Per Kristian Stoveland: I played the bass, by the way.

Clinton Bonner: Of course. Of course. Unassuming, has to be there…

Per Kristian: Yeah. (Laughs)

Clinton: Solid, consistent. Right? Without it, the song’s a disaster.

[CATALYST INTRO MUSIC]

Clinton: Welcome to Catalyst, the Launch by NTT Data podcast. Catalyst is an ongoing discussion for digital leaders dissatisfied with the status quo, and yet optimistic about what’s possible through smart technology and some great people. And I am thrilled today because, I’m just going to come out and say it, I’m a fanboy. I discovered, as if I was some, you know… some majestic person on the open waters discovering this, right? Certainly not the first. But I found, and was delighted to see, the work of Per Kristian Stoveland, who’s a generative artist hailing from Oslo, Norway, who’s really taken the art world by, I would say, by storm this year by an ambitious series that he calls “The Harvest.” He’s joining Catalyst to talk about the purposeful blending of generative art, digital rights via NFTs, and the physical realms of artwork, and how he and artists like himself are truly trailblazing brand-new technology-based future for what is perhaps humanity’s most ancient and noble occupation. And with all that, we want to welcome to the Catalyst podcast, artist and entrepreneur Per Kristian Stoveland. Per Kristian, how are you doing today, man?

Per Kristian: Fine, thank you. And thank you for having me here, it’s an honor.

Clinton: No, thank you. So, I came out hot, right? I’m comin’ out hot. My cards are on the table, and it really is a thrill for me to have you on the podcast. And by the way, me. This is Clinton Bonner. While Chris and Gina will remain as hosts, I also will be hosting some of these, so sometimes I’ll be on with Chris and Gina. Sometimes I’ll be the so-mo… the solo host, sometimes I’ll have co-hosts. And again, today, back to the important person here, with Per Kristian. So as you know, Per, I’m a big, big fan of your work, I saw it out on Twitter, and before I even knew that it was a form of generative art, my brain and my heart screamed to me, “I like that.” Like, it was super cool to see what you were doing. So we’re going to dive in to the technologies and the platforms that power all this. But I also want to know, like, from your perspective as an artist, could you lay out for us, for the audience: generative art. What does it mean for you? How do you define that? And maybe, what are some misconceptions out there that maybe the mainstream audience would love to know about?

Per Kristian: Well, first of all, thank you for those kind words, I’m honored. Don’t know what to say, but thank you. Well, what is generative art? It’s just another discipline of art, I would say, but the key thing about generative art is, I am a programmer, and I kind of code an algorithm, a tight, a coupled algorithm, which can, each time I ask it to generate an image, it generates an image with a set of bounds which I have programmed it to have, and a lot of randomization. And my job as a generative artist is to try and create or tweak this algorithm to create a set of generative artworks that kind of fit together in a series, and you can see belong together, but has a lot of variation, depending on the randomness I would give to this algorithm. In a nutshell, it’s basically, you create… a generative artist creates an algorithm that generates visual outputs, a new visual output every time you ask it, and it is randomly generated but with a set of boundaries that I give it.

Clinton: It’s pretty fascinating, right? It’s this… it’s this… hate to say, I think the word… the manipulation of the possibilities, right? And then the tinkering, and I think the patience of tinkering, little bit by little bit, and probably just working through the edges until something probably captivates you, and you say “Well, I…” Even though you have a series, even though you have a vision of what, and we’ll talk about The Harvest in a second, of what the whole series looks like, I would imagine there are still these moments when you press a button one way or the other, you give a command one way or the other, and it hits you. Is there a feeling when you’re like “Ooh, that’s it!” and you want to springboard forward? Take us through that emotion, when you’re literally like, in the lab, if you will, just manipulating this code to generate opportunities. 

