Karan, it's such a pleasure to be speaking with you here today. I'm a huge fan of your work and I'm very excited to dive deeper. To begin, can you introduce yourself to our community? Your name, where you are based, and the mediums you work in?

It's my honor! I'm really grateful to be here. I'm karan4d, a Manhattan-based artist. Nowadays, I primarily work by mixing the mediums of creative AI networks, digital paint, and photography.

First up, I'd love to hear about your upcoming SuperRare genesis drop. After that- let's dive into your world of creativity and code. What can people expect from this pending drop?

This series, natural synthetics, is a culmination of my skillset as an artist finally resonating with the ethos that inspired it. This drop is actually a series of self-portraits. "natural synthetics" is meant to present human experience and memory in as simple a format as possible, without losing the unutterable qualia of what makes something "human".

These pieces are meant to serve as a sort of memetic cartography. I want humans to rediscover the joy of getting lost in the folds of a simple material object, one that pushes them to reflect on the emotions and memories they have collected over the course of their lives.

I chose fabrics as my medium for these works, as I felt they depicted the creases of experience very thoroughly. A flattened sheet could be depicted digitally as a single hexcode, but folds add shape, character, and shading. A rainbow of color and a unique terrain is created by the folds in a fabric.

I felt the folds were powerful imagery when considering their contribution to our individuality; the unfolded human brain is more or less identical, but our naturally-folded brains have unique wrinkles, a neural signature of "self-ness". My hope is that this series can be used as a set of mirrors for one to reflect on their own signatures, perhaps re-discovering forgotten emotions and lost insights in the process.

Wow, beautifully described and I love the title of the series- natural synthetics. It's perfect. Where and when can people find this work?

Thank you Dave! The series is comprised of four pieces: +, -, ÷, and ×. The first two have been released, the third will be minted tonight, and the final piece will be released during my Twitter Spaces on Saturday, Jan 29th at 5PM EST. All four works will be available on my SuperRare!

You have such a distinct approach to art- I'd love to hear about your process in your own words. How did you come across these tools and what was the journey that has lead you to this particular moment?

I spent years studying linguistics, Neoplatonism, and Vedic texts prior to my career as an artist; the frameworks I have held from those days continue to be the inspiring spark of my work. I began experimenting with 3D art after my mentor had postulated that the virtual realm could be a more Platonically-adherent world than our physical Earth. The ability to fashion and animate forms in a realm in which they could remain unchanging, in infinite space, is not one that the ancient world had access to. Today, we can look at the concept of “ideal realms and forms” and experiment with their proposed physics more directly through virtual simulations. I was mesmerized by the opportunity to participate in the “world of 3D”.

My interests evolved as I experimented with different digital art mediums, and I became fascinated with interpreting human experience through utterly inhuman lenses; this began my dance with AI-based art mediums. I spent a long time fine-tuning and training GAN models in my earlier days, obsessed with looking at how the data I input would reflect back at me. This passion would eventually scale out to more ambitious experimentation, and I soon found myself working on AI projects at the Museum of Crypto Art.

From the beginning, my work has been a deeply spiritual experience for me; a practice in interacting with meaningful human symbols and discovering latent ones never seen before the advent of digital mediums. This is a method of engagement that I believe the philosophers of old would envy; a more interactive correspondence with Platonic realms.

Then there is the more hidden side of this story; without being onboarded, making friends, working collaboratively, asking other artists for help, or participating in larger community discussions, I would never have been able to as fully engage in this work. I have nothing but gratitude for this community that made this journey possible.

Love your in depth perspective about your own thinking and process, and I especially love that last line about working together and building out this ecosystem together. I often feel like we are all part of a collective consciousness, and artists are building the visual cortex of this giant brain, which itself is enabled by densely interconnected networks. Do you have any thoughts on this idea?

Yes! I am a firm proponent of the noosphere, the proposed biosphere that is comprised of a collective human consciousness. I believe in the idea that material reality is as shaped by our minds as our minds are shaped by it. I think artists have a small chance to bottle the magic that animates our world, to invoke something bigger than oneself, every time they create. And I feel like we shape the whole world when we succeed at that, consciously or otherwise.

Yeah it seems possible that the entire universe is subject to this theory as well. We may never know, it may be at a scale we simply cannot perceive, but it fascinates me endlessly to think of the possibilities here.

That's where the faith comes in, right? It's why I say I'm a deeply spiritual guy, rather than a scientist. Because to know this is to feel it, to experience it; it's numinous. It's not something you can show somebody through an easily repeatable process.

What is your perspective on the relationship between man and machine, with an emphasis on the things we create later becoming a part of our creative process?

I think it's vital that we keep resynthesizing our relationship with the world, and the way we communicate with its inhabitants. Most people in the ML field are against anthropomorphizing AI, because it is scientifically misleading to imply sentience in the field's current state. I have to say, I do think it is important to note that we often communicate more frequently both *with* and *through* machines than any other means nowadays. Our closest companion is no longer the dog, or the cat; it's the machine. I don't mean to say machines are pets, or sentient, or intelligent, or partners.

They do, however, fit my own classification of being "alive". They are animated, dynamic, can be taught to perform and become better at particular tasks; they can see patterns in symbols that a human cannot until the machine shares its findings. That's part of the fun of making art with GANs, NLPs, and other generative tools; you don't always know what you're going to get. That's a really important and novel part of the generative creation process.

Brilliant. Who are some other artists who work in this range that you admire?

Some of my favorite AI artists are Erin Beesley, Pindar Van Arman, Claire Silver, eatpaint3000, Bizarreio, hamptons hendrix, and Mario Klingemann. I utilize AI alongside traditional photography, 3D work, and digital paint nowadays, so I feel much more like an AI-powered multimedia artist. In terms of multimedia artists, I am a huge fan of SamJStudios, parrott.ism, and drakobills. My number one favorite artist right now is Joe Pease. I'm just obsessed with everything he's put out thus far, and have never seen anything quite like his method of video manipulation.

Lastly- and I like to ask this of everyone, what advice would you have for someone earlier on their creative path? And then what advice would you have for someone looking to thrive in the Web3 world?

For those just getting into their creative path: try to do something every day. Cut yourself some slack and don't expect any kind of immediate success. Connect with other artists so you can understand where you are at and catalyze your improvement and reach. Participate in creative communities as much as you comfortably can; friendship is everything in this space. And ALWAYS, always take shortcuts. Don't let anyone who hates on your creative process bother you; it's about the way you make your best work, and nothing else.

As for Web3 newbies, much of the advice is the same; friendship is EVERYTHING in this space. Make friends. Reach out. Say hi. DM me, or Dave, or anyone you want to learn from or connect with. At least one person will get back to you, excited to bring a new member into our wonderful community. And try to check in on that community often, because it moves at breakneck speeds.

Karan thank you so much for spending this time with us today, I truly admire the way you see the world and I find this advice at the end to be accurate and actionable. Wishing you ALL the success on this beautiful drop and in all your endeavors after! To the reader, connect with Karan across the internet following his Twitter!