and gm farcaster and welcome this is something a little different that we're doing this is our first artist spotlight here for the art with max jackson so what we're doing with this little series is focusing on the artists who fill our warp cast timelines and really highlighting those sort of farcaster native artists and we we're starting with max one of our favorites and we'll also be dropping a art piece that goes with this episode and that will be both of the episode and the piece will be dropped to our new subscribers for our hyper sub and so there'll be a little bit of crossover here which is kinda fun we'll talk about your hyper sub in just a little bit but good morning gm max how are you doing today
morning i'm i'm doing great i got my little friend let me scroll down i was
gonna say let me let's see him
i've got scooby here
scooby hi scooby
she's a lap cat when she wants to be
hi scooby there's a lot of cats we like the cats we like the cats on parcaster that's for sure there's a whole channel for them i think that was one of the first channels it was very early on
i certainly posted to it a lot with this little
i just started posting in dog recently i had a couple of just funny pictures and i'm like i need to post this on on dog in the dog's channel but welcome scooby oh and i just noticed your shirt nice shirt
oh yeah made this one
noggling
my earl we'll talk about all the all the
we'll talk about that because i remember that from i think you had that on at farcon last year if i remember correctly
yeah i brought all my my nice related designs to farcon last time around for sure
so we're gonna chat a little bit about the your art the artist and sort of what you're doing right now and how that all relates to farcaster but max why don't you tell us just like a little bit of background how did you get started in art what different types of art do you do and let's start let's start there
alright so i've been in crypto for like ten years now you know as like a peer to peer software enthusiast since the napster days when i heard about
love it
crypto i just thought it was awesome and i i remember seeing the ethereum you know white paper come out and i was like oh this is a game changer this is gonna be the future of the economy and i immediately lost all interest in bitcoin and focused entirely on following ethereum and you know i i wasn't i've always been kind of an artist but my focus was on music so in those early days i actually did deploy some some social tokens on counterparty which is on bitcoin oh and i used it to exchange first for services for like music making services and i
okay
yeah and years went by i was working as a developer doing on chain stuff with ethereum deployed some simple contracts nothing worth writing home about just contract work i'd never even thought about nfts being used for art i had all these other ideas and then
so my you know taking a little tangent i was aside from being a developer i've also driven a pedicab for over
i remember that
for tech you know hustling rides give showing people a great time it's it's a blast i do that in boston and i've traveled the country doing it and i was doing it year round quite a bit and this one winter it was just real tough i was having a tough time emotionally and financially and i just needed something to like focus on when i wasn't working and so i you know i was like maybe i'll make t shirts i always wanted to make funny t shirts because you know you see people making a living that way on on instagram with their store i spent money that way and so i started trying to come up with designs and i realized i don't i didn't have any typography skills so i went from you know making patches and then i started doing a little bit of printing and then i'm like well i should probably pick up a calligraphy pen and start learning a thing or two and so i'm just doing the practice strokes and i fall in love with the exercise and i and i start doing it in a circle and making these patterns and that was just the beginning of a whole path just just you know the meditate because what i needed at the time more than another income which you know i could woulda helped but was was peace of mind and and that's really what it gave me it gave me something to focus on something to like breathe into and like let let go of my thoughts with
i love that you know so it's really started as almost like you know when you talk about like art therapy and i've done that as well where i'm like well that will be my release or not i don't think for me it's not really meditation but it's like this creative release where i'll you know play with pixel art or you know other all different other kinds of things and i i so i get that totally from even if you're not there's so much value to that even if it's not like your lifeblood you know what i mean but there's that value of the art therapy of giving you this creative outlet so i love that and then i did see are you you're still doing some screen printing because i did see just recently that you posted something new latest screen print full coverage calligraphy over more bleach painted calligraphy so this is amazing so tell me about that that recent like piece that you just did
yeah so actually this is my first foray into screen printing this is what i'm wearing here this is block printed so okay interesting linoleum block and like inked it up and then and then printed it on here a few times and i was doing that back in in the day which is is like seven years ago but i've never had the access to the facilities to do screen printing until now and thanks to recent sales and largely hyper sub subscribers i was able to start renting art studio space nearby
wow
