https://show.mlow.xyz/Every conversation of The MLow Show read in full: 71 conversations, 19 never aired, 566 lessons, 69 guests and 748 archived works.enSat, 03 Oct 2026 04:50:33 +0000https://show.mlow.xyz/assets/og/home.jpghttps://show.mlow.xyz/ https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2025-06-23-mlow-x-nuclear-samurai.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2025-06-23-mlow-x-nuclear-samurai.htmlMon, 23 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000A ninety minute three way hang with the Australian AI artist behind X Figures, one week after his 404 piece XCOPY toy collection blew up, covering AI agents, narrative marketing, and every overlooked project in his catalog. Taped six days after X Figures sold out and became the talk of the timeline, this is the longest episode in the archive and its only 2025 entry: MLow, co-host Andres Del Vecchio and Nuclear Samurai in a loose ninety minute conversation. The first twenty minutes stay on AI itself: GMing engagement bots because the boost is real, a bot that hallucinated attending one of his auctions and totally gaslit him, chatbot conversations feeding Meta's ad targeting, Andres's Venezuelan grandmother using ChatGPT as a verb, and AI as a productive mirror, which Andres links to scrying. The guest sketches a post AI economy that hits critical mass when companies fire enough people that no one can afford to shop, and predicts an explosion of creativity in a post scarcity world.AI and authorshipCommunity and accessCollecting and tasteSupply, pricing and drops https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2025-04-17-mlow-x-photon-tide-with-andres-del-vecchio.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2025-04-17-mlow-x-photon-tide-with-andres-del-vecchio.htmlThu, 17 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 17 Apr 2025. A co-hosted interview with masked psychedelic artist Photon Tide on music as the root of his images, dream journals, losing control on purpose, and AI as a tool. MLow and painter Andres Del Vecchio co-host this one, interviewing Photon Tide, a masked Hispanic artist born in Mexico and now living in the US. Photon spent roughly fifteen years making things, starting with music (piano his best instrument, then guitar), and came to art six or seven years ago when he tried gouache with no training, failed, and switched to digital art so he could make his own album covers. Del Vecchio opens with the observation that anchors the episode: he had always sensed music in Photon's images, rhythm and a beat, before knowing the backstory. Photon confirms the lineage: Tool, Alex Grey, and Kid Cudi's Man on the Moon era, absorbed subconsciously rather than copied.AI and authorshipPhysical and digitalCollecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithm https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-12-16-mlow-x-rare-scrilla.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-12-16-mlow-x-rare-scrilla.htmlMon, 16 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 16 Dec 2024. A collaborator conversation about 42069, Rare Scrilla's AI assisted album with two dozen crypto artists, and the Rare Pepe and Fake Rares history behind it. Rare Scrilla has made music for more than 20 years, and his method is simple: when he wants to learn something, he creates around it. That gave him Silk Road, an album about Bitcoin as currency on the darknet market roughly ten years earlier, and Sound Money in 2020. AI music entered late in 2023, badly at first, then a program started spitting out loops he loved: one of a kind samples with no crate digging and no clearing, which he calls the backbone of hip hop. By summer he was on Suno and then Udio, tricking friends who asked who the singer was; the answer was a robot. Two days before DJing Pepe Fest he wrote a set of original AI songs in his hotel room, the crowd loved them, and the album was on.Trash Art, Pepe and memesCollecting and tasteAI and authorshipSupply, pricing and drops https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-12-14-mlow-x-orkhan-mammadov.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-12-14-mlow-x-orkhan-mammadov.htmlSat, 14 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 14 Dec 2024. Orkhan Mammadov traces his path from a country with no accredited art school to inscribing TensorFlow on Bitcoin, and lays out his plan for an artist-owned AI model. Orkhan Mammadov opens with the whole arc of his life so far. He designed website layouts at 11 or 12 in Dreamweaver and FrontPage, studied computer science because Azerbaijan had no accredited art university, and transferred abroad to visual communication design at Bilkent after the dean, a family friend, told him losing that kind of talent would be a waste. A 2018 government commission produced the pattern installation that became his SuperRare genesis, collected by OSF. In late 2020, while interviewing for a design director job at a bank, he heard a podcast from the 2018 Christie's art and blockchain summit, minted two works, sold each for about ten ETH overnight, and within a week was applying for a US visa, which he got in two days by writing the ambassador that he had to see a Snoop Dogg concert. Two years in Miami, a government branding job in Dubai, and a move to London followed.Collecting and tasteAI and authorshipGenerative and on-chainCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-11-06-mlow-x-mario-klingemann.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-11-06-mlow-x-mario-klingemann.htmlWed, 06 Nov 2024 12:00:00 +0000Mario Klingemann explains how Botto, his autonomous decentralized artist, actually works, fresh off its Sotheby's debut, and argues that training needs no consent and that models are the new search engines. A Google Meet conversation of about 68 minutes, posted on X on November 26, 2024,, recorded two weeks after Botto's solo show and auction debut at Sotheby's in New York. Klingemann opens mid experiment, teaching Botto new tricks and raving about coding with Claude, then traces his path: a lifetime working with computers, calling himself a computational artisan until, roughly 17 years ago, he dared to say artist. Botto is his brainchild, an attempt to see whether a machine can be accepted and respected the way a human artist is. He describes it as an inverse cyborg made of three parts he likens to a trinity: the AI black box that constantly generates image fragments (a pile now between three and four million), the DAO of humans who vote weekly on a selection of 350, and the Botto token, the lifeblood flowing through the system. Each week the top voted fragment becomes canonical art, minted on SuperRare and auctioned, with half the proceeds paid to the voters and half funding the treasury.AI and authorshipGenerative and on-chainCollecting and tasteCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-10-29-mlow-x-jack-butcher-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-10-29-mlow-x-jack-butcher-interview.htmlTue, 29 Oct 2024 12:00:00 +0000The creator of Checks and Opepen argues that a large collection is one artwork owned by a network, and MLow tests the free mint gospel against what he has seen happen to ordinary artists. Jack Butcher walks through the road to Visualize Value: a UK graphic design degree in 2010, eight years in New York agencies, a solo studio that burned him out within a year, and then the constraint that saved him, black and white diagrams that explain complicated ideas as simply as possible, posted daily until a few hundred thousand people were watching. NFTs arrived in late 2020 when a student asked to collect his work and he answered, what do you mean, they are just Instagram posts. OpenSea did not land for him; a Foundation invite did, and 1/1s followed.Collecting and tasteCommunity and accessSupply, pricing and dropsPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-10-23-mlow-x-alejandro-cartagena.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-10-23-mlow-x-alejandro-cartagena.htmlWed, 23 Oct 2024 12:00:00 +0000A curator with twenty years in traditional art explains why artists took to AI, and how Fellowship's year of daily AI video became a live archive of a movement. MLow opens by congratulating Alejandro Cartagena on completing a full year of Fellowship's dailies program, which MLow followed closely and collected from. Cartagena, a Dominican artist, curator, educator and publisher based in Mexico, lays out the most developed theory of AI image making in the archive: AI models are trained to describe images to other machines, and inside that machine to machine gibberish a visual language developed that no human could produce, given the scale of data involved. Artists saw a tool never meant for art and, as artists always do, coerced it into doing something it was not supposed to do. He sets AI in a lineage running from photography through video, digital photography and the internet, each one forcing the same question: what is the point of humans in the creative field if a machine can make the image?AI and authorshipCollecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmGenerative and on-chain https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-09-20-mlow-x-punk7635-artie-hands-of-verse-works.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-09-20-mlow-x-punk7635-artie-hands-of-verse-works.htmlFri, 20 Sep 2024 12:00:00 +0000A recently doxxed curator at Verse explains how NBA Top Shot led him to fine art, and how he curates shows the way a producer sequences an album. Punk7635, real name Jay, is a former lawyer turned full time curator and marketer at Verse, working London hours from Marin County with three young sons and a 5:30am alarm. He entered in December 2020 when a friend asked him about NBA Top Shot. A basketball fan with an MBA paper on digital assets already behind him, he bought a few moments, made money, funded an Ethereum wallet a month later, and arrived just as the Nifty Gateway boom was peaking. Bored Ape profits became art he loves, and he quickly filed the rest under casino.Collecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmCommunity and accessPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-21-interview-with-richard-skeet-managing-partner-of-hivemindcap.