The Music is Talking with Alexander Hallag

Exploring the Future of Art: Innovation, Collaboration and Technology

• Alexander Hallag • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Have you ever wondered if a blend of film, music, and visuals can craft an immersive art experience?

On this debut episode of The Music is Talking podcast,  we invite you to join us on a fascinating journey to the future of arts with our esteemed guests - Toby Dundas, a renowned musician and composer of the band Temper Trap, the dynamic duo Jerry & Sarah Grayson of Helifilms, and the visionary artist and photographer Nate Hill.

With this intriguing collaboration, we discover they have created art that is not only a stunning fusion of film, music, and visual art but how combining these elements breathes life into the images, inviting the viewer to experience a temporal dimension.  This groundbreaking art exhibition, Flow State  was held at Oshi Gallery in Melbourne.

In this conversation we look into the thrilling world of digital collaboration, the metaverse, and the influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on creativity and art.
We also talk of the potential of collaboration between visual artists, musicians, filmmakers and the challenges and potential innovations that may come out of this new format.

We also look into the future of digital galleries and where art transcends the physical space.

Nate Hill is known for his wild black and white line 'Digital Landscapes" and the imagery he has created for international music acts such as Tool, Korn, The Crystal Method and very kindly created the art for The Music is Talking podcast. To find out more about and to connect with Nate, find him on Instagram at @natehill, on twitter @natehillphoto and Facebook at @natehillphotos.

Sungrazers is a collaborative project between acclaimed aerial stills photographers and film-makers, Jerry & Sara Grayson of Helifilms - they can be found at @the_earth_wins and on twitter at @helifilms and Toby Dundas co-founder, composer and musician of The Temper Trap. 

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Alexander Hallag:

Hi, this is Alexander Halak and welcome to the Music is Talking podcast. For over three decades now, I've been an internationally published music photographer and in that time I've met and worked with some amazing creative people. To see some of my music photography, check out instagram. com. the music is talking, or visit my website, which is www. themusicistalkingcom. So join me as I speak with a wide variety of creatives, including musicians, filmmakers, authors, artists and many others, to talk about their personal creative journeys and their unique ways of making innovative and original work to help connect the wider creative community through shared experience.

Alexander Hallag:

I recently attended an NFT based exhibition called Flow State by my friend, nate Hill and Sun Grazers at the Oshi Gallery here in Melbourne. Nate is a digital artist and a freelance photographer who is known for his whack and white digital landscapes. Some of the imagery he has created have been used by international bands such as Tool Corn and the Crystal Method. Sun Grazers is a collaborative project between acclaimed aerial stills photographer and filmmakers Jerry and Sarah Grayson of Helly Films and Toby Dundas, co-founder, composer and musician of the band Temper Trap.

Alexander Hallag:

So okay, guys, thank you very much for coming this morning. I really appreciate it. As I was saying, I came to this exhibition, expecting just to see visual art or traditional visual art, of artwork on the wall in a form of a print, but what I saw was completely different. So where is the future of the arts going? What happens when music and visual art and filmmaking collide? What does it look like? Well, I got answers in a unique way by seeing this amazing exhibition at the Oshi Gallery with these guys. So if you guys can just tell me a bit about you guys and where you've come from and what brought you together

Toby Dundas:

I'm a musician. I've been playing in a band called the Temper Trap for too many years to mention now, but have always had a sort of a keen interest in film and have had the opportunity outside of the band to score some feature films and things like that. And through kind of working like that and I guess my through mum and dad really, who were friends with Jerry and Sarah we all became acquainted, which led to some songs from the band being used in a fantastic feature documentary that Jerry and Sarah made, I want to say in about 2013.

Sara Grayson:

2013,. Yeah, 10 years ago. Oh my gosh.

Toby Dundas:

10 year Anniversary, 2013. So obviously since then we really stayed in touch and I guess about two years ago I'd sort of approach them about potentially using some of their amazing footage that they've been filming over the years and have got a fantastic sort of reservoir of online for another project. And then, yeah, we just kind of got talking about crypto and NFTs and those kind of things, and so that led very naturally to Sun Grazers, which is the project that the three of us have been working on for the last 18 months or two years.

Jerry Grayson:

Yeah, and Sun Grazers. I don't know if you know the word, but it's a comic that burns brighter as it gets closer to the sun and then it goes round again and does the same thing again a few years later or centuries later. I'm Jerry. I spent my life as a helicopter pilot. I was eight years in the Navy doing search and rescue and at the end of that time they embedded a BBC crew with us doing a documentary about the rescue flight and I think it was only the second fly on the wall documentary that they've ever done and they stayed with us for about six months and they were filming in the back of the helicopter very quietly, staying out of the way while we get on with the job.

Jerry Grayson:

And then there came a point at the end of that where they said okay, we've got to do the opening sequence and so we're going to put we're going to lower by winch present her down onto a pinnacle of rock out in the ocean and he's going to do a piece to camera. So he will be shouting at the camera, we'll record it on his person and then re-record it later, and we want to use the helicopter pilot to start very close to him and we'll be tight on the zoom and then we'll pull back, and we want that pull back to take about seven and a half seconds and then arrive back in the hover, and by which time the cameraman will be wide and they went wow, here's this thing that I've been, you know, flying around for eight years and I can do that reasonably competently. But here I'm using it as a tool to create an image, and that image has a beginning, a middle and an end to it, and I've got to use all of my flying skills to achieve that on behalf of the director. And suddenly this light bulb went off, that here was a whole career in front that clearly was going to take a lot of time investment to learn how to do properly. And that's what I've been doing for sort of more than four decades, and always commissioned by people to create imagery.

Jerry Grayson:

And then we got into creating a library of imagery for ourselves and licensing that, and that led then into NFTs, which is this wonderful fresh sheet of paper where you haven't got somebody looking over your shoulder saying I need this within this period of time. You know, the length is entirely variable, the content is entirely variable, and suddenly we find ourselves, literally in the creation of a new art form. Really, wouldn't you say, nate?

Nate Hill:

Yeah, totally Okay, guess that's over to me. So I'm Nate Hill. I've been a creative visual artist and dabbling in music for longer than I'd care to say as well. I sort of started the journey doing photography whilst being in bands, went down the path of creating sort of digital imagery, wandered into making album covers and doing stuff for bands and then sort of made my way into the NFT world.

Nate Hill:

So it's been an organic journey, I would say, just sort of going down rabbit holes and trying to find ways to express ideas that I had and just ways to be creative, something that I always feel like I need to do. And so when I hit the NFT part of the journey not long in came across the work of the Sun Grazers and struck up conversations just around what we're doing, how we're doing it, how to get stuff out there and get it seen, and through doing that there was a mutual admiration about what each party were doing and how they were doing it. So just sort of organically happened that we collaborated and put together some amazing artwork and music and sort of take it from there. And that's a good point, I think, to chuck over to Sarah, because she tells this story very well about how this exhibition came together.