Per Kristian: Yeah. It’s definitely an iterative process. And a lot of the… a lot of my previous work comes from just playing around and kind of building on what you have, taking it a different direction, working on that iteratively, and then maybe going back to the stem, and kind of working in this way. And then sometimes it just… something pops up. But in other cases, you can have… you can be inspired by something that is not related. I mean, it can be anything outside. And you just get an idea of how… how you could write some code to try and emulate something you were inspired by. And you can work on that. But still, that will become an iterative process, because you’re never done as soon as you’ve tested something. And for me, at least, Harvest… there was one very distinct point I can remember. It was, yeah, the summer last year. I was working on this landscape algorithm, which is… The Harvest is a big part of. Whilst I was working on this, I was testing with just one beam, and at that moment, I don’t know what brought me to test that, but I was thinking, “What would it look like if I had a beam come down and hit this?” and I had a few ideas, and I had to iterate over a couple of evenings to get to that one image, which I still have stored somewhere, which got me thinking, “This is what I’m gonna work on.” And that got me in a more… instead of just testing iteratively, that was kind of a pivot point where I started working with a goal in mind. 

Per Kristian: That’s beautiful. And I think I’ve seen the, like, “Harvest Zero,” I think I’ve seen that on Twitter, if it’s a black and white one that had the one beam. And again, these are striking pieces, and we’ll… we’ll try and, in an audio sense, describe them. But, a couple things that came up for me there. I want to go back for a second. I want to understand the freedom that generative provides you versus physical when it comes to the attempts you want to take. But let’s put that aside for a second. I think, even when I was researching you, you know, I kept saying the words, like, “generative AI,” and “generative, like, the role of AI.” And you were like “Hey, not really.” You know? Not really. So I think there’s a misconception out there as well, that generative equals AI. And I’d love for you to kind of clarify that for the audience, too, because I do believe that it’s a fairly, you know, wide misconception, that those two things go together and kind of always go together.

Per Kristian: Right, right. I see… that’s a good point, and I can see how they could be conflated. But you could always mix these two disciplines, but let’s say, keep them separate. You could say a generative artist would write its own program. I mean, you could do, you could of course Google help for, you know, writing your own script. But basically, you’re writing your own script, and what it’s generating is a finished algorithm, right? It has no, there’s no artificial intelligence driving it. It’s just… it’s a procedural process. You have a code, it works through all the lines of code, and it ends up with a visual output. AI, on the other side, is… when you’re working as an AI artist, what you… I would say you actually are is a prompt artist, meaning you develop your own way to write a prompt for an artificial intelligence, and it creates some output back to you. So, think of it more like a big brain you’re asking to create an image for you, whilst the artistry in that lies in how you prompt this big brain. But in generative art, you’re creating your own very small brain, only able to create this output that you define. The AI brain could kind of create anything. Your program can just create what you want it to create.

Clinton: Right. Certainly a bit more, or a lot more, focused in the parameters that were, in this case, given by the creator of the algorithm, right? And this… for The Harvest, that being you. And I understand the broadness of what AI could go do if it was, “Okay, well just go explore it in all directions,” right? (Laughs) 

Per Kristian: Right. Exactly.

Clinton: Very interesting… not even just nuance, but really good distinction, that I think people should really get around and understand. So, one of the things that I wanted to ask about, too… I love origin stories in general. Like, people who listen to the pod will hear me say that when I was 12 years old, my dad opened a card and comic book store, so the comic book origin I’m always a sucker for. How did things get going, and specifically for you, not just about The Harvest. Pre-Harvest. Would you consider that you were a programmer first? Were you an artist first? Did they happen in parallel throughout your life? So what’s your chicken or egg story for you, Per?

Per Kristian: Well, I would say up until, I guess, high school, I was kind of… I was gonna do some academic stuff. My father is a civil engineer, and doctor of philosophy, and water development and sanitation. So that has kind of… I looked up to him. I had to get a real education, if you see what I mean. But during high school, I started, I got into music in a band, and kind of, it was, you know, black metal. Had much longer hair, much longer than now, at least.