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-21-interview-with-richard-skeet-managing-partner-of-hivemindcap.htmlWed, 21 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0000Hivemind Capital's Richard Skeet explains how an institutional fund defines blue chip crypto art, why it deliberately went second, and how it anchors collections with one of ones nobody can replicate. Richard Skeet, managing partner at Hivemind Capital since Q3 2022, is a former credit investor whose original calling was development; he still writes Solidity and moonlights as a full stack web3 dev. His framing for the Digital Culture Fund sets the episode's terms: they curate blue chip art through the medium of NFTs, and NFT is just a medium, though he immediately concedes that undersells it, since the medium adds authenticity, provenance, digital fidelity and an enhanced design space. The fund is candidly capitalist, but it is not whipping around monkey pictures; the portfolio runs from on chain Art Blocks algorithms (which delight the ex-coder in him) to Winds of Yawanawa and XCOPY.Collecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmSupply, pricing and dropsGenerative and on-chain https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-15-mlow-x-dave-krugman.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-15-mlow-x-dave-krugman.htmlThu, 15 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0000An in person Brooklyn conversation with photographer and Allships founder Dave Krugman on community as the root of all value, mycelium networks, and the zero ETH listing MLow helped him survive. Recorded in person in Brooklyn, this is the warmest episode of the run. Krugman, who grew up outside Boston, studied psychology at Boston University and moved to New York the second he graduated, opens with gratitude to the tool builders who made his career possible: Transient Labs (Ben, Marco and team) and Manifold, whose founder Richard sat with him on a two hour Zoom call in September 2021 minting his Drive collection piece by piece before creator tools existed. He rejects the idea that the two dev shops compete, calling it abundance mentality: when the frontier is this large, everyone is pushing into new territory for the whole space. His token gated Drip Drop print store embodies his yes-and philosophy: log in with your wallet, print only what you own, first copies embossed with the drip logo and his signature, NFTs and physical prints enhancing each other.Community and accessCollecting and tastePhysical and digitalSupply, pricing and drops https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-13-mlow-x-chikai-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-13-mlow-x-chikai-interview.htmlTue, 13 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0000Collector turned artist Chikai on Circle of Friends, defining cinematic AI, and his openly ridiculous goal of making the first AI film to win an Oscar. Chikai Ohazama and MLow open by admitting they have only had flybys at events, and MLow explains why the show exists at all: Twitter Spaces are uncontrolled environments full of distractions, and you only reach the heart of a conversation one on one. The two mirror each other, both collectors before artists, and Chikai's arc was entirely unplanned. Circle of Friends began as homage to artists he could never afford, like Sam Spratt, referencing their color palettes rather than their work. He minted the first season on January 1st purely because OpenSea had promised to grandfather royalty terms for contracts made before January 2nd (a promise later reneged on), planned to check back in a few days, and watched it mint out in minutes, assuming at first he had been hacked. Season two jumped from 500 pieces and 8 artists to 10,000 pieces and 25 artists because nearly every artist he asked said yes, teaching him that selling 10,000 of anything is non-trivial.Collecting and tasteAI and authorshipCommunity and accessPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-07-mlow-x-trevor-jones-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-07-mlow-x-trevor-jones-interview.htmlWed, 07 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0000Painter Trevor Jones walks through Crypto Angels, his bronze, ordinals and video game universe, and the 2018 gamble that made him a crypto art pioneer. Trevor Jones, Canadian born and based in Edinburgh for about 25 years, graduated from art school in 2008 and got into crypto in 2017. His origin story is the show's cleanest case of betting before a market existed: at the end of 2017 he searched for any artist or gallery combining crypto and art, found nothing, and still invested roughly a year of work and his own money into a crypto themed physical exhibition, hiring the gallery himself with no evidence anyone in Edinburgh would buy. Posting works in progress on Twitter drew collectors from around the world who paid in Bitcoin and Ethereum months before the October 2018 show closed, and he sold all but one of roughly 12 to 14 paintings. The Bitcoin Angel painting from that period became the February 2021 Nifty Gateway open edition that placed 4,158 editions and built his collector community overnight.Physical and digitalCollecting and tasteCommunity and accessAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-04-m-low-x-hans-dehlinger-interview-expanded-art.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-08-04-m-low-x-hans-dehlinger-interview-expanded-art.htmlSun, 04 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0000An 84 year old pioneer who was present at the birth of computer art in 1960s Stuttgart connects six decades of generative practice to his new Fibonacci collection with Expanded.Art. Hans Dehlinger, 84 and nearly 85 at recording, is the oldest guest in the show's run and the only one who was in the room when computer art began. As an architecture student in Stuttgart in the early 1960s, before the university even had a computing center, he studied alongside the movement's founders: Frieder Nake, Georg Nees and the philosopher Max Bense, whose advice he still follows. Do not talk about art, talk about aesthetic events, because art is a loaded thing and an aesthetic event is specific. He learned ALGOL from a professor teaching engineers, applied it to a design project, and produced 2,500 solutions where one building was expected. The gigantic failure that followed became the turning point of his career.Generative and on-chainCollecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-07-31-mlow-x-post-wook.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-07-31-mlow-x-post-wook.htmlWed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0000Collage artist Post Wook explains The Astronomer's Daughter, a Bitcoin ordinals project built from real satellite data, and the political campaign playbook she uses to sell art. Natasha Chomko, who works as Post Wook, opens by untangling her name: it is a jam band festival reference, not Star Wars, and the Instagram handle was grabbed for an abandoned lifestyle blog about wooks becoming adults. She has made collage since 2007, and her craft claim sets the tone for the whole conversation: the difference between good and bad collage is how well you can force perception, giving flat images depth and matching color and light until incompatible sources read as one photograph. Around 2019 and 2020 her work announced itself as collage with visibly distinct layers; now she chases seamless realism, which she ties to a post lockdown appetite for a little bit of real life. She calls her six years of work a visual diary.AI and authorshipCollecting and tasteCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-07-16-mlow-x-rhett-mankind.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-07-16-mlow-x-rhett-mankind.htmlTue, 16 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 16 Jul 2024. The full story of Turbo, the meme coin Rhett Mankind launched as an AI-directed social experiment, told alongside twenty years of surviving technology shifts as a working artist. MLow opens by asking Rhett Mankind to trace his path: a twenty year career as an art director across TV commercials, motion graphics, animation and branding, semi-retirement, a hiatus when his daughter was born, then the discovery of the crypto art hashtag. He had been in Bitcoin since 2013 but dismissed Ethereum as a shitcoin when it arrived, a call he now holds up as his lesson in the value of changing your mind. Crypto art gave him an unexpected second career, because for the first time a digital artist could find real collectors.AI and authorshipTrash Art, Pepe and memesCollecting and tastePhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-07-10-mlow-x-schmrypto.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-07-10-mlow-x-schmrypto.htmlWed, 10 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 10 Jul 2024. Never-published conversation with Schmrypto, steward of the Robert Mallory archive, on rescuing a shipping container of mid-century generative art, Checks and Opepen, royalties, and the eight dollar open edition model. This never-published interview opens with the best art-historical story in the show's archive. Schmrypto was a gallery artist from 2006 to 2016, then ran his family's hospital until selling it in 2021 and going all in on web3. In late 2021 a business partner said he thought he knew where a shipping container full of generative art sat in New England; Schmrypto's reply was that this was ridiculous. It was true: two containers in a New Haven, Connecticut shipping yard, one holding the life's work of mid-20th-century American generative artist Robert Mallory, the other the centerpiece of the New York Pavilion from the 1964 World's Fair. Mallory died in 1997; the work sat in his Conway, Massachusetts barn for 20 years until the family sold the barn and paid storage rent for years, waiting for someone who wanted to push the legacy rather than flip it. Schmrypto bought nearly all of it, plus the IP, shipped it to a Texas warehouse, and now functions as the estate: translating Mallory's code (Bob called it robotic serial code, a much cooler term than generative) into modern codebases, training an AI on his writings, producing two books, short films, and five shows in the next 12 months.Collecting and tasteSupply, pricing and dropsRoyalties and artist economicsPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-06-21-mlow-x-defiance-works.