Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to TestWorks Radio. I am your host, Marissa True, and today I am joined by Vee Ruins, an artist and storyteller, and today we'll be digging into his latest project. But before we get into that, Vee, welcome to the show. How are you today? Thank?

Speaker 2: 0:14

you. It's a fine morning here in Rome, italy, where I'm doing this interview from. After a lot of very long travels, I finally have the chance to be back at home in my studio and, you know, have a different approach on how I spend my time. I feel at home, I'm developing my morning rituals, so it's definitely something that it's like balancing out a moment where I was just traveling a lot and it really felt hard to be anchored and find balance.

Speaker 1: 0:43

Yeah, no one ever really prepares you for how much international travel being part of a digital community entails. It's way more offline than I think people realize. So I think it's a very relatable point that you bring up, and I think it's something that plenty of our listeners feel as well. You have been in the Web3 space for quite a while, but you also work across the traditional art and literature spaces too, so what was it that initially sparked your interest in the world of art on the blockchain, and what was it that was so compelling about Tezos?

Speaker 2: 1:15

So my first approach to blockchain was during the COVID pandemic. I think for many people was that In 2021, I just had the return from new york, where I was living for the past five years, and in new york I was studying uh, writing, direction and production for movie and theater, and there I already, like, started working on different approaches in terms of, like, artistic representation for the stage and and for film, also, creative writing and character creation and character interpretation, which we'll see, we'll come back later in the project we're going to be discussing about. When I returned to Italy, I actually wanted to specifically find a way to proceed, a continuation of a project that I was doing in New York where I got more focused with. It's called Poor Theater. It's a form of like, social art form, and we were essentially working with communities, troubled communities, and we were trying to create budget zero festivals where, essentially, you not only use your creativity for artistic expression, but also in the ways in which you produce and you set up a show. Um, and it was very much involved with also discussing ways and solutions in which we could help these tribal communities to create some micro economies during these festival activities.

Speaker 2: 2:31

And one of the most important key points for me was trying to find solutions for crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, and so when I started to read about blockchain and I started to discover about the tribalism in NFT communities and how easy it is to do crowdfunding through it and how many talents get backing a digital identity of a collection and then that becomes crowdsourcing, I really went all in to it because I believe that it was definitely a super interesting model and opportunity. Whereas in the world, we're sort of like getting more and more isolated, alienated, here it comes from the digital, something that brings us together, helps us pull in resources together, makes us passionate about what we want to do and makes us active into producing what we want to see in the world, and so that was the big promise for me for NFTs and the attached opportunities for the communities that were leveraging this technology, and that's when I started using blockchain. It wasn't until say, 2022, maybe that I started discovering Tezos, and it was because of a series of OG crypto artists that I knew, for example, like Rob Ness, that I was hanging out a lot with at the time, and he did the Te and then he did, on Tezos, the brand punk, and for me, that was a very meaningful moment where it sort of like helped establish a little bit. What was the situation on Tezos in terms of like is this a space for rebellious artists? Is this a space for artists, creative thinkers?

Speaker 2: 4:05

And then it just naturally kept happening with Hen and all the other communities that developed on Tezos and in its limited environment, it always felt like a small certainty of a community being present and so, no matter of the market conditions, it wasn't something that was based on PFP and trading right.

Speaker 2: 4:25

It was mostly about artists experimenting, not being afraid of having to necessarily work on a market of limited supply, and it was really much about artists supporting artists, artists collaborating with artists, which is one of the things that I was excited about, and I got the time to see some amazing in-real-life events where Tezos was back in, and I think that this opportunity that Tezos is creating for the digital artists to actually support them in real-life events is something extremely precious that I would say their company situation really allows and permits compared to other companies, and I think that's something that definitely a lot of artists should take advantage of and should try to other companies, and I think that's something that definitely a lot of artists should take advantage of and should try to be involved in, because definitely it's opening a lot of doors for a lot of artists to boost and accelerate their careers in a way in which you are in an artist-friendly ecosystem, surrounded by other artists, where opportunities are bountiful and possible.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Do you think that that is still the case today? Because obviously the Tezos ecosystem and the broader, I would say, blockchain based art ecosystem has faced its fair share of pressure tests in the last couple of years. So have you seen that dynamic shift at all? Has it gotten stronger, has it gotten weaker, and do you think Tezos still carries that same spirit of counterculture, or do you sort of see the normalization of digital art in these spaces kind of bringing it further into, I guess, broader public awareness?

