3 Mar 2024/74 min/OMZ
MLow X OMZ Interview
Collector and Filtered founder OMZ on art-first discovery, social curation, and the collectors and artists who built crypto art before the money arrived.
Recorded over Google Meet in late December 2023, this is a long collector-to-curator conversation between MLow and OMZ, the collector behind the discovery platform Filtered. OMZ lays out his case against marketplace design that puts price at the forefront: on Filtered the art comes first, artist names are hidden by default so the viewer forms a connection before knowing who made the piece, and a controlled tagging taxonomy plus curator-made lists turn discovery into something social rather than algorithmic. He is explicit that he does not see Deca, Pulsar, or JOYN as competitors, arguing the space is too young for platforms to fight over territory, the way SoundCloud, Spotify, and Beatport coexist in music.
The middle of the conversation is about AI. Both agree AI is another brush rather than a genre, that curation and taste become the skill (they credit Claire Silver for that framing), and that narrative is what separates a forgettable prompt output from art. OMZ makes the point through Robness's eBay drop The Queen of NFTs and All Her Friends: the images alone are unremarkable AI, but the layers (a physical certificate for a zip of 69 images, a toter hidden in every picture, the Paris Hilton reference) elevate it. MLow reveals he is a second eBay artist himself and that he minted the certificate for Robness's drop onto his own contract.
The last stretch is a guided tour of OMZ's collection and values: Josie's Onward as his grail, Al Crego's Slaves of Our Own Freedom, Max Osiris collages, John Karborn's Seeker, Xer0x's Aaron's Law tribute to Aaron Swartz, and blockchain-native works like Terraforms, Chaos Roads, and crashblossom's Burner. He closes with the history work he cares about: interviewing Max Osiris and Robness after their SuperRare bans, the Icons of Crypto Art exhibition he organized in Dubai in March 2022 as a tribute to Alotta Money, and the early collectors (Token Angels, Basileus, Coldie) who kept the space alive in 2019. He tells MLow the show sits in that same lineage of shining light on the people who laid the foundation.
What this episode teaches
- Hide the artist's name first
OMZ designed Filtered so you see the art before the artist. Knowing who made a piece biases the viewer, so he wants the emotional connection formed first and the attribution discovered afterward.
- Anyone can be a tastemaker
Borrowing from Spotify and SoundCloud playlist culture, OMZ argues curation needs no credential. If someone's lists consistently match your taste, they are a better discovery engine than an algorithm, at least at today's state of AI.
- Free tagging needs a gatekeeper
Filtered lets artists tag their own work but will not let them invent new tags, only suggest them. Total freedom produces many tags meaning the same thing, so a small dose of centralization keeps the taxonomy searchable.
- AI is a brush, not a genre
OMZ sees AI, and even generative art, as tools in an expanding kit rather than genres of their own. The work he rates most combines AI with other processes, the way Max Osiris layers glitch and phone-made effects over his collages.
- Narrative elevates ordinary images
OMZ collected Robness's eBay drop even though the pictures were basic prompt-based AI, because the layers of story made it, in his words, a mind-blowing work. He says the pieces that stay with him provoke thought, and those always have a story behind them.
- Curation is the new skill
Both agree, citing Claire Silver, that generating a hundred images in Midjourney is easy and choosing the one that works is the art. MLow adds that chaining tools (Midjourney into Stable Diffusion into Runway into Photoshop) is where humans still beat the machine.
- Physical process deepens digital work
OMZ highlights John Karborn, who scans collages built from London street garbage and burns the physical, and Xer0x, who uses tattoo guns to create effects. Visible physical labor and lateral thinking are what impress him in digital art.
- Honor the foundation layer
OMZ urges focus on the artists and collectors of 2018 and 2019, not just the newest stars. He tells MLow directly that interviews like this mean more to overlooked artists than the host will ever know.
The conversation, topic by topic
Filtered's art-first design
OMZ describes filtered.art: search and tags front and center, artist names hidden by default, a shuffle button for random discovery, artists connecting minting wallets so work auto-populates, custom story pages, and an art-focused social feed. It launched seeded with a couple hundred artists and is being built slowly, bootstrapped, with no aggressive marketing.
Social curation and the taxonomy system
Anyone can build curated lists and become a tastemaker, on the model of music playlist culture across Spotify, SoundCloud, and Beatport. Artists tag their own work from a standard tag set that Filtered alone controls; artists can suggest new tags but not create them, to avoid duplicate meanings.
Filtered versus Deca and the discovery problem
MLow asks how Filtered differs from Deca. OMZ points to user experience and the emphasis on social curation, and says he views neither Deca nor Pulsar nor JOYN as competitors because the space is too early to compete. Both agree search on major marketplaces like OpenSea barely works unless a keyword is in the title.
