Cracking the creative code

A conversation with two art dads about bushwhacking new paths, crypto yuck and the Willy Wonka machine they made together

In recent months, friend of the pod James Paterson has largely disappeared from the meatworld alongside another human male that I know IRL, Stephen Ramsay of Young Galaxy. I mean, they’ve been around, they just seemed shifty, diffident, craven. Or maybe just tired.

Turns out, they had a good reason. They were launching KRILLER, a collaborative creative project they’d been working on for almost two years. (Full disclosure: I did some copywriting/consulting on it but it did not impede my free newsletter journalism ethics, in part because I’ve requested to be paid in armour and weapons from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which they’ve said they’re still looking into.)

Despite my familiarity with the project, it’s not easy to describe, which is something I’ve come to see as a feature not a bug. So that’s where we started during a recent chat.

Dead Fresh: Some of my best attempts at describing KRILLER were along the lines of “generative folk art platform” or a “digital folk art installation”… but what did you ultimately land on?

Stephen Ramsay: The description of it has always been a bit slippery - it’s an audiovisual ambient art project but also a standalone form of media. So we spent a lot of time trying to distil its description, trying to capture the essence of the project, where analog and software art collide, all still purely hand-made before the tidal wave of AI comes crashing in. But we also enjoy the absurd aspects of art making, so we made lots of lists of playful descriptions as a thought exercise: A Human Dream In A Sleeping Droid, Cave paintings and music run through a software dream maker, An Aquarium For Robots, things like that.

James Paterson: I have fun thinking of it as some kind of pirate or rogue invading the nauseating landscape of the wellness industry: benevolent mind rinsing protocol, psychedelic diffuser for the ears, eyes & mind, meditative trojan horse, nutrient rich recharge cradle for the human nervous system, or maybe a spa where your ego goes to die.

DF: I like how many of those both do and don’t clarify it (laughs). Ok and where did the actual name “Kriller” come from?

SR: FRAGMELD! James and I made a word generator out of word fragments and lo and behold it spat out the project name itself. There are 6300 of these titles in the project.

JP: A word can be funky like a brick of fancy cheese. It can pong in just the right way so as to elicit a yuck while simultaneously drawing you closer for another fascinating whiff. This vaguely captures the essence of FRAGMELD, KRILLER's very own dynamic word factory.

DF: So what’s it like working together? Does being friends help or hurt things?

SR: I won’t speak for James, but for me, being friends helps in a big, big way. We are in the trenches of life together, as parents, as middle-aged men, as artists… so, much of the work itself comes from a sense of being completely understood on that human, daily level. It kind of obliterates the sense of competition or defensiveness that can occur in collaborations. We feel responsible towards each other, without the codependency. It feels like a choice, given where we’re at in our careers. We’ve both worked in teams, in total isolation and in collaborative environments that have both had success and crashed and burned. At this point, if you’re going into your most ambitious projects in a relatively dire art-career landscape, the commitment to your collaborators has to feel very real and important to you. It’s what keeps me motivated and coming back to the grind everyday.

JP: Being close friends in the parental trenches, both of us with two rambunctious boys the same age helps a lot. KRILLER was challenging to push through at many points. We were often operating at our local maximum. Steve was so gentle and understanding when I was at my most frayed and spazzy. We are trying to help each other evolve. We want to feed our families with art and demonstrate first-hand to our kids that it’s possible.

DF: Think I’ve heard you guys refer to yourselves as “tired art dads” which, first off, is great. Love it. But how does that status inform this work and do you know where your kids are right now?

SR: My kids are hopefully at school, but it’s almost lunchtime so my oldest might be at… Subway?? This is a new development - going to Subway for a sandwich at lunch hour.

One of the great things about us both being tired art dads is that we have a kind of reflexive understanding that, when the kids aren’t around, we’re working. If the kids are around, we may be working, but it’s different. I’ve said before that children are a direct assault on creativity, which isn’t as negative a sentiment as it sounds. I just think it affords me an ability to see that, when I have the space from my children to work, I use the time well.

JP: My boys help to not completely lose balance when working on all-consuming projects like this. I’ve lost that balance in my pre-child life and it never ended well. Now, as soon as I’m careening out of control into an unhealthy workaholic tunnel vision then TADA! It’s time to clean the house, buy groceries, fill the little lunch boxes, do laundry, homework, play chess, force my children to meditate in order to win Fortnite time, build underwater habitats in Minecraft, break up brotherly fights, stuff like that.

DF: Working in the arts these days means having to think outside the box when it comes to making a living. It feels like we’re way past what now feels like a quaint notion of “selling out” and firmly into a “is this even feasible” space. Does that sound accurate?

SJ: I was chatting with our long-time music publicist the other day, and he could only describe the situation these days as “dire”. There are upwards of 120,000 songs a day being uploaded to streaming platforms. A DAY. Something like 20 artists make 90% of the royalties on Spotify. You can only break in these days by having your music go viral on TikTok or something. And physical musical output - vinyl, touring etc - all of this is more expensive to produce and takes longer and longer to plan. It’s not a good situation.