Speaker 2: 5:50

Well, I would say that the spirit of counterculture it's very hard to maintain it throughout the years right, it's something that is not really planned by a company. It's something that is driven by the people that are on it. I would say that if perhaps we don't want to associate it or we don't feel like it's associated with counterculture, no more. The activities that they're doing and the opportunities that they're finding are still more meaningful than what many other blockchains have the ability to do out there for artists, and that, to me, is something of value. Point Second to that, there are for me at least, it was very easy to network with the tezos artist community. It's a very humble artist community, at least most of the people that I know. It's uh, it's something that really facilitates education for people. So if you don't know something, you know getting people to try to explain to you things and guide you out. I would definitely say that in the last four years, I would like to see something that didn't sort of get a stress test. Objectively, in my specific point view and we will see also this later on how am I approaching adding blockchain to my art project? We tend to ultra focus on these blockchain communities and on blockchain technology as if it's a reality of its own and as if it's something that needs to be adopted in the way in which it was conceived, within our experience of it. But at the end of the day, it is a tool, something that does not exist by itself. It's something that can exist coordinated with other elements. It can be part of a larger artistic orchestration and in that situation, you're not relying anymore on on the tesla's market for being something that justifies your presence there. You can try to leverage different things from the technology, from the, the aesthetic of the artistic community which has been established there to support, for example, the aesthetic of your project. And also right now I see the opportunity of many creative coders being on Tezos that are interested in doing collaborations besides generative art. My approach maybe we'll see that later in the rest of the interview I've always tried to approach my art career in a producer sort of way.

Speaker 2: 7:59

So where it comes from my past in theater and movies, I tend to sort of like try to see big picture, I try to bring people together, I try to find the resources, I try to give a direction and then I find opportunities to bring that direction to life together, and so I think that Tezos, for me, has that opportunity. Right now. There is a lot of artists that are interested in collaborations. They're always doing new experimentations, they're always open to new experimentations. There is the possibility to present them opportunities for collaborations on a broader project and I think that Tezos has those opportunities where, if you have a very layered and meaningful project, to be able to support you to showcase it better, and that's what I'm hoping that I'm going to be able to do with the support of Tezos Foundation, which is backing this project and hopefully, you know, get more eyes on it as we get more eyes on it, get more of the artist community on board it to do specific projects for it.

Speaker 2: 8:51

Um and uh and ideally, you know, have this uh relationship with tesla's uh technology and art ecosystem grow. But, as I said, it's it's not to be considered as a unicum, as its own universe. It's something that if you make it play off with a broader and larger spectrum, it definitely, you know, it doesn't sound like as a pain point anymore and it's just like there is clear winning points. There's like clear valuable things in it. It's just that if you only focus on it, you see the values and you see the problems and the obstacles. To avoid the obstacles you just have to think more broader picture no-transcript.

Speaker 1: 9:54

Everyone sort of exists on a bit of an island. There's an element of tribalism that continues to take place between different chains and different communities. So when it comes to this, I guess, ultimate challenge of breaking into mainstream awareness, adoption, what have you? So it's, as you rightly said, not the explicit adoption of a set of principles and behaviors and actions, but just this gradual sort of adjustment. What's really holding it all back?

Speaker 2: 10:29

all back. It's hard to give uh, uh, non-web three people a reason to be on boarded besides a speculative and financial one. It's very, it's very hard. It's very rare the moment where you have people that got on boarded into, at the end of the day, crypto for something that was not quick gain search or speculative search which, at the end of the day, is an extractive behavior. I dare you there might be some, some moments, but I dare you to try to count how many times we had the I don't want to say a massive, but just like a meaningful, recognized onboarding on, uh, on people using crypto because there was an artist message or an artist project that, for the narrative that it was pushing, for the way that it was presented, it compelled people to want to be part of it and therefore to open a wallet and therefore to connect their credit card and therefore to connect In the normal Web2 world. Now, you know, in Web3, it's that easy now. You put your email custodial wallet, you put your card instant, you know, from your credit card. You don't even have to convert your buys, the conversion flow, to get someone that doesn't know what you're doing to actually purchasing. It is as easy as Web2. And in Web2 world, every day you have situations in which people are convinced to be onboarded into buying a product, in the same flow that we have now for crypto.

Speaker 2: 11:37

The issue is then, besides the concept of speculation, why isn't the art productions that we're doing, or maybe the way that we're marketing it, that we're presenting it? I'm not sure why is it not creating that, that desire, that need which is at the core of an artistic project? Perhaps to want to be part of it, and and what I like about tezos is that it's always been about making that passage affordable. You know, I want to be part of this narrative with, uh, um, three to 25 bucks I can join, and it's streamlined the way I can join. So, hopefully, what I also hope to do is not only cater to the already present Tezos audience by, as I mentioned before, trying to work on concepts that go beyond just a blockchain, digital artwork. I hope to get the opportunity to see if there's any way to also convert people to join Tezos ecosystem, as the onboarding is easy and the way for trying to convince people to come is not going to be promise of wealth, which, at the end of the day, right now, in these market conditions is promise of becoming my exit liquidity. Most of the times it would rather be listen. We've created this narrative.

