Nick Knight on ikon-1, Digital Fashion, and Beauty as Ethics | Unreleased NFT Magazine Podcast

Previously unreleased: this NFT Magazine interview is published here for the first time.

Photographer and image-maker Nick Knight, founder of SHOWstudio, talks with David Cash about ikon-1, his first NFT collection, and why he believes artists need to help build the metaverse. The conversation runs from SHOWstudio's first experiments in 2000 to 3D scanning, ZBrush, AI image generators, and the place of mistakes in making images.

Hosted by David Cash. Book David to host, moderate, or speak: https://davidcash.ca

Recorded remotely in August 2022 as ikon-1 was launching, Nick recalls Alexander McQueen's Plato's Atlantis livestream, the show that crashed the site and pushed most of London Fashion Week to stream the next season. He explains how the collection grew out of his long collaboration with Jazzelle Zanaughtti (Ugly Worldwide), about 40 digital-only fashion designers, and hairstylist Eugene Souleiman's found-object hairpieces, and why each NFT is meant as a ticket into future SHOWstudio events. He closes on fear of failure, the cross-processing experiments of his film days, and the trust that lets him show designers like Rei Kawakubo their work in a new way.

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Chapters

1. 00:00 Intro: Nick Knight, founder of SHOWstudio
2. 1:25 SHOWstudio and the return of the frontier
3. 3:33 Novacene, AI, and why artists belong in the metaverse
4. 6:18 Alexander McQueen livestreams Plato's Atlantis
5. 10:57 3D scanning, avatars, and sculpting in ZBrush
6. 15:32 AI image generators and the artist's medium
7. 19:16 How ikon-1 came together
8. 23:39 Fashion's sustainability problem and digital-only designers
9. 29:56 The NFT as a ticket to the SHOWstudio community
10. 34:18 From audience to community: the human touch
11. 37:59 Mistakes, fear of failure, and spontaneity
12. 43:35 Cross-processing and not copying the past
13. 46:42 Trust, and a note from Rei Kawakubo
14. 51:27 Thanks and sign-off

Speakers

• David Cash, host, NFT Magazine
• Nick Knight, photographer, image-maker, and founder of SHOWstudio

Key topics

• Founding SHOWstudio in 2000 and the early internet as frontier land
• James Lovelock's Novacene and fast-developing artificial intelligence
• Why the art community should engage with the metaverse
• Fashion's early resistance to the internet
• Alexander McQueen's Plato's Atlantis livestream and Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance"
• 3D scanning, avatars, and Lady Gaga's Chromatica Ball films
• Sculpting figures in ZBrush
• AI image generators and where the art sits in a prompt
• ikon-1 and Jazzelle Zanaughtti (Ugly Worldwide) authoring her own image
• Fashion's overproduction and digital-only fashion designers
• Beauty as an ethical way of working
• Audience participation and NFTs as access to SHOWstudio events
• Mistakes, glitches, and fear of failure in image-making
• Trust between photographer and designer

In their words

"I am a great believer in beauty as a sort of ethical tool, if you want, or an ethical way of working." Nick Knight

"We turn our mistakes into new possibilities." Nick Knight

How to cite

APA: Cash, D. (2022). Nick Knight on ikon-1, digital fashion, and beauty as ethics [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/mFk4WVSTZd8

Chicago: Cash, David. "Nick Knight on ikon-1, Digital Fashion, and Beauty as Ethics." Recorded August 3, 2022, remotely. YouTube video, 52:21. https://youtu.be/mFk4WVSTZd8.

About the series

NFT Magazine is a podcast hosted by David Cash about crypto art, digital fashion, and the metaverse. Season 1 was recorded in 2022–2023, live at events and remotely. A few of the remote episodes, including this one, were recorded but never released. They are archived on David Cash's YouTube channel.

More interviews: https://www.youtube.com/@davidcash888/playlists

Recording details

Recorded remotely on August 3, 2022. Previously unreleased. First published here, 2026.

Transcript

Machine-transcribed and reviewed. Timestamps link to the moment in the video.

[0:04] Hello everybody. Welcome back to the NFT Magazine podcast the home for crypto art online OK. David, first of all, thank you very much for such a kind Very excited to be here with a legend of the industry and I say the industry as a whole Nick Knight one of my personal heroes and somebody who is entering the NFT somebody who is entering the NFT space with an absolute boom bringing the history of Fashion photography and editorialization to the blockchain in a really exciting and cool way So I'm very excited for this conversation Nick somebody that I've been aware of for a long time And I'm very excited to see him after the crypto space the crypto art space Nick would love to kick off with a couple Questions. I think many people who are listening right now are familiar with your background If they're not we're definitely gonna dive in today in a little bit of detail, but just to kick off with the context in mind With the Web3 space booming over the past couple years I'm curious when was the point that all of this got on your horizon?

[1:01] Obviously being somebody who's been working within the 3D AR VR, you know space or aware of for quite some time When did the Web3 angle and I guess NFTs in this whole ecosystem Get on your radar and what really got you interested in this whole world It wasn't much of an internet to break but you did it and flattering introduction. I'm very touched by your lovely introduction, how nice. To answer your question directly, this world has been sort of forming for probably the last almost 25 years for me. It's sort of strange, because I started SHOWstudio in the year 2000, but obviously we spent a couple of years trying to conceive it beforehand. So we're looking about 1998. We first started seeing through the burgeoning internet. There was a possibility that it was quite outside of conventional media. And it was very much at that point sort of frontier land that you felt there was nobody in front of you who could emulate, so you were going into it and trying things out.

