Producing in The Metaverse with BasedAF — SuperMassive

Nat Emodi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Highlight. Their product is being used for generative releases by leading artists, organizations, and platforms. Helping creators to release any type of collection, from tightly curated series to generative open editions. Opening the space for experimentation as more people can explore their ideas and make generative art.

Nat is based in the Bay Area. We met online when we were both judges for the We Love The Art competition hosted by Optimism. He was working on ideas for a blog post which became ‘20 for ’24: Digital Art Trends That Will Shape This Year’.

We decided to record an episode about these ideas, and put the focus on art and trends in the industry, technology, for artists and collectors, galleries and curators. Jumping on the mics right before Nat was heading to the airport to fly out for NFT Paris from California.

We talk about art trends such as the expansion of ‘generative’ as a concept. Games and interactivity having an increasing role in digital art. And how best to create immersive IRL gallery experiences for onchain and digital art.

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Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Paragraph is where you can create, distribute & monetize - on your own terms. This publishing platform enables creators to mint posts as collectible content and send token-gated newsletters directly to wallet addresses. To get started with these radically powerful tools, visit paragraph.xyz

Lore is a group wallet experience for co-ownership. Own expensive NFTs, move memecoins markets and win crypto games together. Check out how you could use Lore with your friends to earn more than you could alone at lore.xyz.

Alvaro Delgado is a musician, artist, and co-founder of Oval — A newborn creative community from Barcelona.

Starting in 2024, Oval is putting together a series of concert and club nights, community events, suppers, and writing camps — designed to foster cross-pollination among individuals who have come to the city in search of something more: a spotlight, a sense of belonging.

They believe they can build something better, and they want to do it onchain.

The project was introduced with Barcelona Series on Zora. The first token is a text note that outlines their project, and the second is a video for BCN, their entry for the music category of the We Love The Art contest by Optimism.

Oval produced a song, visualizer, and artwork inspired by Barcelona and its people. Fragments of a city that needs to be heard, seen, and felt. The video was assembled from clips sent in from their community in the city, to offer a multi-faceted composition.

In this episode we talk about the inspirations of Oval for creating a space for people to belong. The power of events to build a community and an actual scene where cross-pollination, friendships and collaboration can take form.

We talk a bit about the music industry in a time of shifting technology. About radio and the onchain realms, looking at places like NTS, Catalog Radio and what we’re creating here at UFO.

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Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Paragraph is where you can create, distribute & monetize - on your own terms. This publishing platform enables creators to mint posts as collectible content and send token-gated newsletters directly to wallet addresses. To get started with these radically powerful tools, visit paragraph.xyz

Lore is a group wallet experience for co-ownership. Own expensive NFTs, move memecoins markets and win crypto games together. Check out how you could use Lore with your friends to earn more than you could alone at lore.xyz.

On today’s show, Alex Guy, aiio and LGHT. We are the hosts of the first shows on the UFO network.

Alex is head of Growth at Zerion and in December launched Still Here. A show to explore his curiosity. Talking with people who are active web3 citizens, through all the ups and downs of crypto, answering the question of what inspires and motivates them. Why they’re still here.

aiio is a researcher, community builder and writer bridging across web3 and the underground electronic music and arts communities in Copenhagen. She writes about the concept of space, linking it to human culture, existence, and the need for adaptive ecosystems. Soon bringing a podcast to UFO!

LGHT is a pseudo anon artist, designer, writer, and technologist based in the Eastern United States. Creator of the Hypercultures essay series as well as co-founding Based Management. His work mainly focuses on protocol design, the science of digital language/memetics, and zero to one acceleration of tech primitives and adoption.

Today we’re announcing LGHT’s upcoming series on UFO — PROTOTYPE

This is a special episode for UFO 50. We started in September 2022, soon after Nick Hollins returned to Byron Bay in Australia after travelling in Europe, where he met Alex and aiio at ETH Barcelona in July.

The first episode was with Charlie Waterhouse, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion who helped design their art and iconography. From the jump UFO was publishing with the available onchain tools. Publishing on Mirror, establishing a web3 social audience on Lens Protocol, releasing mints. We had the UFO Genesis Pass in November 2022 with over 8000 mints, which helped create an audience and community starting from scratch, which has only grown since then.

In June 2023, UFO was the first podcast to mint on the Zora network as it went live. We publish to an 1155 contract, and you can listen and mint onchain via all your favorite apps.