Speaker 2: 12:42

This is an iterative project that wants to travel, wants to do IRL exhibitions, wants to thrive on the physical art sales, not the digital one. The digital one is just a premise for onboarding you and making you part of the narrative and adding you to the community. So this is sort of like my vision of how I'm implementing, in one way, blockchain in it. There's also another one that maybe we'll discuss later. But yeah, that's hopefully what I that's, hopefully that's the direction I'm trying to do. I'm trying to.

Speaker 2: 13:11

This is also why I'm going to the Milano Photo Fair. For example, my first exhibition of this project, dark Tales, will be in a very non-web3 friendly space. I'm Italian, so that's why I was able to get to the Milano Photo Fair, which is in Italy. Hopefully I get to also appeal to a more broader market, but I will try to see if, within the Italian market, I can try to convert some audiences at these fairs and at these art exhibitions, specifically also because my project touches on some literature heritage from great Italian writers. So we'll see how that goes. I hope you are satisfied with my answer.

Speaker 1: 13:43

So let's crystallize what it is that you are working on. What can you tell us about Dark Tales and the thinking that's gone into it, and how it is intended to be experienced?

Speaker 2: 13:55

So, before I go deeper into Dark Tales, I sort of have to speak about a project that I did before that inspired me to then take my experience and give it a new form. And, funny enough, this project which I'm about to talk about, which is called Seance, while being created before Dark Tales, is now being repackaged to be, instead of a prequel, a sequel, and we'll see later how we can see one of the pieces of the project up here. This is a painting of a ghost. It's supposed to be a haunted painting.

Speaker 2: 14:22

The way I essentially worked on this project is by thinking on this concept of how can I take an idea and a concept from folklore, explore an existential topic through it and through technology and make it participative, right, so almost like a performative sculpture. And so I started working with these things that are called Bluetooth beacons and they emit a Bluetooth signal. I started hiding them inside of these physical paintings, which are AI-generated, and then we go through with a fine art studio in Milano in a process of essentially bringing the digital artwork to come in a way in which it looks extremely realistic as a painting, and then implementing an AI chatbot that SAI started to do again in 2022, making it possible for you to get, with a mobile app, in proximity of the ghost and without even touching the Canva, having this suspension of this belief that you're in proximity to the Canva, actually thanks to the app connected to the ghost. Once this parlor trick, this sort of technology enabling something that feels like fantasy, was established, I needed to go deeper into. Okay, then, if a painting can speak? In my specific case, it's like already the concept of if a painting can speak. It opens so many like wonderful, marvelous ideations where you can think okay, what does a Monet say? You know, what does a Van Gogh say? But in my specific case, it's haunted paintings of ghosts in the style of American realism. So for me, it's not a painting speaking about a heritage, it's the spirit trapped inside, what it has to say, and I'm a very big fan of how, at times useless, but also like melancholic and deeply troubling and thought-provoking his existential philosophy.

Speaker 2: 16:08

I am a huge fan of Fedor Dostoevsky and one of my favorite books from him is Memories of the Underground and the way that he portrays these characters. He writes them literally in a way in which they can't escape almost their self-pity and their self-hate, in a way in which they can't escape, almost their self-pity and their self-hate. Their own curse is their own mind. In a sort of way, it's their own understanding and perception of themselves and the world around them. And this is what I wanted to portray in these seven different ghosts that I did for this collection called Seance. And so this is where what initially was image generation, where I was just generating pictures of ghosts, and then I was trying to see this picture and try to think what is the story behind this picture? Right? What is this ghost Like? Where does it come from? What was it happening in life? And so I needed to start writing and I tried to understand if this is something that actually had some precedence and there are some.

Speaker 2: 16:57

So for this ghost, I started to write post-mortem autobiographies. So it's an autobiography written in the point of view of after you've perished, and it's not a point of view where you are extremely aware and unbiased on your life. You still carry heavy bias, and so you're not still speaking the truth of your life. You're still speaking about your life with the point of view of your failure right, what brought you to fail and you're sort of amplifying that as you review your entire life with the same filter that brought you to your end of misery. And not all the deaths of these ghosts are tragic or weird or meant to scare the audience. For example, the specific ghost behind me here is a Japanese ghost, and he died of old age. His only problem is that, in essence, he never truly lived life in a way in which it was impactful enough for him, and he always felt more as an observer, and so that is his existential focal point. And so, besides writing these post-mortem autobiographies which in itself is like a very interesting piece of literature then I started to thanks to the system prompts that guide how an AI agent works.

