105 from the 105: a playlist

🎧 What we listen to when making art

We were chatting recently about finding song choices with which to showcase our artworks on instagram. Adding music to art is an extra dimension not all of us have played with extensively, although we all love music as a way to inspire our individual creative processes.

We thought it’d be fun to put together a Spotify playlist of 105 tracks – 26 chosen by each of us – plus one collective choice to make 105 in total.

The songs were added in chunks of 26, but feel free to shuffle. We’re not entirely sure what the full set says about us (other than reveal some clear generational differences 😂). Maybe someday we’ll put it through an AI and find out.

Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy it – and let us know what you think!

Love, the 105

aka

@urben

@stina_jones

@UnrealcityArt

@oculardelusion

Welcome to the IMAGINARIUM – a laboratory of gloriously creative madness.

The 105 Collective throw open the doors as part of the First Course in ASYNC’s massively  collaborative Forever Supper

WELCOME TO THE IMAGINARIUM

The 105 Collective (oculardelusion, urben, Unrealcity + Stina Jones) cordially invites you into the IMAGINARIUM – its laboratory of gloriously creative madness.

INTERLINEATED WITH THE INDIVISIBLE, INTERLEAVED WITH THE EXTENSIONLESS, INTERCORRELATED WITH THE IRREDUCIBLE, INTERROGATED WITH THE INTERMUNDANE: NOW HERE IS THE NOWHERE THAT DREAMS ALL OUR MEANING…

Launching today, the IMAGINARIUM (flings open the doors to the 105 Collective’s virtual – yet very real – inner sanctum.

When programmable art platform Async honoured us with an invitation to create an expansion pack for the First Course in the Genesis of its massively collaborative Forever Supper dynamic blueprints function, we knew this was our chance to offer the community a glimpse of the rich creative imaginary space that we have forged between us as artists. 

As a collaboration within a collaboration, we’re extremely excited to be releasing IMAGINARIUM in the First Course alongside other legendary cryptoartists Hackatao, Skeenee, Gernplam, Neurocolor and Uczine.

In the years since the artists of the 105 came together in early 2020, the collective has functioned as a safe haven in a volatile space. It’s a lab for playful experimentation with new technologies, an incubator for collaborative projects, a mutual support group championing our individual art practices, a place to get a reality check, a knowledge exchange, and a source of inspiration.

Yet we’ve only all met in person once: in July 2021, at the Tate Modern museum in London, to view the exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders. Not only was it incredibly emotional to finally be able to give each other actual hugs, but the exhibition itself mirrored back to us our own core preoccupations – including collective creation, transnational identity, the importance of dreams and symbolism, and finding the uncanny in the everyday.  

Hence, IMAGINARIUM was born – both a representation and a celebration of our collective imagination, through the time- and technology-bending lens of Surrealist artists who came before us, and those who will come after us.

The IMAGINARIUM expansion pack includes a complete set of 13 NFTs, which will be fully interoperable with other artists’ works in the FOREVER SUPPER collaboration:

⚡️characters >> At the table, surrounded by the tools of their trade and preside the founding members of the 105 interpreted as five Surrealist artists: Stina Jones as Remedios Varo, Sparrow Read as Max Ernst, Unrealcity as Pablo Picasso, oculardelusion as Victor Brauner, and urben as Salvador Dalí. / artist: oculardelusion 

⚡️table >> Exquisite Night / Illuminated Table / A slab of starry night, illuminating our darkest creations / artist: oculardelusion
⚡️tabletop objects >> Wunderkammer / Trophies of our collective knowledge; objects of curiosity / oculardelusion with all

⚡️frame (left) >> Text Corpse / 3A / "A small mechanical figure stands inside a futuristic world made of geometric shapes, its determined expression centred against a backdrop of dramatic skyscrapers and glowing neon fairy lights." / artists: Stina Jones with all 
⚡️frame (right) >> Text Corpse / 27B / "A kraken sitting deep in thought, surrounded by a colorful environment, with a bustling, neon-lit world made of geometric shapes in the background." / artists: Stina Jones with all

⚡️foreground (left) >> Heart Machine / An apparatus of energy, organically generated and artificially incarcerated / artist: Unrealcity 
⚡️foreground (right) >> Vat / The most complex object in the universe, both preserved and dynamic / artist: Unrealcity 
⚡️outside >> Intelligence / An exploration of universal intelligence using organic effects / artist: urben 
⚡️room >> Painting with AI / AI-assisted mural of organic and digital fusion / artist: Stina Jones

IMAGINARIUM is available from 18 April to 9 May, at .05 Eth per mint, in an open edition to encourage as many people as possible to join us at our conjuring table. Needless to say, this is just the beginning: this sanctum never sleeps, and the Collective conjures continually…

Enter our world – and prepare for enchantments and evolutions.

