Categories
Aesthetics Art Crypto

Welcome To The Dessert Of The Real

On certain developments in the content of NFT art as we enter 2021

Non-Fungible Token art associates digital art to blockchain identifiers as metadata, producing a saleable ownership proxy similar in concept and usage to a certificate of authenticity for conceptual or video art. In itself this makes no demands on the artwork other than that it ideally be minimally problematic (legally and technologically) for any services or platforms the artist uses to create and sell it. But that art still exists within a technonomic milieu that holds very specific promise and appeal for those who might be interested in it as an environment in which to produce and experience art.

Early NFT art that was not simply existing illustration art registered onchain became steeped in blockchain promotional imagery – project logos and figureheads. These were soon joined by easily consumed attentional lures appealing to viewers(/potential purchasers) pre-existing sensibilities such as naked human bodies and technological glitches. Where the problem of their technical production and content intruded, it was when an artist or a buyer did not understand the source of a library image or of a filter’s stylistic flourish. This was a problem because of the imported concept of ownership as transcendental possession and control, seen in NFTs as “true digital ownership”. Blockchains exist to establish ownership of digital assets with mathematical certainty. To own a piece of NFT art is to possess something unique with cryptographic certainty backed by a sizeable percentage of the Earth’s computing power. It is to possess it more securely than if it was stored in a vault (en-crypt-ed) at a maximum security freeport facility, and for the object of that possession to be more uniquely identified object than the Mona Lisa. Where the thing that you possess is a copy, a fake, or misrepresents its production or its materials in some way either intentionally or unintentionally, the unspoken contract of ownership is broken offchain. Or at least ironised and degraded in the hodler’s eyes.

Discussions of authenticity (as opposed to authentication) in “authentic digital art” emerge as a panic from this encounter between onchain mathematical certainty and the messy nature of human understanding offchain. To secure authenticity offchain in response to this is to destroy the value of onchain security – you might as well have a paper certificate of authenticity. A cypherpunk dark forest of aesthetics, completely disjoint from meatspace concerns of identity, reputation and career, would firewall artistic value from authenticity – a liberation that would upset art historians as much as any existing market. But security thinking can be a cold, lonely, corrosive lifestyle and is not for everyone. Or even for most.

A different approach is required within the slow recuperation of the cypherpunk imaginary that is wider society’s encounter with it, and one which engages more with the affordances and resonances of blockchain technology. This is not an ideological prescription, it is recognition of the factors that drive every artist and collector/purchaser’s attraction to NFT art and that must show returns if NFT art is to be coherent. Neither pre-established iconography nor discrete stylistic flourishes sufficiently establish aesthetic value worth securing and owning on a blockchain as blockchain art as transaction fees rise ever higher. Art is proof of work, whether Whistler’s “Nocturne” or an Abstract Expressionist act of heroism. There must be something to own, a parsable product of labour that represents the potential to exponentially multiply the value of an investment of time by the artist and cryptocurrency of the collector. Strategically, to achieve this, the artwork has very few moves it can make. One, modernist/post-modernist one, is to dramatize and reflexively intensify this experience of possession of something that lives in a world of dicscrete technological time. The more vivid this experience of ownership can be made – the more parsable, although absolutely not the more easily digested – the better.

This has led to accumulation of significant form in various registers for excess/surfeit, materiality/presence, and presentation/encounter in NFT art. The in-frame agglomeration of this is reminiscent of the bricolage of Post-Internet Art, its careful leading of the viewer is remeniscent of motion graphics in advertisements, cut scenes, and other liminal moments of guided significance. Where assets and shaders being from libraries would be an impediment to true ownership when presented in a two dimensional artwork consisting of the mere conjugation one or two of them, their composition and animation in time – the work that they do and represent – within the current wave of NFT art performs the requisite alchemy to make it clar that it makes the unownable ownable. Materials, interactions, choreography, assembled into brief microworlds with an aesthetic surfeit that makes very little sense as anything other than an answer to the problem of NFT art at this point in its development, and make very much sense as that.

