Dimitria: Both of us share a common experience: our entry into the art industry began with our work at blue-chip galleries. For many, these galleries serve as institutions that shape the way the art world operates. How did your time at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich and London influence your evolution in the market?

Georg Bak: It was my first job and entry point to the art world. I learned a lot about how the art market functions and also experienced an already large gallery becoming one of the top four mega-galleries in the world. It was a very fast paced environment and interesting experience.

It was interesting to observe the way artists are being made into superstars. Most of them signing with Hauser & Wirth would suddenly become very expensive and successful. These galleries have a big impact on institutions, and they finance large-scale exhibitions of their artists in museums. It is a well designed game. The art world works with a lot of gatekeepers and maybe that was also a reason why I’m really enjoying the freshness of the NFT market, which just tore down all these structures and gatekeepers and gave any artist the chance to succeed.

These galleries are selling financial assets. If you want to get access to one of the hottest artists, then you have to, for example, finance a museum show, or buy one work and donate it to a museum. All these kinds of rules you wouldn't find in any other market.

D: In early 2015, together with Christina Scheublein, you hosted forward-thinking exhibitions at your gallery Scheublein + Bak, including historical shows such as 'Thinking in Algorithms' and 'Against Photography.' How did your passion for photography, digital art, and generative art evolve?

G: The passion for photography came, maybe through Christina. She was previously working in the photography department of Phillips auction house in Berlin. We actually inaugurated our gallery Scheublein + Bak with two photographers, Dan Holdsworth and Michael Reisch and the exhibition was a great success.

Through Michael Reisch, in 2011 I started investigating digital photography and I suddenly came across an essay about generative photography. I thought, this is mindblowing!

Then I started reading essays and books by Gottfried Jäger and I got really curious about this completely unknown chapter in art history. I was struck by the clarity of his language and the way he defined a completely overlooked art movement. I was familiar with net.art and early computer art, but not with generative photography, and it was absolutely fascinating for me to dig into this art movement. I contacted each artist involved in generative photography, visited them in their studios and when I first visited Gottfried (Jäger) in his studio in Bielefeld, a whole new universe opened up in front of my eyes.

G: He (Gottfried Jäger) was just absolutely on every level, superior to everything else I've seen, as a theorist and as an artist. He's been doing symposiums for 30 years or more, teaching generative photography at the Werkkunstschule (WKS) Bielefeld, establishing the theory of generative photography in more than 20 books and hundreds of essays.

Although Generative Photography for a long time was not accepted as genre by most photography scholars, Gottfried finally managed to include it into the major photo theory books as an art movement. He explained to me that in the 60s, when he was working as a photographer, there were two directions, either it was documentary photography (Karl Pawek), or subjective photography (Otto Steinert).

G: When I first visited Gottfried, he told me that he hardly sold any artworks in his life. He obviously didn't have to, because he was a professor and got paid.

When I was showing generative photography at Paris Photo and Photo London, we had many curious curators from the Whitney, V&A, Tate, MoMA, etc. visiting our booth and none of them were really aware of generative photography. We had to educate them and subsequently museums started to buy these artworks; the Centre Pompidou bought a large convolute by Gottfried Jäger and Herbert W. Franke recently. Museums are now starting to fill their gaps in computer art as they realise that in the context of NFTs the artworks from the 1960s are historically relevant.

With time there was more and more acceptance, but in the beginning, we had a hard time explaining to the audience that this was art. Even our artists were complaining, how we could show this. Christina and I took a big risk to take generative photography to the art fairs. In the photo fairs, you couldn’t find any experimental photography at all at that time. We realised that there was a lot of interest and even though there were not many buyers, those who bought were mostly major art collectors. Some of them weren’t even digital art collectors. We sold to people who were collecting abstract expressionism and classical modern art.

G: We also sold to museums and institutional collectors. Obviously, prices were not high. We didn't make money with it. I almost felt a little bad to sell these artworks - I was aware that this is not just regular art, but cultural heritage and we had the responsibility to place them carefully to major institutions.

D: How was your relationship with the great pioneers of generative and computer art, artists such as Herbert W. Franke, Gottfried Jäger, Hein Gravenhorst? How did you come across these key figures that were so underestimated years ago?

