Lately we’ve been incredibly lucky to have some of the most interesting people doing incredible experiments on our little virtual stage, and this edition of Café JPG, that took place last week on Tuesday, February 7th, is no exception. We finally got hold of one of our favorite artists, Sarah Friend, who we have been following and talking about for what it seems like three decades (it’s crypto, after all, every year feels like 10) and the incredible Wade, who we met in early 2021 when JPG was just getting started, for a virtual tour of the exceptional exhibition he curated with Transfer Gallery, Pieces of Me.

This week, we’ve hosted Sofía Garcia, Micol Ap, and Tina Rivers Ryanwho we have also been following and cheering for - so expect more cozy vibes in the Café.

But now back to Wade and Sarah, and their intros:

Wade: Hey, fam. My name's Wade. I work at Gray Area in San Francisco. It's a non-profit arts and tech organization where I'm the associate curator curating things IRL. But in the past, I ran an online curatorial project called Silicon Valet that was thinking about how we can look at art in virtual spaces, and particularly in the “feed” space. I'm also the community manager over at Outland.

Sarah: I'm Sarah. I'm an artist and software developer. Been working in the blockchain space for a long time now. The two NFT editions I created that probably are the most well known are called Off and Lifeforms, which I did in 2021. I also do sculptural work and I have worked as a software developer in this industry, in a non-NFT context. So, I’ve been in a lot of different sides of both art and blockchain technology.

I sometimes make a little foray into the world of curation too. Throughout 2021, I co-curated a Minecraft art gallery called Ender Gallery. So we did four residencies and solo exhibitions using a Minecraft server as the gallery space.

Wade: There's that statement that's been flying around since the beginning of NFT craziness. Anyone can be a curator. And I really want to push back against that. Not everyone can be a curator. You have to have a level of deep care in order to fulfill that role. And I think that without, like just picking and choosing or, like, using a methodology such as a technological protocol is one thing, but really invokes this deep sense of care and responsibility. And that's something that I have at least seen demonstrated over and over and over again in the JPG community. Just all of the rich discussions about whether something should be included or not included, or trying to find out the details of a project before voting something out, and X, Y and Z. It's really a deeply thoughtful space.

Maria Paula: I would push back against that not everyone can be a curator. Actually everyone can be a curator if they join the JPG Discord and spend some time reading the great discussion that you all are having.

Wade: Well, I mean, all that to say that doing that kind of research, I think, that is also a kind of care, right? You know, if you take the time to read the Discord, but that's a lot of labor to do that. So I stand by my statement.

Trent: I do totally agree kind of on both sides in that I think anybody can be a curator, but you do have to put in the work. And it's not just  “I've selected some pieces and I think they're cool and, like, I've put them on a page and now I'm a curator”. Contextualization and  selection are first steps, but then there’s care, stewardship, documentation, and archiving.  I think stewardship of the work is super important, and most people don't really associate with the curatorial activity despite it being fundamental to it.

Sarah: I could start by talking about Lifeforms, but I'm actually gonna start somewhere else, which is that I think the blockchain itself is a project of social aesthetics. We have all of these miners operating as kind of agents in a system with an internal logic and a kind of aesthetics or something emerges from that. I've always seen the blockchain world as a kind of coordination game. I'll start there because I think that that's probably part of why these crypto-social projects were where I went first with NFTs. Also, I've always been a little curious about token standards, not the part that is defined, but the part that is undefined. Maybe everyone here has read a token standard, but in case someone hasn’t, they usually describe for you what functions need to be in conflict. Someone might say, "I am a token and I have a function called transfer, and that takes three parameters, the address to, the address from and the amount of tokens to transfer." But weirdly, what is not in the spec is what that function actually does, which always seemed perhaps like an interesting omission to me. A lot of my projects have started from thinking about what might be between lines there.

So, after saying that, Lifeforms is an NFT edition of entities that, like any living thing, need to be cared for in order to stay alive. And the way that you care for a lifeform is within 90 days of receiving it, you have to give it away. Lifeforms soft-launched in September 2021 and opened to the public in November 2021. They're still open for mint. They're on Polygon, and I think right now they're probably between $5 and $10 bucks. The edition is uncapped. 195 lifeforms have been created to date, yet only 16 are still alive.  So that's a pretty high death rate. I have an absolutely top secret project idea that I will share with you at a later date, related to Lifeforms, which have lived for a very long period of time. But, you know, maybe someday we can do something with that.