Sara Grayson:

Oh gosh, thanks, nate. That's very big shoes to fill, following on from you three legends. So I'm Sarah, I'm married to Jerry. We have had a film company since actually 1989. We shoot principally from the air, in the early days from helicopters, the fixed wing and now, most recently, drones, which is a much more environmentally friendly way for us to shoot, which is part of our raison d'etre. So we're pretty happy with the way things have gone.

Sara Grayson:

I think, just picking up on what Jerry was saying, I guess the first sort of three or four years of Heli Films, which was the company that we used to film through, as Jerry was saying, we were commissioned by directors, whether it was Ridley Scott to go and shoot Black Hawk Down or Verna Herzog to go to Kuwait after the first oil fires and bring them back images that really were striking. We would take a brief and then very often be left to our own devices. The same for TV commercials and music videos that we would make with bands, also with directors, which led very neatly into Jerry directing commercials and music videos and then films for museums and art galleries around the world. But we would always win on locations, whether that was in the US or Africa or Europe would find a reason to stay on location and shoot for ourselves creatively, and that was how we built up the body of work that Tobes was referring to and Nate was referring to. We got quite a large back catalogue, I guess, for one of a better way of expressing, and we got to the stage I guess it was at the beginning of the pandemic, which I'm sure everybody has a reference point there where we could no longer get on location. We were stuck in Melbourne, one of the toughest lockdowns, I think, in the world and one of the longest, five kilometres from our home.

Sara Grayson:

Thankfully, tobes Studio was within the radius of our studio, so we had started conversations about NFTs before the pandemic struck, so we were able to continue working between the three of us, sharing files backwards and forwards, but we weren't able to get on location and shoot specifically, and so, for that reason, we were looking at new ways of incorporating this creativity, which usually we would express by going on location and shooting new material, for whatever reason, probably, like Tobes was used to creating music, and we couldn't get on location any longer, and Jerry had spent almost a year I think it was 2020, darling, jumping into crypto, looking at NFTs, simultaneously unbeknownst to us. Toby had been doing the same thing and so when we started the conversation in early 21, we were the three of us that were very much flying in parallel, flying in tandem, which was why we set up sun grazers, and it was to incorporate Tobes music with the vision that we create and I think, sort of going back to the concept of the Flow State exhibition, which is what you came to see, alex, at Oshie Gallery. Having been filmmakers for so many years before getting into NFTs, you know, when you make a film, you have a soundtrack you usually have. You have a narrative, you have the peaks and troughs that Jerry was describing. So, although although you know, one could create, obviously, stills that work as NFTs and we do have a body of work of stills based on the Hurricane Katrina series that we shot it's really the third element, which is the music that comes into play with the narrative structure of the film that works for us. And I sort of deep dive the subject of NFTs Once Toby said yes, he'd like to work with us, which was very exciting, and one of the first people I came across was Nate, and I was really intrigued and entranced by his twisted landscapes which were on several platforms and they were sometimes animated, sometimes stills, mostly color, although he has an amazing black and white series of work which really has like its own visual identity and, like Toby with his band's music and Nate with his visual art, we also have kind of, I guess, a visual language which we're quite known for.

Sara Grayson:

So when I found Nate and I shared his work with Toby and Jerry, I was like, oh wow, you know, this is, this is going to another level, and we loved how he incorporated the twists and in fact, I think it was the first series of four NFTs of ours that we created. We used a particular piece that has a revolve. It's not a twist like Nate does, but it's. It's a world that Jerry uses in the edit suite, and so I guess I'll be quick, I'll fast forward to Got the bit first. Thanks, boys.

Sara Grayson:

Yeah, I'll fast forward to, I guess, the end of June 2021, when we released our first five NFTs and we sold two one-of-ones very quickly within a week of each other, and it sort of gave me the confidence to reach out to Nate and to say you know, I'm not sure where you're based, but this is who we are.

Sara Grayson:

We really love the work that you do. We're open to any discussions that you know, whether it's over the phone or in spaces or whatever. And Nate came back and said well, I've seen that you guys are based in Melbourne. So am I. I was like, oh, you know, it's back very, very quick, quick fire messaging. And I said, oh, did you know that we're working with Toby Dundas? He's also in Melbourne, as are Jerry, both Jerry and I and Nate sort of pretty much came back saying well, I'm also a drummer and a musician as well as a visual artist. So there was this kind of coming together of the four of us in that year of 21, which then led to maybe this time last year I plucked up the courage to say to Nate you know, would you ever do a collab with people like us? And I didn't tell Jerry and Toby because I thought, if he's, I nearly swore then if he says no, if he flicks us off.

Sara Grayson:

I won't tell the boys and they'll never be any the wiser, because we'd already kind of started a friendship and we'd had beers and I think they would have been mortified if they'd have known that I was going to, you know, push that out. So but I did push that out and Nate came back like 10 minutes later saying I collab with you guys. Yeah, sure, absolutely, and that was kind of the flavour of how it felt to work together. It was really a meeting of many minds, many creative skills, nate and Toby with the music. Toby's very visual, obviously, nate is very visual, and our starting point was creating the original art, the aerial pieces, and there's a couple of ground pieces too, which Nate then puts his special source, the twist to, and the piece basically has another life of its own. So, yeah, that's kind of, I guess, the background and the lead into Flow State, the exhibition.

Alexander Hallag:

You know. That's really cool that you guys, you know the symbiosis, that you all happen to be in Melbourne and they just worked out that way. So I guess, for someone like me who is new to this whole NFT world, nate, can you walk me through this, because, as a visual artist, what is NFT? Why did you pick this route to even explore with your work, as opposed to a traditional work on wall?

Nate Hill:

Yeah, sure. So NFT stands for non-fungible token and basically the best way that I sort of have thought of to to talk about it is that when you are create an NFT, you're creating a token and the artwork is attached to the token. Someone buying an NFT is effectively sort of buying like a stock in an artist. So they'll hopefully they'll connect with the imagery and really love it and want to have it as something that they can collect, display on a digital display or look at it on their phone or whatever. But they're also investing in your as an artist and hoping that you will have a lasting career as an artist and that that artwork that they've collected will retain or gain in value. So basically you can see the artwork is like a cover, like an album cover, if you like, for a token. The token is the part of the scenario that holds the value. So I don't know if that makes sense.

Alexander Hallag:

That's sort of one way to look at it, so they're not actually getting a physical piece.