G: I was always interested in this art movement and read many books. Eventually I also met some of the artists in person, as our gallery specialised in digital art. I met Manfred P. Kage for example when he was still alive. I remember, I visited him in his castle (at the Schloss Weissenstein in Pommersfelden, Germany), but also went to Berlin for a large Zero Retrospective in 2015. He showed one of his spectacular projections in the whole main courtyard of the Martin Gropius Bau museum, it was a very touching moment. I was absolutely fascinated by how contemporary it was, I felt like this could have been done 50 years later and still feel so contemporary. Many of these pioneers of computer art became good friends of mine and mentors. I kept many great memories of those who unfortunately passed away recently.

D: What makes blockchain technology so important and needed in the art market? Do you think that the art market will ever realise its importance and adapt to this technology?

G: Blockchain technology is an open decentralised registry where you can prove who owns what. In most cases the NFT is just a certificate of authenticity which documents the whole provenance chain while the actual artwork is stored on IPFS for example. But it can also be a very interesting medium for artists to use code and smart contracts as a medium of art.

It's evident that sooner or later, every artwork, whether it's physical or digital, is going to have a digital certificate on the blockchain. NFTs are a great invention for the whole art market.

D: How did you come across ERC-721?

G: I was not there when the primary minting of the CryptoPunks took place, but just a few weeks later. There was a huge buzz around CryptoKitties and everybody was talking about ERC-721. Now you can own additional artwork on the blockchain. From then on, I was closely following what was going on in this field.

G: The first blockchain artwork I came across was actually Primavera de Filippi’s Plantoids in around 2016. She was presenting it at conferences, back then. In 2018 there was the first Rare Art Festival in New York. I couldn't attend, but I heard about it. The crowd was small and we all knew and supported each other.

D: Anne Bracegirdle invited Larva Labs to Christie’s London for the Art + Tech Summit: Exploring Blockchain in 2018, where you met the two creators for the first time and said, “Guys, what you did is art history, I have to show it.” At which moment did you realise that this was art history?

G: Recently Kevin (Abosch) reminded me that I told him that the CryptoPunks would cost more than a million - at a time when the floor price was at $20. Obviously, I was exaggerating a little bit, but I knew from the beginning on that the invention of the ERC721 and the launch of the CryptoPunks was historical and relevant.

G: When I first showed the CryptoPunks in “Perfect & Priceless. Value Systems on the Blockchain” at Kate Vass gallery in 2018 we sold 24 physical CryptoPunks in total, each for 5000 Swiss Francs. I was confident enough to publicly say things like “the CryptoPunks are the Andy Warhols of our time”, even quoted so in magazines and on television (laughs).

Installation view of “Perfect & Priceless. Value Systems on the Blockchain”,
at Kate Vass Galerie Zurich, 2018, Courtesy of Georg Bak.

D: How did your relationship with John Watkinson and Matt Hall take off from there?

G: I had a lot of contact mainly with John (Watkinson), obviously he was delighted to be in the show. Interestingly, I don't know why but when I spoke to them for the first time, Matt told me I should speak to John about the exhibition, because he's the artist. They obviously didn’t expect that someone from the artworld would approach them to exhibit the CryptoPunks.

John was the only one who signed the Sealed CryptoPunks on paper works and he was the only one mentioned on the exhibition poster. We didn't state Larva Labs back then. I think it felt awkward for them to be artists at that time. 

They were really surprised that we sold out the whole show. Nine exhibited Punks, plus three from the storage. There was such a high demand for these works that they decided to print another 12 and we sold them as well. I even had a patron from the Guggenheim who wanted to buy a Punk and had to tell her that we are sold out.
So, there were 24 CryptoPunks sold within a very short time and they produced one more printed CryptoPunk for an auction a bit later.

G: We had some conversations with John about the early days of computer art, Sol Le Witt, Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr and how they used plotters to print digital art. I tried to convince Gottfried Jäger to do something together with John and Matt. It was just too early.

Installation view of Autoglyph by Larva Labs at “Automat und Mensch”,
Kate Vass Galerie Zurich, 2019 Courtesy of Georg Bak.

G: Out of these conversations, suddenly they developed an artwork which predated the Autoglyphs (a protoglyph). It was a QR (exhibited as a print) which generated 10’000 unique artworks on your mobile phone; they looked like the Autoglyphs. While I was planning a new show, I asked John whether they could do an NFT version of this and they came up with the Autoglyphs, the first onchain generative NFT. I presented a sealed Autoglyph in the exhibition “Automat und Mensch” which I co-curated with Jason Bailey. In total they produced four Autoglyphs as physical plotter drawings including a sealed envelope with a digital NFT.

