Week IV February 2023 - SamJ Studios

Each week I sit down to write to you all and I have found that finding the initial droplets of words to then formulate into a steady flow of coherent thoughts through these letters is the most difficult part. That being said my mind can only dwell on one thing this past week.

One of my few goals in 2023 was to read more books. I picked up 3 at the end of December and got to it. Initially I read Fight Club, a small book I finished in a day. Then I started The Time Travelers Wife. Now I had heard of this book (and movie) but I didn’t know anything. When I tell you the way I so deeply connected to this story and the characters involved, it took me on such a ride! The bitter sweet tragic ending caught me a bit off guard and left me so emotionally raw, it really served as a grounding force to me. In order to cope I found solace in Sufjan Stevens’s discography… It felt like I shed my winter fur and I now have a soft exposed underbelly, yet I’m eager to explore the new warmth of the spring. I’m not sure if these metaphors make sense to anyone but I really recommend the book and generally the experience of connecting deeply to characters and letting your mind explore. I’m now playing through The Last of Us hoping for another experience such as the Time Travelers Wife. Over all it’s left me feeling very grateful to all the connections I have with the amazing people in my life, many of who I will be seeing in Paris this week!

Speaking of NFT Paris, and bringing it back to relevant web3 relevant topics, I saw this tweet about artist strategy and it sparked my interest, causing me to think about my own strategy and if i even had one. It speaks on how artists can most effectively showcase work to their collectors through their minting strategy. This term “renegade minting” to distinguish minting when ever a piece happens to be ready to share, is an interesting concept to me. I’ve only ever minted in a renegade manner, and looking back I’d say that is due to the wild explorative nature of NFTs. Planning a year worth of releases back in 2021 would’ve been impossible! Now that the market has slowed of course minting a series of works all at once does seem to be tempting but that doesn’t appeal to me.

This is usually how the trad art world operates from my knowledge and it’s effective at selling the art, but I have hopelessly been trying to create art in a way that would otherwise not be possible outside the NFT space. An example would be that rather than exploring a concept or a source of inspiration over a series of say 10 works to show as a collection at a gallery, I would much prefer to condense all these fragments of work into a magnum opus 1/1 expressing all my thoughts and desires regarding said concepts at hand. I also find it silly that the space is so heavily emphasizing secondary sales when a healthy artistic career usually tries to avoid reselling the artwork until a few years have passed. I’m personally not going to release my art in a way to optimize my secondary, I am going to release my art in a way to optimize the art. An example of this is my piece @Username (This probably is to my detriment when it comes to growing my career in this fast paced environment thought)

Some final thoughts now. I saw these two videos discussing the adoption of new technologies and found surprising parallels. One is a cautionary call to awareness about AI and how that can change our future, and one is about how the railroad industry was the birthing grounds of the modern day bar code. Rail roads seem quite primitive to AI today but I think the position of the railroads in the 60s, not knowing where these new developments can take us while desperately trying to adapt the date industry, can be seen again across many fields today in regards to new AI tools.

As a little anecdote: I tried ChatGPT for the first time this week to explore the biases towards queerness and found it quite funny. It really doesn’t know anything about queer culture, as it identifies femme queens as male identifying female presenting individuals. (for those who don’t know a femme queen is a top tier trans woman, the most woman a woman could be) Additionally, moning means to be on hormones as a part of a femme queen’s transition which also seemed to be lost on ChatGPT… lol

Let me know of any books I should check out for this year, and I’ll see you in Paris! I’m really looking forward to exploring the fashion of this web3 convention ;)

Tuez la maison avec des bottes besties,

SamJ