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Fastackl Of Kanon.art - A Web3 Art Community Combining Top-Tier Art Industry Players With NFT Technology
There is an immense potential that Web3 art holds that remains to be tapped. Kanon.art is making waves in the art community as it combines top-tier art industry players with Web3 technology. Today on the Edge of NFT, our Edge team sits down with Fastackl, a representative of this community that is making strides in facilitating the growth of Web3 art by building protocols and products that align the incentives of the artists and collectors. Kanon.art is a pseudonym collective of institutional art design and crypto-native technology professionals dedicated to building enduring practices and protocols for the art of the next 100 years. Plus, learn how yWhales, a community-based firm, is revolutionizing the world of commerce through a metaverse trade show concept. Tune in for all of these and more on the Edge of NFT!
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Fastackl Of Kanon.art - A Web3 Art Community Combining Top-Tier Art Industry Players With NFT Technology
This is Fastackl from Kanon.art. We are a pseudonym collective facilitating the growth of Web3 art. I’m on the Edge of NFT, the show that is showing you what is growing in every season of Web3. Stay tuned.
Stay tuned for this episode to learn how Kanon.art is making waves in the art community, combining top-tier art industry players with Web3 and what our guests would do with a hyper-personalized AI assistant. Finally, how yWhales, a community-based firm, is revolutionizing the world of commerce through a Metaverse trade show concept called Y1.
Before we go, don’t forget that our Outer Edge LA event returned to Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. Did you know you can catch up on all the discussions, presentations and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and registering with only your email address? You will have access to over 60 captivating conversations and performances. Binge watchers are welcome. Netflix, watch out. See you inside.
This episode features Fastackl from Kanon.art, a platform that builds protocols and products that align the incentives of the artists and collectors. Kanon is a pseudonym collective of institutional art, design and crypto-native technology professionals dedicated to building enduring practices and protocols for the art of the next 100 years. Fast, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. I’m very excited to be here. It is great to be here with all of you.
For the readers, we did mention that we are pseudonymous. Fast is joining us. You can check him out on YouTube as a small green dinosaur in a cool desert background.
A levitating dinosaur, at that. For those that are driving or working out, please do not endanger yourself. Just visualize this.
I get jiggly when I get excited.
Kanon.art** is an artist collective that utilizes blockchain tech in the Web3 community. Maybe you can tell us about the project and when you became a part of it.**
In February 2021, I had been collecting for maybe about 3 or 4 months before that. Around December 2020, I collected Deadmau5’s first NFT. I started getting into NFTs. I also had a friend who unfortunately couldn’t join us. He used to work for one of the largest art institutions in the world. Both of us had been doing degen stuff for five years before that.
We both started getting into NFTs. We got together. We were like, “We should do something.” It all came together within the space of three weeks. It was an incredible whirlwind but we thought, “We should get a collection together of NFTs.” Through Alexis’s network, you can get access to some of the most incredible artists in the traditional world.
I had started to build a network in the crypto digital native world. We are like, “Let’s put together a collection.” He said, “My institution might be interested.” If they were interested, we were like, “The biggest institution in the world is going to launch a collection.” We sat down with them. They said, “This is awesome. We want to do this. How does August sound like a launch date?” We are like, “What are you talking about? We need to launch in two weeks.”
We walked out of there. We were like, “I don’t know about this. Maybe we should do this ourselves. We know the people, artists and curators. Fuck it, we got what we need. Let’s do it.” We did it. We launched the K21 Collection. We have included twenty artists. The other thing is Elon Musk posted that had this banner. It said, “We don’t do this because it is easy. We do this because we thought it was going to be easy.”
We thought we were going to get this thing done. We launched it in three weeks. We are going to get this thing done in two months. Several years down the line, we started realizing all the opportunities that were there. We are almost done with twenty artworks. We are going to do 21. Cai Gou-Chang’s artwork is number twenty. It is one of the most resource-intensive to pull off.
