David speaks with Sterling Crispin, a conceptual artist and software engineer known for his work in smart contracts, generative art, machine intelligence, and techno-sculpture. His creations have been showcased in prominent galleries and museums, including False Flag. Sterling's work has also garnered attention in esteemed publications such as the Denver Post, The Art Newspaper, and Art in America.
They talked about:
💻 The impact of technology on artistic expression
🖌️ How art became a matter of choice
🤖 The artist’s role in the age of AI art
💰 What makes art valuable?
✨ The importance of conceptual art
🔮 The future of artistic expression
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📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[02:03] How art school led Sterling back to programming
[05:18] The impact of family and creative freedom
[08:27] What is art today?
[10:16] Can AI make real art?
[12:14] How Duchamp challenged what we call art
[14:31] How do we decide what art is?
[18:54] Cultural perspectives on art and creativity
[21:22] Conceptual art is more than just a canvas
[24:52] Creativity in the age of algorithms
[26:13] Art is a financial asset
[31:07] How technology reflects the world around us
[34:16] The futuristic innovations we expected but never got
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Ray Kurzweil | https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/
James Milmoe | http://www.jamesomilmoe.com/
Carnegie International | https://carnegieart.org/art/carnegie-international/
Andy Warhol | https://www.warhol.org/
Banksy | http://banksy.co.uk/
Pablo Picasso | https://www.pablopicasso.org/
Art Isn’t the Output | https://theknowledge.io/art-isnt-the-output-why-artists-shouldnt-fear-ai/
Midjourney | https://www.midjourney.com/
Marcel Duchamp | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp
Maurizio Cattelan | https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2
Willem de Kooning | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_de_Kooning
Yoko Ono | http://www.imaginepeace.com/
Painting for the Wind | https://www.moma.org/collection/works/289486
Long-Form Generative Art | https://www.tylerxhobbs.com/words/the-rise-of-long-form-generative-art
Vincent van Gogh | https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/art/vincent-van-gogh
Andy Warhol Foundation | https://warholfoundation.org/about/
Art Basel | https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach?lang=en
Richard Dawkins | https://richarddawkins.net/
Future Tense | https://www.sterlingcrispin.com/future_tense.html
Flourish | https://www.sterlingcrispin.com/flourish.html
Point Break | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102685/
Marty McFly | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_McFly
👤 Connect with Sterling:
Twitter: https://x.com/sterlingcrispin
Website: https://www.sterlingcrispin.com/
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
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📜 Full transcript:
Sterling Crispin: The pushback against generative art, if you hate something, it's probably a good time to look deeper at it and try to understand why and see if you're missing something and see if there's like opportunities there for you to like expand your horizons. it's a tough thing to do and I totally understand why people are just like, oh, nope. Too easy not art. Next, you know.
David Elikwu: This week I'm speaking with Sterling Crispin. Sterling and I had a really incredible conversation. This is probably one of my favorite conversations which was essentially at the intersection of art and technology, which is where Sterling has spent the bulk of his career.
So we talked about his background getting post graduate degrees, both on the engineering side and on the artistic side, and his journey both as an artist and as an engineer. So I think an accurate framing of the conversation we had which is essentially about the technology that we use to create art and to build things in the world, and how the act of using that technology can change us as humans.
So we started the conversation talking about art and how the medium of creating art has changed over time. We talked about the evolution of photography, the evolution of art and painting, and how things like generative art are changing the art scene and how NFTs have changed the way that artists interact with their audience and interact with the financial aspect of being a successful creator.
But we touched on so many things that you're definitely gonna come away with a strong idea of the many possibilities that lie ahead and a lot of the things that we'll need to think about as we continue to innovate and collaborate on new and inspiring technologies.
You can get the full show notes, the transcript, and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io. And you can find Starling on Twitter @sterlingcrispin and check out his project Flourish, which will link to in the podcast show notes or the description if you're watching this on YouTube.
If you love this episode, please do share it with a friend, and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts, because it helps us tremendously to reach other people just like you.