Nate Hill:

Not necessarily, so sometimes you can. As an artist, you have that choice. You can offer a print or something with your NFT. I've done that myself. I've given out prints to people who have collected my work, but essentially it is the token that they're collecting and buying and investing in, if you like.

Alexander Hallag:

Right, and Sarah was talking about your twisted landscapes. So for those that don't know about your work, can you talk to me about those?

Nate Hill:

Sure when that came from. So it alluded to the fact that I started out in photography. So I studied photography at university, went away from it for a little while while I was being in bands and doing little mini tours and all that kind of stuff Came back to it again when we had our first child, and so photography has been the huge part of my sort of creative outlet. And so once I started sort of getting back into it again, working from home, sort of starting a little bit of a freelance business, I started dabbling in photo manipulation and digital art. That was around the birth of Instagram. So I was sort of finding all of this new art and working out and wondering how it was made and trying to do some creative stuff with it myself.

Nate Hill:

So I ended up sort of going down a rabbit hole of apps and doing digital art on my iPad, iphone, you know, just whatever I had handy and in diving into a whole heap of these apps I found one that could manipulate photos in this twisty kind of way. So there are a few apps like it on the market. One famous one is called Tiny Planet, I think, but there are a few things like it. The one that I use is no longer available, but I have kept a device with this particular app on it so that I can keep doing it, and basically, I sort of found a way of taking my landscape photography, twisting it and creating these portals or different universes, and I found it really fascinating.

Nate Hill:

It was something that struck me and it was something that I hadn't seen other people doing, and I started toying around with including a figure in these places just as something to start with, to tell a bit of a story and to show a bit of scale, and that's how it sort of started. Once I started putting these things out there, they started gaining a little bit of attention, and I got my work shared by platforms like Photoshop and the like. So it was something that I felt like I discovered that perhaps hadn't been done before, and it was something that I felt like I could really express some creativity and a visual language that was my own, I guess.

Alexander Hallag:

You know, as a photographer myself, that's really cool to hear that. You know, you too came from a background of photography, and I suppose I don't say for most still photographers, but when you do stills, you sometimes at least for myself, speaking on my behalf. So that, speaking on behalf of myself, I found that sometimes I'll be looking at my stills and I wonder what if they had movement? And your twists and landscapes definitely have movement to them. So then, like what's also what I like with what you guys have done, it's almost as if a whole movie has been created in a single image from the filmmaking element that Sarah and Jerry provide, and then Toby with your music as that score. When you guys started collaborated on this, is that how you looked at this or how did that? You know what came first the visual from the filmmaking, or the music, or the landscape? Yeah, yeah, you know the old chicken and the egg thing. So what's the chicken? What's?

Sara Grayson:

the egg? And well, that's the big question.

Jerry Grayson:

It you know it changes. It changes sometimes piece by piece. So the first weird part of what you're just saying is that we frequently I'm just thinking my way through the, through the pieces that we've that we've done here in flow state, but the majority of the time it's not come from a photograph, it's come from a piece of film. So we will have generated a piece of film and we'll go, okay, let's take a still image out of that, because you know, a film is only, you know, 25 still images every second. So, provided the, the definition is high enough, then you can take out out a still. And that's how we began with Nate and said, okay, what about this still? And? And he would say, well, it would be better if the horizon was a bit more like this, and we'd, you know, shuffle for forward or backwards to a point where it accommodated the, the needs of Nate's particular special source, and and then, from that still, nate would animate it. So this new baby was, was born out of parentage. That started out as as movie, then became still and then got animated and twisted. So, from the, from the, from the visual side of things, it's quite a peculiar direction to go, then, and I'll turn it to you in a minute Tobes, because we don't think with these pieces but with other work that we've done together, we have sometimes let the visuals lead and sometimes let the music lead.

Jerry Grayson:

So we found in early days that we were trying to do pieces in under 60 seconds as a typical sort of length.

Jerry Grayson:

But and we would be doing that because of technical constraints, because at the moment the platforms that sell our work and not well equipped for large file sizes, that's the, that's the holy grail, that's where we're working towards and that then changes the whole dynamic of of how we watch movies and all that kind of thing. But for the moment, just to get you know a two and a half minute piece, for example, we have to choose what we're going to do. We either have to have very little movement in it or we have to compress it, which we don't like doing. But we found early on that the under a minute was just not long enough for you to express yourself musically and I think we've sort of settled into a nice balance between the, the, the music, the visuals, the length, the movement etc. Which tends to work out of being a little bit over over two minutes and that that seems to give you the chance, toby, to to work your magic where you're. You have a beginning, a middle and end and a theme to. Is that about right?

Toby Dundas:

yeah, that's definitely true. I think the one of the sort of exciting things about the fact the the way we're working in animating a still image, even if that's come from a film in the first place, is that it does add the kind of temporal element and gives you a chance to tell, sort of impart, a story onto this still, and music is really good for doing that. And that's why in films, when you want to enhance emotion or drama, that's why music is so effective at bringing that sort of element which is not always obvious from what is shown visually.

Toby Dundas:

And so, like Jerry was saying, in order to kind of create that narrative with music, it does take time and it's it is really hard to to sort of go on any journey within like a really you know, within 30 seconds, which was you know the early stuff we were doing and that was a real kind of challenge for me is like well is, is that possible to kind of like start here and end here and then how do you do that so quickly?

Toby Dundas:

but certainly throughout the first year of kind of working, as we did start to sort of extend our timelines and then obviously reaching the kind of flow state series where we were working with Nate and sort of settling on sort of two minutes 15 with this work, with the kind of animation style, we've got a bit of a head start because it isn't as file size intensive as if that was two and a half minutes of film.

Sara Grayson:

Yeah, we'll be screwed for the reason that that Tobes was explaining in terms of the narrative arc of the piece of music, it. This is the most complete body of work that we've made. That's, that's moving, that's animated, and I think that that would be a real plus for you and Nate Tobes working together and doing the composition and playing instruments together and jamming together, and each of these individual NFTs stand alone because of the freedom that you've been able to bring to the music. I mean as well as the vision, obviously, but just the other thing I wanted to touch upon is that one of the things that we've all loved about Nate's work prior to this collection was the three dimensionality that the twisted landscape brings, because even if it's come from a still, the twist brings you, the viewer, into that, whether it's a vortex or whether it's the, the rabbit hole of life, however you want to describe it.

Sara Grayson:

One of the pieces is actually called after the undertow that was in the in the collection, and although it's a 2d image, the technique that Nate brings draw, literally draws you in, which you would have seen in the exhibition and, through that, I think that you need the time to be able to be drawn in as a viewer, which the music allows you to do, because you are literally in the zone, you're in the flow state when you're watching the piece can I?