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-06-21-mlow-x-defiance-works.htmlFri, 21 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 21 Jun 2024. Never-published interview with collector Defiance Works (Eric Witschen), a 13-year Wall Street technologist on unsystematic collecting, rare Pepes, L2 caution, and why Blur was doomed. This never-published Google Meet conversation is with Eric Witschen, who collects as Defiance Works. His path: baseball cards in the 80s without caring about sports, then art once he started earning, spending whole bonus checks at Christie's works on paper auctions on two lines Picasso put on a piece of paper. Professionally he spent 13 years in Wall Street technology, building derivatives risk and trading systems and leveraged loan settlement plumbing, with inside views of Goldman Sachs, Apollo, and secretive shops like Renaissance. His verdict on traditional finance is blunt: extractionary and terrible, and crypto is the answer. He was into Bitcoin in 2010 and 2011, drifted away, and came back for DeFi in 2018 and 2019 after leaving Bloomberg to build a data company. Pepes with jpegs in tokens made instant sense to a lifelong collector who already understood provenance; he gives the tour of his Pepe room on camera, including Rare Scrilla hand-drawns and a Vandal Bitcoin piece with the Fed blowing up in the background.Collecting and tasteTrash Art, Pepe and memesAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-06-16-mlow-x-batsoupyum-of-6529-capital.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-06-16-mlow-x-batsoupyum-of-6529-capital.htmlSun, 16 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000BatSoupYum of 6529 Capital delivers hot takes on underappreciated AI art, points economies sucking oxygen out of the market, and why high-value 1/1s still belong on Ethereum L1. A hot takes clip from MLow's conversation with BatSoupYum of 6529 Capital. Asked directly for hot takes, and joking that this is the part of the podcast where he gets in trouble, he offers two. First, AI art remains underappreciated and will stay that way for a long time, with traditional non-AI artists increasingly folding AI into their work; he would welcome, hypothetically, a Coldie Decentral Eyes series with AI elements. Second, Blast and Blur did not kill NFTs, people are overreacting, but the points ecosystem has sucked all the oxygen out of the room. He stays deliberately neutral on the model itself while observing that farming for points distorts incentives across art, PFPs, and meme coins, with an unlock at the end of the month that should make June revealing once the points have a price.AI and authorshipCollecting and taste https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-04-16-interview-with-bharat-krymo-of-6529-capital-part-1.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-04-16-interview-with-bharat-krymo-of-6529-capital-part-1.htmlTue, 16 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000Bharat Krymo of 6529 Capital lays out his personal collecting criteria: memetic charge, cultural timing, and the storytelling an artist builds around the work. A short, dense clip in which Bharat Krymo of 6529 Capital walks MLow through how he collects. He opens by drawing a firm line between himself as an individual collector and the fund, then describes his wallet structure: Notable Pepes in the hot wallet, his 1/1 collection and 6529 meme cards in the cold wallet, and a vault holding a long tail of 1/1s dating back to his first purchases in 2018.Collecting and tasteTrash Art, Pepe and memes https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-04-16-mlow-x-ryan-zurrer-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-04-16-mlow-x-ryan-zurrer-interview.htmlTue, 16 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000Investor and collector Ryan Zurrer on digital scarcity, his proof of artwork thesis, buying Human One and The Monument Game, and why artist inflation matters. Ryan Zurrer arrives with over 11 years in crypto: a decade running a Brazilian renewables company, Bitcoin in 2012 via remittance rails, then first money into MakerDAO, Filecoin, Polkadot, and Dfinity, with early checks to Solana, Near, and Axie Infinity. By 2019 he was worried crypto was the same group from 2013 trading tokens back and forth, and digital art became his answer: Satoshi solving the Byzantine generals problem created provable digital scarcity, and without scarcity there is no collectability, and without collectability no value. His proof point is that the most Beeple ever got for an everyday before NFTs was about 110 dollars. He buys almost entirely direct from artists, calls the relationships the actual reward, and names Refik Anadol as close friend, portfolio artist, and collaborator.Collecting and tasteCommunity and accessAI and authorshipDiscovery and the algorithm https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-03-19-mlow-x-shavonne-wong-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-03-19-mlow-x-shavonne-wong-interview.htmlTue, 19 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +00003D artist and NFT Asia co-founder Shavonne Wong on virtual models that tell human stories, supporting Asian artists, and the honest mechanics of brands, auction houses, and curation. Recorded over Google Meet in October 2023, this conversation covers Shavonne Wong's whole arc: more than a decade as a commercial fashion photographer shooting for brands like Nike and Sephora, then a move into crypto art where the brand relationship inverted. As a commercial creative she was handed a mood board and asked to execute it; as an artist, Vogue and Bang and Olufsen come to her wanting her voice. Her work uses virtual models, sculpted and lit in 3D and rendered to video, to tell human stories she hopes viewers see themselves in.Collecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmCommunity and accessAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-03-03-mlow-x-omz-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-03-03-mlow-x-omz-interview.htmlSun, 03 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000Collector 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.Collecting and tasteAI and authorshipDiscovery and the algorithmPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-02-20-mlow-x-ryan-koopmans-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-02-20-mlow-x-ryan-koopmans-interview.htmlTue, 20 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000Lens based artist Ryan Koopmans walks MLow through The Wild Within, his time zone aware Enchanted Hour, and how he finds abandoned Soviet grandeur, and MLow answers with his fullest statement of why the show exists. A full Google Meet conversation of roughly 53 minutes. Koopmans introduces himself as a Dutch born, Canadian raised lens based artist: a grad degree in photography, video and related media, years of fine art, editorial and commercial work, then a shift to pieces where the camera is only the base layer under 3D, animation and mixed digital media. He minted his first pieces in early 2021 after a year of watching the space. The opening stretch covers The Enchanted Hour, his second dynamic piece with Transient Labs: every hour, in the viewer's own time zone, an owl leaves the painting on the wall, flies a different pattern around the room and hoots the hour, a contemporary take on the cuckoo clock that also switches between day and night at 7am and 7pm.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalDiscovery and the algorithmAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-02-14-mlow-x-deafbeef.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-02-14-mlow-x-deafbeef.htmlWed, 14 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 14 Feb 2024. Fully on chain pioneer DEAFBEEF on writing C on a cheap laptop, satirizing the mania with FIRST, and why permanence is a dogma of crypto culture. Recorded February 14, 2024 and never published, this is one of the archive's most valuable conversations: a patient first person account from one of the most respected fully on chain artists working. DEAFBEEF explains the practice behind his six 2021 series, Synth Poems, Angular, Glitch Box, Transmission, Entropy and Infection: low level C code written on a cheap laptop, synthesizing abstract sound and animation, with the generating instructions stored directly on Ethereum. The method predates his knowledge of NFTs; it grew from pandemic evenings synthesizing weird sounds while raising young children, posted to Instagram's modular synth community, until the Art Blocks Discord pulled him down the rabbit hole in early 2021 and Snowfro's encouragement helped him, as he puts it, hit the jackpot.Generative and on-chainAI and authorshipPhysical and digitalCollecting and taste https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-01-22-mlow-x-zeneca-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-01-22-mlow-x-zeneca-interview.htmlMon, 22 Jan 2024 12:00:00 +0000Zen Academy founder Zeneca on turning 16 years of poker into web3 education, why he ran a burn instead of a cash grab mint, and how to build a personal brand. Recorded October 10, 2023 as a full Google Meet behind a 17 minute clip, this episode sits down with Roy, better known as Zeneca: professional poker player from 2005 to early 2021, then all in on crypto, where his newsletter and Twitter threads exploded within months and pushed him to make educational content his full time work. Zen Academy grew from noticing that the space had PFP, IP, gaming and flipping communities but no education community, and its mission stays deliberately broad: it is literally just to help people.Collecting and tasteCommunity and accessSupply, pricing and dropsAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-01-19-mlow-x-victor-mosquera-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-01-19-mlow-x-victor-mosquera-interview.htmlFri, 19 Jan 2024 12:00:00 +0000Surrealist Victor Mosquera on his Instagram era crew, Seoul, the Messi collaboration, open editions as a platform, and the most considered AI skepticism on the show. Recorded October 2, 2023 and released in January, this is one of the longest and most peer to peer conversations in the archive. Mosquera arrives fresh from Harmonix, a group show at Ghana Art in Seoul with Beige, Mad Dog Jones and Fvckrender, friends of roughly ten years from the Instagram era when the goal was commercial gigs, showing all physical work together for the first time. He reports that Asia, and Seoul especially, is waking up to NFTs in a huge way, running a scene largely disconnected from Crypto Twitter that learned from the West's mistakes.Physical and digitalCommunity and accessCollecting and tasteSupply, pricing and drops https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-12-21-mlow-x-guido-disalle.