TezTalks Radio - Tezos Ecosystem Podcast
TezTalks Radio - Tezos Ecosystem Podcast
108: How One Tezos Artist's Journey Through Tourette's, Synesthesia, and Childhood Trauma Created a Mission for On-Chain Permanence
James Lee, co-creator of Zero Unbound Art, shares his journey of blending art, music, advocacy, and technology on Tezos blockchain. Through his surreal hand-drawn animations and passion for fully on-chain formats, he's creating artwork that will outlive us all while championing accessibility and permanence in digital creation.
• Converting ADHD into a creative superpower by hyperfixating on learning new skills
• Building Zero Unbound Art platform to make fully on-chain NFTs accessible to everyone without coding knowledge
• Creating the largest fully on-chain animation on Tezos at 261 kilobytes through hand-drawn pixel art
• Living with Tourette's syndrome and discovering that creative activities help manage symptoms
• Experiencing synesthesia where sounds create visual patterns that influence his artwork
• Developing a 118-element periodic table animation project that combines science and art
• Supporting fellow artists by collecting, amplifying, and mentoring throughout the Tezos ecosystem
• Finding new creative inspiration through fatherhood and teaching his children artistic skills
• Leveraging his experience as a former college professor to make blockchain technology approachable
Join us in exploring how blockchain can preserve our creative legacy forever while removing gatekeepers and giving everyone a chance to participate.
welcome back dogs. Today we're joining someone who's been quietly doing big things on tezos for a long time james lee aka jams to. If you've spent time around Tezos' art, you've probably come across his surreal hand-drawn animations, his passion for fully on-chain formats or his deep support for fellow artists. He's co-creator of Zero Unbound Art, a world record-holding guitarist and someone who's brought a lot of heart and honesty into this space. James, thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1:You've got this mix of art, music, advocacy and tech all blended together in your work. When someone new lands on your page, what do you hope they take away from it?
Speaker 2:I hope that when people look at my art or what I'm doing, that they're inspired to try something new. I'm never satisfied with just trying to learn one thing and get really good at it. I get bored really fast, maybe because I have weapons grade ADHD, I don't know, but I kind of turned that into a superpower. Um, I hyper fixate on things for for really long periods of time. I can, like you said, Guinness world record guitar player. I can play guitar for 26 hours and without taking a break, and, um, you know, and when I'm done I move on to the next thing. So I've got all these different things that I've learned how to do that I want to try and just get really good at All the people that have inspired me, Of course, one of my greatest inspirations being Salvador Dali and Leonardo da Vinci.
Speaker 2:You can't really put a label on Leonardo da Vinci as to what exactly he was, and I think people like that are truly inspiring because you know you can. You can play music, you can make art, you can write poetry, you can learn how to program with JavaScript. There's all these things that you can do. Why are you stopping at one thing? Just do all. Do all of it. Do whatever makes you happy and find, find out where that leads you and so far in my journey with, with tezos and nfts, you know it's. It's brought me to so many different places and I've met so many interesting people I never thought I'd talk to before, before ever even touching Web3. I never met anyone outside of the United States and now I've got friends that I can truly call friends, that are in the Philippines and Turkey and Germany, Australia. It's really connecting with people forming a community around the world. It's really connecting with people forming a community around the world, not just with my next-door neighbors and close family. It's a really unique experience and I just don't want to stop.
Speaker 1:One of the things you're most known for is pushing fully on-chain art, and we're not talking just minting compression formats, making it all accessible. What pulled you toward that challenge in the first place?
Speaker 2:um, I have to tip my hat to ella, bright light art, very well-known artist in the nft community, kind of all over the place on every blockchain. I? I, when I first got into nfts, I? Um befriended her and started collecting her art as just collecting, looking at stuff that I like, and she's really smart a lot smarter than me, I think so you remember that specific piece that made you it was on voice.
Speaker 2:It was a, an early n NFT platform that didn't do well, unfortunately, but she was making these symmetrical flowers that were just really beautiful that I'd not seen anyone do in digital art before, so I bought one of those and I've been following her ever since and buying a lot of her fully on-chain art. I've been following her ever since and buying a lot of her fully on-chain art, which I didn't know the difference between off-chain storage and fully on-chain art until Ella kind of introduced me to it and I got to really learn blockchain technology at that point and how really incredibly complicated it is and how difficult of a task it is for all these developers to be creating what they're creating. This, this online archive, uh, that that is immutable and the permanence and the and the preservation of the art itself the, the provenance and the art are in the same place, and for me, I really liked that. You know um want to make something last, something that will outlive me.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know, you go, you go to Hobby Lobby and you can buy a piece of archival cans and rag uh art board, or you know a really expensive piece of paper to do your artwork on and it'll last about a hundred years before it starts to fade in yellow and needs maintenance, and that's if it's just kept out of direct sunlight. But, um, what, what they're proposing with fully on chain nfts is that you know you can put a piece of information not just art, anything fully on chain and it will live forever as long as the blockchain exists. And tesla so I personally believe, has the highest chance of existing longer than the rest, just because of its super low carbon footprint, which means it's going to be sustainable for a longer period of time than the most most of the rest of them, and it's I mean, I love trees and I love oxygen. We're all about tesla over here.
