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For each episode we engage in long format interviews with artists, curators, technologists, and other thought leaders, and share news and educational segments.
You can listen to this podcast on Youtube, Spotify, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. You can also listen right here! Episodes will be released every Sunday, so make sure to subscribe to never miss a moment.
Colborn Bell is the Founder of the Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△), an immersive digital art center for NFTs in virtual reality.
He is a long-time blockchain and venture investor and advisor to individuals allocating capital towards frontier technologies and exponential change. Previously he was a co-founder of the 5th Element Group, a global braintrust advising corporations in aligning brand and social impact. With Abacus Wealth Partners he worked with families to create value-aligned investment portfolios. He has also served alongside the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) in designing an innovative infrastructure bank for East Africa.
On this special episode of the DXM Podcast, Qu Harrison Terry interviews designer of the DMINTI Metaverse Hani Rashid. Originally recorded on April 25th 2022.
Artist and historian Martin Lukas Ostachowski talks art, academic underpinnings of Web3, transparency, access and more with the ever insightful Colborn Bell!
Martin Lukas Ostachowski is an artist based in Canada who explores geometric abstraction and minimalism using physical and digital languages through the use of technologies like blockchain.
Conceptual artist and software engineer Sterling Crispin checks in with Colborn on his new wiiiides project. A conceptual artist that works between digital and physical objects. Crispin lets his ideas lead him to form and content relationships, rather than focusing on one medium or style of making art. Sterling is interested in the conflicting stories we tell ourselves about the future. Are we going to merge our bodies with machines and become gods that live forever? Or will we face a global climate collapse and all go extinct? Somehow, we are moving towards both of these conclusions at once.
He views technology as an extension of humanity, an embodiment of the human spirit, rather than an external force that we must mitigate. Yet technology has its own agency and goals, and can be understood as a distributed life-form pulsing on the surface of the Earth. By technology he means individual devices and networked systems, like cameras and software, but also what I call the “Technological Other”, a living global super-organism of all machines and software.
He’s interested in the growth of this exponentially developing techno-organism and its impact on our human bodies, minds, and psyches.
Sterling’s artwork often misuses or reverse-engineers this technology in order to give form to things that are otherwise formless. I’m interested in the creation of new dialogues, signs, and symbols which challenge societal power structures. And he believes that earnestly reaching toward objective beauty and truth in an effort to produce the real, rather than an image of the real, is itself a political act.
In this spirit he attempts to depict the landscape of our consciousness as it is transformed by the Technological Other, and create objects that embody the conflicting cultural narratives, anxieties, and dreams that exist about the future, and thus the present.
Pioneering digital artist Marjan Moghaddam catches up with Colborn Bell about the dynamics and the future of the field.
An award-winning, pioneering, digital artist and animator, who works primarily with 3d CG and digital media for animation, NFT, Net Art, print, sculpture, installation, and AR/VR. Known for her original, unique and influential style of 3d figuration and animation, she is considered as one of the top female 3d CG artists in the world, and has been exhibited extensively at international galleries, museums and media festivals, in addition to curated exhibits at the Armory Show in NYC and Art Basel Miami. Ms. Moghaddam’s work has also been an official selection of the prestigious Siggraph Computer Animation Festival and art gallery (the world’s top CG festival) a total of 4 times.
Marjan is a recipient of numerous grants for her innovative and cutting-edge art, such as Rockefeller Fund, NY Department of Cultural Affairs, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Experimental Television Fund. Marjan was also the featured artist for the launch of DOTCOM Gallery and International Forum for the Digital Arts in 1996, the first internet based digital art gallery in NYC, sponsored by Prodigy Inc. Her animations have also been the official selection of numerous international film/video and animation festivals throughout the years. Marjan is also a popular and prolific public speaker in the digital arts.
NFT Artist and founder of El Cuarto Elastico checks in with host Colborn Bell on their work and their practice.
Federico Solmi joins the pod to discuss his work, his journey to the blockchain, and changing the world. Since 1999 he lives and works in New York. Solmi’s work utilizes bright colors and a satirical aesthetic to portray a dystopian vision of our present-day society His exhibitions often feature articulate installations composed of a variety of media including video, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Solmi uses his art as a vehicle to stimulate a visceral conversation with his audience, highlighting the contradictions and fallibility that characterize our time. Through his work, Solmi examines unconscious human impulses and desires in order to critique Western society’s obsession with individual success and display contemporary relationships between nationalism, colonialism, religion, consumerism. By re-configuring historical narratives across eras, he creates social and political commentary works which disrupt the mythologies that define American society. Scanning his paintings into a game engine, Solmi’s videos confront the audience with his own absurd rewriting of past and present, merging dark humor and sense of the grotesque with new technologies. He creates a carnivalesque virtual reality where our leaders become puppets, animated by computer script and motion capture performance rather than string.
