Patrick Amadon is interested in art that stirs shit up in the real world. He showed the power of digital art to ruffle feathers with his piece “NO RIOTERS” in March 2023. The artwork was displayed on a massive billboard in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay for 72 hours during Hong Kong Art Week before being taken down over threats of legal action, once people realized what was being shown. It flashes the names of several pro-democracy activists that were jailed during the 2019 protests over Hong Kong’s eroding civil freedoms. Clearly, the piece made its point.
Amadon began creating glitch art more than a decade ago, sharing work on Tumblr alongside peers like XCOPY and Max Capacity. During these pre-NFT years, posting on Tumblr was simply a way to connect, create, and explore ideas. But when Amadon returned to the digital art scene in early 2021, he found a completely different paradigm taking hold. Since then, he’s become a leading voice in the crypto art community, helping to shape it into a more egalitarian and inclusive place.
We first spoke in October before “The Golden Age” exhibition (where “NO RIOTERS” was featured) about surviving the bear, his optimism for the future of digital art, and his plans for digital disobedience in 2024.
Chris Kokiousis: What have you been thinking about lately [regarding] the crypto art world? What’s been on your mind?
Patrick Amadon: Hmm I don’t know. Obviously, winter. I think discoverability is a big part of that. I think we’re kind of at an inflection point about which direction we go. I made a bit of a shitpost, but are we gonna become this inclusive art movement that’s notable in history, or are we gonna be seven dudes who sold out on blockchain? I think a lot of it has to do with artist technology, and whether or not we can help these artists stick around, or whether we just watch the space consolidate around a handful of people and ultimately become kind of pointless. So that’s on my mind a lot.
I’m really interested in AI, in the direction that that’s taking. Not so much the art but in augmenting our ability to contextualize and process all of the art that is here. Because that’s one thing…I think even at this early stage, we’ve had issues with scalability. We can’t rely on a handful of platforms to curate art, you know, a handful of curators. I don’t think we had the infrastructure built, nor were key elements of the infrastructure compensated — writers — to do all the work that’s needed to just start figuring out what we’re all looking at, [and] what we should be looking at.
CK: Yeah, I’m in total agreement. Do you feel optimistic though about where the space is going, or does it feel like it could go in either direction? And is that why you wanted to make that shitpost, just to draw attention to the fact that it’s not a guarantee?
PA: Well yeah, I think it’s definitely not a guarantee. Do I think we’re going to go in a healthy, positive direction? Yeah, I ultimately do — I’m optimistic about that.
You know, I said that physical art is dead as the dominant art form. And I think that’s true. I think if you look at how we digest information now, obviously no one’s gonna argue that it’s predominantly digital now, and just becoming more digital. I think that with new ways of identity, I can’t imagine a world where we’d become part of a [less] digital existence.
And I think as a part of that, obviously art that is native to this digital world will have a more prominent place in the digital world. You look at the transmissibility, you look at the durability of digital art. You talk to artists. It’s all, Oh I’m exhibiting in Dubai, I’m exhibiting in Japan, I’m exhibiting in New York — at the same time. You just can’t do that with physical work.
“Glitched Painting 00110001” (2021)
CK: Right.
PA: You can have the greatest physical work in the world, and there’s going to be 300 people crowded around it at the Louvre constantly every day, in a really annoying pile of people. And that’s for the people that are fortunate enough to have the resources to be able to get to France to see it. Digital art democratizes in a way that we’ve never seen before in art.
And it’s different if you take a photo of a physical piece, right? You know it’s a reproduction of the original. You know you’re not looking at the actual art. But with digital, if you see the digital art, you’re actually looking at the digital art, which is interesting. And I don’t think people really quite wrap their heads around that, but they intuitively know it. And I think that makes digital art very interesting. Plus, you look at how many screens we have.
You know, I throw paint on walls. Usually it’d be the side of a wall, because you’d get arrested if you’re painting the front of a building, right? And now, you know, I was able to put up a piece of art on a billboard the size of an entire city block in Hong Kong and get the attention of the Chinese government, and have them sic their hackers on me. You never could’ve done that before, you know?