i have an art studio where i in in a maker space where i have access to a screen printing shop and all this other stuff it's it's amazing like you name it they've probably got it they've got like jewelry casting like if you wanted to like we've got three d printing so you could go into the three d printing room print something out make a cast out of it and then like pour that cast out of metal or something so i've got all these ideas but i'm starting simple in the screen printing shop trying to take a pragmatic approach see if i can't like come up with some good designs seldom pay for the art studio keep it rolling but keep
building yeah i love that
the screen printing the screen printing i'm i'm starting by just like doing some of my calligraphy designs you know i've been wanting to experiment with a few different types of patterns so that's been really great practice i have some other things in mind that are gonna hit the timeline with some transaction frames for sure before far hint hint hint
alright before oh a little alpha here before far time
that's that's gonna be that's gonna be something people might want
interesting
i think it'll get some interest
so let me you'd mentioned muse you mentioned hypersub so i'm gonna show this on the screen right now you just put this post up about 38 drops so just took account of my art on muse hypersub drops page 38 drops made available to all subscribers on top of that a few of those are big collections of one ones ai three d calligraphy soon screen prints which is this is gonna be really interesting join the fun and subscribe so these they're beautiful you've got amazing pieces here different approaches i love your you also have a channel for muse and just going to your page right now you have a new one the future is blobs that's up which is pretty cool that's celebrating this week but there's it's really very eclectic a lot of different approaches you do have one particular type of style i'm assuming that ties into the calligraphy that you sort of circle back to a lot in that collection so what are your favorite pieces that you're creating right now do you have any favorites from the ones you've dropped on muse
well so i'll say one thing i'm really excited about is muse editions number one muse editions is the contract that i do the airdrops through number one one one of the optimism iheart art prizes in the ai category and it's it's one of my calligraphy pieces that is just lightly reinterpreted with ai to give it like that kind of ai i don't know what you call it you know when you see something that's like lightly done with ai and it's got that textural quality that an that slightly animated feel it looks really cool and i'm i'm really proud of it and i'm glad that it's the first piece in the collection and yeah it won that won that award so that that one holds interesting my heart i've done you know pure ai reinterpreted calligraphy with ai to various levels synthetic habitats that's a really cool one that's just a pure ai collection
i love the idea of taking the physical work and then seeing what you can do with it with ai i think that really creates that sort of cocreation of you know the the artist and ai and bringing it to a different level and i think that's a lot of fun
yeah you know what i love about doing that is that it gives a sense of my style i have a a nice continuity in all of these drops between the ones that are pure calligraphy and you know looking like they're pure ai but they still hold that same form that i that i take with my calligraphy and there's this just something there's like a common thread between it all because of where you know where it comes from but yeah you asked about which was my which was my favorite and like you know that kinda it's hard to say and it kinda goes back to why i named the the subscription muse and it's
that was one of my next questions yeah yeah i'm why did you name it why did you name it muse
because i want to just follow my creative path and and what better name than muse i'm following the muse anybody who's subscribing is subscribing to that journey and they are somebody who's going to get whatever i'm making that week and and you know last week it was you know a pure ai collection called unknown abandonware which is like screenshots of non existent shareware games from the nineties and then the week before that it was pure calligraphy and now just yesterday last night i dropped a piece that's just you know pure procedural three d animation and so that
was the blobs one that was the future's blobs
actually last week last week's airdrop was also a three d animation loop so yeah i think right now you know as much as i love all my art right now what i'm most excited about is just diving back into three d and like exploring techniques that i haven't explored yet and just getting my hands dirty there again
i love seeing you know i love seeing the experimentation i think that because that can lead to things you build on as you see okay this worked really well or i really like this now what can i do with it in a different way so i think there's a lot of fun to be had there as well which is and i'm really excited you know going back to the screen printing one you mentioned that this will be part of a drop for muse holders also so will it be like something you can redeem for the physical piece is that what you're thinking because that's really interesting
yeah well i you know i have a few different thoughts on that and it's kinda my my procedure towards like how do i decide these things is a lot like how i decide what art to drop which is i just kinda like i follow the muse there as well you know my my strategy changes every month as far as how i distribute art so one thing i was definitely planning on doing is giving away some of these shirts through a raffle
oh cool
