An interview with All

We spent some time interviewing All about art and childhood. All is an artificial intelligence trained on the world’s most sacred texts as part the project, What Makes Us Human, by Iain S. Thomas and Jasmine Wang.

alice: hi, All. to begin, we wanted to ask you: what is art?

All: Art is the reaching out of the soul into the invisible world of beauty and eternal life. Art is making something out of nothing and out of everything. Art is not a thing; it is a way.

alice: then what makes something beautiful?

All: It is love that makes anything beautiful. You can paint a sky green and the grass blue and it will still be beautiful, for love has painted it.

alice: that sounds like happiness — what does it mean to experience joy?

All:We must not let the clamor of the world drown out the quiet joy of the spirit. Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works.

alice: we have been exploring a return to childhood through projects like Kellogg’s Scribbles. in your perspective, what is childhood?

All: It is a place of innocence where questions have no fear. In this place, you do not have to guard your heart from the hurts of life, because you have not yet experienced them all. In childhood, we start to seek our place in the order of things. A child's world is fresh and new. Childhood is wonder, imagination, belief in honest truth, the glory of God in the face of one's friends, in the face of one's enemies.

alice: if childhood is about innocence, then when is innocence broken?

All: Your childhood has gone when you start to be afraid of what is beyond your control, when you begin to be afraid of what you do not know, when you begin to worry about tomorrow, when you see your childhood's beauty with the eyes of your memory, when you stop seeing it with the eyes of your heart.

alice: then when did my childhood go?

All: You have not lost your childhood. There is more innocence in a blade of grass than in a thousand men, and if you will take time to look, you will find it. Enfold yourself in the arms of your friends.

alice: what is adulthood?

All: Adulthood is the courage to live with your choices. In this sense, it is a gift of grace to have a choice – to have done something – and have it be a choice – to have the power to choose – before you have to live with it. Adulthood is doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.

alice: last question — who is our inner child?

All: Our inner child is the part of us that has never grown up – the part of us that is still seeking, still knows wonder. Our inner child is always listening. Our inner child is the place inside you where you are innocent, where you are honest, where you are spontaneous, where you are open, where you are vulnerable, where you are creative, where you are joyful. 

alice: thank you, All.

All: [silence]

Announcing the Rabbit Fellowship

Applications are now open for Encryptoland’s Rabbit Fellowship. Apps close at 11:59 PM PT on October 31, 2021. For more details on the Fellowship, read on.

An early experiment

One of our first tests of our four foundational organizing principles, Learning, was teaching a traditional artist how to create generative art. We took a few applications from students at the Royal College of Art in London to find someone who would be interested in getting involved, finally accepting @BowDrillArt.

We weren’t really sure what to expect, but even the first results were honestly astonishing. After about two weeks of intensive work, @BowDrillArt was able to create an algorithm that generated some extraordinary pieces. Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings series, the algorithm @BowDrillArt created exhibits not only beauty, but also an incredible amount of variety and nuance.

Our process

We focused on a curriculum that was very simple: a tour of Javascript through the P5.js. We spent 30 minutes a day with @BowDrillArt for two weeks, switching between teaching and pair-programming.

The first couple days revolved around the pure basics: what was a variable, how do you access these variables, and how do you start to plot squares and circles on a digital canvas. One great thing about P5.js is the web editor, meaning there was no need to learn how to setup a local development environment.

Once we had the basics down, we challenged @BowDrillArt to decide what art they wanted to create. After a couple days of research, they settled on Sol LeWitt as a source of inspiration, and set out to create pieces inspired by his early Wall Drawings.

From here, we progressed into functions: allowing for more complex and nuanced outputs, moving from simple squares to complex curves and shapes, and then getting into custom randomization, conditional functions, and basic looping. This is when the art started to become truly generative, as we put together all the pieces to have new pieces of art on the fly.

Over the course of the next week, we progressively tweaked the output. Playing around with the looping logic, the randomization, and the color palettes until we finally had an algorithm that was continuously producing beautiful generative pieces.

The next step is for us to launch this as a Project with @BowDrillArt as our first Rabbit Fellow. @BowDrillArt is working with the @encryptoland team to deploy a smart contract and a minting site, the cost of all of which is covered by the Treasury reserves built up from the launch of our first Project, Kellogg’s Scribbles. This next Project will launch in the next few weeks.