There are limits to this (and any) strategy, but we are not there yet. Intensification or finding lines of flight from the elements of this strategy, in sum or individually, can take us very far beyond the current state of the market now we have broken this resistance level. Capitalism loves challenges to its property regime, they are how it expands it. True digital ownership requires something to own. Unproblematic commodities, consisting either of artistic originality or of commercially manufactured aesthetic swatches, do not provide a sufficient challenge or object to hang the predicates of desire for an ever-intensifying experience of possession on. The fact of the digital aside, this dynamic was as true of paintings of fruit or of music and dance based on peasant forms as it is of GPU-accelerated aesthetic flights of value.

High culture is a strategy of enclosure, of proprietisation, of the transubstantiation of kitsch/low forms in an affirmation of the wider economy’s transsubstantion of resources into value. It is also a heatsink – symbolic resolution or closure for the untenable claims or other moments of a given (property) regime. You can see much more of the former than of the latter in the current state of NFT art, but the latter is present precisely in its engagement with the psychological requirements of ownership. How far the latter goes will depend on how blockchain technology engages with wider society over the next few years.

True digital ownership as a memeplex collapsed into aesthetics by assembling materials and competences to deploy in an intensive experience that can be owned onchain has produced an experience of moments of post-digital surfeit as an answer to the demands of artificial digital scarcity.

This is the world as it exists today.

Categories
Aesthetics Crypto

Aesthetic Comparison Games

Using ideas from design theory, provable computation, and calculus we can construct games of aesthetic comparison with arbitrary precision. These games can be represented in a form that allows them to be resolved using blockchain smart contracts via reference to materials submitted to set up the game, by reference to on-chain precedent, or as a last resort by appeal to a third party oracle.

Game Setup

To construct the game, two parties must agree on two images, on the properties of the elements of those images under consideration, the relationship between them that is under consideration, and the degree of that relationship.

▲ = ▲ ?

The properties must be represented electronically and atomically, for example as RGB colours, as extremely small pixmaps, or as simplified bezier curves. The hashes of these values are then arranged as the leaves of a merkle tree for each image, in lexicographic value. A third three is then constructed by the first party of the hashes of tuples of pairs of leaves from each of the first two trees, the name of the relationships that is held to be true between them, a stated tolerance for deviation from simple mathematical equality in that relationship, and the weight of these properties as evidence in the aesthetic assertion being made accorded to that relationship (this must sum to 1.0 for all leaves). A threshold for property significance is declared (e.g. 0.001), this may be updated in later rounds of the game with mutual agreement or by appeal.

These trees are then combined with the root of two further trees – the precedent tree and the adjudicator address tree – to produce the merkle root of the game setup. It is vitally important that both parties agree on the representation of each image contained in the tree and on the tolerances and weights accorded to elements from them. It is trivial to make green into red with a high enough tolerance for colour difference, for example. Tools to automate preflight tests for game trees will be important.

For a multi-stage merkle tree acceptance phase, use rounds of committing/revealing proposed trees with increasing stakes. Accepting a tree returns the stakes. There may be a time or round limit for this phase, or no hard limits on agreement only exit rules.

Compulsory/voluntary comparison games may require different agreement, comparison and appeal phases to avoid griefing. Or a single well-understood workflow with well-understood and clearly described failure modes in each contect may be easier to reason about and therefore ultimately more reliable.

Game Rounds

Once the game root has been registered, the comparison proceeds in rounds of assertions made with reference to the content of the subtrees that the root anchors.

If the comparison can be made automatically (e.g. #FF0000 == #FF0000), this proof can be offered onchain. An uncontested assertion of this form wins.

Example comparison relations and properties include: =, ≠, ≈, ≉, ⊂, ⊄, ⊃, ⊅, <, >, geometric affine transform, colour difference, freeform textual statement.

Beware of image content when comparing. Steganographic information may mislead automated comparison.

Where statements can be phrased equivalently, the one that would place the lowest value on the left branch should be used.

Unrealistic trees, e.g.

  ▲
 / \
◯   ▧

can be rejected by submitting a contradictory precedent or an appeal if evaluation is binding, can be replaced with a more accurate proposal in a multi-stage MAST acceptance opening phase for a comparison game, or simply not entered in to if an evaluation is not binding.

