Not About Money—Digital Art after“Blockchain”

In the past 2021, a number of seemingly new and promising production technologies have come to the forefront of the public’s mind and are set to disrupt our way of life. The “metaverse” is an imaginative container for these technologies and the industries associated with them. However, the discussion of both “NFT” and “metaverse” has become our daily vocabulary and discourse on one hand, and ended in a dichotomy on the other. The problem behind this is that the numbers of “money” are constantly being refreshed, while the samples of valuable practices are not being seen. Therefore, we need to suspend our conclusions and face “money”, value and price, technology and its entire ecosystem again, in order to judge whether it will affect the logic of operation between people and things, people and people, people and society, and even create new relationships in the art ecosystem.

Blockchain, smart contracts, NFT, self-organisation, DAO organisation

In 2008, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto first described the technical principles of blockchain in a white paper, perhaps as a response to the financial crisis, and thus excluded the state, banks, and fiat currencies from his alternative solution, which is a very dangerous and crazy idea for a sovereign state.

The parallel world of “money” has experienced ups and downs that have evoked memories of “money” in the real world. Like a conspiracy, natural shell money has been found on almost every continent on Earth, including Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia. However, the understanding of this shell money system, which lasted for more than 2,000 years, is limited by our existing knowledge of scriptural prefixes and archaeology. To this day, it is debated whether to treat it as an intermediary for “bartering” or as a currency of circulation.

In the system of Baycoin, the control of the total amount of money by making it more difficult for a single unit to be productive, e.g., by drilling holes, embedding metals, etc., might be taken as an initial attempt to build a consensus mechanism. In his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber(2), who passed away the year before, took us to the “credit” dimension of money, which is a reversal of the simple understanding of money as a medium of exchange. He traces the context in which “money” was first established and argues that people have lived through several eras of virtual money and that it was the original form of “money” – the need to borrow and lend – that led to the emergence of the physical object as a medium. The physical object as a medium emerged.

In this way, considering “coins” as intermediaries for information storage provides an entry point for understanding the operational logic behind today’s virtual currencies (homogenised tokens) and NFTs (non-homogenised tokens). However, there is an implicit paradox here in that the value of non-homogenised tokens still needs to be determined by homogenised tokens. If you browse the website of OpenSea(3), the mindset of randomly admiring those digital objects doesn’t last long, and you are immediately attracted to the lists that are made through various data analyses. This is an instinctive reaction when we are unable to judge the value of an artwork. Therefore, NFT works do not become the equivalent of “money” as homogenised tokens do, and the value of digital artworks still requires a lot of data analysis to confirm their price.

On the surface, blockchain technology offers the possibility of confirming the rights of digital objects, and the distributed data storage method ensures that the information of confirmation of rights is open and difficult to be tampered with. This is similar to the mechanical reproduction era, the artist with the traditional prints of “edition + signature” to solve the problem of scarcity and authenticity of the work. Blockchain technology, on the other hand, provides a more native solution for art in the age of digital reproduction – an iteration of the technology from handwriting to encrypted uploading. However, it is actually a placebo in the logic of capital through the lens of “private rights”. By stripping it of its token attributes and making it irrelevant to “money”, we seem to have lost the power of judgement. Can a collection certificate really give “credit” to all digital objects? I’m afraid it’s not that simple.

Obviously, without blockchain technology there would be no NFT work, yet, even without crypto-transactions there would still be artistic practice. So, let’s peel off another layer of its veneer and look at NFT for what it is. Of course, you might say there’s no way to understand NFT out of the context of blockchain. However, I’m not a fundamentalist defender of the chain, and just as the two founders of BAYC have just been exposed(4), I think it’s inevitable that the realisation of the “meta-universe” will not be able to sever the link between the virtual and the real. Besides, they don’t have the same commitment to anonymity as Banksy, and even so, in 2016, a group of scientists from Queen Mary University of London published this search process as a topic in Spatial Science, using criminal psychology and geographic analysis techniques(5).

If NFT is categorised in terms of production mechanisms, it can be seen that it is roughly a digital object of four logics – developer-generated, participant-generated, the program or code itself, and a token of the event. And these means are all related to digital art, new media art, electronic art, or event-based art. This reminds me of the playful remark that “the original sin of Western painting was to be decoration for the rich”, in which case presumably the original sin of these aforementioned art forms is that they have nothing to do with money and don’t sell well. This is true. Whether it is early internet art practices or performances or events that take place in the social scene, they all begin as experiments by artists outside of the capital or power system, with a low-cost and high-efficiency path. Therefore, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at the technological means used to produce these virtual objects that cannot be easily traded.

