Exploring Generative Art in Ethereum - Simon de la Rouviere

uh i am floating in space uh in denver i'm actually really really excited to introduce uh this next speaker it's someone that you will uh all know and recognize a real og in the space so simon de la riviere the man originally behind all the research around bonded curves and today he's actually here to talk to us about exploring generative art in ethereum so simon welcome and uh we're really excited and take it away for for this presentation um i am going to cover uh its generative art in the ethereum um it's got a bit of a rich history and recently um it's actually become quite popular as a lot of really interesting projects that's that's come out so um let me start i'm going to give like a bit of a history sort of somewhat chronological on on um what's been happening in the space um and then also going to sketch uh what i feel is still the future and stuff that we i feel we need to see that's that should happen because there's a lot of interesting possibilities still out there and so um i want to make it happen so i want to see other people also share ideas around this so i'm going to start off with um if you're if the technical things get gets a bit too big in the weeds what you also can do is just look at all the cool articles there's really a lot of cool stuff been happening so i'm going to start off with one of the basics that almost everyone in the space probably not familiar with is crypto punks it was one of the first nft projects before the standard existed but one thing they also did was they created the first generative art project in ethereum and how it worked back then um when it was launched before all the newer fancier generative art projects came online was um they created these 10 000 crypto pumps and all of them combined have different traits and features that create 10 000 unique crypto punks so all of them now combined they they took this basically an image of 10 000 punks took a hash of the image stored in a smart contract and that way you can reference and verify that uh whatever punk you have in terms of an id and a smart contract references your specific crypto punk um off chain um so yeah it was it was just it was uh it was one of the first projects and that also helped inspire things like cryptokitties and now it's you know as we've recently seen the values come up quite a lot um what followed after that took a bit of a while but i was debating whether to include this in this in this presentation merely because when i think of generative art i've i when i look at it it's it's it feels to me it should be the primary purpose but that being said um cryptokitties did have some stuff some new things that contributed towards the space that other projects now use and also um add to their experiences and what it also did is that it took some of that is a crypto punks where you had this unique kitty that had various traits um and the way the kitty you know how it looked was again you had this unique string of numbers and each sections of the string would relate to specific traits but what it also then introduced was this ability to to have kitties um breed with each other and create new traits so that also definitely spawned a lot of interest in people trying to find rare traits in these generative art pictures but cryptokitties was also also a predominantly more like a kind of game this game of creating this this thing um similar to that is the axis project which also um has a predominant alternative feature set which is related to a game that's being played with these creatures um after cryptokitties now i don't think there's a lot of people that know of this project um after cryptokitties came out again people were inspired by this idea of being able to merge two pictures together to create a new picture and cryptokitties had and crypto punks had discrete set of features you know like um a cigarette in the mouth or a purple hat but krypco went and used um cans which is generative on adversarial networks to combine two images together to create a completely new image and in this case it's these um anime girls um which then combines and to create new new versions of it unfortunately i don't think the project ever launched they or it might have launched in this they they switched it off but i tried finding the contract addresses but but i couldn't find it but they they had i still have the white paper available which you can go read on how it works but it essentially created a more fluid manner in which traits can be combined and created and that is what you more readily see in generative art is the sort of more flexible process where it's not a small set of discrete features after cryptco again by the same team that created cryptopunks the larva labs team they created autoglyphs and this was the first first i would say in definitely the first generative art project on ethereum that attempted to entirely include the picture on chain in ethereum now in the case of auto clips what is created is there's a bit of smart contract code that generates a sequence of um literally like slashes and circles and stuff like that and stores that on chain and then as with um the the famous artist sol lewitt there's a set of instructions on how to recreate the artwork once you have this set of symbols right and and so once you have the set of symbols and you have a set of instructions you can recreate your piece this is also very popular it also spawned a bunch of fast followers like color glyphs and and other kind of projects one of them was generative which which followed a similar pattern but here it it drew what's called k compositions um then what there were other ones as well chain faces which they created instead of this sort of symbols that's directly stored in on chain it literally just stored the the specific uh unicode or ascii art directly on it so if you would go into the smart contract now an ether scan and you go for a specific token id you will see one of these faces and this was also automatically generated now after that period which is all the autoglyphs kind of clones and all the sort of cryptic crypto punk loads clothes one of my favorite projects launched and this was clovers and clovers contributed new kinds of mechanisms to generative art projects which i feel is still relatively unexplored today so clovers adds one interest to a few interesting things one of them is um it's it it incentivizes people to keep generating generative art so as most of the cases before the creators of the generator said chose say 10 000 punks 512 autoglyphs so there was there was somewhat of an intent to limit the set of available options but in clovers there is practically an infinite set because what you see on screen right is different games being played the final stage of a game of othello which is the the game where you play uh with the the the black white stones that flip each other um