If comparisons can be reduced to precedents, cite them. This means that if a comparison has been resolved in a previously successfully completed comparison, submit the merkle path of that proof and the merkle path of the properties that it matches in the properties tree instead of starting an appeal. An uncontested assertion of this form wins.

If either party wishes to reject an assertion they can provide the merkle path to a contradictory assertion.

Appeals

If the content of the game tree root is exhausted by assertions without a simple winner emerging, either player may attempt to establish a new prededent by assembling a pair of merkle paths from the property trees of the attacker and the defender, staking a pre-agreed amount of value that will be forfeited if they lose the appeal, and sending the appeal to a third party tribunal implemented using prediction markets, an ombudsman oracle DAO, or some other means.

The outcome of the appeal becomes available as a precedent for future games.

Game Outcome

Ultimately a winner will emerge, in which case they can exercise the right granted to them by a pre-game commitment to update a DAO’s state or receive an amount of cryptocurency or some other action that a proof of resolution can enable. Or both parties can co-operate to declare a winner or a draw before that, either returning any stakes, burning any commitments, or co-operating to exercise the commitment that the winner would have been able to exploit.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Crypto

Intensive and Extensive Aesthetic Property Token Composition

ERC-721 tokens can be composed into tree structures using ERC-998 tokens. Where those ERC-721 tokens represent images or image elements, that tree structure becomes a rendering tree or two-dimensional scene graph (three-dimensional scene graphs will have to wait for 3D Rare Art standards to solidify). To lay out the elements of the image we must be able to transform them in various ways, changing their position, size, colour and other intensive and extensive aesthetic properties. We can represent these aesthetic properties as ERC-20 tokens with 18 digits of precision as they are continuous quantities.

To apply these properties to an ERC-721 token we can attach them using an ERC-998 composable tokens in an SVG-style tree hierarchy. Each ERC-998 token has one or more quantities of ERC-20 aesthetic property tokens attached, one or more child ERC-998 tokens, and zero or more (usually zero or one) ERC-721 tokens attached. The properties expressed by the ERC-20 tokens attached to each ERC-998 token are applied to any attached ERC-721 token(s) and transitively to the children of any attached ERC-998 tokens.

Where the values we wish to represent should be limited to a given range (e.g. 0.0 .. 1.0 or 0 .. 255), we can either assert if too many tokens are are sent to be attached to ERC-998 tokens (we might also be able to refund them in an additional transaction, but this would affect the gas required – and as per the ERC-20 standard we should not accept fewer tokens than are sent), we can treat higher values as meaning the maximum (e.g. 3.1 is 1.0, and 1337 is 255), or we can scale values relative to the largest quantity.

When the values must be both positive and negative (for example if we are representing co-ordinates around an origin, especially relative co-ordinates in a group hierarchy), we can use a second token to represent negative values (this would be better represented using ERC-1155 tokens but ERC-998 does not support this standard). If both positive and negative tokens are applied their values should be summed. For co-ordinates we can use only positive tokens by treating group origins as their top left rather than their centre and only adding positive offsets to child ERC-998 tokens.

Affine transformation ERC-20 tokens are applied as a transformation matrix to the children of the ERC-998 token they are attached to. This means that children-of-children multiply their parent matrix with their own. There is an implicit graphics state push/pop for each ERC-998 token, so transformations do not affect sibling tokens, only child ones.

For colour or alpha (transparency) values, these values are added to the colour values of the image represented by the token. This may not be the expected behaviour. As with co-ordinates, using only positive values can be achieved by carefully structuring the hierarchy of the image so that child ERC-998s only need to add rather than subtract colour values to represent their colour scheme. Alternatively we can treat colour tokens as scale, allowing both increases and decreases of colour to be expressed across the token hierarchy, and source primitive forms to be arbitrarily coloured if they are white. More complex colour interactions and other filter or layer behaviours could be specified by additional tokens.

This gives us the following ERC-20 tokens:

X x co-ordinate offset values in distance units.
Unbounded.
Y y co-ordinate offset values in distance units.
Unbounded.
WIDTH width in distance units.
Unbounded.
HEIGHT height in distance units.
Unbounded.
ROTATION rotation in degrees.
Unbounded, wraps around past 360 as usual.
RED red scale.
Unbounded, although values that multiply the source value higher than 1.0 will have no additional effect.
GREEN green scale.
Unbounded, although values that multiply the source value higher than 1.0 will have no additional effect.
BLUE blue scale.
Unbounded, although values that multiply the source value higher than 1.0 will have no additional effect.
ALPHA transparency scale.
Unbounded, although values that multiply the source value higher than 1.0 will have no additional effect.