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-12-21-mlow-x-guido-disalle.htmlThu, 21 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000Photographer Guido Disalle on 22 years of hairdressing, the flash as truth, the 33 ETH Poolside sale, and why artists should stop taking orders from collectors. Recorded November 21, 2023 as a full Google Meet behind a six minute published clip, this conversation traces an unusual road into photography. Disalle cut hair for 22 years, working editorial shoots and fashion shows where he watched the photographers, having grown up in the 80s on his older sisters' fashion magazines and the golden era of Mario Testino, Steven Meisel, Terry Richardson and Ellen von Unwerth. His father's death in late 2019 and the pandemic pushed him to quit the salon, care for his mother, and bet everything on his art; broke at 41 and googling how to sell his childhood hockey card collection, he stumbled onto an article about NFTs in January 2021.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-12-14-mlow-x-blac-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-12-14-mlow-x-blac-interview.htmlThu, 14 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000AI artist BLAC lays out a complete philosophy of prompting as language calibration, breaking tools on purpose, and knowing why you create, not just how. Recorded as a full Google Meet on November 15, 2023 and published that December, this is the show's deepest dive into AI art method. BLAC arrives with a traditional grounding, abstract expressionism, oil painting and photography, and a practice built on dark and light, transcendentalism and a sprinkle of the occult. He explains the Black Label Art Cult, the artist incubator with Friday critique sessions that MLow himself has just joined, named as the extreme antithesis of Bored Ape Yacht Club: not a club, a cult.AI and authorshipCollecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-12-13-mlow-x-rebecca-rose.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-12-13-mlow-x-rebecca-rose.htmlWed, 13 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000Collage artist Rebecca Rose explains how to bring traditional galleries into web3, and why the career still runs on open calls, residencies and showing up. This is the full Google Meet recording behind an eight minute published clip, recorded October 19, 2023 and released that December. Rebecca Rose describes her work as a 20 year exploration of collage, from sculptural collage cast in molten metal and worn on the body to the 3D video collages she mints now, and says the goal is always the same: the viewer should feel thrust into the storyline as one of its characters.Collecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithm https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-29-mlow-x-all-seeing-seneca-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-29-mlow-x-all-seeing-seneca-interview.htmlWed, 29 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000The artist behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club art reveals unreleased pieces from Perils live on the show and refuses to explain them, handing MLow the interpreter's chair instead. Recorded days before the Perils launch, this is the archive's exclusive: All Seeing Seneca, the classically trained visual development artist best known for creating the main art behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, walks MLow through unreleased pieces from the collection for the first time anywhere. Seneca frames Perils as the culmination of a lifetime of world building, from childhood characters and an attempted novella through art school figure drawing and a career in commercial illustration, structured around Freud's theory of the psyche, with chapters like Ego and Id and characters built as tangible depictions of those abstract concepts. Every attribute is hand drawn and painted, no AI, with the generative structure inspired by collecting animation cels: each output is a significant key frame of a nonlinear story.Collecting and tasteGenerative and on-chainAI and authorshipCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-18-mlow-x-robness-interview.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-18-mlow-x-robness-interview.htmlSat, 18 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000ROBNESS tells the Trash Art story firsthand: the PhotoMosh fight, the 64 gallon toter deplatforming and vindication, Rare Pepe history, and why the Impressionists are his blueprint for the AI era. This is the movement founder episode of the archive. ROBNESS opens by warning collectors that he changes all the time, consistently inconsistent by design, the explicit opposite of XCOPY's locked style, then tells the Trash Art origin story from the inside. He and artists like Max Osiris managed to do everything wrong by the standards of the day: minting too much, collaging sources, and above all using PhotoMosh, a tool he had quietly used for years on glitch and vaporwave subreddits. When he disclosed it, Twitter decided the work was too easy. His answer, delivered here with relish: you liked it after I made it, so what is the point of the method? He knew from art history he would win that argument, went for a run listening to the Sex Pistols, declared his output trash gifs, and cranked them out on overdrive.Collecting and tasteTrash Art, Pepe and memesAI and authorshipDiscovery and the algorithm https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-17-mlow-x-empress-trash.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-17-mlow-x-empress-trash.htmlFri, 17 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 17 Nov 2023. A never published hour with Empress Trash: from an Oakland trash heap to Sotheby's, the ego moment that almost ended her crypto art career, and a complete map of her glitch and AI process. This episode never aired, which makes it the archive's buried treasure: the most unvarnished biography in the corpus. Empress Trash tells her life straight. She left home at thirteen, dropped out after private school, partied through her twenties, earned a BFA in painting, drawing and design in her late twenties, then moved to California, where she worked as an art sales intern, assembled Lego portraits of prisoners of conscience for the Ai Weiwei show on Alcatraz, joined Tom Franco's Firehouse Art Collective, and ran punk shows and experimental performance nights out of her rented West Oakland house until Covid ended it. An Oakland mutual aid fund for artists carried her through, which is why she champions mutual aid in crypto art now.AI and authorshipCollecting and tasteCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-10-mlow-x-tustont.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-10-mlow-x-tustont.htmlFri, 10 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000Zak Tustont on branding detailed work as garbage, the fake Vogue cover, a broken TV that became an artwork, and two years of training his own StyleGAN models. MLow catches Zak Tustont on a work break for a conversation about the strangest positioning problem in the archive: an artist who makes highly detailed, time intensive work and insists on calling it shitty garbage. Tustont opens with a PSA that there is more to his art than meets the eye, then spends the episode showing exactly how much: the fake Vogue cover he made overnight after Vogue tried to get OpenSea to pull an Alpha Centauri Kid piece over the word Vogue, the broken TV from his day job that became a glitch piece in a style he had never tried, and the hidden links to free mints buried inside a commentary series about the shitcoin meta.AI and authorshipCollecting and taste https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-10-mlow-s-journey-in-2023.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-10-mlow-s-journey-in-2023.htmlFri, 10 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000A 7.5 second clip of the MLow Show theme jingle, posted as a trailer rather than an episode. Despite the title, this is not an episode about MLow's year. The posted video runs seven and a half seconds and contains only the show's sung theme: the MLow Show jingle, ending on the line about talking to people about crypto. It is a trailer or title card, even though it sits alongside full interviews on mlow.xyz. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-03-mlow-x-batzdu.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-03-mlow-x-batzdu.htmlFri, 03 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000A full hour with meme artist Batzdu on Geometric Pepes, the Opepen collaboration with Jack Butcher, free drops that did 200 ETH in volume, and why memes are contemporary art. MLow sits down with Batzdu, the designer turned artist best known for Geometric Pepes, for a full hour that traces a whole career: teenage years making Call of Duty clan signatures on gaming forums with a copy of Photoshop, DeviantArt and digital collectives like Depthcore, a decade as a working graphic designer, then the moment NFTs clicked and he entered as both artist and collector. His thesis anchors the conversation: memes are the ultimate form of contemporary art in the digital age, and he intends to keep making them and advocating for those who do.Collecting and tasteTrash Art, Pepe and memesCommunity and accessAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-02-mlow-x-lovid.