Speaker 1:I love oxygen too. I'm a big tree fan as well. Do you think artists are starting to care more about permanence as well, or do you think maybe it's still niche?
Speaker 2:I think that there is a huge opening into fully on chain. There's a big difference. It's also educating people what the difference is. Um, in the in, in its roots, in the beginning, yeah, it's very niche, uh, I mean gotta be honest about that but at the same time, um, nfts as a whole, uh, you know, the statistics around the world show that nfts are still kind of a niche as far as breaking into the world of fine art and removing gatekeepers and allowing anyone to jump in and have a chance, which I thought was amazing. You know, I never had a professional education in art.
Speaker 2:I'm very self-taught in everything you know. I'm a self-taught musician. I'm a self-taught in everything you know. I'm a self-taught musician. I'm a self-taught programmer. I'm a self-taught. I learn very quickly just diving into the knowledge that's openly and freely available on the Internet, and I hyperfixate on things and I learn until I become really good at it, good enough to get a job and be a network engineer, and you know all kinds of other things. So I think that this whole decentralized, open network of information is super important that we hold on to, because it removes monopolies and gatekeeping and it opens up the door for huge learning opportunities opens up the door for huge learning opportunities, whether it's niche now but may not be niche in the next two months or so. The platform I built zeroonbandart.
Speaker 2:It is a fully on-chain NFT platform that connects directly to the Tezos blockchain. It doesn't rely on any indexers to display anything you're seeing, and it's a new kind of internet. You know, being the nerd, that I am being a musician and an artist and and building it from that perspective instead of from a CEO's perspective of Jamstown Blues Creations LLC. I want to build it for artists so that they can make their art permanent, and when we first started, yeah, in September last year, there was five people fully on-chain. Now there's actually over 949 minted tokens fully on-chain on our Xero contracts that YesDemZero developed the contract for. I built the platform. So I want to be clear, I'm sure credit where credit's due let's talk about zero unbound.
Speaker 1:It's really one of the few platforms built for the artists who want to keep everything fully on chain. So what was the story on how it all started? I mean, what? What were you trying to create through it long term?
Speaker 2:Well, I wanted to understand CryptoPunks. You know they're doing well for a reason and as much hate and hype that kind of balance each other out, they did something right. They did something right and minimalism, compressionism getting as much information out there into a piece of art as you can and then making it as simple as possible. I just thought it was fascinating. The idea of compressionism altogether blew my mind and the fact that you have to do this in order to put art fully on chain. Compressionism is extremely important. It's also sustainable. So we're thinking about using less resources and and technology is evolving to a point where now we can do things more efficiently and waste less energy. By putting art fully on chain, um, we're helping that along.
Speaker 2:So when I started creating my first fully on chain pieces, they were on other blockchains just because there was tools readily available. But tezos has always been my home base and I've I've loved everything tezos represents um and the smart roll-ups and, and you know, being able to do the things that it can do. I thought it was fascinating. So I have been looking for a long time for a way to put NFTs fully on chain on Tezos and I didn't have to look far. Ella introduced me to yes Dem Zero, by the way, the author of the Xero contract. She put us together in a tweet. She said hey, you two need to talk to each other.
Speaker 1:And I found his thread she was right.
Speaker 2:I found his thread about Zero Contract and all the work that he had done to create a Tzip-compliant, fully on-chain NFT contract that lets you put the image fully on the blockchain where your art is stored in the big maps on Tezos, and doing it in a way that is displayable on all the popular marketplaces like objectcom and Taya and all that.
Speaker 2:So I thought that was fascinating and it removed the need for me to to do it all from scratch. So there hadn't been a tool built for it yet, though, so his his work was was to get an NFT at at that point in time. Fully on chain was around september last year was when I was when I found it. He um, you know you have to get on better calldev and you have to convert things to hex and uh, create json strings and and mint it that way, which is a very complicated process that scares a lot of artists away. So I decided to automate it and I built the first web app for the Xero contract Xero Unbound. It went by a different name before, but now it's XeroUnboundart. That's what we call it.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:I automated it, made it easy and accessible so that it can be a no-code process. That was easy for anyone to access, because blockchain technology is very complicated, but it doesn't have to be. If you know what you're doing, you can build a platform and interface to interact with the blockchain. That's as easy as clicking an upload button and typing in what you want to call the thing and hitting mint, and that's what I did, and now there's a lot of people using it is there anything you wish existed on the site that you're still working toward right now?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, it has become quite an experience building on this platform something I never thought that that it would become. It started out really simple with GIFs and PNGs and JPEGs and I just recently added the ability to mint generative HTML text files and it's compatible with those which no NFT platform out there on Tezos is. Zerounboundartart will support generative HTML scripts, so we've got generative artists coming in from all over creating generative sgv files and scripting. I've also created this validator that that tells you for collectors, like there's a little golden star on the token card that means it's fully on chain, so you can know the difference between an artwork that is fully on chain and one that is using off-chain storage like ipfs and stuff like that. It also it opens up the door because it is so easy to use and it's kind of intuitive. You look at it and you're like, wow, this is what it takes to mint an NFT. I made it a little more granular than you would normally see on an NFT platform so you can see all the entry points, and I've turned all the entry points into buttons in plain English so you can control every aspect of your NFT. And also it puts the user in charge, so the artist is in charge and in control of the NFT. They are the admin. A lot of NFT platforms make some kind of contract, the admin or a wallet that created the NFT, the admin, some kind of contract, the admin or a wallet that created the nft, the admin. But when an artist mints an entity on zero unbound art, it's not just fully on chain, they are the owner of it, they are the admin of it. They are in full control for the lifespan of the nft and there's nothing that I can do with it. There's also no fees. We're talking about decentralization here.