CK: Hundred percent. It’s almost like the immediacy of it allows for more opportunities for artists to make statements like that in a very direct way, where it would’ve been impossible to pull that off [before digital art]. It’s almost like a magic trick. You’re putting something up and then people are like, oh shit, how did that get under our noses?
PA: I think we have a lot of power in that regard. And I don’t think it’s really been explored much at all.
“NO RIOTERS” (2023)
The development of the space has been interesting. I think that through PFPs and the whole kind of degenerate gambling game that we seem to love in the space, we’ve brought a lot of people over to art. So there’s a ton of first-time collectors, a ton of people that are new to this that are now collecting art, which I think is great.
You know, you talk about this emergent class of artists that are able to meaningfully contribute to their livelihood. But you also have something here which I don’t think has ever existed before in the same way, which is, you have a middle class of collectors, right?
Before, it was people buy something for $50 because they like it, and then this gap, between $50 art until it’s like $50,000 art, right? Because that’s kind of the level of art where you can actually resell the art. You can buy something in a gallery for a few thousand dollars, and then you say like, Hey, let’s sell it, and I’d be like, Cool…no. You’re stuck with it. It’s all a sunk cost. But with NFTs, you’ve got liquidity, you’ve got people that can trade it.
It becomes easier to transact, so you’re not stuck with what you get — if you need money for whatever reason, if you want to sell, if you want something else. You have the option to do that. And because it’s not a sunk cost, people are able to spend more money on the art than they otherwise would be able to justify. And as a result, artists are all of a sudden making a living.
You have people that aren’t ultra-rich being able to collect art, and it’s not a sunk cost, so they can collect art, have a beautiful collection, but also not have the financial insecurity of being too levered into something that you obviously wouldn’t have been able to sell in the previous world. So it’s created an interesting ecosystem that way.
“Screen” (2021)
CK: It has, and it makes me want to ask you, does the future look like there’s going to be a solid middle class of art collectors, or as some were putting it — especially in the [2021] bull run — that in the future, everyone will be a collector? I’m curious what you think about that. I guess any step in the right direction is good for bringing art closer to the people and making it less of an elitist game of parking money, or putting artworks in vaults in port cities and stuff.
PA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs] No, we’re not playing the freeport art tax game with our stuff…We’re changing the culture of all of this. Basically, high-end art previously was…a lot of it was an alternative asset tax game. You know, that is what it is. But what are you going to do? You’re going to buy a piece of art, you’re going to put it in your living room, and you’re gonna have 20 friends come over and see it at some point, and [you’ll] never be able to sell it again. That was kind of where you were at sub-$10K art before this.
Now, we’re so much more entrenched in our digital identity and sharing things, and there’s such a flex in being able to say, Here’s my art collection. And more people are collecting art, so it’s more common. You’re not an outlier if you have some art, and you can also share your art freely. So it’s really completely changed the dynamic for that middle class of art collector. So I can see it just continuing to expand.
I think right now, we’re working through a bit of a PR awareness thing. Obviously, the economy is a little bit shaky with rates and macro pressures, which is affecting our space. We’ve got NFTs and the negative branding around that. We’ve got a problem with perception with these pixelated monkey JPEGs. But we’re fighting our way through that. And ultimately, I think without really any doubt, we’re going to get to a place where we’ll have a whole new class of people that appreciate art and are happy to collect art, share art, trade art…It’s a fascinating thing to have. It’s a fascinating conversation piece, and it doesn’t take up any room.
CK: I love that about it. I kind of consider myself to be a minimalist collector, and NFTs made perfect sense to me once it finally clicked that I can have hundreds of pieces, and it’s not like when I move, I have to worry about packing them up and taking care of them in the same way.
PA: Yeah. Physical work is still a big part of my practice; it has been for a decade now. They take up a lot of room. You know, like storage facilities…studio size. It becomes costly at a point, to just store the physical work. You know, it’s always nice having some around so you can just switch it up. But at the same time, you have limited wall space, you have limited storage space, you have transportation costs — it’s not the most fun thing to put a 5’ x 5’ wood panel into a truck to drive to a storage facility to get another one. And you know, that’s not even talking shipping it. You want to ship it across the country; it’s a couple thousand dollars insurance. Because you have to go freight, you know? It gets pricey.
