An Interview with John Orion Young

I met him right out of college in Boulder, Colorado. He was thinking about leaving Kid Robot to start a bike company and I was like, “You should totally do it and you should hire me!” Then like a week later, he called me and said, “I’m quitting and I’m hiring you.” So I ended up working with Paul for, I think, three years. We worked in Boulder for a year, then we moved the bike company to Vermont and worked there for two years. They’re still running the bike company there, but then I left for California.

Paul had a huge impact on me. He taught me a lot of stuff. A lot about duality, aesthetic, and design. I did a lot of the photo work for Budnitz Bicycles and some sales. A lot of that influence has made its way into my new work.

Dan: I didn’t know you were into photography. If you weren’t working in VR sculpture, what would you be working in?

John: Oh man, I’ve actually been thinking a lot about that lately. I just moved recently and every time I move, I kind of reconsider everything. I think I would get more serious about making clothes. I make a lot of my own clothes, I paint my clothes, I make a lot of apparel and stuff like that. A lot of lifestyle stuff. But I just make it for fun, for myself.

I think that could be a really fun direction, to make something more physical. And I think it could be cool to somehow make something physical and issue a token of it at the same time, then when it sells, to pay the current owner of the corresponding token a portion of that sale. There are some interesting things to do there, too.

If you’re putting a brand on your shirt, you’re really putting yourself out there with your identity connected to that brand. In this day and age, we’re all more conscientious about that stuff because corporations generate revenue by selling our data.

Blockchain and smart contracts provide more efficient mechanisms to reward people for repping our brands, for being part of the team. Everyone that supports a brand could and should be rewarded. That’s a huge next step I’m trying to figure out: how to tie all those incentives in. If you own Original JOY, and Original JOY shows up on a t-shirt, and it sells like crazy, then you should get paid part of that revenue.

Dan: Why did you choose to create one-of-one editions instead of editions of twenty or one hundred?

John: The thing that made me most excited about blockchain was creating one-of-one original digital art. I’ve spent a lot of time making art in traditional mediums like oil painting. When you spend months making a huge six foot by eight foot painting, it’s hard to sell it because it’s so expensive and your friends can’t afford it yet because you’re a young painter. There are all these complexities that come with selling a work in a physical medium.

So, I bought a paper printer. I was creating prints, maybe an edition of twenty or an edition of thirty. I got a credit card machine and I’d do art shows. I’d show up at the art show with the painting and I’d try to hustle prints of it. It’s a crazy, roundabout way of meeting the desire of somebody who wants to own that original artwork.

If somebody wants to own an original, they should be able to. Nobody knows for sure how much that original artwork is worth. But if somebody could just buy it for a dollar, and then somebody else can buy it for two dollars, and so on, and each time the artist can get paid, it makes so much sense. The work finds a price close to its value and collectors get to own the original. It’s just that their ownership is limited by time frame instead of by the immediacy of its connection with the original. To me, it’s a system that makes so much sense, and it’s the kind of thing you can only implement effectively with blockchain.

But it feels weird to me to create an edition of twenty and then say, “Each one of these one-of-twenty Original JOYs costs one Ether.” That model definitely lines up a little bit more with reality and how conventional ownership works, but I see this project as an opportunity to experiment a little bit and see what else we could do.

Dan: You must be pretty excited about Decentraland, right? Have you worked with those guys? Are you planning on expanding into that world or is JOYworld going to be separate from Decentraland?

John: I really want to get into Decentraland. One of my original collectors, who goes by KalebK on Discord, owns a bunch of LAND. When he’s ready to start building it out, I’m going to help him. We’re going to build a little section of JOYworld in there. I definitely want to build a JOYland in there, at least an access point into JOYworld or a kiosk where you can learn about it. Decentraland really excites me and has definitely inspired me in a lot of my thinking and what I want to do with my artwork. I want to integrate with them. I talked to a few people over there, but I just haven’t found a clear path in.

