The Generative Art Museum (TGAM): Hello ser! Thank you very much for joining us today. How are you?

DEAFBEEF (D): I’m doing well! thank you for asking.

TGAM: Let’s make a proper introduction, who is Deafbeef?

D: DEAFBEEF is the moniker I chose for an art project I began in 2020. The word is an example of ‘hexspeak’ - words that can be written using only the symbols in the hexadecimal numbering system 0-9 and A-F. People in crypto are probably familiar with hexadecimal at the very least from seeing Ethereum addresses, transaction hashes etc. But my choice of moniker predates my knowledge of Ethereum. I chose it for its associations with low level programming in C, the reference to sound, and also just due to it being a unique and funny word. In a absurd or mischievous way, it’s fun to see it in print, or to have it be used in otherwise serious situations.

TGAM: Could you tell us more about your background and how you got into generative art and C programming?

D: As a kid in the 80/90s I spent a lot of time playing genre of games called roguelikes. A key feature of these games is the procedural generation of game levels. That was my first introduction to generative content, and it was a formative experience, motivating me to learn programming to explore generative systems.

TGAM: What motivated you to develop a new method for efficient on-chain storage of media files for NFT art?

D: It was circumstantial that the way that I had already been working, writing self contained C code, happened to lend itself to the “on-chain” narrative that already existed when I became aware of what was happening with NFTs/ETH in early 2021. NFT people like the idea of things lasting forever. It’s a dogma of the culture.

TGAM: Can you explain your proposed method for on-chain storage of media files, and how it differs from existing methods?

D: I like to write programs in a conservative programming language called C. Mostly because I’m familiar with it, and because it never changes yet remains essential, unlike the 3rd party software that constantly changes and becomes obsolete. I’ve been through enough cycles of obsolescence and dependence on systems that are outside of my immediate control. I’m old enough that I just want to keep things simple and not have to buy things or waste time learning new trends that are quickly supplanted. It so happens that describing generative systems in this way, in a compact self contained way, allows its memory footprint to be small enough to be economically stored on a distributed ledger like Ethereum, and has minimal dependencies. Crypto people seem to like that. But I didn’t set out to do that, as I described it was circumstantial that my process seemed to fit in to this existing narrative, exemplified by NFTs like Autoglyphs and later Artblocks, of having an art making system stored immutably and eternally. Aking to carving something in stone. It’s a nice story, not completely without merit, but speaks more to the culture than as a practical means of digital conservation.

TGAM: Could you walk us through the process of creating a generative artwork using your method?

D: Until recently I used a 2012 Macbook pro running linux. I type C code in the emacs text editor. The code is a description of a system that generates sound and animation. Sound and images can be represented as numbers. The programs I write calculate numbers in particular patterns and write them to a file on disk. It’s not a real time system; I have to run the program, and later evaluate the resulting sound/animation. I prefer that it is not realtime. I think of it like composing, rather than performing. The creative synthesis happens when I’m thinking, in silence, and typing. It’s a personal preference.

TGAM: What advice would you give to artists who are interested in exploring generative art and blockchain technology?

D: My advice is to open up the hood and try to learn things at the most basic and fundamental level that you can. To me, it’s more important to learn how a system works, for example, the physics of sound, and how it can be represented and processed as digital signals. That’s more important than implementation details, which as I discussed can change all the time. But the physics of sound and the math that describes it doesn’t change; that knowledge is with you forever, and can carry over into other domains. That type of learning is time well spent; it’s an end in itself. The rest is just noise. There’s a lot of noise these days, learn to filter it.

TGAM: What measures have you taken to ensure that the code you write for generative art will still be usable in the future?

D: I write in a very conservative programming language (C, conforming to ISO C99 standard) that hasn’t changed much in a very long time, and yet remains and will remain essential because C compilers are generally used to make every other high level programming language. The software that runs Ethereum network is already dependent on C compilers, so this is not an added dependency.

I don’t use any external libraries; I try to write all my own implementations because I think it’s a fun and satisfying exercise to reinvent the wheel. I output simple uncompressed formats like WAV and BMP files. I want to get as close as I can to a mathematical description of a system that outputs numbers representing sound intensities and pixel intensities.