👁

THE 105 IS A COLLECTIVE OF UK-BASED ARTISTS BRINGING A DIVERSITY OF VOICES TO THE CRYPTOART SPACE. READ MORE ABOUT US, AND VISIT OUR PREVIOUS PROJECT, MORE THAN GLASS, ON VOXELS.

We are oculardelusion, urben, Unrealcity + Stina Jones

Follow:
TWITTER @105collective // Instagram @105collectiveuk // + Linktree

105 imaginarium preview trailer with Surrealist artists and faint crackling synthesizer music

Between Meat and Machine: Experiments in AI Art

As text-to-IMAGE AI excites and enrages the world, the 105 artists calmly ponder the joys of using AI to make art.

Text-to-image AI has hit the collective imagination big time since companies like Midjourney and DALL-E opened to the public last year. Servers are grinding away with the storm of activity, and social media feeds are clogged with images claiming to interpret our thoughts via words.

The buzz is equal only to the angry denunciation: this usually happens when a critical mass of people suddenly get access to a paradigm-shifting tool. People from all walks of life — musicians, sculptors, data scientists, teachers, truck drivers! — are at it. And why shouldn’t they be? Everyone needs an outlet for creative expression. Meanwhile, established traditional artists are (somewhat understandably) outraged that their styles have been scraped unceremoniously and nonconsensually into the communal electric brain.

As experimental digital artists, we’re here to add to the conversation, not point fingers. Besides, four out of five of us have, to some degree, already been using AI tools in our work for a number of years. We’re an inquisitive bunch, so of course we’re gonna tinker with the new toy. We thought that instead of joining the debate, we’d take this opportunity to show you some of our AI-infused artworks, past and present. Enjoy!

// OCULARDELUSION
Past: Deep Dream, ArtBreeder
Latest: Playform, Midjourney

Do Androids Dream of Electric Kool-Aid? (2022) by oculardelusion. A self-portrait as a bridge between the physical, human consciousness, and the digital realm, and interrogating my willingness to be subsumed. Photography, Deep Dream, and digital illustration and animation.

I first became aware of AI being used to create poetry around a decade ago, and first witnessed neural style transfer — taking the style from one image and applying it to another — about four years ago. The idea of making art in conversation with computers not only doesn’t scare me, but one of my thematic preoccupations is the effect of technology on human consciousness. I’m usually happiest splashing around in the limbo between digital and physical, and my practice usually involves mashing up artmaking technologies to open portals into new realities.

In early 2020, I began experimenting with style transfer apps like Deep Dream and ArtBreeder in combination with 2D digital painting and animation, photography, and VR art. I found the style transfer process satisfying on many levels: it introduced a sense of the irrational, added an element of chance, and exploded depth, texture, and color possibilities.

“There is no noise like the rare silence” (2022) by oculardelusion. This began life as a doodle on Playform, and I took it through more than 50 translations before choosing one and completing it using digital illustration. I often find titles by opening nearby poetry books. The phrase where my finger lands at random becomes the title — a bit like using the I Ching, or indeed like dialogue with an AI. In this case, it’s from Frank O’Hara’s “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s”.

I also enjoy the layering of realities. I’m distorting my own vision — already the product of environment, education, and intergenerational and collective consciousness — through the collective intelligence of all those humans who came to play before me. Then the output can be once again curated and refined by me, and I can go around and around as long as I want. I think of it as sort of a large-scale glitch process.

Then came the Midjourney beta. I thought that as a writer, it would be easy. I entered various prompts in Discord and churned through the process. Here are some examples.

“No one, not even the rain, has such small hands” (2022) by oculardelusion. As a lapsed poet, the first thing I wanted to do when faced with text-to-image technology was see how the computer would convey lines from favorite poems. The result (a literal rendering of an exquisite metaphor) was disturbing, compelling, and hilarious. The Midjourney AI is slowly getting better at hands, by the way, which is a shame.

Batty (2022) by oculardelusion. I prompted Midjourney with familiar totems and themes to see whether it would make art that resembled my own. The result was more horrifiying than anything I could have ever come up with myself, which I quite enjoy.

The examples I’ve given above are my favourites so far, but typically, the image bank Midjourney draws from is not at all what I want, aesthetically. Yes, I could amend my prompts, but then it becomes a drawn-out exercise in learning how to manipulate the machine to get an image. This is less fun than other processes I use. Meanwhile, I’m aware I’m wasting a lot of processing power and energy.