First of all, the technologies behind the developers’ production include painting, photography, video production using digital products, as well as the visualisation of data through programs (computer graphics), or generation using algorithms or artificial intelligence. This type of approach is also what we see most often in Beeple, Tyler Hobbs and some anonymous groups: Larva Labs, Yuga Labs, Dapper Labs, etc. At the same time, we should also compare them with artworks that use the same means but are not corroborated using blockchain, such as Manfred Mohr’s generative art, David Hockney’s ipad paintings, and Refik Anadol’s data art should be viewed in the same context. .

The second category is participant-generation, which is the mechanism of audience participation added to the technical means just described. Nicolas Bourriaud, in his 1998 book The Aesthetics of Relationships, summarises artistic practices that incorporate audience interaction into their work, and as a necessary component. Later, in her 2012 book Artificial Hell: Participatory Art and the Politics of the Viewer, Claire Bishop reorganised the political claims of artistic events in terms of social movements. In this way, it is easy to explain that PAK, now the NFT’s highest-priced artist, would present an NFT work entitled Censorship (6) with imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, to influence real-life political events through viewer purchases and participation and to generate a wider public discussion.

Furthermore, stemming from the cryptographic underpinnings of the blockchain, most of the earliest practitioners who started to bring their work to the chain had a background in the discipline of computing, which included programmers and even hackers, such as, Rhea Myers, Simon de la Rouviere. So it is not surprising that programs such as Tim Berners-Lee’s www source code, or Mad Dog Jones’ NFT generator, or the code itself, become high-priced NFTs.

The last category, would overlap with the second, but such NFTs, as they are not themselves artistic conversions. For example, the first tweet of a tweet, or a crowdfunding campaign launched explicitly for a good cause. Although they also have a high price tag, they are more akin to art derivatives or digital monuments to public events, so they are in a separate category.

In summary, we have tried to loosely categorise those works with a clear NFT label, and we can see that the production methods can all be traced back to a wider artistic lineage. Doesn’t this make blockchain technology a real booster of art prices? As Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner put it in their article, “Blockchain is a two-faced thing; on the one hand, its transparency and decentralised nature is conducive to fairness and accountability, but on the other hand, even though it’s open source, its roots as a financial payment system mean that the logic by which it operates is often is capitalist.” (7)

So, on the dangerous side, blockchain gives financial properties to digital objects, while the decentralised standard prompts the de-elitism of art, with legions of fans being able to chip in to set new art trading records. In this way, the art trading market is no different from WeChat’s or Instagram’s, where quality does not need to be thought through, but rather is the first to gain traffic, even at the expense of plagiarism and borrowing. A certain pop-up video on Shake Shack may be found to have five siblings plus a real mother if you do some careful detective work. Such a thing played out on OpenSea as well, and the democratic platform instead created mediocrity in NFT, homogenising non-homogenous tokens.

Still, there seems to be an optimistic side, again stemming from its decentralised, distributed storage, the consensus mechanism is applied, the program on the chain cannot be tampered with, and there are smart contracts. Artists express ideas and convey feelings by making rules, and unlike previous approaches to computer graphics or artificial intelligence, creators need to control the viewer through the code, not the image through the code. And speaking of control, it can’t help but remind us of Norbert Wiener, the granddaddy of cybernetics and the proposer of cybernetics. So, whether NFT can gain a greater imaginative dimension in cybernetics, we’d better understand the layer of clothes of blockchain first and continue to examine.

It seems a foregone conclusion that artists cannot keep up with the pace of production technology, and for a long time in history “technology” and “art” were confused with “technique” until the period between the two world wars when the terms technology and technique were now widely used. It was only between the two world wars that the terms technology and technique came to be widely used in the current English system. In the vein of philosophy of technology or communication, “technology” is often seen as an object of critique that requires vigilance, but at the same time, changes in media forms have become part of a dynamic evolutionary process in nature. Technology has challenged the logic of artistic production, but it has also opened up opportunities for artists.
Therefore, long before this wave of NFT came out of the circle, some artists had already paid attention to this series of technologies and their derivatives. Instead of becoming direct technology admirers, they chose a more dispassionate observation and critical perspective. And rather than indifference or frenzied adoration of new technologies, this part of the work helps us to think about what blockchain technology means? Or what kind of relationship it is having and brewing with our reality?

César Escudero Andaluz and Martín Nadal’s series of works on Bitcoin and mining present the technological logic of this from the perspective of the Internet of Things, media archaeology and economics (8). In BitterCoin, the artist adapts an old calculator, connecting it to a mobile phone and providing it with a network to participate in the mining of bitcoins, “which works as the most basic of computers, increasing the time needed to produce bitcoins to almost eternity.” At the same time, in order to make the calculations and the consumption therein visible, the artist has also given the foolproof calculator the ability to print out the calculations, with strips of paper overlaid with verified values spreading through the gallery.