There’s been 61 guests on UFO, covering arts, music, technology, and culture. Exploring trends in AI, web3 social, onchain media. Many of the most happening projects have dropped into the UFO studios to share stories along the way.

It’s been a place for revolutionary ideas. A show to discover new projects and the people creating them. Revealing the many connections and friendships between people in this space who are collaborating and building things together.

It is a counterculture scene, spread across the world, and happening for the most part online and onchain.

Now that we’re here, next steps for UFO is launching a collective of podcasts. Building towards an onchain radio station and magazine from ufo.fm.

Our approach is a combination of music, arts and ideas. These podcasts we have coming through, including quite a few we’re not announcing yet, will surprise and delight our listeners. We’re still early.

This recording for UFO 50 with Alex, aiio and LGHT was the first time the four of us have all spoken together. We talk about UFO as a collective signal. The vital importance for collective platforms like this to exist. Sharing experiences and imaginings for how we see this going forward into 2024 and beyond.

Thank you for being here. This is UFO 50.

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Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Paragraph is where you can create, distribute & monetize - on your own terms. This publishing platform enables creators to mint posts as collectible content and send token-gated newsletters directly to wallet addresses. To get started with these radically powerful tools, visit paragraph.xyz

Lore is a group wallet experience for co-ownership. Own expensive NFTs, move memecoins markets and win crypto games together. Check out how you could use Lore with your friends to earn more than you could alone at lore.xyz.

Leo Pastel is a musician, songwriter, multi-sensory artist and active builder in web3 music from Cincinnati, Ohio.

He started releasing music in 2018 and has been involved from early days in the crypto music scene. His first single Woah was a hit with almost 750,000 streams on Spotify. He's produced as part of Songcamp and Camp CHAOS, and performed at FWB Fest in 2023.

Leo tells stories about experiences in the gospel scene, growing up in a musical family, and singing as part of the Sunday Service Choir with Kanye. Leo is super prolific talking about music online, sharing opportunities in the web3 space, and co-hosting a weekly live space GRLKRASH talking all things music, with a podcast on the way.

Music NFTs have been a hot topic in the US lately after Flyana Boss withdrew an NFT mint because their fans called for them to cancel it. Onchain music is a controversial and unpopular medium at this moment. NFTs have a reputation problem.

Meanwhile, Condé Nast announced major layoffs at Pitchfork, gutting the editorial staff. People have since been reflecting on the value of music. How do we appraise and experience it culturally? If we’re making music and no-one’s around to listen, critique, write about it and record into the zeitgeist — does it make a sound?

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Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Paragraph is where you can create, distribute & monetize - on your own terms. This publishing platform enables creators to mint posts as collectible content and send token-gated newsletters directly to wallet addresses. To get started with these radically powerful tools, visit paragraph.xyz

Lore is a group wallet experience for co-ownership. Own expensive NFTs, move memecoins markets and win crypto games together. Check out how you could use Lore with your friends to earn more than you could alone at lore.xyz.

Nick Smith is a designer from Melbourne, Australia. Founder of Fam, a space for music communities to grow, collaborate and collectively fund creative projects.

He’s an OG early member from FWB and helped to organise Soulquest, a collaborative music project featuring Iman Europe, V.C.R, illcamille, and Swarvy, along with visual artists Jamee Cornelia and Shawntel Johnson. The group performed and recorded at FWB Fest in 2023.

This project is an inspired homage to The Soulquarians, a loose collective that formed in the late 90s while recording D’Angelo’s acclaimed album Voodoo. Involving members Questlove, D’Angelo, James Poyser and J Dilla along with collaborators Common, Erykah Badu, Q-Tip, Mos Def, Talib Kweli and many others.

Nick is intrigued by music collectives through history such as the Wu Tang Clan, The Grateful Dead, Odd Future, and Native Tongues. In late 2023, Nick ignited a pop up group called Cheeks Collective. Spurred by a tweet about exploring ways to collectively stage music events around the world. A telegram group formed with people interested in staging parties, hosted by local producers. A bit like Boiler Room. Positive sum.

In this podcast, we talk about Nick’s origins in crypto, as a co-founder from Talisman and projects with Flex Dapps. Ambitions and dreams for onchain music and experimenting in new formats for creating and releasing music on the internet. The revelation of positive sum collabs with artists and people in the community, to help make art, music, and experiences happen.