Clinton: (Laughs)

Per Kristian: I started kind of realizing that this wasn’t something I could live off of when I was getting into my adulthood, but what… the good thing the music, or the band I played in, did for me was that we created a couple of CDs, and I had… somebody had to design the covers. And that’s how I got into graphic design. So I went to graphic design school, and so I would say at this point, I did have experience with computers, but that was mostly gaming, you know, in the ‘90s. But when I was done with graphic design school, actually through a small bet with a friend of mine, I ended up creating a website for their band. To create that website, I had to learn, and this was just early in the internet age, right? So, I got into Flash, which was kind of a program, was kind of quite hot at that point.

Clinton: Oh, yeah!

Per Kristian: Yeah. 

Clinton: Unicorns flashing on the screen. Very MySpace. Flash, out there, for folks who just don’t know yet or just forgot about it, right? Very MySpace-y times, right? Where in MySpace you might have had, like, glowing unicorns coming across the stage, little rotating doodads. 

Per Kristian: Yeah.

Clinton: Very colorful and very, um… free, I would call Flash, right? In some ways.

Per Kristian: Exactly. And what it did also do, because it matured over time and became its own language, or a language in its own right. And the fascinating thing, it was… for me as a designer, it was an easier way to get in to what programming was. You could start with, you know, real small bits of code. And I’ve always been, you know, logical, technical guy. So I was really intrigued about how I could just write things, and just get things to move, and respond. And that’s what got me into hardcore coding, and that’s basically what my career’s built on after that. So, like, from a combination of coding and design, helped… let me into the design and ad agencies, which I probably had 10 years there before I kind of got tired about the consuming part of that. Yeah. I got tired of, you know, adding to consumption by working at ad agencies. So we… I and a few friends of mine started up Void, which is a, you know, alternative design studio. It’s a bit… bit of a cliché now, but we say that we work at the intersection of art, technology, design and architecture. And create a lot of installations, interactive installations, permanent, stenography and stuff like that. And so, the NFT part of me is something I started a couple of years ago. And, you know, generative art has been part of my life since I started with flash, ‘cause I did a lot of generative art then, but it kind of… once you get older, life happens, you get children, and you don’t have that same amount of time. But when I realized NFTs became a thing, I said “This was… I used to do this. Why don’t I just give it a go?” And I got really sucked into it. It was great fun, and it was kind of a refreshing, a new refreshing part in my life, together with kind of the serious stuff that happens in Void. And, yeah. Two years later, here we are.

Clinton: It’s super cool, because… I ask, “Was it code or was it art?” and you go “Yeah, it was a rock band.” 

‍Per Kristian: (Laughs)

Clinton: So, that’s… which is great. And then, back to The Harvest, again, which is this really wonderful, I would say provocative in a good way, series. You know, you talked about it being landscapes and a lot of topography, so again, just trying to paint the visual picture for folks that are out there. These sometimes sharp, sometimes hilly, sometimes very mountainous and peaky landscapes with these vertical beams of… which look like light, just careening into what you would think is the earth, or some Martian territory. And then these splatter effects of color, and destination of these beautiful visuals. That’s how I’d put it into a nutshell. And it’s really just awe-inspiring stuff. So you’re tinkering, you get to zero, you get that feeling of “I’ve got something, okay, I’ve got something special here.” What is it? ‘Cause you’re fired up, right? You’re like “Ooh, I got something.” And like you said earlier, now you’re tinkering heavily, you kinda got back into it, you had the great origin with Flash, so you already knew what… you were already in generative to say “I can tinker rapidly. I can experiment at low cost. I don’t gotta get on canvas and oil, oil and that costs money, and that canvas costs money, and I gotta cover it back over, and it’s gonna take me three days.” So you could experiment extremely rapidly in this format. What was the acceleration from zero through, let’s say, the first few of the series in Harvest?

Per Kristian: Well, first of all, just to clarify, I mean, when we’re talking about “The Harvest Zero,” are you referring to the first mint of the series? 

Clinton: Good question. So, what I saw on Twitter, I think Harvest number Zero was not minted, from what I read. 

