Visual artist All Seeing Seneca is known for her paintings and characters of "cosmic horror and candyland". A muted yet suggestive color palette and surreal expressions are hallmarks of her artwork, inspired by her A love of "horror, animation and graphics".
"Her creativity fueled a technological revolution," Rolling Stone wrote, praising her contributions as lead designer of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), which rocked NFTs when it launched in April 2021 world.
For specific details, please click: Boring Ape Creator, a 27-year-old Chinese girl’s NFT journey
Seneca attended Rhode Island School of Design and after graduation her work earned her commercial clients, while her paintings and illustrations have won prestigious awards and been exhibited in international galleries such as the New York Armory.
Her first NFT collection, a collection of four pieces, was recently presented at her first solo auction of a series of works with Phillips Auction House, and her work has since been sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
She is also a featured artist on PROOF’s Grails: Season 3 and was named one of the most influential artists of 2021 by Coindesk.
Describing itself as “the premier innovation platform for building digital creativity and the future of web3,” Transient Labs develops “a cutting-edge toolkit for digital creators, enabling them to realize ambitious and groundbreaking projects built on decentralization and self-sovereignty.”
Founded by artists, entrepreneurs and aerospace engineers, Transient Labs focuses on creativity and technical prowess to unlock the potential of blockchain technology in the creative industries. They provide web3 products including custom smart contracts and immersive digital experiences.
Transient Labs states that their mission is to build an inclusive, autonomous, decentralized, and innovative web3 future.
Now, All Seeing Seneca is releasing her groundbreaking digital art series titled “Perils of Sēsē.” Limited to 2,880 unique pieces, this illustrative, generative and hand-drawn series promises to provide an immersive experience into the enchanting world of her surreal imagination. “Perils of Sēsē” will be the first collection to be released on Transient Labs’ innovative token standard, ERC-7160.
Allowlist minting begins at 10:00 AM PT on Thursday, November 30, with public minting beginning two hours later at 12:00 PM PT on Thursday, November 30.
OpenSea: We’d love to start with a macro question about your art. Who or what are your biggest inspirations and influences when creating?
All Seeing Seneca: I’m passionate about comics, classic illustrations, animated films, promotional and advertising poster design, and experimental music! Put all of this together and I think you get the idea of the design characteristics of my work.
As for who, I'd have to say David Lynch, Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss, Mary Blair, Junji Ito... and many visual development artists I've met who do background designs, characters, etc., but who never become their own entity.
OpenSea: Can you tell us about your artistic background and how you got into the world of web3 and NFTs?
Seneca: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing stories in my head or dreaming up a movie. I was a very introverted kid, too concerned with my own imagination than reality. Yes, I was the token “art kid” in my grade. Boring and obvious! But it made sense.
I went on to train as a classical artist and designer at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I became a professional illustrator, all the while developing my personal work as I navigated the choppy waters of freelance work.
The first footprint of my work in web3 was with Bored Apes, and I’m not kidding, it was the character design collaboration that brought me here.
OpenSea: What is the inspiration behind your new generative art series “Perils of Sēsē”? Would you say this series represents a departure or evolution from your previous work?
Seneca: It started with three things, first, I wanted to build something original in my own voice, something to do with introspection, self-reflection; second, I wanted to challenge myself to take an abstract concept and create a tangible visual design that accurately captured the essence and feel of that concept, which led me to take existing structures from Freud’s theory of the human psyche (id, superego and ego) and spin them into characters; third, I took inspiration from cel animation, the generative aspect of it came from this method of using a single background and varying different elements, characters and poses, ultimately changing the meaning behind each still image.
I would say all of the above? My paintings look and feel a little different because they have different techniques but honestly if you can understand the brush strokes and tones then everything is cohesive, what is new here is that I am taking things to a different level than before, I am trying to world build.
OpenSea: “Perils” uses a mix of generative and hand-drawn elements, can you discuss the balance between the two and how they contribute to the overall aesthetic and storytelling?
Seneca: It's all hand-drawn and painted by me, which is always very important because that's where my roots are - from traditional illustration and animation, and the computer can't help me better than I can.
Where the code really comes into its own: the mechanics of it taking the elements of my art and churning them out and spitting them out, I think of it like having a team of 100 animators in the studio, working on every frame under my direction, and this script that was crafted by my incredibly talented technical partner does just that.
Automation was also a factor where I had to understand “danger” and was I ready to give up some control over the final design in some ways? There was an aspect of fate to the random output, as well as a vision that I curated.
Once again, I have to thank my partners at Transient Labs, who as artists themselves completely understood it and knew what needed to be done to execute this idea!
OpenSea: “Perils of Sēsē” is the first collection to utilize Transient Labs’ ERC-7160 technology. How has this new standard impacted your creative process? What possibilities does it open up for artists and collectors?
