In an age where our digital world is as palpable as the physical, the boundaries of art, commerce, and social commentary blur, giving rise to audacious, and in this case, cute af projects.
Enter Ed Fornieles, a multimedia artist who delves into relationships, pop culture, and societal protocols, alongside Sam Spike, a curator and art historian. Both have been pivotal in defining the conversation surrounding digital art, in our physical reality and in the Web3 domain.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Ed and Sam via video call. Though we were all in London, virtual meetings remain the optimum choice, go figure! We spoke about Fini, a technology company disguised as living NFTs, the intersection of cute aesthetics within 'bro' culture, the harmony found in brand collaboration and the significance of community for artists.
Emily May: Ed, could you share how the exploration of blockchain and crypto was introduced into your practice?
Ed Fornieles: There's a culprit in terms of this exploration, which is Ben Vickers. A longtime friend and significant influence on my work, Ben was an early adopter of Ethereum, with this engagement opening up a conversation about the potential applications of ETH contracts in the art world. At the time, it seemed to me that Ethereum was introducing a method of art practice reminiscent of the 1970s conceptualism - a rule-based thinking that sets up protocols to generate something, which we've now seen a branch of crypto manifest in that direction.
My first hands-on experience with the blockchain was in 2016. That year, we developed Crypto Certs, a concept that allowed stakeholders to invest in the production of specific artworks. These ‘certs’ were essentially a hybrid of physical and digital assets that could be purchased. A percentage of the sales from these assets were allocated to an Ethereum contract, designed to finance the production of future works.
The attraction to crypto in the first place was its likeness to an imaginarium - a reimagining of how structures could function. There is a significant amount of work, not just my own, that revolves around strategising for alternate futures and thinking about alternate modes of reality. What I find intriguing, is the progression of these thoughts from their conception to the present day. The idea, particularly in regards to Fini, has been transformed from projection to a tangible reality through this weird thing known as crypto.
EM: I'm also intrigued to learn about your approach to handling a broad body of work. This becomes particularly interesting when the work assumes an identity, often unintended, that may stand apart from the artist behind it. Did you and the Fini team envision creating a brand with its own distinct standing?
EF: Yeah, that did ultimately become the game. However, I believe there's a greater question to be asked: what is it for a company or corporation to exist? As a piece of art can potentially be so many different things. It has these convergence points which have traditionally been the gallery, but there's no reason why that needs to be the case. Despite this, the creation process has been complex as it's emergent and unknown. It's very sticky and difficult to see it clearly, even when you're in the midst of building it. Yet, to me, that always has been the most exciting work, when you don't even have the language to fully describe what it is you're doing but you have faith that it's in there somewhere.
EM: Sam, I'd love to learn about your journey. How did you transition from a legacy art background to co-founding JPG and Fini? What was it about NFTs that spiked your interest?
Sam Spike: I became curious about crypto nearly three years ago now. I have a very good friend who's been working with Ethereum protocols for a long time, so I’d always followed it from afar. But frankly, I didn't understand it very well, it seemed very alien and all about finance. It was actually through prediction markets that I had my first real experience with crypto. During the 2020 US election and its aftermath, I started using crypto betting sites to bet on politics. The owner of the site I was using was a big NFT collector, which in turn led me to become very curious and want to get involved.
In January 2021 I worked with an artist who was creating conceptual photography works and wanted to sell them as NFTs. In order to find buyers, I cold-messaged the few hundred NFT collectors I could find on Twitter. It was quite a small world then and I was able to connect with a lot of interesting early adopters through that process. It was during that time I met Trent and the wonderful MarÃa Paula, with whom IÂ co-founded the curation platform, JPG. I also got involved with a community called Fingerprints, who are an art collecting DAO. It was there that I saw the opportunity to spotlight this small group of artists who were exploring the use of blockchain as an artistic medium rather than just a platform to sell work.
