Baptiste Crespy, Founder of fxhash, Interviewed at TezDev 2022
In a live-streamed interview from the TezDev 2022 event last week in Paris, Crespy went into detail about his background in programming and art
600 words, 3 minute read
Baptiste Crespy is a generative artist and founder of , one of the best-known generative art NFT platforms on Tezos. In a live-streamed interview from the TezDev 2022 event last week in Paris, Crespy went into detail with host Marissa Trew about his background in programming and art, and his views on the future of generative art on the blockchain. He also explains what makes fxhash unique compared to other NFT marketplaces, and why he felt he had to create it.
Crespy creates generative artwork under the name of Ciphrd, in whose guise he explores ‘autonomous systems from which life-like behaviors emerge’. Ciphrd’s work is characterized by colorful organic forms, pulsing and morphing in response to complex algorithms based on various logic, including molecule behaviors, crystal growth, and sound.
You’ll find highlights from Baptiste Crespy’s interview below, and the full TezTalks Live conversation at TezDev Paris 2022 is at at the top of this page.
Baptiste Crespy’s journey into generative art:
I’ve been into programming since was nine or 10. I was deep into programming, and I was doing video games, I was doing websites, and I liked the practice very much. I kept doing it for years, and at some point, it translated to doing some generative art.
I had no idea I was doing generative art in the first place. I was just doing creative coding stuff, not thinking it was creative in any way, just doing math, and it was doing visuals on the screen. […] And at some point, I decided, “Okay, I need to share what I’m doing,” and I forced myself to put stuff on Instagram.
The inspiration behind ‘Ciphrd’:
Ciphrd, it comes from […] cipher is a way to encode a message, and I like the idea that this person was an encoded version of myself.
What makes generative art special:
I think it comes down to, first of all, it’s a beautiful concept. Before, you could post something that generates infinite outputs, but you can’t post this on your blog or anything. It doesn’t have a final state, or it’s hard to find a final state. And now with blockchain, there is this way to entangle the code and the output, and have it part of something that will last for a long time. I think that’s why [generative art] in particular works for blockchain. Also, conceptually, it’s interesting to use the blockchain itself, and the transaction, to generate the outputs. It ties everything together, and it just works. It’s great.
How fxhash will evolve:
The key point is to always keep thinking about what will help the ecosystem in the long term. Don’t implement a feature if three years from now, it could […]cause trouble for artists. And it’s also trying to see the whole ecosystem, because there are artists, there are collectors, but there’s also creators. There’s also people that write articles. So the idea is to try bringing in new tools, and build open tools for these people to be able to express themselves, and ideally get money by expressing themselves in a meaningful way.
And one of the key focus on the platform in the years to come will be to try to develop sort of a pipeline to create, to facilitate the life events, make it easier for artists to be showcased in galleries and spaces, because this was my struggle a while ago, and I think that it’s the struggle of many other artists.