One Giant Organism: Efdot's GLiFS

By @JustinWetch

In the basement of a house in Syosset, New York, Eric Friedensohn's grandmother Rita kept a workshop. Stained glass on one side of the room, watercolor and needlepoint on the other, and tucked among everything else, a braille machine. Rita translated texts into braille for blind people on the side, typing out tactile embossments on Oak Tag, that thick yellow paper she always had stacked nearby. Three-dimensional dots and lines raised above the page.

Eric drew on her leftover paper. He was six.

"Those dots and lines subconsciously led to what I'm doing now," he says. "And I only noticed that recently. I only remembered that recently."

He's telling this story for the first time on this interview. Three decades after Rita's basement, he's about to release a project of three hundred animated symbols that three thousand collectors will arrange into compositions on a website. The shapes are deliberately open so the viewer's eye completes them. Marks made to be touched, marks made to be received, marks made to be played with. 

Around twelve, he ditched school sports for skateboarding. He absorbed the visual culture by osmosis, stickers on every surface, the slow training that comes from falling off a board a thousand times before you land a trick.

"Your first expression, first try is not gonna be your best try always," he says. You have to be patient with the process whether you're learning an ollie or building a six-year GLiFS project. He's been channeling that loop ever since.

The tag came in his late teens. Tipsy at a friend's party, he wrote a lowercase E on the inside of a wall with a fat paint marker, went to sleep thinking he'd dreamed it, woke up and realized he hadn't. That E became his profile picture. It's still his profile picture. He calls the character The Blob, same lowercase shape, an i in the negative space for the eye, a few fingers, a little movement.

The handle has a similar origin. Preschool had two Erics, so the teachers wrote his as Eric F. The nickname disappeared and resurfaced years later when Instagram launched. He chose FDOT, then discovered the Florida Department of Transportation owned the search, and added the E back. Efdot stands, if anyone asks, for Eric Friedensohn's Department of Transformation.

A few years into his New York career, Efdot was working from his Murray Hill apartment on a sign for a friend's tattoo shop. He smelled smoke. The backyard was on fire. The windows shattered from the heat. He ran. One of the cats made it out. His partner's cat didn't. Everything else burned.

Days later, digging through the wreckage, he pried open his fire-melted scanner and found one surviving sketch inside. It read "optimist."

"Am I gonna let this fire define me for the rest of my life," he says, "or am I gonna use this as a sign that I'm meant for something more?"

He printed the design on everything. Shirts, hats, pins, postcards for the GoFundMe donors who'd kept him afloat. The postcards he made using letterpress, which is also the technique he'd use a few years later for the first official print of GLiFS. The mark goes back into paper. Embossment, again. Rita's gesture, again, this time for people who'd given him a way back into his own life.

"It's my origin story," he says, "but also my optimist story."

In 2017, WeWork sent him to Argentina to build creative teams across Latin America. For two years he hopped between Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá hiring local muralists, painting walls, learning Spanish well enough to fit in. The pace was absurd. One weekend painting a giant watermelon in Lima, the next installing an abstract cheetah sculpture in Brazil. He extended every trip by a few days to do unpaid street collaborations with the local artists he was meeting.

Then he stumbled upon something that changed his artistic eye forever: the Mayan glyphs and the ancient writing systems carved into the pyramids.

"I felt like I saw myself in them," he says. He's not Mayan. His ancestry is Eastern European. He can't explain it.

He came back to New York in 2019, left WeWork before the pandemic gutted the art team, and was about to reset his entire life when Topps called. They wanted twenty official MLB rookie card remixes for an open-edition drop. He took it. The mechanics felt strangely familiar, edition counts you couldn't see, demand spiking in real time. A few months later he was minting on chain.

Efdot draws in Procreate at four thousand pixels square, using the same Letterpress Print color palette he developed in 2020. The shapes are bold, the lines textured, the colors high-contrast. He never closes a shape if he can help it.

The principle is Bauhaus, called gestalt. Parts becoming a whole. Mystery, intrigue, the unknown. The viewer's brain finishes what the artist leaves open.

There's a second wrinkle to his color practice. He's red-green color blind, diagnosed as a kid. He had to learn digital color tools to compensate, measuring colors mathematically because his eyes wouldn't.

"We're all just agreeing that blue is what it is," he says. "No one knows what everyone else is seeing."

That line is the whole worldview in miniature. We share reference points without ever truly sharing perception. His work runs on the same logic. He makes the marks, you bring your eye.

GLiFS is the project he's been pacing around for six years. Thirty sketches became three hundred animated symbols. The three hundred will be used in three thousand compositions, arranged by the collectors themselves on GLiFS.art, a custom site built with Transient Labs, with a two-week customization window after mint before all metadata locks. 

The shapes are open, the collectors are the co-creators and proliferators. The project doesn't finish until a few thousand strangers complete it.

"Art should be a gift," he says.

The lineage isn't subtle when you've followed it this far. Rita Nelson made marks for blind hands to touch. Efdot made postcards for donors to receive. GLiFS makes symbols for collectors to play with. Same gesture, three generations, scaled up.

He believes the dimensions don't really exist as separate things. 2D and 3D are one. Maker and viewer are one. Past and future are one.

"If we focus on this simple fact that we're all essentially one giant organism," he says, "a lot of our problems would be solved as humans."

The GLiFS are an argument for that, marks set in motion and offered, waiting to be completed by another person's hands.

GLiFS launches June 3rd through OpenSea. Collectors co-author the final art on Transient Labs built website GLiFS.art, where the builder is already live. Cities is around eighty-five percent minted, and holders get guaranteed mints on GLiFS, two for each Cities they hold. He's headed to Lisbon next week to show the project.

Inspiring artists lately: @jakejfried, for the long-term vision and the persistence that Efdot says mirrors what skateboarding taught him. @benstraussphoto painting with light in ways that capture order and chaos at once. And @0xVestica, the Serbian artist Mariah, who he brought to Rio Art Residency last year, and whose deep-research approach to local culture he calls a perfect balance of playfulness and darkness.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @EfdotStudio recommends @0xVestica, @alimofun, and @0xdiid.