Machine learning, Tinder for art, and human curators
MLow floats a Tinder-style swipe app that learns your taste, and notes an AI curator would put him out of a job. OMZ says Pulsar is the only platform he knows using AI for discovery, but his hypothesis is that other humans remain the best source of discovery for now.
AI as a tool and the autonomous artist
OMZ calls AI inevitable: resist it or embrace it. Both discuss Botto, the autonomous artist project by Mario Klingemann, which OMZ calls historically important. MLow describes breaking AI models on purpose, building custom models in ChatGPT with DALL-E, and turning his seal PFP into new characters; artists cited for hybrid practice include Claire Silver and Rocket Girl, who paints over AI output.
Robness on eBay and the power of narrative
OMZ collected The Queen of NFTs and All Her Friends, a Robness eBay drop: a physical certificate for a zip file of 69 AI images referencing Paris Hilton, each hiding a 64-gallon toter. MLow reveals he also sells on eBay and minted the certificate onto his own contract since Robness was off blockchain this year. OMZ says the narrative, not the venue, hooked him.
Max Osiris and Robness, the SuperRare ban
OMZ explains his loyalty to both artists: entering the space around February 2021, he read about their SuperRare bans, found banning absurd in a supposedly decentralized space, and interviewed each of them as a near-stranger with about 200 followers. Their generosity earned what he calls his undying loyalty. MLow notes his own first interviews included Max Osiris.
Blockchain-native art
OMZ names the collections he thinks could not exist without a blockchain: Terraforms by Mathcastles, Chaos Roads by ChainLeft, Mutant Garden Seeder by Harm van den Dorpel, and crashblossom's three collections including Burner, which changes with Ethereum gas data, Gold, which responds to collector behavior, and Recall, an Ordinals piece driven by mempool data. He also praises Matt Kane's Gazers.
A tour of OMZ's collection
His grail is Onward by Josie, an aspirational piece he first saw around March 2021 when Basileus owned it. Other favorites: a 2018 animated pixel piece he calls Skeletal Garden with the text Congratulations, you've planted a beautiful garden; Al Crego's Slaves of Our Own Freedom, a fence-into-birds animation whose 2014 concept was stolen and flipped on Foundation before OMZ collected the original for less; Entropy by an artist the transcript renders as Ten Cross; and Max Osiris collages including Birth of Cyclewave and Crypto Art Vision 2023 and Onward.
John Karborn and Xer0x
OMZ highlights two artists for fusing physical and digital process: John Karborn, whose Seeker collection with Transient Labs grew out of collages made from garbage found on London streets, scanned at high resolution and then burned; and Xer0x, whose Aaron's Law paid tribute to Aaron Swartz with proceeds donated to Creative Commons. MLow says Karborn's use of the Doppelganger contract inspired his own collaboration with Max Osiris.
Monogramma
Asked for a project people might not know, OMZ points to Monogramma, a self-funded social impact art project by an OG collector, working with artists in poorer countries including a piece Coldie made inspired by work with a tribe in the Amazon. Patrick Amadon and BatSoupYum are involved and OMZ advises.
Icons of Crypto Art in Dubai
In March 2022, timed with Art Dubai, OMZ organized an exhibition of roughly 40 to 45 foundational artists (Pindar Van Arman, Coldie, Osinachi, Connie Digital, Miss Al Simpson, Max Osiris, Robness, and more) as a tribute to Alotta Money, who had recently passed away. He says every conversation with outsiders then had to start by explaining the space was more than Bored Apes.
The collectors who kept 2019 alive
OMZ argues the space would not exist without early collectors as much as early artists: Token Angels, Moderats, Basileus, and Coldie, whom he calls arguably one of the best and savviest collectors in the space and someone he shadowed to learn. He praises the collector essay series from Colborn Bell's museum, and MLow recalls meeting the collector Sats Moon in person at Basel.
Why the show matters
OMZ closes by telling MLow not to underestimate what recognition does for overlooked artists, since most people chase the shiny new thing rather than the people who were here before. MLow explains he releases interviews slowly so each artist gets full attention.
In their words
“I don't want you to be biased by who made a piece. Form an emotional connection with the piece and then find out who made it afterwards.”
OMZ“The space is too young, and it's too early in our evolution, to be competing amongst ourselves.”
OMZ“I can't wait for the days when there will be a fully AI autonomous artist.”
MLow“He could have minted that on Alibaba and I would have probably collected it.”
OMZ“The moment when you fall in love with a piece, that piece is your whole world.”
OMZ“Don't underestimate the impact that you have on artists when you do stuff like this. It means more than you will ever know.”
OMZCite this conversation
OMZ in conversation with MLow, "MLow X OMZ Interview," The MLow Show, 3 Mar 2024. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-03-03-mlow-x-omz-interview.html. Quoted from a machine transcript.
Quotations come from machine transcripts. Check wording against the audio before republishing.