In 2009, Solmi was awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation of New York with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in the category of Video & Audio. Solmi’s work was included at the 100 years anniversary exhibition of The Phillips Collection, Seeing Differently, and currently at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s traveling exhibition, Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today, and the inaugural exhibition of the Ocean Flower Museum Island in Hainan Province, Danzhou, China. His work is on view at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University in the exhibition “Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts” until December 5, 2022
Rhea Myers is an artist, hacker and writer originally from the UK now based in British Columbia, Canada. Her work places technology and culture in mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us.
Kate Vass of Kate Vass Gallerie drops by tue show to discuss the early days of blockchain and crypto art back before they were called NFTs, the nebulous nature of the NFT, and the complexities involved with interfacing between the crypto art space and that of the traditional art world.
KVG is the first physical gallery in the world, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, which specializes in art and technology (blockchain, crypto, AI) since 2017. Pioneering in the space of physical and digital, the gallery represents the best program of generative art. It works closely with international curators, showcasing both: emerging & established new media artists, facilitating their rise to distinction. In addition to the physical exhibition activities, the gallery implements art projects in VR, decentralized lands. It creates “artist experiences” worldwide to cooperate with various art market players, museums, and tech companies and participate in many cultural and educational events. Gallery publishes its educational material for a new generation of collectors quarterly. KVG has its own permanent physical and digital art collections that are always open on display for the public.
Mathew Dryhurst is an artist and researcher based in Berlin Germany.
His research focuses on technical and ethical protocols. He makes music and creates art with Holly Herndon and their albums “Proto” and “Platform” (4AD) have provoked international and critical acclaim. He teaches at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Strelka Institute and European Graduate School. He previously served as a Director of Programming at Gray Area in San Francisco.
On the third 18th of NFT Sundays, host Colborn Bell of DMINTI and the Museum of Crypto Art interviews the author of The Metaverse Handbook and host of the podcast NFT QT, QuHarrison Terry. Qu unpacks his history with web 3, a fascinating journey that provides insight into Qu’s method for becoming the consummate guide to the Metaverse space!
QuHarrison Terry is a growth marketer at Mark Cuban Companies, a Dallas, Texas venture capital firm, where he advises and assists portfolio companies with their marketing strategies and objectives. Previously, he led marketing at Redox, focusing on lead acquisition, new user experience, events, and content marketing.
Daisy Alioto’s career has touched practically every genre of media. From a fashion internship at ELLE, she went on to intern at NPR (twice) in audience development. From there, she held staff positions in audience engagement at International Business Times and Time Inc., where she supported the launch of the US edition of Wallpaper* magazine. She then went on to manage audience development at The New York Review of Books. Most recently, she was the audience engagement manager at HODINKEE, the world’s preeminent resource for all things watches. She also co-founded the NFT-funded newsletter, Dirt.
Her journalism and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review Daily, TIME, New York Magazine, The New Republic, GQ, Longreads, Los Angeles Review of Books, Curbed, Vox, CityLab and Condé Nast Traveler among others.
In 2013, she graduated from Bowdoin College where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Bowdoin College Non-Fiction Prize and the DeAlva Stanwood Alexander First Prize (for best baccalaureate speech). Her poetry has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Unbroken Journal and Triangle House Review. She aspires to live in a lighthouse
The metaverse as platform capitalism, web 3 potential to support new social movements (caveat; does not supplant boots on the ground!), the painterly side of mo cap and VR… in this doomed out plunge host Colborn Bell and artist Sam Rolfes parse out available vibes and gesture toward utopias and dystopias..
Sam Rolfes is a Chicago and New York based mixed-format digital artist and director. Using the human body as a mark making device and underlying structure, he crafts diffusive psychosexual worlds that sublimate space and identity. His work examines the mutability and malleability of flesh, and surreal performance through the lens of contemporary portraiture.
Rolfes has been active across several formats and industries through video and still image projects for artists including Amnesia Scanner, Danny L Harle, and Caroline Polachek; fashion print and promotional design for Nicola Formichetti’s Nicopanda line, a music game for Adult Swim, album art and animation for Kingdom; a distorted series of stills with Danny Brown for Complex Magazine, fashion editorials for King Kong Magazine, live visuals for Lafawndah, Squarepusher, and part of Rihanna’s VMA 2016 performance; EP covers for Dawn Richard, DJ Orange Julius, and Nobel; and live 3D sculpting/visuals for Evian Christ, Mumdance, Lightning Bolt, and Teengirl Fantasy.
Multidisciplinary artist and NFT phenom SamJ graces NFT Sundays with their presence! Colborn Bell and Sam enter deeply into the intersections between identity, drag, crypto and NFT art practice! Buy the ticket, take ride, go deep with Sam and Colborn on this episode of NFT Sundays!
