Today, I'm speaking with a friend and a true New York OG artist. Aaron "SpazeCraft" Lazansky-Olivas. We connected way back in the NFT early days and have been working together and kicking it ever since. Let's dive in.

First off, can you introduce yourself to our community? Your name, where you are from, and the mediums you work in?

Absolutely, my name is Aaron Lazansky-Olivas, also better known as SpazeCraft one. I’m a native New Yorker born and raised in Midtown/The upper Westside, I grew up across the street from Lincoln center and was privy to all the incredible talent from around the world that would come every summer to perform! I also grew up in the Amsterdam houses projects which also gave me the streetsmart sensibilities and street credibility in the graffiti world. I was 14 to 18 years old doing typography on the outside and inside of the trains!

I work in the plastic arts painting from ACRYLIC to watercolors and gouache. To motion graphics and VJing. As far as live projections and visuals go- I create my own original content to Remix and meld just like a DJs do with songs.

Of course my graffiti styles have also evolved into abstract letter forms and wild style structures and cute but deadly characters like my line called “da holy Rollahz!”

And I’ve been a musician, producer and instrumentalist for almost as long as my Visual Arts, had the pleasure and privilege of touring the world as a musician and DJ and sharing the stage with some really incredible artists, including Gil Scott-Heron, DJ Logic, StereoLab, Otomo Yoshida & a slew of others. Some of the amazing people that I’ve done live visuals for are folks like Dibia$e, Brain Orchestra, Nothing Neue, Obuxum (canada), the Phronetic & most recently with the Animus Collective, live visuals for DJ Premier at the Golden Era Future event during Bitcoin Conference in Miami in June.

Interesting to note, I map my controller pads to instances of a video synth app called Lumin, & I literally finger drum the motion graphics to the beat, analog audio reactivity & interactivity, I really collab with the producer/artist!

What was your first exposure to NFTs, why do you think they are important, and where are you minting / do you have any available we can link to here?

So as much as I’ve been an analog artist working in traditional art mediums, I’ve always been exploring the digital aspect of design and I can’t remember the exact moment I discovered NFT’s, but I know that it was one of those moments where you see something for the first time and you don’t really know what it’s all about but then because you saw it, as you move forward in life it starts to pop up more and more. With that said, I must give a shout out to my homegirl Natalie Crüe. One, because we’ve been connected and arts/culture colleagues well before the NFT craze (2020 till now), last and this year and she’s so up on the cutting edge of technology, commerce, community and culture that she’s pretty much been my mentor ever since I stepped into the space.

She onboarded me to Club House, where I literally spent over three months as a listener in the audience not attempting to go on stage but really just soaking up the energy and the vibe the communities love for each other and you know the slight Epiphany happened because there’s so much love in the NFT community that was not apparent in the IRL art world.

I knew that this was a Renaissance, a watershed moment in humanity for longevity and for the arts to really start to come up in the world for the people. Through Clubhouse I got to meet you, and JN Silva, and a slew of other really incredible creatives, and it became more comfortable for me to share my story and my love of art and why I do the work that I do and have done for so many years. Building community and using the arts as a springboard for young people to envision themselves in better spaces. The kids already know all about Metaverses and wearables and digital assets through Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnight so I see the natural progression of my education work diving deep into the NFT space.

My first introduction into creating NFT’s was being invited to the Animus Collective to design all of the graffiti assets for the incredible DJ Premier collaboration. A true collaboration I had the pleasure and privilege of working with some of the best Creative) in the space, shout out to Lumi, shout out to Reo, shout out to Tom shout out to Tammy shout out to Phil & Blnk and the rest of the team that really made this project super special it was a true collaboration in every sense of the word and it is a pleasure to be a part of that journey that is the “Golden Era Future”. That collection is on Nifty Gateway.

Then I started a conversation with an amazing hip-hop artist turned NFT curator named Hanifah Walidah, also known as new World curator on all platforms. Hanifah pivoted into the space after being an accomplished hip-hop artist, Rapper, thespian and global hip-hop force. Hanifah was at the forefront of technology and the Internet with her hip hop online magazine 'Guillotine' back in the early 2000’s, so it only made sense for her to move forward in the NFT space. Se’s really bringing some incredible ideas to the table.

