Interview with Dr. Slurp and Cookie Tree
We interview Dr. Slurp and Cookie Tree of MyFi Studio.
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Welcome to today's interview with the creative power couple, Dr. Slurp and Cookie Tree, the brilliant minds behind MyFi Studio, which is a multimedia studio producing IRL and Web3 experiences. With their latest venture, "ooze", they are creatively merging audio and visuals on the blockchain. Join us as we delve into their innovative journey and explore how they are pushing the boundaries of artistic expression.
Thanks for taking to time to chat. Could you tell us a bit about your backgrounds and what led you to Web3 and creating art?
Cookie Tree: My background is in art history. I'm skeptical about the way we learn and write and create the canon of art. I'm a curator and I work on projects that bring stories and materials that haven't always been taken "seriously." I have curated art for traditional art spaces, hallways in community centers, and in Nintendo's Animal Crossing. The process of creating art and contextualizing it excites me in a way that's magnetic. In 2016, I co-founded an art gallery/project space called Rojas + Rubensteen Projects in Miami. I was commissioning site-specific installations, multi-sensory performances, hosting workshops, and curating a space that embraced process and first-person narratives. We made a video art nook and exhibited video art in each show. At the time, viewers would gravitate toward the video art but collectors and passerby did not understand why we would sell an mp4 file. This really stuck with me. After my partner and I closed the gallery, I was appointed to work at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I interviewed survivors, veterans, and their families. I acquired hundreds of artifacts for the Museum's archive. I'm really interested in archives, but also the stories that are left out of them. The permanence and the ephemera.
Then, Slurp and I started talking about web3. The space presented some key things I had been searching for: decentralization, transparent provenance, digital art (and mp4 files) being on the same page as "trad" art, and financial possibilities for artists. I learned a lot from Slurp, and other artists and projects, specifically Forgotten Runes and Mathcastles. It felt like web3 could be the thing to get you to the thing. We started MyFi Studio and I started learning how to use analog glitch video equipment and recording videos to make 106 hours of video art for our first collection. I would spend four hours in the Everglades taking videos on my iphone and then come home and turn the knobs on my BPMC Fritz Decontroller until the images felt right. I was experimenting with screens, live video performances, and projection surfaces. I loved the feeling of being deep in nature (covered in mud and mosquitoes, my iPhone overheating) and then playing with analog/digital gear in my dark studio. Collaborating with Slurp and making MyFi Studio a company is in many ways thanks to web3.
dr. slurp: I've played music, made art, and used computers almost my whole life. I somehow found my way into web3 through my work in AI.
A bit of my 'professional' computing background: I finished a PhD in computer science in 2018. My dissertation research was about getting computers to automatically extract information about stories from text. Things like, identifying where stories are told in text, what is the narrative point of view and diegesis, narrative boundary extraction, and information about the plot + events. All things AI, NLP and NLU. Using machine learning to train a model to do story understanding tasks. Working with annotators and writers to markup stories + transcripts to use as training data to teach computers about stories. I did this research because people use stories to communicate with each other. I wanted to make computers a bit better at 'understanding' people.
Then I worked at a video game company, initially in making AI for conversations with NPC characters. Eventually this morphed into making AI to generate backstories and traits for NFT characters that would be used in a video game. During this time, one of my coworkers/friends founded Forgotten Runes Wizard Cult, and that is when I saw the grand possibilities of what NFTs could actually be. Around this time, Cookie Tree and I started MyFi Studio, and began our first collaborative project, aptly named 'MyFi'.
I quit my job in October of 2022, after almost 4 years. I began to fully focus on making art and technical projects at that time. I feel so fortunate and lucky that this is how I am spending my time.
Rewind back to art: I've always made visual art. Cycling through intaglio printmaking, cyanotypes, watercolor, and ink drawing. Piano was my first instrument, but it never really stuck. I played french horn for a huge chunk of my youth, in bands and orchestras, but lost all desire to play after doing two years of marching band. In high school I started playing bass, and that became my main instrument. I've had a few bands and I love playing music with other people, but the thing that's the most consistent is writing my own music. I've immersed myself in electronic instruments / synths / drum machines. During the pandemic I began experimenting with code that generates audio, and made my own custom multi-effects bass pedal.
What is MyFi Studio?
Cookie tree: MyFi Studio is a multimedia production studio specializing in web3 and IRL experiences. MyFi (Mycelium Fidelity Network) is inspired by mycelium and the interconnected communication networks in nature and technology.
We focus on building on-chain audiovisual art and musical instruments. We launched two interactive on-chain instruments in February 2023. The first "toy instrument" is wind tunnels, and everything you hear and see is synthesized by code stored on the blockchain (programmed in p5.js and p5.sound). The second instrument is circles are bad, a collection of 3333 unique instruments that are on-chain drum machines and harmonic sequencers. We sold out both collections. We were named #4 on Billboard's Biggest Music NFTs in February.