Per Kristian: No. So, okay, right. Sorry, let me just explain, then. So, when I create this algorithm, it has to live on the blockchain to be an NFT. Right? So what I do is that, before the sale opens for the series, I collaborated with Art Blocks, which is a platform. They deliver a, you know, system for uploading it to the blockchain, and then doing the… all the handling and stuff like that. So, I get into the platform, I upload my code onto the blockchain, and to be sure that everything works as it should, the artist mints the first one, and that is what is called the Mint Zero. And that is also what is used as the kind of profile picture for that series. So if you go to OpenSea, which is a secondary market where you can buy this, you would see, kind of, the Mint Zero to be the profile picture. This is also an NFT which I own, I own the first one. I haven’t sold it. Probably won’t ever, because it has an… a value of, like…

Clinton: It’s your baby!

Per Kristian: Right, right.

Clinton: It’s your baby. (Laughs)

Per Kristian: Definitely.

Clinton: It’s yours. I get it.

Per Kristian: But after that, so, when I upload, and I also have to say how many iterations this algorithm will accept. Which is handled by the blockchain, right?

Clinton: Mm.

Per Kristian: So, when this is minted, this happened a week or two before it was actually going out for sale. And then there was some promotion, and the sale date came. What happens then is, people can just go to this platform, see that it’s available, and can just purchase it there. And then each time one purchases it, a new generative token is generated, and that person owns this token. Right? So, the rest, the 399 were sold out in that Dutch auction. So that, all those were generated probably within a window of 20 to 30 minutes. 

‍Clinton: Oh, wow. Okay. That’s crazy.

‍Per Kristian: So, when I’m talking about the first kind of image, when I realized that I had something when it came to Harvest…

Clinton: Yeah.

Per Kristian: That was an image I generated probably around August last year, which was on my computer and is just… now, I have no way of generating an exact copy of it anymore, so I have the PNG file, low-resolution PNG file, and that’s everything I have from that. But I still have it, if you see what I mean. I could never generate it again. So it has value for me, too, still. So, yeah.

Clinton: So, let’s dive a little bit deeper into that technology stack. So, we talked about, you had shared earlier, OpenSea. And the best way I look at that, and… correct me, you know, guide me if I’m a little misguided here…

Per Kristian: Sure.

Clinton: I would look at that as, the NFT marketplace

Per Kristian: Right.

Clinton: As a lay term. So, OpenSea… is it opensea.com, or opensea…

Per Kristian: Opensea.io, I think it is.

Clinton: And people can go in there, just type in The Harvest or Per Kristian, and you’ll see your… I don’t know if you call it a gallery, but you’ll see the work and then see, it’s out there on the… on OpenSea. And then the individual pieces, so, did you say there are 399 total, or 400 if it includes…?

Per Kristian: There’s 400 total including the one I minted first.

Clinton: Gotcha, gotcha, cool. So there’s 400 in total, and then there was a first auction. Away they go. Now, at this point, people can buy and sell them as just something you could own digitally as an NFT. But that’s still happening on NFT, and that is powered by etherium purchases, is that correct? 

Per Kristian: Right. So, in some way you can think of… think of the blockchain as one big giant database. You know, you have currency stored there, but you can also have applications and data stored there too. It costs money to store it, but once you’ve stored it, it’s there. So that’s what happens with the code. It actually gets stored on the blockchain, and that’s kind of your tracker of who owns what, right? So, and what OpenSea does, they don’t own the blockchain in any way.

Clinton: Right.

Per Kristian: They use the blockchain as their database for the data. So, it scrapes the whole blockchain and displays all the NFTs that are available. If you own this, you can put it out, you can list it for sale. Or you can, you know, there’s people discussing it over DMs, and then they agree to just transact. And… there’s different ways of selling these. But you can have a view of everything that’s available on OpenSea, in the same way as you can when you’re purchasing stocks, for example, at the stock exchange. It’s a simplistic comparison, but there’s a lot of…

Clinton: No!

Per Kristian: …economic, uh…

Clinton: That’s effective, though, because... And again, where generative art in general, I think, again, makes it… simpler is not the right term, ‘cause it undersells it. But allows for more experimentation more rapidly, I think, is a fair way to look at it. Again, versus physical, oil or something to canvas. The OpenSea platform also allows for, and the fact that it’s on blockchain and the irrefutable ledger that comes with it, it allows for… think about it versus a physical piece of art that is only a physical piece, where you may have to go to a certain gallery over in England and talk to a very, very small pool of humans who have access to that thing. And, who knows, have some discussions about potentially… and then maybe going to a, there’s a, Lloyd’s, right? I think, is the auction house. Going to an auction in that way. Very, very exclusive. Versus, this is much more democratized. Mainly because the technology, by its nature, is a democratized platform.