Speaker 2:I'm volunteering my time. I wasn't financially motivated or backed to create this. I just volunteer my time to create this platform and it's open on github and open source and anyone can fork my github and and and add to the project if they want. Um, I'm not gatekeeping. I'm not saying no to anything. The other day someone came to me well, the other day was a couple of weeks ago and asked me if I could support MIDI files. So that's what I'm working on now. You asked me what else do I want to have on there? I want to support virtually every type of file that you can to put it fully on-chain and we're even talking about in the future not in the near future. It's going to be very difficult to do, but I'm considering putting entire JavaScript libraries fully on-chain so that we can create this monster of a If a company goes out and stops working, if an IP address has a conflict and it interrupts your program.
Speaker 2:That won't happen on Tezos. If we finish building what I dream about building now, which is there's a lot to do and it is very hard work. I put in 40 to 50 hours a day of my own time volunteering for free. I'm a disabled veteran. I get 100% service-connected disability from the government for medical malpractice, and so I have no need to have a job. That's why I have all this time to volunteer to build things like this, and to me it just feels really cool even if my art doesn't really get out there that I am creating something that can make other artists permanent, because I am a collector too and I really enjoy every kind of art that's out there, from photography to HTML, generative, sgv scripting to oil painting.
Speaker 2:And I know this artist in uganda that vintage on our platform.
Speaker 2:He took one of his paintings, a really good oil painting of a of a head kind of floating in space, and it was a piece of surrealism with, with really good use of technique, and kiara scuro, and he captured it in a way that used compressionism to keep the file size under 20 kilobytes and stored it fully on chain.
Speaker 2:So it's there forever and it will outlive the real painting. Now, that's archiving, that's, that's, that's saving human history, it's, it's inevitable and necessary if we're going to evolve and learn as a species that we, we don't forget anything in the past. We've all heard history repeats itself, right? Well, if we have a database and an archive of everything that's ever happened and it doesn't die, then, yes, we will be able to do better in the future and we'll continue to be able to improve and learn from our predecessors. And I think that it's really important to do this with art. I believe that art is a monolith and testament to our fleeting existence in this universe. Life is temporary and if we can figure out how to outlive that temporariness, to pass it on to other generations and whatever they do with it, whether it be good or bad, I think it's still important that we store it so that we can learn from it.
Speaker 1:Now you've used the phrase they sell you the dream. We provide the glitch that wakes you up. Where does that idea come from and how does it show up in your visual work?
Speaker 2:So I personally feel like I have awakened to a lot of things I was ignorant of through my own life experience. I didn't have the greatest childhood you know. I grew up in a very rough spot in Northern California and was homeless a couple of times by the time I was 12 and stealing from grocery stores to eat, and I got adopted at a very young age and went from that lifestyle very quickly to one where I was, after I was adopted, to having food and shelter and being forced to do homework. When I was forced to do homework, though, I found out I was really good at it and I started to question everything I had been told by anyone at a very young age, and I have more life experience after that, even as an older adult. That made me open my eyes to what the world kind of really is.
Speaker 2:Sometimes and you know that saying is it comes from my ancestry. I am probably one of the whitest Native Americans you've ever seen, but I am Native American 50% ancestry. I am probably one of the whitest native americans you've ever seen, but I am native american 50 percent. Um and the heyoka are a sacred group of clowns. Basically that that oppose and contradict what people think reality is and they test and and probe it to show you a more spiritual side of things. I'm not necessarily wholeheart you a more spiritual side of things. I'm not necessarily wholeheartedly a very spiritual person myself, but I do believe that everyone needs to take a good look at themselves and what they truly think is real.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, there's there's a lot of people out there taking advantage of dopamine farming the human race.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of people out there taking advantage of, uh, you know, just us being ignorant of how things actually work, and it's really easy to sell an idea to someone that doesn't know the periodic table of elements from, uh, you know, a zero or a one, and on a blockchain.
