The creators of the first NFT Talk New Collection, Web3 Future

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy need little introduction. Ten years ago, the renowned artists introduced the world to Quantum, the first art NFT ever created. Quantum found its home on the Namecoin blockchain in 2014, when Kevin McCoy decided to mint it as an NFT to establish the provenance of the digital image.

The web3 world may view minting an NFT for a reason as a banality these days, but in 2014 the idea was revolutionary. Origin documents for digital art did not exist at the time, and Quantum showed the world that blockchain technology could solve the problem of ownership in the digital age.

Its landmark million dollar sale at a Sotheby’s auction in 2021 gave it the recognition it finally deserved.

Having created just a handful of NFT artwork since then, the McCoys are now releasing their first NFT collection, Land Sea and Sky. Launching at Artwrld on April 5, the project is a collection of 310 collages that combine elements of AI-generated landscapes. nft now caught up with Jennifer and Kevin to talk about their upcoming release, how the NFT ecosystem has evolved since 2014, and the ethical issues that come with using AI art tools.

Web3 since the time of Quantum

Given their position in the annals of Web3, Jennifer and Kevin are uniquely positioned to offer a bird’s eye view of how the crypto and NFT space has evolved since minting Quantum on Namecoin in 2014.

Calling back to comments he made with Anil Dash at a conference in 2014, where the two argued that blockchain-based technology had far more interesting things to offer the cultural world than funding did, Kevin recounted a particularly poignant observation he made had during the bull run in 2021.

“I had this experience walking around Manhattan, looking out and [thinking], everyone here has heard of NFTs and how weird it was,” Kevin recalled. “In a very real sense, NFTs became [bigger] in the popular imagination than the monetary aspect of cryptocurrencies. And I think that’s because NFTs are about media, they’re about ideas in a direct way. It’s culture versus money. And the culture wins every time.”

Web3 trends tend to be cyclical. The recent ASCII art meta that the Owls NFT project started in early March demonstrated this fact to the full. The project’s text-based aesthetic sparked interest in some of the earliest NFTs on the blockchain, many of which were just simple tokens associated with a domain on Namecoin. They may not have been the first art-intentional NFTs Web3 witnessed — that would come with 2014’s Quantum — but they nonetheless form an integral part of the space’s history.

As individuals who have been creating art for decades, the McCoys undoubtedly advocate for people to learn and honor the value of historical developments in art and technology. But they also regret that they have seen history forgotten time and time again. The pair even go so far as to say that “history slows down the market.” When a new development occurs, few are interested in shedding light on the things that came before it.

This is one of the reasons why Quantum’s 2021 Sotheby’s auction was such an important moment for both the McCoys and the wider Web3 community: an important part of NFT’s history was finally due.

Can’t stop, won’t stop

Web3’s future is as unpredictable as ever, but the McCoys believe that the dynamics of decentralization are still finding their way. Referring to the role of traditional arts institutions in guiding conversations and cultural movements, Jennifer noted that while admittedly centralized, such organizations provided some clarity in separating the signal from the noise.

“Everyone is excited about peer-to-peer disintermediation, the idea of ​​direct connection,” she explained. “And yet, in the absence of institutions that bring us together and point us toward an ongoing conversation, it becomes really overwhelming and a little scary to sort through everything. And I think that’s what good institutions can do.”

However, the two are still big believers in Web3’s egalitarian potential. Kevin was quick to point out the recent resurgence of discussion around faith in cryptocurrency and Defi to free people from the catastrophic mismanagement of the financial sector.

“Fraud i [the NFT space in] 2022 was pretty intense,” Kevin said, “and it shook a lot of people. But then, out of the blue, we have a banking crisis [with SVB], and suddenly the core argument for crypto dating back to Satoshi is brought up again. So you never know what’s going to happen. We believe in this technology [and] decentralization. The idea of ​​digital scarcity, uniqueness and ownership is not going to go away.”

While that’s basically a guarantee at this point in Web3’s history, it doesn’t hurt to hear it from one of the people who helped ignite the digital revolution in the first place. And nothing speaks to their belief in the importance of digital scarcity and uniqueness more than their new work.

Land Sea and sky

Collage work has long appealed to the McCoys, who appreciate the idea of ​​combining disparate visual and cultural elements into something new. To create the collages for Land Sea and Sky, the duo analyzed Ansel Adams’ work, highlighting certain landscape parts of his photographs that caught their attention.

