Semi-pseudonymous artist jvmi’s “swatches” series is one of Base’s best-selling series. As a front-end developer for Ethereum’s second layer Optimism and a streetwear designer, he relies on his technical coding skills and graphic design expertise to create dynamic digital artworks. His ultimate vision? To create an art world that encourages viewers to get up close and personal with the digital works.
“I often find myself getting too close to paintings in exhibitions,” jvmi recently told OpenSea. “About a month ago at SFMoMA, I got so close that the security guard had to remind me to step back.”
That moment sparked jvmi’s epiphany about NFTs, and he thought of their potential to encourage interactive digital art — something that didn’t exist before. For the first time, jvmi said, digital art could be collected and experienced in a way that was native to the forum in which they were created (i.e. the internet). He wanted to advocate for art that was primarily experienced on a screen and built for interactive participation in a public environment, not just passive observation.
“It makes sense to focus on the online realm because screens are the primary medium for consuming art,” he said. “This is art that is rendered by a computer and contains its native digital form, rather than simply reproducing an image that exists in both physical and digital form.”
In this interview, we explore the San Francisco-based artist’s approach to design and blockchain, as well as his thoughts on the future of digital art.
Note: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
OpenSea: Let’s start with your background and inspirations. Can you share your journey to becoming an NFT artist and how your experience has shaped your style in the NFT space?
jvmi: Of course, I got into the cryptocurrency space about three years ago. From a very young age, I knew I wanted to pursue art full-time, but finding a clear path to support myself was challenging. During my college application process, I discussed this with my guidance counselor, who recommended computer science due to my own misunderstandings.
I thought it was the same as graphic design, but it’s not, however, this confusion actually led me to coding, which I gradually came to see as another form of creativity.
After graduating from college, I became more and more involved in digital art, and about three or four years ago, I began to combine art with programming. The combination of these skills eventually led me to the NFT space. Inspired by several artists I admired before the 2021 hype cycle, I decided to explore and create in this new space. It has been an incredible journey.
OpenSea: I love this story, it shows that even if someone’s path takes unexpected twists and turns, they are still on their own unique journey, you can’t really screw things up, we should find what is meant to us, your accidental entry into computer science is a great example! What was the first thing you coded? When did you realize that you could merge coding with graphic design as a form of creative expression?
jvmi: The fusion of coding and art was not immediate for me, it was a gradual process. Initially, I considered coding and art to be distinct. About three years ago, I started merging them. My exposure to digital art started in school, where I taught myself to use Adobe Illustrator and similar programs.
Later, I recognized the potential of combining art and code when I worked in a development shop that provided technical support for artists to launch NFTs. In that job, I realized that coding could enhance NFTs beyond static images and enable rich interactive experiences. This realization opened up new possibilities for me to create things by combining these two skills.
OpenSea: On that note, congratulations on “swatches” being the 8th best-selling artist on Base (at the time of the interview), what was the inspiration behind this series?
jvmi: Well, traditionally my art has been more hand drawn, in terms of code I am able to create programs that take hand drawn features and build collections that way, however, I have never really been exposed to the form of generative art, I have always been very inspired by generative artists and startup artists but I haven’t really done a project like this myself.
A big inspiration of mine was Snowfro, the creator of Chromie Squiggles and Art Blocks, so, I basically wanted to create a fully generative project where nothing was hand drawn, everything was generated by code, this was the constraint I set myself before creating the "sample", and then, I wanted to see what would end up happening, and I guess that's how the "sample" started.
Another really cool thing that I was really inspired by at the beginning of this series was the concept of embedding iframes into NFTs to make them interactive, so for “Sample” there were two main factors that guided my decision: one, I wanted to do a generative art collection, and two, I also wanted to do something new that made generative art interactive.
Those were the two main inspirations and themes that I used when I first started creating "Samples," and then I built it over time and it really became this larger collection that we see today, but is really surrounded by those two principles.
OpenSea: You created swatchpunk using Jordan Lyall’s profile picture (PFP), tell us that story.
jvmi: We’ve been internet friends for a while and thought it would be a cool collaboration, for the swatchpunk piece my goal was to create a low risk and fun synced piece, I wanted to use the visual language of swatches to convey a popular image that everyone recognizes, like cypherpunk, and combine the two elements.
