We’ve followed Jason’s art for a while, and were intrigued by Jason’s onchain debut, and the time and thought that has gone into the project. So, we sat down with him to dive in!

Jason’s journey to TODEM

Jason Salavon is a prolific artist, producing data-driven generative art since 1993. You should look him up - his work is included in prominent collections at top galleries and museums around the world, and has received sustained media attention for decades. He’s a professor at UChicago, and has contributed to Computer Vision research too (his talk at CVPR2023 is a great introduction to his work). 

He’s especially known for reconfiguring huge amounts of communal material with software in different ways.

To give you a flavour, here are 3 pieces that we think fans of onchain generative art may like:

Self-Portrait (The Jason Salavon Show) - 1997

A custom robot/sculpture that controlled a TV remote. It was programmed to flick through the channels Jason would have watched on TV, had he been watching 24 hours a day for 7 days.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about AI agents (especially with regards to autonomous agents on the blockchain), and we thought this way of visualising such an agent was interesting! Maybe one of you will create an exhibit of your ‘agent’ scrolling through Farcaster?

<Color> Wheel - 2012

Jason constructed a colour wheel built from thousands of images returned by Bing for queries of colour terms. 

It was an exercise in mapping a “semantic gradient” to the “amoral & skewed lens of search engines”. Given renewed interest in semantic search thanks to the proliferation of online content and advances in large language models, it’s interesting to think about riffs on this piece today. 

Genmo - 2017

Genmo (Generative Mosaic) let users recreate photos or videos using AI, using an entirely separate set of images generated by Jason and his team's own neural network (blending GAN and others).

It was one of the early consumer-facing AI art apps, and that it was created by Latent Culture (AI research & production venture in Jason’s studio), the same team creating TODEM. It’s interesting to see the throughline between these mosaics (with flexibility in tile size, arrangement, and shape) and the “hyper-tapestry” of TODEM.

TODEM (Tapestry of Decadent Meritocracy)

Go to the TODEM page to explore the piece. Here’s a quick breakdown:

• You’ll see what’s possibly the largest GIF ever created: 10 second looped 100K x 58K pixel GIF (the equivalent of ~2800 HD screens).

• Zooming in, you’ll see tiles and subtiles -  a tapestry of individual animations comprising 14.5 hours of total content. 

• Each of these tiles are AI-generated, created with prompts derived from the 5226 most viewed Wikipedia pages using Stable Diffusion. 

• Tiles are fitted together to form meaning at various scales, creating an experimental hyper-portrait of culture.

For example, tile 0034 (called “Dorian Nakamoto”, below) consists of 23 individual sub-tiles, each with their own AI animation - and you can see prompts used across each of the sub-tiles.

Why an NFT project, why now?

Many fine artists who launched NFTs during the heights of the bull market have now distanced themselves from the space. Many talented generative artists have chosen not to create NFTs, full stop. 

So why is Jason choosing to release his project (which took years to make!) now?

“I’ve always thought the underlying technology behind blockchains and the cultural significance of digital provenance was interesting. But I felt like I wanted a more compelling reason to create an NFT. While I’ve created other physically huge pieces of art [...] the sheer size and ways of visualizing TODEM meant it had to be digital, and it had to be an NFT.”

And though he's new to building onchain, it's great to see an artist of Jason's calibre go all-in on the potential of the technology and community: him and his team wrote their own smart contract and minting platform themselves!

TODEM consists of 1000 NFT tiles, varying in size and mint price to mirror the distribution of wealth in the United States. In creating TODEM, Jason felt “seeing the wealth distribution in pixel real estate was a more visceral experience”.

Another noteworthy aspect of TODEM was its commitment to charity - proceeds from certain classes of tile go to charities working on structural reforms in the US. In conversation with Jason, he pointed to charities exploring and advocating for Rank Choice Voting and its variants, “to help address polarities in the electoral process”.

Both AI and blockchain technologies have the ability to further entrench inequality, but also have the ability to share power and access to information. Seeing a project confront this in different ways really caught our attention.

Wen mint

There was a brief pre-sale period, and thanks to a Mint Or Skip feature there was a flurry of attention, with 43.6% of tiles minting out.

The public sale is now live, and you can check it out here.

Regardless of whether you intend to mint TODEM or not, we recommend checking out this monumental work of art, and exploring Jason’s other pieces (via his website). He’s a prolific artist who’s grappled with these themes for decades, and we’re excited to follow along as he brings more of his art and exploration onchain as well.

We’d love to know what you think, and see some of your favourite tiles too! Tweet at @unjumblexyz, @salavon and @latentculture - we’ll highlight our favourite responses!  

None of this article is to be considered investment advice - do your own research. The writer of this article holds 1 TODEM NFT, bought during public pre-sale.