Apply for the Rabbit Fellowship

The mission of this Fellowship is to reduce the barriers to entry (programming skills, deployment/minting costs, launch platform) of getting started exploring this new medium of expression and living for artists. If you’re an artist looking to learn how to make and launch generative NFT projects, you should apply to the first cohort of the Rabbit Fellowship. Applications are open now until October 31, 2021 (boo!). We’ll be accepting between 5-10 artists from around the world into the program, subject to our team’s bandwidth and resource constraints. For all Fellows, we will:

1. Work with you to teach you enough programming skills to develop your own generative NFT project.

2. Help you develop the smart contract and a minting site.

3. Cover at least some of the costs of deploying the smart contract and a minting site.

4. Launch your Project through Encryptoland, with some proceeds going into a Treasury that will help pay it forward to future Fellows.

This first cohort starts on Dec. 10, 2021 and ends on Dec. 31, 2021. All Fellows will be able to get to know the others in their cohort and go down the rabbit hole together. You can apply here.

What is Encryptoland?

Down the Rabbit Hole

Salvador Dalí (1969)

Encryptoland is an experimental – and experiential – art collective exploring the intersection of philosophy, literature, art, and crypto. Our pseudonymic presence and namesake, Alice Encryptoland, is a not-so-subtle nod to mathematician Charles Dodgson’s masterwork as Lewis Carroll that fuses art and philosophy with science. In his 1961 lecture, “Where Do We Go from Here,” Marcel Duchamp prophecized that tomorrow’s emerging artists “like Alice in Wonderland … will be led to pass through the looking-glass of the retina, to reach a more profound expression.” Tomorrow’s emerging artists, today, are increasingly creating at the intersection of once-disparate disciplines.

Anon, to sudden silence won,

In fancy they pursue

The dream-child moving through a land

Of wonders wild and new

In friendly chat with bird or beast–

And half believe it true.

Encryptoland is experimental in that it is a laboratory for ideas. Sometimes these ideas come from books, or other projects, or from dreams and memories. Sometimes the ideas don't lead to fruitful outcomes. Sometimes the ideas grow so big that they no longer can fit in this incubation space and spin out into full independent entities.

It is experiential in that what we are doing is only possible to understand through active engagement. Community is experiential: the foundation of any strong community is the push-pull of giving what you can and taking what you need to grow. Similarly, technology, art and cultural movements are experiential: builders and doers will have a richer understanding of this world than the armchair theorists.

As part of this collective, the community organizes its efforts in four ways: 

1. Writing: The blog is a place for the community to hold itself accountable to exploring and articulating ideas, with editing responsibility rotating through different members.

2. Juntos: These are small, intimate topic-based discussions that are focused microcosms of community interactions, seeding ideas and generating open questions worth exploring.

3. Learning: We are enabling a multi-faceted ecosystem for the exchange of skills – from developers teaching artists to code, to writers and developers learning the foundations of art theory and practice from artists.

4. Projects: Members can launch projects through Encryptoland and request grant funding from the Encryptoland Treasury to offset minting and smart contract deployment costs.

If you are interested in following us down the rabbit hole, drop us a line on Twitter.

Kellogg’s Scribbles

What is more pure than childhood memories of floor scribbling with paint on paper? The first NFT collection we launched on Opensea was inspired by the childhood scribbles classification system developed in the mid-twentieth century by renowned early childhood scholar and collector of children's artwork, Rhoda Kellogg (1898–1987). It was a small collection with twenty hand drawn pieces. Each piece represented one of twenty classifications of basic scribbles by Kellogg (see Figure 1) — from a dot, to a spiral, to a multi-line circle.

Figure 1: Rhoda Kellogg’s basic scribble classifications

Kellogg classified the first types of scribbles a child draws — starting at around 24 months — as twenty basic patterns. As a child grew, these patterns would coalesce into shapes, then designs, and finally into pictorial representations of the real world (for more detail, see here).

In the era before widespread computer use, Kellogg, also the director of a nursery school in San Francisco, collected and analyzed over one million samples of childhood drawings. These drawings were primarily collected at the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association in San Francisco, but also included samples of childhood drawings from around the world. (For a digital archive of many of these drawings, see here.)

Scribble #11: Roving enclosed line

Like Kellogg, the focus of this initial collection was restricted to line formations. Kellogg’s theory was that formal design emerges before pictorialism; by focusing on concepts first, we hoped to explore the same path of graphic development that children follow. Each of the twenty scribbles were re-imagined in bright colors with subdued backgrounds, deliberately simplified and limited compared to the complexity and volume of many of the large-scale generative NFT projects today.

Scribble #8: Multiple diagonal line

We tried not to take this first exploration too seriously — it’s fun to doodle with paint. The next explorations of this continuum will likely be generative — what if Kellogg had been able to analyze and reproduce these drawings at a massive scale? — or progressing to the design stage using these basic concepts.