Per Kristian: That’s very, I agree with everything you said. That’s how I view it too.

Clinton: So, one of the other ways, which is, I just mentioned physical prints. And one of the things that I thought was, just say, call it outstanding, was that for the owner of the NFT, that you offer the ability to get a… I think, again, and correct me if I’m wrong, a single print done. And you have a way to control the printing process, to, I would say, enhance or solidify the integrity. That this is in fact the print you can get from the NFT ownership. And I think you actually sign all the ones yourself, as well, as part of it. So, had you seen that been done before by different artists? Was that something borrowed or was that, like, an added way…? Because the physical pieces are… they’re gorgeous, right? You want them on your wall. You don’t want them just as a piece of digital life. But printed, they’re absolutely gorgeous. So where does that idea come from? Is that borrowed or something new that you threw into the mix?

Per Kristian: Well, I knew when I started this that I wanted to have the ability to print, because I come from… you know, when I went to design school, it was print. And I’ve been digital basically all my career. So, it was… this was an opportunity to go back to print. So, this series I wanted to do a print. So I did a lot of research on how to do that in the best way, and I found different approaches to how to do it. So… I cannot say that this is my idea, but the idea of wanting to give an exclusive print, that was… that was what I wanted to do. So the solution I came up with was, is kind of a mix of some different ways to do it, but this was the way I wanted to do it. So, how you do it is that, you have to prove your ownership of the NFT when you order yours. And depending on what size you want, I would generate one high-res image. And I work tightly with a print shop in downtown Oslo to create these prints, and I sign it. I also deliver a certificate of authenticity, so it kind of has the same authority as any print from a regular, you know, traditional artist would have. Yeah, and then… yeah, sign them and ship them off. And once I’ve done that for one, that NFT, that NFT can’t be redeemed again afterwards.

Clinton: Let me look at that for a second, right? So, let’s say I was lucky enough to own one of your pieces, and of course, if I’m gonna own the NFT, then I’m gonna pony up and get the physical piece, and get the biggest one I possibly could get that fits on my walls appropriately. Um, that’s just me. So, after there’s a print, what happens if… let’s say, then, I want to sell my NFT? Let’s say it’s 10 years later. I sell the NFT rights. The new owner, are they not able to go get a print? It’s like, “Hey, that one print is the print.”

Per Kristian: So, what I’m saying is that you won’t be able to get a new signed print with a certificate of authenticity. I mean, when people own the NFT, if they would like to generate their high-resolution from that algorithm themselves and print it, I mean…

Clinton: Go ahead. 

Per Kristian: It’s up to them. I’d be so honored if they want to do that. But if you want to have a signed version of that NFT with a certificate of authenticity, that can only happen once. So, what I wanted to do is also, you know, create some exclusivity in some kind of way. It might backfire 10 years down the road, I don’t know, but this is kind of how I want to do it now. And what you had to do, if you want to buy a piece because you want an authentic, signed print, there is on my webpage, which is perkwerk.art, p-e-r-k-w-e-r-k.a-r-t, you can go and see, there’s a list from the sign… which prints have already been signed and are not available to be redeemed for a print. That’s how I’ve chosen to do it now. And that list is updated as soon as I get an order.

Clinton: Interesting. It’s interesting that, um… you know, ‘cause I know there’s an added expense to the prints, but again, for me, it’s like, if you’re gonna own the piece then go get the prints, right? Because, and very very much because of the exclusivity around it, too, and of course that for me, it is a piece of art and I want to physically be around it and see it in my living room, or wherever I want to hang it. 