From left to right: Mario Klingemann, Robbie Barrat, and Georg Bak in Bahrain, 2019. Courtesy of Georg Bak.

D: How did the idea for “Automat und Mensch” with Jason Bailey come around?

G: I was at a conference in Bahrain and was about to put together a show on the history of AI. I had lots of conversations with Gottfried Jäger and he always mentioned a book (Automat und Mensch) that was a strong influence for him. It was one of the very early books on AI. So, I had this book in my mind. I thought, well, I don't understand half of it, but it's kind of interesting and it could be a fitting title for an art exhibition.

G: One evening, I was drinking a beer with Jason Bailey (Artnome), Robbie Barrat, and Mario Klingemann and we had such a great conversation about AI. I said, “Hey, guys, I have something” and I took out my book. I said “I want to do a show” and I asked Jason whether he was interested to co-curate this exhibition with me. Jason was very delighted to proliferate. Robbie and Mario were also glad to be in the show.

I had many calls with Jason to put together a list of artists which included Manolo Gamboa Naon, Cornelia Sollfrank, Helena Sarin, Casey Reas, Memo Akten and Jared Tarbell and many others. Our aim was to tell a compressed history of AI from the early 1950s to then (2019). At that time the latest technological inventions were the DeepDream algorithm (created by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev) and GANs.

We were delighted that some of the artists even came to the opening of the exhibition. There is a photo of Herbert W. Franke, 91, with Robbie Barrat, 19 at that time.

From Left to right: Robbie Barrat, Herbert W. Franke, Mario Klingemann, Kate Vass, Jason Bailey, and Georg Bak.

G: We also had an early version of Primavera’s Plantoid. The plant started to move and the lights were flickering, when someone was feeding it with cryptocurrencies and once it had enough funds on its account, the Plantoid automatically triggered a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) to commission an artist to create a new Plantoid.

D: And how about the “HERBERT W. FRANKE – Pioneer of Digital Art” show you curated at Gerber & Stauffer in 2021?

G: I knew Thomas (Stauffer) and Manuel (Gerber) for many years. They are very established secondary market dealers and Thomas was regularly doing exhibitions in his loft in Zurich. He asked me whether I'm interested in doing a show in his space and gave me a carte blanche. So I could just come up with anything, which was a generous and trustful gesture from him. I proposed to him to do a Herbert W. Franke exhibition.

We did an exhibition showcasing his early photographs, analog graphics and oscillographs. We included some plotter drawings, works from the “Mathematica” series, the “Cellular Automata” and screenshot prints from his virtual installation in Active Worlds (early 2000s). It wasn’t a retrospective, but it was a nice overview exhibition encompassing some of the artist’s most important work series. All the vintage works sold within one hour of the opening, almost 30 works.

Installation view of “HERBERT W. FRANKE – Pioneer of Digital Art” at Gerber & Stauffer in Zurich.

D: You are advising for Le Random Collection — A Generative Art NFT Collection and Institution. What can you say about the collection?

G: They are a group of very knowledgeable and dedicated collectors, who are establishing an institutional collection. They are also doing an ongoing research and timeline on the history of generative art.

When they asked me to be on their advisory board alongside Jason Bailey and Anne Spalter, I joined instantly, because I saw their true passion for art.

As far as contemporary art is concerned, they don't need much advice. I am there to enable a few sales of artworks that are not really on the market. I give access to artworks that are not accessible, normally. And I also spot a few historically important artworks for them.

The Le Random Collection made a few very nice acquisitions. Recently I enabled the acquisition of “0=45 version I” by Analivia Cordeiro, a true masterpiece of digital art history.

D: What are your top five NFTs that will define this movement?

G: Undoubtedly the Punycodes - the very first art NFTs count among the most important artworks you can own. They are the cave paintings of NFT art history and fully on chain. Also the CryptoPunks and some Rare Pepes are essential. Among the artists I would count my favourites are Kevin Abosch, Sarah Friend, Primavera de Filipi, Casey Reas and Operator.

D: Is there such a thing as an NFT culture outside of a bull market?

G: Oh, absolutely yes. I'm living immersed in that culture. All the merchandising, verbal language, fashion, parties and behaviour of the degens define this culture. You're handing over stickers of your PFPs to your friends, collecting stickers on your laptop, and communicate with memes. There are songs and video clips.

It is a real subculture comparable to the graffiti scene, where you have your own language, your own history that only insiders are aware of. Maybe we'll become more mainstream at some point, but at the moment it is still a small community.