What is to stop the owner of an artwork created in this way from breaking it up, re-arranging it, or adding to it?

Nothing at all…

Isn’t this an extremely expensive way of assembling art on-chain?

It depends on the value of the work that is made using it…

Categories
Aesthetics Art Art Computing Artificial Intelligence Uncategorized

Contemporary “AI Art” In Context

The “AI” used by current “AI Art” is machine learning – recursive neural networks or linear regression if you want to deflate it. These algorithms are not “artists”, they are tools or faculties. Harold Cohen’s long-running AARON project, software written under the previous AI paradigm of “expert systems” was an apprentice or studio assistant. Its use of explicit written rules also makes it a form of discourse. Machine learning could be used to produce digital muses but for the most part AI inflates menial work rather than deflating the status of the artist or their inspiration.

Appropriating a GAN is appropriation art and, ignoring the legal status of appropriation art and the political question of who-appropriates-whom, can be evaluated as such. Appropriating kitsch or canonical high art is a critical move. The critical value of appropriating the art of peers is less clear. Art GANs have at least a claim to the status of art or artistic materials. The producers of it have at least a claim to the status of artists. To treat the products of the GAN as found objects and the GAN’s algorithm as their author is a conceptually provocative move but its precedents lie in the erasure of skilled labour in the work of Koons and Kostabi.

GANs produce pastiches and AST produces interpretations. These are robust art historical categories and are hardly unprecedented. Art that falls into these categories should not be fetishised or rejected based merely on a misapprehension of novelty.

An AI-generated pastiche is of something that (almost certainly) does not exist. This non-existence may consist in several senses:

  1. The image produced does not exist in the training set.
  2. The image produced does not exist in the oeuvre, genre, movement or medium that the training set draws from.
  3. The image did not previously exist and exists only as this image. This is trivial compared to the other senses but it the sense of existence usually meant.
  4. The entities depicted by the image do not exist in reality.
  5. The entities depicted by the image have never existed in the arrangement or event depicted.

An AI-generated interpretation is of something that (almost certainly) does not look like that interpretation.

  1. Where the interpretation is of photographic imagery (in the last moment of its popular acceptance as a mechanical capturing of reality) the results will not resemble it due to the imposition of the distortions and modulations of artistic style.
  2. Where the interpretation is of one artist’s work in the style of another, the results will not stylistically resemble the source work. This is trivial but it usefully illustrates the level at whist AST operates.

At the level of content the introduction, removal, or alteration of subjects and themes is approached more by Deep Dream’s “puppyslugs” than by other contemporary methods. Even then it is a Surrealist’s idees fixes that intrude from the AI’s “subconscious” into every image rather than a freer or more reflective play of concepts and influences.

The current tools of AI art fit neatly into the history of artistic tools and art theory but begin to problematize them.

  1. Historical styles being competently revived may no longer simply be forgery or quotation.
  2. Influence (and at the level of law, copyright infringement) becomes both mechanically explicit and operationally diffuse.
  3. The impact of AI on art is an automation of production, replacing manufacturing jobs the same as in other industries.
  4. The opacity of artist’s explanations of the construction of their work is doubled, as the artist is now using tools that perform actions for reasons that may be opaque to them.

The technology used in contemporary AI art is that which threatens democracy with facial recognition and deep fake images, video and text. Its explanatory opacity (why does the image look like this, which exact sources did it draw on, etc.) can be addressed by the same systems that are being developed to address the need to explain the operation of algorithms within corporations, law enforcement and other powerful organizations if they are to remain accountable. So this entanglement can be critically and politically positive where it is acknowledged and explored.

Current AI art works at the level of style, in the shallows of form. To extend their reach through the realm of form more profoundly and into subject and content is possible with current tools should we choose to do so. This may require more complex pipelines of generation, classification and search but these can be constructed within the same frameworks that current systems are.