In Canada, we are working with artists both in the crypto-native space and also in the traditional space. We are picky about the artists that we work with. They have some vision that we think needs to be brought in and we help them make that a reality. In terms of Canada, we are like a fight club because I’m not from a curatorial side. I can say these things. The curators would be horrified that I say it was like a fight club.
I don’t know if you remember that scene where people are walking around in their normal jobs. The number one rule is you don’t talk about fight club. People recognize each other because they got marks or black eyes. People are trying to figure out where these curators are and who they are in actual real life. They are walking around there with two lives with us at Kanon, doing the stuff that they can’t do in their traditional personas and institutions. At the same time, they are incredibly experienced in real life.
There is so much that we could unpack there. What it sends out to me is a couple of things. One is using the drop-in four-letter bombs feels normal because I came from VeeCon, where Gary Vee was dropping those with no tomorrow. I also interviewed Nate Alex, AKA Founder of ChainFaces, over there. It feels like there is a little bit of that in what you are saying here. For those that don’t know ChainFaces, shame on you. It was a bit of a fight club mystique to that project where there is a battle royale. You got these scars on your NFT. Your NFTs could die if you lost a fight.
I appreciate the traditional roots of what you are building there in terms of getting to our cardinal instincts. That is the essence of degen. You guys are building some cool stuff. One of those things is Cai Gou-Qiang and the EET Oracle Project. Those are both on your roadmap. I would love to hear a little bit more about them because they converged with some of our favorite topics, like AI.
The artist’s name is Cai Gou-Chang. I’m not from an art background. My background is in software and finance. I fell into this through doing degen stuff on both DeFi and NFT sides. I can say this because I’m not from this traditional world. He is probably one of the top five living artists in the world at the moment. He started to hit his stride in the ‘90s. He was the visual director for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. That is a massive event. What he is most famous for is gunpowder. He will use gunpowder both on canvas. He will also use gunpowder in these massive in-person events. Josh, would it be okay to show a video? I could talk about it to get a sense of the scale.
Web3 Art: Psycho Chang is most famous for gunpowder. He’ll use gunpowder both on canvas and absolutely massive in-person events.
You gave us the link. Let’s pull it up here. What were you going to say, Josh?
My girlfriend has purchased a handful of NFTs in her life, one being Tom Brady. For me, some other special projects. One was this gentleman’s fireworks project, which is one of her favorites. This fireworks project that he did is incredible. It is one of the first dynamic NFT projects, to my knowledge.
His girlfriend approved. Let’s check this out.
“Contemporary artists are playing on the big stage. I remember hearing about the explosion events and thinking that guy nailed it.”
“This combination of space and scale and invention, I saw it. It was clear to me that side arrived. That was the moment.”
“To say that the Chinese artist, Cai Gou-Qiang, has exploded on the contemporary art scene is no exaggeration.”
“He is turning the idea of what art is on his head.”
“As far as him, how do you challenge yourself?”
“Early work has begun on the largest single installation ever commission.”
“His work does have a strong subtext. He is trying to do art with integrity.”
For the audience, we didn’t preface it too much but that was a Netflix promotional video for Sky Ladder, the official trailer there, which I don’t know that they would necessarily mind us sharing. A lot of it is in a different language. It might not come across perfectly but what we can do is recap the video. It is inspiring on a highly professional level in terms of artistry, what an artist can achieve and what they can aim for. He is impressing a lot of people with what he aims to achieve and communicate through his art.
The scale of these things is immense and the amount of resources that go and execution that is required to pull these things off. For this Sky Ladder, they don’t show it in the document because they are trying to tease you into going and seeing the documentary, which I would highly recommend people do. It is mind-blowing.
If you look up Sky Ladder on the internet, you will see an image. It is a ladder of fire that goes up 500 meters into the sky. It is massive. He had this dream for 22 or 23 years to do it. He has four failed attempts. The documentary covers that arduous journey. All the while, he’s building up this incredible career for 23 years. There was one thing he did in 2016 that was the one thing he was obsessed with. The amount of energy and drive that Cai has is insane. In person, he is a lovely guy with an incredible sense of humor. He is warm. He doesn’t speak English. There is always somebody translating for you. One of the most exciting things is working directly with him to create EET.
