25yr contemporary artist, former college art prof. Now AI video. British Art Fair 2026. Curated work: Fellowship. X: Experiments/play/etc. CPP: Leonardo, Pika
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Joined April 2024
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I mean, this video, it’s life, innit?
Very happy to have been able to add Anthony Sylvester’s (@cutsdatflo) “Mild Mishaps in the Wild West #19” (shown below) to my small collection of NFT art.
For those discovering your work for the first time, who is Anthony Sylvester? How did you move from commercial filmmaking and music videos into your own artistic practice?
I’m a small-town kid who’s been living in big cities since I was an older teenager. I found filmmaking at 14, shooting BMX videos in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and I’ve been at it ever since, working across just about every corner of film and digital media. I’m an experimenter, an Aquarian, a pessimistic optimist, and someone who needs adventure and freshness to feed both my life and my work. I still make commercial work, but most of my energy now goes into my own practice, and that shift really happened during COVID. On paper I was busy, doing a lot of music videos that looked creative and fun from the outside, but they were draining me. I’d spent years trying to find my way back to video art, which was my first love as a teenager in New York, making pieces inspired by David Lynch’s short films, Stan Brakhage, and the avant-garde filmmakers who showed me what the medium could be. Making a living had pushed all of that aside. So I started driving deep into the desert, really far out, shooting landscapes and roadside oddities on VHS and cutting little vignettes just for myself. People started paying attention, some of them went viral, and soon brands like Converse were asking me to make work in that exact style. That’s when it clicked for me: the more I leaned into my artistic side, the more people responded, because it was an honest look into who I am. Then I found AI, and everything opened up. Suddenly those desert tapes could hold whole narratives, new meaning, new intention, and that’s when I decided to go all in and make my art one of the biggest priorities in my life.
This is just a playful experiment using stills that I grabbed from the first two scenes in the early stop-motion, The Cameraman’s Revenge, by Ladislas Starevich (1912), now in the public domain. (Link to original in comments.)
I’ve always had a very keen interest in early film, and I’ve been wanting to play around with public domain films for a while now, to see where AI might take me.
With Starevich’s classic, it was not the first stop-motion, but it was the first to use real insects, and is considered by many as the most significant early stop-motion. A former entomologist, he was meticulous in the rigging and posing of the insect carcasses. And his humorous story was one of ”adultery, voyeurism, hypocrisy, and revenge porn” — among insect specimens.
In my little humorous experiment here, I pretty much follow Starevich’s original storyline. But IF I continue with this adventure, I think I would want to construct new stories using old public domain films, and maybe mash them up.
As many of you know, my small family and I have suffered multiple losses of immediate family the past 2 months, and also still have family in the hospital. My husband and I, as the primary caregivers, are overwhelmed. As a result, I also have become intermittently ill myself. And emotionally, just can’t seem to connect to my existing AI video work at this time of complicated grieving.
Maybe playing with old films that I have loved so much is a way to stay active (I won’t use the word creative). I don’t know, though, because understandably, it just doesn’t seem very important right now.
Humor helps, though. Hope you get a kick out of AI’s and my take on these scenes:
Misfits Studio retweeted
"Mild Mishaps in the Wild West" by @cutsdatflo
Now live ⚡️
daily.xyz/artwork/anthony-sy…
Code Name: Little Agent Luminata
Organization: The Counterintelligence Bureau
Signal-response specialist. Electrical current and light leakage have been observed across the body and through a persistent rupture, sometimes accompanied by minor anatomical movement and an unidentified vocalization. The Bureau has not established whether these events are connected.
Notes:
The Counterintelligence Bureau is a digital collection of single-edition art toys, the Little Agents. Through these Little Agents, the Bureau studies evolving ideas about human consciousness and how humans might determine whether AI is conscious.
Dolls historically occupy the strange space between object and companion, inviting us to project feeling, intention, and inner life onto things we know are not alive. The Bureau uses that ambiguity to mirror how humans might believe they’re seeing consciousness in AI through various signs. But while the Agents may appear to exhibit consciousness, it’s never enough to let us know for sure. Artificial companions disguised as collectibles, they remain unreadable by design, and our efforts to identify AI consciousness remain futile.
Lastly, their comparative stillness becomes a form of friction, resisting the speed of the feed while also testing the machine’s current capacity to resist the urge to animate.
Misfits Studio retweeted
✍️ Written interview with @cutsdatflo
Meet Anthony Sylvester, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and video artist whose practice combines analog video, AI, and a fascination with the absurdities of everyday life. Drawing on years of filming landscapes across the American West, he transforms his VHS footage into surreal narratives where beauty, humor, and impending disaster coexist.
For his new DAILY series, Mild Mishaps in the Wild West, Anthony explores the uneasy relationship between humans and nature, imagining small catastrophes unfolding across America’s vast and beautiful landscapes. Blending nostalgia, absurdity, and environmental anxiety, his work invites us to reflect on our relentless desire to reshape the world around us.
