Category: Art

Categories
Art Crypto

Multisig Art Organization

(Via the awesome @keikreutler .)

This is a key insight.

Social collaboration around learning to use technology is a key part of its value for art communities. In the net.art era this involved getting online, subscribing to mailing lists, making web sites, etc. . Each step was an opportunity for frustration, assistance, bonding and productive encounters. For blockchain art setting up a wallet, receiving and sending transactions and learning good security practice are equivalent to this in many ways but they lack the ongoing productive, collaborative communication involved in engaging with a listserv.

From experience I would argue that the closest experience to this now for crypto is running an m-of-n multisig wallet. Setting up and testing the wallet, proposing transactions, gathering sufficient signatures, and transmitting the result is just this kind of shared technosocial task. It’s a focus of activity and a spur to communication and learning.

Crucially for representing artworld forms such as collections, you don’t need to add anything to a multisig in order to own an ERC-721 token representing an artwork. It works right out of the box, and doesn’t require setting up or understanding a more complex DAO before explaining it to others.

I’m hoping that we’ll see the emergence of blockchain art multisig groups with strong creative and critical identities. Initially as collectors, then as curators, and eventually as collaborative artists themselves.

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
Art Crypto

Tokens Equal Tokens

The Nifty Report’s excellent post on the MATH token and two projects inspired by it provide an interesting contrast with “Tokens Equal Text”:

https://niftyreport.substack.com/p/the-nifty-report-vol1-issue-4-the

MATH is an Ethereum smart contract that allows people to buy numbers, identified (and in identity with) ERC-721 non-fungible token IDs. Token ID 1 is the number one, and so on. To buy a number higher than 100 (the project’s creator owns the numbers up to 100), you must pay the owners of two existing numbers to generate it by adding their values. It’s a wonderfully absurd example of artificial scarcity and true ownership taken to the extreme. But it’s also an example of creating new forms of property on the blockchain, capturing things that could not previously be treated as commodities. Although people do try to assert ownership over numbers off of the blockchain as well.

Using token identifiers as the entire content and meaning of what they represent makes those tokens very secure – they require no off-chain resources to establish the significance and value that they assert merely by existing. They are self-describing or self-encoding.

The RGB token builds on MATH to create 16×16 coloured bitmaps by using the binary digits of three MATH numbers for their red, green and blue components and paying their owners for the privilege. It’s still an entirely on-chain token – no metadata from a web server or IPFS required – but it doesn’t encode the information directly into the token ID. The token ID is linked to each of those numbers elsewhere in the contract’s data instead. That makes sense as there isn’t enough room in the Ethereum number type used for token IDs to store three token IDs, but a monochrome bitmap of the same size or a much smaller coloured bitmap could be stored that way.

Likewise the WORDS contract also mentioned by The Nifty Report uses a similar join-and-pay scheme to that used by MATH in order to generate and purchase new words while storing them separately from their token IDs like RGB. As with bitmaps, words can be stored directly in a token ID. Depending on how long they are, several can be store in a single token ID as long as they don’t take up more than the 32 bytes of space available in the number type used to represent token IDs in ERC-721. Not doing this means that, like RGB, WORDS is a token with a significance that is purely on-chain but is not purely ID-based. Neither RGB nor WORDS are not self-encoding.

Tokens Equal Text’s tokens consist of words that are self-encoding. Its ERC-21 contract uses short fragments of text encoded as token ID numbers. It then assembles these these using an EC-998 composable token contract to create descriptions of imagined Vaporwave artworks. The colours for each token ID / each piece of the composition are generated by taking the first few hexadecimal digits of the hash of the token ID and treating that as an RGB colour, extracting surplus value although but surplus meaning from the code of the token IDs. This is a more complex structure than than MATH, RGB or WORDS but has a flatter creation structure – I have minted and composed all the tokens that will be available in the series and owning each token implies no residual rights.

Self-encoding tokens are both conceptually interesting and operationally robust. We’ve only started to see what they can do.

For more information about Tokens Equal Text see here:

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/tokens-equal-text/

Or to buy one of the pieces head over to OpenSea:

https://opensea.io/category/tokens-equal-text

Categories
Art Crypto Projects

Staking Ratio

New on-chain blockchain art project! This is last in the series pairing aesthetic properties with blockchain governance systems. Stake Ether to alter the ratio between two (perceptual) values.

See: http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/staking-ratio/

Categories
Art Crypto Projects

Shared Secret

New project! Open your authenticator app (e.g. Google Authenticator or Authy) and point it at the QR code above.

Or for more details see:

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/shared-secret/

Categories
Art Art History Crypto Reviews

The Rarest Book

The history of rare digital art doesn’t make sense without Rare Pepes.