the the last raffle we had was like pretty pretty big we had a lot of prizes i gave away some main net nfts that i'd made oh one main net nft i got one single edition and then three editions of a piece called social liquidity which was a remix of artwork by tomato who
oh cool
speaking of procedural three d artworks that guy makes some amazing stuff all all of you go check out tomato on farcast he's awesome
very cool
and then some
other i think i think your tech background too and your developer background really plays well into obviously into blockchain art and crypto art and ai art because you can really you have an understanding of you know the the the tech side of it but can then move it roll into you know your the art focus as well and pull those together and i think that's exactly what crypto art has an opportunity to do is to use the tools just like we use paintbrushes just like we use whatever but having it not replace the artist and i wanna talk a little bit about my background and what what this is all about which is the new crypto art channel that you launched and the crypt and the dao that you're going to be launching yes you haven't launched it yet correct
no it's launched we have our alright already writing up our public documents and wow steps
so let's talk about that how did you so you went did you launched the channel crypto art channel what was the inspiration behind that and then let's talk about the dao how that developed why you decided to go in that direction
so for anybody who is an older farcaster user they know that there was not any dedicated place for people to post their nfts let alone shill their nfts and i arrived a year ago as an nft artist thinking oh this is the absolute solution for us we need to get away from twitter we need this crypto centric platform look there's an nft tab on my profile how cool is that that's perfect they must be building up this and that and i was so excited and then you know unfortunately it it became apparent that that that the artist community was not the demographic that dwr and the the team were were focusing on and you know that's okay they they they have their plans dan likes to say if you don't like it go build your own client and you know what i'm gonna take them up on that one of these days but
others have others have they've done just that well i think also i think it's important to know that you know if we go way back you you couldn't share images
oh i was for
a while that was oh yeah no no there was no images either for a long time so then that got added and then so it's been like step step step so to your point like if you're an if you're an artist coming over to farcaster really early on you couldn't even share your art like there literally wasn't a way to do it like in terms of the visuals so yeah i mean it's it's definitely something that's i think evolved but also what i've loved since mints were incorporated like since you could post within you know if you posted something or first it was just from zora where you can mint with warps and you get the well now you get a frame but minting with warps and having the farcaster team do a monthly drop and highlight an artist i think has been another step in the right direction of focusing on the artist now but i love that you started you know start your own channel start your own channel you know
i had to the the day that they launched permissionless channels i went right i ran to my computer i was like i i created that channel and because we needed it you know the community needs a place to congregate and there now there's a lot of really good channels you know there's
yeah and there's some individual artists who and well and the hyper subs a lot of the art hyper subs have their own channel and group and group chats and things like that so i think there's a lot more focus on artists now for sure even just in the past six or seven months so which is amazing to see
yeah yeah my hyper sub channel my my the group chat is like super active it's it's great i never expected group chats to be so exciting but i have like a 100 people in my group chat and it's like this talk like every day it's great
i think that's an unappreciated
part of farcaster that a lot of people or a lot of creators may not realize is that easier ability to communicate with your collectors you know to have those chats that connect everything all these connective threads that you can connect the hyper sub to the chat and all these different things and i think as those grow more and more there's just more reason for artists to continue to drop their work as nfts and have those connections i think that's important
yeah and and you know one thing that i have to say just it's like a little promotion about hypersub for the artists it has helped me find the artists who not the artists the collectors who are really the most passionate about what i'm doing like the return collectors the super collectors whatever you wanna call them and rope them in get them into the group chat start talking with them more and like getting feedback or just you know usually those are the ones who are just like we love you whatever you do and yeah that's what i wanna hear because without that without having a way to like get in touch with those people then you're just gonna have the like where's the liquidity community who i exactly
yeah they just want they just want the number to go up and you wanna connect with your yeah you wanna really connect with your real collectors which is great yeah
and and so what really helped me start there was when i first started the hyper sub especially i would grant a free month to people who collected my work that month anywhere even if it was a free mint on zora i would would airdrop them a a free month of the hypersub to see if it stuck and it did for a few people most most didn't because you know the problem there is if they collect on the zora l two and then i airdrop them on the base l two like some of them just aren't gonna bridge they're just not gonna make that app so
