Innovation is messy.
What often seems clear gets confused, what’s inevitable becomes questioned, and the things that were absurd last week somehow become this week’s sensible solution. It’s a process of fits and starts born out of consistent and constant trial and error. It’s an inherently unpredictable quest that seeks to make the impossible real.
The tiny little bundles of neurons in our brains that we all call ideas are at the heart of this process. We replicate our ideas in the minds of others by stringing together other bundles of neurons that represent language. Sometimes, the neurons expressing various thoughts in our brains align perfectly with those in different brains. Whenever that happens, ideas are transmitted from one mind to the next without much degradation. A near-perfect clone of a thought.
More often, however, differences in language, culture, expertise and life experiences cause the newly received idea to slam into a pre-existing configuration of neurons programmed to hold their own competing ideas. For the open-minded, this collision produces an entirely unique combination of neurons that expresses a totally new thought, one created fresh instead of simply copied.
The creation of an idea causes a spark of excitement. As Matt Ridley describes it in The Rational Optimist, it’s as if the ideas have had sex. When my ideas meet your ideas, new ideas are born and shared between us. The ability to trade and combine and adapt information is the source of our most outstanding achievements. It’s what fuels innovation’s fire. It’s humanity’s secret sauce.
A few weeks ago, I spent a few days at the “Bitcoin Unleashed” conference discussing crypto and web3 with a passionate, international crowd of enthusiasts. It was a chance to learn from one another, break bread, and collide with each other to give birth to new ideas.
It was held in Miami, Florida.
When I think of Miami, I think of Memphis Design and ‘Outrun’ style neon. I envision Miami Modernism. I find it a charmingly garish place where form often wins out over function. It’s a white linen suit eating Gnocchi with red sauce at Palat. It’s a 9pm cafecito at La Colada. It’s the sensory overload that comes from listening to Pit Bull, Gloria Estafan, and a Jimmy Buffett song all at the same time. Miami is the physical manifestation of an Aston Martin Daily Driver rocking New Jersey plates playing a bass line from a Roland 808 on loop. Unapologetically.
But while Miami’s filled with gorgeous art deco, it’s also technically still Florida with lots of Old Florida’s pragmatic Mediterranean Revival still around. Drive inland and the city turns outdoorsy instead of flashy as you approach the Everglades and Big Cypress. Just when you think you understand Miami, when you’ve got it fit nicely into some box, the city changes shape and shows you something else. That’s its nature.
This constant stream of Miami’s juxtapositions is due to being one of the country’s most international and diverse communities. Approximately 60% of the city’s residents were born outside of the United States.
Think of all those neurons colliding, taking new shapes and forms and presentations. It provides a creative environment that enables a range of outcomes, from 95 South beating Tag Team to the punch by a whole month to a city government exploring what it might mean if taxes were voluntarily paid through crypto mining.
No wonder the web3 world loves it. Miami was built for it. NFTs are to Fine Art what Luther Campbell is to Yo-Yo Ma. Web3 itself is a lot like a city that somehow cares what you think of it while also not caring at all. There’s a grittiness to both that combines with a level of audaciousness that manages to inspire and offend at the same exact time.
Also like Miami, the Web3 community is a really diverse collection of people from all over the world. It’s made up of unique shapes and sizes and colors and preferences and everyone’s got their own angle on this crypto thing. Some of us are still skeptics, while others are true believers. Some are simply interested in technology, art, or finance. Others are fired up over privacy, data ownership, or decentralization. The motivations run the gamut but this early on one thing is most certainly true — it’s a collection of insatiably curious people interested in changing how the world works so it’s fairer for everyone.
So when the Gamma.io team approached me about commissioning a few pieces of art to celebrate people coming together through Bitcoin and Web3, I immediately thought of our recent time together in Miami at the Bitcoin Unleashed conference.
And then my neurons started doing their thing.
Creative Collisions is a set of only 3 pieces of algorithmic art that fuses Miami’s vibe with geometric shapes, segments of binary, and a little bit of morse. The series will be included as part of a larger collection called “Together, with Gamma”
Objects are distributed randomly following a Gaussian Distribution that concentrates them in a gravitational center where they collide to form intricate new patterns. It was written in JavaScript using p5js.
The other NFTs I’ve released so far — Blocks and Frontier — have been more whimsical, channeling the midcentury design and coloring of Disney artists like Mary Blair and Eyvind Earle and combining it with geometric patterns reminiscent of generative art pioneer Vera Molnar.
While I was tempted to try and repeat that aesthetic for a Sinatra-at-the-Fontainebleau approach, I wanted to try and capture who Miami is now. The Capitol of Capital. The burgeoning gravitational center of the diverse web3 universe that doesn’t fit into any silly box. It’s my humble attempt at Memphis Design, but one that’s well suited for the 2020s instead of the 1980s and 90s.
It’s kind of like if Saved by The Bell’s The Max were a real place and it was still open and it was located in South Beach instead of Pacific Palisades, then this might be its current aesthetic. And let’s face it, Max would totally be into crypto.
Creative Collisions will be a part of a special collection of NFTs commissioned by Gamma.io to kick off their new re-brand (formerly they were STXNFT.com). The collection is called “Together, with Gamma”
“If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.” ~Steven Johnson
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