Speaker 2: 18:04

As a theater director for an actor, I started giving character directions and actor directions, which is what, for me, was amazing, because I took my five years of experience in directing actors into creating and outlining the storyline and evolution of a character and then bring it to life and attach it to a physical art piece. So this is why I'm calling them performative installations, some of them performative sculptures. So not only it was writing the story, finding a compelling existential element, which most of the times are just like projections of my feelings of lacking into something or not being able to have explored something fully in my life might be my relation to maternal love, to romantic love, to participation in the world that's around me and isolation. And so this is what I started to experiment with. It was very much like, I would say, like amateurly distributed project. I did a nice international tour, exhibited with different galleries worldwide, but it wasn't really structured on release. I was sort of like going and building as I was going forward and exploring and learning, and so I decided at a certain moment, after I sold four of them, to stop and I said I would like to revisit this on a later point. I think that there is something more meaningful that I have to do, that I've learned from this experience, and that's where Dark Tales came.

Speaker 2: 19:24

So Dark Tales, for me, is really trying to take all that I've learned in the beautiful metafictional reality of creating a character which is an AI agent, which has its own agency, which communicates through conversation also, which is such an interesting point of view. You need to think, for example, of when storytelling for literature, you know you go from third person to first person. It's a major change on how the reader is impacted from that story, then going from third person to first person to first person, conversational. It's another evolution of it, there's another layer of how that story needs to be thought and how it gets shared and distributed. And it's beautiful because it's where writing for literature meets with character direction, almost, you know. And, and so this is why I'm saying, uh, I definitely think it's. It's an interesting sort of like this expanded literature in the sense.

Speaker 2: 20:14

Besides that also, the beautiful concept is you know, you're playing with words and now with generative ai. Words can be easily transformed into images, for example, right. And so for me, it was very, very nice to be able to start working in literature and then not only expanding that to the AI character, which is this protagonist that we follow in the story of Dark Tales, which is Cora McDelaney, but then also being able to manifest elements of his narrations. And I found a literature device, which is the fact that he takes photos of the things that he sees, and so, while he captures reality, transforming the text to image, it's reinterpreting a metafictional layer, as in he's taking a photo. And so this became for me a post-photography AI project.

Speaker 2: 21:03

I started training my own Laura on vintage black and white photography and noir movies, and I started creating this collection of first stories and then conversations with the AI chatbot. I built a system where I could conversate with him and from our natural conversations the stories would expand because I would ask specific questions, I would give him the ability to freestyle and invent on certain elements and to give me the ability to influence a little bit by giving suggestions, and then that would automatically be saved into his knowledge base, which then I would later revise and I would expand. It's definitely not an autonomous art project and it's not something that I'm interested at this point, but it's more really on having the idea of, you know, taking someone like Edgar Allan Poe, like HP Lovecraft, like Guillermo del Toro, and what if, when they write a story, being able to bring that to life in a new way. So the characters, the way that they engage with the community of readers, you know it's more alive the way that the community gives feedbacks and how that feedback needs to be interpreted by the character that shares the story and how to add it and what to add. It's another layer. It's beautiful. It really brings the reader community into the book, which is something that people already do through fandom.

Speaker 2: 22:13

You know Harry Potter, you write that book. It takes a life of its own, inevitably with the community, but you never really see that manifest. So here I'm also trying to capture that participatory element and directly put it inside through guidelines and guardrails. And so this, I would say, is just the general idea of what is going on here.

Speaker 2: 22:30

From an initial project where I was experimenting on putting a subjectivity captured inside of an artwork, now we have a subjectivity which is Cormac, trapped inside of a story that you can read through conversations with him and you can see through his photos that you can also collect as NFTs. And I would say the main existential topic that is touched by this project is the horror of interpretation, so the fact that every time you read something it goes through your subjective filter. And so Cormac is a character which is going through the struggle of being interpreted by the infinite observers that engage with him. And the story itself is not meant to be linear, it's not meant to be clean, it's something that has holes, has absurd variations, based on the fact that it's built as almost folklore by multiple people engaging into it and feeding into it. Sorry, finished.