David Elikwu: So I noticed that you have both a masters in finance, so you have MFA, but then you also have the masters in multimedia engineering. So I guess it's kind of two very different sides.
I know like I've heard you talking a little bit about your background. You grew up in Hawaii and I think you spent some time in different places in the US as well. I would love to know what were the data points that you saw that led you on this journey?
Because what I'm specifically interested in is, I think you mentioned, okay, you started learning to code quite early as a teenager, and so there's some of these building blocks that might have taken you directly down, like let's say the engineering route, but then you still ended up doing the the MFA. So how did that come about?
Sterling Crispin: Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I've always, you know, been really creative and yeah, spent a lot of time on the computer as a young kid and yeah, got into programming and stuff, but at the time, you know, when they were teaching computer science to high school students in the early two thousands, it was like very not creative and not fully expansive as to like, everything that's possible with code these days.
So it just seemed like a strange career route and I was like, I wanna do something that's really creative. And so, yeah, I went to art school and, you know, really enjoyed that experience and just thinking like conceptually and, you know, like making art with ideas and being super experimental. It was a painting, a drawing degree, but I did like very out there kind of stuff you know, working with every medium, turning in like sculptures welded out of metal sculptures made of little cakes from gas stations.
I did a artwork once. We had this teacher that was giving us crazy assignments. Like, tomorrow morning, you have to wake up and create an artwork on the way to class. You can't start making the artwork now. You have to only, you have to come up with something as you're coming to class. I was like, oh, this is awesome. There are all these dandelions in the field that are putting their seeds out. I'm gonna collect up all these dandelions and blow them and have them go across the wind and it's gonna be great. But it started raining and so there was nothing I could do. I ended up like microwaving an ice cream sandwich and pouring it into a shoe and passing that around the class. It was like really, really bizarre artwork that I was making at the time. But it really helped me, like think non-linearly and like sort of allowing my creativity to go in a lot of different places.
And yeah, I ended up reading all of Ray Kurzweil's books around the same time thinking about the singularity. You know, like the computer in all of our pockets in the shape of a phone is like a hundred million times more capable in the computers that took astronauts to the moon, right? And that exponential growth of technology is setting us on a path where a thousand dollars computer in 2045 is gonna be equivalent to like every human brain on the planet combined. And it's like, what happens to society at that point? A really mind blowing thing and he lays out a really strong argument for it. So at the time I was like, this is what I want to be doing with my life. I need to go back to school and really get serious about programming and computer science and stuff and that, I mean, Ray Kurzweil's really set me on that journey.
David Elikwu: To step back a bit very quickly, the assignment that you mentioned, was this in high school or was this when you were doing the MFA?
Sterling Crispin: That was my BFA. That was my BFA. It was, it was a very like experimental, small kind of private art school.
David Elikwu: Yeah, that's exactly what I was gonna ask about because I can't imagine that, that type of assignment in a lot of other places.
What I would also love to know is, I dunno the extent to which you are happy talking about I guess your like family background. But I'd love to know if your creativity was something that was encouraged because even the project that you decided to go with is very out of the box. I don't think it's, you know, something that anyone might typically think of immediately as either as their first thought to submit, but I think also more specifically, in terms of like how you were conceptualizing art at that time. And I think this is another thing where very often people go to school and what you get taught is art is very, not rudimentary, but very traditional, right? You see people drawing with graphite, you see people painting on canvases. It's, you know, this is art. These are the great masters of the past, and here is what you're supposed to be doing. And there's not always a lot of room to experiment and think non-linearly about what forms art could possibly take.
So I'd love to know maybe what maybe took you in that direction as well.
Sterling Crispin: Yeah that's a good question actually. My grandfather was a really prolific photographer. His name was Jim Milmoe, and he was the one that suggested that I apply to that school. And, you know, he was taking photographs as artworks at a time when photography was like not considered an artwork. It was like you take photographs of artwork and their documentation and like photography isn't artwork, you know, so he was doing really creative things with it. And slowly over his lifetime it became recognized as a full on art form. But I think my mom being raised by a prolific photographer showed her a lot about art. She was taking us to art museums. And you know, I remember being a teenager and seeing the Carnegie International Show in Pittsburgh, which is like a big biennial kind of show showing like the most radical artworks all over the world. And it was like, not exactly traditional work, really experimental out there stuff.
