An Interview with Tib

Meet Tib, a talented creative coder and artist who is pushing the boundaries of digital art with his innovative approach to generative art. Tib is the founder of 256Art, a generative art platform that showcases on-chain art and the stories behind the artists. He has a drop on ArtBlocks out called (Dis)connected. Today, we have a chat with him.

Can you give a brief introduction of yourself?

Sure thing, my name is Tibout, but most people in the space know me as simply Tib. I'm a generative artist with works released on multiple platforms (ArtBlocks, FxHash and of course 256ART of which I am the founder). I'm also always looking to expand my personal generative art collections, often times focusing on lesser known but in my opinion very talented artists.

Could you tell us a bit about your background and how you got into art and coding?

Absolutely! I really love this question as for a long time both art and coding have been passions of mine, but for a long time I somehow never thought of combining the two until I found out about generative art that is. Artwise, I was mostly focused on music and prose. I used to play the drums and the piano and for pretty much as long as I can remember I have always been writing prose. Throughout my life I have often times performed with my prose as well in Belgium and have some of my poetry published. My mum is a fine arts restorer and she used to work at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. I think my exposure to the visual arts has come pretty much entirely through her and my grandmother, but at the time I never actively pursued visual arts myself. As for how I got into coding, thats an entirely different story. In highschool I had a small internet store for an online card game, but I wasn't the developer behind it. After highschool I went traveling and ended up living in Costa Rica for a while. It was in my tiny, somewhat shoddy, but lovely apartment I decided I wanted to learn how to code. My routine in Costa Rica would look something like: travel around the country for a week, learn how to code for a week. I still look back at that time incredibly fondly. Eventually I went on to do two years of university before dropping out to start another company. Over time both art and coding became two important pilars in my life, but I had somehow never thought to combine them. That all changed when I stumbled upon a small project in the NFT space called Open Palette, this was also my first time directly engaging with generative art. The project had a simple core idea: you have on-chain color palettes and you can mint generative art using your palette. I instantly fell in love with the idea and decided to explore further. I've always been a person when I absolutely love an idea I go waaaaay down the rabbit hole and it will pretty much take over my life. Which is exactly what happened and I've loved and worked on generative art ever since pretty much, both from the artist as the platform side.

How did you find your way into Web3 and creating art?

Hah, I guess I already answered this somewhat in the previous question. But to go to the start of my web3 journey we have to look at the Hive blockchain (Steem back then). In short, it's a chain where part of the inflation of the currency goes to authors of, mainly, written content. It must've been around 2016 and I was very heavily focusing on my writing at the time, so a place where I could get rewarded for that seemed incredible. What I didn't expect is how the community at Hive took me in and over the years became a bit of a slightly dysfunctional family, haha! Over the years I created a few dapps for that community and while I'm less active there now, I still often check in. If we're talking more specifically about the NFT scene, from around end 2020 it was on my radar, but I hadn't taken the time to really dive into it. From mid 2021 that changed as I found myself with more spare time after I had to stop work on my previous venture, a social media app for travelers, due to Covid. It was an especially low point for me as I had been working on the project for three years. My first generative art project was in essence in big part, me finding my groove again.

Do you remember the first time you heard about NFT Art?

Hmmm, I'm not sure what the first time was I heard about NFT Art, but the one that got me very intrigued is the Open Palette project I mentioned above.

Who or what are your biggest influences or sources of inspiration?

Oh god, there's way too many to name that's for sure. In my own works for a long time I was struggling with color palettes and I think that's where you can see most of the external influences of my work. I did a lot of research into the palettes from works I thoroughly enjoy and more specifically into why those colors work so well and what emotions they invoke etc. You'll very clearly see color palettes inspired by both digital and non-digital artists like Edward Hopper, Van Gogh, Rothko, Grant Yun and XCopy.

Why did you choose to make your art projects fully on-chain?

For me the preservation of my art in a decentralized way is incredibly important. Both when I create and when I collect art. Simply put, the best way to preserve generative art is by having it entirely on-chain. At times it feels like a fight as it seems a lot of people currently don't value or understand the preservation aspect as much. I think it requires a pretty long time horizon, at least a few years, in order to fully appreciate how important preservation will be for digital art.

What inspired you to create 256Art?

In short, when I was just experimenting and playing around with what generative art is and what is possible with it, I found, fairly unexpectedly at the time as it was just me playing around / experimenting, some success with my work. At the time it was prohibitevely difficult and expensive for artists to release their generative art on Ethereum and only the top artists had the opportunity of being selected by the very few platforms that were around at the time. I felt there was a need to provide a place for upcoming, clearly very talented generative artists, where they could release their work AND tell their story without having to worry about the difficulties and cost that come with releasing on-chain generative art on Ethereum. With 256ART we cover all the costs for the artist and put a lot of focus on the story behind the artist and their work, which I at times find a bit lacking in the generative art world. We also put a lot of focus on technical improvements, on the smartcontract side we were the first platform to store the art in the contracts bytecode, the first to lower the minting gas by 4x and the first to offer a getArtFromChain function (which allows a collector to directly get their art from chain). Right now we're working on taking all of this a few notches up in our transition towards a fully open platform where any artist can release their work fully in-chain at a cost another 2 - 4 times cheaper than is currently done.

Which tools do you use to create your art?

I personally prefer to work in vanilla JavaScript without any external dependencies. As for tools, I guess my laptop with my preferred code-editor VSCode. And coffee, does that count as a tool, haha?

Where do you see on-chain art going in the future?

I love this question. I think on-chain, and especially in-chain, art will become more and more important. As time passes I think two things will start to happen: some art will be lost forever as it was stored off-chain AND storing on-chain on the Ethereum mainnet will become more expensive as gas and the price of ETH increase. I do believe eventually we'll see a transition to a layer 2 solution for on-chain art, where art on the mainnet will be kind of wow-ed over. With that said, there are of course a lot of factors that could mean it plays out another way and this is a prediction that will like take a decade or more to play out.

Which piece of artwork do you not own that you want to collect?

Hah, there's A LOT of those. Two artists that I don't own any work of at the moment, but would really love to collect some work from at some point are Harvey Rayner and Emily Xie.

What can we find Tib doing when he’s not busy creating Art?

Usually working on 256ART to be honest, haha! But I do really enjoy traveling and going on multi-day treks.

Thanks for taking the time for this conversation. What is the best way for people to follow you and your work?

I think the best place is likely my Twitter: @shaiktibout . The 256ART Twitter and Discord are also good places: Mint256Art Twitter and 256Art Discord.