be the founder & ceo of your passions

welcome to issue #12 of moments, our bi-weekly newsletter. if you’re new here, this is the space where we share product updates, news from our community, and a curation of the best things we’re seeing online and offline.

for those of you in the u.s., we hope you’re having a relaxing memorial day weekend :) as for our team? we’ve been busy planning more community events, rolling out search (!!) and paid drops 👀

our featured creator this week is nyc-based dj & producer, ana roman (@anodromedan). their music is hypnotic and rhythmic, moving between meditative repetition and uptempo electronic beats. ana has created a unique stage persona, skulptor, that represents their relationship with identity, data dignity, and gender fluidity. we sat down with ana to discuss their creative influences, the impact they hope to make in the music world, and what it means to break down technical barriers.

tell us your story – let’s start with your first creative outlet

i got into piano when i was six, and my music practice just grew from there. i taught myself music programming when i was 17. i liked electronic music and i got into producing my own stuff. on my tracks, i’m the producer, songwriter, mixer and mastering it all. then i got into the digital art space during the lockdown where i became very fascinated with gans (generative adversarial networks).

what is skulptor and how is it related to your music?

skulptor is my digital persona (crafted using ai) producing future-frequencies one track and performance at a time. creating skulptor sprung from data dignity and transparency - a right that is not reserved for marginalized communities. for context, i was detained in two different airports because of faulty data surveillance; they had mistook me for someone else due to coded bias.

i processed that kind of interrogation through art. i began to train my own face through generative models, then i combined it with my music and made the faces move and shift with java script and other open source libraries. skulptor is fluid and agender, meaning it doesn’t identify with any gender. it constantly is transforming because it's regenerating. so skulptor is sculpting — sculpting frequency, sculpting music, sculpting sound design and sculpting gender and transparency.

what spurred you to get into web3 and nfts?

i wanted to get out of my comfort zone of just being at a table doing live electronics. i knew that i would get more visibility and i wanted to make generative art instead of just putting my stuff on bandcamp and being a dj. i don't believe in staying in the same formats all the time as an artist.

how does your experience with emerging technologies impact your work?

instead of seeing ai and generative voice etc. as a threat, i see it as remix culture. if you think about it, it's like technological punk rock. it's communities getting together and mashing things up and sharing and open source and teaching people things.

i love it because it gives me more visibility and the ability to split royalties if somebody wants to use my voice or if i want to use somebody else's.

how do you think about impact in your work?

it's very important for me to work with singers and to help produce for other women. skulptor at its core is a cyber-feminist statement. so naturally i wanna be able to help singers or female artists who are really badass while i stay in the background. it's really important for me to evolve in service to people.

what’s your goal in regards to developing skulptor and getting more visibility?

my goal is to help people navigate all of this, especially the trans community. i think if you're running a company, collective, or organization and you forget to install an ai ethics board or completely forget to to create awareness around marginalized communities, then you're doing yourself a disservice.

i consider myself fluid and it's very important that stays at the core, even when skulptor is femme. one thing i noticed in the nft space is that it's not inviting for certain communities. it's changing now, but i think a lot of these music nft founders aren't speaking to it enough - we need to improve access to all these spaces.

how do you envision your future as a creative?

you have to be an optimist, and be the change that you wanna see. i've been told that all my life from my heroes. i was thinking about dj [ed note: dj is the founder of primitives] the other day. i'm sure he was like, “i have to be the change that i wanna see and make this barrier to entry obsolete”. you have to be the founder and ceo of your passions. that comes with responsibility, and for me that means nurturing others’ on their digital art or web3 journey in decentralized spaces.

what do you like most about primitives?

i love primitives because you could explain it to my mom. i was really thankful to be in the space very early on.

want to add one of ana’s moments to your collection? visit their profile and start collecting.

this week it’s all about search – we’ve built it from the ground up to help you discover new things across primitives. search by category, media type, or for creators you love. try it out and let us know what you think :)

what’s else is new?

• updated onboarding experience 👋 – when you join primitives, we now welcome you with a personalized list of moments to collect and creators to follow. invite a friend to experience it :) thanks to johnny for launching this!

• sms login 📲 – want to ditch your email? now you can login to primitives with your phone number. it’s stupid fast and we can’t get enough :) s/o to ricardo and paul on our team for their work here

a few things we’ve been thinking about this week: dot swooooosh, you gotta be, where she goes, and the headphones living rent-free in our minds.