Categories
Art Crypto Projects

Certificate of Inauthenticity

“Certificate of Inauthenticity”, 2020, ERC-721 Tokens.

Provably inauthentic art.

A follow-up to my collaboration with Furtherfield.

Find out more here:

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/certificate-of-inauthenticity/

Or buy here:

https://opensea.io/assets/certificate-of-inauthenticity

Categories
Art Crypto Projects

Facecoin Cash

Facecoin Cash is a new higher-resolution, lower pixel bit-depth advancement on the original Facecoin.

Facecoin is one of my most popular projects. It’s a good introduction to some of the technical and ideological ideas behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

This new and improved version produces larger, more defined images with clearer “face” identification. It has the same block size though.

See it in action here:

https://show.robmyers.org/facecoin/index.html

Get the source code here:

https://gitlab.com/robmyers/facecoin

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 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 That version incorporated more historical references and I renamed it “Like That”, a reference to a phrase one of my children had used as a general purpose assertion as a toddler.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/

Categories
Art Crypto Projects

Proof of Work Bitmap

“Proof of Work Bitmap” (2019) shows a 16×16 pixel monochrome bitmap that lives on the Ethereum blockchain.

 

Clicking on that bitmap shows an editor.

 

Submitting any changes made using the editor starts a (simple) proof-of-work calculation.

 

When that calculation is complete the results can be sent along with the bitmap to update it on the blockchain. Doing so costs some “gas” Ether to pay Ethereum for the transactions.

 

You can see it (in an Ethereum-enabled browser) here:

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

The source code for the series is here:

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

And the project page is here:

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/proof-of-work-bitmap

Proof of Work Bitmap is the latest in a series of pieces that pair aesthetic properties with methods of economic allocation or social governance. In computer art and digital culture a monochrome bitmap is the simplest representation of a discrete image. In blockchain-based systems a “proof of work” is a time-consuming computational puzzle that is impossible to cheat on but simple to check the result of. The result of solving that puzzle in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Proof of Work Bitmap, is a 256-bit number with a specific number of zeros at the end. This is the same size as a 16×16 bitmap and as a memory cell in Ethereum. There’s a resonance here, as there is in each piece in the series.

On a technical basis this is the first piece in the series made with the Web3.js 1.0, Bulma CSS, and raw JavaScript DOM access rather than Truffle-Contract, Bootstrap and JQuery. It’s a much more lightweight approach, which is good for maintainability.

The next and final pieces in this series are “Hacked Line Properties”, “Staking Ratio”, and “Pay Previous Path”.

Categories
Art Art Computing Crypto Ethereum Projects Shows Virtual Reality

Galerie Default

I created a building in CryptoVoxels using one of their default build templates and filled it with a show of Tokens Equal Text:

https://www.cryptovoxels.com/parcels/2000

I’ve named it Galerie Default after how it was made. You can take a look in your web browser via the link above (and if you have a fancy VR headset you’ll soon be able to wander around it immersively). There are much more advanced uses of the CryptoVoxels system to show NFT art within it, but this was a fun experiment.