That being said, having my code run in the distant future was never my original concern; I just wanted for once to not have to come back to broken projects requiring upgrading bloated software and expensive hardware. So I chose to keep things simple, and see what I could do within that constraint.

TGAM: How do you see the field of generative art evolving, and what role do you see blockchain technology playing in this evolution?

D: To a new audience, generative art has been narrowly understood as randomly generated images, often in styles of traditionally understood collectable art objects, such as paintings and prints. But generative art has such an expansive definition, and I hope the market continues to mature and consider works incorporating all manner of systems and models, including data driven models and AI, and include performances, games, architecture, product design, etc. I can see blockchain continuing to be used for provenance and authenticity, especially as we see explosion of media generated by automated models. I can also see blockchain being used as the common reference point, the consensus reality or “gameboard” in collaborative or communal experiences.

TGAM: Your recent tweet showcasing some classic 80’s Mac games really made us feel nostalgia for the days of no internet & the sheer joy of discovering new things as a kid. Do you think we will ever go back to a simpler time? Is there a way back, or has the internet changed everything forever?

D: I hope not, as that would probably mean some apocalyptic event sent us back to the stone age. No, the genie is out of the bottle. We live collectively in this world. The technologies we create have profound social, political, and environmental implications. None of them are inevitable, as some would argue. We need to decide as a society what type of world we want to live in.

TGAM: We saw you were experimenting with diffusion models and AI, how do you feel about AI in art? Is it something you intend to incorporate into your practice?

D: There’s great potential for machine learning models to be used creatively, it seems natural that generative artists will integrate data driven models along with their custom designed algorithmic models. Lines will blur.

Image synthesis and language models we’ve seen make mainstream breakthroughs, and very soon we will see the same for sound and music generation. It will be messy, but exciting.

TGAM: Your release “Memory Box” shared a beautiful video with some history & background on your art. If you were to make a game like “el wormo” in this day and age, what would your approach be in this new hyper connected world?

D: It’s hard to say. I often wonder how my interests would be different if I had been a teenager today. I’d probably be too distracted by social media, or not really see the benefit given the time investment required to complete a simple game like El Wormo. Maybe I’d be making Tik Tok videos instead.

TGAM: How do you balance the creative freedom of generative art with the need to create something that resonates with an audience?

D: That’s a good question. When I started the DEAFBEEF project it was purely for my own enjoyment, without thought of an audience. It’s been challenging to adjust to the attention and market considerations; one tries to ignore that part and get back to personal exploration, but those considerations are still in the back of your mind.

Generally I try to make work that first resonates with myself. But I should also say that there’s great potential in the feedback loop between audience and artist, and that’s part of what makes NFT art space unique, that hyperconnected loop. And the different ways that it’s being explored using a programmable distributed ledger as a common reference. We’ve seen examples of collaborative creation and performance, and expect to see many more.

TGAM: What do you hope people take away from your art, both visually and emotionally?

D: I like art that has layers to it, can be interpreted or appreciated at many different levels whether they be visceral, craft/technical related, or heady conceptual. I also like humor. On a whole, if anything, I would be very pleased if the DEAFBEEF project exudes a spirit of exploration, and inspired others to be curious, take an interest in a process of exploring and learning, have the rewarding experience of discovery or creation, in whatever field or form that may take.

TGAM: Who are some other generative artists that have influenced your work or that you admire?

D: I was not part of the visual generative art scene. My influences are from games and music. That being said, I have admiration for the brave and honest sharing of personal expression from every artist. The world is better for it.

TGAM: What has been your favorite project or collaboration to work on as an audio visual artist, and why?

D: I was honored to be among the group of artists collaborating with Holly Herndon’s Holly+ project, using an AI model of her voice with the rights administered by a DAO of creators. The themes are extremely relevant, and occurred just prior to the inevitable explosion in the mainstream of AI generative models.

DEAFBEEF is part of Issue #06 Input Output, the sixth TGAM's issue exhibition showcasing the work of Licia He, Anna Carreras and DEAFBEEF.

About The Generative Art Museum

The Generative Art Museum (TGAM) is a non-profit organization based in Barcelona dedicated to explore, promote, and advance the understanding and appreciation of generative art as a unique form of artistic expression.