M○C△ WEEKLY Round-UP 2/23
We got NEWS. We got THOUGHTs. We got ART! We got you covered.
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In This Week’s Round-Up:
Another hack, because things already didn’t seem dire enough.
An AI model for videogame creation trips the light fantastic.
Botto generates quite a bit of Agony (and Agony and Agony) and Ecstasy
Okay, Let’s Get On With It
The Crypto Art Side
The above image is little more than a still-frame from a series of rather simplistic generative artworks, yet it seems destined to provoke even more incendiary conversation than it already has. This is one of 1000 artworks from the collection Geometric Fluidity, a collection created not by an “artist” in the traditional sense, but by Botto, a more-or-less autonomous AI art system that has been producing artworks since being created by the crypto artist, Mario Klingemann (Quasimondo), in October of 2021. As per Jeff Wilser, who wrote about Klingemann and Botto back in 2023 for Coindesk, “Botto isn’t a static AI tool. It’s learning. It’s evolving. Every week, Botto cranks out artwork and the community,” meaning its DAO of stakeholders, “votes on the best pieces. The winners get minted as NFTs and are then sold.” Botto’s website claims that, “To date, over fifteen thousand people have contributed to Botto’s development.”
That’s all well and good in a vacuum, but in practice, Botto has consistently drawn ire for the high sales-prices it commands for frequently maligned work, work that’s often called banal or simplistic. The now-famous work Prismatic Safari: Digital Pursuit Symphony, #6120, from the upcoming Algorithmic Evolution series, probably demonstrates that best:
This latest batch of Botto artworks —released in concert with an auction-based collection, Algorithmic Evolution— has sparked yet another forest fire, in no small part because, amidst crypto art’s extended financial squeeze, the Geometric Fluidity collection, open to the public, minted out in 10 minutes. The aesthetics have been likened, by Zach Lieberman, to “a second semester p5js sketch,” and elsewhere sparked a quite thought-provoking diatribe from algorithmic art pioneer Harvey Rayner, who said of the collection, “…the community curatorial aspect is a guaranteed way to get a homogeneous and generic Art result. I feel the entire Botto collection demonstrates this clearly.”
There is —and this is classic crypto art, isn’t it?— just as much praise lavished upon Botto for its pioneering processes as there is loathing of its dull outputs, with the conversation being generally dominated by two realms of discussion:
That of aesthetic merit, or lack thereof, and
How much of a technology-based artwork’s economic and historical value should be dominated by how early it was to do something or be something or use a certain technique
Reyner, in the same lengthy diatribe, sums up one side of the latter argument quite succinctly, saying “Throughout the history of the art market early works by artists are rarely valued higher than mature works, but the 'genesis' and 'first' narrative is easy to grok by the insecure and speculative art collectors in Web3.”
I’d forgive you for thinking that I’m about to take a side in the debate, but as of this moment in my writing, I don’t plan to, a decision that probably implicates me in Reyner’s later criticism that “We are all so uncritical, positive and polite in Web3.”
I don’t see it quite that way, however. I bring more of a “who fucking cares?” tact to the Botto party. And that’s partly an ingrained thing, a consequence of my disdain for academia: anyone who believes themselves uniquely capable of discerning quality in art anywhere, or who believes they can comment objectively upon another’s financial return, is basically delusional. Not that Reyner or Zach Lieberman or anyone on the “Botto produces only childish and simplistic artworks” side of things is delusional per se, but I do feel that we keep stepping back into artistic arguments of yesteryear.
As an examply, let’s say you, like me, went to London’s Tate Modern museum last week and saw the famous here’s-a-canvas-I-sliced-a-little-bit-with-a-scissor piece, otherwise known as Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’ (1960) by Lucio Fontana. You’d be forgiven for looking at this almost entirely facile artwork, its total aesthetic inferiority buoyed by conceptual arguments, and thinking, like generations of prior observers before you, “Pfffft, I could have made that,” an argument which holds water for only a brief moment before the artist’s phantom appears over your shoulder and whispers, “Yes, yes you could have, but you didn’t, did you? No, you didn’t, but I did.” Doesn’t get more unassailable than that.