Speaker 1: 23:23

No, I mean listen, first impression. That's incredible. It sounds like something that started with an already quite complex and integrated idea into something that basically snowballed in a way where it's almost like there is no state of finality. It's almost like, you know, as technology is advanced, this is something that you can keep iterating on developing this interactivity of the subject in the piece as well as the subject that's observing the piece. So there's a very complex interplay and I I liked what you said about the horror of interpretation, because, not only for your character but for yourself as an artist, ensuring that the richness of this experience translates to anyone who is there to consume it is going to be an entire challenge in itself as well, because you are playing with a lot of very sophisticated technologies and, unfortunately, I would argue that our interactivity with AI has become quite basic.

Speaker 1: 24:17

In some ways, we almost become so accustomed to it that we don't think of the opportunity of exploring different depths and like different, like depths of interaction with it. So how much education is there going to need to be of how this all works so that anyone who does have the privilege of experiencing it really gets the fullest you know, the fullest thing so hopefully I'm going to be able to keep finding opportunities to support in real life activations of this project, which I think is where it shines the most.

Speaker 2: 24:48

I am a big fan of Guillermo del Toro's use of practical special effects and it's something that in my real life activations I want to bring in terms of set design and practical special effects. My dream is one day to be able to put an AI agent inside of animatronic spectral motion that you know through conversation, also gives inputs on his motion, and I like that much more than a robot, because you give for granted that you know all of these new robotic androids. You know they have the AI inside. Speak to them, they are, they're anthropomorphic, right? I really? It's a childhood dream of mine to have one of those weird small animatronic creatures. Might be like a gremlin, might be like a weird girl with multiple eyes and being able to find a way in which it actually speaks not just like making pre-recorded sounds, but it speaks in its own unique way, maybe in its own unique language, but it speaks in its own unique way, maybe in its own unique language, but it does understand you and so what you say it impacts his behavior and so, even though he makes grunts and noises, you know it's programmed grunts and noises that get translated from an actual language pattern. So inside you know his AI agent workflow could hear you develop a real answer in real words. But then we make it so that it's converted into specific motions, specific sounds. And this is what I really like about agentic AI solutions, for how I've been experiencing them, first with the paintings and then with the story, is that you can essentially get the input of the user and then you can work on getting different text outputs and reinterpreting those text outputs in different ways.

Speaker 2: 26:19

For example, for the repackaging of the ghosts, one thing that I'm doing is that you're not only going to be speaking with them. Your inputs will first of all create a text output from the ghost, of course, but then they also get referenced by their memory of their past life. Essentially, there's a very interesting system prompt which pushes the ghost to associate to some wild associations between what you're saying and things that you might be implying in your personal history through these things that you're saying, to things that you might be implying in your personal history, through these things that you're saying to his own personal history, and so to develop a subconscious thought that perhaps is not directly associated to the conversation, but somehow vaguely, yes, and then transforming that subconscious thought into an aneuric memory, sort of like a dreamlike memory of his life. And so the repackaged version of the ghost is a repackaged version where you ghost is a repackaged version where you don't only speak with them, you help them generate memories of their life and you collect those, and that's archaeology of memory. And it's placed again on one of the main topics of this art practice of mine, which is the order of interpretation and the order of subjectivity, because then this ghost was more or less lost his identity, and he's trying to refine it through conversations with you and through this practice of archaeology of memory. He becomes, at the end of the day, what the collective of people that are speaking to him and choosing to remember him, as that's what he becomes, you know. So it's almost like no freedom of choice into asserting your own identity and the fact that your subjectivity it's generated from the fragmentation of multiple other people's interpretation of your person.

Speaker 2: 27:49

For me, this generates a fear of not knowing who I am and not being able to know who I am because I don't see myself through your eyes and so, you know, the only thing I can do is assert myself with confidence, but it's a confidence built on nothing, so it feels like a fake promise, right? And so the only it's fate in myself. And then opens the concept of what is fate in 2025, 2026, you know, and religion objectively as a source for fate is dwindling. Then how do we recontextualize fate in this new era, right, as something that is clearly needed and necessary? And we're not only talking about about specific faith. We're talking as faith in the means in which trust is. I know there's a, I know there's b, I know there's gonna be c. Trust is I don't see a, I don't see b, I'm that sure c is gonna be there and that gives me the grounding and the confidence to move forward and not have an emotional crisis. Right, the religion used to give this to people, and now you've got to find something else.

