MOCA LIVE

Today's episode is all about the Metaverse, and who better to speak about it with than the hosts of the longest-running web3 Metaverse meetup (and crypto art OGs), Rizzle and Niftytime. From their early history with TheWIPMeetup, to building a Metaverse audience, to a long debriefing on where the Metaverse is today, Rizzle and Niftytime evoke five years spent building this still-unfinished, still-...

Today's MOCYah or MOCNah tackles all the degeneracy in crypto and crypto art of late. That means Crypto Nick and choosing rich! It means Darkfarms1's logic-defying $BOME token! It means Kevin Rose being hopefully, mercifully gone from our lives for good! And it means a whole lot more discussion of Solana vs. Eth, cycles of degeneracy, and much more more! 

On her record-breaking 3rd MOCA LIVE appearance, performance art extraordinaire OONA joins Max and Colborn to talk live performances, live events, how they go so right and so wrong, maximizing participation/discourse/creativity we meet face-to-face IRL, and so much more. Prepare for laughs, nihilism, and maybe even a few good ideas. 

Max and Colborn take a long look at crypto art curation with the curator and writer of TASCHEN's On NFTs, Robert Alice. With Mr. Alice's art historical, curatorial, and cultural expertise on full display, the three discuss the nitty-gritty creation of a giant crypto art book, decentralizing curation, whether or not crypto art is dead, and stories from ON NFTs inception. 

Max and Colborn are back, and this time, they're playing for keeps. Listen and marvel as your two hosts affix the label of MOCYah or MOCNah to all the latest current events, from SHLOMS' latest performance art, the vibes at NFTParis, the curatorial decisions made by TASCHEN and Morrow Collective, and the return of a fan favorite argument "ETH or USD." 

Today, Max is joined by the multifaceted artist, foundational crypto art writer, and censorship whistleblower, Natrix , to take on the dirtiest topic in "web3": How censorship —by platforms, by Twitter, and by the culture itself— infects everything that happens here. It's a conversation that ranges from Natrix's own experiences being censored, why censorship comes for sex workers first, and the on...

This week's MOCA LIVE is a revelation about all things AI. Max and his guest, the artist and Makingit24/7 member Aleqth, explore a unique perspective on the philosophy, subtleties, and possibilities of AI artistry. From marketplaces for custom-designed datasets and the unstoppable proliferation of symbols, to the evolution of artists into worldbuilders, and the coming politicization between AI tec...

Max and Colborn finally return and to a newly-formatted weekly podcast: MOCYah or MOCNah! Taking on stories, topics, sales, and tidbits from around crypto art, and separating them into one of two overly simplistic bins: Good or bad, and why. Getting the Yah/Nah treatment today: Apple's newly-released VisionPro, auction house sales of poetry and NFT rocks, a big sale for early Botto AI work, and th...

Max welcomes the artists/researchers/educators Gene Kogan and Vanessa Rosa to the podcast for another AI-centric episode. This time the conversation gets in the weeds about using AI to create connections between mediums, the layperson's changing understanding of AI, the necessity of AI education, where we can find the artist's heart in an AI artwork, chatbots, practical advice for creatives, and m...

On an episode covered in flies beside a highway off-ramp sex shop, Max and Colborn talk to provocateur and ground-beef purveyor, Diewiththemostlikes, about remixing eons of art in his own image, the power of parody, the social media abyss, the importance of keeping comedy in crypto art, and how looking deeply into the void is actually a kind of superpower. 

Goodbye Current Events (for the moment), hello Current Events and Company! Colborn and Max are joined by a whole cavalcade of guests to discuss all things RarePepe, from the OG project's inception and influences, its expansion into every tiny little facet of crypto culture, its incredible memetic longevity, and the true value of the original RarePepes, the Nakamoto card that started it all. Today'...

On today's podcast, Colborn and Max are joined by the curator, Eleanor Brizi, and the OG crypto artist, Moxarra Gonzalez, to talk about crypto art's humble beginnings, it's most important early figures, Moxarra's position as crypto art's resident journalist, the tired and the trite and most exciting parts of crypto art's present, and much more. 