Jerry Grayson:

can I add to that also that that and I've only really realized it quite recently is that it's usually Toby that ends up naming the piece, by which I mean we all throw names for a piece into a hat. It's usually Toby's that we choose, because what, for example, after the undertow? It's a watery landscape, it's a, it's a. It's like coming up out of a whirlpool that you've been sucked down into and and you know we stress about what. Now, what are we going to call this piece?

Jerry Grayson:

and Toby comes up with after the undertow and you go bloody obvious really wasn't it and but that's what also, I think, in that particular piece, for example, that's what you had in your head from actually quite early on, wasn't it?

Toby Dundas:

naming wise both or feel yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, and I think I mean in flow. So I think Nate had quite a, I think actually we probably all had quite a few names in the end. But certainly, yeah, I think that's true like when I and in this case when Nate and I were composing, you do sort of like you get a feeling from this visual and you kind of follow that pathway and that certainly what you create musically, in that, that feeling that you try to enhance, which is the first one that the piece, kind of like, radiated to you, and then you kind of reflect back, does you know, point you in directions of, of titles, because you're trying to like, I guess, make that, that feeling more that to the person that's coming to the exhibition to view it okay.

Alexander Hallag:

So let me ask you this, toby. So you're saying earlier that you have done scores for film. How is this different for you in your approach, obviously, since it's not a narrative film but a narrative piece of art how do you approach it?

Toby Dundas:

I think I think in this case, like you have, you actually have more freedom in a narrative film if you are sort of somewhat bound by what the director is trying to say or what the script's trying to say. So that gives you kind of like a street that you can go down and you might be able to, like you know, the air to the left or the right of that sort of message. But certainly you're trying to amplify someone else's message. And in this case it is like a quite a just a visceral reaction to watching, watching the pieces and just kind of how, how do they affect you, how do they make you feel? And that's the sort of starting point that I tend to use in terms of when we started Nate and I started working together.

Toby Dundas:

Often I have just like a little little, kind of like a nuggets of an idea that had been something that had come to me from just watching the work that Nate, sarah and Jerry put together. And then that's when we would sort of like begin our own collaboration of like okay, well, if we're sort of got this little seed here, how do we sort of push it in directions, and where do the ideas of the drums take it, and even in one case it was the drums that were that idea and the music kind of reacted to the drum. So that was a really interesting way to work. But I think yeah, to kind of summarize your actual question it's actually much more free form and you can really do anything, and that's certainly one of the things I like about sort of working in this format.

Sara Grayson:

Can I just add something?

Sara Grayson:

to that Sorry. So you know, as filmmakers, jerry and I are very used to working with musicians and Jerry usually directs the piece and I usually produce. And in that context, you know, as Tobes was saying, you know the director has sometimes written the script or has certainly been working with the writer and has cast the movie and has a very clear, you know, definition of how the score is going to bring the drama or the pay-fas or the sentiment to the piece. And specifically with this collaboration with Tobes, sun Grazers, as well as then working with Nate, we didn't want to be didactic, we wanted the musicians to be, to have their own freedom, and we do pass the vision backwards and forwards with Toby, toby, jerry and I, even before we'd send it to Nate and some things we rejected and some things that Nate would reject, and it has been a collaboration is kind of how I would describe.

Jerry Grayson:

Yeah, and it's fully sent.

Sara Grayson:

Yeah, and I think we had that very first convo that we had with you, tobes and Melbourne, and before we'd even started on the first four pieces for Sun Grazers, we wanted you to have that room and so I'm really glad that it feels like that, because we haven't had much where we've not. We might have wanted to amplify certain things from each of us, whether it's the visuals or the, the music, the soundscapes, but it's, it's been fun, yeah all this is very hard for me, though, because I'm a didactic miglimaniac, so it's quite a king.

Sara Grayson:

you're the king, aren't you? Yeah, they call you the kings in Sun Houses.

Alexander Hallag:

So, king Jerry, at the gallery opening, you talked about this art form and basically changed in the world. And you talk, you spoke about virtual galleries and things and blew my mind. I'm like I say this is all. This is new for me. So you know, I think of going to a gallery and seeing pieces on the wall, seeing prints, paintings, sculpture in a physical space, and you were speaking of a digital. I mean, this is a digital art and then you're also speaking of a digital space. Can you talk me through this? Because this is that I say blew my mind then and still even trying to process this is still kind of I'm still trying to figure this out how all of this?

Jerry Grayson:

Sure, okay. So when you say you're new to it, don't worry, we're all new to it. It's only by degree, because it really has not been around very long. You know, we're all. We're all talking about the AI chat, gbt. And do you know, it was launched in the middle of November. We're only in February. It's just extraordinary the rate at which things move and become accepted and then we build on that and we move on to the next and the next. So you know, really, nfts we should call them art NFTs, because in a minute there's going to be everything NFTs. And that's an important part of what Nate was saying about how you tokenize things, and I'll sort of explain a bit more about that at the moment. But they've only been around for a short handful of years and I keep referring back to when we first got the internet, or web2 as they call it now. And we've been operating in web2 for, say, call it, 25 years now, just sort of the mid nine, mid to late 90s.

Jerry Grayson:

And if you think back to that moment when somebody said to you, what do you think of the internet, and you went, uh, what's that exactly? Oh, I know what it is. I've read it in the newspaper. It's where thieves and drug lords run riots, isn't it? And avoid the law.

Jerry Grayson:

And that's what we all thought the internet was. We had no concept of where it would take us, what it would result in the fact that, you know, we can now have our fridge tell us that we're about to run out of milk, or that all of the things that we've come to take for granted, like zoom, chatting with our grandchildren or a meeting or whatever it might be, all of the purchasing online that we do the directions that we need I mean, try going out without your iPhone these days and finding your way from A to B. We've all lost the ability to do it, and so we had no concept at the start of web2, the internet, as to what it would become. Here we are at an exact correlation of that moment, when somebody said what do you think of the internet? Um, what do you think of the metaverse? We're at that moment. We're go.

Alexander Hallag:

Uh well, let's define that in some way yeah please from someone like me, what the hell is the metaverse?

Jerry Grayson:

okay, so it is a digital twin of where we're where we're at. Let me try and expand on that a bit. First, although everybody talks about, ah, put a headset on and wander around in the metaverse, yeah, you can, but that's quite disorienting, especially for older people. So start in the easy way which is on your screen and use your mouse to move around in three dimensions. It's not the same immersive experience, but it is a step towards understanding it and it means that, for example, um, we've we've had this exhibition together in the oshi gallery, uh, and we're used to what a gallery is. It has walls and it has a ceiling and a floor and we walk around on the floor and the and the art is, you know, nicely lit on the walls that's the space I know.

