Life in our Minds: The Project Bible

The evolution of LIOM NFTs begins by default when bought by a new wallet. If a LIOM NFT stays in the wallet and is not put up for sale, it gradually evolves by adding new Boids to its formation and gradually revealing the traits of its pre-existing ones.

✦ The process continues until one of these three conditions is met:

— the NFT is put on sale in the secondary market. It continues to evolve as soon as it is bought by other collectors, and their wallet data now influences the evolutionary process;
— the number of Boids reaches the NFT’s "Boids limit" trait (the higher this number, the rarer this NFT);
— the NFT’s evolution is locked by the on-demand option at OG.Art platform.

✦ During their evolution process, all Boids may go through the same stages but at different, individual times: 

1. First, a Boid is added to the NFT.
2. Its decorative pattern is revealed.
3. The pattern may reveal special material (silver, golden, pearl etc).
4. The whole Boid could change its color to special material.

✦ Some NFT properties are predefined, such as:

— The Boids shape
— The Maximum Boids number
— The Boids' Formation shape (e.g a circle, triangle, square, infinity, etc)
— Their Initial evolution progress (for example, some NFTs could be born with 5%, some with 30% progress)
— The NFT color scheme (flat, rainbow, gradient, etc)

✦ Other LIOM NFT properties are affected by the buyer's wallet — including both the NFTs that they own and past transactional activity: 

— Evolution speed
— Collaboration Patterns on the Boids from other NFTs in the owner's wallet
— Special pattern materials distribution (% of regular/silver/gold/pearl)
— Special Boid materials % (for example, completely gold NFT)

✦ There are 60 major NFT collections and partner organizations that give unique patterns to the Boids:

Art Blocks Curated Collection, Autoglyphs, Azuki, BAKC, BAYC, Chimpers, CloneX, Cool Cats, Creature World, CrypToadz, Cryptopunks, CyberBrokers, CyberKongz, Doodles, Fingerprints DAO (members wallets), Flamingo DAO (members wallets), ForeverBots, Friends with Benefits (members wallets), goblintown.wtf, Gutter Cats, Invisible Friends, Ksoids by Danil Krivoruchko, MAYC, Meebits, MFers, MOAR by Joan Cornella, Moon Phases by Jeff Koons, Moonbirds, Murakami Flowers, nouns.wtf, OG:Crystals by Michael Joo and Danil Krivoruchko, OnChainMonkey, Otherdeed, Outland (Elemental by Fang Lijun and Fragments by James Jean), Pace Verso (teamLab Matter is Void, Glenn Kaino Pass the Baton, and Verso VIP), Pace x Art Blocks, Pleasr DAO (members wallets), Proof Collective, Psychedelics Anonymous, Regulars, rektguy, The Currency Damien Hirst, Tom Sachs Rocket Factory (Tom Sachs Rockets, Tom Sachs Components, Tom Sachs Mars Rocks), TRLab (David Ariew x Tatler China, AI 2041, Exploding the Self, YDF Packets, YDF Fireworks, Imagine This, Vogue Meta Ocean), VeeFriends, World of Women, XCopy, [ mxtter ] (members wallets), 89 seconds Atomized by Eve Sussman.

The list of contracts that give collab patterns to your LIOM NFTs.

✦ LIOM NFTs can also contain randomly distributed qualities such as high evolution speed, higher Boids limits or unique visual qualities (all-black Boids, etc.), which can help boost rarity.

✦ Some features can also be received on-demand:

— Evolution can be locked/unlocked at any moment at OG.Art platform
— Evolution speed may be boosted. All the NFTs will eventually reach their complete and final form, but those who gain completely evolved NFTs earliest will presumably be able to sell them for more.

✦ Strategies to gain a rare LIOM NFT

— A Long hold (even with relatively common wallet contents) permits Boids to reveal their rarer traits.
— Having more than one LIOM NFT in the wallet boosts evolution speed for all of them — so there is a reason to hold onto more than one.
— Rare NFTs from other collections in the wallet unlock rare patterns to LIOM NFTs.
— Having OG:Crystals with collab traits (Apes, Cryptopunks, Meebits, etc) works as a substitute for actual NFTs from these collections, giving the LIOM NFTS the same Boid types. So you may get rare traits by purchasing OG:Crystals with collab features.
— Owning OG:Crystals gives a small boost to Boid’s evolution speed.
— Since some NFT features are predefined by the characteristics of the owner’s wallet, it may make sense to transfer the NFT to your other wallet if you have more than one.