I do see art made using TTI that I enjoy, that even moves me. I often hear TTI artists defend what they are doing. I don’t think it’s necessary to apologize. To one traditional artist friend who has managed to create stunning artworks but feels weird about it, I said, “Maybe collective artmaking is ok. Maybe individual artmaking was always an illusion. But I CAN say that these would not have happened without you, any more than your paintings could happen without you — or your brush and palette makers and paint manufacturers and the history of art behind you.”

// UNREALCITY
Past: Artbreeder/ Ganbreeder, Google Deep Dream
Latest: Google Text 2 Dream

“Arm One Woman And Leave” (2021) by UnrealCity

Like Karen, I first encountered AI in the arts sphere through poetry. A couple of years ago, I introduced a lecture on poetry generated by AI, during which the speaker gave out some verse — some by machine poets, some by meat poets — and challenged the delegates to assess them and file them appropriately (if anonymously, so as to save us professional embarrassment) in two labelled boxes at the front of the hall.

76% of the poems were filed correctly.

It was a surprisingly easy exercise: while individual lines and figures of speech did not diverge significantly between the machine poems and meat poems, the latter had a greater conceptual unity, or at least a sense of an accretion of technique towards a single end: the rhythm spoke to the lexis, the lexis spoke to the figurative language, the parts spoke to the whole.

And that speaks to me: I regard AI as a tool for, or even an assistant to, the intentionality of the human artist.

In my own practice, what I want AI to do is the things I can’t do, or at least the things I can’t do easily, either because I don’t have the skill or because I don’t have the time. I recognise many artists are a lot more exploratory and less intentional than I am and that’s perfectly valid, of course: I understand the excitement of discovering what emerges from an equal conversation between meat and machine. But personally, I have a pretty complete notion of what I want to make in my head before I start making it, and although that will obviously evolve (as the spirit of Bob Ross sprinkles the fairy dust of happy little accidents over the canvas, screen or pile of disparate rubbish I’m screwing together as a sculpture), I always feel I’m making deliberate decisions to serve an overarching end. AI to me is about looking for artistic solutions by design, not finding them by accident.

“This Is A Token” (2021) by UnrealCity

For example, “This Is A Token” is a digital collage based on a GAN AI figure originally constructed on Artbreeder as a skeleton or sketch, and then composed of tokens left with Foundling Hospital children by their parents to identify them. I placed this on a background generated from an original photograph and mapped to skeins of wool using Google Deep Dream. That hybrid method allowed me to make the familiar strange, locating the piece as a representation of reality from a certain perspective or emotional state — the Unreal City I so often come back to — rather than as an image from either a fantasy world or from our shared orthodoxy of the real.

The work looks something like the notion I had in mind when I was first organizing my thoughts, that intentionality underpins it, whilst preserving that sense of the other and strange I want to participate in as the artist rather than to just manufacture for the viewer. I arrived at “Now There’s A Tragic Waste Of Brutal Youth” with similar tools and methods, letting the decisions about the AI enhancement distance the photographic image from me as much as for anyone else.

“Now There’s A Tragic Waste Of Brutal Youth” (2021) by UnrealCity

In “Arm One Woman And Leave” I wanted the method to reflect evolution, with a range of iterations created by AI as the random variation and my artistic internationality as the deterministic selection. The title came by asking visitors to my house to use magnetic poetry to compose lines on the meatspace mannequin sculpture, as she’s painted with an iron-based rust patina system used by car modifiers, and then I chose between their compositions to look for meaning and an organizing principle for my visual selections for the final representation of the sculpture. The piece feels like a collaboration between intent and the random, more than anything else I’ve done, and the speed of iteration when using AI made that approach practical. Again, the AI is a tool or an assistant to my intentionality as an artist, only with this piece I let that intention itself generate through a conversation with intelligences other than my own, both human and artificial.

It’s often been pointed out that no new technology has ever truly usurped an old one: the motor car never completely replaced the horse, the rifle never completely replaced the bow, the microwave never completely replaced the campfire. Obsolescence is contextual. The trick is, I think (to get back to the poetry) to “commit the oldest kinds of sins in the newest kinds of ways”.

// STINA JONES
Past: Playform
Latest: DALL•E 2

Hand-drawn input vs GAN output. GANOODLES experiments (2020) by Stina Jones.

I first discovered AI art in 2019 while browsing KnownOrigin. As an artist, I was intrigued by the concept of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and wondered if I could use them to create variations of my own hand-drawn works. I decided to give it a try and see what would happen.