Jerry Grayson:

Yeah, there you go, and you stand there and you have a conversation about it and you move on to the next piece well, yes, thanks, brown brother, that's a good exhibition you have good wine and, um, well, there is a, a digital equivalent of that, a digital twin of it, and actually using oshi gallery is a really, really good example of that, because they did create a twin of the real world environment. It actually looks like it is. You can go and stand virtually in this virtual environment and it is as if you are standing in the real thing. Now, those who are not yet on board with this whole concept would say well, why am I doing that? Why wouldn't I just go there? Well, hang on a minute.

Jerry Grayson:

Um, first, you might be living in new york and the gallery is in melbourne, um, and you might not want to spend the two or three days and thousands of dollars that it takes to get there, but you can afford to give 20 minutes on a friday afternoon or whatever it might be. So this enables people to gather from all parts of the world in the same place at the same time, nearly as if they were there. And because it's not the flat 2d thing, that, uh, that a zoom call is, um, you are seeing a person expressed in the way they want to be expressed. I mean, it might be in a Darth Vader costume or, you know, with a goat's head on or something in the same way as in real life, in the way that we dress and we sort of um dressed to be a part of our tribe, but never mind all that weird stuff. Just imagine that you, your avatar, your simple avatar that looks like you, appears in this virtual gallery and he's able to talk one to one with a person who's actually in new york, but you're both standing looking at the same painting, the same piece of art on the wall.

Jerry Grayson:

And then imagine that sarah, as the, as the producer of this is, is, is talking to you in the, in the corner of the gallery, but she can see that those two people over there have been standing talking at that piece of art for the last five minutes. So she'll go. Excuse, excuse me, yes, I'm just going to go over and talk to those people and and therefore her. The physical relationship of people within this gallery is much, much more like what it would be in the real world, but it takes away the time problems, the expense problems, and then lets you take one step further. So, for example, our gallery in the meta metaverse, which is still kind of being defined as a, as an expression, but has a water floor and, no, no ceiling to it. Um, and because you're not constrained by things like gravity and physics in the metaverse, you can let again. You let your imagination run wild. Does that kind of get?

Alexander Hallag:

sure I mean so for me as a photographer. I shot analog film for years digital came out and I didn't move into it, run away. I told everyone that I knew that was going into that. I thought it's a passing fad yeah people are gonna wake up soon enough and they go. No, quality wasn't that good and it wasn't until even uh, it was around, actually around the time that my daughter was born that we got our first digital camera.

Alexander Hallag:

I think it was two or three megapixels yes and it was great because it was just something where I had to go and film, I could take a quick photo and, much to her chagrin, uh, for the first year I took a photograph of her every day yeah and I think now she hates cameras because of me um so I, you know, at that time I saw, okay, this is useful for that.

Alexander Hallag:

But what you're speaking of here is again mind blowing. And you know, I kind of think of you know where people used to talk about, who people that could afford this could say, oh, I'll meet you at lunch in london, if one was in new york was in san francisco and they had the funds.

Alexander Hallag:

They can do this, this now, from what I'm hearing, it's not about funds. This will be a possibility, a, a reality within a, within a virtual reality yeah, it's, almost it's almost like um going into one of those films. Oh my god, the matrix type of thing where there's a gallery, am I, am I kind of grasping this right?

Jerry Grayson:

yes, yeah and what, and what it does eat up is not funds but time. It is voracious on your time because it becomes addictive and you go well, if I can do this, then maybe I could do that, and so you explore a bit further and explore a bit further, and that's why there is such a rapid adoption going on here, but still people have not really wrapped their head around where it has the potential of going right, uh.

Alexander Hallag:

So nate, um, you have two hats here. With flow state, you not only do this amazing twisted landscape which goes over the film footage, you also are helping tobi create some of the music. So, for you, are you ever thinking about music as you're making the landscape, the initial landscape, or do you come back to that? Yeah, kind of kind of walk me through this for you as because, yeah, we're in two halves, yeah, for this.

Nate Hill:

Music's always been a huge part of everything that I do, so um being in bands and and loving music um passionately from a young age.

Nate Hill:

Um it's informed all of the creative stuff that I do. So when I'm creating visuals, I often almost always have a record playing um at home while I'm doing that. So it's music definitely informs the art in some way, even if it's just a small way. With this particular project, it was really important to me to to be able to have a little bit of a dabble in the music side of it as well, just to be able to have that full collaboration that we were talking about earlier. So being involved in in a lot of different aspects of the, the whole overall piece and the fact that it was working with someone like toby um was a huge, huge plus for me, being a uh temperature up fan from uh a while back, uh, so it was just really cool to be able to um have the visuals as something that I normally do and comfortable doing, but I then also push into the music and have um an idea of where I'd like it to go and what I'd like that universe to sound like, I guess okay.

Alexander Hallag:

So, um, now with this we've touched about this a little bit of the ai technology coming out. Do you guys see this, um and this is a question for all three of four of you do you guys see this as a help or in a possible hindrance? Because I've heard of some things where people are going into the ai generator saying type me an essay. Essay comes out. So could someone not say I need this landscape, this music yeah out in terms of visual art.

Toby Dundas:

It's already.

Jerry Grayson:

It's already it's happening as you can go into there's.

Toby Dundas:

There's several ones you can go into and type uh, draw me a picture of a shark with a surfer on its back going through a cosmic landscape in the style of rembrandt and it'll do it, and it's like an approximation. It can pull all those things and it can do something um and it's gorgeous sometimes it

Jerry Grayson:

is if you know how to.

Toby Dundas:

I mean, it's like it's like a tool if you know what in any. If you're trying to make something visual uh, music. If you're trying to write an essay my brother-in-law, jayme, is obsessed with chat gbt and he's using it in all sorts of interesting ways for his business of like writing client emails. Or if you have to write, if you have to research um he's an architect. If you have to research a particular um technique to present to a client, you can put that in and it will come up with like all the information that can pull from the internet and give you a really good broad list of um ideas and from which you then shape them, and the same with the art tools. It's like it can be good for like an idea generation. No one's gonna successfully like do that and then sell it for a lot of money because anyone could do it. But the skill, I guess, is in like knowing what to input on the input side of the equation so that the technology gives you back something that you want okay.

Alexander Hallag:

But so I'm gonna ask you as a musician, because I've heard that some people are talking about it can be done musically. So if they you know, if someone made the example of the shark surf a guy and said, and I want a soundtrack sounding similar to the temper trap, now is and is going to find the temper trap and it's going to, I guess, create something musically loosely based around your guys music.

Alexander Hallag:

So, yeah, how do you feel then? Feel that as a musician that I suppose, and maybe if I'm not understanding things fully, but I guess if it collects all this information, then it's going to have a big pool to pick from and it's just a matter of time before maybe you'll be obsolete as a musician, possibly yeah, I mean look at, look at the history of the world, our, our entire human.