Life in our Minds continues Random International’s exploration of the human tendency to ascribe character, intent and narrative to the complex behaviors of simple moving forms, as well as the subconscious instincts and emotional triggers that cause us to do so.

At the core of the work is The Mother Flock — a virtual, generative, and interactive sculpture that lives on OG.Art platform permanently, visible to anyone, and viewable at any time, free of charge. The sculpture encompasses a myriad of individual swarming shapes, which, in clusters of varying formation and size, are made up of thousands of individually owned constituent NFTs.

Earlier works from this series have recently been shown at The Store, 180 The Strand in London, and The ZKM in Karlsruhe, with a forthcoming exhibition at the MIT Museum opening in October 2022.

The studio is proud to join forces with OG.Art, Danil Krivoruchko and Pace Verso in bringing this family of work to broader audiences and transcending the borders between on and offline.

The flocking shapes that embody the work reference Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s ‘Experimental Study of Apparent Behaviour’ of 1944, which reveals both the extent and the commonality of our human propensity for anthropomorphic projection. For Random International, our capacity to do this underscores what it is to be human; the automatic instincts and emotional reactions that cause us to feel a sense of connection, regardless of its veracity.

Life in our Minds is Random International's first experiment into using blockchain's much lauded de-centralized qualities to realize a new form of public art that is concrete, communally owned, and widely accessible. The work's interplay between collective ownership, individual mark-making, and distributed spatial control is re-staged in a new (meta)-universe according to new rules.

The multitude of NFTs that come together to create The Mother Flock evolve along a trajectory that continually alters their aesthetic form and activity. From the moment the NFTs are minted, the swarming objects come to life, changing from grayscale to increasingly colorful vivacity, depending on variables of the collectors' behavior. The different collections live alongside one another digitally within The Mother Flock, which also acts as their home within the material world through the interface of video sculpture. As such, the individually owned NFTs make up the very fabric of the physical work so that Life in our Minds can be firmly rooted as public sculpture whilst being privately owned on a collective scale. This invites a reconsideration of what it means to create and collect when these actions and concepts are inherently connected. In so doing, Random International surrenders control of the development of the work, making collector behavior a co-author, and posing the question of just how much perceived control is, in fact, illusory. Life of the Mind can be seen as a leap past the death of the author and into a digital afterlife.

Through the dynamic interrelation between the NFT collection and The Mother Flock, Random International delves into the possibilities for decentralization — of artistic ownership and authorship, of collection, consumption, and currency, as well as for intelligence itself.

Flocking that fascinates us

"Flocking or swarming behaviour is an amazing form of sentient collective intelligence and a rich field in which to play. Whilst each individual follows some really simple rules, together, they create an incredibly complex feat where half a million birds can fly together without a single crash.

In one way or another, for over 15 years, we have been building sculptures that simulate this collective intelligence in an attempt to capture and translate our longstanding fascination with flocking behaviour. But what started out as a somewhat simple admiration of the swarms’ aesthetic qualities has led us to consider the question of just what exactly, for us, it means to be alive.

As human beings, we are predisposed to respond emotionally to motion that we perceive as organic or natural. So, if a robot moves in a human-like way, we're likely to engage with it instinctively. This response to movement is one of the oldest features of the brain. And it's not limited to humans; it takes 150 milliseconds to distinguish biological motion from non-biological, whether you're a chicken or a human being. Our brains have been trained for millions of years to respond in a certain manner so that, essentially, when we look at something, we can know within a split second whether or not that thing is alive.

But, these days, we can build machines that imitate biological movement really successfully, and that leaves us vulnerable to our own perceptive faculties and instincts. The simulations of flocking behaviour and biological motion in our work aims to study this all too human vulnerability because people cannot help but open up and relate instinctively to these movements.”