And I mean, it took me a while, you know, as a person growing up, I remember even thinking about my grandpa's photography. Like, oh, photography's so easy. You just point the camera and click and like these beautiful images come out and like, no big deal. And then I took this black and white photography course where we had to, you know, wind all of our film and develop it all in the dark room. And I was like, this is actually really, really, really hard. I think going through that process by hand helps you develop that appreciation of different medium. And then also, you know, just being exposed to art history in general. Like, I feel like most people, they kind of have a rough understanding of art history, but kind of like it fades out right around impressionism and then they might know like, oh yeah, there's Warhol and Banksy and there's a couple of other people in the last 120 years.
I think people's like aversion to really experimental stuff just comes from like a lack of context on what else has been going on in art history.
David Elikwu: You mentioned so many interesting things. There's so many different ways I can take things from here, but I'd love to know maybe how you might define art specifically because just the last part of what you were mentioning.
First of all, that is very similar to part of my, my art history knowledge. But I know it's the same for a lot of people, but I think more specifically, one of the paradoxes that I find very funny that comes up a lot is that people always assume that Picasso is super old. And because most of the art that you are taught is from people that lived a very long time ago. And so actually even when people are hearing about artists that are relatively contemporary, they almost put them directly in the box of here are the old masters, and it just must have been at some vague time in the past. So if it's painted, it's automatically old, and if it is something strange, then maybe it's contemporary or maybe it's brand new. And there is, like you say, this gap in between where people don't really know what people were doing or how art transformed? So I'd love to know maybe your thoughts on, I guess, how to conceptualize art?
And specifically also because this is the other part that you touched on, where there's this idea that using photography, when you take a photo, it might seem easy now relative to, okay, you take the photography on this, on a film camera, you're having to develop the film in the dark room. You're having to do all of this work. And I was actually writing something today that I posted actually, which is just this idea about the connection between effort and output. And how some of that is changing now that we have like generative arts that people are just going on Midjourney and they type in a prompt and create some artwork and it's, what is the extent to which you could call this art that you have made in the same sense when there was none of the effort that is connected to it.
And yeah, so I know I've just thrown a lot of different thoughts at you, but I'd love to know how you would respond to that.
Sterling Crispin: Working from the last point backward. I think the connection between photography and generative AI is super interesting, actually. If you think about a photographer walking around New York City looking for photographs to take, right? Like they didn't create the city, they didn't create all the people, they didn't create the culture, they didn't create the fact that that person was busy today and they're running late and they dropped some paperwork and you saw you were standing at that corner at the right time and like you decided right there, like, oh, this is art. You know, I'm taking this picture.
And like someone could walk to that exact same intersection, point the camera in the same place, decide that that framing is also their photograph and take the same photograph, right? And at the end of the day, photography is like largely an act of starting with the world and like doing a curatorial process of saying like, okay, this moment is artistic choice I'm making, right?
And I think generative AI is really similar in a way that like you have this sort of open conceptual landscape of things you could depict and the act of you exploring that space and picking something that you are deciding is this artwork and is this final image is that creative act.
So to me it's just obviously an art form, even though I totally understand, like, if you went to school specifically for, let's say, illustration and like your career has been like essentially being prompted by clients and then using your imagination and the craft that you've honed to illustrate images and give them back to people. Like, this is a very threatening new tool, but like the history of civilization is the history of automating human labor and making things easier, and like changing the nature of work and like shifting what it is that people do. So I totally empathize with those people, but at the same time, that's kind of how it goes. And like, you know, I write a lot of code and the same thing's happening to coding so it's, it's interesting.
