Origins of AwkwardAI

I knew I wanted to be in film before I graduated high school but I was also attracted to animation. I was particularly inspired by mixed media animation utilized by Soviet animators and Ralph Bakshi (Who I had the honor to meet and hang out with in 2011). 

My first animation class was in 2006, we made our own South Park animations in After Effects. By the end of the first week I realized I had a knack for making perfect GIF loops. (Thanks ADHD!!)


In 2007 a theatre director saw me perform with my band and asked me to join the theatre company as a live composer. I wrote and recorded pre-arranged compositions as well as performed live along with the plays. When they found out that I had animation and editing skills; I started creating digital scenes and art that were integrated and projected as a backdrop into the live plays. At the time there were only a handful of productions in the world that were doing this.


By 2009 I had beaten 33,000 applicants to earn a prestigious internship at CNN. I was simply there to edit B-roll but by the end of the internship, I was actually editing for live news broadcasts. This was an extremely stressful, fast paced atmosphere. Sometimes you would have less than 5 minutes to edit a story, the metadata, and upload to live broadcast. I graduated college with a degree in film production in June of 2009.




That same summer I produced a Video Installation for a Gallery Show for the Plastic Aztecs. 


In 2011 I was hired by Warner Bros and became a soundstage manager for a popular network series. I still work as a production manager for TV and Films to this day.


In my spare time I made mixed media animations and wrote and recorded music for 5 bands that I performed with. Everything from dance music to punk to folk.


In 2012 I started mining Bitcoin. By 2014 I was making bitcoin/crypto influenced art and realized I needed a new handle for anonymity purposes. I decided on AwkwardAI, aka Awkward Intelligence - A play on the emerging AI industry and how it’s basically awkward in every sense of the word. I think it’s hilarious. 


In 2018 I returned to college and got a second degree in video game design in 2020. This is also the time I started studying NFTs, use cases, and blockchain gaming. 


To me, NFTs are the culmination of everything I’ve done in the past and the perfect medium for my bizarre art, concepts, and animations. Which I felt never had a proper fit IRL. 


And that brings us to today, I still make NFTs. Experimenting, trying anomalous, ambitious styles to achieve certain effects. Everything I make is calculated and has a long road before it makes it to digital form. 


The creation of each NFT is a different process and based on the final effect I hope to achieve. I call it procedural but it is best defined as “Process Art”. Where each piece is created through a unique series of rules and constraints.


I love doing write ups so I will update with that information to help people understand my process for each piece.




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