“Fiat” (2021)
And that’s not even the full scale artwork, right? And this is one of the things, you know, with physical — you want to build out your studio so you can scale up. Because a lot of the high-end collectors…they don’t have your eight-foot walls that us common folk have. They have 10-, 15- foot walls with a lot of space for art. So a lot of the higher-end art, it’s desirable to have six-, seven-, eight-, 10-foot canvases. And that’s incredibly expensive to ship. That’s a custom shipper insurance.
You know, a lot of people who have the expensive work don’t even display the expensive work in the house because of insurance. They’ll have somebody recreate it. You pay a guy to recreate it; you put it up on your wall. You have the original, so it’s…sort of that? You store that in downtown LA in one of these nondescript buildings that stores art, and then you put the fake up in your house, and that’s how you play it for insurance.
CK: [laughs] Just right click save that artwork and put it on your wall.
PA: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting spot though, too. One of the biggest barriers to adoption I think has to do with just the complexity of it. Roger Dickerman used the phrase “mental Rubicon.” I like that. We’ve all kind of sat there, scratched our heads for like an hour, or two, or three, or half a day trying to figure out MetaMask, recovery phrases…how do I not lose everything I put into this? You know, all that. So getting people to go through that, and then getting people to have good practices and also just not get phished, or hacked, or everything else.
CK: Very good point. It makes me wonder, you know, your peer Matt Kane has been talking a lot about trying to move away from the extractive elements in the space and to create a more fair system that values contributions and gives back. What does that look like for the upcoming cycle and into the future?
PA: You know, I don’t see any world where our sensibilities don’t shift into a bit more mainstream art, in terms of what we value in art, what artists are interesting, and so forth. I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed if they’re holding onto expensive JPEGs thinking the trad art world is going to come over and buy them. They’re just not going to buy much of what I think people are betting on.
CK: Yeah.
PA: I [also] think we have a tendency to impute so much value into the distribution of artwork, and I feel that has very little residual value.
CK: The distribution? What do you mean?
PA: Like some mechanic, burn this to get this, you know. Do we make you play a game, do we make you write poems in the game…I think there’s a lot of people trying to trigger that lottery gambling, kind of addict trigger. A lot of people are doing a lot of emotional baiting. A lot of people are using very effective psychological mechanisms to manipulate people into buying work that I don’t think necessarily holds up if you look at it conceptually or from a lens of traditional art…
I think it comes back to what Artnome says — buy what you love. I think the people that are buying what they love are the people that are going to come out ahead when this whole thing gets shaken up. But I don’t think for a second that the top selling artist today will be the top selling artist in five years. I think it’s going to be a completely different list. Which I think is great. I think if you can process that past the bias you have from the bags you may hold, there’s a lot of artists out here right now making incredible work that just don’t have that social media wolfishness to make it all work.
“POP CULTURE” (2023)
CK: That’s a big piece for sure. And also, if you were lucky enough to have started building that traction in that window of time, when a lot of these collectors were establishing themselves and what artists were going to be historical, you’ve kind of already set this ground level for yourself. But I hate that, because, you’ve got to work for it, you know what I mean? You’ve gotta earn your keep even after you’ve “made it.”
PA: [laughs] You’re not a fan of the instant grail?
CK: Yeah, no [laughs]. You just keep seeing the same artists, and in an attention economy, it’s taking up so much of the air and the space, when there’s hundreds of amazing artists that deserve recognition.
PA: Yeah, I agree with you completely. I think we’re very, very obsessed with price signaling. And I think we’re obsessed with price signaling because it’s one of the few signals that we have in the absence of a lot of writing and contextualization. I think if we had more people writing, I think if we had more ways to discover art and more words people could read that could help them learn how to see art…
And yes, it’s all subjective, everything’s subjective. But there are some really basic things about concept and telling a good story that are universal. So I think we’ll see a big shift in that regard as well. It’ll be interesting to watch.
CK: For sure. There’s been a lot of terrible news in the world lately…how does art fit into that? I think a lot of people instinctively will try to minimize the role of art in times of crisis or war. But I’m also seeing a lot of artists reiterating that being able to make art in times like these is essential not only for healing, but to send a message or to make meaning.
