Making 3333 Paintings using Generative Code, AI, and My Hands - And 'Selling' Them Out in <2 Hours
The story of ALTARS, my most recent NFT collection
To the new collectors of ALTARS 👁🗨 thank you for your support and welcome to nfts (notes, feelings, thoughts) with amac. This is an every-so-often newsletter that includes long-form articles on the state of modern creativity and short-form updates from my studio. Enjoy.
Am I a… Creative Technologist?
After hearing about my work, someone recently looked at me and said: “Oh, so you’re a creative technologist.” Which immediately gave me pause and had me doing one of these: 🤔.
I’ve never called myself a ‘creative technologist’ despite increasingly and explicitly integrating technology into my artistic practice and despite consistently tweeting things like the above.
Upon reflection, it’s because ‘technologist’ is a charged — and sometimes dirty — word, especially in the creative context, especially in the spiritual context. Why? Because technology is often placed in opposition to humanity and/or nature. One is robotic, one organic. One fake, one real. One full of falsehoods, one easily misled by falsehoods.
When examined, technology’s purpose seems to be to maximize productivity in the very many ways you can define it. Humanity’s purpose, in theory (I think), is to maximize meaning and fulfillment. When you look around, in practice, most of us are pointed at maximizing productivity: in work, in relationships, in financial success, in creativity… and technology (computers, algorithms, transportation, etc.) is often our best tool in service of achieving that (misguided?) motive.
I’ve seen many people, myself included, who reject the corporate life in favor of a more spiritual or “conscious” path immediately disavow technology — the spreadsheets, the screens, the social media. But I can’t help but think this is wrong. Technology has become a convenient scapegoat for our own misaligned choices. The blaming of technology for humanity’s failings is like shooting the messenger. Technology is just a tool — and the way it is used, for good or evil, is up to the one who wields it. It is not inherently bad, or good, in and of itself. So what does that mean for art? And specifically, what does that mean for art that relies on code or (dun dun dun…) artificial intelligence (AI)?
Technology has become a convenient scapegoat for our own misaligned choices. The blaming of technology for humanity’s failings and misleading is like shooting the messenger. Technology is just a tool — and the way it is used, for good or evil, is up to the one who wields it.
A Short Art History Lesson
At every point in history, technology has shifted the way that art is created — and this has always been met with the resistance of the old guard, those who benefit from the tradition of the time. During the Renaissance, sculpture was considered a lesser art that fresco — a craftsperson’s task. And then Michealeangelo made this:
In the 1800s the invention of painting tubes was key to the rise of Impressionism — a wave of artists painting quotidien or everyday scenes en plein air. Portable paint allowed artists to sit outside and paint men working in the fields, people walking down city streets, which was drastically contrasted to the “proper” portraiture that existed before. At the turn of the 20th century the camera was invented; photography was considered a lesser art than painting or drawing. We now know that sculpture, photography, and the painting of everyday topics are considered worthy as art as anything else; the past resistance now translates into naive shortsightedness.
Which brings us to the 2000s, where we are living through the arrival of digital art, very much seen as the lesser to physical… see where I’m going with this?
As artists, we are tasked with communicating truths and responding to our times. Are we really going to practice art in 2022 without responding to the internet? Without responding to the digital movement?
As an aside, I’d be bereft not to acknowledge that in the past week the crypto market has taken another massive blow to its value. My intention was, and always will be, to focus on crypto as it relates to contemporary art. This newsletter continues to offer opinion and long-form thought, not financial advice.
Integrating Traditional & Modern
I am an extremely dedicated studio-based artist, dedicated to my brushes and my paints and my canvas. But I am also a millennial, coming of age amongst the internet, and an individual that has been deeply steeped in the world of Web3 and NFTs. By many (smart) accounts, the artistic movement coming out of the Web3 space that is most intriguing is generative art.
Generative art “refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist. In some cases the human creator may claim that the generative system represents their own artistic idea, and in others that the system takes on the role of the creator.” (Wikipedia)
In other words, generative art is a type of art that combines the human hand with a non-human “hand,” i.e. code or technology.