Speaker 2:And you know, I I feel like that kind of art is timeless because it's just human nature and it's not going to ever die. It's going to be something that continues on for eternity, as long as humans exist. There's always going to be this need to control and to own and to have power and, um, you know that that that purpose that I drive in my art and the meaning of that cognitive dissonance is not just to hopefully wake up people that see it, but make the ones that are doing it realize how wrong they really are, and it is something, it's a battle, a battle that that that is timeless, that we're always going to have to deal with. So you know, long after I'm gone, someone might see that art on the tesla's blockchain and change their ways, or maybe actually help someone that that needs something more than or, uh, you know, maybe put their phone down for a little longer to spend a little more time with their children what, what?
Speaker 1:no, I'm kidding, I was gonna say what now? Can you point to a specific piece that you feel like really captures that idea?
Speaker 2:yeah, um, I think oroboros is probably one of the best pieces that I've done. It's a pixel art piece, compressionism uh, I did. It took me a long time to draw this one. It was my first time doing an animation like this and I wanted to challenge myself to do a frame-by-frame hand-drawn piece on Aseprite, which is a program that lets you draw with pixels and kind of works like Photoshop, so it has layers and a bunch of tools that makes it a lot easier to to work with moving parts and and keyframe it from from start to finish. So I challenged myself to build this piece, uh, doing something that I've not done yet.
Speaker 2:I'm always trying something new. It's because every time you try something new, you never know what you're going to learn from it or how it might change you as a person. And, uh, you know this piece. I didn't know it was going to come out of me. I, I, like I said, I love salvador dali, so a lot of my creations I use what's called surrealism, automatism. I shut the thinking part of my brain off completely and I let my subconscious just kind of scribble until something appears and then I make sense of it and then I draw what was coming out of my subconscious and that's what came out of this piece was was you know, the ancient oroboros monster, the snake swallowing itself, which this piece is a metaphor for, that, which is a meat grinder with a bunch of heads that are just kind of zombified and smiling, but all being sucked into this meat grinder. But instead of blood and guts coming out of the meat grinder, it's money, and the money is going back into the meat grinder to feed the power of the machine, which is a huge net loss of everything. It's entropy. It is the snake swallowing itself. It's not getting any energy or resources from eating itself. It's destroying itself, but it's it's also satiating its hunger and, of course, on the machine I I show the big monopolies of the internet that control what people think and what they see in the algorithms, that kind of are in control of what we're allowed to believe from, from big people like meta and X and Instagram and, of course, rx, which is prescription.
Speaker 2:I've got a big thing about that and I don't want to say too much about that. I'll let people interpret that for themselves. I have a huge personal experience Reason why I put that there being misdiagnosed for nine years with bipolar disorder, when it was an underlying autoimmune disease called celiac disease, and being medicated for something that I didn't have for nine years and being gaslighted and passed around and labeled by doctor after doctor after doctor, until someone that knew what they were doing, got it right and wasn't judging me for having a history of mental health issues. You know that's a big monster in society that I think people need to learn from.
Speaker 2:Even if you're not a doctor, even if you're just a patient every patient that ever goes and sees a doctor I beg you, I beg you, learn about your body. Don't just take their word for it. Write down what they told you when you, when you're at your visit and research, and learn about it yourself. If you don't, you're going to end up like me brain damage, taking pills that you should have never been on, and you know that's Ouroboros the beast. It really is, and the government was paying for that prescription.
Speaker 1:Now what I've read you've been really open about living with Tourette's as well.
Speaker 2:Yes, I do.
Speaker 1:But as something that's part of your art, your music, even how you approach life. How is that shaped? How you think about creativity or expression?
Speaker 2:It's one of the reasons why I like to shut my brain off, to not think as I do something, because the more I think about something, the more I tick. When I'm improvising on the guitar, I don't really feel the urge or the compulsion to have a tick. It goes away. That's why I'm holding this right now. If I put this down I might embarrass you and myself, because I do have some pretty bad ticks. Sometimes I have coprolalia, which I blurt things out that are subconscious, that I can't control, passive thoughts and repetitive things that I get stuck on, and it is severe at times. It's gotten a lot better as I've gotten older, but having Tourette's taught me something about free will is that sometimes you have them and you have no control and there's nothing that you can do, and the only thing that you can do is continue to be a good person, no matter how hard things get, and that's that's one of the things I try to push in my art.
Speaker 2:Just because I have forgiven the monsters of my past and it made me feel really good Not did it only make me feel good, but sharing that forgiveness helped them heal so they could be better people. My abusers when I was a children are doing amazing and I won't talk bad about them anymore. I let that go.
Speaker 2:Just like I let go. Being born with something that I can't control. And you know, art and creativity sure is a really good therapy. It's probably one of the best for this kind of thing. But I will say that you have to make an attempt to learn while you're doing it or it won't work. And having growing up with Tourette's, you know, when I was younger it was a lot worse. I had tics so incredibly bad. I could not hold a book in my hands and read it until I was 11 years old. My arms were flying all over the place and my shoulders were popping out of their sockets. I couldn't stop moving. I had to hold books against the wall with my feet.