OpenSea: Nice, now you have programmed the revenue split 50/50 between you and Lyall from the sales of Sample Punk, is this managed via smart contracts?
jvmi: Yeah, so swatchpunk was deployed using Zora’s Creator Tool, which has the option to split creator royalties, and that’s all public information.
OpenSea: I remember when I first learned about using smart contracts for creator revenue sharing, it seemed like one of the most attractive features of web3 at the time. Do you think artists are now fully leveraging the power of smart contracts to achieve this purpose?
jvmi: I haven’t seen too many collaborations like that, I mean, that’s what I’ve been trying to do lately, like “swatches” is a big collection that took a lot of time to create and is now coming out, but as an artist I don’t just want to do really high profile pieces, I want to work in all different types of fields and scales of collections.
So one of them is a perfect example of something that didn't take me eight months to build, but it's also part of the story and shows what I want to put out there and that's where the royalty split comes from and it's more of a collaboration and I'd love to see other artists take a similar approach where we just put something out there and then you split it if you like it because a lot of my early background was inspired by street culture so that's how I got into NFTs as well.
One of my favorite streetwear brands is The Hundreds, they are very ahead of the curve when it comes to Web3 and NFTs, and collaboration is a big thing in streetwear culture, where two groups that aren’t necessarily different but complementary come together and create something cool, so I think that would also be a great culture or model to bring to web3, where not everyone is creating in a silo, but we’re all collaborating together, and token splits are the perfect tool to do that.
OpenSea: Now, turning to your vision for the future, what do you think the intersection of art and blockchain is? Where is it headed in the coming years? How do you plan to evolve?
jvmi: This is something that I’ve only really figured out recently and where I want to place myself and how I want to grow, mainly through the idea of interactive art and internet native art. I go to museums a lot, and one thing that I’m not very comfortable with in museums is that I’m always too close to the paintings.
About a month ago I was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and I got really close to this painting and the security guard told me that I needed to back up and basically get some distance from the painting and that idea really gave me an “aha” moment and I imagined what “swatches” would look like in real life and what the real message was: interactive art, art that didn’t exist before because before we had pictures and videos.
In my opinion, there is a real, untapped market for creating interactive art, and I think it fits in really well with the state of web3 and where we’re going as an industry, you’ve never before been able to collect digital interactive art that’s almost native to the internet, so it makes sense to double down on that in the web space.
OpenSea: What are some examples of interactive art?
jvmi: Just the concept of someone walking up to a piece of work, which is obviously visually cool, but it’s only when that person actually interacts with the artwork that the true art is revealed or happens in the interaction, the future should be built natively for the internet, or built interactively.
It fits in really well with the skills I've built throughout my life, and this type of art is only possible because the artist has coded it, and it unlocks a lot of cool different possibilities.
OpenSea: More interactivity? More live casting, more interactive events, more live shows - just using the technology to encode different types of experiences rather than static pieces?
jvmi：That’s right.
OpenSea: Right, I’ve always felt that way too, people don’t understand why NFTs are important but they attend events like the Vincent Van Gogh immersive tour, for me I envision similar events using NFTs where interacting with a projected digital file could unlock points or exclusive artworks, or at the very least, artists could put exhibitions on the blockchain to prove provenance and show who owns or rents it out, etc.
jvmi: Yeah, I mean, my view on NFTs is that a lot of them have utility that people are collecting - not for the actual content in the metadata, but for the external promises that the team makes about future development that are not deeply connected to what's in their wallet, and I'm generally not very bullish on that kind of thing.
I believe that the more we focus on creating real art with real use cases — understanding that NFTs are digital art, that you can convert a physical static image into a digital image and put it on a blockchain — the better it will be, and the more digitized the work itself will be, the closer it will be to its native environment.
I’m interested in innovation in this space because then you’re not selling a fantasy, you’re selling a fantasy, you’re offering art sincerely. I’ve always been skeptical of making NFTs that go beyond the surface, which is why I want to focus on making the art itself appealing.
OpenSea: Absolutely, well, that’s great, I’m really happy to see this vision come to life for you, thank you so much for your time today, it’s been great meeting you, and I hope you have a great time the rest of the day.
jvmi: Thanks, you too, Megan, take care.
#jvmi #swatchpunk #NFT #OpenSea
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