Glassface's Work with Latent Visions
In early 2021, Glassface was already a successful musician and producer, director and editor of music videos for major recording artists, commercial director and VFX artist for major brands. But when he first heard about NFTs in late 2020 he immediately understood their potential to empower artists.
After minting his first (non-AI) NFTs in January 2021, he connected with Patrick Hoepner and Jordan Meyer at WolfBear Studio (who specialized in creating custom software for artists including Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst) and began creating and minting his first audiovisual AI art.
After seeing what these tools made possible, Glassface was eager to share the experience with others. With his multidisciplinary background he understood the importance of artists having access to good tools, and saw the potential for AI art tools to empower creatives. It was in this spirit that he created Impermanent Digital, an NFT project with the goal of introducing AI art to as many people as possible.
Glassface launched the Impermanent Digital genesis collection in September 2021, the second full-scale pfp project to use AI (after Bastard GAN Punks V2 earlier that year.) In addition to exploring themes of mortality and changing human identity in an increasingly digital world, the project took on the subversive theme of symbolically "killing off the standard paradigm of NFT art to make way for a new wave." To accomplish this, Glassface took the images of all ten-thousand CryptoPunks as a starting point ("init image" in AI art terms) and transformed them via a semi-automated process built for him by Hopener & Meyer, using a variety of custom prompts he had composed which he called "wavelengths." He then curated his favorites from each wavelength to form a collection of 4444 "AI-evolved" punks.
"What's more punk than killing your idols?" This was one of Glassface's early taglines for the project. The concept of "killing" the CryptoPunks wasn't a criticism of CryptoPunks itself, but of crypto art's tendency to fixate on its early history and dismiss newer artists entering the space. Especially in 2021, when the new wave of participants was often met with cynicism by the "OGs."
Glassface wanted to pay homage to the past but also keep looking to the future. But what exactly did he mean by "killing" the punks? The idea was to use AI to transform a specific image through multiple stages of evolution until ultimately it became something else entirely. There would be three total stages of evolution, in which ID owners would be given the option of whether to evolve their IDs or leave them alone. This made the concept of rarity a dynamic phenomenon, as the final number of IDs at each evolution level would not be known until the all three stages had occurred.
For each evolution phase Glassface also created a whole new set of wavelengths, so when an ID owner chose to evolve, the new wavelength blended with the one in the previous image, allowing for a huge variety combinations. This also meant an ever-increasing aesthetic variety to the collection, along with the dynamic rarity.
Finally, owners were given the option to burn their ID token in exchange for a newly minted token in a separate collection called Afterlife. The choices made by the owners of whether or not to burn would determine the final supply and scarcity of the two collections, a further experiment in game theory and dynamic rarity (in the end there were 2822 remaining genesis IDs, and 1613 Afterlife IDs.) Glassface also created an entirely new set of wavelengths for the Afterlife collection.
The IDs burned into this collection were the punks that had, finally, been symbolically "killed" (but lived on in a new form in the Afterlife.) Evolve or die, as the saying goes.
Evolution Stage 2
Evolution Stage 3
Afterlife IDs (Tier 3)
Now that Glassface had formed a community of AI art appreciators through the interactive, multi-stage experience that being an ID/Afterlife collector entailed, he could move forward with his larger vision of tranforming a community of collectors into one of creators.
To test the waters for this next step in his vision of introducing AI art tools to as many people as possible, Glassface and his dev team worked with Hoepner & Meyer to create a prototype bot that would allow people to create their own text-to-image AI art simply by typing prompts into the bot in the Impermanent Digital discord server. This first prototype (only a test phase for what was still to come) came to known as the LizardBot.
The 500 unique 1/1 artworks created minted with the idBot between January and March 2022 form a collection called the Impermanent AI Gallery.
iDreamer
Some 1/1s from the Impermanent AI Gallery
Afterlife IDs (Tiers 1 & 2)
Tier was determined by the Evolution Stage of the ID that was burned
As with IDs in Evolution Stage Three, the Afterlife IDs that were created last reflect the rapid improvements in AI art in the intervening months
The IDs reaching this stage begin to look less like the CryptoPunks they began as, and more like original works of AI/GAN art in their own right. Also note how the rapid improvements in AI that had taken place in just a few months between the genesis mint and the final evolution stage give Stage 3 a distinct aesthetic compared to the previous stages. Thus the multiple stages serve as time capsules of the state of GAN art at specific points in its development in late 2021
Now that the idBot had shown what was possible, Glassface dreamed even bigger. If 500 1/1s could be created by a community of AI artists directly from a Discord bot, why not a full-scale PFP collection of thousands of 1/1 AI portraits? For this next stage of the vision, Hoepner & Meyer created an even more advanced bot designed to create portraits by using images of human faces as init images. This new phase of Impermanent Digital was called iDreamer, and launched in March 2022.