A few weeks back our host Colborn Bell had the opportunity to catch up with ASYNC Art founder Conlan Rios. The resulting conversation reveals the attitude of gamification that belies Conlan’s prescient platform as a whole, the two chop it up about the importance of ASNYC’s Genesis piece, and Rios riffs on the world changing potential associated with expanding the generative and interactive dimensions of fine art practice. A must listen for generative art heads!
Conlan’s background is in game and mobile development.The only physical possessions he values are his bike and his laptop. He’s also an avid digital art collector, a firm believer in everything virtual and that the future of the field lies within the Programmable Art movement.
Legendary Trash art artist and historian Eric Rhodes dishes with our host Colborn Bell on Defi Chads, unofficial punks, getting kicked off Super Rare and a more utopian time on the Block Chain for art and artists. Colborn and Eric compare notes on their journeys into and through Crypto art. Get into this deeply personal and insightful take on Crypto art and NFTs.
Eric Rhodes is an award winning NFT artist, and founder of Second Realm hailing from the Land of Pizza and Bagels, New Jersey.
Before Second Realm, he was a customer experience (CX) and service design expert heading up programs at Twitter and Google. He also spent 10 years in UX design and digital marketing working with global brands like MLB Advanced Media and HarperCollins Publishers.
What are Ecto-games? What are the possible connections between public art and the NFT space? What are the implications of curatorship re the NFT space, within it and beyond? Kevin Buist of Outland and our host Colborn Bell explore all this and more in this episode of NFT Sundays.
Kevin Buist is an independent curator, writer, and former Artistic Director of ArtPrize, where he oversaw artists, operations, and design. He holds a MA in Visual and Critical Studies from Kendall College of Art and Design. His writing has been featured in numerous print and online publications including Art Forum, the Art:21 Blog, where he was a Blogger in Residence, MNartists.org, Michigan Quarterly Review, and kevinbuist.com/blog. He has presented academic papers at the Institute for the Study of Latin American Art at NYU and the College Art Association Annual Conference. He has delivered lectures at many conferences and events, including The International Council of Fine Arts Deans’ Annual Conference, Museum Next, the University & College Designers Association Conference, and more.
We are graced by the legendary Micol Ap of VerticalCrypto Art! Colborn and Micol reminisce on the early days of web 3 and discuss their motivations for getting into the space. Much has changed! Yet there is still exciting work being done! Tune in to get these two OGs’ takes.
Micol Ap is the founder and CEO of verticalCrypto Art. VerticalCrypto Art is media hub and studio dedicated to CryptoArt and NFTs, providing curatorial services, content creation, NFT consultancy, and event production.
An economy based on intrinsic motivation rather than market forces? Paying royalties to artists? An NFT novella? Judy Mam of Dada.art regales our host Colborn with tales from the utopia she’s created at Dada.art! Inspiring lessons about propagating and maintaining community lie within!
Born and raised in Mexico City, and a New Yorker since 1992, Judy Mam is the Co-founder of DADA.nyc, the world’s only visual conversation platform with a rare digital art marketplace on Ethereum blockchain.
Kenny Schachter talks NFTs, fine art, teaching, curating and money with our host Colborn Bell and special guest co-host DMINTI’s own Beth Fiore! In true Schacterian form Kenny wades into the complexities around fine art and finance, getting gallery representation, and the technological hurdles to learning about NFTs and crypto. Beth and Colborn soften the blow with their deft insight and some fancy footwork. Get into it!
Kenny Schachter is an American artist who was born in 1961. Their work is currently being shown at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Crypto Kiosk in Berlin. Numerous key galleries and museums such as Magenta Plains have featured Kenny Schachter’s work in the past. Kenny Schachter has been featured in articles for The Art Newspaper, Observer and Apollo. The most recent article is The Art Galleries Leading the Charge into NFTs written for Ocula in March 2022.
Beth Fiore is Artist Liaison for DMINTI and is a seasoned expert in the field of Modern and Contemporary art advisement. Beth specializes in historical works from the 1900-60s and critical, political, and challenging artists from present day.
This week on NFT Sundays Episode 8, Colborn speaks with fine artist and NFT artist Julian Brangold of Crypto Arg, a crypto art based organization hailing from Argentina. The two dive into the Argentinian crypto art scene, which is replete with artists bound together by style and socio-political and economic backdrop, as well as organizational modalities, curation, and common tropes surrounding the work of Latin American artists in the fine arts world. An illuminating journey for anyone interested in exploring the world of Argentinian art and crypto art.
This week on NFT Sundays, episode 7 features legendary NFT phenom Erin Beesely! On the heels of her celebrated Pseudomods drop with Art Blocks, Erin and Colborn talk synthesizers, growing up online, favorite artists of the space, spirit animals and touch on a litany of other topics. The two agree the space is ADHD and the conversation that ensues instantiates this claim.