Going earlier about your point about what art is and how I define it? You know, Marcel Duchamp did a really interesting piece where, you know, essentially to get your work seen by the public, there was this institution that was like, we are the deciders of what art is and isn't. And you submit your work to the salon and you're either in the show or you're not in the show. And if you're rejected, like you're not an artist. And like, even impressions at the time, the impressionist painters, they were like totally rejected. They're like, you're making horrible paintings. Like these, these look terrible. This is like a violence on nature. We hate your work, you know? There was a pushback against that. And, you know, artists started organizing their own shows that were supposed to be more inclusive. And it's like, hey, if you've got art and you wanna show it, submit it to us. This isn't the salon.
And Duchamp or arguably, there's some like, argument in art history, there was actually a woman, and not Duchamp, I like can't remember the entire history behind it, but someone submitted this toilet, a urinal that was like signed as an artwork, right? And it was a big controversy at the time, and they had like a curtain around it like, oh my God like, pull the curtain back and see the controversial art that's in this show. And that was in like 1905 or something. And since then it's kind of like, blown up the container of what could be art. And really if someone decides that something is an artwork and puts it into an a context of art than it is art. And I know that that like frustrates some people and they're like, oh, that's not a definition anymore. If anything can be art, then nothing's art. And it's like, this is how it is. Not everything is art, but it if you sit down and consciously choose like, okay, this is an artwork. Then we can sit down and talk about, we can talk about it. You know?
And I think that the question like, is this art? Is sort of a dead end question. Like, you just end up with like a yes or no answer and then you move on, right? But if you're like, who made this? Why did they make it? Like, what did they intend behind this? What are the cultural forces that must have been around them that led them to make this? Is this political, is this, there's so many other questions you get asked to really dig into what it is that you're looking at, try to understand it.
And I feel like, just letting go of the pressure of is this art or not? It's like, it kind of doesn't matter, you know? It's like
David Elikwu: It's funny. So the part you just touched on is very similar to the point that I was making, but I wonder if I expanded my point if you would then disagree with me, cause I'm not sure if you would. So the view that I was taking, and I think in line with what we were just discussing, right? I think there's two paradigms by which people have been conceptualizing art. There's the effort paradigm, like how much effort did this take? How much work did you have to do to get to the end product? And then the other paradigm is judgment. Like, what was your intention? How much thought actually went into the creation of this?
And so sometimes when something looks like low judgment, low effort, people will say, oh, it's not art. You just put a toilet there. You just threw some brush strokes at the wall. You didn't think about it deeply and it didn't take you that, that much effort to do so, this is not art.
But I think what is really interesting about the moment that we are getting into is, now that you can create art without the same amount of effort in the same way that before, photography used to primarily be about effort, you had to go somewhere physically, you had to set up a huge piece of machinery. At first, you know, you've got your pinhole camera, so it's a whole setup. You have the light, you have all sorts of stuff. But then even going after that, when you're developing film, that takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of patience, it takes a lot of skill. So you're still very high on the effort paradigm. And then when you move from there to mirrorless cameras, okay, so it's not the same amount of effort. You maybe do spend some effort doing like, post-processing and learning Photoshop, et cetera, but you can at least take the photo. And so now it's a lot more about judgment, I would say, at least in how people judge photography as art. And so it's like, okay, you're using the world as your canvas, but what were you trying to create? What was the judgment here? What were you trying to say with this photo that you took? And there's so many choices that go into that. There is, what lens did you choose? Is it wide angle? Is it narrow? And all of these tiny little creative decisions are what give you the end product of something that you would call art.
I think the point is that at least for now, the end product is still a product of judgment. And so when you judge the art, you are judging the thought process of the artist. And so I guess the way that that paradigm changes now that you can go on Midjourney and type a prompt and just create something from scratch is that we are still relatively still in the low effort side where the effort is still there in terms of, okay, you have to learn to prompt and you have to learn to be creative within those constraints. But the barrier is very low, so anyone can just learn to type a few things from a Twitter thread and create something that looks wow, amazing. So you get the output without necessarily a lot of the same effort.