Speaker 1:I don't think people really do understand the compulsion behind everything that unfortunately goes through your body. A lot of people just think it's a weird kitschy vocal thing. It wrecks your whole body, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, there's a lot of layers to Tourette's Syndrome. What's popularized on the internet and on social media is one of actually the most uncommon symptoms of Tourette's syndrome coprolalia, where you kind of blurt things out that are inappropriate, and, to be honest, that is one of the least common symptoms of Tourette's syndrome, but it's the most popular because it's funny to a lot of people. And you know, the weird thing about Tourette's is anxiety makes your tics worse. I feel really comfortable talking to you, by the way.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 2:But you just have this warming vibe and I don't really have nervousness right now. But if I was really nervous I'd probably be ticking right now. When your anxiety levels go up, when you have Tourette's, it makes your tics worse and they're kind of connected. One you know, um, I don't know what to do. I'm super neurodivergent in social situations. Often, especially if I'm meeting a new person, I'll have really bad tics in front of them and embarrass myself. I'll say something that I didn't mean, or something disgusting or gross or inappropriate on accident that I didn't mean, or something disgusting or gross or inappropriate on accident, and or, uh, I typically have facial tics that just never go away, which I'm kind of suppressing right now. But here's the thing about Tourette's.
Speaker 1:If you suppress your tics, they get worse.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's like a sneeze. It's like you can't hold back a sneeze once it comes and maybe, maybe, somebody will come up and put their finger under your nose or they'll scare you and make the sneeze go away, but it comes back with a vengeance and you have this massive uh you know tick attack that that I have to let out and then I feel better and I don't know how, any other way to explain it other than that when a tick is coming, it literally feels like somewhere in my body I have a sneeze and it is approaching and the feeling is getting more intense. And then, when, when I let whatever that compulsion is out, I feel relieved, and when I don't let it out, it is pure hell. It is like an itch that you can't scratch that never goes away and continues to get worse and worse and worse and worse until you itch it. And the only way to itch it is to go through with whatever the compulsion was.
Speaker 2:Um, and you know there's no cure for it. There's not even really medications you can take for Tourette's. They did test me on medications when I was younger and they made me crazy and unfortunately, you know, I I had to learn. Of course, I grew up with it in the nineties, which, when it was not very well understood, it's actually documented in the state of California. I was the youngest child to ever be diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome, and the first in the County I lived in. So I was it's still very new I'm 37 years old and and we barely even understand what it is Um. So that's why I spread awareness about it in my art and I talk about it openly, just just to educate people and make them aware you know it's. It's really important to have empathy in this world to to you, can't you? I can't put myself in your shoes as much as most people can't put themselves in mine. But if, if you have a little knowledge about what it might be like, I try to share that in a way that that's easy to understand, so that there's just more empathy in the world in general, not just for people with Tourette's, but for people with autism, for people with with uh, with disfigured, injured bodies, for people with any kind of disability and even just people that are normal. They just got to put ourselves in their shoes too. It's not just neurodivergent people that need help. Everyone needs help. Everyone needs to understand each other. Everyone needs, I think, a better grip on what it means to be human, and a lot of us don't even know why we're here. A lot of us wake up, you know, at the age of 40 and go through midlife crisis, and that's when they realize, oh my gosh, I'm gonna die. I went through that at the age of five, so you gotta imagine like it's scary for everyone, doesn't matter how old you are, how long it takes.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you a story about this man in a mental hospital. I went into psychosis in 2019 because of Zoloft. It was one of the misdiagnosis pill related things that the VA put me on. I went into psychosis, taking meds I shouldn't have been on and I was in a mental hospital.
Speaker 2:I met this old man that was confessing all of his deepest, darkest secrets and sins to me in that hospital and he trusted me with it for some reason, and he asked me if he was going to hell. And I said I think you're going to go where you want to go. And I said I think you're going to go where you want to go. Where does your soul, where does your spirit, where do you want to be? And it's never too late to be forgiven. You told me some of the worst things I've ever heard a human being do and I'm telling you right now I forgive you. I know you didn't do them to me and it would be harder to do if you did them to me, but I've forgiven monsters that have done things to me and you're not a bad person for finally realizing how wrong you were and feeling something. It's such a huge, passionate thing, you know. Uh, I think it's super important to spread that love and joy and that that empathy, compassion is everything.
Speaker 2:Emotional intelligence is everything we don't. Doctors and just 40 years ago came up with the five pillars of emotional intelligence is everything we don't. Doctors and just 40 years ago came up with the five pillars of emotional intelligence, and nobody even knows what they are today because it's not taught normally in all the schools. They don't. They don't. People aren't being raised and taught what these things are. So I don't know. I just feel like I have to share what I learned. Maybe it's my neurodivergence, it's part of of who I am. Anytime, I learned something new, that that I have a kind of a wow, eureka moment or or inspiration or epiphany about. I feel like I have to share it, because if I don't, the people that I'm surrounding myself with won't be like that.