After the SEC announced this week that Bitcoin Spot ETFs can be traded on the U.S. stock exchange, Max and Colborn do a deep dive into what these ETFs are, why it took so long for their approval, and what this means for crypto and crypto art in both the short-term and long-term. Then the two revisit some of the best and worst Bitcoin ETF tweets in the new segment, MOCYa or MOCNah?  

On today's podcast, Filecoin Senior Fellow Danny O'Brien joins Max and Colborn to explore the good, the bad, the dangerous, and the experimental aspects of preserving absolutely, positively everything on the internet. Danny takes us through the cultural wonders of preserving an art movement, the fight Filecoin is fight, the good and bad of having every online post live forever, his days as an earl...

On the first Current Events of 2024, Max and Colborn hit all the stories they missed over the holidays, including crypto art's reaction to the Steamboat Willie copyright ending, the continued fervor around Ordinals, the U.S. Government's new law requiring KYC for all large crypto transactions, and Avalanche courting the PFP ecosystem. They end with the first MOCYah/MOCNah good and bad tweets of th...

On 2024's inaugural podcast, Max and Colborn are back with their professional, personal, and crypto-art-wide New Years resolutions! Join us for a wide-ranging and joyful ol' discussion about returning to the art, radical abundance, determining our own values, and much more! 

It's the First Annual MOCA LIVE Awards Show! We give out awards for all sorts of things —good, bad, ugly, completely FUBAR— that happened in 2023. It's a trip down memory lane, for better and for worse, with your uproarious hosts, Max and Colborn. Join us for laughs, tears, a frankly unsettling amount of curse words, and our thoughts on a pretty nutso year in crypto art. 

On Current Events this week, Max and Colborn talk about an AI scandal and whether artists should have a responsibility to disclose AI use, how artist/influencer cabals work, a week full of various crypto hacks (are we back?), and why so many artists seem to be moving towards the Solana ecosystem. 

Max and Colborn are joined for the second time by artist, curator, and TimeAI100 laureate Linda Dounia for a deep-dive, all-encompassing AI power-talk. Linda leads us into a conversation about homogeneous AI monoculture, how it affects us, why we're sick of it, and how to destroy it outright, before we go off on a series of tangents: Where does culture come from? Why export a dying western aesthet...

This week, Max and Colborn talk about the TezPole phenomenon from a few angles: The beautiful community response, the pathetic Tezos foundation, the best and worst of crypto art, all wrapped up in one chicken-wire-wrapped cylinder. After that, they discuss why EtherRocks are selling once again, the merging of RugRadio with Decrypt Media, and what people really crave from their art: human connectio...

Max and Colborn are joined by the two brilliant Argentine artists, Julian Brangold and Frenetik Void, for a chaotic discussion of all things AI, starring their strange, provocative, oddly-endearing AI-assisted collaborative project, PsiPsiKoko (which you have to see to believe). The conversation ranges from using AI as a tool vs. treating it as a collaborator, to the homogeneity of most AI artwork...

Max and Colborn start off discussing what Bitcoin breaking $40,000 (at long last) means for crypto and crypto art, if anything at all. They go on to discuss Observer's male-dominated list of blockchain art power brokers, ROBNESS taking his JPEG talents to Ebay, why crypto art won't make the traditional art world play by it's own rules, and aliens. 

Joining Max on the show this week is Subjective.art curator and creative director, Clay Devlin. The two talk about Clay's now-extensive experience curating IRL exhibits that bring together physical, digital, and crypto artists and audiences, the roots of crypto art's crisis of individualism, how connected crypto art really is to mainstream artistry, curation stories, advice to would-be curators, a...

This week, Max and Colborn talk about the seeming blood-feud between artist Refik Anadol and critic Jerry Saltz, how multi-layered performances by Matt Kane and Operator are stretching the crypto art paradigm ever-higher, why crypto art continues to take itself so seriously and how that's hurting us, and more!

A wild and wacky podcast as Max and Colborn attempt to breakdown a wacky and wild document: Hugo Ball's 1918 "Dada Manifesto," which may or may not have elevated modernism to new heights in Europe. This is a text about nonsense, the absurd quite literally, giving things names and taking them away, the invention of an entirely new language. As crypto art everyday fights further to solidify its own...