NFTs as Keys to Virtual Reality - Android Jones

good morning hi everybody uh there's a lot of people uh i'm so grateful to grateful and nervous to have this opportunity to speak to everyone here my name is android jones i uh yeah colorado native third generation mom thank you very much uh the joneses originally were druggists here in colorado and they started a they ran a pharmacy and a camera shop in boulder for 101 years so it kind of makes sense that i sell psychedelic jpegs okay i'm i think that's the only joke i have so uh man this is amazing i've been here since monday setting things up and like i've been so busy schlepping art and lugging monitors and dealing with cables and electricity that i didn't i kind of overlooked that i was actually i didn't know i was actually speaking on this stage till last night at 11 p.m so a little unprepared and nervous but we're just going to wing it and do my best so some of you let's talk about just kind of a little bit of where i come from and how i got here and why i do what i do uh i grew up making art my whole life i was just like that kid in the back of the room that was terrible at sports and you know very dyslexic but uh i was uh i was great at just making images you know it's like sometimes like the the boon of any digital artist or just to get a feel for them how many digital like nft artists am i talking to today yeah being a being a digital artist and in the era of having nfts come around it was kind of like being the kid that draws when there's like a a a book report assignment you team up with somebody and need a cover that's kind of what it like it feels like right now so grew up my whole life drawing and making art is like my main language of communication went to art school for computer animation and uh i guess i first got into digital art and i picked my first wacom up in 96 and uh you know i can say at that time like going in the digital art it was a you know i didn't i definitely didn't do it for the money back then you know i think i really did it for there was an experience of working with a new medium that even though at that time i don't think it had a lot of appreciation galleries wouldn't touch me nobody was really respecting art back then but for me it was really about the experience of of of making it you know feeling like you were adding to the conversation of art history uh some people might recognize me as my first my first big job a concept artist for nintendo working on samus and metroid prime i think working for a big studio i realized that after that experience i realized i didn't want to work for studios anymore [Applause] so these are just some images that make made their ways around the interwebs for the past i guess 10 15 years once i realized that i was kind of i wasn't great at working with art directors and i was slightly unemployable i decided to make art and kind of collaborate a lot more with the electronic music community burning man festivals making art on stage thank you very much i'm a burner first burn was in how many burners in the audience nice great uh my first burn was 2003 and i have a perfect attendance record ever since kind of proud kind of ashamed of that but i've surrendered to the fact that i'm a burner and i accept that that's kind of where i'm at so um yeah but it's a been a really exciting community to to to be a part of that and uh we're gonna we're gonna speed run my life here 2016 i'm just doing my thing here in colorado making art and i got a call from a buddy at hp saying that i need to try out this new vr headset he's got and so got a headset put it on and kind of realized this is the i could just see this was that the new future path and uh so this is uh may 24th 2016. this is my office barn in uh in lyons about an hour north of here you just just appreciate just like the zen-ness of this so that's this is like before vr and now we're getting to after vr and now my studio looks like some type of like cyberpunk wet dream um but uh yeah it's kind of been spending a lot of a lot of the last six years in different types of virtual and uh altered realities um i started a company called vision agency six years ago um and we've spent pretty much all that time five of those years creating one product called microdose vr i don't know if we have any we have any micronauts in the audience here yes thanks yeah we're um we're a three-man team that are are all pretty addicted to scope creep hence it took six five years to make one vr title that we've sold 300 of them so far but it is the the quality not the quantity um one thing that we've developed oh man let's do this so for people i haven't seen microdose vr this is a this is a good way of just showing what it is it's basically a we call it a lot of things but ultimately it's like a like a flow state simulator when i first got into vr and i realized that could create any type of experience we really wanted to create the experience of what it's like to experience a flow state and create create art and so a lot of what we do with microdose i'd consider it more of a you know it's pretty abstract but uh our ultimate goals were to really create like a new a new language um we sort of recognized that in this new digital age like identity has become like really important to a lot of people and i totally honor that like i personally like he him but i identify as a particle a lot of the times you know my partner fong is a wave and uh you know when it comes to our future online interactions in digital and virtual spaces we just wanted to create a tool that people could use that they could express themselves in a way that you know a colorful avatar would doesn't really describe you know like you know obviously we can't choose what our voice sounds like we can't choose what we look like we do the best with what we've got but with microdose we really wanted to create a medium where people have the ability to express themselves through aesthetic choices and their movements and it's it's really interesting you know i think privacy is going to be a big thing that we deal with in the future and not just that but like how we authenticate ourselves and with with microdesk it's kind of like if you're on a dance floor like if you know some if you you can see you can sense a lot about someone by how they dance and in a virtual space where with microdose it's totally isolated so all you're seeing is their movement and their flow i've known a lot of people in the flow arts and about 99 of them all are pretty cool people that i could have a conversation with so it's a nice it's just a we wanted to add another layer of a meaningful interaction and we wanted to create experience that also gave meaning to people so these are some of the worlds that we have inside of microdose whoops [Applause] these are some of the projects we create at vision agency and uh you know of course now that we have a company of three people with a low burn rate that's only sold 300 copies of their software which we only price it in crypto it's a 0.02 bitcoin so you can you can buy the dip when it goes down and we have now slightly pivoted from microdose into the the world of of nfts um these are two nfts we just dropped on portion with uh these fences and i guess they don't have the audio on them but um we've worked exclusively with the unreal engine i do a lot of zbrush a lot of some photoshop um and fong my partner is more of the technical artists and engineering things and um yeah it's been it's been a been a pretty pretty wild ride so far with the projects we've been enduring uh this one's