Breaking a lot of boundaries and working with a pioneer has been an innovator his entire career. It is a special collaboration. To put a pin in it for our readers, what we are talking about with EET is an AI augment fortune telling on the blockchain featuring the first ever on-chain generated GIFs. This is quite special. I’m curious. Why did you choose to work with an AI oracle to produce this?
This was Cai’s vision. I just started working on this but the Kanon team had been working with Cai for a while. Throughout his work, Cai developed a personal philosophy about unseen forces around us. This is something that took me a lot of time. I used to be an M&A banker and software product developer. This took me a while to wrap my head around it. Cai has a philosophy that he has developed throughout his life about how to commune or interact with the unseen world. There are these unseen forces around us. It is different from the materialist view that we have in the West. He deeply believes in the curative and the guiding power of the unseen world.
Throughout his work, whether it is the fireworks events or gunpowder paintings, he is always trying to get audiences to experience that connection, especially for people in the West like us. It can be quite an alien thing. I’m reasonably skeptical about these things. The beauty of the artworks of Cai Gou-Qiang is you can go to one of these explosion events.
I don’t care how skeptical you are, whether you are a scientist or spiritual. If you are able to sit through one of these explosion events without feeling something, you might be an AI. You might not be human. You are going to be moved and feel something no matter how hard-nosed you think you might be. I’m speaking from a layman’s perspective. What I find the most amazing about Cai’s work is his personality.
EET is Cai’s third or fourth NFT project and I’m excited. Josh, I heard your partner was into Cai’s previous work. He doesn’t need Web3. The guy is operating at the top level. He saw potential in Web3 to be able to reach people in a way that no other medium can and to be able to reach millions of people, potentially. He is very excited about that. What he gave us was a challenge. He said, “How can we heal the world with art?” That was his vision at the time.
People are very unfamiliar with practices that go back 10,000 years. People in China, India or Japan are more familiar with this concept of being able to interact with the unseen world using oracles. These are situations where some question might be weighing on you that is causing a rupture in you. It might be, “Should we launch the next meme and shitcoin? Should I leave my job? What is going to happen if I marry this person?” These kinds of things that is important that we have logic and reason to be able to grapple with some of these things but it is also not sufficient. That is well understood, particularly in the East, that logic and reason are not sufficient and interact with forces beyond our perception.
You don’t have to believe that there are forces but if you act as if there are. The feedback that you can get from some of these systems that date back 10,000 years, in the case of EET, is an evolution of an old oracle bringing in blockchain and AI. That is where Cai saw the potential to help people heal when they are trying to deal with uncertainty. I will pause there because there are a lot of concepts in there.
What I’m gathering in summary with everything that we were talking about is there are elements of rationality and creativity or generativity in some way. That is at play. We see that throughout Web3, life in general and ancient philosophical concepts like the Ying Yang or Tao Te Ching. These things are useful and I love that you pointed out that rationality is something that we need to utilize and can’t ignore. The whole trusting your gut on questions that maybe require some statistical analysis is not always the right answer.
One of my favorites is Brian Eno, the famous musician and recording engineer, who had these oblique strategy cards. If you were stuck in the recording studio or life in general with a bunch of cards, you could flip one over and say something like, “Make it backward. Take it twice as fast.” You could do whatever you want with it. It is to stimulate creativity.
Thinking outside of the box is where this is all leading. We are always in need of something. Einstein said, “Doing the same thing over and over again can be insanity. If it is not working right, you need to find something new.” How does this all connect with making it a non-chain GIF? How did this all lead to becoming a GIF-centered project yet?
We’re always in need of something new. Click To Tweet
When we started, we started developing this idea, “We can help people by creating an oracle.” We are building on top of some old traditions. There’s this oracle called the I Ching. People don’t know because it emerges from pre-history. It is a beautiful, super concise system. It sees life as a wave. It oscillates between extremes. What the I Ching does is it tells you where in that wave it is. That seems weird.
