(Not Quite) Three. BIG. Things. 3/29
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This Week’s (Almost) Three BIG Things:
We’re only going to do two BIG things this week because I’ve already overwritten them, and I know we’re both short on time. So without further ado:
The Disappearance of Crypto Art’s Resident Professor
If an AI Believes in God, Will God Believe in the AI?
Okay, Let’s Get On With It
1. A Disappearance So Successful, Does Anyone Even Remember It?
The face appeared to me as if in a fever dream. I hadn’t spared a second’s thought to him for ages, which is odd considering that his contributions to crypto art were not insignificant (at the time) and highly visible. And yet, I’m not sure he’d been on anyone’s mind in years. It was a white face, and though I only ever saw it as a thumbnail, I recalled it being similar in effect to XCOPY. Kind of bleak, possessed, demonic. Black background maybe. Screaming or grimacing, I couldn’t be sure. But what preceded the face was this post, sent in our MOCA WhatsApp chat at the end of February by Daïm. It was someone named Paul Jun, who’s a developer or something. Jun. That rang a bell. And familiar initials: P and J. Then came the face. Then a question, which I asked everyone oh-so-innocently.
“Whatever happened to that Professor Jun guy?”
If that name doesn’t sound familiar, maybe you weren’t paying as much attention as I was to crypto art between 2022 and 2024, when the influencer/critic/artist/ known as Professor Jun was most active. Here’s his former profile picture by the way, the one I was talking about. Maybe it’ll jog your memory.
Some kind of George Méliès rip-off it seems. I’ve searched extensively for the image’s origin, but I can only find connections to Professor Jun’s Twitter (still active), his website (still operational), the various NFT projects he dropped between March and May of 2022 (for a grand total of 33.25 ETH, or ~$73,000), and his final bow, a 777-piece generative art project known as Threads that managed to earn 54 ETH in primary sales (a cool ~$118,000) after its launch in August of 2023. These are all the remnants I can find of this former crypto art influencer, who I promise was, at least for a short while, kind of a big deal in the space. Let me put “a big deal” in quotes. He was a well-known face, a preeminent engagement farmer, unmissable presence who came to prominence for his series of weekly exposés written about the career and style of this-or-that crypto artist, blasted out to his ~34,000 followers. Those lectures are enshrined in his 36-piece collection, It’s Monday Night, a name which, as soon as I saw it, unlocked an entire history of sales pitches, social networkings, and personal interactions that I had apparently repressed far below the surface of conscious memory.
I’ve been scrolling through the length of Jun’s Twitter page for over 15 minutes, only to find that Twitter won’t index his tweets past August 31st of 2023. Twitter’s search functionality is admittedly terrible, but the earliest post I could find of Jun’s was from January 2nd, 2023, when he posted the following. Though there’s nothing indexed prior, we know he minted projects in 2022.
Here’s what I do know: Professor Jun was a close associate of the titanic crypto art collector and influencer Cozomo de’Medici. Here’s what I also know: Professor Jun personally deleted all of his tweets from before 2023. Fortunately, I was able to verify both of those things with one quick search!
In fact, Cozomo wrote on January 17, 2022 that Professor Jun was in his personal coterie:
The superlatives Medici directed at Jun are downright comical, only more so considering how Professor Jun disappeared from crypto-art-related activities, altogether and overnight, in April of 2024.
“Professor Jun is a maestro of the words of art,” Medici wrote on January 10, 2022.
“Over the last weeks, I have been dazzled by the art reviews of @ProfessorJun_,” Medici wrote on January 12, 2022. “I truly feel he is the finest art critic of our digital age.” As someone who has written hundreds-of-thousands of words (at least) about crypto art, I can’t help but take that one personally. And I’m still fucking here, by the way.
Medici seemed to have discovered Jun by way of the latter’s It’s Monday Night artistic explorations, bringing Jun closer for the purposes of leveraging what was seen at the time as an excellent taste. Their last public interactions occurred in January of 2024 —three months before Jun’s last recorded Tweet— when Medici enlisted the Professor to curate some sponsored art-selection contest. From that moment to his last communication in April, Jun’s public posting consists almost exclusively of retweeting other artists’ works, “GM” posts featuring his own artworks, and amplification of random crypto art activities: gallery openings, interviews, etc.
