The Phygital Guerrilla: The Blockchain Provocations of Jet Williams, aka Teji
A grab for attention, or an artist pushing the boundaries with NFT and blockchain?
This seems at first like the work of someone who really wants attention, but Williams insists it’s more than that
One afternoon at the beginning of the Australian summer, Jet Williams bundled his girlfriend, a poster, and two fake bus shelter maintenance uniforms into his car and drove to a high-traffic neighborhood in Sydney.
Williams, who also goes by the name Teji, planned to break into the bus shelter advertising display and hang a homemade poster he had made advertising a “permissionless” sneaker called a Phunk Force 1, which consumers could buy through purchasing an NFT.
Williams, a self-trained graphic designer, created it using an upside-down Nike swoosh logo, reversed Louis Vuitton logos and decorated it with the outline profiles of jpegs found in the popular CryptoPhunks NFT collection. Donning the fake vests while his girlfriend filmed it, he sprinted to the bus shelter, unlocked the advertising display and slipped his poster in. And then he put it all on Twitter.
“I don’t want to disclose how I got the keys to the bus shelter or what day I did it on. But a simple google search will do the trick if you're inspired,” he said to me recently.
It was not the first time he has done something like this. In fact, Williams has made a name for himself as being something of a phygital guerilla artist – a combo of physical and digital art, that is -- invading institutional and commercial spaces with his creations and antagonizing our perception of what an artist is allowed. Web3, blockchain and permissionless culture are the reason for it.
“I just want an open Internet where you can remix whatever symbols you want. To me, taking an LV or Nike logo and putting it on one of my pieces of clothing is the equivalent of Kanye West sampling Daft Punk for his number-one hit Stronger,” he said.
Williams links his NFTs to homemade art or manufactured goods like hoodies, puff jackets, shoes and luxury leather bags and installs them in public spaces. But his work is more than just marketing. While his efforts border on law-breaking, he is behaving like a modern-day Marcel Duchamp, presenting art in a new way, offending mainstream sensibilities and questioning the logic and the law that says a commercial brand reserves the right to control narratives attached to images and symbols.
For many people, NFT-related art is an abstract notion, often explained by profile picture collections of up to 10,000 jpegs like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, or the CryptoPunks, minted on the immutable blockchain, and sometimes sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Brands like Tiffany’s and Nike, which purchased crypto company RFTKT last year, have made their names by amplifying their logos and consumer brand consciousness in the growing NFT ecosystem. Nike made $185 million through NFT sales in 2021.
On the other side of this equation, artists like Williams think that the blockchain should be used for better, more creative purposes. They want to see the blockchain break down the brand walls protected by trademark and other IP regulations and enable people to use their creative impulses to design ideas of their own that they can benefit from commercially.
The technical aspects of smart contracts and NFTs give them the right to do so, says Williams.
This mentality and the technology have enabled Williams to do things like placing models of his Phunk Force 1 in a shoe store in Sydney so that the staff and customers see it. He then performs an “ironic” purchase of the shoe, using it as a performance to reveal a freedom to transact and to create that many people may not realize they have the power to do.
A model displays her “Permissionless” Louis Vuitton Bag courtesy Jet Williams
His urge goes way back. As a child, Williams fell afoul of complex trademark laws during a time when the internet was open and clashing with traditional legal ideas. Using some software, he made and then uploaded a slideshow onto YouTube featuring the music of Sean Kingston, an American music artist. In a few moments, he ran into trouble with the trademark law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. He was nine years old. He didn’t even know what a DMCA was.
“I was proud of what I’d created, it was a display of an early act of creativity from a kid who just wanted to make something for the fun of it — This kid wasn’t trying to make money or drive sales away from Sean Kingston, he was just trying to express himself,” Williams said.
In 2016, he started mixing his own music and then releasing it on the web. He was DMCA’d again. This time, his Soundcloud account got banned. In 2017, he learned about blockchain and started making digital art for it. He had taken a trip to Vietnam and spray-painted a character he designed onto a wall under a bridge.
Eager to learn more about blockchain, he flew to Japan and met up with some digital artists and visited art galleries and digital installations. “Going to Japan was really my first time seeing that this creative shit is possible,” he said.
“Visiting places like Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Gallery and the Ghibli Museum really showed me there’s people out there making a living selling cartoons and clothes and it really made me think if they could, why can't I?”
Since that trip, he’s launched several NFT projects, all of which sold out, except for the shoe.
In March, he took an AI-shaped painting that he collaborated on with another artist and during opening hours walked into the New South Wales Gallery and hung the painting on a wall in the Renaissance section. He did this to promote the auction of an NFT he had created about the painting, which he called Lord Teji. “It's a digital print inside a fake gold frame I purchased from eBay,” he said.
Willams was escorted out of the gallery. You can see the entire installation and discussion with security in this video. This seems at first like the work of someone who really wants attention, and who is riding the waves of gimmickry that have become synonymous with the NFT ecosystem, but he insists it’s more than that.
An image of the “Lord Teji” painting hung in the NSW Gallery in Sydney courtesy Jet Williams
“I think there’s definitely some part of my ego that wants recognition. But I do also think the act of creating is a big part of what gives my life meaning,” he says.
Williams has received lots of criticism for his lack of communication and failure to mint out a collection of 500 NFTs that give holders access to the Phunk Force 1, the permissionless sneaker on his bus shelter poster.
He needs to sell 500 shoes in order to get the factory in China to make them for him. Right now, he’s sold about 77 of them. Yet the fact he hasn’t sold it out hasn’t stymied him.
“Consider it that you’ve paid for the performance,” he said, jokingly.
What’s the performance? It’s the realization that consumers depend too much on brands for their symbolism and meaning. The role of the artist has been diminished and humans, Williams said, just consume images, rather than think about the role that art plays in their lives. He believes people are numb to the potential that NFTs and art can have on how we understand our interactions with reality.
“Whenever I sneak something into a store it usually takes me less than five minutes to get my clips and dip,” he said. “I’ve even had employees watch me record my videos and not even think twice about it. Because who the fuck would sneak something back into a store?”
Worried about arrest, being caught trespassing or antagonizing staff? Worried that trademark infringement letters from legal teams will fill his mailbox? No.
“It’s not hard to check what address has launched a collection and that’s the beauty of the blockchain, the transparency,” he said. “I don't care [about the risks].”
With the bus stop, it definitely created a buzz. People following Williams on Twitter began making pilgrimages to the poster to take photos with it.
“This has allowed me to bring the same ethos from the world of graffiti and put my stamp on another medium,” he said.
Two of Williams’s followers pose in front of the poster, using their CryptoPhunks NFT images to mask their identities
A few days later, Williams put the bus shelter key in an envelope next to the poster and told everyone on Twitter they could go get it if they wanted it. Within a few hours it was gone.
Not all is lost, though.
The painting he hung in the New South Wales Gallery is in the care of the museum management. No charges have been leveled against Williams. If he wants it back, he would just have to ask the gallery for its return, say people familiar with the whereabouts of the picture.
“I think that would be cool! I might try to get the work sent to the original auction winner,” he said.
Disclosure: this reporter owns two Phunk Force 1 NFT tokens