Who is mjfellowactuary?
Introduction
My name is Michael Jordan and on SuperRare I go under the name mjfellowactuary because of my YouTube channel called MJ the Fellow Actuary which has 28000 subscribers. On Twitter, I go under the username @bayman1991 as Bayman is my middle name and 1991 is the year I was born.
Professionally I am a Fellow of the Actuarial Society of South Africa as well as a Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary.
In 2015, I designed an anonymous social media app called Count19 that went viral in my hometown.
In 2016, I programmed a stochastic artificial intelligence to play Rock, Paper, Scissors that featured in the South African Journal of Science.
In 2017, I raised capital to launch my own token called Hypecoin but it ended up getting hacked despite a rush of early users.
In 2018, I launched Crypto-Rose, a dapp that allowed you to write love letters on the Ethereum Blockchain. But no one ever used it and I closed it down.
In 2019, I wrote an article on Ethics & Uncertainty and it got published in Philosophy Now Magazine.
In 2020, I joined SuperRare.
My Art Journey
I’ve always been a doodler, at school I would get in trouble for making fragmented patterns instead of doing the assignments. At church, I would play with art apps and mess around with various techniques. I listen better while I’m creating. At university, I spent a lot of time in lectures and so a lot of time making digital art. Unfortunately my family was victim to an armed robbery and my first iPad with all my early work was stolen. At the time I was using an app called Art Rage and would play around with fractals.
After university I joined a tech firm. The one interview question was: “What is Bitcoin?” This was back in 2014 and all I could say was: “That is the online Pirate Gold.” That made them laugh and I was hired. Bitcoin was a common topic of conversation and I would pay for everyones coffee and receive bitcoin from them which I converted into dogecoin and explored the blockchain with. At this same company another actuarial graduate recommended I watch a documentary called Exit Through the Gift Shop, it filled with the Artistic Spirit.
I applied to many galleries but kept getting the same response: We like your work, but we don’t like your medium. I was making digital images and printing them onto giant perspex squares. I kept applying and finally in 2016, Young Blood Gallery allowed me to do my first exhibition. I also exhibited at The Art Curator in 2017, Smak in 2018 and at Linum Labs offices in 2019. I wanted to do an exhibition every year but due to Covid, I had to turn online and that was when I applied to SuperRare.
I had been using a site called Ascribe.io to create cryptographic certificates for my digital art in 2017 but the SuperRare concept was much better. Acribe wanted to link the blockchain to the physical art world, SuperRare proved that art could transcend the physical world and exist in the virtual metaverse.
Exhibitions:
- Young Blood Gallery, Cape Town, 2016
- Art Curator, Somerset West, 2017
- Smak on Bree Street, Cape Town, 2018
- Linum Labs, Cape Town, 2019
- SuperRare, Metaverse, 2020
- Cryptovoxels, Metaverse, 2021
- L’Avant Galerie Vossen, Paris, 2022