The strange thing about making projects featuring music in the Web3/digital art space is you’d think there’d be more excitement around them as an option. But the narrative within the music industry about these kinds of projects is usually that no one will take you seriously because they think the space is exclusively full of scams. The irony of this, of course, is that everyone in the conventional music industry knows that their industry has been thoroughly corrupted by the streaming services and major labels - and yet everyone continues to just throw things at the wall to see what sticks. It’s a form of madness and I think that something has to give at some point.

JP: I’ve never fit comfortably in the context of the traditional Fine Art establishment. In over 20 years of attempting to integrate, I’ve come to understand that for a number of reasons it makes more sense for me to gravitate towards cultivating a custom audience online and serving them directly. Steve and I are in a similar position, abstracted from the details of our respective backgrounds in art and music and trying to bushwhack our way to something new.

DF: One of the things that I think is so neat about this project is how it’s essentially a sort of self-financing platform, through an exchange of what I believe is technically called “robot money”. Is that correct and/or could you explain how that works?

JP: (laughs) Yes, this “robot money” (technically ETH) doesn’t feel real but it is. KRILLER is funded by its fabricators, people who commission one or more of 6300 “cassettes”. Each of these cassettes is a fully standalone piece of audiovisual software art which can be experienced, bought and sold on its own.

Each cassette gets marked with the name of its fabricator in perpetuity, like the little metal name badges on a donated public bench. It also shows the name of the current collector in the case that the piece has been resold or gifted to someone new. Once they’ve all been fabricated, the cassettes will fuse into a free, seamless seven day, eternally looping, globally synced software art broadcast. In this way it’s basically a long form generative art project that has its very own Kickstarter-esque mechanism.

We fully understand the knee-jerk “crypto yuck” feeling oozing around after all the gimmicks and scams of the past few years. However, we do think that there exists a niche audience of enthusiastic CryptoArt patrons who still see the promise of the mechanisms crypto offers, despite its fumbling, sordid beginnings.

DF: Now despite how online this all is, there’s a huge part that’s about connecting all of this with more handcrafted artistic practices. How does it all fit together?

JP: An area of fascination for me is feeding traditional artefacts to code-driven art systems. So for instance, making a code system that arranges and recolours drawings, then feeding that system thousands of pen and ink sketchbook drawings to see what comes out the other side. Basically, Willy Wonka art machines. While I’ve worked this way visually in the past, the biggest leap for me and Steve was to treat music in exactly the same way: feeding traditionally created music stems to the Frankenstein sausage factory of a generative code engine.

DF: Starting everything in this more analog fashion - is it way more work? Is it a statement? Is it a way to add a patina to the aesthetic that you couldn’t get without it? 

SR: The analog nature of the material we made is super important to how it's perceived, especially as a generative software art project. There’s such a focus on AI as a generative tool - in the case of KRILLER we’re alluding to AI in a very deliberate way because we made a generative engine, but the creative elements including the code are all very bespoke, very handcrafted. James coined the term “code quilting” as a way of describing the process, like grannies in a quilting circle, laying down colourful thread. 

I think for fans of James’ work, particularly, they see that he occupies a unique position in the digital art world. I tried to emulate that process a bit in my work, making most of the music on analog gear, effects, etc., so that you could feel that particular grain to the work, as well. 

DF: Obviously I know you two, but who else was involved in this project?

JP: Jacob DeHart is a creative/tech/biz veteran of Web 1.0, 2.0, and now 3.0 paradigms. I like to think of his role as a Technocreative Biznologist. He wrote the entire blockchain aspect of the project from scratch, but he’s also supremely creative in his approach to business and marketing, has a keen sense of aesthetics, and this very rare way of bringing it all together in the context of a super hairy, technical product launch.

And Greg Sadetsky is one of the sharpest humans on the planet. He’s done some crazy shit. He reads my messy convoluted code as if he’s Beethoven reading a simple piece of sheet music written by a child. On this, he’s been responsible for laying down the technical infrastructure, along with countless ingenious creative solutions across all aspects of the project.

SR: It’s funny, as the only non-coder on the team, watching discussions take place around the code made me feel like I was from another solar system. It was a digital version of watching someone build a house, or a machine, or a factory, before your very eyes. Truly astonishing, and something I’ve never experienced before.

DF: Ok, one last question before I let you go. There’s over 6000 of those cassettes but do you have any faves? Any that you bought for yourself?

JP: I’m slowly buying some when I see ones that I love up for sale in the secondary market on opensea. It may sound weird to buy your own art, but it’s just one of the many examples of where CryptoArt is counter-intuitive until you are flowing around inside it.

SR: I’ve bought a handful of cassettes for me and for my family. You gotta keep a few for yourself, you know? I am a bit of a magpie, a sucker for the brightly coloured, fully saturated, lurid ones. So I like #3401 ARGSEMIS, for example.

DF: Ahh yes of course, #3401 ARGSEMIS. A classic. Anyway, thanks for taking the time, gents.