After the creation period came the curation phase. A website was deployed where voters could rank the 15000 portraits using the ELO ranking system used in chess, picking their favorite from images displayed two at a time. The portraits were thus narrowed down to the best 20% according to the voters, and given a numbered rank. Since every image in the collection is a 1/1, this ranking would take the place of traditional rarity. Instead of a token having arbitrary value based on a rare combination of traits regardless of its aesthetic quality, Glassface wanted to see if value and aesthetics could be better aligned. Would a high rank be more valuable to collectors, if that rank was determined by the quality of the art as perceived by the voters in the curation process? Ultimately It would be up to the market to decide.
Over the course of three weeks, over 50 participants, ranging from community members to well-known artists like SHL0MS, Godmin, and of course Glassface himself, created around 15000 portraits from the iDreamer bot in the Discord server. The goal was to start with an abundance of portraits and then curate the best, down to a final supply of 3333 that would make into the collection.
The Impermanent Digital genesis collection includes a 1/1 honorary of Holly Herndon, an artist who helped inspire Glassface to see the creative potential of AI
iDreamers by Glassface
iDreamers by JaSno
iDreamers by Vodnik
iDreamer
to
From
iDreamers by sour ave mel
iDreamers by MozooZ
iDreamers by JoeMomma
iDreamers by fearofsaint
iDreamers by CD Guthrie
iDreamers by errorgardener (aka ConfettiPrime)
iDreamers by yung.raj
iDreamers by tricil
iDreamers by JawaTheHutt
iDreamers by Aubjectivity
Another effect of the artists seeing each other's generations in real time was the emergence of memes and joke prompts, as people in the channel tried to make each other laugh. One day someone started making portraits of people "smelling a fart" and hilarity ensued, with more and more people joining in. It got so bad that Glassface finally put his foot down and banned the word "fart" in the channel, worried that the collection was going to be nothing but portraits with scrunched up noses. It was the one and only time that he ever censored the creation process.
Another example of the channel collectively riffing on a theme was that the community shared a lot of collectors with HeavenComputer, the cult-classic generative glitch art project created by solo artist godmin who was known for using a picture of Britney Spears as her avatar. So one day everyone started making portraits of "godmin" (i.e. Britney Spears.) One of these, which happened to be a portrait of Britney Spears "smelling a fart," was gifted to godmin as an honorary.
Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell (smelling a fart) by BeerMagician
Britney Spears smelling a fart (godmin honorary) by CD Guthrie
Other celebrities who appear in the collection include David Bowie, Prince, Tina Turner, Larry David, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, Cillian Murphy, Bryan Cranston, Carrie Fisher, Vitalik Buterin, Gary Vee, Joe Rogan, and many more.
But while jokes and memes made the creation process even more fun, most of the time the artists focused on pushing their imaginations and the bot's capabilities to see what truly unique works they could create. Eventually this even included pushing the bot beyond its intended limits.
The bot was designed to preserve the structure of the init image portrait no matter how many prompts were used, but as the artists got better at manipulating the bot they figured out how to force it to create images in which no recognizable face remained, or new faces emerged in random places. Several of these "bot-breaking" pieces made it into the collection.
Another Britney portrait by Glassface
Glitched Britney by Aubjectivity
A selection of "bot-breakers"
Multiple faces
Finally, after the collection had minted out, there was one last phase of evolution. Owners of an iDreamer could load it into the bot and put it through another series of prompts, then choose whether to mint the new version. The updated token would replace the original image with the new one and update the metadata to include the name of the "last evolve artist" along with the original creator.