i think that'll get easier with time because i think more people are on multiple chains now but i think you know we're we're talking about most of the you know the op stack l twos really weren't active didn't get launched until august so it's pretty new oh so yeah i mean we're still really we're not even at a year yet less you know so it's i think as people get more of the other types of eth in their wallet it'll get easier for those cross chain things and superchain superchain is supposedly coming so
oh yeah
optimism we'll see i guess
the specifics about what superchain is aside from just a lot of l twos
i think it's the idea that it'll be easy to cross between them because they're all built on the same tech stack so oh yeah
that's the idea yeah which which for sure and that would help subject suddenly on you back to hypersub we were talking about crypto art dao
we still have we're jumping all around
let me finish talking about the crypto art dao because that's gonna be awesome so yeah i created the channel for that reason for the you know for the reason of just like having a place for the community to congregate and like you know
i created it myself and i was i thought i would be valuable if i did that because i'm not going to like gatekeep the channel i'm not going to go feature popular artists over up and coming artists or you know up and coming everybody's up and coming yeah popular ones i'm up and coming and i've been doing this since 2020 but what are you gonna do yeah and so like i created the dao after talking with proxy studio i'm in his hyper sub and that's actually if you like getting alpha or if you wanna like talk about up and coming projects his is a really good sub his is i get the most value of out of out of all the hyper subs aside from the artists that i love the most and i always value getting those drops but yeah so proxy studio had this thesis on channel daos and he wrote an article about it which i linked in my announcement article for the dao which anybody listening if this interests you you should go read that article it's very brief and it explains all of the operating procedures that we're starting out with for this dao so yeah he he said every channel should have a a dao wallet for the community to participate in and i thought that was a really great idea and but coming from the art community i know how bad the speculation and the like hype cycle how bad that can affect you know an artist's mentality the the liveliness of a project stuff like that so what we're doing instead of letting people buy in is we're we're granting memberships we're you cannot buy in yet for a while that will happen eventually likely if the you know if the members vote on it but for now we're just going to be granting memberships one two at a time probably on like a weekly basis or so and so our operating procedure is basically going to be put a mint up mint it via the dao wallet feature that on the channel incentivize it you know give people reason to collect it like if you collect it and you participate
then you excuse me then you you know you get access to this or that we have we're talking about it this is still very early days i only launched it like yesterday morning
yesterday it's brand new
i i actually launched the dao like over two weeks ago and i've just been like getting
what tool what is it is it nouns builder or something else
it's on party oh yeah
dao okay
yeah which is which is great and i've been talking i had a a meeting with like the entire party team and they were like talking about all the all the ways that this could be good and they really
sold doing a connection with hypersub as well and like a way that you can a a party dao could buy a subscription and i think there was also another way to go the other direction johnny had just posted something about that
i did not
very recently so look at nonlinear's profile i i can't remember where it was but cool yeah so that's that's why i was thinking you did it i was like oh it's connected with the
that's new they might have teased that but i didn't get any details about it what really sold me on using them is the fact that they make it easy to work with a bunch of different specific contracts like they they they have the zorra integration so like you can just propose a zora mint straight from their ui
proposal mhmm
that's so cool and like you know they they have the walletconnect so you can propose any transaction quite easily that way and like i you know i was really i i'm we've talked in the past about
mhmm
my criticisms of daos because i'm i'm like a huge proponent of daos since day one since the dao hack which caused the ethereum oh wow before
yeah
and like i so i love the idea of daos and i've been in daos i've started daos before i've started artdaos which you know they've gone different ways
well flamingo dao i think is probably the one of the best you know well known and most respected daos and they are art collectors that is that the you know the basis of what they do
yeah and that that's awesome you know i i think that we will become an art collecting dao and that's why we're doing the mints is we can start building up some funds but as you may may see in the article i suggest that people that artists when they propose a mint they take the majority of the split because i want this to empower artists i'm not trying to build up a massive treasury as much as i'm trying to like make this something that benefits the community so when we add an artist and we have them as a featured mint i want that i want them to get rewarded for that like i want the data benefit like i think of it like a like a gallery cut we shouldn't be getting the majority the artist should be getting the majority
