"Make More Art." - ZEROPOD Ep. 8: An Opepepod with Jack Butcher!1

"Make More Art." - ZEROPOD Ep. 8: An Opepepod with Jack Butcher!

March 13, 2024

Check the full episode on Youtube:

SUMMARY

Creativity and art can be cultivated at any age, and by making art more accessible and creating a shared vocabulary, there can be a collaborative explosion of creativity and innovation.

• 00:00 🎨 Contribute to open networks, add your flavor to communities, publish and produce consistently to be a better artist, and participate in the internet as an artist, as Jack Butcher shares his journey from school in the UK to pursuing a career in graphic design in New York.

  • Contribute to open networks, add your flavor to communities, publish and produce consistently to be a better artist, and participate in the internet as an artist.

  • Jack Butcher talks about his journey to becoming an artist and designer, starting with his school experience in the UK and his cousin's influence in graphic design.

  • The speaker talks about how he took a different path by pursuing a skateboarding brand assignment, which led to a life-changing experience in a design studio.

  • Exposure to the idea of earning a living through graphic design led to pursuing a career in the field, despite initially working at Honda.

  • Worked at a commercial printers, saw high-end graphic design magazine, got internship in London, met people who could get almost free flights to New York, and came to New York.

  • Sent 150 emails for graphic design, got a response from a veteran advertising guy, worked with him for a couple of years, then bounced around the agency scene in New York for almost a decade.

• 07:25 🎨 Jack Butcher discusses his transition from studying in Wales to New York City, the influence of temporary experiences in design, and the evolution of Visualize Value.

  • Jack Butcher discusses his transition from studying in Wales to moving to New York City and the challenges of making that leap.

  • The speaker had the opportunity to go to New York and was inspired by the idea of taking time out to travel and have new experiences before settling into a career.

  • The speaker discusses the influence of temporary experiences in the design world and the importance of making family lore, while also mentioning the decision to start Visualize Value.

  • The speaker discusses their experience working in the agency world for eight or nine years, starting at a boutique shop and eventually feeling confident in their ability to do better than the agencies they had worked for.

  • The speaker gained insight into business economics while working for an agency, leading to the decision to start a solo agency business with a focus on automotive clients, but eventually realizing the need to pivot and make several iterations before finding the right path.

  • Jack Butcher discusses how he transitioned from a podcast agency to offering visualized value services and eventually productizing his skills to create a curriculum for adding visuals to writing.

• 21:21 🎨 Jack Butcher discusses his journey into NFTs, the value of minting digital art on ethereum, and the significance of preserving and authenticating creative work through blockchain providence.

  • Jack Butcher talks about how he started with a service business, evolved into a product, and eventually got into crypto after creating a blockchain explanation for a client, leading to a brief investment in Bitcoin.

  • Jack Butcher discusses his journey into the world of NFTs, the importance of context in understanding their value, and the transition of his work to be more crypto-native.

  • The speaker discusses the value of minting digital art on ethereum and the feedback loop of creating and selling art, highlighting the downside of the commercial component and the importance of having an immutable record of one's work.

  • The speaker discusses the significance of digital art and NFTs in preserving and authenticating creative work, highlighting the value of cumulative providence and the potential for creating a paper trail for future recognition and value.

  • The speaker discusses the importance of publishing work, the nuances of blockchain providence, and the hope of evolving from cringe.

  • The idea of the blue check mark representing top-down verification has evolved into the concept of the check mark as an artist's signature on an image, with the commentary on the waning value of the check mark and the confusion of the check mark with truth.

• 40:48 🎨 The speaker discusses the creation of digital artwork, the changing context of the Twitter check mark, and the importance of maintaining artistic input in digital art.

  • The speaker discusses the creation of a digital artwork and the commentary on digital status, notability, and the value of a check mark.

  • The speaker discusses the creation of a mechanism to combine checks into a single canvas, the concept of a black check, and the addition of a trait referencing the day of migration or modification in the onchain collection.

  • The speaker discusses the changing context of the Twitter check mark, the potential loss of significance of the symbol over time, and the evolution of the oepen project on the blockchain.

  • Digital art as a medium has the most attention and distribution, but creating 10,000 variations of the same thing is not artistically fulfilling, so the speaker split the collection into smaller segments with pre-assigned rarity to create something more interesting and maintain interest.

  • The speaker discusses the conceptual depth and transparency in producing art, emphasizing the lack of a set schedule and the adaptability to changes in the world, particularly in the NFT space.