Per Kristian: Yeah, I totally agree. At least for me. I… as soon as it becomes physical it has another dimension. But you can also, I mean, Harvest has a… kind of a unique animation when it generates. So, every time you see it, it generates to kind of build the image, so you can see it. And that animation is something you can’t get in print, of course. So there’s a drawback on having a print, too, but I would say the ups of the print is also quite amazing.

Clinton: And the flexibility of the artwork itself, to live in both realms, very successfully, points to the overall successfulness of how it speaks to people. ‘Cause you put out on Twitter, and others put out on Twitter, they show the animation, they show the progress of looking at a Harvest piece coming to life, and those are something as well. And, I know that you’ve been on a bit of a whirlwind tour. I believe… I know New York, I know you were in New York recently, I think you were in Tokyo if I’m following, you know, bouncing ball, or going there soon.

Per Kristian: The artwork was. I wasn’t able to go there, but my artwork was. Yeah.

Clinton: So, what do the galleries do with it? Is it more the digital, where they’re doing the build and showing it? Is it more the stills? Is it mixed media? How are galleries taking this and then representing it to the world for folks that walk through physical doors?

Per Kristian: Well, that depends a lot on the gallery. So there was one showing in New York, which I was at, which was more like a… it was in the basement, it was more like a club feeling to it, and it was dark and there was a lot of monitors kind of spread out over the room.

Clinton: Mm.

Per Kristian: It showed a few different of my works, some animated and some just stills, but it was on screens. Same in Toyko, it was more like a… think of screens hanging as a physical frame would. And the image would just be displayed there. And finally, I had this exhibition just last month in London, where you had one physical piece that was framed. That was actually a gallery, the Disruptive Gallery, that… they bought up quite a few high-value NFTs, and acquired the prints for these. That was very much a physical gallery and exhibition, whilst also having some digital aspect to it, though. But yeah. There was a lot of physical there. So, yeah. Depends a lot about the gallery.

Clinton: So, I don’t know… I don’t know if you’ve been asked this, or if it’s like “No, I won’t say,” but I’ll ask anyway. So there’s 400 pieces. Is there one for you that you’re like, you know… zero’s your baby, and we get that, that’s the first minted. Is there a piece within the 400, or a style, even, to give it a little more broadness, that you personally find the most pleasing?

Per Kristian: It is actually a very hard question to answer. It’s a bit like, if you have more than one child, and you wanted to say which one’s your favorite, it’s hard to kind of define one. Maybe…

Clinton: Sure… but that’s on the surface. What you tell your wife is, “This kid picks their stuff up, this one’s lazy.” (Laughs)

Per Kristian: Yeah, fair enough. Well, to be honest, I think each palette has been… I used, spent a couple months on palettes, so I mean, each of them has grown on me. But I would say there’s one piece that has, kind of, for different reasons, popped out as quite unique, and that’s number 112, which has this one big majestic beam coming down. And it is in black and white, and it’s also the one that’s had the highest sale, though. But it’s also one of three that has one single beam. Every one… all the others have a lot. And this is, back to the generative art part, this is where… it’s quite rare to just have one beam. You could see it. There’s just… there were only three of them in a series of 400, so that’s less than 1%. But that’s one of the edge cases of the parameter windows that were defined when we create this. And a lot of the… a lot of the work in generative art is that part there. You can have an algorithm which is, I haven’t been working that much on the drawing part of it, but I would say 60 to 70% of the time I’ve spent has been going to finding the edge cases and narrowing that window, so you know that each time… because once you’ve put that algorithm on the blockchain, you have no control of how the result will be. So when they click, when you purchase a mint from The Harvest when you’re auctioning, firsthand sale, people don’t know what they’re gonna buy. What they…

Clinton: What? I didn’t realize that they’re buying kind of blindly, and that they have to just see what was delivered.

Per Kristian: What they can see, though, is that… the week before, when this was announced, there was an auction on Art Blocks, people can go in there and hit the “generate new” one. Generate new, as many times as they want.

Clinton: (Laughs)

Per Kristian: And they can see the actual algorithm in action. So, they can get a feeling of what you’re going to get.

