#35 - Roger Haus

Tell us more about you.

Hello, I am Roger Haus from Barcelona, Spain. Excited to meet the NZBR team and readers!

Since I can remember, I have loved to draw. So when I finished the Artistic Bachelor Degree, it was clear that I wanted to take the path of an artist. I signed up at the La Llotja School of Arts and Crafts and later for the Graphic Design and Art Direction at the Higher School of Design and Fashion in Barcelona, Spain. I ventured into developing a visual language for bands like Cocoon, Els Amics de les Arts to expressively communicate a new product, being engaged in an illustration agency whose major clients included Amazon, Nasa, Spotify, and Microsoft. My goal was to provide the world with the finest vector art, illustrations, icons, posters, branding, animation, made with a modern aesthetic in my personal style. 

The long quarantine that the whole world went through in 2020 was a great revelation for me. I decided to take advantage of that large amount of time and I founded the digitally native project Exquisite Workers. Exquisite Workers was born from the need to co-create among hundreds of creatives in difficult times such as the pandemic, overcome the isolation and emotional trauma of the lockdown and build an active network communication with opportunities.

As a basis for creative exchange, I used the Exquisite Corpse game technique. Exquisite Corpse has a funny name, but it's not as scary as it sounds. It's an exciting surreal practice where players contribute to a sequence of images without seeing the next or previous block. On April 6, 2020, we co-created the first Exquisite Corpse on Instagram with hundreds of artists from around the world.

The readers are encouraged to explore the rich legacy of the participating digital and AI artists and the longest piece of art based on this great collaborative drawing approach. The age of the participants varies between 1.5 and 95 years and the number of illustrations in 2022 already exceeds 3.000. Although the artists strictly follow the rules, the drawings' continuous figures in a shape of a snake always culminate in unpredictable fantastical forms which are ultimately one single object, in which one piece would not exist without another one.

With Exquisite Workers, we search to engage communities through the liberating and positive experience of the game, to create a lasting impact, and to add real value to creators' lives through education, exhibition and open call opportunities. We search to add value to the commercial sector too and provide unique illustrations to projects, brands, and organizations which are available to purchase online. We have an annual tradition to release the Calendar which includes exquisite illustrations in different colors for each month from the best Exquisite Corpse editions as well as the creators' accounts. It is distributed around bookshops and shipped worldwide. 

On May 1, 2021, we started our first NFT collection which finally and fully came out after 12 months. Our pride is that these days when it is ready to see the world, Exquisite Workers has been nominated at NFT.NYC Awards among over 12.000 nominations for the Diversity Award, the Best NFT Project for Creators, the Best ecological initiative from an NFT project. I am delighted with the achievements of our creative collective. Our artists´ refined imagination, sleek skills, poetic language, and multiculturality, make Exquisite Workers a hit in the purity of its results and uniqueness. 

How do you describe your NFT Art?

With 15 years of experience creating digital products, my NFT work is a blend of several disciplines— Digital Illustration, Product Design, Animated Music and Art Direction. These days I am experimenting with the GAN, or Artificial Intelligence.

My first contact with AI was about 10 years ago with the appearance of Google Deep Dream. It was one of the first algorithms to come to light created by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsey. The operation was very simple. You uploaded a photograph and the algorithm reinterpreted its shapes in a somewhat psychedelic way. There wasn't any kind of control in the result, it was just clicking a button and the magic happened, but it was still fascinating. It was in 2022 that I began to be interested in AI again. First with Disco Diffusion, then with Midjourney, DALL-E 2 and finally Stable Diffusion. 

I have been interested in creating works with a pictorial style, either static or in motion, almost always playing with pop icons from current and past culture, as well as experimenting in a field closer to that of photography. I invite you to explore the compilation of my AI works created in 2022 on Foundation as well as on Objkt.com. 

In August 2022, a selection of my works was projected in a large building in Brussels thanks to Artcrush Gallery which became the first open-air AI art show in Belgium. The same month I created the first collection of synthetic photography, or AI photography under Time Traveler AI. 