Toby Dundas:

Look back we've made all sorts of innovations we've made all sorts of careers obsolete over the past hundreds of years through technology, so it's inevitable that that will happen but there will always be a need to if you're a fan to see a band live that's where it becomes more tricky.

Toby Dundas:

But but then there's things like you look at, gorillas have been doing something for decades already where you know it's, it's animations and holograms and projections are the band. I'm not squeamish about these things. It will be a certain amount of time before, like, physical musicians are replaced, but I think it's inevitable that visual artists will be replaced, musicians will be replaced. Filmmakers will be replaced at some point in the timeline, because we've done that to all sorts of things that have been replaced by technology, and that's okay, because people will figure out new and interesting ways to interact with that technology and create something that we haven't even thought of.

Nate Hill:

yet that's what I was gonna say. I don't think it's gonna stop people from being creative. So because I know from me personally I have a need to do something creative in my day, and so it'll just depend on the tool that I use to be creative with. So that's sort of one of the things I've been thinking about with the whole AI thing. Plus, at this stage, and probably, like Toby said, it probably will happen, but I don't feel like some AI can generate my visual language. So there's gonna be parts of things that you can do as an individual, as a creative, that perhaps it'll take longer for these things to come and come for you and take you.

Nate Hill:

But I do think that it's just. It is a tool, it's something that you can look at. You could be worried about it or you can just not necessarily you don't have to embrace it, but you can perhaps use it as part of your toolkit. I think that's one of the ways that creatives can go down this path. The other thing that I would say is as it stands at the moment, something interesting happened to me the other day in this AI world is I had a contract sent to me for an artwork that I'm making for a poster for a band, and in the contract it stipulated that you were not to use any AI in the creation of the artwork.

Sara Grayson:

So there are.

Nate Hill:

It's very. People are aware of it. People know that there are options out there where you could create something with AI, and it's not a personal creation, it's a machine creation. So there's a lot of discovery to happen with this and I think rather than be scared, just work out ways. Embrace it, work out ways.

Toby Dundas:

Another I mean an interesting sort of parallel path to that is perhaps to look at, like, the concept of sampling. When that became a thing and everyone's like, oh, you're just taking someone else's work, but people figured out creative ways to take something and enhance it. And I mean maybe an idea like is that the AI becomes part of your process and you're kind of like visually sampling something and then you're taking that and turning it through your kind of like skill and style and all those kind of things, and taking it and turning it to something that's better than what you would have made on your own. But with that so it's interesting to hear that people are like going no, how do we do that? And I guess, and the side to that is like well, how do you police that?

Nate Hill:

Yeah, it's gonna be harder to. I think now you can still sort of I feel like I can see what's been AI 100% generated, if it's a whole thing.

Toby Dundas:

But if it's like, what does that contract mean? Is like, can you use AI as like an idea generator and then take it and completely do something?

Nate Hill:

I am sure you could, and that's the gray area. It's a big gray area, yeah, absolutely.

Jerry Grayson:

But it's the difference of exactly what you're saying, toby. It's the difference of it being a component or it being the be all and end all. I mean, I've been really conflicted about this until I realized that. You know, back in the day, a long way back I know, when I was doing my end of school exams and we weren't allowed to use this new thing, the electronic calculator. You had to use this bloody slide rule and I remember thinking at the time this is not preparing me for the world that I'm going out into, because they have calculators there. That's how it operates. And of course, we then multiplied up with computers and so on. And the other day I read that Harvard are now allowing AI to generate the students dispositions at the end of the term and the old Foggy and me went hmm, absolutely.

Sara Grayson:

I'm a questioner.

Jerry Grayson:

And then I thought back to that aspect of the slide rule or the calculator, and you go well, if this tool is out there, then we should be training to use it and that should become a component of what we're doing. But now we move on to the visual side. I don't just hand over the Sarah on this, but I absolutely agree with what you guys are saying. First, it's not a constraint to creativity, it's just another tool in the box. But if it's and here's my picture, which is generated by AI that stuff I'm already tired of because you can recognize it, yeah yeah, yeah, 100%.

Sara Grayson:

So we collect NFTs. I mean, we all collect NFTs. We're artists that create and most of us then put the percentage of what we've earned back in, and often it's more than we've earned.

Sara Grayson:

Sorry, Tobes, sorry, tobes, so as collectors and I'm in a lot of Twitter Spaces, groups and direct messaging groups on Twitter and dealing with lots of artists and photographers filmmakers and photographers, I should say and when some of the photographers moved into using AI, probably in the last two to three months, I could pick immediately if it was Dali or Mid Journey. And because it was, it's pretty obvious and I'm quite shocked at how much material there is that is pure Dali or Mid Journey and I think that I actually think that some photographers have somewhat lost their way because their own personality isn't coming across in the art. Having said that, we do collect a lot of AI, but when it says all of the boys have said it's a tool and the original heart of the artist is coming through. But one thing that I think is pretty obvious is one thing I just wanted to say because it's a massive subject and we could probably talk about it for another podcast.

Sara Grayson:

Before Jerry and I got together in 1989, my background was photography, stills photography, also film and television. But specifically I looked after for two years an incredible British photographer called Terry O'Neill, who is one of the world's leading portrait photographers celebrity portrait photography in general.

Toby Dundas:

Right, okay, you know Terry's work right sure.

Sara Grayson:

So I looked after him when he moved back to London with his then wife, faye Dunaway. He'd been in the US for six or seven years managing her career and he came back to the UK and he's a cockney guy so he swore a lot. I met him at a gallery opening and we got on well. And I'd come back from Africa I think I'd been taking stills over there and I'd been introduced by the gallery owner and the gallery owner had said you know, terry's just got back from the US and he's looking for somebody to basically get him out and about and working in the UK. And the reason I tell this story is that, you know, terry was a traditional photographer initially, mostly black and white. The Stones, the Beatles, the who, mccartney, oh, clapton that was his era. You know he was a kid of that period of time and one of the first things I did in order to get work for him was to look at his body of work, so curate the black and white material into mood boards that I could then take to galleries, to museums, to magazines, to commercial clients.

Sara Grayson:

And the reason I'm telling this slightly long-winded story is that, like Jerry and I, we are and were back along live action filmmakers With the birth of NFTs. We have taken those live clips of material that we've shot and we've bought them into the computer and we've digitized them and we've put VFX visual effects onto those pieces so that they're no longer just the natural world. So a particular scene which we created with Tobi is called A Beater Birds and it's an extraordinary scene shot outside Cape Town, very near one of the really poor townships called Kailisha, and it's a scene of flamingos in all their glory, sort of dancing and strutting through the waters. And I say dancing and strutting because the way that we bought the piece into our edit suite. We then added effects and slow-mo and so on that enabled this action to sort of come to life, if you like. So what we're creating is not AI and was not AI and we're not.

