Yeah, what's the dread?
It doesn't feel real because nobody else is seeing the magic that I'm seeing. Everybody else is having these shared experiences together. And the experience that I love most is one that I don't understand how it can be experienced together. Because I know if anybody else was feeling this and experiencing this, that we would look at each other in our eyes. It would be this crazy moment of like, Did you just see that? Hear that? Feel that? Like, What the fuck? And we would be like, Wow, this is insane. And then we'd go back to it and we'd keep going on this adventure through planets that we're discovering—all these new things with new beings, and life, and infinite possibility. But I was all on my own.
You were constantly battling with doing things on your own. So, the next mission is: how do you create community and shared experiences around this world?
Exactly. I called a dear friend of mine before I came here today, and I was like, ‘I have so many different opinions and things that I might want to talk about. What do you think I should talk about for this with Zack?’ My friend said to me, ‘You’ve got to talk about community. Zack is the epitome of what it means to bring people together and unite them around electricity. That's your biggest shared ground.’ And it's funny, I didn't even have to say it because you arrived there on your own! So, for me, it was like, I have this world that I've been going to. Let's all go there together.
Were you still living in Jersey at the time?
Yeah, I put my stuff in a U-Haul. I remember calling some kid in my neighborhood and I was like, ‘If you help me pack up all my shit into this U-Haul, I'll give you a little painting.’ And we made that trade. So, he helped me load up the U-Haul, and I didn't really know anybody in New York. I knew, like, maybe three people. But the visual in my head was kind of that there's a dark place and you have the opportunity to let there be light. You know, you have the opportunity to build up the bonfire that is keeping you warm, and it's warm enough that it can keep a lot of other people warm if we can just all convene around it. So, I get to New York, and the thing that made me go there was I was like, I want to bring what I'm doing to people. There aren't that many people where I am. I’ve got to go where the people are. Then I got there and I was like, How do I reach out and be like, ‘Hello people?’
Right, like You want to be part of this?
Yeah. So, the first thing I did was, I got a bunch of squeeze bottles of paint, and I just went outside and started putting creatures everywhere. I would put them on the sidewalk because I was nervous when I would go outside, so I would pretty consistently be looking down. And I was like, All these spots on the ground—I'm not the only one that's walking around, looking at the ground. Imagine if everybody that's walking around, looking at the ground, is seeing all these, like fun, whimsical pictures and the creatures could enter their lives in this way. So, I started drawing everywhere. And the craziest thing is, that was the thing that did the most for introducing me to the city above anything else that I've ever done.
How far were you taking these paintings? Where were you drawing?
Wherever. There's so many people to this day, where I'll meet them and they'll be like, ‘You know, this many years ago I saw this little drawing you did on the sidewalk on this exact street. And I remember exactly which one it was and that's how I know you.’
People say that to you?
I heard it this morning!
So, it's having a profound impact.
Well, so my thought was, if I don't believe in this day and age it's realistic to ask people to come to you, to come to the art.
Yeah, you bring it to them.
Yeah, you’ve got to bring it to them. And not just putting it in front of their faces, but also giving them a path to engage—a path to walk down. Like, This is how you can experience the art.
Art is made by anyone for anyone.
Art is the people. I want to make art that is a way to unite all of us in what life should feel like and, as a result, what life will be—that's the superpower.
I want to talk to you about NFTs, but I want to preface with the fact that I wouldn't call you an NFT artist. There's nothing wrong with that, by the way. But let's zoom out and look at things from an art history perspective: it's inevitable that digital art will be a part of our history. And we're living in a place where you're amongst a generation of artists that are creating digital art in a way that we didn't even think was possible, and reaching people in a way we didn't think was possible. So, I don’t think you’re an NFT artist, and what I mean by that is: you’re an artist who has multiple mediums of translating your art, the NFT being one of them, which you marry with your original cause—in-person gathering. In a society where we increasingly share our lives online, it only makes sense that the two would come together intrinsically.
I would say that everything ties back to connectivity—to community—for me. And it's not actually necessarily a matter of bringing people together in person. It's a matter of bringing people together.
Like, how can you connect with someone in China or somewhere else around the world?
It's wild. But there's this thing where, like, we associate screens as a degree of separation. So, I think it's really important for us to compensate for that degree by using these phenomenal tools to get even closer together.
Does that make the translation of the art less meaningful? Is that why you have to go the extra mile? I think that what everyone in the WEB3 space is banking on is, the idea that this next generation of consumers is equally as comfortable consuming through a screen as they are in person—by virtue of COVID, and just by virtue of exposure from a younger age. Like, you told me that you were one of the first kids in your town where everything you'd consume was on the internet—that's 10 times as true for a kid born today! Does that degree of separation get increasingly minimal?
But is it not a degree of separation because this is just life? I got a metaphor for you: [Rapper] Yeat and the people that score a Disney movie are both making music. They’re still very different things, you know? So, the things that I give my attention to in regard to NFTs are, how is this technology going to service the things that I care about? Bringing people together, immersing us into joy, into the best things in life. And those things are not actually what’s most popular in the NFT space. As a result, I'm relatively critical of the space, but that's not going to stop me from saying that I see it as a tool I can use to make something I think is a product worth engaging with.
It's like people use electricity to build homes and people use electricity to build weapons.
It is. The simplest way to put it for someone who knows nothing about this tech is: you own things in the real world. Well, now, you can own things digitally. It is very simply the enabling of possession on a screen of trustless possession.
Of traced, cemented, unbiased possession. The same way you have registration for a car that shows, This car is mine.
But it's more. It's way more. The idea that the best we can do is just that this tech can function as a COA—a certificate of authenticity—it's like, No, no, no. There are plenty of things that we engage with where we engage with them differently because we possess them. And I almost find ourselves veering away from the word ownership and towards possession, because in my head, when I think about ownership, I'm thinking a lot more about a financial aspect to that. It's emotional. But also quite literally, there are products that I engage with differently because they're mine. So, an example of what I built with the first Creature World collection: we were like, We're going to make a collection of artworks where a shit ton of people will be able to have their very own creature. A creature that only looks like this and it's yours. That was a really exciting idea to me. And because of the pioneers that paved the way for us, we were able to do that—both on the side of who invented all this technology, and also on the side of the people, the consumers.
Yeah, the marketplace that has been created by both sellers and consumers.
Exactly. So, the first thing that we sought to do was to make artwork that is able to be really uniquely personal to people—that is able to be really uniquely personal to more people than we've ever been able to do. I'm always coming at art from this perspective of like, How do you experience art and how can we make it so you are able to experience art even more? And the fact of the matter is, when we're starting with art on a screen—and maybe this is not going to be the same for future generations, or for kids now—but for me, if something's on a screen, there is a slightly greater degree of separation. So, it's like, I want to make something that you are going to be able to experience more, not less.
Right, like, How do I go above and beyond?
The box has gotten bigger in terms of what you are able to create when you're talking about what is, and if my limitation is the physics of the physical world versus of what you can create virtually, there's still a box, but it's gotten a lot bigger. So, the first thing that I wanted to do with Creature World was—I was like, When you make a painting, what is the goal of a painting? The goal of a painting is that somebody will see the painting and then go there, go to that place inside of the painting mentally. And I was like, Well, how can I assist them in the ability to do that?