and so in this case what's interesting is the final outcomes are symmetrical ones which people seem to appreciate um versus non-symmetrical ones then the second thing that clovers did which is really cool is they they created this economy that incentivized people to keep creating these new pieces it had this bonding curve in the background where you could buy these coins and the coins were needed in order to essentially mint these new end states so it was just a really interesting combination trying to find art and patterns in a board game and also incentivizing people to do that which i think is is not explored well enough and when i get to the end you'll see what i mean um by by by what we can still do with this model of trying to incentivize people to create generative art then um a project came out called other stars um it's it it also followed the the general pattern of trying to create different traits and and combine them together same with like crypto punks um and and cryptokitties but what avistars did was which brought a new um facet to generative art and ethereum is that it it's the first project that that explicitly created these pictures and images with sp svg which is the image drawing standard and by having that svg directly stored on ethereum um in this case it's not storing the entire image in svg on ethereum but it's but it's stored all the separate traits so in this case you know the guy with the beer that svg would be on um on chain and when the they you have a specific hour start it would render it by combining these different components svgs and then creating the art piece which is which is really cool um there was like the fun of one of the first projects to do that and and the interesting thing to remember um after cryptokitties came out when the erc721 standard was created there there wasn't really a an attempt to create or include in the standard the ability to reference unchain representations of the art so the the metadata was assumed to be a uri which is off chain you uh say a website and including the image right but as you can see like um as the the project leader from uh avastar's sid and dan from opens he also said is i think one of the goals with these art projects is that we need to try to create what's called uh looks like we uh lost simon see if his internet unfreezes here real quick okay well hopefully my internet doesn't release my router doesn't reset but um let's let's keep going i could just show a bunch of cool pictures and then finish off so squiggly also that's svg it's really interesting um art blocks is a platform that creates generative art projects so there's much of different ones like ringers uh numbers um utopia cyber cities but they don't store svg directly it references the script neolastics is a project i created that also renders the svg but unique thing here is it borrows some of the stuff from clovers which uses a bonding curve in the background um i'm going to ramble through after the rest of this f block art is a new project that allows people to create different styles and then also um includes um the the blocked numbers or block hashes as reference for inputs other interesting projects are nf trees which also include some of the fees towards co2 removal carbon removal which is cool tiny boxes also uses svg these are animated but you can't see this now on this presentation but it's really cool um crypto cubes is also an animated generative art project and a recent one that also became popular with hash masks which sold for quite a lot of money although what's interesting about hashmasks is that they follow quite a simple approach that hasn't been seen in other research projects is they just reference the hash as is and then what we've also seen is artists like pixel queue which is just artists that have created generative art in the past creating you just individual pieces and then and selling it on platforms like openc future projects which i think could be interesting is coming some stuff like euler beats which also includes generative art plus generative music should be cool to see or um different ways to experiment with creating additions like poles is also a project that's coming um where you you you're trying to create certain kind of scarcity but automate it through new kinds of editions so to end off with um i think what we're still missing in a picture here is the inclusion of daos around generative art so there was osaka dao that that commissioned people to create art for in japan for japan japanese defcon japan and there's also been projects like trojandar that helps to create art and then there's also flamingo people might be more familiar now that collects nfts and commissions nfts now the holy grail at the end of this to finish off is the ability to combine these new kinds of economies with generative art such that you end up with an automated but or what's called an autonomous artist and gene coogan which is the creator of machine learning for artists created this project called abram dot ai which includes all these different aspects but also most interestingly includes multi-party computation such that whatever is being generated by this generative artist um would not be known by its contributors uh human contributors or program contributors to the project so you essentially get this combination the generative artist creative backing economy ai and philosophy of mind to ideally create a fully autonomous and artificial artist that could create art that we can enjoy participate in and share the value in that's being created so i think there's still a lot of stuff that we can do with generative art as you can see there's so many cool projects that i've launched that are exploring different things and i hope with each one we try something new to create new kinds of economies around generative art because it's really cool so thank you for that um i think my time's up and my internet's still on so good for that thank you simon this is so cool i think we have so much more to see on the side of generative art i'm really excited to to learn more about future dials that can come through um i remember we were part of the early flamingo dow so it's good to know that you think that's on the cutting edge um yeah i would love to jam some time to talk more about you know art endows and what the future of creators is going to look like thank you so much

Channel: ETHDenver

Views: 4,562

Rating: 4.9708028 out of 5

Keywords: Cryptocurrency, Crypto, Blockchain, Blockchain technology, Etherem, ETHDenver, Bitcoin, Decentralized finance, DeFi, Token engineering, Hackathon, Smart Contracts, Social Impact, Decentralization, Privacy, Identity, DAO, Crypto Education, Blockchain Education, Blockchain for Good, ETHDenver BUIDLathon, ETHDenver hackathon, Ethereum Denver, ETHDenver 2021, Ethereum hackathon, Ethereum Denver hackathon

Id: jhG2qCzuZaE

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021