But then on the other side, I'm wondering what you think of the judgment side of the paradigm where I do think there's an extent to which, you know, creators will always think creatively within constraints. And so artists will always push the boundaries of what it is possible to create. What someone could do with a simple prompt might not be the same as someone that spent a lot of time with prompt engineering and trying to figure out, okay, I can use all these different phrases, all these different wording and get something really dialed in in a different way.
But I think maybe the part that I find interesting is there's still an extent to which you don't get to choose everything, you get to choose when you are done with generating. Like you could keep generating, but you don't necessarily get to choose everything that goes into the output. And so there is an extent to which people could judge or say that, you know, you are not creating art so much as like shaping it. It's almost like, a lot of the old masters might have had like an apprentice. You are more like the apprentice, watching the master do work and giving feedback and commentary on the extent to which it's done as opposed to the one holding the brush.
Sterling Crispin: Yeah, I think those are interesting points. I mean, I still think it's almost like photography in a way. It's like I chose that this moment is my artwork, and especially in an iPhone now, it's like I just pull my this thing outta my pocket, hit go. I don't have to worry about exposure or anything. I can crop it after the fact, you know?
Yeah, I didn't create the world or New York City, but I could just pop my phone outta my pocket and make an artwork. But yeah, like effort and judgment and stuff, those are all totally good points. And I guess I have like some empathy for just the fact that other people have different value systems. You know, like I have two art degrees and I spent a lot of time in that world. And like the contemporary art world has like a very specific set of like the things that they value and things that they think are, like the real values and how you're supposed to understand art. And then everyone else's understanding of art is like some sub form of artwork that normal people like or something. And I, I just try to have like empathy that it's all human creativity and nothing's really, I mean, it's good to judge things and try to understand them, but I just try not to like, come at it from a point that things are in like inherently bad because they don't come from some contemporary art world value system or something, which I think some people get caught up on, or vice versa, like the public has their own value system and they see contemporary artwork. They see Maurizio Cattelan duct taping a banana to a wall and lose their mind. Like, this is just vile non-art artwork, right? So it kind of goes both ways.
But I had a intense experience with Willem De Kooning's work when I first saw it. I was just like, this is grotesque. Like these paintings of these women that this guy is making, like this is horrible. And my mentor at the time was like, you should go get like a book of all of De Kooning's work and just look through all of it and like spend a couple days with it. He's still not my favorite artist, but like from an initial judgment, an initial knee-jerk reaction. Like, I understand the things that he was trying to say with his paintings and like, I understand the aesthetic and like the color choices he was making, even though he is still not my favorite artist. Like, I kind of get that. And I feel like the pushback against generative art, if you hate something, it's probably a good time to look deeper at it and try to understand why and see if you're missing something and see if there's like opportunities there for you to like expand your horizons. But it's a, it's a tough thing to do and I totally understand why people are just like, oh, nope. Too easy not art. Next, you know.
David Elikwu: I'd love if you could explain, you would describe yourself, I think, as a conceptual artist, if you could explain like what conceptual art is, and maybe also a definition for generative art, because I think even for me, I might be using it in the wrong context sometimes I think there's some context where people say generative art to describe that there's the type of art where you can put in some code and it's using like some mathematical computation to create art versus, you know, you click a button and something happens and you don't know what happened.
Sterling Crispin: Totally. So, for me, conceptual art is like art that primarily the focus of the art might be the idea behind it. Whether that's super ephemeral, like some of Yoko Ono's work, like she has this piece called Painting for the Wind, and I think it's a few sentences that go, like, hold a bag of seeds and cut it open and watch them fall through the wind. That's a painting for the wind. She has this whole book of kind of like poems that are conceptual artworks you just read and like think about. And that's the artwork, right? So there's kind of that historical context of conceptual art.
But for me, in the way that I approach it, it's like I just let my curiosity guide me to whatever makes the most sense and that kind of like form and content relationship where you have an idea and you're like, okay, what form most could reflect that content and that concept and like, where does that take me? And I work across like a lot of different mediums and I don't necessarily have like one aesthetic in my body of work that I'm always presenting. It's like a kind of a spiral of interests and aesthetics that kind of like come and go and revisit themselves.
