On April 5th, the photography platform Web3 Fellowship went down post photo perspectiveshis inaugural group show spearheaded and curated by AI designer and contributing artist Rainisto rope. Featuring 500 new pieces from Reworld, Rainisto’s latest collection, and another 1000 works by 10 IA artists handpicked by Rainisto and Fellowship, post photo perspectives it is one of the most anticipated NFT drops of the year.
The show is at the center of several exciting technological and cultural developments that have sparked intense debate both inside and outside the walls of Web3 in recent months. We sat down with Rainisto and Fellowship co-founder, Alexander Cartagenaahead of launch to hear their views on discussions around the art of AI and the importance of pushing the boundaries of technology and art.
Rainisto’s vision meets Fellowship’s mission
Rainisto has seen a monumental rise to fame in the NFT and AI art spheres after life in western america, his successful February 2023 BrainDrops release that presented a feverish take on the idea of the American West. That collection helped cement BrainDrops’ status as one of the leading platforms for AI art on Web3 and has generated nearly 1,800 ETH in secondary market trading volume since its launch.
Rainisto’s style is instantly recognizable and compellingly weird. Instead of trying to hide the fact that her works are the product of AI art tools, her AI photography leans heavily on the “AI-ness” of his images, creating something at a time. familiar and strange. Rainisto’s work, perhaps more than that of any other artist in space, plays on the brain’s inherent pattern-finding capabilities, presenting viewers with scenes they’ve seen a million times and yet never encountered. .
“There is something [in Rainisto’s work] I’ve never seen before.”
Alexander Cartagena
“In my many years of studying photography and art, there is something [in Rainisto’s work] that I’ve never seen before,” Cartagena said of Rainisto’s unique aesthetic while speaking with nft now. “He’s the only person doing the things he’s doing with AI. His vision is very particular, concise and technically sound. What he has done is embrace the tool and its flaws, its flaws, and find expression in precisely that.”
The Fellowship’s goal is to capitalize on the opportunity Cartagena sees in building a photography collection unlike any other on the planet. Himself a photographer with decades of experience creating, curating, and collecting photography, Cartagena believes that Fellowship can be he organizing to consolidate 180 years of photographic history into a single, cohesive collection, independent of the confines of museums that store 1/1 of physical photographic work in vaults and rooms few people will ever see.
In November 2022, Fellowship collaborated with none other than Dmitri Cherniak for the launch of the artist’s 100-piece generative photography collection, Light years. Experimental releases like these align perfectly with Cartagena and Fellowship Co-founder studio137the vision of, making the platform’s partnership with Rainisto a perfect fit.
“We see Fellowship as this core collection that is the foundation for building what photography can be in the future,” Cartagena explained. “We love the margins of photography and the things that have made photography photography. Because the NFT space moves so fast, we can experiment in a very sophisticated and fast way. We are a gallery, a collection, we commission work and we want to be a charity to support marginalized artists. We want to be many things because the NFT space allows for that flexibility.”
Cartagena and Studio137 began collecting Rainisto’s work in early 2022. Connecting with the artist shortly thereafter, they agreed to work together on Rainisto’s follow-up to Life In West America: Reworld.
REWORLD and Post-Photographic Perspectives
Reworld’s 500 pieces are thematically reminiscent of those in Life In West America, but are different in their particular approach. While the latter’s images focused on individuals and personal relationships on a small scale, Reworld deals with broader concepts, forming a commentary on social issues at a much higher level.
Starting April 5, pieces from the collection will be sold in a Dutch auction format, starting at 10 ETH and going down 0.4 ETH every minute until the price reaches a minimum limit of 4 ETH. After this, the price will drop 0.1 ETH every minute until it reaches a minimum of 2 ETH, after which the sale will go public if any inventory remains. The first 35 minutes of the auction are reserved for holders of Patron’s Pass, the Fellowship’s annual membership token launched in March.
On the second day of the show, Rainisto transitions from featured artist to curator, featuring 10 AI artists who were chosen for their ability to showcase the range of what AI tools can do in the post-photographic field. While some artists in the second leg of the program are known for their own approaches to AI photography, others push the very concept “to the limit,” as Cartagena puts it. Artists selected for this part of the program include AI. SAM, Andrés Hernández, Antti Karppinen, Charlie Engman, Jess Mac, Julie Wieland, Katie Morris, Simon Raion, Ben Millar Cole and Pierre Zandrowicz.
The group show will also include at least one IRL activation, including an exhibition in May at an as-yet-undisclosed gallery in Los Angeles and the Paris photography fair.
An artist like no other
At 43 years old, Rainisto is just beginning to explore artistic expression on his own terms. Having worked as a designer since the late 1990s, Rainisto’s artistic journey came to a head two years ago when he began seriously considering how virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies would begin to drastically change the way he works. the world.
“The failures seemed much more interesting to me.”
Rainisto rope
“I thought I might be one of the first people on this bandwagon or one of the last people,” Rainisto explained of his interest in AI tools while speaking to nft now. “I’m always excited about new technologies, trying to figure out how you can use [them] to create something meaningful. That was my inspiration.”
The 500 pieces in REWORLD, a collection he’s been working on for the better part of the past year, are the final cuts of more than 50,000 products Rainisto created while building the series. They feature Rainisto’s singular style: a surreal photorealistic familiarity steeped in America inspired in part by Robert Frank’s photographic book, The Americans. Rainisto also attributes the origins of the project to the idea of a road trip seen through the eyes of an algorithm, technology that he says represents a shared understanding of the world.
“They see in five billion images. In some ways, [the collection] it’s a road trip to a kind of shared humanity,” Rainisto offered as an insight into his project and vision.
Rainisto likes his approach to AI photography, quickly becoming known as post-photography, precisely because of the way it embraces imperfections and the utter strangeness of the way algorithms “imagine” the cues they’re given.
“Instead of trying to hide the ‘AI-ness’, what if I tried to explore it?”
Rainisto rope
“We’ve all seen that AI can take photos where you really can’t tell if it’s a real photo or not,” Rainisto continued. “I think it’s okay, but my kind of reference point is the camera. When Stable Diffusion came out, my idea was to make the results look like a photo. I had successful renders and things that had ‘failed’. But the failures seemed much more interesting to me. Instead of trying to hide ‘AI-ness’, what if he tried to explore it?
Reworld will be Rainisto’s last full-scale collection in 2023. Aside from the time and energy it took him to create and launch two series in the span of a few months, he is hesitant to saturate the market with his work. Interested collectors can expect him to continue experimenting with AI art and working on 1/1s, animations, and potentially even small-scale limited editions. For now, Rainisto advises fans of his work to pick up a Patron Pass on the secondary market so they don’t miss the rest of the 2023 Fellowship shows.