ALTARS: My First Generative Collection and An Attempt at a Second Life for My Paintings
In my practice I’ve been interested in giving my paintings second lives, a concept I wrote about in January.
I want to pause paintings, mid-creation, and take them a different direction; I want to reuse my favorite strokes. If I could copy and paste on canvas, wouldn’t I take the perfect splatter and put it somewhere else? Wouldn’t I use it again? I often find myself wishing I could freeze a painting at an underlayer, duplicate it, and take the painting in two different directions. I can’t quite do that on physical canvas, but I can do it digitally — by photographing a physical painting, moving it into digital, and painting over it digitally. This idea has totally gripped me for the past year.
In January, I released “SECOND LIFE,” on the application-based NFT platform KnownOrigin. With SECOND LIFE, I did just the above. I took still images taken of physical oil paintings like DESERT OASIS (center) and brought them onto my iPad, where I painted new digital layers on the photographed physical underlayer (RHS) or where I cut, copied, pasted and layered the photographed physical underlayer to create a new composition (LHS) which was also painted over.
The result was a body of work true to my practice — inherently physical, but newly digital — and one that felt true to 2022, this contemporary time and space.
Generative Art and Open3
I’ve been interested in launching a generative project since I heard about the movement in 2021, but the “non-human” i.e. computer algorithm part of the equation requires more technical expertise (or resources to pay for technical expertise) than I had. That changed when I saw a post from my friend Matty, the founder of the new platform Open3, looking for traditional artists who wanted to build a generative collection. The idea was that Open3 would build the tech, the artists supply the art, and in exchange Open3 to take part of the earnings. Bingo, I was in.
As mentioned earlier, generative art is art (partially) created by code via system designed by a human. You can think of it as “paint-by-numbers” for the computer:
The human defines the structure, i.e. creates the outline and picks a box of crayons.
The computer then randomly colors each section with a different crayon, generating the output.
The human then defines an outline where certain sections can only be certain colors… and so on and so forth…
Some generative projects are done at the pixel level - quite a feat! But the simpler ones are done at the layer level; imagine a photoshop file with many layers that can be switched in and out. This is best understood by looking at a popular project like Bored Ape Yacht Club, below. As you can see, the ape is templated. The figure always sits in the same orientation on the screen, and its attributes — shirt, hat, facial expression, background, change. The artist defines all the possible attributes, but the computer algorithm decides which show up on which image.
In this way, a massive amount of images are easily created out of the same file; each with a unique combination of attributes on an image that is aesthetically and compositionally extremely similar. In the NFT space, this type of work is the standard for PFP (profile picture) projects, some of the most lucrative in the space. But also, in my opinion, some of the least inspiring.
My question was - could the same system be applied to abstract art? Could I design a layered approach that created X number of unique abstract works — and could those works look as close to physical paintings as possible? In other words, what was #abstractgenerative?
My question was - could the same generative system be applied to abstract art?
ALTARS and #abstractgenerative
With ALTARS I wanted to create an elegant collaboration between canvas and code — a digital generative collection that looks as close to physical art as possible. To do this, I combined hand-painted layers done on physical canvas with layers painted digitally on iPad, as well as photo manipulation and just for fun — a very little bit of OpenAI Dall-E. This was then combined with code written by the Open3 team to generate the 3333 unique paintings that made up the ALTARS NFT collection.
This is a very unique — perhaps a first of its kind — project in the NFT space.
To create ALTARS, I of course started with physical paintings. The ALTARS file was made of about 60 unique layers broken up into 8 groups of about 7 layers each; each of these uniquely created by me. To create a full ALTAR, the algorithm would randomly pick 1 of the 7 assigned layers for each group, then repeat for each of the 8 groups. These groups all had themed names, like “PORTALS” or “BLESSINGS.” This process would be done 3333 times to create 3333 unique ALTARS, though the potential unique combinations was 8^7 — or over 16M.