Yeah, as far as generative art goes, it is like a very large container of different types of artwork, right? It could be that you're using, you know, cinema 4D or Blender or some 3d rendering engine and using someone else's algorithm that some computer scientist wrote and clicking a few buttons and watching things happen. Or you could be starting with a total blank slate and writing all of your own code and kind of, carefully crafting every part of an equation to make something come out of it.
And a lot of that type of generative artists been interesting to see over time. People often write a program to make art. Some images come out of it, they might save them, they might change the program. Some different images come out and in three weeks you might not even be able to get back to how it used to be. And after the course of a month, you might just say, oh, this one sequence of six images that came out of this program, these six images are the artwork. And the program was just a tool for me to get there. And there's a whole genre called long form generative art that's kind of come out of the blockchain space where you write a program and transactions are used as a random seed for your algorithm to produce artwork. And so everything that the code produces is like a new instantiation of that artwork. So each piece is an artwork, but then as a collection, you're kind of seeing everything the algorithm does as an artwork and there's no curation after the fact. So once you create, as things are getting generated, you can't go, oh, these two look terrible. I'm taking them out of the collection. It's just like you have to get the program to a point where everything it produces is interesting. And that really is like its own sub genre of work that's very specific. And the way that you approach creating that work is like really, really different.
And that's been a super interesting journey for me to just like, engage with this new context that like really changes what the work is and how it's made.
David Elikwu: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting aspect that you mentioned as well, and I can't really think of an analog to prior times where, art can still have this social element and also an element where you are working with something that is not out of your control, but it is, I guess, in addition to you or beyond you in a sense that there are some contexts where you can code and create some kind of output.
But I can't really think of, apart from maybe like two painters working on a single painting, but even like with photography, which we use as an analogy, you're still very much in control over the output. There's not much that could maybe surprise you in how something comes out unless there was a mistake. Whereas with generative art and working with computers now almost like partners, it is very interesting to see how that is pushing the boundary of what we can create and what we can expect, and the ways that we can interact one with each other, and then also with computers as an intermediary as well.
Sterling Crispin: Yeah, totally. I think there's so many ways to think about it. Like, oh, this program is kind of like my studio assistant. Or it's almost like the chaos that abstract painting might invite where you kind of, you sort of know what you're doing and then something else happens and you kind of have to like roll with it.
So yeah, it's a, it's a super interesting super interesting medium for sure.
David Elikwu: I know that we've been talking about art for a lot and, and there's a lot of other things I'd love to discuss, but one more question that I had on this, which I thought would be quite interesting, just cause you mentioned NFTs. I'm interesting what you think about the relationship between artists and money and financing.
And I think, you know, throughout history we've seen that evolve as well where you have some of the people that we now say are, oh my gosh, this is one of the greatest artists to ever live. But during their lifetime they could hardly sell a single painting. I think even Van Gogh could barely sold any of his paintings while he was alive. He did over 900 paintings. First of all, he doesn't have 900 famous paintings, he has a handful. And out of that handful they all sold after he wasn't here. And now in retrospect we say, wow, what a great artist. And so it's a really, that by itself is a, is a very interesting paradigm I guess.
But then also now that you have NFTs, there is this financialization aspect which is far more immediate I think, unless let's say you are doing commissioned work for, something where a commission is immediate and, and it's done prior. I think it's very interesting that now you are seeing a shift to a process where there's almost not necessarily an expectation the art will be sold, but the financialization aspect is a lot much closer connected to the creation of the art.
So I'd love to know what your thoughts on that and how that might change, if at all, people's creative process in a sense.
Sterling Crispin: Yeah, definitely all interesting things to think about. I mean, for me, it's been really interesting because, coming from kind of the contemporary art world and the art fair scene and the art exhibit scene, I've been making digital art for a long time and there just hasn't been a market for digital art, right? It's like I've had to take the digital art that I'm making in like programs that I'm writing and try to turn them into like, "Discreet fine art objects" I call them. Just these like singular things that you could like, point to and say like, okay, this is a unit of art that I can buy and, you know, put in my collection or bring home or whatnot.