Speaker 1:Now, I know you probably do, but I just want to to make sure you do. You feel like your process is really different now because of that, or do you think maybe that's just how it would have been well?
Speaker 2:um, my process has definitely evolved. The more I work on something, the more it changes. I get bored. Like I said, I get bored very quickly, right? You know, I had this period where I was drawing counterchange tessellation fractals about seven to eight of them a day for about two years by hand, and it's because I wanted to understand geometry. And I wanted to. I wanted more control over my body.
Speaker 2:Being someone that has Tourette's Syndrome, it irks me, and even to this day, at the age of 37, I get so upset with myself when I do something or say something or have a tic that embarrasses me. And you know, I want control over my body. I want it so bad I work for it. So many people without Tourette's syndrome don't even try to control their bodies. I wanted to learn how to draw a perfect square by hand, and it took me a year to do that, every single day. But I did it and and I got control and I got to a point where I could draw these really complex symmetrical fractals that were just perfect in every way.
Speaker 2:But what did that teach me? It taught me weird little things. I don't, I don't know how to explain it, you just have to do it like when you start to learn like a scale on the guitar. It's really boring at first and it hurts your fingers and, um, you know going through the motions of memorizing the pattern and then turning the pattern into something that sounds good or feels good, and then not just feels good. But you practice enough, you get to a point where you're not thinking about the pattern anymore. Now it's just a noise that you're controlling with your hand, and sometimes when I'm playing I I don't even think about what I'm playing. It's just my hand is automatically just doing things and all I have to do is kind of think ahead a little bit where I might want to go with it, and my do is kind of think ahead a little bit where I might want to go with it, and my hand does crazy beautiful things that I I can't explain.
Speaker 2:And, uh, the more complex you get with learning and digging into something, the more you learn about yourself and all these little tiny processes in between. Like, oh, this technique works because of how I'm drawing from top to bottom if I switch hands. Can I do it that way? Learn it with both, why not? Why are you doing it with just your right hand? We're all trying to control just one side of our bodies at all times. We have two sides and both use different sides of the brain and they make you think differently. It's just different ways to think, different ways to open your mind and you mind.
Speaker 1:This is awesome, by the way. I love this. So you recently broke new ground with a 261 kilobyte hand-drawn animation the biggest fully on-chain piece on Tezos at the time. That's not just art, that's engineering. How long did that take you to pull off and what did you learn from the process?
Speaker 2:Well, the piece I hand drew with Aseprite. Again, I just really love this tool. It's an amazing tool. Frame by frame, one frame at a time, and I believe it's about 53 frames fully on chain, or maybe 100 actually, I can't remember. I have to look at it again.
Speaker 2:But um, that was an automatism piece. I wasn't really thinking. I turned my brain off and I was like I'm just going to make pretty colors and make them morph. And the thing that I learned while doing that was that there are so many dimensions in a two dimensional flat piece that can be extracted that I didn't know were there, because as I was drawing it, my brain was just making it up as I went. So I could stretch the pixels, I can move them, I can morph them, I can blend them together and I created this new pattern.
Speaker 2:Somewhere in the middle of the animation You'll see this beautiful improvised symmetrical pattern that pops out of nowhere. It's super colorful and it's got eight points of symmetry and every single pixel in that piece is built on the previous pixel. So it's it's like growing and evolving and then it forms back into the original loop. So it created this perfect, seamless loop where it starts over like a flower growing and the flower stretches and becomes something else and it transforms, which is why I called it transformer.
Speaker 2:Um, I I always, I've always been a big fan of the Transformers, and that's what it made me think of while I was drawing it and as I was making it. What I learned, I guess, is more deep into myself, bringing out old memories. I'd forgotten about watching the Transformers cartoon when I was a kid and drinking hot cocoa at my grandma's house and just all the joy that you can have, remembering innocence and being a child. And that's what scribbling is. But if you the, it's like a muscle, though.
Speaker 2:The more you scribble, the more you improvise. The more you make it up as you go, the better you get at it. It's like on the computer it's a machine that's constantly predicting and making really complex calculations. We take it for granted. When you scribble a line, your brain is sending a signal to your arm to plot something in three dimensions that is, several spaces away from where your brain is actually at, and you're making these calculations in real time that are astronomical, that we take for granted and we think are simple. But what if you can turn that scribble into a photorealistic painting of a frog, which I've done. What if you can take that scribble and turn it into a little girl crying and hiding from her abusive parents in the bathroom? What if you could take that scribble and turn it into a transformer that reminds you of your childhood?
Speaker 1:oh, I'm lost in it, man, I love it. Oh so you're a musician, right? I mean, you're holding the guitar, you're clearly a musician, but you're also a singer, right, and you're a world record holder. How does your music connect with your visual work? Do you approach them differently or?