PA: You know, I feel like the good art has a purpose. It’s not just there to look pretty. And I feel like there’s a lot of different things you can say with it obviously…as long as it comes from an informed and connected personal perspective, I think it has the ability to achieve a number of different things. I think it can be really useful, it can be healing, it can be enlightening. There has to be somebody that can say something that is true, but is difficult to say. And I feel like art can often walk that fine line visually, because you can avoid the trigger words.
“Transient” (2021)
CK: I would love to hear more about your creative process these days, and what you’re exploring. How do you approach it generally, and maybe not generally, if there’s a story you want to tell?
PA: I have multiple notebooks, so I’m always sketching things out and coming up with ideas. So I feel like at any given moment, I probably have five to seven concepts at varying degrees of completion. And it just kind of comes naturally through life.
And if I’m not working specifically on a piece, I like collecting — I call them artifacts, the folder on my computer is called “artifacts.” So I’ll go downtown and just try to find good graffiti. Not street art. I feel like that’s somebody else’s art, you know? But I like graffiti. I like tags on top of tags. Interesting textures. You know, I like exploring the wasteland outside of LA just finding interesting things.
CK: There’s a lot of it to explore.
PA: Yeah, yeah. Or painting in my studio. You know, I still try to include physical work as a part of all the digital work. So it’s either working on a concept that I’ve already created, or it’s working on finding interesting things to then have this collection of things that I can incorporate in a later work…
Again, I feel like [with] digital art, we did a good job of demonstrating that pixels have value. That’s the biggest thing we’ve done so far in the space. You know, coming from a digital art background of about a decade, it was really tough to convince people that digital art was anything real. You know, you throw your file on a computer, and then you ship the computer with instructions and a note saying “this is the original.” I mean, it was such a terrible system…it was just so unwieldy to transact or collect digital art.
So we needed this. I’m just really happy about where we’re at right now with the technological progress.
CK: Yeah, I wonder, is that still happening in the trad art world? Are they still shipping computers?
PA: Yeah, we have a few holdouts. Not everyone’s embraced NFTs because you had something that represented a significant disruption to a lot of people’s practices.
CK: Yeah.
PA: You had a lot of artists very upset that so much money and attention was going to digital art, which didn’t have value before. Everybody always thinks something comes at their expense. And it doesn’t. But people are worried about, “Hey, I’m gonna lose some of my practice,” and digital artists are like, “Hey, why are these guys making money? I’ve been doing this for a long time, throwing computers around the world.”
“Code Glitch 2014” (Minted 2023)
So, a lot of people were affected, and I think scared. And there’s a big barrier to entry from a technological understanding, especially early on. So as soon as something like the environmental issue came up — which we all knew was going to be solved within a year or two — everybody just jumped on that because they thought a little signaling will help push us away or slow down the progress.
You know, [it’s] just people not adapting to change well. But it’s inevitable. I mean, it’s a better system. It’s better for collecting, it’s better for distributing, and I think when we start seeing more art affecting people in the real world from our space, I think that’s when we’ll really start to see a change…
Pixels have value, but we haven’t really demonstrated that digital art can affect the real world. And I think when we do that, I think that’s one of those watershed moments where all of a sudden, I think we really start to take off. And it’s all there. I mean, look at the billboard in Hong Kong. We’re able to broadcast a subversive message to hundreds of thousands of people over the course of three days.
So that’s what I’m interested in. I’m interested in figuring out how we can take digital art and disrupt people in the real world.
⚜️⚜️⚜️
On January 13th, 2024, Amadon announced a new series of seven 1/1s on Solana, titled “Sequence.” For Ethereum and Tezos maxis, that may have come as a surprise, but for Amadon, even the most beloved technologies need counterweights. This is especially true in the realm of AI, which “Sequence” explores both as a subject and a tool for creative expression.
We spoke as the auction for “Void,” the first artwork released in “Sequence,” was about to end.
CK: Let’s dive into the process of what you’ve created here [with “Sequence”]. You’re using AI to interpret and process oil paintings that you’ve already created. What surprised you most about how the AI interpreted your paintings?