Taking these outlines and using them as the basis for structuring each handcrafted piece, the pair used the AI ​​art tool Stable Diffusion to generate hundreds of landscape images. They then sorted the images into five descriptive databases: land, sea, mountains, trees and sky. Custom scripts then searched these databases to produce recombinant landscapes, and the areas of each collage derived from shapes taken from Ansel Adams’ photographs were then filled in with one of the five types of generated AI landscapes that the McCoys produced.

The result is a fusion of 20th century landscapes filtered through 21st century technology.

“We knew it was going to be a landscape project,” Jennifer McCoy said of the genesis of Land Sea and Sky. “We had experimented with jagged carvings and juxtaposing ill-fitting kinds of landscape elements before, but with stable diffusion and artificial intelligence, we’ve gained ground. [thought] This could be a very interesting way to go straight from fantasy to landscape without involving photographic sources, which was very exciting.”

And while tools like Stable Diffusion are at the center of a heated debate about the ethical use and existential implications of increasingly capable AI systems, the McCoys were curious to explore how they could use them in their artistic practice. They explained that one of the most appealing aspects of these tools is how they evoke the idea of ​​a visual statistical average.

Elaborating on what appeals to them about the summative nature of AI, the pair pointed to Russian duo Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid’s 1994 work, The People’s Choice, as a parallel. Komar and Melamid were Russian émigrés who were fascinated by the idea of ​​”the American people” and how they would express their collective preferences for art and culture.

Komar and Aleksandr commissioned a public investigative firm to investigate American citizens accordingly; the survey included questions about lines and curves, colors, size and shape, content, and even what figures they liked to see depicted. Komar and Melamid then created paintings of the most and least popular elements, forming a damning satire of both creation by committee and the idea that artistic expression is an elitist endeavor.

“What’s the idea of ​​a California coast? 110 ideas about a coast in California? What are 40 Pictures of Vermont Trees? These were the kinds of questions we looked at, Jennifer said as a perspective on how the couple approached Land Sea and Sky. “And the script we did was essentially to combine these into specific formats based on Adams’ [work] from Sierra and Yosemite. We’re kind of driving the American East through the American West.”

The collages include AI-generated depictions of all 50 US states. The pair were interested in portraying different environments through Adams’ lens, especially scenes that are completely different from the photographer’s rough depiction of grand nature in the west of the country.

An artist’s job, Kevin emphasized, is to look out into the world and report back what they see, and landscape is one of the primary genres in which that happens. Only now is the landscape digital, an “algorithmic landscape” that, thanks to new AI technologies, can be used to report back in a completely new way.

The concerns that prompt-based AI art tools have given rise to are still not lost on the pair. Kevin believes that critics who point to their social aspect – the fact that these programs are trained on the work of others – are quite right to ask who benefits from the use of these tools and who owes what as a result.

“These tools are going to be pretty weird,” Kevin acknowledged. “The consequences are unknown and I think people are right to be nervous.”

Nostalgia and memory, synthesized

Land Sea and Sky is imbued with a deep sense of nostalgia. The project’s Artwrld page notes that the AI-generated images in the collection are meant to evoke something closer to memory than imagination, with hints of “cross-country road trips, Ektachrome film and the strange, hazy yellow-green color of […] childhood snapshots’ spread out.

But this sense of memory, Kevin says, stems not from McCoy’s own childhood, but from their interpretation of the anxiety people feel about the real world as they are increasingly thrust into the virtual.

“It’s this kind of questioning and desire about, or recollection of, the physical world. Nostalgia for the real,” he explained.

Speaking to nft now about the project, Artwrld’s artistic director and founder Nato Thompson drew attention to the McCoys’ unique dynamic of being a couple producing art together.

“They often work with these types of assembly technologies,” Thompson explained. “They think of both cinema and landscape, but they’re also a couple, so they’re inevitably almost a collage themselves. There is a certain form of pushing up against things that are in that work, which I think is perhaps also the result of two people working together.”

The 310 pieces in Land Sea and Sky are divided into two parts: 300 short-form collages and 10 longer pieces accompanied by sound. And while there’s nothing particularly unique about landing on 310 as a supply for the collection, the McCoys observed that using NFTs allows them to maintain “serial uniqueness” on a scale that might otherwise be impossible in more traditional art forms.

The McCoys have chosen non-profit Rhizome, a “born digital” art platform, to receive a portion of the proceeds from primary and secondary sales. Those who wish to gain priority access to the drop can do so by minting an NFT from one of Artwrld’s previous collections by March 31. Minting for Land Sea and Sky for the general public goes live on April 6.