So, there were people buying art on USB sticks, but like, pretty much nobody, right? So the introduction of NFTs, I think has been really awesome to be able to create a market for that. And they operate a lot like a certificate of authenticity would like, a Warhol can be perfectly replicated. So the fact that you have a thing from the Warhol Foundation saying it's the real Warhol is what's valuable. And similarly, you know, NFTs operate in the same way and they do create this 24/7 global unmediated market, right? Which I think is super exciting.
There's definitely huge new ways that that market has evolved. You know, people sort of like playing to the audience and creating things that they think are gonna sell well to collectors. There's tons of people just gambling and other people making things for them to gamble on. So that's like another part of that market happening. But the financialization of art has been like a huge part of art for a really long time, right?
A lot of huge collectors buying artwork at art fairs and stuff and buying Van Goghs and whatnot, they might have hundreds of millions of dollars and they might say like, okay, 10% of my portfolio is gonna be in wine and 10% of my portfolio is gonna be in art, and I'm just gonna do these like more speculative high risks, strange things of my portfolio. Cause I already have money in real estate and stocks and like, I'm treating art like a financial asset anyway, there's tons of that. I don't know, like $5 billion worth of money exchanges hands at Art Basel, Miami in, you know, a three day time period. So the financialization and playing to the audience and figuring out things that people can gamble on in the art world are definitely a thing.
Yeah, it's interesting to see like what's successful in the market and what doesn't work. And at the end of the day, like, I'm super interested in mimetics and like how, everything is a meme like Richard Dawkins who coined memes is talking about memes like the cultural version of genes, right? So, photography is a meme. The fact that you can even do that is being, it's an idea that gets passed between people on passed between generations. And it's something that's like survived over time, right? So the idea that Van Gogh is valuable painter and that these objects are valuable is also a meme.
And it might have taken like a rich collector who got in early on those paintings to then go pay an art historian to write articles about how important Van Gogh's work was so that their collection could accrue in value. And they're like all of these games people play by like, storytelling and, I'm on the board of directors at this museum and I happen to own a bunch of work by this artist, and I'm gonna advocate for them to be in this show, which then increases the prominence of my collection. Like it's all Game of Thrones and like the landscape of ideas and culture that makes all this stuff happen.
David Elikwu: I'd love to hear maybe a bit more about your work. You've mentioned some in bits, but you've done a lot of really interesting work. I think you had one project, which was future tense. So you had the Future Tense Project, which I saw, which was super interesting. And then you've also got Flourish, which I think is coming up with art blocks.
I'd love to hear more about, how do you think about the work that you create and, you know, the judgment that goes into it, and also a lot of the ideas that you talk about. Cause I think I've heard you talking about the future and what the future looks like, et cetera as being one of the influencers in, in your work.
Sterling Crispin: Yeah, so I think I have these two main undercurrents in my work. One is like the computational beauty of nature. Like I grew up in Hawaii and I have this like deep reverence for the beauty of nature and having written code for like nature simulations, you just get in awe of how complex and incredible the natural world is. And I've made a lot of work that kind of touches that, like Flourish is a piece that is indirectly about that. It's a project about making generative architectural drawings for ornamentation. They're kind of inspired by the late 1800 and early 1900 of these architects that would do these conte crayon drawings of primary geometry, recombining and creating these more elaborate forms that would be carved out by mason masonry artists. And I just found those drawings to be sublimely beautiful and wanted to see, you know, what that would look like through code and through software and kind of like reimagined in this more generative automated way. Yeah, I've made a bunch of other work kind of like that, and it's like a nice kind of grounding part of my practice. But I'd say like the other underlying current is sort of comes just through like the anxiety of living in the modern world, right? Like somehow there's like geopolitical instability and like, the dollar is weakening. And we're growing food in California with 10,000 year old groundwater. And there's so many sort of like collapse narratives that are out in the air, right? But at the same time, AI is developing very rapidly and then we've got driverless cars and all this stuff, and it's kind of like, how is this incredible growth seemingly inevitable? And also the collapse of the global environment feeling inevitable. Like how are these two things happening at the same time and intention with each other?