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-02-mlow-x-lovid.htmlThu, 02 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000A 36 second surviving clip of LoVid walking MLow through a body of analog video portraits, one of which sits in the Whitney's collection. This is not a full episode. The posted video runs 36 seconds, and only the opening narration carries audio; the rest of the runtime is silence. What survives is LoVid, the artist duo of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, describing a series of works during what sounds like a gallery or studio walkthrough. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-31-mlow-x-pindar-van-arman.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-31-mlow-x-pindar-van-arman.htmlTue, 31 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000Twenty years of painting robots, a 100 percent on chain collection dropped the day OpenSea killed royalties, and why beautiful AI makes story the scarce good. Pindar Van Arman has spent nearly twenty years, since 2005, programming painting robots with AI, and this conversation catches him mid transformation: from an AI artist who used the blockchain to sell art to a crypto artist who uses the blockchain to make it. His ByteGANs, dancing pixel aliens dripping neon slime, are 100 percent on chain, every bit inscribed on Ethereum with no IPFS and no external dependencies. By pure luck they dropped the day OpenSea abandoned royalties, and he watched royalty payments collapse to near zero within days. He had the option of a royalty guard or operator filter and refused it on principle: encumbering the contract would violate the piece's own ethos, even at his own cost. Half his collectors treat the work as art, half trade it like an altcoin, farming Blur with it toward roughly 6,000 ETH of volume, and he accepts that an artist who releases work into the wild loses control of it.AI and authorshipCollecting and tastePhysical and digitalGenerative and on-chain https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-28-mlow-x-jason-bailey-artnome.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-28-mlow-x-jason-bailey-artnome.htmlSat, 28 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 28 Oct 2023. Crypto art's working art historian on the forgery database that started Artnome, why half of NFT art is not on chain, and the case that early crypto art was a revolution. Jason Bailey is the founder of Artnome and Club NFT and publisher of Right Click Save, and this is the longest unpublished conversation in the archive. He opens with his DNA: raised in a family of engineers, lousy at math and science, rewarded in art for arriving at different outcomes as long as he could explain the process. After art school left him jobless he went into tech, taught himself Photoshop overnight, then took a master's at the Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2007 to 2010), learning Processing and decades of generative art history. A book on forgery, claiming ten to fifteen percent of art at market is forged or misattributed, sent him calling the Smithsonian and the Getty for a database of complete works. None existed, so he built the largest analytical database of twentieth century artists' complete works, and started the Artnome blog so anyone would ever know.Collecting and tasteTrash Art, Pepe and memesGenerative and on-chainDiscovery and the algorithm https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-24-mlow-x-other-world.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-24-mlow-x-other-world.htmlTue, 24 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000A bioengineering PhD candidate making dark art with bright colors explains collage built from classical paintings, hidden Armenian Easter eggs, and quality over quantity. Other World is a dark fantasy artist who is also, invisibly, a bioengineering PhD candidate spending eight to ten hours a day in the lab. His origin is a lockdown story: labs closed during Covid, he picked up an iPad for a second try, abandoned imitating canvas painting, and instead built a collage practice, cutting and recoloring existing images found online, making a piece a day to match whatever song he was listening to. When NFTs reached him via Twitter in late 2020, he deliberately slowed down: fewer pieces, each meant to hold a museum viewer's attention rather than one second of a social feed. Today his work still roots in collage, sourcing classical paintings from WikiArt and high resolution archives, with his own drawn characters layered over historical backgrounds and poppy artificial color slammed against realistic period palettes.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalSupply, pricing and drops https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-19-mlow-x-coldie-part-2.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-19-mlow-x-coldie-part-2.htmlThu, 19 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000A studio show and tell with the stereoscopic OG: the 30 percent collecting rule, buying back his own Genesis piece, and the View-Master lineage behind Decentral Eyes. Part 2 with Coldie moves to video on purpose: Part 1 was text, so this time MLow can see the wall of trinkets behind him (a Van Arman, Die With The Most Likes, David Henry Nobody Jr) and Coldie can hold things up to the camera. The first half is his collector philosophy from 2018 SuperRare days, when a 1 ETH sale meant about 180 dollars and nobody knew what a 1/1 was worth. His rule: spend roughly 30 percent of every sale on peers' work, both to spread love among Telegram friends (Hackatao, XCopy and the rest) and on the explicit thesis that the collectors were going to be the winners.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalPreservation and provenance https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-19-mlow-x-hardley.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-19-mlow-x-hardley.htmlThu, 19 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 19 Oct 2023. A multidisciplinary artist explains how cold messaging sixty artists off SuperRare's Instagram stories, plus a past spanning Nelly beats and royal fan mail, built his crypto art career. Hardley (Aeneas Middleton) describes his art as Leo DiCaprio in Inception: different levels, never one medium. He paints in oils, shoots photography, builds 3D and dabbles in code, and his signature move is fusing physical and digital, embedding tablets into wood panels so collectors hang an interactive digital work on the wall. The episode's most repeatable lesson is his outreach method: arriving on the scene in late 2021 known only for music, he messaged every artist SuperRare posted to its Instagram story, fifty or sixty in all, proposing collaborations. Enough said yes that he ran up 68 collabs and over 150,000 dollars in sales, with Gary Cartlidge collabs alone hitting roughly 10,000 dollars a piece.Collecting and tasteAI and authorshipPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-15-mlow-x-sara-baumann.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-15-mlow-x-sara-baumann.htmlSun, 15 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000The Women and Weapons founder on provocation as design, Iranian heritage, the Nova digital influencer, and keeping a PFP brand alive after royalties collapsed. Sara Baumann, a former occupational therapist from Dallas, built Women and Weapons from a ten piece hand painted collection into one of the biggest female led NFT brands. She explains the project's engine plainly: powerful women, modeled on her mother who hustled her way to the top of a university while raising her largely alone, painted against the 1940s to 1960s advertisements that showed men spanking wives over bad coffee. The weapons are metaphors for strength, intelligence and empathy, and the jarring title is deliberate: she wants people to ask why James Bond with a gun does not distress them but women with brass knuckles does.Community and accessCollecting and tastePhysical and digitalAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-12-mlow-x-astram-collector-s-corner.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-12-mlow-x-astram-collector-s-corner.htmlThu, 12 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 12 Oct 2023. A collector-media operator explains how he reads the October 2023 bear market, why AI art is Costco art, and how taste itself is an investment signal. Astram runs Collector's Corner, a media company that grew from a podcast into a newsletter, live shows, Twitter Spaces and a private paid Discord for collectors who want a more critical, investment-aware view of crypto art. He has followed crypto since late 2016, which makes him and MLow, as they joke, the old guys in the space. The conversation is a collector to collector exchange recorded over Google Meet and never published.Collecting and tasteGenerative and on-chainAI and authorshipDiscovery and the algorithm https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-12-mlow-x-patrick-amadon.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-12-mlow-x-patrick-amadon.htmlThu, 12 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000The glitch artist behind the 404 Catalog on broken discovery, conceptual glitch, the Sotheby's walkout, and why art and artist cannot be separated. Recorded weeks before it aired, this conversation catches Patrick Amadon fresh off two firestorms: his protest work taken down in Hong Kong, with the Chinese government allegedly trying to hack him and jail threats if he ever returns, and his very public withdrawal from Sotheby's first glitch only auction because it featured no women. He tells both stories plainly, saw something, said something, and traces his whole path: an art history degree, a day painting in a Hollywood courtyard that clicked, and the discovery that deleting random lines of a low res file in WordPad warps an image. Glitched versions of his paintings, hosted on Tumblr for Twitter, became the practice; a February 2021 article pulled him into NFTs.Collecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-10-mlow-x-david-henry-nobody-jr.