Clinton: That is so…

Per Kristian: So if you sit there for 24 hours and just press that button and save each image, you can get a quite, um…

Clinton: A data set, right? Different interpretations of what could be. Yeah.

Per Kristian: So in that way, you’re not actually buying blind. And that’s part of, I think, from the way… when I go and buy art, because that feeling of not knowing what you’re gonna get is really exhilarating, there are… there have been some times where I have sold the one I bought at an auction and buying from the same series, but maybe in a different palette. That has happened. But there is something special about not knowing what you’re going to buy, and then… and then seeing it generate when you’ve bought it.

Clinton: Did not know that. So glad we got to that, ‘cause that is… that’s a really cool wrinkle. And that’s such a, from the physical world, huge departure from the physical auction, sitting there and being like “Okay, I know exactly what that is.” And the excitement of having to wait to see it generate, that’s a really intriguing piece that I just had no idea, and I bet lots of folks didn’t either. So I’m glad… glad we kind of arrived to that.

Per Kristian: Yeah. For me, this is the, this is natural for me, so I didn’t think of saying it…

Clinton: Right, right, absolutely. No, this is… this is blowing my mind! That’s so cool, love all that. 

Per Kristian: But you can also, then, imagine how nerve-wracking it can be for an artist…

Clinton: Yes.

Per Kristian: …when the sale goes up, because… I have one admission, though, about this set of The Harvest, which is that there’s been one bug that has tormented me throughout last… when I started this project around summer last year. And it was released in January. So, that whole time, there’s been one bug that’s been tormenting me all the way, and each time it popped up it was the result of an edge case. So I had to kind of trim that edge case, find a better way. And so, it popped up less and less over time, right? But you can never prove a negative, so I could never be 100% sure that it would never pop up. But I’ve probably iterated 1,000, 10,000, probably, iterations, after the last time I got that bug, and never saw it. So I was quite confident that it wouldn’t pop up. But, yeah. I was nervous about that small bug.

Clinton: I mentioned my dad owning a card and comic book store earlier, so I’ve collected physical cards for quite a while. You know, on and off again. And right before COVID, through COVID, the physical card world, cardboard cards, got extremely… like overly hot, just crazy, crazy hot. And with that, you know, the bug piece is actually kind of fascinating, because in the cardboard world, they would call it an error.

Per Kristian: Yeah. Yeah.

Clinton: Right? That’s an error card. And one of the consequences of error cards in the physical cardboard world is, they’re usually worth a lot of money.

Per Kristian: Yeah.

Clinton: Like, those are the ones that actually are, like, “Oh, a Dale Murphy reverse negative,” if folks know the Upper Deck Dale Murphy, that’s the one you want to chase. Because there’s only so many of them. So I do wonder if there’s any parallels there, where you’re like “I’m trying to get rid of all those,” but from a collector’s perspective, might they see it as an error card, and there might be a bit more… might be a bit more value to it?

Per Kristian: I would guess that… that was kind of my small consolation. If it popped up, hopefully it would only pop up once…

Clinton: Right.

Per Kristian: And maybe it would be a, something like you are mentioning. Because… I was into Magic: The Gathering in the ‘90s.

Clinton: Sure.

Per Kristian: When I was a kid, so I know exactly what you mean. There were a few error cards which were, you know, rare and cool. So I, yeah, definitely, if… it would have been fun to see if that had popped up, I’m sure if it just had been one, it would probably have a higher value, I don’t know. It’s hard to speculate in how you, you know, value art, but yeah.

Clinton: Right. 

Per Kristian: Big possibility.

Clinton: Sure. Well, I’m glad we’re talking about the art world now, too, ‘cause I do want to ask, you know… you’ve been at this for a while, and doing different projects, certainly before The Harvest as well. You know, I’ve seen some of your other interviews, where you almost share, I would say, pangs of guilt that your work got the commercial wave and catched… that it caught fire, and it’s really being appreciated commercially as this beautiful artwork. And I’ve heard some of your interviews where you’re like, yeah, there’s so many other people that you consider colleagues or peers who are just great artists, that for whatever reason, theirs has maybe just not caught yet. So, are there other artists or other styles out there, since this is a platform where some folks will hear it, that you’re like “You know what? I love these people too. Like, they deserve your eyes also. Go check out some of their artwork, ‘cause they’re pushing boundaries also.”