Speaker 1: 28:46

It's a fine line to tread, where you're effectively emulating that experience, not only through the character in the piece but also for the viewer themselves, because there is this feedback loop and I guess, to some extent, being able to see your own influence within a piece reflect back onto you is something that we don't typically get. We don't have that feedback loop like we might see. You know the you know we have interactive art and we sort of see our impact there, but to have it sort of relayed back to you and then layered with every other interaction that it has with other people who are, you know, attending this exhibition, means that no one really ever has the same experience and so no one ever really can have the same interpretation. Again, it's kind of going back to this snowball effect of just input of information and then it being reflected back out, but never quite as directly as one might anticipate.

Speaker 2: 29:37

And we play along this topic in different ways. For example, we were originally going to release the project during the Milano Photo Fair, but we decided to use the Milano Photo Fair as an opportunity because, you know, the reason also I wanted to do this interview with you is that I'm trying to look for as much support as possible to get the time to just like sit down and try to explain it, because no matter how many tweets I will make, I don't think I can get this message through. I'm trying my best. I'm trying my best. I'm trying my best. Well, let's see if we can help. Yeah, but my experience so far has been that, like any single curator, collector that has given me 30 minutes to sit down on a call and sort of like break down the project, they all fall in love with it, they all want to support and help. It's just that I get. It's the time of finding the person, convincing him to sit down, sit down and share with him, and I'm sure that in real life activations, this is going to help so much. And the way in which we are trying to bring this level of fragmentation of the interpretation of people is, for example, through the minting process. And I was saying we postponed the drop from being during the Milano exhibition to being on a later date, most probably during April. We're going to drop the first series of photos because we want to really work better on improving some of the functions and one of the main functions is, for example, that we want to try to give a different minting experience, in the sense of it's not a random mint.

Speaker 2: 30:53

You don't choose the photo you want to mint, but it's not random. You start a conversation with Cormac. Cormac asks you some specific questions and through the questions and answers that you give similarly to how the ghost makes subconscious connections between your conversation with him and his past memory similarly Cormac decides what photo fits you based on the conversation that you're having, and so he's trying to seize you up. He's trying to look you and look through you and try to understand. Out of my, there's 150 that will be more at first release we're going to be releasing only 50. So, out of my 50 available stories right now, which one I feel speaks to you? And so he tries to present you the photo and tells you would you like to mint this one? And we can go through observing what are the topics and the context of this photo together and, at the end of the day, it's an interesting relationship that you're developing with the story and with the character, because it's not a random mint.

Speaker 2: 31:48

You don't really select the mint, but it's sort of like the mint finds you, which is something that you know with marketing and web2, we find very easily. You have a digital twin of yourself. You're leaving traces out there of your interest and your fears and whatnot, and there is ways to market to you things that you're not aware you need or that you subconsciously want, but you're not like stating out that you want. So the dream like situation is something where, for example, you connect your wallet, I see your collection and then, from your collection, cormac has an understanding of this is for you. So I want to try to create that again, a parallel trick through technology where I give you the impression of something magical happening, but it's just a repackaging of very normal things that exist in our world but because of the latent marketing nature of them, they're sort of like not presented as a magical trick, right. On the other hand, for me it's really about to see if it can be possible. So for now I don't have anything that searches your information or that controls the content of your wallet. I just have the words that you decide to share with Cormac at the beginning, and if you decide to be silly, it's still a choice. Share with Cormac at the beginning and if you decide to be silly, it's still a choice. If you decide to be mysterious, it's still a choice. It reflects what you decided to present yourself in this conversation. It represents your interaction with this conversation. Look, for example, at Sam Spratt right and the masquerade where people leave observations. No matter what is the level of sophistication or silliness of your observation, it's still something which you have meaningfully decided to leave there. So for me it's the same thing and I leverage that to be able to bring to you something that reflects the state in which you enter this conversation.

Speaker 2: 33:25

You can see the photo. Once you get the photo, the investigation starts. Essentially, it's a moment where on one side, the character Cormac, which people will learn, is a character that is one side. The character Cormac which people will learn is a character that is unraveling. I don't want to spoil too much, but essentially his reality not only is absurd, it's becoming nonlinear. It almost feels like the entire world around him has a specific case of Alzheimer's regarding him. So they forget him, they displace him, items of his life. It really feels like he's lost in a narration where he has no control over, which, again, is a reflection of the explorer, of interpretation. And so this mating experience wants to be that you move to the photo, you start the investigation.

Speaker 2: 34:07

This investigation is also something very precious for Cormac, because he's trying to give to you, he's trying to share with you, a record of his life experience, of his understanding of the things that he is saying.