PA: Taking a step back, just a little bit bigger picture, I feel like I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about what the next 10-15 years kind of looks like. As far as I can see, I don’t think really anything after about five to eight years is worth any projection at all. Because I think everything we see is basically this sprint to general intelligence first.
China’s throwing billions of dollars at it, you know, we’re throwing billions of dollars at it. That was the whole Sam Altman thing, right? He wanted to push harder, and the board wanted to just really make sure the ethical constraints were there. And I see value to both sides. It’s interesting being aware and also witnessing this race to probably one of the most transformative technologies we’ve ever created.
“Expansion” (2024)
You know, we obviously haven’t been able to cure cancer. We haven’t been able to understand much of how the body works. We haven’t been able to figure out how to do fusion. There’s so many of these intractable technological and biological issues that we’ve never been able to fully understand yet.
A general AI is the first technology that is actually capable of processing those things. So if you look at the economic implications of who gets there first, imagine if China gets there first, right? They have a reasonably solid gen AI that comes out in five years. Well, what’s gonna happen is they could just target that at cancer and then the AI is like, Oh, well here’s how you fix cancer, silly humans. Because that’s just the power of the processing — that’s the power of it to be able to understand, interpret, contextualize all the different biological data that’s really eluded us to this point.
So you see AI being able to solve these tremendous issues, which not only is good for society, but it’s a huge economic win. It’s kind of like the discovery of the jet engine, or atomic power. It’s just civilization changing tech. And what’s going to happen is, [if] somebody else gets there first…nobody’s waiting two years to have their cancer addressed. I mean, I probably would because I’d probably get thrown in jail still, but I feel like most people would travel over to Beijing if they had a reliable treatment for this, that AI could generate…
“Attack Vector” (2024)
You know, it’s interesting with art — we’re right at the edge of this technology, which has been fascinating. They needed art to help the computer understand and be able to contextualize a lot of these creative, expressive challenges that had kind of eluded programming for years, right? So artists being at the forefront of this revolution, I think is fascinating.
CK: For sure.
PA: It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about, which is why I started this series. And I think so much about what the future looks like comes down to how AI interprets what we all are doing, what we’re experiencing, what we’re creating, what we want. Because ultimately on so many different levels — politically, socioeconomically, even culturally — we’re going to be receiving AI outputs of what AI thinks is best for us.
So I think there’s just a really interesting throughline in this moment right now. What is AI doing to interpret what we’re giving it? How is it interpreting that, and how does that establish the building blocks [and] give us a clairvoyant moment of what this all looks like in the future? So I just really wanted to explore that with some of the tools that we have now.
“Zeroed” (2024)
CK: How involved were you in shaping the AI’s process? Or how did you find the right tool to use, so to speak, or the right AI to use for this project?
PA: Well, I’m fortunate that we’ve spent the last couple of years building a really nice community here in Venice. We have probably 150 people that come regularly to these events that we host. And we have a really nice AI community — a lot of people that are AI scientists, doing the real research, building LLMs, doing a lot of the hardcore nuts-and-bolts science behind all this.
So having them as a resource here in Venice has been not only tremendously helpful to me, but it’s been tremendously helpful to the rest of the community as well. Because we’re at this critical juncture…
I think it all just comes down to, AI is a tool. It’s a very powerful tool. I think we’ve seen a tendency for people to anthropomorphize AI and call it a collaborator, say it’s intelligent. AI is just a very smart set of processes right now. It’s not an entity in and of itself. It’s not a collaborator. It mimics intelligence, it mimics collaboration, but it’s just a very powerful code that can be incredibly helpful for artists.
Whether or not you’re embracing AI now, ultimately, you will. Even Adobe is incorporating AI into a significant number of their tools. I mean, we’re all going to be using AI on some level, you know, the same way we’re all using ones and zeros in a computer on some level in the digital space. AI will just be part of the fabric.
So I think it’s important to fight the tendency to anthropomorphize AI. And I also think it’s really important to understand that as a tool, its power, its promise, its danger, really all comes down to who’s wielding it.
“Singularity” (2024)