To start, two unique physical paintings were made specifically for the project. These paintings were photographed, digitally ‘cut up’ and manipulated to create about ~15 unique layers — most of the layers in the “FROM THE DESERT” and “ALTARS” attribute groups.
In the spirit of second lives, I also brought in favorite strokes and in one case, nearly a whole piece, as outlined in my Twitter thread:
Some layers were made fully via digital painting, but all very unique in some way. The aesthetics of the layers are really what make the artwork recognizable as my own.
The ALTARS System
In many ways, the creation of the art for the layers was the easy part. The hard part was creating a layering and grouping system that worked with these abstract images that would provide both visual distinction and visual elegance. Unlike Bored Apes, my desire was not to create a templated-looking painting. It was to create 3333 truly unique compositions that challenged a viewer to wonder — is this generative or not? Is this digital or not?
ALTARS aims to sit in the medial space in between digital and physical, generative and 1/1; it aims to be something you have not yet encountered.
Because the work was not easily templated, the creation of the system was not as simple as selecting foreground, midground and background layering groups. As you can see in the “build” below, the layers needed to work in such a way that they partially but didn’t fully overlap, that neither the presence of overlap nor its absence meaningfully affected composition, and that this could be true of every possible (16M+) combinations of layers.
Sounds complicated? It was, and the process is best viewed on the timelapse of my .PSD file linked below. Most of the creation process of ALTARS was spent figuring out this system: different orientations, trying and retrying and testing the combinations. Many beautiful layers were ultimately cut, left to be manifested another way…
The color palette was another massive challenge, but…
When all was said and done, the file was submitted to the Open3 team over the summer, and my launch date was set for October 6th.
ALTARS Mints Out in <2H
ALTARS launched on Open3 as a free mint (i.e. free to claim) at 9a on October 6th, with 3333 unique pieces available, limit of 3 pieces per collector. I had every intention of sending this e-mail before then, but figured, as the NFT market is quite slow these days, that it would take at least a few days for all the pieces to be claimed.
I was very wrong. In what became a crazy morning, demand for the ALTARS launch created more traffic than the Open3 team had ever seen and all the pieces were claimed within less than 2h — the fastest mint they had ever had. Wow. And before I could even post on Instagram or send to my e-mail list!
Looking back, some highlights from the day:
What a rush. The day was incredibly overwhelming, but I was filled with gratitude for collectors and supporters, old and new.
ALTARS: Behind the Name
It occurs to me that we’ve gotten all the way down here and I haven’t explained the meaning behind the name ALTARS. If you’re new here, welcome, and know that I am deeply engaged (conceptually, practically, intellectually, artistically) with spirituality. Read more about that here.
Altars appear in nearly every religion and are generally believed to be the medial point in between worlds: heaven and earth, upper and lower, etc. They are where you commune with [God, god, goddess, spirit, your ancestors, saints, etc.] — a place where dimensions meet and merge. A medial space. I am fascinated by medial spaces and aim to live my life within them as much as possible. My art practice is no different, increasingly blending digital and physical — neither one or the other, but both. Never one or the other, always both. ALTARS became a natural name for my first generative project, an explicit merging between human and technology, canvas and code.
Altars also inspired the project’s lore. If you explore the ~60 attributes, you will see their names pull directly from things that might be on an altar — sacred plants like palo santo or wachuma, crystals like rose quartz or amethyst, animal bones, Agua de Flor. Other layers are calls to different spiritual traditions or the own lineages of my life. There are a lot of easter eggs in there; I invite you to take a look by using the filter function on the Opensea collection. This, was a way for me to honor the gifts I’ve been given on my path in an environment that many would assume is devoid of spirituality at all. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is true!
Perhaps My Defining Work (Hah!)