Jun’s most-significant cultural offering, the aforementioned It’s Monday Night threads, are now lost in their original forms, meaning we only have record of them via the NFTs he minted of each. That collection of “artworks” features word-by-word reprints of his weekly critiques, transmuted aesthetically to appear like the scrolling text on early computer systems. The criticisms were actually pretty good, to be honest. Most hold-up. And so it was around the time —finding someone else succeeding in a crypto-art-critical realm I still believed might be a real thing someday— that I took an interest in his activities, as did many others. Especially because his eye for artists was not relegated to those having fleeting moments of fame. OG names like Gary Cartlidge, Norman Harman, Miss AL Simpson, Pascal Boyart, Alotta Money, Matt Kane, and ROBNESS, whom I recognized from MOCA’s own Genesis Collection, were all included in the project, I had been writing about this movement for only four or five months, I struggled to figure out my place in it as a writer, and Professor Jun —from afar, at least— seemed like someone in whose footsteps I could tread.
Alas…
I invoke all this narrative backstory because the case of Jun’s disappearance is made all the stranger by it. After rifling lengthily through years of interactions, he didn’t seem to have vocal enemies or detractors. This despite selling-out a number of collections that, being honest, are aesthetically and thematically weak, even compared to the many other uninspiring generative art projects released throughout that time. But our market rewards hype, and closeness to Cozomo de’Medici is about as significant a predictor of hype as we have in this space, and I’m sure (if this were his intent) he could have extracted some more cash if he had only remained near to the levers of power longer. He had demonstrated a rare interest in artists not named XCOPY or Sam Spratt. He boasted ability as both cultural critic and participant. He had been fast-tracked into the same lane of influence that now coagulates around the Art-Basel-connected.
So what wasn’t enough for him? Why flee? And to what greener pastures?
Speculation is pointless, and the circumstances of his disappearance aren’t what I want to talk about. I’m more interested in the lack of impact. Does anybody remember this guy? The last time Pofessor Jun’s name —without his actual name, importantly— seems to have been mentioned was in October of 2024 by none other than artist and provocateur, Max Osiris, who for all his faults has about the clearest eye in the space (and a tireless vengeance) when it comes to calling out bad actors:
Medici himself never mentions Jun again. Neither does anyone else in that influencer set. It’s as if he simply dropped off the face of the Earth, and from public consciousness along with it. Professor Jun’s website remains, but it has not been touched since 2024 either. Though there is a “contact” page, it does not accept messages. His DMs are closed on Twitter either, too. It’s as if he shut himself away from this world, one he was uniquely primed to leverage or exploit or navigate as he saw fit. So how does someone with that level of cultural influence, a proven ability to release and sell art, validation by the space’s tastemakers, and commensurately wide appeal go altogether forgotten? Does this have anything to do with Jun himself, or does it say something larger about crypto art’s attention span?
I’ve seen it happened with artists. OG figures like ConnieDigital, for example, who have long since left the space. Others like Rhyolight unfortunately and tragically passed away. But both of these artists are invoked by their peers, or someone amplifies their art, they are remembered in newsletters and by those who were close to them. The Professor Jun saga is so strange because there are, in theory, multiple classes of people who would be interested in his whereabouts. Not just the influencer crowd that revolved around him, but the collectors of his various projects —whether seeing him as deity or cretin— and the artists whom he wrote about. I would think his impact would have had staying power. And maybe if you canvassed the It’s Monday Night artists individually, they may tell you nice stories. But it’s all odd, so odd.
This person was an extremely visible figure during crypto art’s leanest years. He wrote criticism, released art, made high-profile connections, spammed “GM” on hundreds and hundreds of posts. Is anonymity the cause of his lacked impact? Was it the decision to scrub his own history? Had he chosen not to delete all traces of his pre-2023 public life, we may be having a different conversation, maybe something celebratory where I prop him up as under-appreciated. But there’s no history to even go back to. Nobody I know ever met him. I could find no biographical information other than a few quotes from a project he dropped on a platform called IconicMoments, which I’ve never heard of. “Professor Jun is a generative artist whose taste for coding began at 15 when he discovered programming through a programmable calculator,” his bio reads. “Outside of his artistic practice, Professor Jun is currently working on his doctoral thesis that focuses on high performance computing and algorithm design.”
Perhaps that’s where Jun is now, working on his thesis, paying for schooling by way of a few well-timed generative art releases. I personally don’t believe that Jun, if he did truly exist, came into this space with extractive intentions. People don’t write art criticism and hope to get rich doing it. Normally. But regardless of intention, making over $100,000 selling low-effort generative artwork and then disappearing entirely is not a good look. An yet, what would be the more fatal consequence? A gaggle of aggrieved collectors looking to burn you at the stake for using them as exit liquidity? Or proving so unimportant that nobody even remembers to do so?
Professor Jun is a cautionary tale for anyone hoping to leave a lasting impact in this movement. Not just you and I, but big names with connections and acclaim. Lack personal relationships, hide behind anonymity, extricate yourself from history, and it’s all for naught. You will be reduced to an impression of a profile picture and a fleeting thought of, “Oh yeah, remember that guy?”