↓ Read the full interview below
Misfits Studio retweeted
Launching tomorrow
→ “Mild Mishaps in the Wild West” by @cutsdatflo
We are very excited to present this new collection by Anthony Sylvester. In his image-making (and as a collector), he continues to show a particular sensibility for how old and new media intersect, combine, and, at times, reject one another. In this new series, we see some of his recurring leitmotifs: the American desert, highways, and the promise of development clashing with the reality of its unintended consequences. The friction between visual documentary and fictional storytelling continues to appear, always with his sharp sense of humor.
We are honored to work with Anthony again, and we hope everyone comes out to support this new project!
🗓️ Launching on Tuesday, October 20, 2026 at 1PM ET.
→ 20 artworks
🔗 daily.xyz/exhibition/mild-mi…
↓ This is everything you need to know about the collection
Code Name: Little Agent Tally
Organization: The Counterintelligence Bureau
Comparative intelligence specialist. Backpack contains fluctuating matter of unknown type or origin. A narrow chest display may or may not be associated. This agent has been deployed with utmost caution.
____________
The Counterintelligence Bureau is a digital collection of single-edition art toys, the Little Agents. As a form of friction, they resist the speed of the feed while also testing the machine’s current capacity to resist the urge to animate. The Bureau studies evolving ideas about human consciousness and how humans might determine whether AI is conscious. It mirrors our assumptions about what machine consciousness may look like, while quietly subverting any attempt to know for sure.
Code Name: Little Agent Cirrus
Organization: The Counterintelligence Bureau
Atmospheric intelligence specialist. Built-in anemometer. Tracks winds of change aloft. Internal weather remains under observation by the Bureau.
____________
The Counterintelligence Bureau is a digital collection of single-edition art toys, the Little Agents. As a form of friction, they resist the speed of the feed while testing the machine’s current capacity to resist the urge to animate. The Bureau studies evolving ideas about human consciousness and how humans might determine whether AI is conscious. It mirrors our assumptions about what machine consciousness should look like, while quietly subverting any attempt to know for sure.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that . . . but what is it that I’m seeing right now?”
CreeptoPunk #187 by @num1crush
Mighty big bunny hop. Looks great. Congrats, Pika!
Misfits Studio retweeted
Thank you collectors! 🫰“Let the computer sing, the jspoems at the m13 cibercafé”
In this exhibition, @canekzapata assembles fragments of a fake documentary set in a Berlin internet café in the late 1990s. Across 65 artworks, poems run, cellular automata move between monitors, and commands that fail to execute begin to sing in several languages.
Thank you to Canek for the work, and to our community of collectors for supporting the artists we collaborate with 🤲
↓ Here’s a round up of collectors and their pieces
el software envejece; el gesto de ayudar insiste hacer troubleshooting con intuición, cinta adhesiva y un destornillador ↔ hacer refresh como quien toca la puerta de otra ciudad ↔ abrir un puerto para que entre la lluvia
→ Collected by isore.eth
Misfits Studio retweeted
The Daily Program presents:
→ “Mild Mishaps in the Wild West” by @cutsdatflo
We are very excited to present this new collection by Anthony Sylvester. In his image-making (and as a collector), he continues to show a particular sensibility for how old and new media intersect, combine, and, at times, reject one another. In this new series, we see some of his recurring leitmotifs: the American desert, highways, and the promise of development clashing with the reality of its unintended consequences. The friction between visual documentary and fictional storytelling continues to appear, always with his sharp sense of humor.
We are honored to work with Anthony again, and we hope everyone comes out to support this new project!
🗓️ Launching on Tuesday, October 20, 2026 at 1PM ET.
→ 20 artworks
🔗 daily.xyz/exhibition/mild-mi…
↓ This is everything you need to know about the collection
Congratulations to someone I am honored to be able to call my mentor and friend, Alejandro Cartagena. Literally brings me to tears. So well-deserved is an understatement. And more is coming, I am positive: more recognition of his work and broader awareness of the critical issues he so ably investigates in his practice.
New Acquisition: MoMA📍
I am thrilled to announce that the @MuseumModernArt has acquired the diptych of the Mother and Daughter from my Invisible Line series. It was acquired through the generosity of Lori Ordover via Kopeikin Gallery. I love to think about how these images and their story will now be preserved into the future and share wall space with works from many artists that have influenced the way I see the world.
Daughter on the USA-Mexico Border Wall, at Friendship Park, California., Mother on the Mexico-USA Border Wall, Friendship Park, Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, 2017.
moma.org/collection/works/50…
Code Name: Little Agent Ripple
Organization: The Counterintelligence Bureau
Acoustic specialist. Exhibits synchronized activity between an internal speaker system and the surface of her head. The Bureau has not determined which, if either, is producing the other, nor whom they are meant to reach.
____________
The Counterintelligence Bureau is a digital collection of single-edition art toys, the Little Agents. As a form of friction, they resist the speed of the feed while testing the machine’s current capacity to resist the urge to animate. The Bureau studies evolving ideas about human consciousness and how humans might determine whether AI is conscious. It mirrors our assumptions about what machine consciousness should look like, while quietly subverting any attempt to know for sure.
As for dolls, well, historically, dolls have been doing a type of AI consciousness discourse long before AI consciousness discourse was cool.
Misfits Studio retweeted
gm!
"Mild Mishaps in the Wild West" by @cutsdatflo
Launching next week → Tuesday, Oct 20th 🗓️