  • The speaker discusses the creation of art using AI and the importance of maintaining artistic input and personal touch in digital art.

• 01:02:24 🎨 Creating and sharing art online can attract like-minded individuals, leading to a network of people with shared values and skills, ultimately enabling the ability to make a ton of stuff.

  • Making art accessible to anyone and allowing them to signal their values through it can attract like-minded people, leading to the creation of a network of individuals with shared views and complimentary skill sets, ultimately resulting in the ability to make a ton of stuff.

  • Opin and nouns are popular because they allow people to see themselves in the art and use it as a prompt, with the long-term goal of concentrating attention on the artists' work and creating a unifying platform for art.

  • Creating and sharing art within internet communities is the best use of technology, as it encourages collective output and growth, similar to the strategy used by brick and mortar museums to attract visitors.

  • Jack Butcher discusses his involvement with Nouns and the project's potential to solve the cold start problem for internet-native creative people through incentivizing network effects and shared contribution.

  • The speaker discusses the potential of selling caps with noggles on them, the novelty of the idea, and the value of crypto in enabling creative expression.

  • The design and mechanism of the Noggles satisfy all criteria for being a recognizable and reproducible icon, even though the creators may not have initially intended for it to be so.

• 01:12:47 🎨 Creating valuable art that excites people, integrating noggles, and putting work into the public domain, while discussing the transition from service to product business and the potential impact on artists.

  • The speaker discusses the importance of letting consensus determine the value of art, the integration of noggles in everything, and the decision to put a lot of work into the public domain as a visual artist.

  • Creating valuable content that people want to imitate and share is innate behavior, and while it may not be widely accepted, projects built with this in mind have the potential to excite people.

  • The speaker discusses the value and expectations of art, the concept of free engagement, and the programs included in the VV trade-in bundle.

  • The speaker discusses the transition from service business to product business as a creative, the potential impact of the project on artists, and the excitement of seeing the evolution and variety of the project's output.

  • The speaker discusses the potential of linking physical pieces to opeps and collaborating with makers of physical objects to produce artwork in the set.

  • Salino is working on physical claims for op Pepe pens, with the Pudgy Penguins doing a hoodie for the drop, and Luka being amazing at turning things out.

• 01:26:19 🎨 Jack Butcher discusses the future of his projects, the importance of visualized value, and the process of creating and releasing new content, emphasizing the interconnectedness of different fields and the potential for infinite outcomes in the Opep project.

  • Jack Butcher discusses the future of his projects, the importance of visualized value, and the process of creating and releasing new content.

  • The speaker discusses the process of failure in art, the importance of iteration, and the humbling experience of studying complex geometric patterns in nature and their connection to the human experience.

  • The interconnectedness of different fields and ideas, as well as the potential for infinite outcomes, is a key concept in the Opep project, with ambitions to expand and connect visual consciousness in a more comprehensive way.

  • Mint as much as possible to make it easier for Jack to find later, as Opep is a collaborative project with many contributors.

  • The speaker discusses the fundamental truths of blockchain and crypto, emphasizing the potential for coordination and collaboration rather than speculation and scamming.

  • Contribute to open networks and communities, add your flavor of contribution, and consistently publish and produce art to improve as an artist.

• 01:42:41 🎨 Opin will be around for a long time, Jack Butcher is always interesting to listen to, and they are meeting for lunch tomorrow.

INSIGHTS

• 🎨 "You want to be a better artist? Make more art. Nobody wants to hear that answer, you want some magical bean but there are no magical beans."

• 🎨 Jack Butcher didn't think of himself as a designer or an artist until quite late in his journey, challenging the idea that creativity has to start at a young age.

• 🤯 The concept of earning a living as a graphic designer was mind-blowing to me, as I never realized the impact of art in businesses and brands.

• 🎨 Visualized Value became a process of distilling ideas into something that represented exactly what I wanted to do.

• 🎨 Exploring the question of digital status and notability through the migration of an editioned image to an on-chain collection, representing the commentary on fungibility and non-fungibility.

• 🎨 Making art accessible to anyone and creating a shared vocabulary can lead to a collaborative explosion of creativity and innovation.

• 🌐 The concept of a shared canvas to contribute to incentivizes people to pay attention and can create a network effect for themselves on the internet.

• 🎨 The potential outcomes of creating a thoughtful mechanism with a mimetic layer are incredible.