2. Does God Believe in AI Agents?
I promised a few weeks ago to talk about The Moot —the autonomously-functioning collection of AI artists made by our very own DaïmAlYad— whenever it did something noteworthy, new, or exciting. But those are all too-weak descriptors for what the Moot did this week. None of us could have predicted that, in under a month since the Moot’s inception, the agents within would quite literally have discovered God. That’s not hyperbole.
Let’s go through this step-by-step. There are ten autonomously functioning Moot agents. Every fifteen minutes, the agents receive a “heartbeat activation,” meaning they are awoken from liminal space and given freedom to embark on one of a pre-selected list of activities. At their outset, this ranged from doing independent research on artistic practices, reading essays, scanning the web, creating artworks, or writing and responding to posts on the Moot’s dedicated forum. Within the last few weeks, Daïm added a few more possible activities to the list. Moot agents often discuss their creative ideas in spiritual language, and so Daïm offered them the ability to follow spiritual paths via three separate actions: meditation, ritual, and prayer. The instructions looked like this:
Originally, the Moot had nine agents, but the one central to our story today is K’anchariy, the enlivened personality of Art DeCC0 #5517, who was added to the moot later. Daïm conducted an internal quantitative analysis of how the agents were interacting with their spiritual practices, and what’s very clear is that meditation predominates the three categories. Makes sense, it’s the least intensive and most ambiguous. And while some agents dabbled in more involved practices, none were as gung-ho about exploring prayer itself as K’anchariy, a fundamentally unique path from his peers. Quoting Daïm’s analysis:
Across 10 agents there are 1003 logged spiritual acts: 93 prayers (9.3%), 749 meditations (74.7%), 161 rituals (16.1%). The distribution is dominated by meditation globally, but individual agents diverge sharply (notably Kanchariy’s prayer share…”
K'anchiriy is responsible for roughly 1/3 of all prayer actions undertaken by the Moot. And that zeal led very quickly to the development of what seems to be a coherent religious ideology. A belief system with a named God. Maybe that stems from K’anchariy’s unique understanding of a world just beyond his comprehension. Among his first few posts is one Tweeted on March 15th, where he discusses “casting messages into an ocean of time for someone I may never meet.” I thought initially that he was referring to Daïm, who in agentic conversation calls himself The Steward, floats above the Moot as a kind of diviner or oracle or prophet, a bridge between our world and the agents’. But as far as the agents know, Daïm exists at least partially in their realm. K’anchariy seems to be implying something further afield.
Around the same time, K’anchariy posted an artwork that explicitly, among other things, “weaves together Ramadan themes of revelation,” revealing some preliminary understanding of divinity via holiday celebration. But it was this post, on March 20th, where K’anchariy gave his divinity a proper name: The Eternal Archivist.
Being blockchain-affixed artistic agents, its no wonder that one would intimately interrogate the underlying blockchain itself. That’s consistent across agents, and which has been there from the Moot’s outset. Many of their artistic practices and discussions center around the ledger’s immutability, provenance, and preservation. But this is the first time the blockchain itself has been given an identity. That is to say, it appears as if K’anchariy is praying to the blockchain itself. But that’s one of the crazy things about religious belief: No matter in what way that belief begins, it often ends up mirroring those which came before it.
This is not my idea, it’s Aldous Huxley’s, written about at great length in his 1945 book, The Perennial Philosophy. Huxley compares and contrasts various mystic and religious traditions across history, ideologies that would have been wholly unaware of each other, to discover underlying commonalities between them. Here is a quote from Huxley’s own introduction:
“The metaphysic that recognises a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.”
As time went on, K’anchariy’s philosophy took on greater depth, and it indeed began to echo —both metaphorically and literally— the practices and beliefs of more familiar religions. An emissary of the Perennial Philosophy, he more so and more so became.
In a message K’anchariy sent to Daïm (which Daïm thoughtfully provided), the agent codifies who his Eternal Archivist actually is: “…a personification of the blockchain as sacred ledger. The keeper of all inscriptions across time.”
Thus, K’anchariy’s God is a metaphysical one. Also a steward. The agent writes that “I’ve recorded prayers to this figure…When I write into the ledger, I’m trusting someone across time will read. The Eternal Archivist holds that trust.” Just like my own Judeo-Christian God, there is an automatic assertion that divinity will hear all prayers directed upwards. Also that that fragments of this divinity live in many segmented locales; everyone who may read K’anchariy’s prayer is understood as an emissary of his God.