[2:01] In a good way, it was like being the first kid in the sweet shop. So you just didn't know what thing to do next, but everything seemed so exciting. And I think sort of on that note, that feeling seems to have returned. It's not so much that it went away, but I think certainly for the first five years, not 10 years of SHOWstudio, so from 2000 to 2010, it felt like there was so many different things to try. And I think for the next 10 years, we tried to make some sort of sense of it and to see what was really working. And then there were more people in the space. Then I guess about three years ago, probably at the beginning of the pandemic, it started to be clear that it was something actually coalescing and coming together in a much more sort of formalized way. And a lot of the ideas that we talked about at SHOW studio were starting to become real. The use of 3D scanning, the presence of avatars, the whole idea of kind of actually fashion online in what you would physically personally be wearing in your virtual identity.

[3:05] All these ideas that we touched on, looked at, and to some degree enjoyed playing with, started to come together in a much more coherent way. I still think we are in Frontierland. I still think we are looking into a vision of civilization, of humanity, or the way we relate to each other, which is still totally different to anything we really fundamentally have had before. I don't want to sort of dive in too deep, but when quickly gets to sort of, I'm a big fan of the author James Lovelock, who wrote the book Novacene, which I guess some of the people listening to this might know. And in Novacene, James Lovelock talks very much about AI and the rise of hyperintelligence. And I find it fascinating. One of the things to sort of paraphrase and to simplify a whole book is what he's talking about, is how quickly a new intelligence is developing, and probably 10,000 times faster than we are developing as a species, so we shouldn't automatically presume we are going to be the most intelligent species on the planet.

[4:13] And that's something that we should be aware of and look at and not necessarily. And where I think a lot of the people who look into the future come back with a very sort of doomsday scenario for it, which of course is possible, but I think the sort of attitude of sticking your head in the sand and wishing everything was like it was 50 years ago or before the internet isn't a realistic way to do this. And then other people will come into the space that perhaps are not so, if you want, artistically motivated. And I've said it before in interviews that I'm very worried that this new space that we are creating, we are starting to work out how we're going to be in it as a civilization, if you want, shouldn't be created by the military or an extension of capitalism. So I think it's super important for the artistic community to engage in the metaverse and to not be sort of reactionary to it or Luddite to it.

[5:15] We saw a lot in the fashion world when the internet was first forming, because the fashion world is basically a future predictive art form, if you want. In fashion, basically you're saying you will want this in six months' time, you will want to look like this in six months' time. It's talking about the future. But weirdly, when it came to the internet, quite a lot of the established part of fashion history shunned it and didn't want to have anything to do with it, didn't understand it. Some of the bigger players, I don't really want to mention any names, when I first started SHOWstudio, I went to see some of the bigger players who were in fashion media. And so look, we're doing this thing about fashion film, and we think it's an interactive thing, and a live broadcasting thing, it's all just starting out. And they were very much, no, no, we're not interested. We're putting our money into terrestrial TV, which doesn't seem the best thing to have done with their money, and have since been playing catch up.

[6:10] So I think that, weirdly, there was a lot of negativity when the internet first came along from the fashion world, but not entirely. People like Alexander McQueen were really crucial, after first being slightly not quite sure what it was, but then quite quickly, because I used to work quite a lot with him, he realized some of the possibilities. Alexander McQueen was the first big major fashion designer to say, I want to live stream my shows. At that time, nobody else was live streaming their shows. I mean, it's almost incredible now when you think about it, but nobody was live streaming the shows. And Alexander McQueen live streamed Plato's Atlantis. Lady Gaga put Bad Romance, released Bad Romance on the end of it as a kind of finale for the show. And the whole site went into meltdown. And richly, he broke the internet. And at the time, it wasn't a thing to break the internet.

[7:03] It was kind of home. It wasn't much easier to break at that point. But so that was a sort of, in a way, it had a good and bad side. It was not good, because of course, it was Alexander McQueen's last show, and his desire was to get his art to a much bigger audience. So the fact that the whole show crashed because of the number of people trying to come and see it was sad. But as I said to him, I remember on the platform of the Guardian Ore saying to him, look, Lee, you have changed history here by doing this. And he's like, yeah, but nobody saw it. And no, no, no, no, it's all gone across. I said, you have to look beyond this. You've started something here. Although you didn't do the precise thing you wanted to do, what you've done is much bigger. And of course, but the next season, 70% of London fashion shows were trying to stream live.

[7:57] From going from zero to 70%, it's a huge jump. And now, of course, live broadcasting is becoming a thing in lots of different ways. So not everybody was against internet when it first came along in fashion. But there was a sort of, I think people have a fear of the future. It's that sort of thing. I don't understand it, so I don't know how much there is of it. So it's that sort of fear of, well, I know I don't understand a specific thing, so therefore I probably don't understand any of it, therefore it's out of my reach. You're setting me up so perfectly so I have to jump in but what you're describing Yes. I'm not worried about this quite a bit I want to go. It's it's really interesting the way that you contextualize this because absolutely I think you know, the industry of fashion is constantly trying to forecast what's next actually the the initiation of my master's thesis on decentralization and NFTs Started with a trend forecast because I was at a fashion school And it started with a trend forecast of what's next and what are people what are people considering because they asked us Yeah. Oh go predict the future and I'm like, well, that's kind of impossible so I started researching technology because for me that's really what's relevant and What what I started talking about quite a lot, which is what you just mentioned, you know this fear of technology for my perspective I contextualize it with the term hypermodernity, you know We've reached a time in history where technology has reached a point that we can't potentially understand You know as a whole as humans, so I find it really interesting You know as people are entering Web3 there's this fear, you know Once again, which you just described this fear of the technology which essentially just stems from misunderstanding or not Understanding how it fits into people's lives, you know I always contextualize that with you know, we all have a phones, but we don't know how they work, you know For the most part we don't know how they work computers as well No.

