that and so right i'm sure there's a lot of spammy low quality stuff on zuora but but i only ever see the good stuff and like the enjoy community on there it seems to be pretty high quality in my opinion

i think so

like that yeah

of i love this era of free minting or now we have erc 20 minting that's pretty low cost you know i think in the the bull market we had these like one of ones or like a collection of 10 and the prices were really crazy and that was very small

i think like the the value of i think this is like a hot take and but this this is my my world view like the value of digital art is how many people see it i mean it's like you're on the internet you're connected so like where the value of a one of 1 physical piece of art is like someone's work it's actually hard impossible to reproduce that stuff yeah whereas like the value i think of digital art is mimetic and so the more people who can collect it the more value it has and so then this notion of 3 minutes plus protocol rewards this fits really into my entire thesis i think all of these things coming together sort of protocol rewards microsoft having met light and jacob and gammy and all of these people just resonates with my art and then all of that and then for forecasts are growing like crazy it's a big part of it and then all of this kind of fuels my current creative output and then also through all of these people and and other media just being less precious about what i put out has has been really fun i mean it's like it's the most fun i've been having on chain since i've been here

absolutely i mean we we have to do it this way because most of the world is still against us and so yeah it's like we all have to we're you know we all have to win together here because there's no other option

so true true story

i think i probably will not be going to farcon this year

maybe i'll be at best fest might be my next travel