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SPONSORS

Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Paragraph is where you can create, distribute & monetize - on your own terms. This publishing platform enables creators to mint posts as collectible content and send token-gated newsletters directly to wallet addresses. To get started with these radically powerful tools, visit paragraph.xyz

Lore is where communities come onchain. Helping communities of all kinds raise funds onchain, up and down vote decisions and take action towards a collective mission. They are accepting applications from community leads and creators who want to crowdfund initiatives to be on their V2 launch line up. Go to lore.xyz to apply

Welcome to 2024. We talk about music. Artificial intelligence. Creative practice, processes and collaborative formats. Nascent space. Onchain collectives. Minting works. Experimental music. What it all means.

Hexorcismos aka Moisés Horta Valenzuela is an artist, musician and technologist working with generative artificial neural networks over the past 7 years.

Based in Berlin, originally from Mexico, his upcoming album MUTUALISMX is coming out on Nicolas Jaar’s Other People on February 15. The record features artists from around the world collaborating with AI models created for each artist’s musical imprint and style.

Moisés is the founder of SEMILLA, helping to design and build an astonishing and surreal synthesiser in Iceland using seeds of divination cast into a circle which then produce sounds based on their placement.

The SEMILLA AI instrument employs computer vision techniques to translate the coordinates of the thrown maize in the “world-space” interface and utilizes knobs to scale their values. The divinatory practice serves as an interface to inject real-world randomness into the process of synthesizing new sounds using neural networks for sound synthesis.

aiio aka Irina is a researcher, community builder and writer bridging across web3 and the underground electronic music and arts communities in Copenhagen. Her creative practice is informed by her collective intellgience research practice. Building spaces that enable people with diverse areas of knowledge to come together and experiment.

She's the co-founder of an experimental collective that she started in a garage, co-host of Ethereum meetups in Copenhagen and is currently co-creating a distributed interface for digi-physical communities.

As aiio and cattfutur she writes about the concept of space, linking it to human culture, existence, and the need for adaptive ecosystems.

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SPONSORS

Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Paragraph is where you can create, distribute & monetize - on your own terms. This publishing platform enables creators to mint posts as collectible content and send token-gated newsletters directly to wallet addresses. To get started with these radically powerful tools, visit paragraph.xyz

Lore is where communities come onchain. Helping communities of all kinds raise funds onchain, up and down vote decisions and take action towards a collective mission. They are accepting applications from community leads and creators who want to crowdfund initiatives to be on their V2 launch line up. Go to lore.xyz to apply

Adam Levy is the creator and host of Mint Podcast. Exploring the web3 creator economy, discovering how the creators of today are building the communities of tomorrow. Genuinely of the best podcasts in the space.

He is also a founder of Bello, where you can discover actionable insights about your collectors from their wallets and onchain activity through a simple search.

We met in November 2022 when Mint and UFO were both early moving media projects on Lens, experimenting with onchain media and web3 social, and how we can use these tools to help establish an audience and a culture and vibe around our releases.

We were running in parallel when not many other people in the industry were doing what we’re doing. Turns out that Adam’s journey in creating Mint and figuring out how to build a subscriber base ends up inspiring what he’s building at Bello.

They realised how helpful it would be to know more about the collectors of their releases. What these people are doing onchain. Coming up with new ways to assemble an audience.

For example, UFO had released our Genesis Pass on Mirror in November 2022, and Adam showed us on Bello that ⅓ of those collectors had a Lens profile. We could see by wallets that minters of the UFO Genesis Pass were also subscribers to UFO on Lens.

In this episode we talk about Adam’s early experiences in music, playing drums, the records he was into. How his first experiences hosting a podcast type show including interviews with Mark Cuban and others illuminated a path forward to creating Mint and putting out 7 seasons so far with many big names in crypto, music and entertainment.

This episode was recorded while Nick was working from Liverpool for a week, setting up a podcast / radio studio in an apartment in the centre of town. Stay tuned!

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SPONSORS

Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Paragraph is where you can create, distribute & monetize - on your own terms. This publishing platform enables creators to mint posts as collectible content and send token-gated newsletters directly to wallet addresses. To get started with these radically powerful tools, visit paragraph.xyz

Lore is where communities come onchain. Helping communities of all kinds raise funds onchain, up and down vote decisions and take action towards a collective mission. They are accepting applications from community leads and creators who want to crowdfund initiatives to be on their V2 launch line up. Go to lore.xyz to apply

Rafa is the founder of Folklore, a community crafting knowledge of connection, lorecraft, and digital realms. An amazing place to discover ideas and pieces of writing thanks to collective curation.