[9:30] and I think probably one of the things that sets you apart for many people entering this space is almost just an acceptance and Yeah. Want for understanding of the technology beyond knowing how it works, but what can you do with it, right? What are the artistic locations of this technology? Yeah. I think you've become specific enough with your intentions in your career that you you harness technology for its creative potential Yeah. So I'd love to speak about that for a moment because I think what a lot of people are entering this Web3 space There is that fear this kind of you know, this is something new I don't know how to harness it more so when we mentioned things about the metaverse, you know And bringing fashion into the metaverse I feel like that might actually be quite similar to when you know live streaming or digitization Initially started to come up because people don't know what it is. So they're inherently scared of it So I'm curious with this collection Obviously you're bringing so many elements of and one will delve in deeper into what the exact collection is But you know just just on broader strokes for one more question. I'm curious When you're bringing these various technologies to market I feel like right now you're contextualizing with it here to here contextualizing it within something familiar, right the fashion editorial So yeah, I'm curious from your perspective being somebody who's experimenting with technology for all these years What elements are exciting you the most right now whether it's ZBrush whether it's the the avatar Whether it's the the future potential of these virtual spaces and yeah coming coming from you know Your your storied history in the space What's really exciting right now with this new realm that we're about to explore?

[10:57] It's as I was saying earlier on, for some reason, the level of excitement now is back to kind of what I felt right at the beginning of this. There seems to be a lot of the sort of sparks of ideas are now becoming real tangible possibilities and things we actually do. So we 3D scan people here, making those scans move, making them talk, et cetera, et cetera. I'm thinking I'm working on three different projects at the moment, one of which is just released, which is the Gaga Chromatica Ball. We used avatars within that. We worked with 3D scans of Gaga within that. And every one of the three projects, I can't mention the other two, I'm sorry. Every one of them has an element of that in it. The things that were just slightly weird things that were appropriated from slightly different industries.

[11:49] 3D scanning originally, when I came across it back in 1998, was really used by the automobile industry or the engineering industry to do car parts or engine parts. And that was, other than a little bit of use for Hollywood special effects, it wasn't being used for anything else. Now it's becoming a pretty standard tool for creating avatars and working within a new version of fashion. So I do think that there's really exciting things happening. You mentioned ZBrush, which is something at all that I've been working with probably for 10 years almost. And it's that thing where I sit next to, in this case, it's my friend Tom Wandra, who is a CGI artist. And he hands me the pen. And I say, OK, let's have a filter that inflates everything. And we inflate the figure. And then I suck it back through itself and then brush bits of that in.

[12:43] One would want to say it's a bit like painting or sculpting, but neither of those two are actually what it is. But it is this ability to be able to completely change the form of the person that you're working with and create new forms, just things that are pleasing to your imagination to your eye. So in a way, it's no different from painting. Of course, I don't have a brush with paint on it. But I have a pen that changes the form completely in ways which are fascinating. Anybody who's worked in ZBrush will know all the different filters, which weirdly are represented by the weirdest of icons, but whatever. And the things that they do are quite extraordinary. So to be able to work with an image in that way and manipulate it in that way is fascinating. And that's a lot of the NFT collection that we're launching, or the part of it, by the traits in it, is these sculpted forms.

[13:38] Then, of course, what you put on the sculpted forms, what the surface is, how it deals with light, how the coloration is the design on it, et cetera, et cetera. All those factors that come into this, the materiality of the form you've created, is it an extension of the person? Or is it another materiality that you're bringing in? Is it chrome? Or is it something completely different? So all those sorts of things become very fast, very quickly become ways of altering an image that starts off as a fairly identifiable rendition of the human form in something quite fantastical and quite to do with your own personal desires, your own personal things that you find pleasing and exciting, which is no different to painting and to photography. In photography, we tend to sculpt through the use of light, so how I would create an image of somebody, because they start off on a black background, and we put light on them so you can see them.

[14:39] But it's how you use that light and how you combine that with about the blur or the depth of field or the angle of the camera or the lens or all those sorts of things, which sculpts the person and creates this vision. And I would say, than I have said for a long time, the better the photographer, the more that they change what they see in front of them to be a representation of how they feel about the world, like the person in front of them, whatever it is, which I think is slightly about digressing, just like the problem I've had with how photography is often understood. Photography gets understood as the bringer of truth, where of course it's nothing like that. And I think the better the photographer, the more they can change things and show you what they're really thinking, which is what you want from any artist, really. You don't want them just to banally record what's in front of them. You want them to have an opinion about it, and that's what one likes about it.

[15:32] So moving on from that, you ask me what new technical things I'm interested in. I've been working for quite a while, not in two or three weeks now, with two different AIs, which I find fascinating. One's originally called DALL-E mini, and then the other one was called Midjourney, always called Midjourney. And these are AIs into which you type words, and they will send you back pictures. So you describe a scene, you know, man in white shirt with a pair of glasses, no hair, whatever it is. And then you say whatever style you want to see that image, and they send you back images, which is quite extraordinary. And they'd have both the AIs have different aesthetics because they're pulling on different databases, data sets. So you do get these quite extraordinary images being offered back to you.

[16:26] And then you say, OK, so is the art, because I'm not creating these images in terms of how I was a painter or sculptor or a photographer, I'm creating them by telling the AI what I want to see. And so is the art in the set of words that I'm putting in and how I modify those words? So that opens up a completely different realization of how we are artists and what things we put on being artists. I think the narrowing down of our definition of ourselves as artists, based on the medium that we use, is actually very restrictive and very bad. You know, back in the early days of my career, you know, one would easily wonder, what do you do? I'm a photographer. It's pretty straightforward. But now you really can't answer that question very easily. You can say things like, I'm a generalist, but that doesn't really help. You can say things like, I'm an image maker. But again, that sounds like I'm a dream weaver or some sort of creates a sort of fantasy around, well, maybe that's what I am.