So yeah, future tense was like a big collection of works. It was my first solo show in New York that I kind of was taking these anxieties and like turning them into objects and just thinking about these like conflicting cultural narratives and trying to make objects that sort of represented them in ways. So there's one of the pieces is a surfboard that I called an escape vehicle, but it's this like existential escape vehicle. Like, I love the idea of you know, if New York City collapsed, like somehow just like surfing into the ocean, like at the end of the Point Break movie. If you saw Point Break and just kind of like letting, letting the apocalypse take you and the surfboards got like graphs about the CO2 levels in the atmosphere and, you know, AI kind of prophecies and predictions about the growth of AI and that kind of thing on it.
David Elikwu: That's super interesting. I guess, you know, even on that topic of the future, I would love to know, I guess it's your take on, one part of it is the future and where things are heading, but I think the other part is what I find really interesting is how our vision of the future has evolved over time. You know, if you look back to, let's say, I don't know, even the twenties or the fifties or so, the vision of the future was, Wow, gleaming paradise and how much better everything could be. It was very optimistic.
And I think actually even at some points, maybe let's say in the eighties or so, there was still some elements of optimism, but definitely there was also simultaneously a shift towards a lot of pessimism around the world that we are creating. And I don't know if that is just a factor of maybe, my point of view might be that I think we had a lot of this initial optimism during a very industrialist phase where we are rapidly growing. And there is an extent to which the future could be anything and it wasn't super crystal clear because technology was taking so many different directions.
And then I think we started to catch up to the future we were envisioning and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we thought it was. There were some parts that seemed magical and seemed great, but it's very interesting. For example, when you look at films, Marty McFly had shoelaces that tied themselves, right? And he had his hovercraft and he had a bunch of these things. But what's really interesting is that in some of these Futuristic films from the past. There's some really basic stuff that they didn't have. They didn't have doors that just opened and closed by themselves, right? Which we have. You just have it in the supermarket.
And so it's strange how, you know, there's some stuff that we thought, oh my gosh, this is gonna be really cool in the future that we never got. And there's some really basic fundamental things like, oh, everyone should just have clean water and, you know, people should have toilets and all these fundamental things that we completely forgot and we don't have at all.
Sterling Crispin: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what's that saying? The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed, right? Like that's kind of, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. And I think kind of the pessimism about the future is almost like a second order effect of mass media and like what drives eyeballs and what drives advertising, right? If you say something is scary, it like triggers some deep you know, ancient part of our brain. Like, oh, something scary. I have to pay attention to this cause I might run into it in the future. And so you click through and we've all been sort of like, as a culture wound up into thinking that bad things are constantly about to happen. Which I guess part of that show that I made was definitely about, but yeah, It's hard to tell like, the second order effects of things. I think we could sit right down right now and say like, obviously the capabilities of AI are going to rapidly advance and they're gonna change society in ways that we just can't predict.
I think that's part of why Ray Kurzweil's writing it so interesting to me because he does, he does sort of try to predict what might happen after the singularity. But like the singularity is this idea that like, at some point technology is gonna advance so far that there is no predicting what's beyond that. It's just this like line in time where like, future predictions are no longer possible in any way, right? What does it mean a thousand dollars of computing power is equivalent to every human brain in the planet combined? Like, what happens to the government? What happens to corporations? What does money mean? You know, like things just fundamentally break down.
But yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Like if you imagine the world that you want to exist and start building toward it, it's gonna be way more possible. And I guess that's, that's like one of the lessons of SpaceX. Like we could have really, really incredibly advanced space programs right now, but people stopped working on it. You know, it wasn't this thing where people kept working on it and it kept getting better. Yeah, it's kind of up to all of us to like, contribute toward whatever world vision we'd like to see happen.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
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