1on1 with Clown Vamp 🤡

Why do you do what you do?

'Two things get me going. First, I love humans. I know that is somewhat ironic for someone creating an alt-history sci-fi dystopia. But I love humans. I love the weird ways we work to create meaning in our lives. I think we are endlessly fascinating. I love exploring the funny, quirky, even dark side of what that means. '

I’m also fascinated by how things work. I’ve always been obsessed with deconstructing things. Why are certain things the way they are? Creating art has become the thing that most allows me to engage those two great loves. It allows me to explore humans with all our weirdness and reimagine the world as we know it.

Have you always been an artist or was ‘Truth" your debut into the digital art world?

When I was much younger, I was (and this is being generous) a semi-pro photographer. I would take photos of the local emo and pop punk bands. I was your guy if you were a band and only had $50 for your photo shoot. I also explored fine art photography. But my only claim to fame was getting a five on AP Studio Art. I loved photography but never entertained the idea of doing it professionally (I wonder what life would’ve been like if I had).

Spending years trying to master how to take a photo is excellent training for this wild world of AI-assisted art. I love the metaphor that people say AI is photography for your imagination. I think all the same ideas are true, whether composition, lighting, or color. I believe you’ll see many people with prior photography backgrounds find their home in AI.

What led you to the utilise AI as a medium for your work?

I started to go down the rabbit hole by collecting and realized that it was incredibly stimulating. I became obsessed with how you could do grand conceptual things with AI as a tool. I’d always been a fan of alt-history, and here was a way you could create not only alt-history but alternative art history too.

Combining things we don’t think of as complementary is my main objective with AI. I like to use the medium to make you feel and question. In my IRL life, one of my hats is being a professional writer, so creating worlds using words is very comfortable, and translating that into a visual medium is intoxicating.

What do you usually start with before creating a new piece, does the inspiration automatically come to you?

Often I will start with a visual component or a plot point. Or something that is a combination of the two. But, what I find so exciting about AI, is that as I start working on the idea, the AI will provoke interesting new connections or concepts. So you end up finding all these surprising nooks and crannies of the concept. So often, the prompt and the plot will also react to what I find in the AI.

Put another way, the AI often prompts us, just as we are prompting it.

What role do you think AI will play in the art world in the near future?

I’ve said this before, but I think AI is the most significant paradigm shift for visual media since the camera.

We will see a massive change in how people perceive their creativity and even the broader role of visual media.

I could see a world where every novel becomes a graphic novel, where every music album has a visual accompaniment, and where kids can use AI to visualize their literal dreams.

The biggest sign of how monumental AI will be is the blowback we are seeing right now. If we look at any massive technological or cultural shift, there has always been an immense blowback. In fact, the more hysterics I see, the more conviction I get.

What was the inspiration for the name ClownVamp?

I had become obsessed with a specific Cryptopunk with a combination of vampire and clown traits. Eventually, I ended up figuring out a way to buy it. I loved the idea of it as a character, so I created a Twitter profile for it. A vampire who was too nice to bite people. So it did the only obvious thing: it joined the circus! But a few days after buying it, I realized that buying this really expensive NFT didn’t bring me the joy I was hoping for.

So, I sold it.

I used that money to seed my Tezos collection. And I kept thinking that while I didn’t like having this singular NFT, I really liked the idea of a friendly vampire. So I decided to continue that narrative, just without a very expensive PFP :).

We know you as a collector too, from this perspective what would you say gives you that ‘this hits the spot’ moment when collecting other artists?

There are three elements that I look for when I collect. And this is all subconscious. It’s not a literal matrix. But the first thing is world-building. I love to see recurring characters, repeating colors, and consistent ideas. I love how it feels like you’re peeking into an artist’s brain when world-building is executed well.

The second thing I work for is color. I adore intense colors. There are some monochrome works that I love, but I think that color is such an expressive element of art, and I admire how people can use it.

Third, I love an artist who understands the NFT paradigm and all the interesting ways you can push and interact with the concept of an NFT, the market, or any other meta-element of what we are all doing.

Any conspiracies you’d like to share with your followers?

I mean, the truth will set you free.

What’s your most embarrassing moment?

Clowns don’t get embarrassed.

What’s your favourite artwork both traditional and AI generated ?

I don’t know if I had two singular favorites or even a set of favorites.

I tend to get in my head about certain works and think about them a lot. On the traditional front right now, there is this piece, Breton Boy in Profile, that I saw in person by this under appreciated Irish painter Roderic O’Conor. I think it’s one of the most unique pieces of impressionist art I’ve seen. The use of color struck me in a way I wasn’t expecting.

On the more modern front, I recently collected a piece called The Yawn by Indi Sulta, which I think is a powerful and potentially iconic image of this new second wave of AI diffusion art. AI-assisted art can create mesmerizing emotions, even from the weird and scary.

Can the artistic life be lonely? If it is what do you do to counteract it?

I find that NFTs are a definitively not lonely experience. I often find that the thing I’m struggling to do is disconnect and focus on creating. There’s so much stimulation. There’s so much new art always coming out. There are so many exciting communities to participate in, chat in, and learn from. I have a lot of very wonderful artist friends and collector friends. Some of those friends are also now IRL friends. Clowns are naturally very extroverted.

What wouldn’t you do without?

Twitter. I am a massive, raging Twitter addict. And I love it. I especially love creating and engaging using a pseudonym. It allows you to extend world-building and character development in a much broader way. I’ve completely stopped using my personal social media as I find it so much less fun. NFT Twitter is mostly a life-giving activity, while real-life social media seems to sap us of energy.

Lastly, do you have any spoilers for future releases ?

Soon.

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