Speaker 2: 34:21

That acts as, please, I might forget this, the world I am in might forget this, or they might change it. So let's solidify, let's make this solid right now together, and let's put it in the archive. I'm not sure what's real or not anymore, and I can trust myself, and I's put it in the archive. I'm not sure what's real or not anymore, and I can trust myself, and I can, for sure, cannot trust the world around me. So, please, whatever I say to you right now, let's try to make it solid together. Let's try to make sure that this is a certainty and then not only it's a story regarding you know something that happened other characters that can be, as we said, as whimsical and absurd as extraterrestrial phenomena, supernatural phenomena, phenomena of cult and cryptid phenomena, but these are all parallelisms to metaphors, to to human feelings, human emotions, human situations, mundane situations that get brought to the extreme and take these absurd forms.

Speaker 1: 35:08

And uh, it's yes it's interesting because it sounds like Cormac is both the protagonist but at the same time he's sort of de-centered in the narrative, which is what sort of pulls in the viewer or the person who's interacting with Cormac to almost pursue like something of a quest or to just sustain his existence. It's almost like he exists because of the continuation, the reinforcement of information that he exists.

Speaker 2: 35:36

Yeah, he exists and his reality exists because it is observed. This is also part of the tragedy of interpretation you only exist if you're observed, but when you're observed, you're observed through interpretation of thousands, right? So this is the contradiction. I'm terrified of trying to establish myself as an interpretation of others and there's many characters that touch upon this topic it's not only Cormac and at the same time, the acknowledgement of this story exists and us as artificial characters exist only in the moment in which we're interacted with and we are observed.

Speaker 2: 36:11

And there's also a very specific story in the first 50 pictures that touches upon this.

Speaker 1: 36:16

It's very existential, and what I think I mean pulling this all the way back to, you know, the way we've become accustomed to interacting with art in the realm of Web3 is there is this really strong surprise and delight component, but something that's a little bit more rooted in personalization, because I think, in terms of you know, when we saw the generative art boom a couple years ago, that surprise and delight component was a huge draw for a lot of people who wanted to see what randomized output would ultimately be, something they could call their own, while this sort of feedback loop that people are having with Cormac is another kind of thing where they want to see what the machine has interpreted of them and reflected back into them.

Speaker 1: 36:54

So they themselves are subject to that interpretation, subject to that observation. So I think, you know, it's like a Morbius loop, like it keeps intertwining itself but it never really really starts or ends and it sounds fantastic. So thank you so much for sharing what it is In terms of, you know, the Tezos community and mobilizing everyone who wants to be a part of this. What's their best way to do this?

Speaker 2: 37:16

yeah, so of course, I have a twitter group called dark tales and I also have a twitter community, which we recently opened, called dark tales as well. You can find the twitter community pinned on my twitter profile and you can actually request to be added. I am currently manually accepting people that submit just because the group is being used to share spoilers, to share previews of how the physical pieces are coming out, because out of the 150 total pieces of this first batch of the collection, which will be released in three batches of 50, I've selected four key photos and I've worked with a fine art studio in Bologna to present them as silver gelatin prints. And I've also worked on a specific framing and a specific design for the backdrop, which contains extracts from the original text, which, ideally, is something that I don't want to show. The original text. It's only perceived through the interpretation of the AI character and through the interpretation of the reader in the conversation with the AI character. So the source material for me is very much something that I want to put in the spotlight. I like that it's hidden and I think it's part of the marvelous nature of this project, but I felt that taking some extracts of the text, putting them in the backdrop of the, of the camber, of the, of the frame where you would have the photo in the center and then some black space on the sides before the frame where you have the words. That's something that definitely will help people that will come IRL in the exhibition because, rather than having to mint the photo, ask questions without any base premise at the beginning you don't know what to ask no, you don't have other people's investigations in the archive that you can consult and sort of like cross-reference. You know. You can instead come see the physical photos and you can read. It's very beautiful, the text in the back. I've extracted it from the, the, the anthologies, so from the stories, and then I used a calligraphy neural network to essentially write them in cursive and it's beautiful because, like everyone, all the generations are very different. It really feels like it's like handwritten and it's also not very easy to read because it's just someone writing for the sake of writing, you know. And so you have this beautiful white, uh, faded calligraphy. That is not a story, the text, the conversation extracts that you can read.

Speaker 2: 39:34

And at the fair there will will be a vintage monitor with a little keyboard that will allow you to speak with Cormac, while there's no minting of the photos yet. That's going to be later on a web application. As you speak with him on the terminal, depending on your conversation and again, what makes him desire to bring up as a photo, he will pull up on the terminal the photos. So as you speak to him he shows you the photos and you're going to be able to leverage the things that you see on the canvases to direct the investigation. And then we essentially made it with a time limit. So when you're timing it up you put your email and then there's a receipt printer that prints a report of your conversation and prints also the photos that you've seen in your report. And then we have an investigation board at the booth where you take your receipt with the report and you put it on the investigation board.