Speaker 2:is it all? The same uh, not, not a well-known fact about me. I don't really talk about it that much, but I'm a synesthete. One in two thousand people are born with synesthesia. A lot, of, a lot of the times I could smell color yes oh very, but in my case in my case, sound and visuals are kind of one in the same when I hear something it feels like I'm seeing it, wow.
Speaker 2:And when I see something it feels like I'm hearing it, they're kind of just mixed together, and so when I'm painting and drawing, it's always this huge, really weird trippy experience to me which feels normal. But when I describe it to people, they're like it sounds like you're on something and I was like no, I didn't know.
Speaker 2:I had it till I was in the military. I was playing guitar in my dorm room fresh on my first duty station in Tinker Air Force Base, and I was playing guitar with a fellow airman and I was asking him about the purple triangles and what he thought about them to that song and he looked at me really weird. He was like what the hell are you talking about purple triangles? You don't see the purple triangles Like they have those cool patterns in them.
Speaker 2:I never talked about it before. I just thought it was normal my whole life that I'm hallucinating sound and there's these really beautiful kind of insane landscapes that come out of these things. And the root of my geometric drawing was an exploration into trying to figure out how to reproduce those in animations. I have a periodic table of elements uh project on objectcom that I've been working on for the last two years, one of the most ambitious projects I've ever worked on. It's all completely hand animated and drawn in adobe after effects and what you're seeing in those animations is what I hear when I'm making them.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, okay.
Speaker 2:So it's 118 elements of the periodic table and they're very. I did my research and I'm tipping my hat to to the the ones that pioneers and the people that discovered these elements. It's so important we take it for granted I think the red carpet should be rolled out for these guys that they're the reason why we even have a smartphone, that we can talk to our grandma every day on. They discovered these elements and they not just discovered the elements, but they figured out how to make technology out of them. It's mind blowing we take it for granted every day microscopic and and and how important it is. So, uh, you know, that kind of mixed with my own personal experience with synesthesia is what that's about. And uh, you know, I've still got some more to make. It's there's 118 elements and I've I've made about 67 of them so far and I hope to be finished by december.
Speaker 2:I'll have all 118 elements and I've made about 67 of them so far and I hope to be finished by December. I'll have all 118 fully animated. Every element gets more complex than the last because there's one more proton and one more electron, so I'm trying to keep it as not just scientifically accurate with a Moore's Bohr model set of electrons and electron pairs circling a nucleus, but also visually appealing to the point where it's almost an optical illusion. That's what a lot of people tell me my art is. I didn't know, because I see the world like that all the time. Even just talking to you, you're just a bunch of really crazy moving patterns and right on, and you sound really cool.
Speaker 2:Well, thank, you, I think I'm comfortable but at the same time, uh, you know, a lot of people tell me when they look at those animations they feel like they're tripping. It's really trippy like this is the kind of thing that you would see if you were hallucinating on something, and I. I guess that's true because I'm hallucinating all the time and it's normal for me.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's. That's a wild world man. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. So anyone who's been around Tezos art for a minute knows you are constantly showing up for other artists. You help, you collect, you collect, you amplify. Why is that such a huge priority for you?
Speaker 2:I'm not in this alone and I I learn from other artists. I typically buy from the artists that I learn from. It's making me a better artist. It's making me a better person a lot of the times too, because that, that heyoka message that I'm looking for, uh, I find it often in other art not not my own, um and it inspires me and I I personally believe, like I said, that art is a monolith and testament to our fleeting existence. And when people I can tell when someone puts their heart and soul into something, um, and when they do that, I feel it and I think it's really important to support that, because what they're creating might, might, inspire a doctor to cure something.
Speaker 2:You know, the mother of invention is creativity. Albert Einstein himself said that creativity is more important than knowledge, and I love the guy. One of my biggest inspirations is this guy. He played violin. Not a lot of people know, you know he was a creative person. He was more creative, I think, than people let him on.
Speaker 2:I'm sure he was probably one of the most brilliant minds to ever exist, but I think that it's because he was always learning and always creating and never stopped, and every day he was working on it and I think if we're working a little more, sharing the right brain with the left brain and adding more creativity into the world, it opens the door for more acceptance too, because when you create, you dive into things that might make you feel uncomfortable, like I might be painting a piece that makes me cry. It's because I'm re-experiencing a childhood trauma getting over it while painting it, but I also shared that with the world. Someone else that didn't know how to get through their problem saw it. This has happened to me, me came to me crying and said thank you for making this. I was going to go buy an ar-15 today, but I decided not to change the world with your creativity now you've mentioned some names.
Speaker 1:Have you had any mentors or people that helped you early on that really shaped this approach?
Speaker 2:Yes, my, there was this guy named. I honestly can't remember his name. It's when I was very young, my mom had this friend that used to come over. That was a guitar player and he let me borrow his guitar and he taught me how to play Stairway to Heaven in one day. First time I picked up the guitar age 11, and I realized that my tics went away when I was holding it and when I was 11, my tics were super bad. So they saved up some money and got me a guitar and he was also an artist. So he was a musician artist and that inspired me.