It’s weird. I make game art, so I talk to a lot of people in the VR space. And because of my art market, I talk to a lot of people in the crypto space. Crypto people are definitely bullish on Decentraland. But then, it seems like a lot of VR people are doubtful. They seem to feel that as VR matures, it will take a form similar to the internet’s. They tend to believe that there doesn’t need to be one centralized place or access point. Instead, they believe you’ll just be passing links around to people and users will jump into different experiences. But I love the idea of one cohesive, shared, decentralized world with ownership and assets. I think it’s cool. I can see a version of it working. There are so many people working on making it real that it’s got to become real.

Dan: It surprises me that VR artists aren’t psyched about Decentraland. It seems like they’d be well equipped to tap into the new opportunities made possible by a platform like Decentraland. When it comes to art, are the opportunities for using blockchain more about generating meaning or generating revenue?

John: The blockchain art world mirrors the traditional art world a lot of ways. There’s a contingent of people who are working very hard to make art for the sake of art, to make meaning. There are also people working to not make meaning. The purpose of a lot of art is to remove meaning, to ask questions, and to cause people to question meaning.

I’m interested in both the possibilities to create meaning and the possibilities to create new economies. That’s why I built the art market first. I was looking at JOYworld and I was thinking about how to solve the problem of who would own what, about the problem of how property and economics would work inside there. And I felt like it made more sense to start with the incentive structures. People are incentivized by money and by speculating; it generates a lot of excitement. And I feel like VR tools aren’t quite up to par yet.

But for JOYworld itself, the core feeling and experience in there will be intrinsic. It’ll be about creativity, fun, and excitement. The art market will be a place where people who don’t necessarily want to create or make things will be able to speculate and participate.

Both types of opportunity excite me. I like the idea of investing in art and the idea of messing with the monetary systems surrounding value creation in art. I like using the blockchain to manage property records and to allow people to efficiently buy art when they’re willing to pay more for it.

Dan: How do you feel about the commodification of art?

John: Man, if you’d asked me in art school, my answer would have been way different from what it is now. But actually, I am so fascinated by speculation and commodification of art. I’m really obsessed with art ports. Say a collector in London buys a Picasso from somebody in America, but doesn’t want to import it, they can put it in an art port. And it just sits there. No one sees it, no one looks at it, and at some point, somebody else just comes and buys it. I love that whole world and the idea that a Picasso has its own economy, driven by the magic of those pigments on that board. I think that’s just amazing.

But commodification and speculation can get weird. What happens in a place like Decentraland, as speculation increases, property becomes too expensive for somebody new to come in and say something interesting. But I don’t feel like that’s a completely satisfactory reason to be flatly opposed to commodification or to rule out opportunities for people to make money.

But we need to make sure there’s still room to create value off of creativity. Instead of just saying, “You have to make a finished product to make a sale,” we should be asking how we can celebrate somebody for making something and how we can financially incentivize them to keep creating, to reward them for their effort. There are intrinsic reasons to create, but I feel like we also have to build a reward system, somehow, so that people can live off of that creativity.

If we could build ways for people to live off of their creativity, then people will build even weirder, more interesting stuff that will push us all forward. We all have to have money to live. You can’t avoid it. It has to somehow be part of the art process. And now we have new tools to make that a reality. So, I’m excited to experiment with it, at least.

Dan: Speaking of paying the bills, your contract has processed around 120 ETH in six months. Each time a piece changes hands, you get a cut of the sale price. But you’ve said to me that it’s not enough to live off. What do you do to put food on the table?

John: I haven’t created enough ETH flow to live off of yet, but with a few more iterations and improvements, it will totally happen. I did a lot of design work and for the past year so, I’ve actually been exiting stock positions [Laughs] and self-funding this whole project. I’ve been self-funding my insanity. [Laughs]

I’ve been working since the time I got out of college. One day I was doing design work for a bunch of different people, and I’d been experimenting with the VR art and the blockchain stuff, and all of a sudden, it just felt right to me.

After working for so many years — I’m 33 now and I’ve been working ever since I got out of college — I decided I needed to spend some of my money on myself and actually build something that I really believe in, that I want other people to be excited about. So that’s what I’m doing.

Dan: Wow. That was the perfect wrap-up speech. Thank you so much for your time. I can’t wait to see where the project goes from here!