A new Blueprint for digital art, technology, and artificial intelligence

Jan 21, 2023

Hi Fintech Futurists — this is a highly personal email for me.

I am going to ask you to consider joining me on yet another exploration, this time at the intersection of art, technology, and markets.

Check Out the Art Blueprint

Over the last five years, I have loved building out a research practice around fintech, blockchain, and digital investing.

It is a privilege to have the attention of 60,000 amazing builders and investors, not to mention the 100,000 more on LinkedIn. I have learned a tremendous amount from this community, and am excited for more to come.

Another idea has kept pulling at me for a while. You see it sneaking through again and again in my writing. You see it popping up in our NFT experiments.

That idea is to dedicate a space to digital art, generative AI, cultural emergence of NFTs, and the work that technology and art are doing in bringing about the metaverse.

Code, glitch, and software-based art is complex, multi-dimensional, precise, and endlessly compelling.
Generative AI has mined the collective human intelligence, and is able to hallucinate incredible, dream-like, convincing visual artifacts.
Art markets have digitized using NFTs, and the Web3 platforms that support their exchange are exploring the frontier of creator economics.
The era of the painting and the photograph is over. The era of machine hallucination is here.

I’ve always had my own art practice. It is in our visual choices and the covers of the newsletter. It bubbles out with the poetry of the writing.

The rise of generative AI and software-based NFTs makes these topics deeply seductive for me. We will cover the sector in the same way we cover fintech — with a focus on high quality building, an understanding of what drives different dynamics, and a creator’s personal point of view.

I hope to plug my art practice into full view as well.

Here are some examples of work of this type in the Blueprint and earlier writing today:

Definitive 2015 thesis: Human art is dead. Long live software art.
Fintech Blueprint selected pieces:

Fintech Blueprint 🤖🏦🧭

What Finance can learn from the Evolution of Beautiful Artificial Intelligence Art; plus 14 short takes on top developments

Hi Fintech futurists -- In the long take this week, I take a journey from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, to the impact of Photography on Portraiture, to Artificial Intelligences building generative art on blockchain networks. We take stops along the way to see analogies to financial services, and to notice how expert craft turns to code…

6 years ago · 1 like · Lex Sokolin

Fintech Blueprint 🤖🏦🧭

Long Take: Luxury and Fashion market structure applied to finance, NFTs, and DAOs

Hi Fintech futurists -- This week, we cover the following: Thesis: Luxury and fashion markets are structurally different from finance or commodity markets in that they seek to limit supply in order to generate value. This increases price and social status. We can analogize these brand dynamics to what is happening in NFT digital object markets and better understand their function as a result…

4 years ago · 14 likes · Lex Sokolin

Fintech Blueprint 🤖🏦🧭

Long Take: Financial Mythmaking with $200MM of Loot NFTs and their growing world

Hi Fintech futurists -- This week, we cover the following: Thesis: We discuss the top-down and bottoms-up approaches to innovation and project building. For the former, we reference Australia’s draconian surveillance laws, and the integration of US driver’s licenses into Apple’s wallet. For the latter, we dive into the Ethereum-based Loot project and its incredible derivatives, $500MM token, and $200MM of volume. Last, we conclude by highlighting the role of creators on the coming wave of Fintech…

4 years ago · 14 likes · Lex Sokolin

Fintech Blueprint 🤖🏦🧭

Long Take: Generative AI creates the surreal search engine of our dreams

Gm Fintech Architects — Today we are diving into the following topics: Summary: We catch up on the $150MM and $100MM fundraises from Jasper AI, a generative content assistant, and Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion. The analysis puts into perspective how long it takes to train a single human agent, with an average of 13 years of education and 20 years to just enter the workforce, relative to the progress machines are making at mimicking human labor. We also look at the state of the markets in AI funding, valuation, and examples of trading multiples. Last, we attempt to extend our hypothesis about what the purpose of generative AI really is. Beyond “shallow labor” in DAOs, we come up on the idea of a search graph of our surreal desires…

3 years ago · 13 likes · Lex Sokolin

We do not yet have a fixed publishing schedule, and are likely to be closer to a bi-weekly cadence as we polish our voice and find the things worth saying.

If you are interested in these topics and want to support the growth of The Art Blueprint community, please join me below for free —

Try the Art Blueprint

Thanks as always,

Lex Sokolin

Fintech Blueprint 🤖🏦🧭

A new Blueprint for digital art, technology, and artificial intelligence

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