I already had a folder full of character doodles on my iPad, all with similar proportions and colour palettes, so I uploaded them to Playform.io and used their online service to train a GAN model on the dataset. The results were pretty unexpected: while my original characters were made of simple geometric shapes, the generated images were much more abstract and free-flowing. I was drawn to the glitches and random shapes, so I decided to take my favourite results and repaint them using Procreate, creating a series of artworks that I called GANOODLES. This process of hybridising GANs with my own doodle art was exciting and opened up new possibilities to explore.

First completed GANOODLE artwork (2020) by Stina Jones.

More recently, I have been experimenting with DALL·E 2, a text-to-image AI tool that uses machine learning techniques on a more comprehensive dataset. Instead of being influenced by a specific set of images, DALL·E 2 looks for patterns on text-image pairs from a variety of sources.

Text-to-image experiments with DALL·E 2 (2022) by Stina Jones.

The outputs are certainly impressive, but lack the lo-fi charm that made my GANOODLES series so interesting to work on. DALL·E 2 seems more useful for its practical applications such as generating textures, collage elements, or reference images.

However, these use cases also present their own set of limitations. As I was using it to generate different facial expressions for reference in my sketchbook work, I noticed representational biases reflected in underspecified results. The developers of DALL.E 2 have acknowledged this issue and are working on ways to mitigate it. Still, it raises concerns about the potential for this technology to create harmful feedback loops.

Overall, my experiments with AI art have been interesting and thought-provoking. It’s fascinating to see how these tools can be used to generate images, but it’s also important to consider their limitations and potential impacts. I’m still figuring out if and how image synthesis will fit into my own workflow, but I don’t see it as a substitute for commissioning artists. Artists bring vision and a unique perspective to creating compelling works, whatever tools they choose to use.

// THE 105 COLLECTIVE 
We’ll end with this: when the 105 first started chatting about our individual experiments with TTI, Stina had an idea: what if we combined a bunch of random text prompts from everyone in the group to see what would happen? After all, we’d already been working on an Exquisite Corpse project (the Surrealists’ game of adding to a previous artists’ partly concealed piece). This seemed like an extension of that exercise. Here are some of the results. 

The results of one of the 105 collective experiments with text-to-image AI. What does this say about us as a group? Prompts, from top: “A nocturnal owl sits inside a glowing mechanical vehicle, its dark metallic eyes fixed on the dramatic nebula above”; “A small neon carrot with a determined expression, illuminated by a natural sidelight”; “A surreal scene with a group of random astringent carrots dance and spin in a world made of flying geometric shapes, their iridescent forms reflecting the light of the glowing midnight sky above.” Participants: urben, Stina, Unrealcity, oculardelusion

THANKS to our collectors! + 105collective LIVE interview with MoCDA

It’s been a couple of weeks since the MORE THAN GLASS exhibition went live on Cryptovoxels following a nail-biting auction on Async.art of our collective programmable work of the same name. The Async piece sold for a total of 27.1 Eth for all of the layers and the Master. Our heartfelt gratitude goes out to our collectors (Master @metapurse; Background @rohamg; One @basileus; Zero @NFTart; Circle @audsssy; Five @rohamg) for appreciating and investing in the work. It means the world to us.

We are also deeply indebted to Serena Tabacchi of MoCDA, who took time out of her insanely busy schedule to help us give an idea into our thought and creative processes around this epic piece. Here is the recording of that interview, capturing the anxious and exhilarating moments just before the auction took place.

More Than Glass is extremely rich in symbolism, texture and personal and collective meaning, and with its 47,880 combinations should give its owners something to ponder for quite a long time. We think the layer owners may even be collaborating to try out different compositions! We hope the video below will also help you explore and appreciate its depths.

Enjoy, and please visit the piece (best viewed flying!) and the associated exhibition at our HQ in Cryptovoxels.

In the final moments before the auction, Serena Tabacchi talks to five excited but slightly nervous artists about the launch of our collective Async piece More Than Glass.

Tonight!! More Than Glass exhibition opens w/ Async auction

We are so excited to be launching the More Than Glass Async piece – now live – and exhibition.

This day has been a long time coming. We’ve enjoyed every moment.

Here’s everything you need to know:

Today at 4pm UK time, we’ll be chatting live with MOCDA’s Serena Tabacchi about the project.

The Async auction then goes live at 6pm UK time, with a stunning lineup of artists including Hackatao, Gala, Kitty Bast, and Brandi Kyle. Come hear about everyone’s pieces as the auction goes live on Discord: https://discord.gg/RYmKXxr.

The More Than Glass exhibition will be live after the auction tonight in Cryptovoxels at https://www.cryptovoxels.com/parcels/1628. Come say hi!