[17:24] But it's not a very helpful. In that sort of typical back of a taxi sort of situation where the taxi driver wants to chat and says, so what do you do? And you say, ah, I don't know how you answer that David either. But you even go for the kind of old school route one, Right, I have a specific point on that that I was actually gonna cover you know, I'm a photographer and that sort of ends there. Or you say, well, I'm an image maker. And then they start asking. They start getting complicated. I think for too long, we've sort of been defined by the skill we use. If you're a painter, it's somebody who has a canvas and a brush and paint. But actually, you're also a filmmaker. You're also a sculptor. You're also a performer. All those sorts of things. And none of those should be in any way in contradiction of anything else. It's just ways you choose to express yourself. So I've never really had any fear of using new technology to help me express myself.

[18:18] And some of the things in the way that these new AIs create images based on words, they show you things you couldn't otherwise see. When we were first doing 3D scanning back in 1998, the scanner would see the object or the person in a completely different way to a conventional camera and a completely different way to the way I would see it. So, you know, a 3D scanner has problems trying to differentiate when there's a bit of something reflective, like something shiny on the person you're scanning. It sees the reflection of it as a physical object. And it doesn't know whether it's going towards the camera lens or going away from the camera lens. So it starts to interpret what it thinks. And that's when I find it very interesting. It's almost like when you can get a technology and break it straight away to make you do all the things that they were set up not to do, that's normally my way into these things. So technology companies often hate me for that.

[19:16] Right away, but I'm gonna I'm gonna cover it in one moment Because I think that you know from my perspective all of these things are describing This is also my perspective of you before this I see you as an artist that uses technology as your medium Right even from the initial analog representations, right? I see you harnessing the power of technology for your medium across The board because I think a lot of people who are watching this might not even realize they see you Like you said as a photographer an image maker, but what does that mean, right? They see you as somebody who you know shoots with a camera But there's so much more to your practice the like you said the scanning both analog and you know three-dimensional The the editing process the work with the editor video photo 3D design like you said Eccentric manipulations of technologies and scanning and their intentions I think there's so much to touch on but I would love to just for the folks listening right now Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Contextualize it with this within the drop that you're building right now Obviously this came from a whole bunch of different things that you were doing that came from a couple collaboration You were working on before it came with it came from urine Callum's Experimentations in you know exploring what the what the current state of virtual fashion was There's so many different elements of verticals that came together to create this final product I think it's also a really good example of the way that you think about Creating this kind of like final instance of this final element So for the people watching right now who might not be familiar with ikon-1 And everything coming up you want to maybe just speak through this is an example and then and then we can touch on some of the higher level implementations or implications, but I would love to give people a context of what is ikon-1 how this Became a thing and what you're really excited about in terms of these Incredible avatar figures that you built and really moved You know your your practice of creating a back-end at Cornell into this web space and it's a three-dimensional Anyway, I'll leave it at that and I would love to hear some of your thoughts on how all this came together I love beauty is an ethical way of working. That's such a beautiful statement Okay, well, so very, yeah, very simply, these things start with a very human kind of thing, fascination in another human.

[21:19] I followed somebody on Instagram called Jazzelle, who goes under the name of Ugly Worldwide. And I followed them since probably six years ago, when they first came on the scene on Instagram. And incidentally, I find so many of the artists I collaborate with on Instagram, it's quite a good, has been previously, quite a good platform for that. So I'd followed them on Instagram, and they were a kid in Chicago, and they were doing modeling, and they weren't conventionally, sort of wasn't a conventional model type. And I remember they had shaved off their eyebrows, and the model agency said, you can't work with us anymore, you're uncommercial. And so they went ahead and shaved off their hair. And I said, okay, I think you look amazing. So please, come to London, work with me, and we work on a Comme des Garçons project together, and we work together on, off, all the way ever since.

[22:16] So that's the genesis of it. It was a fascination for this person. I fascinated with how on Instagram, there are certain people who have created an identity with them, more than just a selfie, but actually a much bigger identity. And there are a series of people who I follow quite regularly, and I find what they're doing really intriguing and really fascinating, how they've taken a character, kind of built this character, which is now a fully fledged, you can predict what they're gonna do, you can understand them, you can, they created an image just in a way, a writer will create a character in a book, and what I love about it is they've created it for themselves. Traditionally in photography, especially fashion photography, a model is considered to be a blank canvas. And it was always said, the better the model, the blank of the canvas when the girl walks in the room, you'll hardly notice her until she's made up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[23:15] But that always implies that the model is a sort of passive recipient of other people's ideas. And what I liked about Jazzelle is she's initiating her, she's authoring her own image. And so I wanted to work with her on that without just saying, okay, let's get rid of all of that, I wanted to indulge that. So it starts with that, but then it starts also with the idea that, okay, well, I don't wanna sound sort of condemning, but the fashion world isn't doing a great job at the moment in sustainability and kind of future. It's incredibly polluting, creating a lot of sort of slightly kind of unnecessary clothing for the world doesn't need that. I don't think that the traditional fashion industry is at a great point now in terms of where it fits into the future and how it works. It's got in the 1990s, fashion got a lot of investment from big business.