Rank #30
Rank #22
Rank #9
Rank #23
Some high-ranking portraits that haven't already appeared in the gallery:
Original Artist: tricil Evolve Artist: tricil
Original Artist: JaSno Evolve Artist: JaSno
Original Artist: Aja Lee Evolve Artist: Aubjectivity
Original Artist: Glassface Evolve Artist: Aubjectivity
Many of the artists who were first introduced to AI art through the immersive experiences Glassface and his team made possible have continued to develop as AI artists, minting their own collections and/or incorporating AI into their other projects like music videos and cover art. In the progression from Impermanent Digital to the idBot to iDreamer, Glassface accomplished the goal he had stated from the beginning: to "inspire the next wave of dreamers." empowering his community with some of the earliest truly accessible AI art tools ever created. Impermanent Digital and iDreamer not only accomplished new innovations in the history of AI art and its intersection with blockchain, but they did so in ways that involved their community in dynamic creative acts done in a spirit of fun, collaboration, and playful experimentation.
Impermanent Digital continues to push boundaries. A third season of solo AI art by Glassface called 2222glassfaces launched in November 2022, focusing on post-photography by using a new model trained on thousands of images of Glassface himself, and referencing many specific photography styles from magazine photoshoots to Instagram selfies, to explore the theme of "identity in the age of deepfakes." Launched before the concept of "post-photography" was trending in the AI art scene, 2222glassfaces is yet another example of Glassface always being ahead of the curve. However, due to launching in the depths of the bear market, the collection didn't mint out and is currently on hiatus.
Impermanent Digital (Genesis)
Afterlife (ID)
(October 2021 - February 2022)
(September 2021)
Impermanent AI Gallery (idBot)
(January - March 2022)
(March - April 2022)
Some examples of the first 16 wavelengths, compared with the CryptoPunks used as init images:
Delta
Gamma
Micro
Electromagnetic
Ultraviolet
De Broglie
Astra
Starlight
Wavelength 1: Delta
Wavelength 2: Lamark
Wavelength 1: Virtua
Wavelength 2: Mirage
Wavelength 1: Electromagnetic
Wavelength 2: Vizier
Wavelength 1: Optica
Wavelength 2: Permain
Wavelength 1: Electromagnetic
Wavelength 2: Ambrotype
Wavelength 1: Magica
Wavelength 2: Permain
Wavelength 1: Delta
Wavelength 2: Biotic
Wavelength 1: Electromagnetic
Wavelength 2: Magnetia
Wavelength 1: Gamma
Wavelength 2: Obscura
Wavelength 3: Anderson
Wavelength 1: Ultraviolet
Wavelength 2: Mendel
Wavelength 3: Simoni
Wavelength 1: Virtua
Wavelength 2: Deuteron
Wavelength 3: Aronofsky
Wavelength 1: Starlight
Wavelength 2: Aurora
Wavelength 3: Simoni
Wavelength 3: Simoni
Wavelength 1: Zeta
Wavelength 2: Deuteron
Wavelength 3: Simoni
Wavelength 2: Summerland
Wavelength 1: Alpha
Holly Herndon Honorary
Glassface's early work with Hoepner & Meyer's custom version of Latent Visions (minted on Foundation, June-August 2021). Note the thematic contrast to the Herndon/Dryhurst piece shown above. Glassface's love of pop culture, with references to cartoons, music, sports, film and television, and memes of all kinds, is a running theme through all of his projects
Jokes, Memes and Honoraries
"Breaking" the Bot
Curation and Ranking
iDreamers by BeerMagician
iDreamers by Aja Lee
Evolution
ID was the second full-scale pfp project to use AI, after Bastard GAN Punks (popularly known as "Bgans") created by artist Berk Ozdemir. Berk created Bastard GAN Punks V1 as a small experimental collection in April 2020, and the full-scale V2 collection a year later, by training a GAN on images of CryptoPunks and generating new "bastard" punks from the trained model. In contrast, Impermanent Digital used the other of the two most common approaches to GAN art, taking specific CryptoPunks as "init images" which are transformed by text prompts using a model trained on a general image set. By using the same source material as inspiration but coming at it from different technical and aesthetic angles, Bastard GAN Punks and Impermanent Digital offer complementary historic examples of GANs being used to create pfp collections in 2021.