Besides the drop she did with George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic, she created a collaborative NFT project “Pieces of a Dream,” with some of the hottest, most relevant American poets from the legendary Nuyorican poets Café and DEF Poetry Jam scenes, like Saul Williams, Lisa Jesse Peterson, Ursula Rucker, Jessica Care-Moore, and a slew of others in collaboration with the legendary Gil Scott Heron‘s music partner Brian Jackson, (the revolution will not be televised? Yeah, he wrote that album!)

Brian wrote an original score & the “pieces” were then given to the poets to create original haikus & then given to us visual artists to marry it all together. Now if that wasn’t enough, one of the poets just happens to be a brother named Keith Lamar and he is unfortunately wrongly committed on death row, so in a slightly dark way, we’re actually making history by creating the first NFT collection ever that includes an artist that is literally live on death row. He has another two years there before his supposed execution. This Collection is helping to serve as a collective push for more exposure of his advocacy.

I’ll also say that he does the work daily from inside, youth & justice work at the forefront. The main unlockable for any of the collectors that purchase the pieces of a dream NFT’s is a live audio call with Keith to have a conversation with him or whatever you want to do really with him sing a song, rap, play music for him, bring hope, uncover injustice in the system first hand from a soldier on the frontlines of the American penal system. The intention behind it all, is that this is a real human being with a real beating heart who has real feelings, family, community and deserves his freedom. There is nothing more important than that on planet earth (besides saving ourselves from extinction of course lol).

My NFT collabo is with the legendary poet Saul William who was the lead in the movie SLAM, & ironically he chose music for the soundtrack to the movie & music I played flute on by DJ Spooky is all over the film, & to make it more in alignment, back when I was a performing artist I had a group called urban chant and we were an all acapella beatbox and rap R&B group, all original music, and at one point we were gaining traction in the New York music scene and we were invited to open up for Gil Scott heron and the midnight band at the legendary SOBs night club. It was not only an incredible evening, but it was an amazing proof of concept that the work we were doing at that time was relevant and cutting edge, no one was doing all a cappella groups with beatboxing & vocal percussion as the music bed.

Many years prior I was living in San Francisco and I helped to spearhead a youth program called the DJ project , a Collabo between Southern Exposure Gallery & Horizons Unlimited, and amongst the guest artists that I brought in like Azeem & DJ Zeph, Mark Hurley the producer of the future primitive sound sessions, DJ Romanowski, DJ quest of the bullet proof scratch hamsters, well, Hanifah at the time was living on the West Coast and because I knew of her work and in the community of hip-hop in New York I approached her and I also hired her to be a mentor with our kids in that program! HighSchool buddy Latasha Natasha Diggs is also one of the legendary poets on the collection, so really a true full circle for me with this collection.

While I was working on that project simultaneously I was formulating my Genesis project which dropped on Foundation and I also wanted parts of my life journey and story to be represented into this piece. As abstract as the soundscape and the visuals are it was a cathartic process for me in feeling how my visual art and my audio design can be married. My Genesis piece is called Memory ov an Echo and is part of an abstract A/V series called “Temporal Existence/Reality Ballistics.”

“Memory” is the 1st of 5 in this series and it puts forth the questions of impermanence as far as humans on planet earth go, and explores the idea of cellular memory. Concepts come to mine because it is the 12 year anniversary of my donating one of my kidneys to my life partner and I minted the piece on our anniversary May 20. In alignment with that, the piece includes some pretty incredible unlockables, the animation moves so fast and is so psychedelic that I’m creating 12 high resolution still images from it (12 yr transplant anniversary) to create a unique 1/12 collection of eco-friendly archival prints that will be given to the Collector (if they so choose to have physicals in their possession of course), in addition, since the majority of my work has revolved around interactivity and performance with audience, I’ve decided to include a 30 minute live audio visual performance as part of the sale. I come from the ambient and electronic experimental electronic world where a party could last three days and an artist can perform for up to like 4 to 8 hours either original music or a DJ set, so it was a challenge to put my heart and soul into a one minute audio visual piece, and I want to explore more how the digital work bleeds into our real lives and so I thought it would be amazing to bring the work back out into the public so literally the collector can set up a venue in New York (tristate area) and invite some of their best friends for a unique concert experience or it could be live streamed to the world on the interwebs! I really wanted to make my solo genesis piece/collection special!

And special it is my friend! Spaze, thank you so much for taking the time to share your journey with us here. I am so glad we have connected through this layer of technology and I wish you all the success on these drops and into the future. To the reader, keep up with SpazeCraft on Twitter.