Per Kristian: I, there are too many. I mean, I would feel bad for not mentioning others when I mention a few. But I would say, one thing that was interesting about getting into the NFT world is that, I realized quite quickly I had to be on Twitter, and to be honest, I despised social media and Twitter. I’m not that kind of, you know, I’m not a social media guy. I can lurk, but I don’t engage too much.

Clinton: (Laughs)

Per Kristian: But I realized that Twitter was important in this community, because there’s a lot of… you need to connect in order to kind of be part of that world. And so I saw the value of Twitter through this. And this is where I’ve kind of joined a lot of connections and a lot of great… seen a lot of great artists. So, I mean, if you find me on Twitter, go to the people I follow. I would say there’s a lot of great artists there, at least.

Clinton: Right.

Per Kristian: Start there, maybe, and see what pops up. There’s a… the community’s really helping each other out, to kind of spread the word. There’s a lot of good energy. A lot of bad energy too, scammers and stuff, all that. But you find people that are really legit and, you know, try and tell ‘em to good people. 

Clinton: It’s @perkwerk_, p-e-r-k-w-e-r-k_, is where you can follow Per Kristian and see all of his stuff, but also all of the folks that he’s retweeting and the folks that he’s following within the generative community. The artist community. And for me, I mean, I wasn’t following you per se, but I was following somebody who was following somebody…

Per Kristian: Exactly.

Clinton: …who said “Ooh, that’s pretty.” 

Per Kristian: Yeah, yeah.

Clinton: “I like that.” So I want to end here with you, Per. Alright. The Harvest, big success, at least in my point of view, like… commercial, and I mean that in a good way. The population seemed to really love it. People are struck by it. They really enjoyed the artwork, and that’s something. And, I’d imagine, you being a designer and a coder, that you’re never gonna… you’re not stopping and saying “Okay, that’s it.” So have you already begun next trials and next ideas of what a next series might be? Or are you taking a bit of a break from that process?

Per Kristian: Well, the last couple of months have been a lot about managing the aftermath of The Harvest release, so I’ve been doing a lot of prints, ‘cause that’s manual work I have to do. And…

Clinton: Sure.

Per Kristian: But at the same time, I have been working at, there’s 2, 3 projects I’m working on at the moment. A smaller project, not the size of The Harvest, but it will be released in the coming months. I don’t have enough information to reveal anything yet, but yeah. I’m working on stuff. And I already have started the idea of maybe a new series in the same vein of The Harvest. That may be for release at the beginning of next year, or something like that. No promises, but that’s kind of the… that’s where I’m at at the moment. But I also have to… I have to manage the, my life at Void, because a lot of my identity is part of the Void, the design studio which I started up with a couple friends of mine about eight years ago. And, which has been my baby for a long time. Yeah, so I’m still kind of juggling that part of my practice, too. So, I’ll keep going with both, and my solo art practice is something that I am interested in sustaining over a long period of time, and you’ll see more from me, but… so, I’m taking everything step by step. I like to plan my… my events, going in the future. But yeah. There’s definitely to come… definitely coming more.

Clinton: Per, thank you so, so much. We already said hey, out on twitter, @perkwerk_, p-e-r-k-w-e-r-k_. OpenSea.io, just go there and just kind of search The Harvest by Per Kristian Stoveland, you will find it there. And go check out void.as as well, there’s tremendous work that, again, blending in the physical and art space to bring in concepts and bring this almost, like, live art to physical buildings and give them presence. Really, really cool stuff that you and your team are doing at Void as well. So Per, thank you so much for joining us, and we’ll… I’ll be following, and hope to one day call one of those NFTs, and those prints… prints mine. But until that day I’ll keep watching and keep admiring what you’ve got going.

Per Kristian: Thank you so much, and thank you for the kind words, and it’s been an honor, and fun to chat. Thank you so much.

Clinton: You’re very welcome. Thank you.

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