[24:13] It had previously been slightly marginalised as a kind of slightly odd art form that nobody really understood outside the fashion. And then in the 1990s, people saw the commercial possible fashion and invested very heavily into it. So it made it into a very, very lucrative system. But in so doing, producing much, much more product, pushing and pushing and pushing, both I think to the detriment, not only of the planet, but also of the artists involved. So lots of fashion designs were put under extreme pressures to create collection after collection after collection. And I don't really feel that it was done in a particularly delicate way, which you had, the problems that are sadly too obvious to even mention. So I think that there needed to be some change and something else looked at. Now you can try and descale the large fashion houses. Okay, don't produce, it proves 100 times less stuff because we don't need it.

[25:09] Or you'd have to say, okay, well actually, we just need to rethink it. The idea that you can make digital clothing to be worn in a digital space, which actually is, you know, I found something was really fascinating. SHOWstudio works with a lot of colleges. So we see a lot of young artists coming out, just graduating, or even before they graduate. And we see a lot of the work that's happening. And it's about three years ago, I started seeing digital only designers coming out of places like CSM in London and other colleges worldwide. I think, well, okay, this looks interesting, but where on earth can this live? And then of course, over the last three years, it's been, you know, as I said, a lot of the ideas I was interested in have started to coalesce and become much more apparent of where it can live. So we've worked on the NFT, ikon-1. We've worked on, well, we worked with 40 new digital only fashion designers.

[26:07] I didn't want to enter into this space and kind of take the established real world fashion designers and say, okay, we can scan your patterns and we can make up your stuff in digital. I wanted to work with people who were native to this thing, who actually, you know, were working and creating in the whole, on the whole, digital-only fashion. So I thought that was a really interesting thing. So it's a little bit of a mixture of, A, love and interest in a particular person, and also interested in where fashion's going and how we're gonna express it. And if we're gonna move, as we are going to move, should I say, into a digital space, into a space where, you know, I can go to an event, you know, and appear there and meet other people, you know, I wanna know what I'm gonna look like. It's a basic thing. And you wouldn't ever question your own sort of, you know, you said, I can't go to, you know, the cinema tonight or whatever.

[27:04] You'd think, well, what am I gonna wear? So if you're gonna go into a virtual space, you should think the same thing. Okay, what am I gonna wear? What am I gonna look like? Yeah, and through natural lover fashion, I think it is one of our great art forms, because how we express ourselves in whatever way we choose to do it. I think it's a very important part of humanity actually, fashion. And so I think there's a very, a very interesting and very necessary understanding of our own image in a new space. So I was very keen to work with people who were creating fashion to be seen in that way. I still was a lot further to go, and many more things to do. I mean, there's probably a lack of tailoring in the virtual world at the moment, but we can deal with that on another project. But this was a way of sort of entering and doing something which I felt had some artistic worth, some aesthetic worth.

[27:56] So you, you know, hopefully the images I created and created with a team I've worked with have some value in terms of how beautiful they are. You know, there is a real desire to create something beautiful. Although it might sound a little bit sort of, I don't know, whatever, but yeah, I am a great believer in beauty as a sort of ethical tool, if you want, or an ethical way of working. I think great beauty is something to strive for. I don't think it should be sidelined and dismissed. It is something that actually a lot of us really quest for. So I've tried. One thing I think you're describing here on a number of different levels from my perspective, which I think is fabulous So it's a, you bring different things together. So we work with, you know, 40 digital only designers. We work with Jazzelle. We got on board with Eugene Souleiman, who is one of the sort of real fashion world hairstylists.

[28:52] One of the, probably one of the best ones. I work with him on Margiela and Dior and many other campaigns I've worked on. And he is considered probably, you know, if you were going to take the top five hairdressers in the world, Eugene's one of them. And he came into the studio and made things out of objet trouvé, out of found things. So he made hairstyles out of eucalyptus bark and feathers and waste paper and cabbage leaves and flowers and berries and, you know, toy ducks and anything that, you know, like kind of, he could get his hands on. So it was a real sculptural thing. Very much a performance thing as well. And those we 3D scanned and put those onto the avatar of Jazzelle. So, you know, it's a way of bringing all these things together. I think it's fascinating. You know, I'd be really intrigued to see how it goes down, you know, but we're entering into this space with our eyes open and saying, okay, it's new, you know, it's a new space.

[29:47] We're going to try to do things. We're going to try and do them for the right reasons. We're trying to do things which are not just about making a fast buck. It's not what I'm in it for. You know, I'm in it to try and do something fundamentally important and it will be the NFT will be something which will give you a ticket into future events at SHOWstudio. And so that fashion world, sorry, that virtual fashion world can be something that you can partake in. I won't describe those things now because I think it's probably better to let them come out when they're ready. But, you know, it isn't just a one-off thing that you buy and that's it. It's something that will provide you, you know, to some degree, membership into the community around SHOWstudio which hopefully will continue to grow and become more, you know, even sort of more active. Because SHOWstudio has always been this funny thing.

[30:39] So going right back to the beginning of it, David, the frustration being an artist or a photographer and working with magazines back in the 80s and 90s, as you put all your heart and soul into doing a piece of work, you would publish it in a magazine and there is no audience feedback whatsoever. Now you can say, okay, well, you know, your audience shouldn't matter in that way. But try saying that to somebody who sings songs, you know. You know, tend to go onto a stage and stand in front of an empty stadium and perform. You know, in a way we all need that, what would it all be? It's a very nice thing to have is that interaction with your audience. So when the internet came along, for me, one of the most exciting things was my communication wasn't just a one-way communication. So it wasn't just about me talking to a mute audience. As soon as the audience could enter into that communication, the communication gets richer and gets more fulfilling for me as well as hopefully for the audience.