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-10-mlow-x-david-henry-nobody-jr.htmlTue, 10 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000A studio walkthrough with the performance artist who traces generative art back to Fluxus, crashed the 90s as Alex von Furstenberg, and learned contemporary art by installing it. This episode runs as a studio tour: MLow points at objects (What is that?) and thirty years of work answer back. It opens with Deep Fried Objects, a 1994 piece of deep fried consumerist bridal imagery, double D bras, silk flowers, fake butterflies, baby shoes, once installed by the pool table at Max Fish, the raucous Lower East Side bar of young artists and hard drugs. He frames it as a deliberate turn toward kitsch and Barbie pink against the macho art of his generation, shaped by his collaborator Dominic, an immigrant who taught him that celebrities are constructs, essentially American propaganda, and by Damien Hirst's early 90s medicine cabinets.Collecting and tasteCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-05-mlow-x-ayla-el-moussa.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-05-mlow-x-ayla-el-moussa.htmlThu, 05 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000The surreal self portrait artist walks MLow through dynamic NFTs, alchemy, real gold, and the five year plan hidden inside an inverted triangle. Recorded as an hour long Google Meet and published as a 20 minute cut, this conversation catches Ayla El-Moussa mid auction: her piece Lone Tree is counting down on SuperRare while she talks. She opens with a love letter to Transient Labs, whose tooling let her mint on her own contract and index to SuperRare in seconds instead of weeks, and walks through Natural Forms in Geometric Shapes, the dynamic one of one she built with Transient's Ben: it shifts from water by day to fire by night, when a Procreate sketch layer reveals what lies beneath the surface, and even the hover colors on its custom site are pulled from the artwork.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalAI and authorshipGenerative and on-chain https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-05-mlow-x-spottie-wifi.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-05-mlow-x-spottie-wifi.htmlThu, 05 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 5 Oct 2023. The CryptoPunk rapper lays out the numbers behind the thousand true fans theory, the Snoop Dogg story, and why NFTs became his marketing channel instead of his revenue. MLow sought out Spottie WiFi deliberately: after months of interviewing visual artists and collectors, this was his window into web3 music, with a guest he had already met in person at a Metaverse Miami event during Basel. Spottie, real name Miguel Mora, tells the origin story on the record: he bought a spotted CryptoPunk in February 2021 because the spots trait (only 124 punks have it) looked underpriced, built a character with a chip on his shoulder around it, and wrote a concept album about the life and times of the best and only CryptoPunk rapper living in the metaverse. The August 2021 NFT drop sold 2,000 NFTs to 700 collectors for just under 200,000 dollars, overnight becoming a case study for the thousand true fans theory.Collecting and tasteSupply, pricing and dropsPhysical and digitalCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-05-mlow-x-wgmeets.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-05-mlow-x-wgmeets.htmlThu, 05 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000Randy Ortiz, the abstract artist behind WGMeets, on making abstraction legible, the Cult of Crypto Art, and why he stopped believing in scarcity. The published clip runs ten minutes; the full Google Meet behind it ran well over an hour, opening on Binance jitters (Randy Ortiz quit relying on exchanges roughly three years ago, and MLow admits he off ramps by trading ETH for fiat with friends) before settling into the art. Ortiz, a Dominican American graphic designer of about 22 years from New Jersey, makes digital abstracts built on fractals with AI used selectively. His fix for abstraction's accessibility problem is the description: written as a storyline that leads viewers partway toward the message, then lets them interpret freely, because he refuses to hold hands.Collecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmAI and authorshipCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-04-mlow-x-arthemort.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-04-mlow-x-arthemort.htmlWed, 04 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 4 Oct 2023. A curator to curator conversation with Brian Beccafico, formerly of Sotheby's Paris, on single artist auctions, the economics of curation, and why you should never work for free. This never published Google Meet session is the closest thing the archive has to a peer consultation. MLow opens by saying plainly that he looks up to Arthemort's curation, and lays out his own mission statement: his undergraduate thesis interviewing impact investing professionals taught him how much interviews reveal, and he runs this series because PFP communities get pushed to the forefront while the larger art communities are forgotten. Beccafico, doxxed when a Sotheby's press release printed his real name next to his pseudonym, answers with the most detailed inside account of auction house NFT work in the whole corpus.Collecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmGenerative and on-chainCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-29-mlow-x-lawyered.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-29-mlow-x-lawyered.htmlFri, 29 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 29 Sep 2023. Lawyer and collector Jonathan Kleiman on arriving at art through transactional freedom, the ethics of colluding on artists, and why NFT royalties are almost impossible to enforce in court. Jonathan Kleiman, who collects as Lawyered, opens with the outline of his path: a solo practice lawyer of almost 14 years, a dad with two daughters, and a technology hobbyist since getting the internet at 11 and living on IRC by 13. Bitcoin came late and, like the internet, as a hobby, drawn by transactional freedom and the change it could make. He always liked art but never saw himself as a collector, partly because his father is something of a hoarder. After cycles of chasing pumps he decided to stop trading and buy assets he could look back on in 20 years as a diary of his early history in crypto. Art fit: you invest in people, not projects that go to zero, and you never have to check a floor price.Collecting and tasteRoyalties and artist economicsSupply, pricing and dropsCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-29-mlow-x-so-cmplxd.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-29-mlow-x-so-cmplxd.htmlFri, 29 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 29 Sep 2023. A never published Google Meet conversation with the painter of ordinary objects, on screens, food, intuition, and how to release work you actually believe in. MLow sits down with so cmplxd, whose body of work runs under the title An Ordinary Life. The artist explains how his first series grew from the idea of screens, the small glass we live in front of almost as a ritual, and how supermarket ads and coupons pushed him toward portraits of everyday objects and food. He calls his style Digital Realism, tracing it to the realism movement and the Dutch golden age, when painters first turned to common life, and he layers in manga, anime, Warhol, Tezuka, Hopper, and Caravaggio's lighting, sharpened by his day job as a set designer.Collecting and tasteSupply, pricing and dropsAI and authorshipCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-28-mlow-x-pepenardo.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-28-mlow-x-pepenardo.htmlThu, 28 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 28 Sep 2023. A classically trained oil painter explains how one Mona Lisa frog pulled him into Fake Rares, and why memes are the art of the collective conscious. The best origin story in the unpublished set. Pepenardo spent about twelve years working as an artist and for artists across Chicago, New York, and LA, then landed in a fast track nursing program where he made no work for two years and was, in his words, starving to do something. Watching the Rare Pepe revival on Twitter, for the heck of it, for the meme of it, he painted the Mona Lisa as a frog and posted it under the name Pepenardo, name and image arriving as a single thought. People immediately connected him to the Fake Rares chat, and he fell down the rabbit hole into what he calls the largest artist collective in the world, hundreds of artists from Alpha Centauri Kid to somebody's kid, owned by nobody.Trash Art, Pepe and memesCollecting and tastePhysical and digitalCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-26-mlow-x-psych-df-deadfellas.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-26-mlow-x-psych-df-deadfellas.htmlTue, 26 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 26 Sep 2023. Deadfellaz co-founder and lead artist Psych explains the DFZ Labs restructure, the trading card game, the creator program, and why royalties are an artist's absolute right. The archive's only proper PFP founder operations interview, recorded from Australia and never published. Psych, co-founder and lead artist of Deadfellaz alongside Betty, traces the arc: the two ran interactive agencies together, started Deadfellaz as a digital identity first company (Betty inspired by punk4156 building an identity around his ape), and have now restructured into DFZ Labs, a company built to operate internationally and hold three IPs under one roof: Deadfellaz, Deadfrenz, and a new trading card game set in the same universe with original characters. Ten months of closed door work on mechanics and storylines precedes a Unity dev team starting in October.Collecting and tasteCommunity and accessRoyalties and artist economicsSupply, pricing and drops https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-21-mlow-x-the-guild.