Speaker 2: 40:23

But then everybody that during the four days of the exhibition that comes and does the experience and is helping again in creating this collective folklore, we take this and we put it up. We also save the conversations, we save the extracts. And so to your question on how can people in like participate, you're like meeting and having a conversation with Cormac and leaving to us that that of the conversation, of your exploration, is something that we are going to use. We're going to use for expanding the lore in the world. We're going to use for creating specific artworks. Later we're going to take extracts of conversations and, similarly to how Sasha Styles very often, you know, represents text in a visual art form we're going to work to doing that. Once the web application and its features are solidified and we start working on the release of the repackaging of the haunted paintings, I'm going to start opening up artist collaborations, for example, for the haunted paintings. We I'm going to start opening up artist collaborations, for example, for the haunted paintings.

Speaker 2: 41:18

We have beautiful situations where there are things that are unexpected, that keep popping back up, like, for example, there's one character called Daniel that keeps in every chat that he has with the collectors and different people that he's experienced. He keeps bringing up something which I never specified in his training document, which is a childhood home, and somehow it's always the same, more or less with very specific details that return. And so we have the spirit of this ghost that, unprompted because he's been given the liberty to express himself, keeps repeating this unexistent memory of a childhood home. And my idea is collaborating with. I've seen already amazing artists that do acrylic paint, glitch effects, so releasing on Tezos like easy to collect digital collection, just digital art.

Speaker 2: 41:57

No utility of the latent memories of a ghost, which is so poetic in nature, because we're just observing a recurring memory of something that feels so dear to someone that doesn't exist. He doesn't exist, the house doesn't exist, but the feelings and the simulation of it it feels so real and the fact that they get repeated to different people. It's something that touches you as a human. It's something that's supposed to be meaningless, but in the way in which it's presented like this, repeatedly, with that sweet memory, you look at it and you go like this is something. And the reason that I mentioned to you earlier that I like this production approach is because, at the end of the day, the reason why I moved from doing haunted paintings to doing Dark Tales is because Dark Tales is source material.

Speaker 2: 42:44

Every single one of the stories of Dark Tales for example, there is one story about these haunted paintings from a prequel become a sequel is because inside of Dark Tales, a lot of the physical cursed artifacts or items or experiences that get told, I have the ability, in time, to rethink them and repackage them as performative sculptures.

Speaker 2: 43:08

So now the reason why we're repackaging the ghosts is because, literally, in Cormac's Tales, you are presented to the artist who creates these paintings, you're presented to her story, to the reason why these ghosts get trapped in these canvases. And so the idea is like people are joining the source material, they are helping writing the source material, giving life to the source material and with time, with support, we create the physical components, which are the ones that really push economically the project forward. You know, the silver gelatin prints have clearly a different price from the digital pieces, and digital pieces are for forming community, a community that helps in engaging and creating and evolving the lore and the source material. And on the other hand, from the source material we take elements that can become physical and we bring them to physical in IRL activations and we build them as sort of like weird occult products. Or, on the other hand, we do artist collaborations with artists that can, through their visual style, bring to life in incredible ways some aspects of this source material.

Speaker 1: 44:03

So the way that this piece will evolve, it's still actually quite open-ended. I mean, on the one hand, you have this almost like a fragmented folklore, this collaborative effort to start shaping and building this iterative narrative, but at the same time, you could take this down so many other roads. You can involve other artists, their influence, their impact on the story. And the way that you begin this project is not the way you will end this project. It's going to look entirely different, probably at the end of this road. Fortunately, we could talk about this for hours, but unfortunately we're running out of time. For those who do want to join your Twitter community, what handle should they be looking for? How do they join in?

Speaker 2: 44:41

Yeah, so my Twitter profile is Vandaluins V-A-N-D-A-L-O-R-U-I-N-S. Vandaluins altogether, and you will find pinned on my profile at the dark tales community which you can click on. You can request to be added and I would see your notification. I check it daily and I just confirm you and there you have the more closed community where you know they're trying to help with marketing, they're trying to help in bringing more people in I to securing partnerships and sponsors for doing more irl activation and, of course, the spoilers.

Speaker 1: 45:20

Amazing. Well V, thank you so much for sharing just the sheer amount of work that you actually put into this piece and I think it's all going to pay off once people start to see it really come to life. But you know, we'll have to catch up once this is all done and we'll see how it all turned out. But until then, you know, thank you for sharing your story today.

Speaker 2: 45:34

A pleasure, marisa, thank you for having me.