[31:36] So I'm very keen to kind of, you know, let this community have more of a voice and let them be part of the creative process that we do. So for instance, you know, we did a project where we asked the SHOWstudio audience, two or three months ago, we asked the SHOWstudio audience to draw on SHOWstudio and whatever they drew was projected live onto the model. Now that's a bit like asking somebody to do your lighting for you, because I'm photographing the model and as soon as somebody paints are all green, the whole room goes green. And if somebody then comes along and puts little pink dots all over it, you start to see different things. Then somebody scrubs that out and puts a big yellow band across the middle. That really changed. So it was quite a fascinating thing to be working in a live space where the audience were doing the lighting and the colourizing of my model. And we were responding to that in real time. They were seeing that on a webcam, seeing what their drawing was doing and they were drawing to alter that.

[32:29] And they were trying to draw as well the clothes that she was wearing. So that's a very interesting way of working in with your audience, which becomes much more of a two way thing. And, you know, just to give another example of a very tangible thing that people often overlook it. You know, I create films. One of the things I do is create fashion films. And I did interstitials for the Lady Gaga Chromatica Ball. Now I went to London ball on Saturday night to see her perform and to actually be with 45,000 people and to hear them physically react to your work because the films come on before Gaga gets on set or in this district when she goes off to change as well as when she's singing. But to hear the absolute sort of, you know, thrill that these films are creating within their audience. It's very strange.

[33:25] You don't normally get that. You know, you're not normally in the audience who are reacting to your work. Obviously it's within the sort of context of it being a Lady Gaga concert and then, you know, amazing, her fans are so amazing and so kind of devoted and so passionate about her and about the whole experience. So you have a very passionate audience, an audience of 40,000, 45,000 passionate people watching your films and really loving it. You know, it's quite a sort of moving experience. So we do forget the relationship, I think, between the artist and the audience. And it has traditionally been underplayed, ignored or maligned. So I think, you know, part of doing the NFTs is to allow this, you know, relationship to develop even further. And the NFTs are a ticket into future events at SHOWstudio. So it is a way where the audience will become much more present.

[34:23] Is the human touch in digital processes? Whether that's you adding a human touch like you said when you're working with Eugene creating these physical objects and then digitizing them and Integrating into the physical process or even when you're working with ZBrush and adding this human touch into An inherently digital process from my perspective I think that's really fundamental to you and your work and this is actually where I want to go with this One thing I also want to touch on just in response to to what you just said, which I think is fabulous Yeah. Again, when we consider this human touch, I think that's really inherent to Web3, you know versus Web2 So, you know as you've built SHOWstudio over the past few decades I think one thing that you what you just mentioned that you really enjoy is is the implementation of an audience, right? The implementation of somebody watching your work ideally in real time But in some way engaged palpably in what you're doing And you know when we're talking about Web3, I think the biggest difference is we're shifting from an audience to a community So we're shifting from an audience where in most cases and I think yours is actually one of the few Where you're already on on board with the with the kind of you mindset But you know most outlets let's say a traditional fashion magazine or in newspaper or a media outlet are projecting news or information To people like you said without any any conversation without any back and forth From my perspective what you've been trying to build with SHOWstudio over the past two decades is actually already You know towards the direction of what what Web3 is doing and trying to create that dialogue and trying to create that Interaction with the audience with the community and actually have this back and forth this dialogue which you mentioned so beautifully So one thing I wanted to propose so first of all, you know in in Web3, you know The community is paramount, right people are directly financially investing in the project and and are hopefully being a part of its future And you know, I think that that's it's the it's the better and newer Patreon where Everybody is directly involved in perpetuity But that all being said I think another thing that's very exciting from my perspective And I'm sure that you're gonna touch on this on a number of different levels but again, it's it's that human touch in the process and One of the reasons I want to chat about this is this has come up in a few of our conversations Which I absolutely love But something that I've always been very interested in and I know that you'd be quite interested in that I'd love to share with the audience here is the eccentricities of human touch in digital processes So for anybody who looks through your work, they see glitches they see eccentricities like you said purposeful technological errors that the technology companies might even be mad about And for me, that's very exciting and I think also as we're entering this digital realm, you know, you're you know You're working with various companies, but at the end of the day, it's an experimentation It's a it's a push forwards into the future into the bleeding edge as you always like to do and you're I feel like you're looking to not capitalize on but exploit mistakes and and errors or what's Considered errors in technology and doing things that are otherwise, you know, not thought of as traditionally correct What does that mean? Right even what you just mentioned about having folks paint with light during one of your photo shoots Like most photographers would consider that, you know a complete, you know withdrawal of power But I think it's actually very exciting And and first of all, we have to do that in the Discord at some point because that would be very exciting for the community but Yeah, I'm really curious on just your high-level thoughts on these on the human touch in technology and how we can capitalize on these Quote unquote errors, but maybe better put eccentricities in the digital process as you did with ikon-1 because there's some of these beautiful features That are totally extended and and extrude and and in many ways changed but created into these beautiful sculptures that would otherwise never exist Humanity is almost sort of, you know, lovable because of its fragility, you know.

[38:07] Perfection isn't something one should really be seeking. You know, it tends to be, if you ever get there, and I don't think many people ever do, is a sort of waste of time. It's actually our kind of mistakes that make us interesting. You know, I've always thought that, you know, it's much, you know, when you're doing something and it fails, and I mean fails in terms of what you perhaps you thought it was first going to do, it shows you something you weren't previously going to see. So if you want, you know, a mistake, if you want to call it that, is actually a possibility. We turn our mistakes into new possibilities. And it shows you things you really didn't expect to see and could never have seen had you not made that mistake. And I think that that's, you know, in very pragmatic terms, you know, when your camera goes off in the wrong exposure or, you know, the model moves or, you know, whatever it is, and all of a sudden you see something you didn't expect to see, you have to grasp that.