Sara Grayson:

I've tried to dabble with AI by taking one of our pieces and then going into Dali or going into mid-journey and using the same prompts that I use when I write the backstory to the piece, and it's turned out absolutely rubbish, because I'm not a very good AI artist, clearly. So you know, I always say AI isn't easy, like flying a helicopter isn't easy, or being a drummer or a musician or a composer or a photographer, and it's the same thing as everybody thinks they're a photographer now because we've all got iPhones, but it's not about the beast, it's not about the software mid-journey, it's not about the iPhone, it's about the eye and it's about what you're trying to say is what I think. And then the last thing I would just kind of say is that I'm in quite a few photography groups and taking your point, nate, about the contract, there are a lot of photographers, people like Victoria West, who we all know, who's won multiple awards, you know international competitions and so on, and when you're entering comps you're not allowed to use even backdrops. And now it's saying no AI. And you know, certainly with Terry's work we were based in London and we would shoot a lot of album covers and I'd go out in recce locations to find the moody sky that Clapton wanted and the right kind of brick work that he wanted, and so on, and we'd wait for days and days and days to get the right. You know weather conditions, just as we do with live-action filming. And it got to the stage where we couldn't photograph the work quickly enough to fulfill the client base that we had.

Sara Grayson:

So we started by bringing the musicians into studio, obviously lighting them in the way that we wanted, with backdrops, which is how, and that was back in the mid-80s and we never tried to say this is a live location. We never said this is Battersea Power Station or whatever. But backdrops and effects have been used in all of our worlds, and Toby was talking about sampling and I think that, as Toby's is saying, victoria and others now are no longer using backdrops in their studio. They are creating AI backdrops. So that's putting the backdrop artists potentially out of business, unless they then become an AI artist using those skills. So, yeah, it's a big conversation, but it's not one we're afraid of and I kind of feel like what Nate was saying.

Sara Grayson:

We do have quite a visual language of the work that Sun Grazers puts out the hour and the visual. I'm very aware that when drones came into our world of helicopter filming, all our investment in technology was, frankly, obsolete almost overnight Half a million dollar camera. You can now have a 4K Jara Sabilized camera on a drone for a couple of grand and it's really good quality, but it doesn't mean that the pilot knows how to create aerial imagery. There's a lot of people flying very low level, wanging backwards and forwards, doing all that Superman stuff and dropping over the edge of cliffs, and that's fine if that's what you want to do, but it's not the kind of visual language that we have. I guess we used to do that stuff.

Alexander Hallag:

Hearing. You know, as I said, it took me a long time to come into digital technology myself and I remember the first time I saw or heard a Photoshop, I immediately hated the idea of it because I didn't have enough information. And it wasn't until a good mate of mine actually said well, with Photoshop you're not making a great photo, in Photoshop you're taking your great photos and just making it that much better. And when I start from that approach, that kind of softened my ease into it, because I was. I think part of my fear was people making fake photographs or, you know, just maybe not fake photographs, but just making things that were not possible and or making a piece of rubbish shine. So when I finally did, when I heard it from that viewpoint, it made it. It made me more open to the possibility.

Alexander Hallag:

And I think you know hearing you know, because, again, all this technology is new for me of the AI stuff, yes, so for me, you know, I started seeing Photoshop as a tool, as you're saying with these tools, and so, if I'm hearing, correct it from all four of you, that you're not scared of it, as perhaps I was when I first heard about Photoshop, but you're more seeing this as just another tool which can be used and, depending on how you use it and what you do with it, really dictates. Yeah, yeah, and how is this?

Nate Hill:

going to happen anyway. So it's working out a way to use it or don't. But I don't think that, you know, burying your head in the sand is necessarily an answer with any of this. So I've always felt like if you are creative and do something creative, you'll find a way to do that with whatever you have. So, whether it is and there are still people doing analog photography, you know and processing film, vinyl has made a resurgence so I don't think old things are going to always just forever go away. There is always going to be use for the tools that you have and say, use them in the way that you can. So, rather than being worried about it and want to stop AI, I think just you know you use it or you don't, and you find your own way with whatever you're going to be creative with.

Nate Hill:

And one other thing I wanted to say when we were chatting about it before, about how can you prove it. I think part of the big plus side of things like NFTs is that whole idea of provenance. So being able to prove how you've created something will be a big thing. So that's what I thought about with the whole poster thing, is that I can prove that I illustrated this part, that I took this photo to create this part of this poster, so I can actually show my work. So, whereas if people just want to plunk down a AI generated image and claim it as their own, there will be ways that you can work that out, whether that's happened or not.

Sara Grayson:

Yeah, and here are we having a conversation. Here we are having a conversation, which we do in Twitter spaces, whether it's once a day or once a week or once a month, and there will come a point, I'm sure, when the machine that's generated, the art can give the backstory. But I think that part of the reason why we do these sort of whether it's a podcast or a Twitter spaces or a talk in a gallery or a museum, as Nate's just been doing in Sydney is that the audience still wants to interact and hear the emotional connection with the artist to the piece, in Nate's case in Sydney, or all of our cases at Oshie.

Alexander Hallag:

So if I can jump into somewhere, then, so kind of going off what you're saying, jerry, so let's say that the gallery that Nate was just in in Sydney had a digital space. With that, someone from Seattle could virtually attend his exhibition, hear him in real time. So they'd still be in Seattle, but the experience would still be as if they were there. And again, if they were set up for that, nate could have a conversation with them in real time as if they were face to face, like we are right now.

Jerry Grayson:

Exactly yeah, and you can't have the free wine. But you know, the wine you've gone and bought for yourself is going to be a lot less than the airfare.

Toby Dundas:

I mean, we've been in a way like this sort of virtual attendance is. We've been doing it for a long time, like we used to go to the library and attend a book in order to research for an essay at home and then when Web 2 came around, something, you could virtually attend that book and you didn't need to go somewhere to interact with that source of information. We've all been doing it for ages, just that, as bandwidth gets greater, that you can do more with it. And now we're in a point where we can have a digital avatar of ourselves in a digital location which, just for our human minds, makes us feel more involved in that process. It feels more kind of real to the way we interact with the world.

Alexander Hallag:

You know, with all this, all I can think of is you know, think of it in Frankenstein, where they say it's a new world of gods and monsters and we are on a new threshold of infinite possibility, where some of these things may become great benefits to us and some may become great nightmares but, we don't know, and it's very exciting and a little terrifying to go forward, but so is waking up in the morning.

Alexander Hallag:

We can wake up and get hit by a car. So we can't be living in this fear base of don't embrace the technology, rather go forward as we do every day in life see what happens, learn, adjust take in what is good for us.