Seneca: I will say that I didn’t realize Transient was working on 7160 until after the fact, and we like to say that our collaboration was “accidental” – both of our goals were achieved by coming together, and they clearly have a head for storytelling (quite literally, with the “Story Inscription” feature, I’ll let them name the genius behind them).
Any innovative tool continues to evolve and challenge the creator to make the most of it, it may be that the tool comes before the artist or it may be that the artist comes before the tool - in this case it’s the latter.
OpenSea: How does the ERC-7160 standard impact your interactions as an artist, collector, and art itself?
Seneca: The purpose of Perils is to create a story beat that encourages the viewer to pause in this world of instant gratification, to try to connect and see the soul behind the artwork. I wanted to create something that is interesting at first glance, but when you hold it longer, you feel a deeper meaning. The new 7160 standard gives art an "evolution".
OpenSea: You describe Perils of Sēsē as a non-linear, multi-chapter abstract story about self-reflection. How does the narrative structure of the series align with the generative nature of art? What kind of experience do you hope the audience will have as they move through the story?
Seneca: It’s inspired by the work of traditional cel animation, where you have a painted background and then transparent cel with hand-drawn characters, poses and effects elements that interweave together to tell the story, and like I mentioned before, generative scripting can do that for me, it’s like I have animators working with me, but with a spark of automation.
The experience I want people to feel is one of preciousness and wonder, I started collecting anime cels when I first could afford them, it feels really precious, holding in my hands a frame of an artwork I love, how people feel about my personal artwork is something I can’t control, but maybe this construction holds more meaning in people’s eyes than a traditional 1/1 painting.
My works can be a little dark so maybe they can feel a little scary as well, I always seek to capture the feeling of fear as I am inspired by cosmic horror and dreams.
OpenSea: Given your positive experience using ERC-7160 in “Perils of Sēsē,” do you plan to work on any future projects using this innovative token standard?
Seneca: Maybe, who knows, if I had an idea in my mind I certainly wouldn’t give it up now, anyone who knows me knows I would keep quiet until it made sense and I could be proud of it.
OpenSea: Who or what excites you right now in the web3 and NFT space?
Seneca: The fact is that we’re starting from scratch, and I think I said something like this on the podcast: “We’re witnessing the evolution of the human species, and I’m an amoeba.”
There are incredible traditional producers, artists and crazy entrepreneurs all working from scratch here which is just amazing and something I don’t think I would have been able to witness in my previous work environment, I love it so much, there is so much brilliance around me.
OpenSea: As the lead artist behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, your work has had a significant impact on the NFT community. As the ecosystem continues to grow, what developments or trends are you most excited about? How do you see them shaping the future of web3 art?
Seneca: Some advice for any creator or creative: don’t follow trends, work on creating them, and the best way to do that is to be true to yourself, trust that your true work will find its home, and it may not be what you think it is, who cares about trends? If I were doing this, I would make a Seneca spin-off ape series in my first year.
This may not be the answer you’re looking for, but I have zero vision for what “web3 art” will look like, will we be calling it web3 in a few years? Could we finally decide to call this stuff “digital art” instead of “NFT art”? We have zero control over what this culture will become, and as artists we should focus on each of our experiments and commit to making them as beautiful as possible.
OpenSea: Can you talk about the motivation behind creating the ERC-7160 token standard and how it addresses existing challenges or limitations in the NFT space?
Marco Peyfuss (co-founder of Transient Labs and co-author of the ERC-7160 standard): We have always been interested in creating ways to use blockchain as part of the creative/artistic process and make smart contract code truly a work of art, and looking back at our past projects we thought it was very obvious that ERC-7160 was a step in that direction, where on-chain history is preserved and you can start telling very compelling and unique stories using smart contracts.
Often, projects are forced to change metadata if they want to provide some sort of evolution or storytelling, which can cause friction with collectors as their tokens are forcibly changed and cannot return to their previous state.
ERC-7160 solves this problem because collectors have ultimate ownership of the item and can choose to display any state the token has ever held. It also provides an opportunity to tell the story of a single token rather than an entire series at once, which provides a deeper relationship between creators and collectors.
OpenSea: How does ERC-7160 support artists and collectors like Seneca?
Marco Peyfuss: ERC-7160 greatly empowers creators and collectors. Creators have the power to tell never-ending stories with on-chain provenance and immutability, and collectors always have the final say over their token metadata. The standard really helps strengthen true ownership without limiting the creator's vision.
OpenSea: Transient Labs has a dual focus on creativity and technical strength. How do you view the contribution of ERC-7160 and other innovations to the intersection of blockchain technology and the creative industry?
Marco Peyfuss: We believe that blockchain can be used as an artistic medium, similar to a paintbrush or generative code. NFTs are the next generation of digital items. You can unleash unlimited creativity through blockchain. Our mission is to provide creators with these innovations without having to write any code.
View Perils of Sēsē on OpenSea:
opensea.io/collection/perils-of-sese-by-all-seeing-seneca
Cover photo of the artist by Fei Tang
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