Michael Kutsche

🚀I'm proud that my newest 1/1 frag·men·tal has been selected for the upcoming Contemporary Discoveries auction at @Sothebys , starting Feb 22nd at 10am HKT. Excited to be featured alongside legends such as @terrelldom , @brokedidonato and @sleeprNFT 🔥

𝔻𝕀𝕆ℝ𝔸𝕄𝔸 𝕀𝕍 (🔊 on)

@rhett Great quote 🤝 I can never fully grasp how people (especially crypto folks) don't realize how tasteless it is to entangle materialism (spiritually poor) with art (spiritually vast) on such levels.

@michaelkutsche “When they bring the art out at an auction, do they clap? No. They clap when the hammer goes down. So they applaud the price, they don't applaud the Picasso.” — Fran Lebowitz

The NFT space is still working hard to sell the dream of the independent artist (I still occasionally see posts of young hopefuls quitting their day jobs to chase this pipe dream, which honestly feels insane at this point). It’s like selling tickets to a public show that is really a private club with ten initiated inside. But the thousands left outside in the cold are not incidental, they are part of the spectacle. The chosen ones need an audience watching their wins, applauding them, and thinking, “One day.” Just as a Lamborghini exists for the sole reason that most people can't afford one. Without that crowd, it’s just a sad small club congratulating itself. Ironically, this resembles our (capitalist) society at large. If you're looking for proof, start asking yourself why success here is measured almost entirely by sales volume and record prices.

@DrDreams 🔥🔥🔥

Bambi the Destroyer returns on Saturday Morning with pure ’80s retro camp! Epic villains, wild fantasy action, and over-the-top B-movie energy. Think classic adventure vibes with a strong female hero leading the charge. Pure PG-13 nostalgic fun.

@DrDreams 🙏🙂

@michaelkutsche Whoa this is so cool.

@BrutalS81 Means a lot brother

@michaelkutsche Always immensely proud of my dear friend!

@BrutalS81 Marco my friend 🖤

@michaelkutsche Michael 🫂

@BrutalS81 @verse_works Gm Marco 🔥

GM 9 days left to collect ⟦ OVEREXPOSURE ⟧ on @verse_works 702/1000 · $21.90 Collect link + preview of the airdrop coming to holders ↓

Test-driving the real-time interactive world model @HappyOysterAI by @AlibabaGroup (🔊 on) No polygons. No character rigs. No game engine. It's uncanny but strangely satisfying to control my own character creations with just a keyboard, like in an interactive movie scene in real-time. As someone who started out as a 3d animator over 30 years ago, before becoming a character designer on many major Hollywood productions (and who made mocap experiments with Kinect cameras in 2015), I have to say this is quite mind-boggling. The inefficiency of the controls (the characters still react only sporadically and then go off rails) and random soundtrack that came with it only add to the accidental comedy and the feeling that we might just be living in a simulation after all. 💀

Do you know that feeling when you're like, »Next week will be better«? But then next week just has different deadlines Anyway, here's a text about the part of my week where I was looking at art and talking to people, and then, at the end of the week, thinking about things. It's not my best text, but that's what happens when you plan to write one Substack post per week and actually stick to that plan. It'll also tell you which interviews are about to be published. And then I also decided last week that Friedrich Kunath is my favorite painter, I guess. Met him for a preview of his upcoming show at Pace in Berlin. Meeting my old team and Friedrich there felt a bit like 2021. 🥹

That's a bit optimistic I think. It's also not fully clear what the use case for this is, right now it seems more of a flex/gimmick. Developing it uses a lot of resources so if there's not a market for it, development will stop. I have to admit I'm actually having more fun with this than playing actual video games (games are too predictable and repetitive for me). The randomness of something like Happy Oyster feels much more dream-like and interesting than walking through pre-meditated campaigns to gather points. But I also really don't have a mainstream taste in movies either, so I'm not representative of the market. My guess is that games of the future will be a hybrid of current game engines with AI powered enhancement which will open complete new horizons for realism but also more experimental and artistic visuals. NVIDIA has already previewed some of this, although it looks a bit so-so. But bundled with Happy Oyster type tech it could be on another level.

@michaelkutsche @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup Yep. How long do you think we are from real time 4k photorealistic video interaction like this? 6 months?

@DrDreams @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup It's wild how the extension of the scene (which is beyond the frame) is completely cohesive with the original frame.

@michaelkutsche @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup This is wild - from a single image - a 3d real time game...happyoyster.com/share/travel/4…

@DrDreams @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup 👀🔥

@michaelkutsche @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup Checking it out now

@stinkycubert @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup 🙏

@michaelkutsche @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup Ooh 👊

@jennykrakovsky @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup Thanks! My character designer background has proven as very beneficial when working with these tools.

@michaelkutsche @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup Love how detailed the characters are. It takes a long time to create this level of depth.

Yes, it's quite remarkable, and quite a step ahead from Genie3. I would point out that because it is emulating in-game footage (which is most likely heavily present in the training dataset), the NPC-like movement of the characters and third person-camera break the "realness" of it. But the lighting, materials, consistency and three-dimensionality of the characters and space as well as camera lens behavior surpasses Unreal Engine by far. It looks much more natural and less CG than any of these game engines, because it emulates camera footage and closely sticks to the input frame, as opposed to doing an approximation of reality with textured polygon models, 3d shaders etc, which always results in a too crisp, mathematical and lifeless look. If I throw this frame into Seedance 2 or Kling, it is almost indistinguishable from real, analog film footage. But what's crazy is, this is not pre-rendered in a video model, this is running in real-time.

@michaelkutsche @HappyOysterAI @AlibabaGroup This looks completely unreal to be honest