Erin’s artist statement: I’m a visual artist from North Carolina, working with computers and digital mediums. I strive to create work that fills the gap in my brain, may that be using artificial intelligence, p5js/processing, plotting, CAD, 3d printing, or just drawing. I’m always trying to find the needle in the haystack of latent futures.
On the sixth episode of NFT Sundays, host Colborn Bell welcomes artist Klara Vollstaedt. The two dive into a conversation about identity and the potentiality of virtual worlds and web 3 writ large. Klara discusses her journey from art school aspirant to NFT star, and celebrates the NFT space for its openness and inclusionary tendencies! Not to mention an informative discussion of some of Klara’s most important works with images to boot.
Klara Volstaedt is a transfem artist from Canada, her work analyzes the divide between the metaphysical and real world, as well as the personas / relationships that exist within it. Introspective in nature, her work seeks to discover more of herself.
On the fifth episode of NFT Sundays, host Colborn Bell of DMINTI and the Museum of Crypto Art interviews Maria Paula Fernandez of JPG Protocol and Dept. of Decentralization ETH/Berlin. Solving the problem of provenance, the possible roles of crypto within political and economic uncertainty, and the many visionary NFT projects hailing from Argentina, this sprawling conversation illuminates the practice of one of the most forward thinking NFT curators in the game, Maria Paula Fernandez!
Maria Paula Fernandez has been working in the blockchain space since June 2017, and have consulted or worked for projects such as Polkadot, Gnosis, Melonport, Ethereum Community Fund, Golem, Akropolis, Concourse Open, Avalanche, and other grassroots and established projects on the Ethereum ecosystem. Currently she is Co-Founder at JPG Protocol, and Founder and Managing Director at the Department of Decentralization (ETHBerlin, Görli Testnet, DoD Art Department).
On the fourth episode of NFT Sundays, host Colborn Bell of DMINTI and the Museum of Crypto Art interviews artist and Metaverse architect untitled, xyz. The metaverse, a place where growth can match the blinding rate at which humans have come to absorb text and image based information, is discussed in terms of its potential for connecting a global community, and as a vehicle for imagination. Untitled, xyz, one of the most in demand metaverse architects in the game, provides valuable insight into the possible futures for the burgeoning medium.
Kirk Finkel [untitled, xyz] is a Brooklyn-based digital artist and architect. His work explores metaverse architecture and design concepts emerging from blockchain technology. An assembly of motifs and modular building elements, his 3D collages represent hypothetical artifacts of the virtual age. In 2011, Kirk co-founded Hither Yon; a four-person collective whose drawings and murals have been exhibited in Rome, Milan, Copenhagen, and Berlin. Prior to xyz, he also practiced as an urban designer in New York. Kirk is currently a Resident Architect at the Museum of Crypto Art, MOCA.
On the third episode of NFT Sundays, host Colborn Bell of DMINTI and the Museum of Crypto Art interviews the author of The NFT Handbook and host of the podcast NFT QT, QuHarrison Terry. The two dive into recent trends in the NFT space and Qu advances his ‘dot doc’ theory for explicating NFTs! Qu also unpacks his history with web 3, a fascinating journey that provides insight into Qu’s method for becoming the consummate guide to the NFT space!
QuHarrison Terry is a growth marketer at Mark Cuban Companies, a Dallas, Texas venture capital firm, where he advises and assists portfolio companies with their marketing strategies and objectives. Previously, he led marketing at Redox, focusing on lead acquisition, new user experience, events, and content marketing.
On the second episode of NFT Sundays, host Colborn Bell of DMINTI and the Museum of Crypto Art interviews Somnium Space Founder and CEO Artur Sychov. From inside the Somnium forest, the two discuss his journey in building a virtual space and what the Metaverse might look like in the future.
Artur Sychov is a Founder and CEO of Somnium Space. He has been navigating virtual worlds for more than two decades starting with Ultima Online in 1999, then Second Life and many more. Artur strongly believes in the ultimate future of Virtual Reality worlds with open and decentralized economies.
On the inaugural episode of NFT Sundays host Colborn Bell of DMINTI and the Museum of Crypto Art interviews legendary A.I. artist and roboticist Pindar Van Arman. The two delve deep into the practice of crypto art, what exactly Pindar’s robots do, the dynamics of 1 of 1s vs open editions, and the New York gallery scene’s adoption, or lack thereof, of crypto art and artists.
Pindar Van Arman is an American artist and roboticist who designs painting robots that explore the differences between human and computational creativity. Since his first system in 2005 he has built multiple artificially creative robots earning multiple accolades including a TEDx Talk, making the Shortlist at Barbican’s DevArt Competition, and First Prize in the Robot Art 2018.