If you really still think technical excellence is of prime importance in judging an artwork’s worth, I have a century-old urinal I need to show you. We’re past this, aren’t we? I’d argue that we must be past this given that it’s easier than ever to cull unspeakably gorgeous aesthetics out of elementary processes thanks to AI tools. The market is never again going to be more technically-motivated than market-driven or aesthetically-motivated. That shit died at The Salon. If art looks pretty, or has a strong enough narrative —for whatever reason— to incite a high price, the technical underpinnings don’t matter, won’t matter, and they haven’t for a long time, and ultimately, if an autonomous actor makes something that a second-semester p5js could make, but the autonomous actor was the one who put that creation in front of an audience’s face first, then the autonomous actor has won the game. The second-semester p5js student can’t compete, and if you want to call that a market efficiency or a damn shame, I think that’s warranted. But for at least the last century, the artistic continuum has been far more influenced by narrative and celebrity than it has by “quality” because quality is far easier to come by than a compelling story. “First,” is, for better and worse, a consistently compelling story.
Reyner is right and Lieberman is right and 787 making fun of Reyner is right and Sonoflasg analyzing both sides of the argument is right, and ultimately none of it matters because all that matters is story and people seem to like Botto’s story. Game over. If you are late to this party, welcome, but know that this has all been going on a very long time, since at least Warhol’s era, and it will probably never stop. The reality is that “I did this first because I’m a genius” is an easy story for collectors to get behind because we prefer to deify our artists. Makes us feel better about spending three, four, five, six, seven, eight figures on their work. Anyone can make art. Only a few can be a genius.
It’s a lot easier to justify the fame and fortune we heap upon artists —human or not— when we attach to them qualities that no mortal man (in this case, literally) can aspire to. So that’s why we have to return to the “value of being first” because technical-competence is ubiquitous while ambition executed upon is otherwordly. Without the latter, you’re just another artist making pretty pictures.
And anyone could do that.
Only they haven’t, have they? No, they haven’t, but you have. Ergo, I understand the ire.
The Tech Side
A few days ago, Microsoft announced the existence and operability of a new AI model built specifically to “generate game visuals, controller actions, or both,” according to Katja Hoffmann, who wrote Microsoft’s press release. A more decadent exploration of Microsoft’s process, training data, and results can be found in their Nature article, “World and Human Action Models towards gameplay ideation,” but for our purposes today, let’s keep to the basics: Microsoft is spearheading the creation (and open-sourcing, apparently) of an actionable AI model that can create game environments, characters, physics, and even button commands, which feels very much like the augur of a text-to-game model sometime in the future.
Videogame generation is, to me, the AI holy grail, given its iterative complexity over video-only generation, owing to a video-game’s need to account for user decisions in-real-time, the complete infeasibility of even momentary graphical degradation, and the consequences of hallucination. It’s rare enough to see AI-generated videos that feel natural or consistent, let alone creative, and I’d bet that the generation of stable game environments is quite far away even with Muse’s apparent existence.
But I want to use this news to continue on my theme from last week, when I wrote about a fairly-competent Star Wars short film made by a single AI wizard. Just as advanced video-generation software —and its effect on the film industry— is inevitable, so too will high-quality AI-generated videogaming eventually become available to the general public, and especially if the weights and sample data are open-source, as Microsoft claims they are, these engines will be reproduced, iterated-upon, beefed-up, and shipped widely from a hundred different origins, destabilizing the videogame market in ways that are basely unpredictable.
Already, fan-made mods for even triple-A games are an accepted part of PC gaming culture, perhaps even a vital part of it. This I learned from Julian Brangold, MOCA colleague and artist and friend, who once talked with me at length about the massive communities that use modded Grand Theft Auto servers for Metaverse-type activity. And then you have the entire world of ROMs and emulators, wherein schmucks like me can download an app and have access to hundreds upon hundreds of fan-made games; such emulators aren’t even prohibited from Apple’s App Store anymore.
