Who are you?

My Name is Simon and I’m Swiss, living in Switzerland. It’s kind of hard to describe myself because I have never gone a traditional way career or family wise. I used to be a gamer and was an earlyish adopter of computers and the internet. I know programming but never had a job doing it. I guess I would describe myself as an outsider that feels most at home in web3. My father is a traditional artist and has always kind of inspired me to try doing my own thing, with varying success.

How long have you been in the crypto and nft scene?

I started mining altcoins in 2014 with graphics cards in my apartment and joined twitter to find more Information on Bitcoin and Altcoins. Back then CT was pretty new and much of it was pump and dump groups doing it completely in the open. Most of the shitcoins were scams. Not that much has changed. It was overwhelming and hard to navigate, but sometimes you would find some great Information. For Example, I found @aantonop who taught me a lot. My first run-in with NFT’s was CryptoKitties in January 2018. I didn’t really understand what it was or how it worked but bought a lot of those cute cat pictures and also bred and sold some if I remember correctly. I was in bullmarket euphoria and thought this was going to be a big thing. The following bearmarket basically made me lose all interest and most gains and I only returned in April 2021 when I discovered opensea and started buying Fine Art Punks by XWAVE. Again I became completely manic and bought a lot of different kind of “Art Punks”, joining their different Discords, which I had not known before. I stopped gaming before discord was a thing. I also started experimenting with AI-assisted art myself but never released anything. My friend CampendonkP made his Campendonk Punks collection.

How did you hear about Tezos?

I had heard about tezos but had no tezos wallet and no idea about the art explosion happening on HEN. I finally made a wallet when XWAVE announced they would mint some free works on HEN in April of 2021. So after “buying” these free works by XWAVE I started looking around on HEN, found it hard to navigate but full of cool and compared to Ethereum very affordable art.

Tell us the story behind your genesis mint “Colorfall”.

After discovering fxhash in November 2021 I was immediately fascinated by the technical aspects of the site, not being familiar with artblocks this was all new to me. Minting and therefore creating the artwork at that moment seemed magical to me and I decided then and there I wanted to learn how to create art like this myself. I learned about processing and then p5js and started watching the coding train. However I was moving at that time and got some “writer’s block” after being overwhelmed by the amount of information and possibilities of creating generative art. I was doing just simple experiments with the form primitives of p5js like lines, when my friend campendonkP visited me and saw an early output of colorfall on my screen and said, this looks nice, like a colored waterfall. This was the impetus I needed to get over the hurdle of learning to publish on fxhash. I made it a free mint because I really liked many free mints by greats like punevyr, andronov, John Rising, Fauxjebus and many others.

“Infinity from Simplicity” has tons of variety with the mints. What was the process for creating this work?

In May of 2022 i went to an art exhibition called “Geometrische Opulenz” in the Museum “Haus Konstruktiv” in Zürich. There I saw among other things a few works by Timo Nasseri. And while at the time I was more fascinated by his colorful works, his ‘Order of Everything’ which is 980 similar but different little Steel pieces, must have stuck in my mind. So I was playing around with placing different primitives like circles and rectangles on top of each other in a grid and I was simply stunned by this variety you mentioned. I remember refreshing my browser again and again and sometimes giggling at the cool and always different outputs. Then I added colors to it and just fell in love with the outputs. At first It was just 1 layer but after learning about the create graphics function of p5js I decided to try this and again instantly liked the result of stacking the 3 layers with different sizes on top of each other. I took the name from a Solana Art/PFP Collections I still hold, called ‘Matrica Labs Pixels’. I think that is/was their slogan or something. I liked it but afterwards found it to be too long for comfort.

Do you find you have a plan that you follow or do you like to improvise more when creating generative art?

I am definitely more on the improvisation side. Since I am still so new at this I mostly try to experiment. I have some specific ideas I want to make come alive but no idea how to actually do it yet. If I find something cool or interesting or beautiful in my experimentation I pursue it and see if it would make a good collection. But in the end I never really know if anyone will like it. Except with Colorfall which one person definitely liked. Getting Feedback can be tricky too because I feel with my second drop -oO- I asked for some advice in the discord. Im not saying it was bad advice, but in retrospect I feel I should have stuck with my initial idea. I spent a lot of time trying to make it “better” and it got pretty frustrating. I also try to learn new techniques but find myself stuck with simple stuff because I find I can keep creating more beautiful visuals with just the basics. I like what I heard Raphael de Courville say in one of his teaching videos, “You dont need to be a highly proficient programmer to create beautiful generative art” or something to that tone.

What was the goal with your work “Etude”?

I would say my main goal is the same as always, to create something beautiful. I was Inspired by the works of other generative Artists to create something in a grid like fashion but have it be different enough from my last drop to stand out as its own thing. Also I wanted to see if I could charge a price for the mint. The Response I got was great and gave me a great boost in motivation.

“=DMT=” is your most recent work on FxHash. What gave you the idea for this work and what were some struggles you had while creating it?

The idea grew from one of my earliest p5js experiments with bezier curves. I had drawn a simple flower that I again found to be very simple but also pretty. I was just playing around with this “flower” which was basically static when I tried to make it recursive and play around with colors and transparency. Even some of the earliest outputs reminded me of transcendent things I had seen when in altered states. But the credit for the name again goes to CampendonkP, saying that’s what he would imagine seeing when on DMT.

What is one piece of advice you would want everyone to know?

Everyone is different so I’m not sure I could tell you something that would apply to everyone. For myself I wish I had listened more to the people who told me to take profits when you have them. Diamondhands is a fun idea but only applies to a tiny percentage of all crypto/nfts I think. If you are a (NFT) collector buy what you like without expectations of profit and you will be good either way.

What projects do you have planned coming up?

Probably a final version of Etude, A project using only points, one that only uses transparent forms, one or two with only arcs, a new/old version of ordered Order and one named ordered Chaos.

Why do you create art?

I think I’m obsessed with (creating) pretty visuals. I get so much inspiration from all around me, be it artworks, recently AI and from nature. I love to hike and experience nature in all its forms. Im fascinated by Mushrooms with all their different forms and patterns and colors. Also the mountains are beautiful here in Switzerland and I like the challenge of hiking to the top of a mountain. I also love sunsets, on cloudy days the different colors in the clouds are just amazing. On fxhash I choose high edition count with low price over smaller edition count with a higher price because I like to see all the different outputs this one code can create.

Is there anybody you’d like to shoutout?

Thank you to my friend campendonkP for being instrumental in supporting me and my art. Thank you to XWAVE for getting me on Tezos. Thank you to ciphrd for creating fxhash. Thank you to all the opensourcers, sharers and educators. Also thank you to the nft community and the fxhash team. And thank you for interviewing me.

Anything else?

I feel I’ve said too much already. Just thanks again for what you are doing. I hope WAGMI!

Note for collectors:

Five random collectors of this ARTKL will be selected to win an edition of "Po1nts!" by UpOnlyFan.

Additionally, one random collector of this article will win an exclusive 1/1 "scrap work" by UpOnlyFan.

It will be minted on OBJKT under the "Scrap Works" collection. The winners will be selected on September 16th.