Exploring Artificial Intelligence technology in depth I was quickly seduced by the idea that with this technology we could actually travel in history as if we were time travelers. Time Traveler AI, the imaginary photographer of imaginary characters, has created the archive of the photos of the past, present and future in his albums. His last project was with Vitalik Buterin himself, whom he was able to convince to pose for his fashion photographs. From this extravagant collaboration, the digital clothing brand Vitalik Wear was born, where through fleeting trips to other times I explore fashion design with the help of AI.

I think AI art has the potential to change the way we think about creativity. Traditionally, creativity has been seen as a uniquely human trait, but AI art challenges this notion by showing that machines are capable of generating truly original and thought-provoking works of art. What I also love about AI is its ability to bring people together and captivate them with a sense of surprise. Collaborating with AI, we can tap into a shared neural network, new understandings and perspectives, we tap into something bigger, into the Unknown. 

Why did you choose this piece to show us?

I have chosen to show you the “Hypnagogies”.

There was indeed a groundbreaking moment in my art career which came with a creation of this giant piece in 2011. It was my first substantial project highlighted in galleries, on TimeOut, Wetransfer, featured by UN Habitat at COP26, UK in 2021 and by the Seattle NFT Museum, USA in 2022.

From Catalan “Hypnagogies“, or "Hypnagogic hallucinations", refer to a state which the mind experiences between wakefulness and sleep, when consciousness is not yet active and the subconscious dominates the mind. In the waking state, subjects usually attempt to systematically search known associations in order to discover a solution, whereas in the hypnagogic state, intuitive hunches may naturally draw together new and unusual, distant associations.  

These vivid and often surreal experiences are windows into the unconscious creative process and have been a source of inspiration for many artists throughout history. The surrealist movement, for example, was heavily influenced by dreams and the unconscious mind, and many surrealist artists used dreams as a source of inspiration for their work.

Late at night, I held a pencil in my hand and forced myself to go back to drawing while listening to James Holden´s dynamic techno beats. By day I dived into "Princess Mononoke" cartoon films, the comics of Edward Gorey, Blanquet, Moebius, Charles Burns, and Thomas Ott´s illustrations. I searched for the excellence in the impressive arts of Salvador Dalí and Ramon Casas in the MNAC Museum in Barcelona.

After 3 months of daily practice, I experienced how my thoughts traveled around my mind freely, leaving traces, and evolving into images. Interwoven layers of icons spread over one another knitting a mysterious organism became a 120-180 cm large digital piece. 

“Hypnagogies” has become my statement about my art practice focused on equilibrium, interconnectivity, complexity and virtual humanism. Whether it is our relationship with nature, geography, or gender, balance is the key. We are increasingly living virtual lives, all connected and with no boundaries. Inclusion and diversity is vital in everything, but in Metaverse especially. Web3 is here to make possible a richer experience in a virtual existence that should be a little less separate and lonely. It is also here to open a dialogue about what we can do to be better human beings.

I am excited to announce that “Hypnagogies”  will be released on SuperRare in 2023.

Can you leave a message to collectors and other artists that are willing to connect with you?

I believe that through the process of appreciating art we witness the struggles and the brilliance of humanity and through the process of creating art we surrender to the brilliance within ourselves. As humans, we have inherited many valuable traditions and legacies from our ancestors. It is now our turn to be the ancestors that future generations will be proud of. We can do this by being passionate, vulnerable, and rebellious in our pursuit of a better world. We should embrace new ways of thinking and new tools that can help us create a better future. Let our lives be a testament to humanity's impact on the planet, and let the Exquisite Corpse - a Surrealist game that involves creating collaborative works of art - be a source of wisdom and teach us that each person's contribution to the collective is important.

Thank you to the NZBR for your interest in my NFT art and for your thoughtful questions. I appreciate the opportunity to share more about my work.

Websites to visit: https://www.rogerhaus.com/ and www.exquisiteworkers.com.