Then I met Ed towards the end of 2021. It was really exciting for me to meet an artist who had not only made work outside of the context of crypto that touched upon so many of the central themes in this world, like identity, memetics, role-play and technology, but also an artist who was interested in what I was interested in at that time, which was using the scale that is afforded by NFTs—editions of thousands, or tens of thousands— as a new kind of canvas for participatory world-building. It allowed us to smuggle a conceptual artwork like Fini into the notionally vapid format of a ‘profile picture project’.
EM: Thanks to Finis, along with your Twitter feed, Sam, ‘Animal Software' has become a recurrent term in my lexicon. It automatically transports me back to the golden era of virtual pets such as Tamagotchis, Nintendogs and NeoPets. What was the inception of this term and how does it relate to Finis?
EF: Finis have existed previously in both galleries and museums, from 2016 onwards. Within that zone I suppose they were animal software, they were these cute embodiments of data that existed, using RSS feeds and large screens, sculptures and some film work. But they were limited to the people who enter a gallery space or can afford an expensive piece of work. What I saw in NFTs was the possibility that a piece of work might have an intimacy with thousands of people, and not just a few. This is also true of how I’ve seen other digital forums in the past, for instance, Facebook is a way of conducting performance that might occur over many months, and have these very intimate moments in an ongoing durational way by the allowance of a new technology. The same thing is true for Fini, the framing of them and what they are is constantly shifting, even in terms of the company there are various ways of thinking about them.
The original name, Finiliar, before we cut it to Fini, was connected to a familiar, a spirit entity that was both you, but also separate from you. Back in 2012/13 the data self was very much at the forefront, this idea that there are many different iterations of you that you’re subconsciously unaware of, but can be sifted out of your data, which perhaps is a more honest and direct version of yourself than what you carry around every day. ‘Animal Software’ is essentially a way of capturing these sorts of spirit forms that are constantly emanating from you.
SS: ‘Animal Software’ is a meme term that I spontaneously tweeted once because I'd jokingly taken to describing Finis as ‘digital animals’. We like the idea of Finis being both these digital creatures, but also little pieces of software that you can plug into different contexts. We’ve recently partnered with a platform called Zapper to create Finis that are connected to your personal portfolio balance. If it’s up, your Fini is happy and vice versa. Owning one of these Finis unlocks premium features on Zapper that you can't access in any other way and similarly unlocks various abilities on the Fini app as well. It’s an interesting experiment to turn an app feature into a living being of some kind, especially one that’s then traded as an artwork!
EM: What was the reasoning behind instilling Fini's with ‘The Cute Factor,' particularly when their surrounding environment is predominantly characterised by a ‘bro' culture?
EF: It’s a fascinating point to raise. There are certain themes within the Fini as a piece of artwork, and one of them is cute, the proliferation of cute over many years is something that people are innately attracted to, that attraction being both an instinctive urge to protect and nurture, and relating to a desire to dominate over entities that seem weak and in need of help. To whatever type of person that might be like, we can also see ‘cute’ as a thin veneer of capitalism at many different points. Then this idea of the cute artefact within a ‘bro’ or masculine culture I think is prevalent in both sexualised cute to just simple cute. Again, talking about those reasons before, perhaps it's something to do with the strain of masculinity as being something in which you have to assert yourself as this power and strength thing, whilst also wanting and searching for softer realms. It's an amalgamation of those impulses. But it seems to be popular!
EM: The cultivation of community synergies and cross-platform pollination within the Web3 landscape has always been of importance to me. How has the collaboration with prominent entities such as Rainbow Wallet and Zapper influenced the brand recognition of Fini?