Jihad Esmail is a writer, researcher and builder. A media dealer at Forefront proliferating onchain collective creation. Active contributor in the Nouns ecosystem, and various onchain experiments.

Our conversation centres on a couple things. The Casino on Mars article written by Matt Huang for Paradigm.

‘It’s useful to think of crypto as a new planet that’s being settled. Skeptics see a desolate planet without purpose. Or worse, a haven for an unsavory casino. Optimists see the planet’s potential: a blank slate on which we can build an upgraded financial system and internet platform.’

We talk about a research piece written by Rafa, Welcome to the Swarm, in which he’s exploring ideas around swarm theory and how groups form, with an extra interest in how this manifests online.

Can only imagine where we’ll be a year from now, when we do this episode again!

SPONSORS

Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Paragraph is where you can create, distribute & monetize - on your own terms. This publishing platform enables creators to mint posts as collectible content and send token-gated newsletters directly to wallet addresses. To get started with these radically powerful tools, visit paragraph.xyz

Lore is where communities come onchain. Helping communities of all kinds raise funds onchain, up and down vote decisions and take action towards a collective mission. They are accepting applications from community leads and creators who want to crowdfund initiatives to be on their V2 launch line up. Go to lore.xyz to apply

Bonfire is the no-code website builder for web3 creators, brands & communities. UFO listeners also get a free 1-month trial to Bonfire Pro. Claim this offer at bonfire.page/ufo

Matthew Chaim is a founder of Songcamp which is an artist collective and creative studio experimenting with songwriting camps and emergent technology to unlock new ways of creating and releasing music on the internet.

Started in 2021, Songcamp has run three online songwriting camps with over 50 emerging musicians from around the world. The music they created was released via compilation projects as onchain immersive collections.

We talk about all three of the previous Songcamp releases to date: Genesis, Elektra, and CHAOS ~ the epic headless band with 77 contributing artists. Leading up to their latest, C4 which drops today!

C4 is an imaginative collection with 15 contributing artists producing 5 songs. Audiences are invited to mint blank CD NFTs which can be used to write music to disc. We wander in conversation about music, technology, internet collectives, how Matthew likes to write and produce music, and other esoteric and musical topics.

SPONSORS

Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Interface is a mobile companion for Ethereum travellers. Connect with people and communities you’re a part of, stay updated with their onchain footprint through activity feed and notifications, read, watch and listen to onchain media – all in one place. Visit interface.social

Lore is where communities come onchain. Helping communities of all kinds raise funds onchain, up and down vote decisions and take action towards a collective mission. They are accepting applications from community leads and creators who want to crowdfund initiatives to be on their V2 launch line up. Go to lore.xyz to apply

Bonfire is the no-code website builder for web3 creators, brands & communities. UFO listeners also get a free 1-month trial to Bonfire Pro. Claim this offer at bonfire.page/ufo

Jesse Pollak is contributor #1 at Base. A new Ethereum L2, incubated by Coinbase and built on the open-source OP Stack.

We talk about Jesse’s origin stories in tech and being early to join Coinbase. Where he served as lead for all Retail engineering, including building Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Wallet.

What does it mean to bring the world onchain? We go behind the scenes to discover ‘how did this get made?’ in relation to Coinbase and Base. How the idea to do something radical like decentralise Coinbase and bring the whole org onchain set things in motion, and led to Base being developed like a breakaway startup from within.

You'll hear stories about how it’s working behind the scenes for players in this onchain movement including Base, Zora and Optimism. We look back on Onchain Summer from August and highlight projects including Basepaint, Happy Friday coffee by thepark, create.fun, Paragraph and Lore. 

SPONSORS

Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Interface is a mobile companion for Ethereum travellers. Connect with people and communities you’re a part of, stay updated with their onchain footprint through activity feed and notifications, read, watch and listen to onchain media – all in one place. Visit interface.social

Lore is where communities come onchain. Helping communities of all kinds raise funds onchain, up and down vote decisions and take action towards a collective mission. They are accepting applications from community leads and creators who want to crowdfund initiatives to be on their V2 launch line up. Go to lore.xyz to apply

Bonfire is the no-code website builder for web3 creators, brands & communities. UFO listeners also get a free 1-month trial to Bonfire Pro. Claim this offer at bonfire.page/ufo