The algorithmic base

"Algorithmically, our works in this field have been based on the first basic experiments from Craig Reynolds — “Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioural Model”, a simple, animated form of research created in 1987 and later used by Pixar. It is a rule system that could be assigned to flock elements so that they didn't have to program every single character but so that, at the same time, all the characters would look like they were alive. We took this code as the point of entry to our sculptures and installations.

Earlier works from this series have recently been shown at The Store, 180 The Strand in London and The ZKM in Karlsruhe, with a forthcoming exhibition at the MIT Museum opening in October 2022."

Collective Ownership

"Life in our Minds is our first piece of crypto art, and we find working with Blockchain incredibly energising. Here the blockchain's much-lauded de-centralised qualities are realised as a new form of public art that is concrete, communally owned, and widely accessible. The work's interplay between collective ownership, individual mark-making and distributed spatial control is re-staged in a new (meta)-universe, according to new rules.

Thanks to the work that Danil has done, we now have a collectively owned public artwork where the individual constituent items are beautiful objects in their own right."

Origami and ancient tradition

"We didn't want the swarming objects to be any specific species found in nature. They had to be some minimalist simulation of behaviours that we find in nature — just enough to make you think that they’re alive. We chose this kind of aesthetic because origami has something really manual and analogue about it, and we felt it was important not to make these pieces as some kind of fantasy digital thing. These qualities are very dear to us because they’re something we can relate to as human beings, and they anchor the project in a tangible and highly specific tradition of craft."

Losing control - it’s not a bad thing.

"We love the fact that there is distributed control inherent to this body of work. Control, and the lack thereof, is a huge topic for the studio.

The realisation that we, as humans, are not in control most of the time relates to our subliminal or instinctive reaction to movement — and this element of co-creation with the NFT collectors is the same. Every NFT will be unique due to the actual identity of the owner being printed into the DNA of The Mother Flock.”

We, as artists, don't know what is happening in each collector's world, nor exactly how this will affect the eventual look and feel of The Mother Flock. We relinquish artistic control to the collective activity — I love that."

One unique artwork vs thousands

“People tend to underappreciate generative art collections: “You push the button and get thousands of pictures, they can't be as valuable as one very elaborate artwork! And where is the artist in generative art?”

For me, it’s the contrary. It’s much easier to create one beautiful picture than to create a thousand of them. You can work for days on one picture, making it more and more refined, but it will always be just one image over which you have 100% control. Only the moment you decide it’s perfect does it become finished, fixed, and shown to the world.

On the other hand, generative art collections need you to create hundreds or thousands of pieces all of the same high-quality level. You need to make sure that the whole collection is diverse, with each piece being unique, while also ensuring one can tell that they belong to the same project. All of them should be equally visually interesting, and it’s so much harder as you don’t have control of the final view and final combination. When you do 1x1, you may render it and manually pick the best visual features. In collections, you have to mentally take into account all possible scenarios and make sure that every scenario actually works.

Turning a Flock into NFT collection

LIOM collection is the most complex project I have worked on so far.

Here, I was mostly responsible for the mechanics and visuals of the LIOM NFTs, while Random came up with the idea of the Flock. I tried to translate this idea into an NFT collection and connect all the parts together in a logical way.

A flock is a group of unique individual elements, so I tried to decompose it. The Flock only looks interesting if there are thousands of elements in it, so it gave me the idea that each NFT should comprise more than one Boid. I was looking for a beautiful way to organize these Boids and came up with the idea of animated mandalas with multiple Boids contained in the shape.

The Flock is always moving, so I decided to represent this dynamic in Boids and NFTs evolving with time. The NFTs are constantly updating dynamic 3D videos and we have to render each update. I had to make many optimizations to keep the NFTs looking sophisticated while still being able to render them fast enough and keep the cost of these updates reasonable. From a technological point of view, it was an exciting puzzle to solve.

Paper hands and the true NFT collectors reward

LIOM NFTs grow while you keep them, and in this way, I wanted to reward the true NFT collectors. There is this trend in the NFT space called “paper hands,” which is when people buy and immediately sell NFTs with the only aim being to make a fast profit. So instead of rewarding these traders, I decided to encourage “golden and diamond hands,” who are collectors that prefer to keep what they have.