They continued this work with Bitcoin of things (BoTs), and Bitcoin Traces. Bitcoin of things (BoTs) is a seemingly dystopian idea of mining, in which the artist connects everyday objects to miniature Wi-Fi controllers and sensors that trigger the generation of “random numbers” that can be verified, turning everything into a miner. Although the probability is slim, it’s certainly a mind-blowing experiment in the Internet of Things. And Bitcoin Traces charts the infographics of Bitcoin transactions, and through data visualisation, the viewer can see how transactions are created and constantly flow in anonymity, and it reveals a new relationship between money and people. Like constructing a palpable thesis, the artist unfolds the technology of blockchain before our eyes through three interrelated works.

If you caught the reference to the above text message, then the next step, into Simon Denny’s work in recent years, will open up space for more big picture thinking. In the interview, he talks about how his digging into blockchain technology stemmed from his research into the history of hacking and a longstanding interest in the utility of technology in shaping the image of a nation or a corporation. Thus, the cryptography-based and politically imaginative blockchain became the mediator of his thinking.

The emergence of a new technology is always preceded by a pull on the popular imagination, and Simon Denny in Blockchain Visionaries (9) recasts the founders of three blockchain companies (Ethereum, 21 Inc., and Digital Asset Holdings) as radical fantasists, drawing on their own narratives, assigning each founder a different political future. He created a temporary booth similar to a tech expo and a postage stamp for each company to showcase its supranational economic model and communicate each company’s market ambitions.

And when talking about the impact of blockchain on artworks, he said that “blockchain will completely monetise the attention economy”, and made it clear that the features most emphasised by the NFT – the uniqueness and traceability of digital works – are not so important. — are not that important. However, this does not mean that he will stop thinking about blockchain technology, but rather leaves room for practice thereafter. He has curated two group exhibitions, Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, in 2018 and 2021 respectively, and has contributed to the wider discussion of media technology through projects such as forums and publications.

More recently, he has collaborated with Guile Twardowski, creator of CryptoCat, and the Cosmographia group on a new NFT project (10) – where you can buy new versions of the NFT logos of big internet companies that have gone out of business (Guile Tvardovsky produced), participate in this on-chain memorial service, become a CEO, and own the split of their original domain name in the blockchain domain (.eth). Alternatively, you can purchase an algorithmically-generated logo (generated by the Cosmographia team) to register a subdomain and become an employee. Pay attention to the bottom of the site, where Mark Anderson’s quote “There are no bad ideas in technology, only bad timing” seems to foreshadow that the good idea of this work isn’t the top stream of prices for NFT at the moment, and that the good time hasn’t come yet. You will find a richly layered NFT that does not have “price creation” as its goal, but imaginatively reveals to us the obscured properties of the medium.

In the previous paragraph, the artist explored the idea of what blockchain is, but what would it be like to formally dress up in blockchain and make it part of the material world?

As the author of Blockchain and the Law and a fellow of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, Primavera De Filippi combines her roles as a legal scholar, internet activist, and artist. With the work “Plantoid” (11) (bionic plant robot), she creates a blockchain-based life form to unfold the possibilities of autonomous algorithms. The main body of “Plantoid” is a metal flower tied to a specific bitcoin account and a smart contract account based on the ethereum blockchain, which raises bitcoin through light and music performances and uses the ethereum blockchain to enter into a smart contract with others to replicate itself, paying them bitcoin upon completion of replication, thus reproducing itself. , thereby completing its own reproduction.

“You can’t buy Plantoid because it only belongs to itself.” (12) Behind it is a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) who manage Plantoid’s lifecycle and reproduction through a set of smart contracts. “Plantoid is an attempt to artistically embody what is most innovative and disruptive about blockchain, the ability to create a completely independent and self-sufficient autonomous entity. As a blockchain life form, Plantoid takes the concept of autonomy to a whole new level.” (13)

If Artificial Intelligence empowers artefacts to learn in depth, smart contracts on the chain prepare them to think and acquire “subjectivity”, an extension of cybernetics in the Web 3.0 era. In addition to mechanical objects, texts, images, and events can naturally be given such new contexts, which follows up on the optimistic side of the blockchain, a topic left over at the end of the second paragraph. This part of the practice does provide new paths for interdisciplinary collaboration in art, and may even profoundly affect the future art ecology. In the early stages of an ambitious project, which requires the co-collaboration of talents from all walks of life and financial backing, the new model greatly shortens the bridge of trust.

