xxnft
Nye
Thompson
When did you start using digital/new media for your creative practice?
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It was kind of the other way round for me. Although I initially trained as an artist I went on to spend 20 years designing software and human computer interfaces. When I returned to my practice by starting a part time Fine Art MA in 2011 I tried to leave all that behind and focussed on drawing on paper. But very swiftly the digital world re-intruded. By the end of the MA I was making sculptural drawings with e-waste, then I was learning electronics and new coding skills to activate my sculptures. I was still working part time in software at that point and involved in the kind of discussions happening in the engineering world at the time so these two strands of my life really came together as I started to make work in relation to the new Internet of Things in about 2015. At that point I discovered the images that inspired my Backdoored project - screenshots collected by search bots from compromised surveillance cameras. I worked with a developer friend to create my first art-based software architecture which became Backdoored. From then on creating and using software pipelines to discover and generate material has been at the core of my practice.
What was your first ever NFT?
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My first ever NFT was a triptych created with UBERMORGEN based on our recent horror film for machines UNINVITED
How/why did you begin to upload your work on the blockchain?
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Last November UBERMORGEN & I decided we should make some NFTs to accompany our film UNINVITED. It had just won the Lumen Prize Gold Award and was being presented at Gazell.io in London. Gazell.io were also putting together a collection of NFTs and invited us to contribute. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to explore how the blockchain and NFTs could integrate with the rest of my practice.
What is your most recent project?
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Looking ahead I’m working on a new NFT collection with UBERMORGEN called the Zoomies. The ‘Monster’ protagonist from the UNINVITED film has gained new powers and is able to revisit moments from its journey but now move ‘sideways’ in time and space into new dimensions.
What are the main guiding principles behind your work? Can you step outside yourself for a moment and let us know what you see?
As I hinted in the first question, I'm very interested in picking up on key conversations happening in the engineering world and exploring them through art - I think this kind of cross domain translation can be very powerful. In a way that is what led me to work in the digital art space - it just seemed to have the best tools and channels for exploring these sorts of ideas. I’m also very interested in how and where power resides within the super complex technical infrastructures that frame and shape our daily lives. But these are just starting points - the things that initially draw me to a particular subject - the work itself manifests more personal concerns - maybe about being seen/unseen; and what happens when ideas and experiences are transcoded over and over; and how to think about the mega-network and system processes and relationships that are very real but we can only see or experience indirectly.
Do you get any particular source of inspiration for the visual styles of your works e.g. do they arrive in relation to the place (physical, psychological, or situational) you were located at the time?
I work a lot with found material, so the visual style of my work tends to be derived from that. Much of the material I use is to some extent machine-created - I’m really interested in the dynamics of the non-human gaze, as machines play an increasingly active part in the activity of looking at the world. I’m always looking for the alien perspective - to see something that might be familiar in an utterly new way.
Can you dive a bit into the technical aspects of the works? Software or hardware used (in the wide sense; it could be thoughts and bodies), as well as the editing process? What are some of the particular challenges you and your team have faced in realizing the works?
So the two works I’ve referenced here are from totally different projects, though they both use quite elaborate software pipelines where the initial images are translated and translated through a range of machine learning and other tools. Making the UNINVITED Undead Stills triptych was a fascinating process which really opened my eyes to the possibilities that NFTs afford. The idea was to take 3 related frames from the UNINVITED film (themselves comprised of security camera screenshots animated in various ways) and treat them as starting points for a new super short animated narrative.
So after selecting the 3 starting frames it was a matter of scrutinising them really closely to understand where they wanted to go - what were the internal dynamics of each image suggesting? Because the 3 frames were quite closely connected we created them as a triptych which meant that each individual NFT would be part of a wider narrative. We decided that each animation in the triptych should be around 20sec long but all slightly different lengths so that if looped the internal relationships would continually change.
Technically speaking the animated elements of each NFT were handled using different processes - the two images of men's heads were treated with ML software designed to bring photos of your ancestors to life and have them smile at you or blow a kiss. The crossroads image was treated with a morphing software package. We experimented with lots of different settings with both before picking out the best results. Both these processes were fairly crude in terms of output control so the chosen video snippets were treated with ML video editing software to get the movement speed right. All these pieces were then painstakingly edited together in Premiere to create these short narratives where the original stills slowly start to come to life.
What was really exciting for me was the realisation that you can create a piece of work that has the richness and complexity of a film or a painting while being only 20 seconds long. This feels like a newly viable way of making a work of art, enabled by the NFT space.
Can you tell us about the relationship you want or aim to have with the viewer? What is the underlying approach to this relationship?
I’ve always been interested in how a piece of art works upon the viewer. How does the work make them behave or feel? How do they move about in relation to it? What do they have to do with their bodies to engage with it? Whenever I make work for a gallery or other public space these are important questions for me and the relationships I’m aiming for can vary a lot. Of course it's the work that is having the relationship not me - we’re not synonymous the work and I. How this activity translates when the piece of work is contained on a phone or computer screen in an utterly unpredictable environment is a difficult question and not one that I have an answer to yet.
If we’re talking about my personal relationship to the viewer though - I suppose all my art projects are about investigation and the addictive fascination of discovery, and I’m simply trying to find ways to share these discoveries with the viewer.
How can we increase the involvement of women in web3/NFTs/digital art sphere?
That’s a big question - but specific to the NFT space, the crypto world is obviously heavily male-dominated. I imagine the majority of collectors are also male which has to skew what type of work is ‘successful’ e.g. selling, and in the NFT space NOT selling is a bad look. I think the growth of NFT platforms like Feral File which are more curated exhibitions than sales platforms and allow us to decouple creative quality from financial success and evaluate NFT artworks in a more considered way. Not that I'm saying that women should be content with having their work creatively but not financially recognised!