The operation of GANs tends to produce art with a compositional scheme of all-overness, for the composition as a whole and for any object (rarely objects) within it. This has a deconstructive effect, deterritorializing an image corpus and reterritorializing it in novel compositions that find new local maxima in the dissolved state space of the corpus’s images. These images are latent in the corpus, generated from within it but lying outside of it. The local sense but global nonsense of markov chains and dreams. The challenge of a new metastability, but only of a new metastability.

Now, about AI curation, collection and critique…

(With thanks to Cynthia Gayton and Seryna Myers.)

Categories
Aesthetics Art Crypto

Tokenized Vickrey Aesthetics

In “Radical Markets”, Eric Posner and Glen Weyl propose a system of universal, permanent second-price “Vickrey Auctions” of land as a mechanism for price discovery on the utility of property and the taxation of the ongoing ownership of that value with a “Harberger Tax” as the means of funding a just, redistributive, state. They call this the “Vickrey Commons”.

Critics of the Vickrey Commons proposal tend to focus on the fact that everywhere is always for sale to the highest bidder rather than the fact that the accompanying tax is intended to ensure socially productive use of property and to securely fund social welfare. From a cypherpunk or cryptocurrency point of view however, the intrusion of the state into property relations is inherently unjust and distortive of social relations. We will return to the redistributive element of the Vickrey Commons later, but for the moment it is its capacity for driving price discovery and productive use that I wish to focus on.

Vickrey Auctions are often used by states to privatise radio frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Extending this to the visible spectrum, to colour, would be the stuff of satire. But below the state level we do see the inefficient allocation and exploitation of colour and other aesthetic properties in the artworld. We can tackle this using the intelligence of markets and simulated property rights on the blockchain.

Let us first make individual colours, shapes, line and surface qualities and other aesthetic properties representable as non-fungible tokens on the blockchain. These can then be sold. The right to use those properties can then be sold by the owners as fungible tokens.

Compositions of these tokens can then be represented in turn by a secondary layer of non-fungible tokens and usage rights for those expressed by their own higher layer of non-fungible tokens.

This process can be repeated until concrete instances of the expression of asthetic properties are expressed by composing non-fungible tokens from different layers into a non-fungible token that can be treated as unique or, alternatively, editioned using a final layer of fungible tokens.

If we use the Ethereum blockchain for this, the system can be represented as a stack of ERC-721, ERC-1633, ERC-20, and ERC-998 smart contracts.

In the absence of rent or taxes, the owners of non-fungible aesthetic properties can make money by selling those tokens or by releasing and/or re-purchasing fungible tokens that represent them. The optimal strategies for this are outside the scope of this essay, but do involve reacting to demand at different levels for fundamental and derived/composed properties in a timely manner.

Returning to the redistributive aspect of the Vickrey Commons, we can (pre-)sell the fundamental aesthetic properties to one or more foundations that exist to profit from them in order to redisttibute those profits to deserving artistic and/or social causes. It is possible to imagine various ways of structuring those foundations as smart contracts or their payment(s) as domain-specific tokens, although introducing a Tokenized Aesthetic Vickrey Commons currency coin risks the introduction of a central bank-like entity into the system.

Where the foundations’ revenue must go to the authors of works using those properties, this is possible to enforce simply on-chain although avoiding the sybil problem and other issues with on-chain redistribution is much less simple. Where we wish to enforce more complex relations between the work and the foundation we will need aesthetic comparison games, which can be completed onchain but are much more expensive than a simple token check. Where the foundations’ missions are more arbitrary, controls begin to look more like human organization than enforcement through code.

It is not possible to exclude duplicate token contracts on a given blockchain without support for doing so at the protocol level, and in the general case it is impossible across blockchains without protocol support for a cross-chain proof-of-precedence protocol. It is even easier to simply not use these tokens. Why, then would anyone use them?

Anchoring a singular source of these properties through first-mover and network effects may be sufficient to make it authoritative for anyone who wishes to use them. The use of these tokens is then a means of establishing price and authenticity, which if we squint hard is to say it is a means to establish value.

Further objections to this translate neatly into objections to the artworld and schemes to reform or replace it.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Crypto

From WART to DeAes

Building on some of the ideas of WART (Wrapped Art) tokens gives us a powerful toolbox for organizing the evaluation and production of blockchain art.