Among the cases we can draw on, terra0 (14) is certainly a case worth knowing, consisting of a group of developers, theorists and researchers dedicated to exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems in technosphere. To summarise, terra0 is a project that allows the forest to acquire its own body. In the first phase of the project, the project initiators purchased a forest and did a data inventory of it, then developed and planned an economic model for it and delivered it to a smart contract. Thereafter, the contract is activated and begins to function as a mechanism to automatically regulate the exploitation of the wood and control the sustainable development of nature, and the agency range will eventually be reduced to zero, with terra0 gradually becoming a self-utilising piece of land.

The project leverages the scalable framework of Ether on the public chain to provide an automated technical augmentation system for the natural ecosystem. Through a decentralised self-governing organisation, the land is managed while also acting for itself in a cycle of economic rules. This experimental project, which raises complex ethical issues, makes new claims on theory. It does also echo the planetary-scale perspective defined by Bratton in his Stacks: software and sovereignty (15). In the face of the digital transformations that are taking place today, we need to reconceptualise the reality of contemporary geopolitics and the stacked relationships within it. New worlds emerge and grow between the Earth layer, the cloud layer, the city layer, the address layer, the interface layer and the user layer.

Nowadays, when we talk about “nature”, it is no longer possible to exclude the presence of human beings. The ecological chain behind any table as a starting point could be a zone where scholars of biology, computer science, geography, and ecology are urgently thinking about new relationships between humans and other species. In a 2016 workshop organised by the Amsterdam Institute for Cyberculture (16), participants were pre-assigned roles to launch a preview of a tech company start-up – for the betterment of cats’ lives and futures – and in this role-playing workshop, each participant was assigned a role invested in by a cat, with the goal of Build a profitable business for themselves (cats), (their) community and trustees, with the slogan “We can make cats great again! We can make cats great again!”. The logic is clearly different from the “Cat Rescue Society” on the market today, through the establishment of smart contracts and token systems, cats will gain the ability to self-organise, which seems to be a science fiction scenario, leaving room for change in the social device we are in.

This is probably why Hito Steyerl is willing to get involved in this NFT movement. In the last year she cast an NFT for the RCA (Royal College of Art) and announced in a lecture that she would transfer the NFT to the wallet of a student representative if the students showed her a reasonable model of a future RCA. The students would be required to rehearse and present this on video, role-playing a daring ‘coup’ to re-imagine the curriculum, the system, and the functioning of the institution. Ultimately, the NFT will be sold, and the movement authentically supported. As a test, this is an exciting NFT practice, regardless of the degree of advancement of its outcomes. It may be a transfer of power between the real world and the world of the metaverse that opens our eyes to the possibility of rebuilding schools and constructing parallel worlds with NFT.

By now, we have re-dressed NFT in the garb of technology and money, but if you are still only interested in the auction numbers, then put all your money in reality and become a leek in the financial game. Technology and “money” have the attributes of a pot of medicine, both poison and antidote. In this fight, the power of smart contracts, new organisational forms should be used as a weapon. It seems to me that the awareness of problems in practice must arise from a collective context – social, technological, cultural, political, etc. So if we want to understand the development of technology, we have to look at it from the point of view of a new organisation. Therefore, in order to understand the internal dynamics of technological development, it is necessary to think about its organisational mechanisms.

“Self-organisation” is not a term of art, but is used in various disciplines such as mathematics, physics, biology, sociology, etc. It can be understood as the process of organisation within a system. If we define its scope in the context of artistic production, we know first of all that it is generated outside the centre, be it the local schools of painting of the European Renaissance or the “literati painting” of ancient China. In addition, it is characterised by spontaneity, locality and collectivity. Artists, out of their own subjective demands, are unwilling to be forced to participate in the construction of a certain centre, small groups set up their own kitchen, and gradually establish new collective standards, so that “self-organisation” itself is the driving force of the dynamic evolution of cultural ecology.

Collective demands in stages are often attributed to a certain “genre” or “ism” in art history, so from this perspective, the explosive growth of “self-organisation” undoubtedly began in the modernist period. So, from this perspective, the explosion of self-organisation undoubtedly began during the Modernist period. It is closely linked to the iteration of production technologies, the development of capitalism, the spatial and temporal acceleration of war, and is itself political in nature, an attempt to find alternatives. In reality, however, ‘self-organisation’ is mostly fragile and ephemeral, on the one hand because the fulfilment of claims means the dissipation of ideals (trust relations), and on the other hand because the looser management can only accommodate a limited number of participants within itself (expansiveness). This part of the reality can be seen in the clear development of art groups in China since 1985. Self-organisation has accompanied the development of contemporary art in China at all stages, from various art groups and collectives to artists’ self-owned spaces and institutions. Loose or tightly knit in form, individual or anonymous, fixed space or mobile, the samples are rich, presenting the power outside the system with different demands. However, as artists grow older and the individual value of the group is discovered by galleries, the anachronism between the willingness to co-operate and the reality of the task is gradually revealed.