Our Async piece is displayed outside the gallery above the door, and inside you’ll find each of our solo works for the project.

Meanwhile, to find out about tonight’s Async lineup, visit their writeup on Cent.

SEE YOU THERE!

Sparrow, Gareth, Ben, Stina & Karen

More Than Glass Process Notes: @unrealcityart

As we prepare to launch More Than Glass, we thought we’d share some of the thought processes that went into the piece. Here, find two links to Medium posts from Gareth, aka @unrealcityart, on his pieces for the collaborative artwork. Enjoy!

Why I Made The @ Clock >>>

Why I Made “The End Of All Our Exploring” >>>

Why I Made “Moontomballoon” >>>

Why I Made “The Planck Plank”>>>

Why I Made “The Armour Of Infinity”>>>

105 Collective launches genesis Async artwork: More Than Glass

On 24 October 2020, the 105 Collective auctions its genesis collective artwork More Than Glass, marking the completion of the group’s premiere art project of the same name.

This represents the culmination of several months of communication and collaboration between UK-based artists Sparrow Read, Gareth Davies, Stina Jones, Ben Harriott, and Karen Frances Eng, who came together via the cryptoart community in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to create a public artwork that would reflect their individual and collective experience of being plunged into sudden isolation in total lockdown – while creating an artwork that could, paradoxically, be experienced by anyone in the world who had an internet browser.

Over the course of lockdown, each artist created their own individual pieces in response to the theme for More Than Glass, which are exhibited – each artist occupying a single, semi-transparent room – at the 105 Collective headquarters gallery in art-based virtual world Cryptovoxels.

Meanwhile, they developed a collective work – recently tokenized on the programmable art platform Async Art. This moveable collage is made up of five layers, with multiple layer states contributed by every artist. According to 105’s trusty in-house mathematician (every art collective needs one), the total number of possible variations on this piece is an astonishing 47,880. Each layer and the overall composition – the Master – will be sold as an NFT. The holders of each layer may change it at any time, and will be reflected in the Master. This collective work is exhibited in a room of its own in 105’s Cryptovoxels gallery.

The collective piece will go to auction at Async on 24 October 2020 at 19:00 UK time. Meanwhile, the More Than Glass pieces by individual artists are available directly from each artist via the 105 Collective gallery.

Please join the 105 Collective for the auction at 7pm UK time, and for a party to celebrate the unveiling of the full More Than Glass project at our HQ. Keep an eye on our Twitter feed on Saturday evening for further instructions!

@105collective

105collective on KnownOrigin: guest curation & interview w/ MoCDA

KnownOrigin recently asked the 105collective to guest curate a selection of our favourite artworks from the platform. We had a lot of fun as a group choosing works by WGMeets, Voke, Robness, Animatttic, Monfa and Vansdesign. See our full selection here!

Meanwhile, we were honoured to be Serena Tabacchi’s first subjects in a series of exclusive interviews, exhibitions and curated content – part of a newly announced partnership between KnownOrigin and MoCDA (the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art).

Serena deftly pulls us out of our shells (like whelks) to talk about how we each came to be cryptoartists, and we take her on a guided tour of our Cryptovoxels HQ as we prepare to launch our exhibition More Than Glass. It’s coming, we promise!

See KnownOrigin’s Medium article here, and watch below:

105collective goes to Berlin

Last weekend, 105collective joined Lenara Verle and Ilan Katin for the 48-hour Cryptoartathon, an event hosted by the 48hrNeukolln festival that takes place in Berlin annually. The festival moved online due to the pandemic, and thus so did the Cryptoartathon.

Lenara included the 105 in the programming as part of the gallery tours and artist talks. If you missed it, here they are recorded for posterity.

Here’s the tour of our gallery HQ in Cryptovoxels, led by Sparrow and Ilan:

This was followed by the artists talk – all the members of 105 having a natter and a cup of tea, hosted by Ilan:

The gallery space in Cryptovoxels featured artworks being minted and submitted during the course of the weekend. It also featured voxel sculptures by Lenara of the TXU cryptoart collective (including Sparrow – there’s no mistaking the excellent hair!) and a big screen where tours and talks were broadcast. (The artwork will stay up for one month if you’d like to go check it out.)

While you’re there, don’t miss the voxel build of Das Kapital itself, the real-life bar in Neukolln that served as the original venue for the Cryptoartathon, and from which Lenara and Ilan broadcast the event live on Twitch TV. It’s kitty corner from the Cryptoartathon area, to the left of the screen.

105’s oculardelusion at the virtual Das Kapital in Cryptovoxels for 48hNeukolln.