Comparison to Bastard GAN Punks
Bastard GAN Punks V1 (2020)
Bastard GAN Punks V2 (2021)
LizardBot early test generations by Patrick Hoepner (September 2021)
LizardBot early test generations by Glassface (September 2021)
Final Evolution
Unlike a "collaboration" in which multiple artists create works in isolation to be later grouped together in a collection, this was a true real-time collaboration rich with creative cross-pollination. The artists creating live in the Discord channel could watch each other experiment, learning what worked best and riffing off each other's ideas and discoveries. Additionally, anyone could reply to another person's output with a new prompt and take it in their own direction (if the result of one of these direct collaborations made into the collection, both authors would be named in the metadata.)
Multiple iterations from a creation process by Glassface
"Glassface Genesis Piece" visually tying the gallery to the earlier collections
"Everyday Bouquet: 21- Broadcast " by errorgardener (aka ConfettiPrime)
"🎭" by yung.raj
"crack the skye" by tricil
"Peaceful Inferno" by BeerMagician
"N30N_DR34M3R" by VOIDKROSS
"Angelic F(ai)ry Tale" by JaSno
"eye of the beholder" by MozooZ
"PL(ai) DEAD #3" by CD Guthrie
"Miami Splice" by sour ave mel
"Man Witnesses the Birth of The Universe" by fearofsaint
"IT Magician" by Vodnik
"The Absurd Evidence" by Aubjectivity
Digital
A fourth season of Impermanent Digital codenamed "1111" is also in the works.
Season Three and the Future
Conclusion
J48BAFORMS were generated from a GAN trained on original hand-drawn images.
J48BAFORMS
LizardBot
(October 2021)
At that time, most people making GAN art were still limited to tools like VQGAN with a clunky web interface, slow generation times, and a bit of a learning curve. In contrast, the LizardBot (so named because it used a picture of a lizard as its init image) allowed Glassface's community to jump right into the act of creating, simply typing their prompt into the bot and seeing their results within seconds.
Unlike the LizardBot, the idBot allowed users to upload any init image and guide it through multiple prompts toward their desired result. But the real leap forward was that, once they were happy with their result, they could type the !mint command and be taken directly to a web page where they could connect their wallet and mint their creation on Ethereum. This was a new concept that went beyond text-to-image and could be called "text-to-mint," as the entire process of creation, from typing the first prompt to minting the finished result, could now be done from a single tool. With just a few clicks, anyone using the idBot to create AI art could timestamp the exact moment of its creation by minting it on the blockchain in a matter of seconds.
idBot
(January - March 2022)
Another full-scale collection minted in April 2021 is J48BAFORMS, which could arguably be considered a pfp since the images resemble faces. I consider it more of an experimental art collection than a standard pfp, which I think is consistent with the way the project presents itself. But it deserves to be mentioned here as a third "pfp-esque" AI collection from 2021 alongside Bgans and ID.
Glassface's earliest minted AI art (March 2021, ERC-1155 on OS shared contract)
Early AI Work
Some examples of Glassface's earliest experiments using AI
"Ever since I started learning more about AI art it’s become a huge part of my focus as an artist. ID takes text prompts and themes of mortality, humanity and uses AI software by Wolfbear Studio to visualize those concepts. AI imagining human mortality, it’s wild to see and often beautifully unsettling. My goal is to help other artists in their creative endeavors and introduce people to AI art, share creative resources and inspire the next wave of dreamers." --Glassface on Instagram
This piece, recently acquired by Cyborg DAO, was the first of several text-prompted animations by Herndon & Dryhurst made with Hoepner & Meyer's custom version of Latent Visions. Minted in May 2021, one month before Glassface began working with the same software at the beginning of his prolific collaboration with Hoepner & Meyer
"DISTO FINE ART"
iDreamers by Patrick Hoepner
iDreamers by shl0ms
"SHAPESHIFTER"
Glassface's first audiovisual piece on Foundation to incorporate AI (April 2021)
(Note: For historical context, Midjourney, who popularized the use of Discord bots for AI art creation, entered invite-only beta on March 21, 2022. Prior to that their bot was used privately by their team beginning January 19, 2022. The idBot had capabilities in January 2022 that Midjourney didn't have until October 2022 (applying additional prompts to outputs) or even as late as October 2024 (uploading init images) and others that it still doesn't have to this day (minting outputs as NFTs.)