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-21-mlow-x-the-guild.htmlThu, 21 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 21 Sep 2023. The only panel in the archive: five members of The Guild, the first non fungible organization for art, look back on two and a half years of mass collaboration after winding it down. This never published hour is the archive's only multi guest recording: Valerie Geerken, Rutger van der Tas, ej thek, Shinji Akhirah, and Ytje Veenstra of The Guild, which Geerken introduces as the first non fungible organization for art. Formed in the early pandemic days of 2020 and run until December 2022, the self funded collective pushed collaboration to extremes: over 50 artists on a single project, releases like the Cyber Watch (the highest sale on Async at the time, roughly 88 ETH, later traced to the same collector group behind the Beeple purchase), Pandora's Box (the first nested NFTs on Ethereum via the Charged Particles protocol, sold for 42 ETH to an anonymous collector), a sold out esports PFP collaboration, and the Year of the Ox piece 0x, shown in Shanghai and still listed at a symbolic 278 ETH with a physical bull board donated by Shinji attached.Collecting and tasteAI and authorshipCommunity and accessDiscovery and the algorithm https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-19-mlow-x-jake-fried.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-19-mlow-x-jake-fried.htmlTue, 19 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000Hand drawn animator Jake Fried lays out the most disciplined release strategy in the archive, then walks through his process, his physicals, and the meaning of Open Eyes Flower. MLow opens by asking about Jake Fried's latest mint, Open Eyes Flower, an edition of 20 plus three artist proofs sold alongside lenticular physical prints from Avant Arte, and Fried turns the answer into a masterclass on supply. Over two plus years he has released roughly eight 1/1s, one every four to six months, each taking about a year of daily redrawing to make. He explains why he launched with two editions of 30 plus a 1/1 to seed about forty collectors on day one, why he airdropped the Blue Moon edition to his earliest holders, why he refused the 2023 open edition wave (unknown supply was the disqualifier), and why he gated his edition of 100 to Night Vision holders, selling it out before the public ever saw it. His 1/1 The Deep End sits at AOTM with a reserve around 100 ETH, and he is happy to let work sit: one SuperRare piece waited nine months before selling for about 75 ETH.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalSupply, pricing and dropsAI and authorship https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-19-mlow-x-sarah-script.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-19-mlow-x-sarah-script.htmlTue, 19 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000Never published. Recorded 19 Sep 2023. A never published conversation with calligrapher sarah script about reclaiming ownership from Instagram, preserving a dying art on chain, and hiding Mr. Rogers in the work. Recorded the same day the Jake Fried episode went out and never published, this conversation opens on the one subject the rest of the archive avoids: anonymity. Sarah script remarks how rare it is in Web3 to hear a voice and see a face at the same time, and MLow states his own position plainly: he has been doxxed the whole time he has been in Web3, does not care, and has nothing to hide, though he has met plenty of people who turned out to be nothing like the monkey JPEG they hid behind.Collecting and tasteCommunity and accessDiscovery and the algorithmGenerative and on-chain https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-15-mlow-x-neonglitch86.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-15-mlow-x-neonglitch86.htmlFri, 15 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000A game industry 3D artist explains the Griff District, his XCopy collaboration Vortex, and why he gives most of his crypto work away for free. MLow meets NeonGlitch86 fresh off hanging out together in the Griff District, the virtual space NeonGlitch86 built with Eclectic Method on OnCyber. The space is the spine of the conversation: not an art gallery with pieces on walls but a hangout with live music, DJ sets, artist tutorials, and hidden rooms, modeled in Blender with Midjourney supplying textures. NeonGlitch86 traces his path from a Mona build-a-thon contest into web3 space building, and reveals that a Mona commission for an unnamed artist turned out to be XCopy's grifter bars, the job that started the friendship behind their Vortex collaboration.Community and accessCollecting and tasteDiscovery and the algorithmPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-05-mlow-x-amber-vittoria.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-05-mlow-x-amber-vittoria.htmlTue, 05 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000Amber Vittoria on choosing editions over one of one orthodoxy, leaving errors in on purpose, and pricing paintings by labor instead of size. Amber Vittoria walks MLow through a practice built on accessibility and the visible human hand. Her work has moved from figurative to abstract: early paintings were about seeing herself physically in art after years of Victoria's Secret web design and advertising imagery knocked her confidence, and over time the theme shifted to the emotional experience of womanhood, including her anxiety disorder, carried in ribbons of color and nostalgic palettes. She entered crypto in 2017 through Bitcoin and Ethereum, sold on the idea of medical records and deeds on chain after watching her family struggle through her grandmother's final illness, then found NFTs through friends buying CryptoPunks. Lazy minting is what actually unlocked her: experimentation that cost time instead of hundreds of dollars.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalAI and authorshipGenerative and on-chain https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-05-mlow-x-lauren-lee-mccarthy.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-05-mlow-x-lauren-lee-mccarthy.htmlTue, 05 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000The creator of p5.js on artworks you must visit daily or they die, cloning her own voice before a company does, and NFTs as performance rather than pictures. Lauren Lee McCarthy tells MLow her work is rarely just an image: software, internet and performance pieces that build a call to participation into the object itself. Her recent series Good Morning, 28 unique works in HTML, JavaScript and CSS minted through Manifold and listed with Vellum, dies unless the collector opens it and greets it every day. Its older sibling Good Night is a single NFT whose owner receives a good night text from Lauren every night for as long as she lives, made in 2021 as a pointed reply to blockchain forever talk: what do we mean by forever, and after I am dead, do I care? Both works treat ownership as an ongoing performance that travels with the token.AI and authorshipCollecting and tasteGenerative and on-chain https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-02-mlow-x-michael-kutsche.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-02-mlow-x-michael-kutsche.htmlSat, 02 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000Disney character designer Michael Kutsche on escaping the studio greenlight bottleneck, painting mortality onto a mountain, and pacing an art practice against the crypto rat race. The full Google Meet recording runs about 79 minutes, far beyond the clip that was published, and it opens with the two Michaels comparing entry points: MLow in crypto since 2017 but late to the right art, Kutsche recalling the 2021 gold rush, the Clubhouse rooms where careers were made during COVID, and artists from outside the fine art world getting pulled on stage with Snoop Dogg. MLow lays out his own arc, art as therapy since childhood, a turn toward curation, and the Flowcarbon collection he curated for the a16z backed carbon company, with pieces tied to carbon credits that let him offset his whole life's emissions. Kutsche then traces his path: drawing since childhood, a taste shaped equally by comics, Star Wars and painters like Neo Rauch, no art school, a Pixar short that hooked him on 3D before Toy Story existed, and a career as a film character designer on Disney features including Alice in Wonderland and The Lion King, with another Disney film underway as they speak. His mid 90s stint in a music group now returns as the sound design on his own pieces.Collecting and tasteAI and authorshipDiscovery and the algorithmCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-31-mlow-x-adamtastic.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-31-mlow-x-adamtastic.htmlThu, 31 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000Adamtastic on spreading positivity through art, the name he invented at his lowest point, and why talking to your collectors is web3's real innovation. Adamtastic frames his whole practice as a mission: spread positivity, put smiles on faces, and reduce emotions to their simplest forms so people can see themselves in the characters and tell their own stories. He has run Fluffy Goodness, his creature project, for over fifteen years, selling physicals at craft fairs long before minting them as digital collectibles in 2021 and 2022, and he tells MLow about a recent email from a fifteen year old who got one of the creatures at age three, whose mother commissioned a giant custom version, writing years later just to say thank you for the memories. Web3 also became his most effective charity fundraising channel, with less friction and more liquidity even in a bear market.Collecting and tasteAI and authorshipCommunity and accessPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-31-mlow-x-jordan-lyall-prohibition-art-blocks.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-31-mlow-x-jordan-lyall-prohibition-art-blocks.htmlThu, 31 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000Jordan Lyall demos Heart + Craft live, his million supply collaboration with Snowfro, and explains how Prohibition turned Art Blocks Engine into an open platform. Days after Heart + Craft launched, MLow gets its co-creator to walk through the whole project on a shared screen. Heart + Craft is what Lyall and Erick Snowfro Calderon call an inclusive edition: a 3D heart built from colored blocks, technically capped at a million but designed to stay mintable for a very long time, priced at 0.01 ETH (about sixteen and a half dollars at the time) so it feels like buying a board game rather than making an investment. Every NFT carries instructions for building the heart physically, and the pair deliberately baked those instructions into the blockchain so someone decades from now can still print, mix, paint and assemble one even if every company involved is gone.Physical and digitalCommunity and accessGenerative and on-chainCollecting and taste https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-31-mlow-x-vinnie-hager.