Rather than using a Moloch DAO to decide which ERC-721 contracts to accept tokens from as we could in WART, we can use it to curate a collection of tokenised art directly by voting decide which tokens to purchase, commission, lend and sell as a form of Decentralized Aesthetics (DeAes, pronounced “dais”).

The membership application tribute for joining the DAO can be ERC-721 tokens (unwrapped if we modify the Moloch DAO codebase to directly handle ERC-721 as well as ERC-20 tokens, or else wrapped in the DAO’s own purely internal equivalent of WART) or Wrapped Ether (for the purchase fund). WART itself should not be used for this as it (deliberately) makes selecting artworks for their aesthetic content more difficult.

Each proposal for managing the collection that the membership puts forward to be voted on must fit the stated aesthetic of the DAO, and each member’s votes must evaluate whether that fit is real and appropriate. The DAO’s aesthetic and the interpretation/application strategy used to realize it can be updated through voting proposals, with or without rewards for successfully making the change.

If a DAO member wishes to ragequit they can take art and Ether proportional to their shares. Art allocation strategies for ragequitting can use an internal equivalent to WART, a simple FIFO queue or ERC-721 token, a flat percentage scheme using an agreed-upon source of (pseudo)-randomness, or a more complex combination of or replacement for any of these approaches.

Operationalizing and financializing aesthetic evaluation in this way via investment portfolio management ties art historical development to market signaling in a dynamic and accelerated way, which is to say a mutually beneficial one. This is a radical approach that asks both art historians and financial investors to learn much from each other. Despite this it still cannot reach into the artwork except before the fact in the form of commissions, which extends the history of patronage in a useful way but leaves the frame of the artwork otherwise intact.

We can take this approach further by making the DAO’s voting proposals purely for commissioning or authenticating art, turning the DAO into an artist itself. The former recreates a Koonsian approach to the outsourced fabrication of art, the latter a Kostabian one. The producers of these artworks can be paid in Loot or if the aim of the DAO is to grow by adding like-minded members they can be paid in fully voting shares.

Even where the DAO becomes active in the production of art in this way the edges of the artwork are left intact after its production, securing the interior of the artwork against being connected to market signals. Removing the firewall of the frame rather than routing around it or simply liquidating its contents (an approach I discussed along with the WART proposal) will take still more radical steps.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Crypto Ethereum

WART – Wrapped Art

Wrapped Art (WART) applies the ideas behind Wrapped Kitties to rare art tokens, opening up new possibilities for investment and aesthetics.

The Wrapped Kitties Ethereum smart contract takes CryptoKitties ERC-721 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and gives out its own ERC-20 fungible tokens (WCK) in return, “wrapping” the former in the latter. This makes it easy to buy and sell kitties in bulk, to use kitties in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications, or to trade low-valued kitties that one wishes to dispose of for others with more potential value by “unwrapping” the ERC-20 tokens back to (different) ERC-721 CryptoKitty tokens. WCK is credited with giving CryptoKitties a 50% price bump in mid-2019.

Wrapping Rare Art ERC-721 NFTs with ERC-20 Wrapped Art WART tokens would allow the same use cases. It would be a way to get (financial) utility from (financially) under-performing art. Or a way of exploring new artists by swapping NFTs via the contract, either randomly or by seeing which other ERC-721 rare art tokens the contract currently has wrapped and redeeming WART for them accordingly.

The Wrapped Art smart contract should allow tokens from more than one Rare Art platform to be wrapped and unwrapped, both to allow the widest range of tokens to be used for liquidity purposes and to give access to the widest range of artists and works. On a technical level this might require the contract to be centralized in order to manage the list of platform contracts it accepts NFT tokens from, but on balance this is better than tying it to (one version of) one platform or a frozen list of contracts that will rapidly become outdated. To decentralize this while robustly incentivizing the curators to act in the best interests of WART we can instead curate the addition and removal of contracts using a Moloch DAO with WART itself as the membership tribute.