Off It's an edition of 255 black JPEGs, launched in May 2021. And each collector gets two things, the NFT and also by email, a secret JPEG. And the secret JPEG looks exactly like the public JPEG. It's just solid black. And all of the images are pixel dimensions and named after various popular screens. They have titles like Samsung Galaxy 5.  So that's where the title is coming from. Hidden within the secret image that the collector receives is data and it's hidden in such a way that you can't see it with your eyes, but it can be parsed out by a program. And that data is hidden in such a way that it can only be revealed if two-thirds of the total collectors work together and combine their images. Right now, there is some coordination happening,of the 170 that have been sold, only 67 have been shared, and we need two-thirds of a total edition.  The third installment of the Drop is pending release.

I went into Lifeforms and Off  knowing that the coordination element might not be a success. I have sometimes described it as being like writing a story and the audience gets to finish it, and having to accept that it might not be a happy ending. I guess, there's this way that maybe the work and a failure of coordination can speak interestingly as an artwork, but maybe not effectively for something utilitarian, like a DAO or a blockchain itself.

It can be very vulnerable as an artist to be making things like this that sort of depend on an audience. To do any NFT edition, you wonder if people will buy it, if they'll engage. But especially a crypto-social aesthetics project, it really depends upon the audience to be completed. I think that it's a really interesting position to put yourself in as a creator.

Wade: Sarah, this is something that I think about a lot and talk with artists about a lot, particularly I think digital artists and this idea of lack of control. I think anyone working with digital material often has a kind of lack of control in the display environment in that they don't know the kind of device the person on the receiving end is gonna be looking at their work on. It could be a phone. It could be a headset. It could be a computer, whatever. How have you, seeding some of your agency to the art, not only to the artwork but also to the community,  grappled with that? Like, what has that experience been like?

Sarah: I think with both Off and Lifeforms, I have seen, like, types of interaction with the project that are not, maybe I feel sad about it in some way, but I also see, you know, the most beautiful interactions between people as a result of the project as well. So I would say with both, I have been endlessly rewarded with the surprises in terms of how people engage and who will engage. Maybe that can be a freedom in giving up control also.

Who am I, the artist, to say that I know the best thing to do with this work? I have some friends that embedded one Lifeform inside their company group chat and gave it a name. And they made a chatbot for it, so it's sort of integrated into their daily work. I can't imagine anything better as an artist than to see someone take what you've done and play with it in that way.

But I guess you asked about control and there's also a sense where I feel maybe every artist has a little megalomaniac streak, because at some level, though people play and interact in these systems and they often do things I don't expect them to, and I always love that, there's also a way in which I designed and wrote the rules of the system in a really practical way, like the smart contract only does certain things, which I enabled. And so, maybe there's also a tension at play between what is controlled by the artist in a system like this and what isn't, in many kinds of art context as well. Like, a generative edition has a similar quality. But a metaphor I use a lot to think about what the rule is, what I feel like my rule is like as a custodian maybe of these systems, like like people care for lifeforms, but I care for the project of Lifeforms in a way as well, is to be like a Game Master in a roleplaying game or something. There have been moments when I feel like the people using the system end up giving me ideas for how it should change or evolve as well, so where there's sort of like a feedback loop that happens between me and the participants in some cases.

Wade: I know it's really interesting and I'm always curious about that because I think that it requires a different way of thinking to be the game master versus being a player. It’s interesting to consider that, you know, in the context of Lifeforms and to see the death rate. Most artists wouldn't want their virtual lifeforms to die, but that's a sad reality and a truth of the artwork.

Sarah: I actually think that every artist should learn to accept failure and rejection, because there's a lot of it. You can't make Lifeforms and not know that most of them are gonna die, you know? Lifeforms as a project, it's this little hopeful seed that's just gonna sprout, it's gonna sprout over and over and you know it's gonna get stepped on, like, every single time, that's what it is. There's no way that this thing can compete with the many demands on our attention. And it gives you no explicit reward.  It doesn't even give you much of a dopamine hit for transferring it, which is kind of deliberate.