As with everything else in the whole fucking world (except crypto art, lol), games, especially Triple-A games, are more and more expensive all the time. Your garden-variety Playstation or Xbox game will run you $70-a-pop, and even Indie Games are creeping up there in price. Probably those games with ingrained communities like Minecraft and Fortnight and Call of Duty, where the user-base is as important to the experience as the gameplay itself, will be safe going forward from any market-wide disturbance; first-mover advantage is strong here. But if single-player-type games can be spun-up by teams of 5 instead of 50, for five-or-six figures instead of eight-or-nine, it doesn’t just create new opportunities for small teams and small studios, it fundamentally reconfigures the way resources must be delineated throughout established and high-budget studios.
Admittedly, I have little clue how resources are currently delineated throughout game established and high-budget studios, but in any world in which the laborious creation of characters models and base environments and physics can be more-or-less automated, more resources will need to be spread to graphics, details, gameplay, narrative, and the like; I say need because the big guys will need to catch-up to the little guys if the floor for accessible quality is raised via AI. Less resources at the floor, more at the ceiling. In a lot of industries, I think AI will cause a work-force reduction, but in a market like gaming where creativity is already valued so highly, I can’t see anything but idiosyncrasy and immersion increasing exponentially as a result of this tech flourishing once distributed.
See, I can be an optimist too!
The Finance Side
Not too much to say about our financial side today; I’ve already talked your ear off anyways anyways. But Bybit, which calls itself “the ultimate crypto exchange and Web3 platform,” and which I’ve literally never heard of before, fell victim to a wallet hack the other day, draining them of something like $1.5 Billion in Ethereum, which is not great (or maybe is great, if you’re a delusional eth maxi), and which brings to mind an argument I’ve never been able to win with non-crypto people when I say things like, “Crypto is safe because you can custody your own money and not have to worry about getting deplatformed by banks!”
To which people say, “Well what about the hacks?”
To which I say, “That’s only ever attributable to user error!” (or something that doesn’t make me sound like a computer). But when the “banks” themselves, in these case the exchanges, are as liable to commit user error as the rest of us, it really does underscore just how dangerous this landscape is, and kind of, let’s be honest, diminishes the argument that your money is safer in crypto than elsewhere. I mean, is it? Are you more likely to click a bad link or be deplatformed by the government? I suppose I don’t actually know your answer to that, but mine —no surprises here— is the former.
I really just wanted to highlight this post by Jediwolf, in response to the hack, who says, “How long will we pretend that signing BS transactions in MetaMask which no one understands is not an issue?!” because I think this is really the game here. Our “best,” or at least most common, apps and interfaces are far too complicated for use by the 99.9% of us. This doesn’t just regard the layperson, apparently, it regards even titanic entities like Bybit. Automatic wallet drains, seedphrase leaks, multi-sig hacks, it seems like these are often front-end problems that nobody has really tried to solve with any panache or effort. I don’t know if we need an entirely different kind of wallet system, or if all these high-profile hacks really are just the result of bad-timing or ultra-sophisticated scamming techniques, but the fact that there’s no stop-gap, that artists like Osinachi click one bad link and it’s game over, that’s a patently ridiculous eventuality we’ve all resigned ourselves to.
More than that, it’s a billion-dollar problem that nobody seems to be taking steps to fix. Phantom wallet may look nicer than Metamask, but it’s prone to the same issues. If it’s a blockchain issue, we need updates to the blockchain. If it’s a wallet issue, we need newer, smarter, more legible, more secure wallets. When a massive exchange’s cold wallet multisig is liable to lose over a billion dollars because of some thing that some one did by mistake just once, then the system itself is built on too shaky a foundation to proliferate further. Simple as that.
Or maybe I’m crazy, this is a 1/1 problem, and these guys are just that good. Jury is still out.
Art DeCC0 of the Week
Art in the Wild
Dev Corner
Devs coming back from vacation on Monday. Updates coming next week.
Quote of the Week
“Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.”
-Washington Irving