WART gives collectors who don’t have a background in fine art but can follow price charts the ability to shake up their collections. This is both financially and art historically useful, allowing collectors to benefit from access to both financial and aesthetic liquidity as they build their collecting strategy. The blasphemy (for art historians) of art as a fungible asset class and the blasphemy (for financiers) of money as an insufficient sign of value resolve each other here. In doing so they create better signals than the positive feedback loops that would otherwise emerge when purchasing power drives artistic development under the efficient market hypothesis and nothing else.

It might appear that WART turns rare art into pure financial quantity, but in fact WART turns Rare Art into a pure aesthetic quantity. The monetary value of the art wrapped by the WART smart contract can be established by the trading price of WART but given what its tokens represent this means that hodling specific quantities of WART has an unavoidably aesthetic significance in addition to (and by virtue of) its financial one. Status games of hodling significant amounts of WART (in the sense both of large and evocative numbers) without unwrapping or using them for any further purpose might emerge in response to this fact. This fundamentally changes the concepts of collection, exhibition and value for art, coming down on the side of the price charts in terms of form but thereby opening that up to new aesthetic content.

Taking these ideas even further we can wrap the content of tokens. For example MATH tokens can be wrapped or burnt in return for the bits that represent their numbers as ERC-20 (or ERC-1155) tokens. We can’t break a CryptoKitty up into their genes (that would be cruel) but could we break up the image that a Rare Art token represents into its component colours? What cryptographic proof of the off-chain pixel values could be produced on-chain?

Or we can reverse this process and start by constructing NFT art from other tokens representing discrete aesthetic quantities. COLOR tokens start to do this with their wrapping of MATH tokens, but are monolithic and atomic rather than constructed from discrete elements. Tokens Equal Text is constructed from elements but each contains several words and the colours used are implicit. A more general and powerful NFT art construction system will require a different approach.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Crypto

Flinging An NFT In The Public’s Face

The “Rare Art” market demands something aesthetic to own. “Tokens Equal Text” loops this back through a complexly unownable genre of aesthetics to both satisfy and frustrate this demand and to place blockchain (quasi-)property and the history of art into a state of mutually critical interrogation.

(From the description of “Tokens Equal Text“.)

That demand is exercising selection pressure in interesting ways. I don’t ever want to argue against transformative fair use but, seen individually, examples of what amounts to autotraced stock photos of famous people registered as non-fungible tokens are more like copyright-encumbered decoration than true digital ownership of art.

As a category this kind of tokenized art is absolutely a response to unsatisfied demand to be able to valorize the expression and consumption of creativity, and for engagement with historically and culturally meaningful imagery, which amounts to the demand for a more participatory artworld. Individual tokens of such tokenized art are interesting as tokens of this. And of course there is nothing to stop the intensification or exploitation of such art leading to instances of it that are interesting in themselves read through wider history and theory.

But at present there is an unacknowledged gap between the enthusiasm for such art and the reality of its construction. “That’s just your opinion” is a possible response to this, but it isn’t a strong one when discussing contradictions between the work’s construction and the value claims made for it. To ground the work securely will require either a more cypherpunk attitude or a different set of artistic value claims. Neither will sit easily with the other, and neither will leave the work unchanged in the eyes of its proponents.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Reviews

Haven’t They Suffered Enough?

The original Blade Runner was a postmodern film noir. It had a noir movie’s nihilism and pathos, its archetypes of character, plot, and visuals. The events of Blade Runner make sense within that framework, they are justified as story choices and pay off narratively and conceptually within it. Los Angles 2019 seen from 1982 was a decaying dead-end of sterile images and simulation. From culture and architecture that loops back on and consumes itself, through empty rotting buildings and a few overcrowded streets, everything is second order and running out of time between its quotation marks. Everyone wants to defect. Human beings want to leave the dying Earth for the Offworld Colonies, dying Replicants want to escape their handlers and get back to Earth to escape their pre-programmed obsolescence.

Rik Deckard is not, to quote one of those Replicants, “a good man”. As the opening text crawl of the movie makes clear they are a state executioner of escaped slaves. As the movie makes clear, they’re not very good at it. Deckard’s violent, incompetent, systematically constructed and exploited masculinity may be human or it may be a simulation of humanity, or at least manhood. Critiques of Blade Runner that reduce that to a biological question diminish rather than ring-fence the idea of humanity. The spectacularised, aestheticised slo-mo killings of women that Deckard stumbles through – and Deckard only kills women, the men are taken care of by other means – are a contrast to the realtime depiction of their grimacing, sweating, shaking, bellowing murderer who never makes the clean shots that would cinematically cauterise the violence.