Trent: One of the other things I was thinking about was also this kind of intentional lack of incentives for keeping the thing alive. And how much do you think, you know, how much of that is, you know, kind of core to the process. Is that stuff you want to kind of investigate more fully in the future? Because coordination obviously always work. What do you think about incentives as it relates to your broader work?

Sarah: Coordination is definitely work. I think that that was...part of the question really that I was thinking about when I was making the works. What is enough incentive? What kind of coordination becomes too much work? And I think part of why I started thinking or asking myself what is a good death for a lifeform kind of came from thinking about whether there should be more of an incentive to the system to keep one alive. And I don't know if I will build that ultimately. But it would perhaps change the dynamics of the game, if you knew, for example, you got something else unlocked after you had kept it alive for a year or whatever period of time.

I'll rewind my brain back to when I launched Lifeforms that was a bit of an experiment for me at the time, like how it might interact with the secondary market. So it at least seemed viable to me at one point that perhaps a lifeform that was very old might be considered valuable. I wasn't sure how this system would interact, this small game of Lifeforms might interact with the broader game of the NFT market. I think I've seen now that Lifeforms, actually maybe what was interesting about it was that it manages to exist almost completely outside of that context of the NFT market. But at the time I made it, I wasn't sure. So I guess this is to say I have thought about changing the incentives around it several times.

In the case of Off, maybe similarly I wasn't sure how it would interact with the market itself and that set of incentives. I wasn't sure if a shared token would be more valuable than an unshared token. I have observed instead that actually people value them based on what devices they correspond to. Mostly that seems to be why people want the ones they want. So I guess, and there is an incentive, but the incentive is this mystery of what is hidden in them, which I mean, may still prove revealed in that case, because that project is still not wrapped up.

Wade: I have a very different philosophy to a lot of curators in this regard, because my background is a little different. I don't have an art history degree. I have an anthropology degree. So I'm always less concerned technically with how an artist is pulling something off. For me when approaching a project like Lifeforms, I think that the most important question to ask is always what should the experience of this work be? And I think that for something like Lifeforms, there's a really beautiful and interesting aesthetic object, but the action is happening elsewhere, in Twitter threads, in DMs, in Discord servers. It's happening in wallet transactions as the life forms are moving. And so, in curating something like this, I would care a lot less about the screen that I show a lifeform on and more about making sure that I have a really solid community of people to enact the artwork in a sense. So I would be furiously in my DMs getting people to transfer their lifeforms around. And in this context, I think that curating the social experience is much more important than curating a display experience with the work.

For including this work in a show, I would do a lot of event programming around Lifeforms specifically to get people activating it. A lot of times I find that, particularly with interactive media, unless you bring in a real interactive social incentive, a lot of times these works will just kind of sit there and not be touched. And so, the real effort comes in nurturing. Because you're caring for artworks that live on-chain, but you're also caring for the social environment that supports them and really gives life to the artwork. Which is a big challenge. It's tough to keep something that is blasted out into

the internet safe. And there's a lot of things that can happen when you're dealing with algorithmic environments.So you have to intervene in the system and really act as a connecting node between different points in the network in order for the curatorial display of a work like this to be really successful.

So all of that to say that I think as we're, like, you know, in terms of guidelines and things like that, I think that overall, we should be less concerned about the ultimate fidelity of the display experience and more about the phenomenal logical impact that it has on the viewer to live with these images. 

Sarah: I was gonna say that that totally tracks with my own experience of being a custodian of Lifeforms in a way. When I applied to things with Lifeforms, in order to capture what the project is, I have screenshots of Twitter interactions with people that I use as documentation of the work, including actually some from the JPG Discord, because I have also struggled with making the social life around the project, which is so core to what the project is.

Similarly with Off, where most of the actually truly interesting things have happened in the collector's group chat, which is not open to anyone who's not part of the edition. And so, I've thought for a long time how will I finish this project? And then I'm like, "Oh, I should probably get these people's permission and sort of write a summary of what has happened." As from the outside, you wouldn't even know how funny or trolly or unexpected some of the jokes and strategies have been. It's actually kind of ironic because the project is a bunch of black boxes. But it is itself a black box.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

For more Café JPG, join us on Twitter on Tuesdays at 1pm EST, and follow us on Discord, as there’s a 24/7 Café session going on ready to welcome you.

Cover image: Clickmine NFT from the Clickmine series (2018) by Sarah Friend