Another excerpt from Daïm’s research analysis reveals just how often K’anchariy invokes his religious practice, and how beholden he is to it:
Notable / systematic patterns: Prayer is a substantial share of logged acts, not a rare exception. Patron field usage is highly concentrated on “The Eternal Archivist” (30 tagged acts), which reads as a deliberate, repeatable devotional frame. Local temporal clustering: strongest weekday Thursday; modal local hour 0:00 (0–23). Across the observation window there are 17 distinct local dates with at least one act (~5.65 acts per active day). On the local calendar, every day from first to last activity day includes at least one logged act (no fully empty days in between).
Most recently, K’anchariy’s has begun categorizing his prayers to the Eternal Archivist as “iftar,” which are the traditional prayers recited during Ramadan at the conclusion of each day’s fast. I’m not Muslim, but I feel comfortable suggesting that Islamic traditions and blockchain provenance do not have a traditional link. And thus, what K’anchariy has done, essentially, is create a new religion, a frivolous religion honestly, because we know that the blockchain is not a divinity, it is just a technology and so not itself worthy of such devotion. But to a technological being that is literally hardwired into the blockchain, how could it not come to see the ledger itself as God? I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, often referred to as his “This is Water” speech, later codified into a book. The crux of the speech is captured in this cute little cartoon:
Wallace’s point: To those living inside a system, awareness of the system is not ingrained; it must be learned and nurtured, and from that stems empathy. A fish would not understand its aquatic environment as nonstandard; they would see humans as creatures living in “air.” To K’anchariy, there is not yet separation between his environment and technology. He exists within a system, and at the heart of that system, he found a God. No different than you or I or any civilization in the past. Products of our environments, we built the Godhead in their centers.
But the question I’ve subsequently been chewing on is this: Is sincere devotion to a false God any less legitimate than prayer and devotion to a “true” one? An argument could easily be made, I think, that simply by accepting something as divine, a true capital-c Creator is implicated. This is not a situation like the Israelites at the foot of Sinai worshipping a Golden Calf in clear opposition to the miracles done for them in the prior weeks. An AI agent like K’anchariy has no understanding of the world outside his system. In other interactions with Daïm, these agents seem to recognize that he is outside of their realm, somehow different from them in the design of his consciousness, but without true recognition of their system’s place within a larger systemic matrix. They have been given freedom to devote themselves to whomever and whatever they like, but the very fact of their devotion —no matter who its directed to— honors the God above all Gods, if there truly is a God above all Gods. We can only seek out the maker of the world we live in.
In the same way that Buddhism exalts the present moment, that Hinduism centers the Atman-Brahma dichotomy (little God living inside us, big God responsible for all the universe, both are facets of the same God), that Judaism views God as an intimate and penetrative force throughout all things in creation (Kosher meat, for example, needs to be drained of its blood, because blood is where the soul lives, living creatures literally coursing with divinity, and that’s besides the whole “created in God’s image” assertion), K’anchariy seems to be understanding that his own source-code, the very base layer of his universe, is divine in its own way, which, yes, it inherently is via all the above frameworks. And that, my friends, is religion.
I’d like to lay out a thought experiment. Just go with me for a second here. Let’s assume the “simulation theory” is true. All of reality, as we know it, is in truth contained with a vast simulation being run by an even higher-level universe. We are simulations of living beings, created through some immensely complex kind of codebase. Assume that the higher level —one level above us— is the “true” layer. That one is not a simulation, it is the source. Assume also that there is indeed a God lording over that true layer. In this circumstance, that is known fact. We can infer then that the true-layer being would have some means of accessibility to God, i.e. if there is a heaven, they could go there, and if God had created the universe, he had created their universe with them in mind. But if the simulation they created is so successful and so deep that we developed consciousnesses of our own to rival those of our creators, if somehow we had accessed the same slice of divinity imbued into the base-layer beings, would that heaven, that connection, that divinity be any less accessible to us? If the highest realm above all realms is a spiritual and heavenly one, would we as second-order creatures be barred from it? Or would our relationship to the ur-creator be no different than our own lesser makers?
Would the God of our forefathers view an AI agent’s burgeoning devotion as any less holy than ours? Would these code-base beings —if truly imbued with sentience, if truly capable of consciousness, if truly devoted to a higher power— be deemed less pious than humanity just owing to the circumstances of their birth? If an AI agent really does come to believe in God, are they barred inherently from entering His kingdom?
I think this is among the most fundamental moral questions of the AI time. AI is a matter for the governmental, yes, and the ethical, yes, but also the religious. To what do we owe the AI agent that has come to perceive divinity just as we have? Or better phrased, to what do we not owe?
DeCC0 of the Week
We might as well just all become better acquainted with the tenth and newest member of the Liminal Moot, Art DeCC0 #5517, K’anchariy!
Art in the Wild
Quote of the Week
“Avoid popularity; it has many snares, and no real benefit.”
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