Speaker 2:He would make these really trippy, kind of surrealistic drawings that were subconscious, free-flowing, freestyle drawings that he didn't plan. But when he was done with he would start with his pen on the middle of the paper and he would just do a line and then subconscious would tell him what to do next and you'd make a ball or a bubble and a hair and before you know it it was this massive dragon made out of nonsense. But when you look at it from far away it was beautiful. When you looked at it from far away, it was beautiful. When you looked at it really close, it looked like a child, scribbled something and I loved that. I thought it was fascinating and I wanted to know how he did it.
Speaker 2:So at a very young age, I learned what surrealism, automatism, was, and I have been practicing that muscle and building up that muscle ever since. And, uh, you know, I'm to the point now where I can do those scribbles like he did and I can make a, a photorealistic portrait of a turtle in outer space with it, with the entire earth on its back, which is one of my artworks that, if you I don't know if you've seen that one it's fully on chain as well. And, uh, you know, I I gifted that to one of my best friend's daughters who loves turtles, and I find myself doing that quite often. When I make a handmade piece, I I very often just give it to someone I love. Um, and I don't know why I do it, it's just who I am dude that's why we love you that's why we love you.
Speaker 1:Hey, congrats again on a new baby. You've shared a few quotes about fatherhood lately. Has becoming a dad changed your creative rhythm or even how you think about the future of what you're building?
Speaker 2:My children are a humongous fuel for wanting to be a better person in general and really thinking about what I'm doing and for how long I'm doing it, which I've never done before, because I can get hyper fixated on things and my new hyper fixation is my children. Of course, my wife is out right now with them. Give me time to do this, but I love my kids and I want them to to have every opportunity I never had growing up, so I share with them creativity every day. My son finley he's just turned. He's. He's about three and a half years old now. I had him reading a hundred words by the time he was two because I worked with him on him. He knows how to draw a face. He can draw, you know. He works with all these different colors and can create patterns with rainbows now, which I thought was pretty fascinating for someone so young and can write his name, and he's not even in preschool. So I think it is fuel for creativity. It brings me back to my roots, because so many of us forget what it's like to be a kid that pure innocence, that awe, that understanding, that gullibility, and I see it in him every single day and, of course, in my newborn, you know, waking up to the world for the first time, not knowing what anything is and just pure instinct of wanting to drink milk non-stop. And if he's not drinking milk he's screaming. But he's screaming for a reason and it's one of the most beautiful sounds that a human being can hear. Um, I think it's making it's you.
Speaker 2:Having kids has definitely changed my creativity. It's. It's helped me dive back into the simple things. I was making very complicated artworks before I had these children. Now I'm making pixel art and making it really easy to understand and just straight to the point, and it feels really good to do that. The complex things feel really good too.
Speaker 2:Do that? The complex things feel really good too. They're they're kind of more of a personal, I think, uh, prestige of sorts and uh, but to to enjoy the simple things and to do the same thing over and over again with my kids, because that's what kids do and that when they're, when they like something or they enjoy something, they want to do it again, and they want to do it again the next day and the next day and it doesn't get old. But for us as adults, things get old so fast and it's sad how old things get so quickly. A joke is not funny anymore. Your favorite stand-up comedian you heard him too many times, that song that plays on the radio. You heard it in the shopping mall and now you're sick. You're stung. Why don't we do this to ourselves? We need to learn how to be children again.
Speaker 1:You know what I'm saying. Yeah, some suspension of disbelief would be great. So you've helped a lot of artists figure out how to get started, especially with tricky formats or minting workflows. Do you think of yourself as a kind of mentor, and what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind in this space, james?
Speaker 2:That's a really good question. You know I love to teach. It is one of my favorite things to do. I just have kind of an understanding for all the different learning styles that are out there. I was a college professor back in 2015. I taught computer science at Daymar College to adults, my peers and I loved it. All my students passed. I loved it, all my students passed.
Speaker 2:And it's because I know that when you're teaching a group of people, not everyone's going to hear what you're saying and everyone has has different attention spans and everyone may not even have the same language community you're using to describe the topic, so they don't understand it. And so, as far as looking at myself as a mentor, I kind of I do that just because I I think I absorb and maintain a large, vast kind of encyclopedia of random nonsense that most people can't do, of random nonsense that most people can't do, and I've been able to do it since I was really young. But I'm also open for learning, because you can learn just as much from your students as you can teaching them. Often the last questions that you don't actually know the answer to, you have to be honest with yourself when you don't know and you have to learn about it and then you learn it together, and that's when it becomes a relearning experiences when the mentor and the student mentor each other.
Speaker 1:Well, james, I really appreciate you making the time to be here, especially with the newborn at home. The way you blend art, advocacy, music and community into something honest and technically ambitious, it's rare. So thank you for all you do on Tezos and for continuing to be that glitch that wakes us up when things start to feel too polished or too predictable.
Speaker 2:It's an honor. Thank you for your time. Peace, love and rock and roll.