Idealistic self-organising mechanisms need to face the test of capital as well as revolvable models, and so, in contrast, the limited liability company system has won out across the board. (17) This mechanism also posed a large number of problems, so on 7 September 2013, Daniel Larimer, the founder of Pomelo Coin, first introduced the concept of the “Distributed Organisation Company” (DAC) in an article (18). It is an organisation run and managed by open and transparent computer code, controlled by shareholders and all participants, but with no absolute centre. The records of financial transactions and procedural rules of a distributed autonomous organisation are kept in the blockchain and so cannot be tampered with either. As an experimental path, it delivers a great deal of the managerial and financial aspects of the corporate model to the smart contract and empowers its “Great Leader”, who can even be copied away at any time and split into another organisation.

With the launch of Ether in 2015, the number of DAO organisations attached to this Turing-complete blockchain has increased, and in fact, some of the practices in the article in the fourth paragraph make use of its code. Comparing the logic and definition of “self-organisation” and DAO organisations, we can see that there are many similar original driving forces – like-mindedness and high mobility – but also as a process of internal organisation, blockchain-based DAO organisations have stronger operational security and openness. strong operational security and openness. Although, at present, the mechanisms of proposals, voting, checks and balances, and the risks that exist in between, are not enough in the DAO model to make it an alternative to the modern corporate system, the shift in mindset brought about by technology seems to have been impossible to turn around. And in the external context, the movement has undoubtedly been accelerated by the need to work remotely on a global scale brought about by the new crown epidemic.

Returning to the practice of art, how do we begin? Whether it’s casting a worthy NFT or embarking on a DAO organisation. On the one hand, we need to lift the clouds of “price” and see the possibilities beyond “money”. On the other hand, perhaps we need to start by studying the various types of “scams”, I combed through the development process of the “cryptocurrency” project, and couldn’t help but marvel at the amazing creativity that has exploded in the industry, and its clear sense of the problem naturally because of the existence of “money”. Money” exists. Money has been present in the evolution of religions and state power on every continent since ancient times, and its birth has been hypothesised by researchers to be the result of rituals, which seems to reveal its mysterious and uncontrollable energy. At the same time, money brings cohesion, and every change in the division of labour in history has been accompanied by a reconfiguration of the relationship of trust, which guarantees the expansion of productive forces, thus giving rise to today’s social credit systems.

This time, technology has not stayed in the scientist’s lab or the artist’s studio, but has entered directly into the human concept of trust and the mechanism of social organisation, because it is related to “money”. It has begun to try to learn, control and create, and there is an urgent need for humanity to invent ways to reimagine the value of this, independently of money.

(1) Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper in 2008 called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” describing an electronic currency he called “bitcoin” and its algorithm. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System His real identity is still a mystery, and there is speculation that he is a pseudonym for a team, or that he has passed away.
(2) David Graeber (12 February 1961 – 2 September 2020) was an anthropologist and anarchist activist.
(3) OpenSea is an online marketplace for trading NFTs (non-homogenised tokens). (https://opensea.io/)

(4) BAYC stands for Bored Ape Yacht Club, which translates to “Bored Ape Yacht Club”. Events can be found at “https://decrypt.co/92223/bayc-bored-ape-founders-buzzfeed”.
(5) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14498596.2016.1138246?journalCode=tjss20
(6) The event can be found at “https://news.artnet.com/market/pak-julian-assange-nft-censored-2069268”.
(7) Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain, published by Liverpool University Press, 2017. Preface:
“https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.34053/artivate.8.2.0079#metadata_info_tab_contents”

(8) https://escuderoandaluz.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/critical-miningbittercoin_martinnadal_cesarescudero.pdf
(9 )https://www.petzel.com/exhibitions/simon-denny3?view=slider#12
(10 ) https://www.dotcomseance.com/

(11) https://plantoid.org/
(12) https://www.jinse.com/news/blockchain/11897.html
(13) https://www.jinse.com/news/blockchain/11897.html
(14) https://terra0.org/
(15) Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: on Software and Sovereignty, published by MIT Press in 2016.
(16) https://networkcultures.org/moneylab/moneylab3-report-and-videos/

(17) The earliest legislation on limited liability companies was the German Limited Liability Companies Act of 1892.
(18) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organisation)