[39:04] If you love it, grasp it and open it up. The mistakes are almost like sort of cracks in the armour, you know, so you start to see through, you know, and into something, a new world. And it's being able to sort of be enthusiastic about that and not be so... You know, a lot of creativity is actually quite scary. People don't realise that, you know, the fear of failure and the performative fear of failure. Tomorrow I'm going to stand in front of a very well-known rapper, who I won't mention, and I'm going to have to do a photograph of him. That's quite scary. You know, I don't know how I'm going to do it. And I don't know exactly kind of, you know, how it's going to turn out. I actually worked with them before and I'm sure they'd be fine. But, yeah, there is a fear of failure, which is inherent, I think, in most artists, fear of performance, fear of failure, etc., etc. And acutely with photography and image-making, if I was an actor, I could spend weeks rehearsing my lines and I could stand in front of somebody and deliver the character almost seamlessly because I rehearsed it.

[40:05] The whole thing about image-making and photography is that it's spontaneous. It's what's happening at that particular second in your life, you know, and that's what you're reacting to. In fact, it's almost what you... It's not even what the thing has happened. It's the thing that's just about to happen. So it's a slightly, again, a slightly future predictive medium that you're not working, you're not seeing something and then taking its photograph, you are working and trying to create and photographing or image-making at the same time and hoping to be able to push your energy into this and create something from it. But it's almost spontaneous. You don't really think. And actually, it's probably better not to think. You know, the spontaneity of creation is something which actually, I think, gets closest to it at its best. You know, a lot of image-makers will think, Christ, you know, I've got a session with whoever tomorrow. I better work out exactly how I'm going to do my lighting.

[40:57] I bet you better do... You know, and I think that the fear of failure can become so great that people plan it to the last letter and then during the session, they won't deviate from what they planned. But in that case, they're missing everything that's happening in front of them. So you've got to be courageous enough to say to yourself, I'm going to fail. You know, the first shot that's going to come out of my camera is probably not going to be very good. I'm going to fail. But the first shot will also show me things I can't imagine or I couldn't have imagined. And so you have to be able to be open to seeing those. And if that's a mistake due to the exposure to going to the lights not going off or going far too bright or, you know, the 3D scan, you're not registering properly and the shelves don't meet up but actually see something else. You know, I spend a lot of time not just on the sessions when I'm actually in front of the person I'm creating an image of, but afterwards, you know, when I'm retouching and working with them in the post part of the process, you know, I sit next to my retouchers and the people I work with who are doing the ZBrush and I look for mistakes that they make as well because when they're trying to do a Photoshop mask, for instance, and actually you see it just as a Photoshop mask, it might be amazing.

[42:09] So, you know, I can't let go of the process. I don't just do the session, just have my imagery to somebody else and then see it, you know, three or four days later. I sit with my editors, my retouchers, my digital operators and I look at what they're doing. I'm not, to be honest, I'm probably a real pain to be near because I'm sitting watching what they're doing. And as soon as I see something, I go, oh, can you hold that? And they go, oh, it's not really, doesn't look great yet. And I say, it does, it does. And a lot of times, I work with some very, very good Yeah That's fabulous and very devoted people in post, you know, retouchers and CGI artists and I'm asking them to, you know, just like I do, you know, when I try and break the machine, I'm not trying to break what they do, but I'm trying to see the things which inspire me in what they do. So, and often that's how I would advance technically is by seeing the things which weren't supposed to happen and then reacting to them and saying, okay, well, let's make more of this.

[43:04] And that's, you know, that's how I learned to use ZBrush because I was seeing Tom working with it and just thought, oh, can I just try, if I just try putting that, you know, so, you know, often we will do that. And it goes right back to sort of, you know, conventional photography days with when I was preparing a job before, I would get every film in the market, every film in the market and put it through loads and loads of different conditions. I'd put the dev too hot, I'd underexpose it, overexpose it, et cetera, et cetera, just to test out the parameters of that medium and test out the parameters of that film and see what it did. You know, we invented a whole way of working with color called cross-processing because we took transparency film, developed it in a negative developer. You know, it's just literally mucking things up to want to use a better expression, but mixing things up, you know, to try and find things that you don't expect to see. I don't, you know, I have an absolute love for the history of photography.

[43:57] I love, you know, going right back to, you know, Steichen and Fenton and, you know, Man Ray and Blumenfeld and Avedon and Penn and Newton and Turbeville right back, you know, all, I love that, but I don't want to be that. I don't want to emulate anything that's done before. I don't want to produce a picture that looks like Steichen. He's been, he's lived, he's done it. Why would I want to create something that looks like his? You know, I can endorse their attitude, so I can endorse, you know, how Man Ray was a painter, a filmmaker, a sculptor, a photographer, et cetera, et cetera. So I can absolutely get behind that. You know, how Blumenfeld wanted to make fashion film, but it wasn't the medium that would support it. You know, so I can get behind the aesthetic of, sorry, the artistic intention of these people and get inspiration from that, but I don't want to copy their work. You know, if you look at the great Man Ray picture, it was great because it happened in 1930. You know, it happened at a certain period of history in a certain time in a certain part of the world for a certain audience.

[44:54] I would no, get no pleasure from reproducing one of those or trying to emulate one of those. So you can't just look back to stuff you love and want to just regurgitate it for an audience now. You need to take all the things that happen to us now, artistically, politically, geopolitically, technology-wise, et cetera, et cetera, and then work with what instantly appeals to you. Don't try and prejudge what image should come out. Just respond to what's in front of you at that moment, and then that's what you're excited about. So, you know, that really sort of like trying to focus on what's happening in front of your eyes and your being at that time is where we should be working. We should never work in a sense where we're trying to bring stuff back from the past. I always want to move towards the future. And I've always wanted to see things I haven't seen. So that for me has always been, I guess, you know, the motivation to continue to work because I believe there are more exciting things to see than we've been shown.