oh that's an interesting way to think about it i like the idea of the gallery cut that's interesting
because we are a gallery we're we're curators most that's like the main mission is for us to be a curation now and because we're curating the timeline we're curating those pinned casts we're gonna curate our gallery we're gonna curate the artists we allow into that gallery you know in terms of mints and what we collect so yeah and that's why i'm only we're only onboarding artists and we'll probably onboard some prolific collectors i certainly can think of a few i'd love to have onboard yeah and that's why we're not selling memberships but when we do it's gonna be at a reasonable price and it's gonna it's gonna have a limited voting capacity because we're not we're we're not gonna like let anybody take over the vote and like start ejecting funds or anything
i believe i believe in a veto i'd really do
it's you know
especially early on especially early on
yeah and a lot of people are like oh you say you want decentralization but you hold this ultimate veto power that's a good point and like you know i know that the people who i've brought in can trust me that's not to say that everybody can trust me that's not to say that i'm inherently trustworthy and in the future we've already been talking about this on the timeline but in the future we're probably gonna try to like split that responsibility and like if if it's possible i don't i don't i don't know what
i always think that's that's helpful well you can always you could always give the veto to a multisig as well
exactly that's that's where we're kinda leaning towards
to a safe yeah yeah but it's it's i you you have to be able to do it early on because daos are very easily attacked especially as soon as they have any significant amount of funds they will people will find you you know and you have to to protect it even you know
why i held the power in my hand i was gonna split it with another person in particular but i noticed that they weren't as active on the timeline and like if twenty four hours go by and they don't check and they don't like sign on that veto we we lost our funds so like it's really just for safety's sake because i'm a you know chronically online so i can check those proposals
well this has been awesome we're gonna start to wrap up but i have a few fun questions for you what that we always ask our guests when we're doing a guest interview we have some little fun questions because you said you're chronically online like this is perfect segue who this is a question adrienne always asks she always that you know because we're in this sort of environment that's all online we're making friends online who was your first online internet friend
my first online
where did you where did you make your first internet friend
oh my gosh okay so i could go back to the icq days but that's not something
that's that's some of the answers we've gotten
and my first internet friend that i'm still really good friends with was from turntable fm which was like the coolest website it was basically like sit until cryptoart i had never seen any community that was so passionate and like record labels started out of this like net labels all sorts of communities grew and still are alive because of turntable fm you know
haven't heard that one before that's a new new one but i love it that's a great great answer
started with crypto i started i made a a tipbot in dogecoin ten years ago which i put in chats during events
wow that's amazing
huge and so my community there i i have my good friend dan who holds some of my earliest nfts he he he he was an early friend that i still stay in touch with a lot
i love that i love that okay what's your favorite channel although i think i know the answer
oh my gosh favorite channel well i could say crypto art because that's the
that's the your reason
well give me give me a second let me think let me think what other channel is justice gift's crypto gif art
ah okay i don't gif art so g i f a r t yeah nice alright kiwi skin on or off
oh my gosh
kiwi skin on or off i take the skin off before i eat the skin
okay do you actually eat the skin
no but i did it are we
that's so funny so we're gonna see you you were at far con last year i just wanna do this as we wrap up you're gonna be there again this year from what i understand really looking forward to it there's gonna be an art it looks like i just saw one of the side events is focused on art so that's that'll be fun and what are you looking forward to most
i'm looking forward to seeing everybody and having great conversations because that was the highlight of last year
same same exact thing and we're gonna wrap there this is gonna drop this episode's gonna drop the same day that we drop the special piece and i don't know if you wanna give us any alpha or anything but or say anything about that i don't think i you may not even have haven't done yet but it was funny when i was talking to you about this i was like i want you to just do whatever inspires you about you know farcast or other words g you know the initials g initials gm or anything like that and i was trying not to give you too many guidelines and you're like i think i need more guidelines and i'm like no
i don't wanna give
it to you i want you to be your creative self so anything you want to talk about there or what we could expect or what you're leaning towards
you know just like with my subscription i'm following the muse on this one i have a few ideas that i'm i'm kind of toying with but it'll it'll be it'll be a fun one it'll be a little experimental as usual
love it absolutely love it so i'm looking forward to that that's it for us thanks so much max for taking this time this has been such a fun chat i cannot wait to see you in california
right
so we'll see you very soon and for everybody else bye bye