Our first collection was MyFi: 106 hours of analog glitch video art + algorithmically arranged music about a mycelium network sending you messages. More info here. Our second collection was RSVP: 53 handmade cyanotypes with an interactive art function on chain + IRL. NFT owners sent an RSVP message to MyFi via smart contract, and the messages were included as lyrics during the live performance at MyFi in the Garden.
We create the art we dream about. We collaborate with multimedia artists and musicians to create custom electronic instruments for recording and performances. MyFi Studio also performs live audiovisual sets, including at the Bass Museum, Gramps, and Naomi's Garden in Miami.
What is ooze and what inspired you to create it?
Cookie tree: ooze is an audiovisual lava lamp. I love art that I want to spend time with. I want to hang out with ooze. Watch it grow and change over time. ooze doesn’t really fit into a clear category. It’s not just a collection of music, art, video art, but all of the above. It also just melts my mind. I hope people have fun playing ooze on different screens: on their phones or computers, projected onto a chunky couch. Maybe one day we’ll play ooze on the tv screens on an airplane or at the gas station.
dr. slurp: Initially I was inspired by caustics, the reflections of light off water. I tried making a program that recreates the light bands of caustics as circles aligned to a grid, where the colors represented whether it was a caustic or the background. Once this was programmed, I realized it looked and felt like watching a lava lamp. I also realized, the visualization with the circles is just a layer of abstraction that could be fed into another program, and interpreted in a new way. Similar to a modular synth, taking control voltages and using them to alter a sound / signal to then affect new sounds and signals.
Then, a theme in the project became layers of abstraction, and deliberately lifting the veil of abstraction, deciding which version of a representation to show. Initially it was all circles, but I built more layers on top of the circle ‘control data’ by ways of a boundary/group detection algorithm that I wrote. When you browse through the collection, you might see pieces that are only circles, some with no circles, and some with shapes and circles. You are seeing the different ways the idea of caustics or ooze is represented or abstracted.
I’m not trying to draw some big metaphor between ooze and computation in general. But, a motif in this work is abstraction and masking. Taking something, transforming it, making decisions on what versions of things to show or hide.
Dr. Slurp’s notes from the process of making the caustic grouping algorithm for ooze.
Why did you choose to make ooze fully on-chain?
dr. slurp: It's about making art specific to the medium it's propagated in. The medium is ethereum / the crypto art scene.
Most music NFTs (and even 'art' NFTs) only use the medium as a means to sell their music. The actual music or art, is recorded, encoded into an mp3 or wav file, and stored on a private server that might go down at any time. I support musicians / artists getting paid fairly for their work. Anyone who can get paid by selling NFTs, should. However, in terms of artistry, making work that pushes boundaries, and creating art that has fully soaked in the boons and limitations of the world it exists in, selling an mp3 as an NFT makes zero sense to me.
Who or what are your biggest influences or sources of inspiration?
Cookie tree: Anicka Yi, Pipilotti Rist, Naama Tsabar, Ryan Trecartin, Elinor Carucci, Legacy Russell, Michelle Zauner, Jacolby Satterwhite, Thundercat, Angela Dimayuga, Precious Okoyomon.
dr. slurp: 0x113d Mathcastles + the ICA course, Jon Rafman, Molly Soda, Zelda, Duplass brothers, One Piece, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and Herbie Hancock.
How do you balance creativity with technical skill in your work?
Cookie tree: Working with analog glitch video gear has taught me a lot about this because I'm constantly learning new technical skills to make the work work. The most helpful thing for me is spending time AFK in nature, and making time to be creative in an unfiltered way with no deadlines. Deadlines do help with getting those technical skills sharpened though. I like trying new materials like clay or coding in p5.js as a way that requires me to make the time for the technical skills just as much as the creative.
Glitch by Cookie Tree
dr. slurp: There was a time where creativity and 'technical skills' were partitioned into separated regions of myself. Music was a thing I did after my math/computer stuff. Now I get to do everything at the same time. The goal of the computation is to make something with a deliberate feeling or aesthetic. I was always spending tons of time on both my technical and creative sides. It's a relief that they are less partitioned than ever before.
Where do you see on-chain artwork going in the future?
dr. slurp: I think there will be less of the whole 'trying to do XYZ on-chain', and more of trying to do something new that spurs out of the restrictions and specifications of having limited memory and resources in a decentralized multiplayer setting. A lot of current work is about figuring out how to technically do something that we all already relate to. I want to make and see more work that's more focused on what the on-chain materials are, and make something awesome from those 'rules'. Breaking the rules is nice too.
Which piece of artwork do you not own that you want to collect?
Cookie tree: Anicka Yi, In Love With The World, 2021
dr. slurp: An instrument sculpture by Naama Tsabar
What do you like to do when you're not busy with NFTs?
Cookie tree: Spending the day at the beach and swimming in the ocean, cooking, gardening, and reading memoirs.
dr. slurp: I like watching One Piece, making music, and watching youtube's about mundane shit. Cooking + eating. Making noise.
Thanks for taking the time for this conversation, What is the best way for people to follow you both?
Social Media
https://twitter.com/aimeedotnet
https://twitter.com/myfistudio
https://www.instagram.com/myfistudio/
Discord link