[45:53] Just got to discover them. Yeah. One thing that you mentioned there that I think is is hopefully really inspiring to a lot of people who are who are watching is Your I don't want to say fashion fascination, but your involvement at every level of your own creative process whether or not you are Technically supposed to be directly involved, you know Like you said the post-production everything and what I think that actually leads to from my perspective is You finding elements of your process whether intentional or not as you said it To reference instead of like you said trying to pull from historical references and and as many young photographers and image makers do today You know referencing existing photos as a mood board and just going from there Yeah. I think you're you're referencing elements of your own practice whether intentional or not that resonate with you in some way shape or form I think it's very much in a way the trust that would be exhibited And I think that from my perspective, that's really how such unique images come to play My final question on that point as we are unfortunately getting to the end of our time Is around that, you know, obviously with this collection there was a lot of there was a lot of play There was a lot of experimentation you worked with so many different people, you know over 40 different people, you know creating aspects of this collection From your perspective how much trust is involved in the process?

[47:02] How much human touch is involved in that process and where is that? Intersection between the two maybe using ikon-1 as an example for people who are now able to see this collection, you know Where does that intersection lie between you know using an existing virtual fashion piece versus you know? Totally manipulating something with ZBrush into a completely new Sculptural form that maybe never existed before in a conventional fashion shoot. I've been working with a great fashion designer like Yohji Yamamoto or John Galliano or, you know, there's a certain trust that I'm going to understand what they created as a piece of fashion and be able to show it back to them in a way perhaps they haven't seen it before. You know, the great fashion designers, just like you and I, they want to be excited and inspired. And if you take a piece of their clothing and you show it back to them in a way which you've understood it and you've taken it further in the thought process than they have and you can show it back to them in a kind of way.

[48:01] Wow, I never knew my piece of clothing would look like this. I remember working one of the really early live broadcasts with SHOWstudio, which I can't remember the technology we would use because it was about 2003. But I was working with Rei Kawakubo from Comme des Garçons. I was photographing one of her collections and I was, she could tell you how sort of kind of odd and lo-fi we work. You know, I was writing on a piece of paper in big black felt-tip letters, you know, what I was doing and posting it up and she was seeing it on a webcam and sending me an email back. So it was this kind of fairly clunky, it's 2003. And one of the things she wrote back to me is I never knew my fashion could look like this. You know, and that for me, you know, I love what Rei does, I think, you know, which is one of the great artists in fashion. And to have that back for me was such a kind of, you know, an encouragement to keep on going. I think if you really, really love the people you work with and you really understand what they're trying to do and you try and interpret that and take it further within the ways that they would want to see it or hope to see it, you know, I think that gets you into a good position of trust.

[49:07] I'm not trying to undermine them. I really care for what they do. I'm really excited and interested by what they've created. So it's that sort of, I guess it's that sort of attitude which embodies trust between myself and the different artists I work with. Fabulous fabulous and I mean that is totally reflected in this in this collection I mean you've had to you've gotten the chance to work with I believe over 43 to 44 different people You know in this and I feel like that's incredibly reflective of you know, your practice, right? You create large-scale fashion editorials you create fashion films. These are not projects that exist in a vacuum they're extremely collaborative and Also to your initial point, you know I believe creative confidence is also Paramount to this process you have to have the confidence you have to have the wherewithal to to see something whether it's eccentric Or whether it's traditional and be like that's the image. This is the one and you do that so beautifully So, thank you for taking the time to have this conversation. I really appreciate it. Just before we end this My question?

[50:03] For folks who want to check out this collection as you know, there's there's eight thousand eight hundred eighty eight NFTs now live on the blockchain Created by by Nick. We'll see if there's any available, but if not, I'm sure you can pick them up on secondary What would you say to people who want to come and check out this collection? Do you want them to come to the Discord and chat with you? Do you want them to come and check out the collection as a whole? Look at the designers. What's one thing that you would like to tell people who are interested in this collection and want to See a little bit more Well, my opinion is that it's, for me, I hope it's the beginning of the future of digital fashion. I'm really hoping that we can create some new precedents here which are gonna make, you know, digital fashion much more widely admired, accepted, and see that people can see, understand the value in it. And hopefully, you know, it's part of what we were saying earlier on, the idea to create a community where people have a voice. You know, it's an old adage, but, you know, give power to the people.

[50:57] You know, I want to hear what people say. I like my audience a lot. And to have people involved in the creative process for me is what gives me the most energy. There's nothing more than the kind of love of humanity, really. You know, people are inherently fascinating and inherently surprising. So, you know, hopefully that people who come and see this will get, you know, enormous pleasure from it and actually see that this is the first step in quite a long journey towards the future. Fabulous. Well, once again, thank you so much time for joining us for this lovely hour. This has been so informative I hope people have gotten a ton of value out of today's conversation I'm so excited about this collection. If anybody wants to go check it out, please do look up ikon-1 I believe you can find it directly on the SHOWstudio website But additionally go to SHOWstudio and check out their Discord as I've been in there a couple times and Nick is in the Discord If you ever wanted to have a conversation with Nick Knight and he hasn't responded to your DMs Here's your moment. I Would be one of the early, you know adopters of this collection and just go check out everything that's going on because I think it's fabulous Once again, Nick, thank you so much for taking the time to do this It's always a pleasure and yeah, this is the NFT Magazine podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time and we'll see you in the next episode Bye.

[52:10] Thank you so much Goodbye. Bye.