andromeda this is probably one of my favorite nfts i wanted to throw in here this is a it's a another collaboration with beast fendensen and it's a it's more exciting than this little spinny i i promise it was uh moving right along uh these are my two partners uh fong and scott i've known fong for 14 years i met scott as he was he rolled up playing a renegade dubstep set at a festival in portland that i went to and um yeah i just uh these are really like you know i don't do any of the stuff that i do alone and i always want to be able to just give some recognition to like just two really really really brilliant guys that are a big part of my life um anyone seen samskara here some scars kind of a i got an offer from a bunch of from a russian gangster hari krishna guru with that invited me out to thailand and i gave him a hard drive of art and he created samskara from it and uh and i think it was around uh 20 must have been like kind of early 2020. a really a really close friend of mine stephen glass crane out there in the audience he uh he told me about this nft thing and he told me about it for several months in a row and he got me he kind of drugged me kicking and screaming and uh yeah october 2020 i minted my first nft in super rare and yeah let's please a round of applause for yeah uh obviously as an nft artist a lot of options out there a lot of places you can go i feel so fortunate to have my first experience with nfts super rare um they just keep it 100 i mean they are the high in my opinion they're the high water mark of this entire industry and uh they've enabled uh yeah they've enabled so much for so many artists and um yeah i just can't really thank that whole every every every interaction i've had with them has been impeccable and uh it's really just great to have like this just bastions of integrity and creativity intelligence really like leading the space um so yeah just props is super rare this is a the first mint dharma dragon i think it sold for 55 eth eth was like 300 back then so you know but it's still pretty good gains some other super rare work [Applause] um this is another project we're working on you know we're kind of trying to constantly find new and interesting collaborators these are some some initial concepts from a project i'm working on with uh obscure digital and uh luis ahoya from a racing extinction we're doing a lot we you know we're trying to channel that a lot of the abundance we're seeing from the sale of nfts into projects where all the nft sales half of it goes to a particular charity um of the artist's choice so it's a really and it's gonna sorry shilling shilling it's gonna be a great project super excited about it no really excited about it uh got five minutes let's talk about metaverses that's the buzzword this year metaverses we're into that we're into the metaverses some of our procedural brilliance currently on the books we're doing a teamed up with a incredible group of people called resource network and these are some of the first glimpses of the the master keys this is a these are all different high-res renders of the cloud city world we've uh the whole team's out here to come out and and launch the cloud city project our team is much more there's the we just like making stuff and building things let's see i mean here are some so cloud city is a i would call it a proto metaverse right now it exists as a three-dimensional project file in unreal engine and we pretty much just gave our my main partner fong a mission to create a kind of a floating world in the sky and we had i think we all had the you know the insights to give him that mission to just leave him alone for five or six months and this is the this is the world that he created it's it's it's really a reflection of kind of the the inner human that he is um but yeah it's something we're really we're really interested in we've been really excited about how it's going so far um some of the elements of cloud city i think worth noting is um it's really an experiment in collaboration and all the assets are of creative commons so the work is able to remix we're trying to create like an open source narrative within this city you could even see the way the buildings are you know there's a lot of even with the lack of textures we really wanted to be kind of a canvas that people kind of can project their own mythology around and uh with the creative commons it solves all the legal liabilities of ip rights you know i mean obviously you know i guess metaverse is you know it's pretty complicated you know i mean i think like i mean we're in a metaverse right now spiritually like our bodies inhabit the metaverse of this reality if denver is a metaverse for all that come together it's kind of difficult being a visionary in a metaverse space when you're um have like an avoidant personality and social anxiety and are more introverted like i don't know if the best architect for this world but i feel like i do know a lot about communities and what makes good communities work i've led digital art communities back in the 2000s with 150 000 members microdose we have 15 000 1500 active microdosers i've had i ran a burning man camp in 2013 with 100 and with 500 people in it and you know the one thing i've learned throughout that when it comes to this the creation of these kind of communities is it the only glue that i've i felt really worked to bind us together was a common meaning like something in common that the experience we had in that community gave us meaningful fulfillment whether it was teaching people art whether it was our love of the our creative expression and supporting each other or you know with the community of microdose we've taken micronauts that started a year ago in their early alpha stage and um i'm semi-retired now and uh now they we have a big 420 psychedelic art gig in san francisco that's happening in april and like goop wizard one of our big micronauts we just you know we're giving him the stage he's kind of he went from alpha tester to like a full stage rock star so some type of incentive where people really want to see each other shine and i think that's that's a really amazing thing about this event like i really get the feeling that there's a lot of people here that we all have you know a common passion i mean i i honestly stumbled into crypto i started accepting shopify payments for digital money and digital art in 2016.

i didn't know what i was doing um several months and i was selling 2 000 canvases for for bitcoin and a couple months later i spent a small fortune using crypto to bail my friend out of jail so you know easy come easy go but uh there's a there's a lot here there's a lot to learn and i'm really grateful to be part of this community i'm really grateful for this space and the canvas that youth denver has has offered me and all these platforms of um the support i've got [Applause] uh three kids under the age of five and and the support that nfts have enabled me have made me a better father and that's what really matters to me and i think in being able to support more people around me so i just want to thank everybody i want to thank my whole team that made this happen um i can't do i can't i take a lot of the the spotlight but i can't do any of this alone and it's only through the support of like annie and adam and frank and steven and scott and fong and jake and i could go on and on and super rare but just i'm so humbled and grateful to have this opportunity to speak with you and um you know working on creating this future together so thank you guys very much [Applause]