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-31-mlow-x-vinnie-hager.htmlThu, 31 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000A week before his Diary mint, Vinnie Hager traces his shapes and symbols from his grandmother's basement to murals, concrete and an OpenSea homepage drop. MLow catches Vinnie Hager a week out from Diary, his first generative open edition, and gets the origin story in full. Sifting through the archive in his grandmother's basement, middle school notebooks, high school drawings, scraps from 2015 through 2023, Vinnie pulled about a hundred finished physical drawings that told the story of seven or eight years of his life. Those hundred works were broken into twelve visual categories that became the backbone of the generative system, built with Danny Cole and the Creature World team plus the same developers who made his Letters collection two years earlier. The drop landed on OpenSea's homepage on September 7, paired with an eleven minute mini documentary by his close friend Evan McCormick that features his grandmother, and Vinnie deflects the OpenSea royalties controversy by asking people to look at the story and the artwork rather than the platform.Collecting and tasteCommunity and accessPhysical and digitalSupply, pricing and drops https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-30-mlow-x-grant-yun.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-30-mlow-x-grant-yun.htmlWed, 30 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000Grant Yun walks MLow through his walls, his wallet and his record shelf, and explains how a doctor in Wisconsin builds an art career measured in decades. This is a 45 minute studio visit disguised as an interview. MLow opens with his signature question, what should collectors know about your art, and Grant answers that they do not need to know anything: he wants people to collect for an emotional connection, because his work is deliberately vague enough that anyone can map their own life onto it. From there the two tour Grant's physical wall (a Shepard Fairey print, an Avant Arte drop with Tom Sachs, a Josef Albers print won on Artsy, his own En Route artist proof, the Midwest piece that sold at Christie's that summer, a Daniel Arsham and IKEA clock) and his digital collecting habits, which run toward Chromie Squiggles and early factory era Art Blocks.Collecting and tasteAI and authorshipGenerative and on-chainPhysical and digital https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-29-mlow-x-bryan-brinkman.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-29-mlow-x-bryan-brinkman.htmlTue, 29 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000Emmy winning animator Bryan Brinkman on building a recognizable visual language, collecting daily, and using Sotheby's as a validator for outsiders rather than a marketplace. Bryan Brinkman answers MLow's opening question in one line: his art is colorful, animated, and reflects both his own experience and his observations of the crypto art space. He entered NFTs in January 2020, but the practice goes back to short animations for Newgrounds around 2002, then a professional run through fashion advertising, toy commercials, MTV and animated series, and a long stretch doing graphics and visual effects for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live, where SNL's habit of winning Best Variety Series earned him an Emmy.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalSupply, pricing and drops https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-18-mlow-x-die-with-the-most-likes.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-18-mlow-x-die-with-the-most-likes.htmlFri, 18 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000Mark Wilson, the artist behind Die With The Most Likes, on compulsive creation, the ground beef obsession, keeping the corporate day job, and turning DM scammers into literature. Die With The Most Likes is Mark Wilson, a Midwesterner with a nine to five at what he calls a big corporation where he creates digital waste for a living, spamming people who don't care. The art has always run underneath: he has made things for as long as he can remember and says he has to create or he feels like he is rotting from the inside out. For years that meant toiling in obscurity, trying to give away huge paintings for 20 dollars in a Chicago park, until his wife forced an iPad on him because their walls were caving in under his output, still roughly two dozen new pieces a week. His artist name comes from an early Procreate piece: old people on oxygen machines kept alive by younger people's pointless digital adoration, likes flowing through the tubes.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalCommunity and access https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-14-mlow-x-ac-the-collector-6529-capital.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-14-mlow-x-ac-the-collector-6529-capital.htmlMon, 14 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000AC of 6529 Capital tells the full story of buying the Goose out of the 3AC liquidation, then lays out a fund's theory of generative art, dialogue, auction houses and memes. MLow met AC at the Christie's Art and Tech Summit and opens by explaining the show's whole premise: he is interviewing collectors and artists to map both sides of the market and figure out where he fits as a curator. Then he goes straight at the elephant in the room, the Goose. AC explains that 6529 Capital's job is collecting what represents the cultural zeitgeist of the era, treating the collection as one unified whole rather than individual pieces, with four fund portfolios public on OpenSea. Through 6529Guardian, the fund had been talking to the 3AC liquidators since day one, and when Ringers #879 hit Sotheby's the internal debate came down to one question: would you rather have the Goose or an alien punk? They chose the one of one, transcendent memetic object, and AC calls it the fund's Statue of Liberty, better in community hands than sitting silent in a billionaire's wallet.Collecting and tasteTrash Art, Pepe and memesCommunity and accessGenerative and on-chain https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-11-mlow-x-max-osiris.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-11-mlow-x-max-osiris.htmlFri, 11 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000Max Osiris, co-originator of Trash Art, on how the movement was born from platform bans, why he declared it dead, and the two clocks a crypto artist lives on. MLow opens with the definitional question: what is Trash Art? Osiris gives the origin from inside. He and ROBNESS were banned from a platform at the same time, and ROBNESS launched Trash Art as a rebellion against the bans. The aesthetic was PhotoMosh: deliberately low effort, and that was the point. Everyone was welcome to make trash art, which made it an on ramp for people who did not think they could make art at all. Then came the break: he and ROBNESS fell out over moves Osiris did not agree with, and Osiris declared trash art dead, a declaration he cheerfully admits is itself a trash art gesture.Trash Art, Pepe and memesCollecting and taste https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-09-mlow-x-eclectic-method.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-08-09-mlow-x-eclectic-method.htmlWed, 09 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000Eclectic Method answers MLow's standard questions in character as his own fictional manager Richard, roasting himself in the third person the entire time. This episode is a put-on from the first line. "Richard, Eclectic Method's manager" explains that the artist does not do interviews because he is boring to talk to, so Richard will answer on his behalf. What follows is seven minutes of the artist insulting himself in the third person while smuggling in real answers about his career: video remixer of movies and TV shows, then dance parties, then AI art and crypto art. The transcript also preserves the show's sung theme, roughly "MLow, it's the MLow Show, talking to people about crypto."AI and authorshipCommunity and accessCollecting and taste https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-07-27-mlow-x-coldie-part-1.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-07-27-mlow-x-coldie-part-1.htmlThu, 27 Jul 2023 12:00:00 +0000Coldie walks MLow through his collector thesis, the buyback of his own Genesis piece, and a lifetime of stereoscopic craft from View-Masters to lenticulars. This is a full 42 minute Google Meet conversation, and the surviving transcript actually captures MLow and Coldie's second sit down: MLow opens by welcoming him back, noting that video now lets viewers see the wall of trinkets behind him (a Van Arman, a Die With The Most Likes, a David Henry Nobody Jr among them). The first stretch is Coldie the collector. From 2018 on, selling pieces for one ETH at about 180 dollars, he committed roughly 30 percent of every sale to buying peers' work from the early SuperRare Telegram crowd, on the thesis that the collectors, not the artists, were going to be the winners when introductory prices caught up to reality.Collecting and tastePhysical and digitalPreservation and provenance https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-05-14-mlow-x-andre-oshea.htmlhttps://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-05-14-mlow-x-andre-oshea.htmlSun, 14 May 2023 12:00:00 +0000A 28 second published clip with Andre Oshea that carries no recoverable interview audio. The posted video runs 28 seconds and the machine transcript captures only the words "Thank you." Whatever conversation MLow and Andre Oshea had, it does not survive in this clip, which plays as music or visuals over an outro rather than an interview.