Alexander Hallag:

If it's not, we don't do it. And yeah, so you know, I think that's part of what excited me in seeing the exhibition is it showed me a possibility of seeing art and listening to music, looking at a short film in a completely new way. And excited me is like wow, okay, this is not what I'm used to, but I did like the idea of I'm seeing this visual from the film side and I'm hearing music, which made me think of going to the movies and watching a movie in the cinema, or DVD, blu-ray, whatever the format and then seeing this new component of visual art mixed in and, as I said earlier, it's almost like having it all in one frame, but it's all there.

Alexander Hallag:

Because, I'm not having to watch an hour and a half film. You know, you guys, the piece was saying two, two and a half minutes. So two and a half minute film of amazingness and possibility.

Sara Grayson:

Thank you. I'm really, I'm so happy that you engaged in that way, Because that was the intention and I think that's why we all had the sense from the beginning that it was a collaboration. But we each had our areas of heart and soul and blood to bring to this. So I'm, it's delightful that you felt that. I mean that's an old fashioned word, but it is. It's full of delight, I should say.

Jerry Grayson:

It does come with new challenges. I mean the, the. We want the person who is looking at our art to be immersed in it, and because it has sound with it, it's very hard to be fully immersed in it without wearing a headset, for example. You know, if everybody was, you know, pressing the button and activating the thing, or however they were doing it, and you had this cacophony of sound going on, it wouldn't work at all. But again, there is a solution within web three, the metaverse, because you can set it up such that the music doesn't become audible until the avatar is within. You know, a virtual, let's say, three meters of the image, and for that reason, sorry to cross you.

Sara Grayson:

Donnie. For that reason we created our own metaverse gallery in a software program called ARIUM A-R-I-U-M ARIUM Spaces and there are other. There are other software like Voxels, so Voxels is what OSHI Gallery used to create. The digital twin, spatial, is another gallery and we're in an exhibition that opens I think it's Wednesday and the gallery that's curated us has built a gallery using Spatial. So it's just another software.

Sara Grayson:

One of the reasons why we chose ARIUM when we built our metaverse gallery last year and it did take you a good week because we were importing its all film in our gallery. It's not the flow state, because that's a collaboration and we haven't got to that point yet of bringing it in and it isn't any of the stills at this stage, but it very much has the personality of the three of us and whilst Jerry built it, there was then, you know, maybe curation more by me than maybe Jerry and Tobes, and then there was very much a discussion about the walls needed to be black, as they are in OSHI. We built this last May so that the art could come off the walls as if you were in a cinema, as you say. So even though it's a virtual gallery, it's still very much a part of who we are in terms of the space that you go into, you know, as the audience member or the viewer collector.

Alexander Hallag:

So what's the future for the four of you together?

Toby Dundas:

I think we're about to have a lunch and figure that out.

Nate Hill:

That's exactly right. We created quite a large collection of imagery and music and for the first part of the exhibition at OSHI Gallery we didn't release everything, so the future is putting the rest of it out there, I guess. So we've got how many more pieces? Seven, seven more pieces that we created that we didn't release at the time. We've got an album, almost a short album worth of music that we'd like to put out there for people to be able to enjoy on a tone as well, and we'll just see what happens from there, with such a pleasure and privilege working with these guys that I can't rule out doing more as well. So we'll just see how it all plays out.

Sara Grayson:

Don't be alarmed.

Alexander Hallag:

Well, hey, let's wrap up, guys. We wrap up. If you can, I'll have these in the show notes so people can find you guys easier. But just again, see who you are and your socials and how people can connect to your work individually and then as the whole.

Nate Hill:

Cool. So Nate Hill, digital artist from Melbourne, and you can find me on Instagram under just Nate Hill, On Twitter at Nate Hill Photo, on Facebook at Nate Hill Photos. Just for a bit of fun and games, nothing's the same. And I have a website Natehillphotographycomau.

Sara Grayson:

Fully Doxxed.

Toby Dundas:

Yeah, fully doxxed. Yes, toby Dundas, musician and composer, my Instagram is Lheho, which is E-L-H-E-E-H-A-W, or the band is the temper trap. Thanks, Nate, and I've got a website too, which I should definitely update, which is just TobyDundascom. And then the Sun Grazers website is SunGraiserscom, correct.

Sara Grayson:

Correct.

Jerry Grayson:

I'm going to pass it on to the boss for this one.

Sara Grayson:

Well, as Jerry says, you could go to just linktree forward slash sungrazers S-U-N-G-R-A-Z-E-R-S. We're actually on Twitter as Helly Films, capital H-E-L-I films, and Toby's Twitter is the temper trap. As Toby was saying, Our Instagram is the earthwins, because that's the IMAX film that we made, which is how we met Toby 10 years ago, so we thought it was appropriate to use that. The underscore earth underscore wins, the earthwins. Jerry Grayson, Sarah Grayson, both on LinkedIn. For those that like LinkedIn, which interestingly more and more people are using this year, it's bizarre, really bizarre In our world. I won't give you Facebook because they're private and they're pretty rubbish and it's all family stuff and I guess just picking up on what Nate was saying. So, yeah, we released four pieces that sold out during the Oshi exhibition, which was fantastic. One fellow bought all four animated pieces, which was extraordinary to us.

Sara Grayson:

Amazing. He's a big collector. I think he loves, knows Nate's work very well. Another fellow bought seven of the still piece, which was extraordinary too, and obviously he's somebody that wants to trade and to hold some and, as Nate says, see the trajectory of we artists working together. And then we've had other people who've bought two pieces of the edition that's currently still available.

Sara Grayson:

It's got a day in the deluge. It is a limited edition of 10 pieces and four of those have sold already, two of them to one person and I think the price on those was something like 350 bucks, something like that, and they've kept one for their own collection and they've put one up at 12.50 already. So that's the kind of thing that Nate was talking about, that collectors like to see there's a potential to have a return. And I think, as Nate was saying, to go back to the body of work, they obviously know Nate's history, but they don't know of the Nate Hill Sun Grazers collaboration. So, yeah, we're going to go and have a good lunch and we're going to go and talk about whether we release the next pieces on Nifty Gateway, which is the platform that Flow States on at the moment, or whether we release on one of the other six or seven platforms that we're collectively on. Thanks, alex, though that was good fun.

Alexander Hallag:

Thanks, guys, you know, so you know, as we enter this new domain, thank you for sharing and enlightening me to new possibilities out there. And, yeah, really excited to see where this world takes us in art, music, visually, film. Yeah, I'm really excited. Thank you guys for coming on board.

Nate Hill:

Thank you Our pleasure.

Alexander Hallag:

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