Meanwhile, that same month, Hoepner & Meyer launched their own Halloween-themed project called Ghouls n GANs, and a slightly more advanced text-to-image bot was deployed in that project's discord server. The main difference was that this bot allowed for a variety of init images to be used. But the biggest leap forward came in January, when Impermanent Digital unveiled the idBot.
Background
And yet, despite the free exchange of ideas and the public nature of the prompts, it quickly became clear that each artist had their own recognizable style. This was at a time when AI art was just beginning to emerge into the mainstream on social media, with Midjourney and DALL-E going into beta in March and April, which led to the the first big wave of backlash. A common claim was that all AI art looked the same because the AI was doing all the work and there was no human artist involved. But then how could over 50 people who were all working with the same model each express a recognizable visual style as demonstrated in the examples below? (Granted, the range of style might appear subtle in retrospect, as AI tools have become far more powerful in the years since.)
Examples of direct collaborations:
Glassface / Tricil
Godmin / Aubjectivity
Glassface / BeerMagician
Patrick Hoepner / CD Guthrie
Only owners of an ID or Afterlife token had unlimited access to the idBot, a good example of a project providing the "utility" that so many projects at the time promised to their communities, but so few delivered. Owners of higher evolution levels could upload their own init images, while lower levels could only use images randomly selected from a limited pool. There were also several open houses in which the public and/or communities of other specific projects were invited to try out the bot for a weekend.
When an artist typed a prompt into the bot, a randomly selected photo would be transformed by the prompt and appear as a reply in the Discord channel. The artist could then reply with additional prompts as many times as they wanted, changing and refining the output to guide it to their desired result. The multiple iterations created by this process were all included as candidates for the final collection. As a result, the collection contains multiple versions of many of the portraits, a deliberate choice by Glassface to preserve a visual record of this iterative aspect of the creative process that is unique to AI art.
Ghouls n GANs
(WolfBear Studio, October 2021)
Latent Visions
Glassface connects with a small elite group of AI artists and devs in the Latent Visions discord server
(March-April 2021)
In early 2021 some of the most important developments in AI art were happening in the Latent Visions discord server run by the AI dev known as Advadnoun, known for being the first person to tie CLIP to VQGAN. There were fewer than a hundred members of the discord at the time, but among them were Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Patrick Hoepner and Jordan Meyer (aka WolfBear Studio), and Glassface.
"We were jamming in Advadnoun's latent visions discord. He was the first person to tie CLIP to VQGAN. We saw potential to make an animated series based on an earlier artwork we had made with Reza Negarestani, and worked with Patrick Hoepner to make the software to run and control animations. We were up all hours in a rented Airbnb in the Tennessee mountains losing our mind at what was now possible!
"I’ve often wondered why these are rarely discussed tbh, as they weren’t the first NFT AI animations, they were the first prompted AI animations period. Patrick deserves that credit. I think they went under the radar because they were posted on the general FND contract before collections had their own contracts.
"There are many more [innovations] too. Jordan Meyer invented textual inversion for our Classified collection nearly a year before the paper came out!"
"Crossing the Interface (DAO) XIII" by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
Then in August 2021, Glassface approached Hoepner & Meyer with an idea for an NFT project utilizing AI. It would start out as a relatively straightforward pfp collection (though one of the first to use AI), paying homage to the past and also looking to the future. But this would be just the first step, necessary to gather the community with whom he would share his longer term vision.
Hoepner & Meyer liked the idea, and immediately got to work creating the custom software that would be necessary to realize Glassface's vision.
✨🌈 𝕯𝖎𝖟𝖟𝖞𝓖𝓪𝖓𝖓𝓮𝓭ₓ🎨™₊℠✨®
"NUCLEAR FAMILY"
(July 2021)
(August 2021)
(May-August 2021)
"TRANSCEND"
(June 2021)
As Mat Dryhurst recollected on Twitter:
Not long after these first ever text-to-animation artworks were created by Herdon & Dryhurst in collaboration with Hopener & Meyer, Glassface also began working with their custom version of the Latent Visions software, creating work in his own style influenced by his love of pop culture. The earliest of these were minted on Foundation in June 2021.