SS: It's been a lot of fun to work with platforms and other brands. Just the notion of the brand mascot is an interesting one, and something that is coming back into fashion. That may be a bit of a prediction, but it's something that is already present in the world of Web3 and crypto, where branding often strives for a sort of playfulness. We've worked with Rainbow Wallet to develop a Fini that represents their brand, and also unlocks the ability to monitor transaction fees on the Ethereum blockchain, and with Zapper we created a Fini that tracks your portfolio. I love the idea of these companies having some kind of representation as characters within the wider fictional universe of Fini. From a business point of view it’s worked really well. It gives these brands a cool piece of marketing content that shows they're doing something interesting with NFTs, making them dynamic and connected to data, which I think is still quite novel. And, it allows us to speak to a wider audience and onboard new people into the Fini world, as well as getting access to data that would be very difficult for us to get access to otherwise. For example, when it comes to portfolio tracking, to index the portfolio value of thousands of addresses across multiple blockchains, including NFTs and tokens, is something we don’t have the resources to do alone, but Zapper was able to provide us with that data. It was the first time that we've been able to offer people a Fini that represents something acutely personal to them, which is what we're really interested in.
EM: Ed, with your extensive experience in time-based media, performance, and installation—both in physical and virtual realms—I'm interested in understanding your perspective on how pivotal is the notion of a collective experience to your work? Could you also elaborate how this ties into your work when it is destined for spaces where DAOs exist and community plays a significant role?
EF: The idea of a collective or shared experience has been pretty important in my performative work, where a group of people have adopted characters and immersed themselves in environments in which they were able to explore other facets of their identity. Also importantly, to then come out of that and reflect on their experiences and make sense of them. That mechanism in which a viewer or somebody who's experiencing art moves from the immersive into the reflective, is the frame with which I like to see making work in general. That's something that I'm wanting to continue into this realm, where you have building community around an initial narrative, that then brings these moments of punctuation, be they immersive work within the Fini app itself, or even within the discourse on Discord, in which an individual has the opportunity to reflect on the events unfolding around them and the experiences they are going through by interfacing with Fini.
EM: Sam, I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the role that community plays in the traditional art world compared to its influence on artists working in the NFT space?
SS: I think one of the most powerful things about NFTs as cultural objects is that they are, to use a term that I am stealing from the artist Simon Denny, ‘networked assets’. Every NFT collection—every blockchain in fact—is a social network of sorts.
As I see it, NFTs have turned the traditionally rather aloof or haughty idea of an art collector into something much more like a ‘fan’ in the pop culture sense. Artists now have many more collectors than they did previously and the relationship between artist and collector is usually more intimate and casual than before. If you collect an artist’s NFT, you can easily find yourself shit-posting in Discord with them or making memes about their work in a way that just doesn’t happen in the legacy art world.
If you’re an artist who sells large paintings, or sculptural work, for large amounts of money, you have a small number of people who will experience the work, and an even smaller number who are able to purchase it. Because of the scale of distribution afforded by NFTs, a lot of artists are working with editions and releasing works of at least 200 pieces, if not 10,000 pieces, with a much lower price point. Even if it's not exactly cheap, it’s definitely more accessible to a large number of people. Selling NFTs as an artist has a lot more in common with how a musician used to sell thousands or tens of thousands, even millions, of albums to their fans. Those fans then become part of their community, show up to their gigs, buy their merchandise, and so on.
EM: I remember when Manifold introduced the option for open editions, which sparked the comparison of OEs to merchandise. The debate being whether this approach devalues artists' work as a whole or if it simply provides a means to offer an accessible price point for supporting artists.
SS: I think it ties to a wider shift that's happening in the art world among artists turning their practices kind of into these large commercial businesses—think of Damien Hirst or Takashi Murakami or Refik Anadol. The idea of artists having merchandise is something that is becoming more of a practice outside of NFTs as well.
EF: The contemporary artist is somebody who often is running a business. A good person to go on this would be Seth Price, who wrote the book ‘Fuck Seth Price’, where he talks about the freedom of the artists, what that might mean and how often an artist gets trapped into producing one kind of work in the same kind of aesthetic in order to keep running their studio where they employ people. I think, at least, NFTs wear this more honestly than perhaps the more legacy versions do.
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Interview by Emily May, Community Manager @ Daata
Daata is a platform that has been curating, commissioning and selling digital art since 2015, stay connected with us on Twitter and Instagram.