Pepe the frog is a cartoon character, originally created by Matt Furie, that turned out to be catnip for Internet meme creators. Some of these memes were formatted as trading cards in order to create humorous simulacral cultural fakes called “Rare Pepes” which were shared on imageboards and then sold on eBay and other marketplaces. In reality, digital images are difficult to make “rare”. They circulate as infinitely copyable files on the Internet. There is a “The Simpsons” meme for this, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

The Rare Pepe Blockchain Project took the problem of making rare pepes actually rare seriously and ran with it. It catalogues rare pepe images registered as blockchain-stored metadata in small editions of Bitcoin-based Counterparty XCP tokens. Social media clique exclusivity thereby becomes blockchain artificial scarcity. I talked about the economic and social dynamics of this in “Tokenization And Its Discontents“, but it is worth emphasizing (as Jason Bailey and others have) that one of the outcomes of this was the whole “rare digital art” market. While they do represent a valuable alternative to the economic and social dynamics of the existing artworld, the current rare art tokenization platforms amount to a gentrification of the Rare Pepe Blockchain Project, obscuring that more liminal aspects of their origins and discarding some of their possibilities in the process.

“The Rarest Book” is a physical volume created by Eleanora Brizi and Louis Parker collecting 36 series of Rare Pepes, 1774 in total, along with essays that cover the history of the project and put it in context. It’s a fat paperback edition with a striking green cover, as playful and comprehensive as the work it covers. The Rare Pepe Blockchain Project shows the strength of social and memetic content for building community and value in crypto projects. It would be difficult to produce such a book about most other tokenized art platforms, which tend to lack a unifying theme, iconography, or curatorial approach. If you don’t want to view cartoon frog trading cards as conceptually rich contemporary art (although there is always the MODERNPEPE token on the back of the book in that case), step back and look at the project as a whole. This book is an excellent way of doing that and makes a strong case for the interest, value, and alterity of the project.

So order a copy before it becomes even rarer. There were only 300 to start with. Find out more here:

https://twitter.com/ELEONORABRIZI/status/1187549332519686144

Categories
Art Art Computing Generative Art Projects

Like That 2020 (3D)

“Like That” is a generative art project that started in 1996 as a series of 2d image generators and 3d animations called “The Order of Things”. It drew on the aesthetics of then-contemporary British art (Julian Opie, Rachel Whiteread, Art & Language, Bridget Riley). The 2d works in the series were written in the PostScript programming language. The 3d pieces were written in Metrowerks CodeWarrior C++ on Macintosh System 7.x using QuickDraw 3D, their source code has unfortunately long since been lost.

In 2008 I re-implemented and extended the project using Processing. That version incorporated more historical references and I renamed it “Like That”, a reference to a phrase one of my children had used as a general purpose assertion as a toddler. In 2009 I generalized Like That using a script written in Common Lisp to glue together fragments of Processing code into many different combinations of shapes, colours and movements.

In 2019 most web browsers no longer easily support the Java programming language that Processing is based on and Processing’s JavaScript replacements are either already deprecated or too different from it to make porting simple. I have therefore ported the 3D Processing code to THREE.js (I’m still thinking about whether to port the animated 2d code). Going from platform-specific compiled applications to cross-platform bytecode and then to scripting languages has been the technical journey of much of software development over the same time period.

I still find Like That visually and conceptually engaging so I was glad to be able to update it to add some contemporary references and keep it running.

Project page: http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/like-that-2020

View: https://show.robmyers.org/like-that-2020/build/index.html

Source code: https://gitlab.com/robmyers/like-that-2020

Categories
Art Crypto Projects

Pay Previous Path

“Pay Previous Path”, the penultimate piece in the series of artworks pairing aesthetic objects with economic allocation methods, is now live after some Ethereum transaction wrangling due to unexpectedly high execution costs on the network.

You can find out more here: http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/pay-previous-path/

The final piece will be “Staking Ratio”.

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.

Categories
Art Crypto Projects

Hack Line Properties

Hack Line Properties, 2019, Ethereum DApp.

“Hack Line Properties” is a supposedly secure blockchain smart contract designed to allow only its owner to update the vector line stroke properties that it stores.

But a common Ethereum code bug allows anyone who finds it to “hack” the contract and set the line properties themselves.

If Lawrence Lessig’s descriptive statement that, on the Internet, “code is law” is taken normatively then bugs such as this are governance mechanisms and each hack of the contract is an act of governance.

You can view Hack Line Propeties in an Ethereum-enabled browser here:

https://show.robmyers.org/artworld-ethereum/dapps/proof-of-work-bitmap/app/index.html

The source code for the series is available here:

https://gitlab.com/robmyers/artworld-ethereum/