Think of the Elliott wave or business cycles. Even in the West, wave is intuitive. When you are at one extreme or the top of the cycle, you are going to swing back to the other side of the cycle. You are going to need to revert. There is an element of that in it. The system is incredibly elegant. There are no words. It is like these 6 lines that get generated into 64 combinations. It leaps back to the 1600s or 1700s when he wrote his paper on binary arithmetic on which we base all our computations. He mentions in his seminal paper the I Ching. Mathematically and artistically, it is a beautiful system.
We saw opportunities to evolve. People have been adding layers to that system for 10,000 years. We saw an opportunity to go, “It is not repackaging the I Ching because it turned out to be quite different.” We are being inspired by this old and sacred system. We want to bring it into Web3 and borrow elements from it that we think are going to resonate well in Web3. We are going to need some medium to express the artistic message of this and what Cai wants to express artistically. When you come to an oracle, you ask a question and you are going to get an answer. The answer that you get back is going to be a non-chain and beautiful GIF.
What are the alternatives to doing that? Could we do an SVG? I don’t know if I’m getting a little bit deep into the weeds here but normally when you see chain artwork, it is an SVG. This is effectively like an HTML that you can tell, “Draw me a rectangle here. Draw me a line here. Make it this color to make a human-readable text.”
SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphic, which means you could make it into a movie poster, a billboard on the side of the road or a poster stamp. It is going to still have the same integrity as the image.
If you go onto the EET website, you will be able to see what we are able to generate with GIFs. You will see haziness and animation. There are emotions, ideas and feelings that you can communicate with the GIF that is not possible to do with an SVG. One of the big reasons that they mentioned as we were developing this is that an SVG is a Scalable Vector Graphic.
When you expand it, you don’t lose any of the resolution because it is not an image. It is instructions for a machine to draw a particular image. Whereas the GIF itself, the GIF is dated back to the early days of the internet. It was the first widely adopted image animation format back in 1996. If you want to have an animation, it has to be a GIF.
It is not human-readable. It is compressed. You need a machine to read it. It is not going to scale when you expand it. When you expand it, you get these interesting properties like haziness. It is incredibly difficult to do on-chain. It is not something that you can whip up quickly. It took a lot of techs to figure out which we are going to open source to figure out how to do that on-chain.
That combination of the expressiveness of the medium, and this is the first time that this has ever been done, told us, “This is what we need.” Something that Cai and we feel momentum is putting this new oracle out that needs a medium that lives up the same as gunpowder if you are going to write in the sky with gunpowder. If you are going to create a new oracle, create a new medium for it, release the medium to the world and showcase what you can do with this new medium.
You mentioned, “Go to the EET website.” I have that as EET.et. Is that correct? Is that where you would send people?
Yes, that is right.
There is more to unpack here. It is the answer to every question when we talk to you about this project because you are using eDAO to gamify ownership of the art in how the revenue goes. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect of the project?
In its most ambitious expression, Cai is serious that he wants to heal the world with art. If you take that seriously, that means reaching millions of people over the next X years. If you are going to reach millions of people, you are going to need infrastructure. If you think of ENS, they mentioned two million names. They have raised $40 million worth of capital. I might be getting the exact number wrong but in that order, they got 30 or 40 people working on it. It is the same thing with Dapper Labs and CryptoKitties. These things that are big in scale require big infrastructure. Even if it is in a DAO, it is centralized. That was the initial motivation.
Do not try this at home.
Don’t look for the matza.
What does that mean?
There is a word for that in some languages.
That space.
Yes.
He is doing the happy dance that was promised.
There are crystals.
That is what it was watching all this stuff.
You can catch Josh and me on your show.
Thanks.
Important Links
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Jay Steinback – LinkedIn
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Siva Avvaru – LinkedIn
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Show - yWhales Podcast
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Spotify – Edge of NFT
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iTunes – Edge of NFT