I have never been more proud of, or challenged by, a project. Working within the confines (and opportunities) of this project was incredibly expansive to my practice. I fancy myself an intuitive painter — I channel — I rarely create a plan, system, or structure prior to arriving at the canvas. That was not an option here, at least not in the same way, and in that more rational process I found myself understanding my own composition and color process in a new way. I studied my own work; I sought to understand my own intuitive process and patterns. It was fascinating. It was like being a new kind of self that was rooted in… myself. Meta. Wild. 10/10 would absolutely do again.
With an equal amount of self-seriousness and incredulity, I feel this is the defining work of my (young) career. With ALTARS, I accomplished much of what I have sought out to do since entering the NFT space. It is a body of work extremely integrated into the broader time and technology, and personal practice of the artist, me. I am very proud of it.
Collecting ALTARS, 1mo Later
You might have wondered why I ever so casually glazed over the fact that ALTARS was free to claim — yes, I, a proud ‘PAY ARTISTS WHAT THEY ARE WORTH!’ artist, gave my work away for free (shudder).
My 1/1s have sold for anywhere from 0.33-1.5eth and my series, Desert Minis, is priced now at 0.075eth. Multiply that by 3333. It’s a lot.
So why a free mint? In short, I was intrigued by the opportunity to drastically expand my collector base (you are here, aren’t you?) — to get my art in front of more people. While this sounds exactly like the “work for impression” social media type beat I hate, the difference is something magical and unique to the NFT space: royalties.
With a free mint, the barrier to entry for new collectors to my work would be low — effectively zero — inviting more people to enter my world. The free mint would also likely attract “flippers,” or the type of NFT traders that don’t collect work for the love of it, but rather the desire to “flip” it for a profit. Unlike in the traditional art world, royalties are market standard (for now…) in the NFT space. A portion, often 5-10% of a resold piece’s price, goes back, automatically, to the original artist. If flippers ended up getting ALTARS and flipping them, I (and Open3, per our contract) would get a portion of that.
And that was exactly what happened. To date, 7eth or about $8800 at the time of writing has been generated by secondary sales on ALTARS, of which the royalty is 7.5%, or ~$660. Modest for 3333 pieces, but remember, these royalties happen in perpetuity. While ALTARS are selling for very modest prices now, any increase in the value of my work as an artist as the years goes on, theoretically increases the value of the collection. Notable also is that I sent a free ALTAR to every one of my existing NFT collectors. If they didn’t grab one in the craziness of launch day, not to worry, they already had one sent to them. A small token of appreciation for their early support.
If the #abstractgenerative movement takes off, ALTARS will be — as stamped on the immutable blockchain! — one of the first projects to explore it. The promise — as a figure of speech — financially, for ALTARS is in the long-run. It is a future bet. But, for me, that is still secondary — as the true value and benefit I received was from the growth I experienced during the process and the beauty of the outputted art itself.
Art is always the utility.
ALTARS: MANIFESTED
So where will ALTARS go from here? I’ve been asked by collectors if there will be a roadmap (plan for the project) or what I will do next. That remains to be seen, but I have lots of ideas. What happens when ALTARS burn? What happens when ALTARS are physically made manifest? What happens when physical goes to digital goes back to physical again? How do we examine the individual objects on our ALTARS? What do they unlock? How do you explore your lineages? What will they reveal? All these questions are built into the fabric — and attributes — of ALTARS.
There are so many paths to potentially walk, as is the same in life…. I’m waiting for the right one to be revealed. All I know is I’ll keep painting. And I’ll keep seeking. And I’ll keep writing.
If this intrigued you and you don’t yet own an ALTAR, please collect one below. They’re <$10ea and there is sure to be something interesting happening with them in the future.
If you are an NFT collector and new to my physical work, feel free to explore it on my website: www.alexmacedastudio.com.
As always, thank you for taking the time to read and thank you for supporting my work. If you have thoughts or feedback, just reply to this e-mail and please do share with a friend! Much love and many blessings.
A huge thank you to the Open3 team for their support and partnership on ALTARS. Open3 has many inspiring projects by traditional artists launching weekly, check it out.
If you are an artist interested in launching a project with Open3, apply for their free artist accelerator, now co-taught by yours truly. More soon.