5 Questions with today's Featured 6529 Meme Artist @takenstheorem In line with his upcoming meme card drop at 2.40pm utc today, i got in a quick Q&A with the artist himself: 1. What got you into the NFT art space? I joined full throttle when some of the Metaverse projects were getting started in 2018. I was among some early denizens of a couple of these projects. I was mesmerized meandering these mysterious spaces in their early phases. I fell in love with cryptoartists who descended upon them too. There was this palpable spirit of collectivity and exploration. So I spent time perusing their works and the galleries they assembled in these spaces. I began to plot the community. Plotting them as data. I did not intend these earlier visuals to be “art.” But the works weren’t quite simplistic “infographics” either. Maybe they could be described as playfully expressive visualization through data. Amusingly to me, I was at times listed among these artists as contributing visual art. The visuals were seeking patterns in data that characterized that palpable spirit. I’d long collected on projects, but in early 2021 some of my friends from those Metaverse spaces encouraged me to share them. I do have training in creative activities including composition and performance in my past. I don’t share much because I remain fully anonymous. But that made it feel like a natural transition into formulating a portfolio of my own in this wonderful, strangely alluring place. I love that my assembly in the space arose apart from other aspects of my training. The ledger and its denizens ensnared me. This version of me got assembled here, and while some materials and practices are familiar, I’m a new, different machine in this place. There was some interest into looking into my strange data kaleidoscopes that try to describe the space by visualizing it in its own raw data. I very much appreciate supporters, collectors, friends since that time. It’s been wonderful. 2. Which artists do you admire/are most influenced by? There are too many to name, I still love collecting various artists and own hundreds of works. I love the cryptoartists who were prolific in their exploration of various early platforms, especially those who contributed to Editional, KnownOrigin and SuperRare too. There is a longstanding totally not a cult of Cult of CryptoArt that you should check out, and all the artists there (check out @CultCryptoArt). Their work but also their practice and semiotic approach are inspiring to me. I see myself as trying to do what they do but with the mass-scale data that a public ledger makes possible. I should also note that there are numerous data artists that are influential to me, especially those who do graph-theoretic visuals and interactive interfaces. It’s the semiosis of the space rather than the data-scientific technicals that are more interesting to this machine (though both are wonderful in their way). 3. What are your biggest milestones since entering the space? There are many. We speak of the “rabbit hole,” the Metaverse tooling early on was a rabbit hole. But “Memetic Circuitry,” the 6529 card we submitted, frames this concept differently. Our rabbit hole is the memetic nexus — the interconnected set of concepts, from technical to transgressive, that capture our minds and bring us into a curious sociotechnical space. I’ve experienced many phases of “falling into the nexus.” Another is the creation of fully on-chain works. When working with the ledger’s data, it became a challenge to think of how this expressive visualization could be done with the chain itself. So from 2021-2023 I was trapped yet again by ideas in fully on-chain creation. ...