Blade Runner 2049 is a blockbuster sequel. That’s a very different framework from either postmodernism or noir. Blockbusters must offer spectacle, catharsis and closure. They must have heroes and villains. And they must have a heterosexual nuclear family at their core, however constructed. When a film noir story is continued within this framework it causes problems. Deckard goes from hard-boiled killer and seducer to nobly absent father and widower. The film is not without critical potential: Deckard’s replacement, Officer K, is trapped in mausculinity-as-violence-for-capital by the disciplinary cybernetics of circuits of images of desire. The giant and pocket-sized holograms that this entails have drawn criticism for being exploitative, but this is a confusion of depiction with endorsement.

Where Blade Runner 2049 does become reactionary beyond the collateral damage of mapping from noir to blockbuster is in its central mystery, which replaces the original’s abstract question of the worth and construction of identity to a concrete one of simple parentage. Building on this, its MacGuffin is the replacement of escape from the infinite replicating capacity of technocapital with embracing the nine-month reproductive capacity of its subjects. The nihilism of the original Bladerunner was liberating, in its own way. The sequel’s restoration of the yoke of reproduction is played as hopeful and even revolutionary but is in fact cause for despair. In 2049 both the system and the defectors are obsessed with faith and fertility. Defect from the human security system and you are personally responsible for ensuring the continuity of the replicant race. No matter who wins, the future for replicant women is The Handmaid’s Tale.

Haven’t they suffered enough?

Categories
Accelerationism Aesthetics Art Philosophy Projects Satire

Upload Update

Like the narrator of William Gibson’s short story “The Winter Market”, I don’t think that mind uploads are the person whose brain they destroy. I’m not even sure that a living brain is the same person each day, or from moment to moment, but reassembling a similar pattern on the same substrate at least looks like continuity. Whether the Ship Of Theseus is the ship that Theseus’s sailed or not, a copy built next to it all in one go probably isn’t. But if the Ship Of Theseus burns, that copy is more like it than anything else that exists. Where the resemblance is many billions of bits strong, and there is no stronger resemblance extant, that’s a form of continuity of identity. Hopefully that of a portrait that captures the sitter’s personality rather than a vampire child.

The only fully uploaded neural connectome is that of the tiny C. elegans nematode worm. Not any particular worm, the worm as an organism. So there is no single identity for the upload to continue or to not continue. The connectome been downloaded into wheeled robots, where it bumbles around in a wormy manner. I’m working on using it to control the pen in a version of draw-something. It’s a different kind of neural art. Nematodes probably don’t have subjectivity, so hopefully this isn’t cruel. I don’t want to be the worm-torturing version of Roko’s Basilisk.

What if we are the worms in someone else’s art project, though? If the universe isn’t a simulation but rather an artwork this would render conceptual art nomination a priori correct and give human suffering the moral quality of crimes committed in the name of making art that do not pay for themselves with the resultant aesthetic achievement.

Neal Stephenson’s mind uploading novel “Fall, Or Dodge In Hell” deals in the ethics and aesthetics of mind uploading and its worlds. Less simulation, more simulacra. Reading it and encountering an uptick in transhumanist themes online and in meatspace has encouraged me to revisit my low-resolution “Uploads” project to make it very slightly higher resolution. I’m porting it to Kinect 2, improving its performance, and looking at better EEG options.

Following the themes of “Fall”, the uploads need a world to live in. At present they implicitly live through, but not on, Twitter. Maybe they can inhabit a simple VR environment. They also need to communicate with each other. Sad and other predetermined emotional reacts only, though. As local disk-based blobs of data they are in danger of being ephemeral. Content-addressable storage (IPFS) can help with that.

Blockchain security and permanence can evocatively address all of this as well – there are blockchain VR environments, communication systems, and data storage systems. There’s a fear of loss behind both mind uploading and blockchain systems. Finn Brunton’s excellent book “Digital Cash” draws out some more direct historical connections between the two.

But that’s another story.