About us
Stay in touch
Peter Bauman: Hello everyone and welcome to this Le Random discussion. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, or Monk Antoni, the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random. Today our topic is this tension, and maybe it's only a surface tension, but this tension that I've perceived between two growing trends. One of them is what Mitchell F Chan has spoken about recently, and that's what he refers to as blockchain formalism. Another is this coalescing movement that artists and thinkers like Mat Dryhurst and matto are beginning to write and think about more, which is protocol art. This is an art form that has its roots in Jack Burnham's "Systems Esthetics" in the 1960s, also Roy Ascott's behaviorist art and cybernetics. But it has really taken on this new form today because of protocols like Ethereum, and that's what this discussion largely focuses on. Luckily, the guests joining me today are some of the people that I'd like to talk about this the most with. They are Mitchell F Chan himself and also Operator's Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti. Then we also have matto from Material Protocol Arts and then one of my favorite thinkers and writers and critics, malte. I'll explain what blockchain formalism and protocol art are once we get started at the beginning. I can't wait. Let's begin.
Thank you all so much for joining. It's a real honor to have everybody here talking about this today. It's something I've been thinking about for a while, so I'm excited to finally chat with the people who are at top of mind when it comes to these two topics. Those topics are blockchain formalism on one hand and on the other hand something called protocol art. We'll get into what both of those are today. Just to really quickly summarize and flatten everything out before we unpack and unflatten later: what Mitchell Chan calls blockchain formalism, I think, echoes a lot with Operator's ethos of no tech demos. It's the idea that technology can overshadow an artwork's intended meaning. Ania and Dejha Ti, who make up Operator, both advocate for making technology invisible or more subservient, at least, to the ideas. And again, maybe that isn't exactly correct, and I'm happy for you guys to tell me why later. If blockchain formalism calls for technology to be more hidden, on the other hand is this coalescing term protocol art from writers and thinkers like Mat Dryhurst, but also matto here with us and malte with us as well. Again, these ideas have been coalescing for a while, but they've been around for a really long while, which we'll talk about. The ideas with protocol art are, again to flatten it before we fill out more details later, that it's okay if technology takes center stage. It can be the medium. It can be the aesthetic. It can be the concept. It can be all of those things. And rather than hiding technology, protocol art appears to espouse more of its foregrounding. So I see a bit of a tension there: one side that seems to be calling for technology in general to be hidden and one side to be espousing its foregrounding. That's what we want to pick out and root out today. So maybe we can begin by telling me how I'm wrong or how what I just flattened out wasn't really accurate. Maybe, Mitchell, you can start. Can you just tell us clearly, from a more high level, what you mean by blockchain formalism, the nutshell version, and why you think hiding technology is important?
Mitchell F Chan: Sure. Well, I'll expand it, not to be just picking on blockchain formalism but to talk about a type of formalism that has existed for a long time with a lot of different technologies. It's actually easiest to understand when we look at a technology that is not, you know, an operating system or a computer but a technology that's as simple as an artistic medium, like, say, oil paint. I talk a lot about types of art that have existed to demonstrate the capabilities, boundaries or material potentials of a particular medium. So in the 20th century we get this type of painting that is very much about painting, that is about indulging in the sumptuousness of the material of paint and its visceralness. And then at the same time you can combine that with a demonstration of the process through which that medium is applied. I'm describing a Jackson Pollock painting here, right? A Jackson Pollock painting is a painting that is about paint. The material properties of paint are right there for you to see. And the other thing that is on display in the Jackson Pollock painting is the physical process of the artist: the troubled, emotional man, and he's whipping the paint around. You can see it. You can feel the high heels coming through that paint. And we see this pattern repeated again and again in art. So what I've just described in a Jackson Pollock painting you might see again in a Gerhard Richter smear painting. If you know those paintings, Gerhard Richter puts all the paint on the canvas and he's got it right where he likes it. Then he takes a squeegee, goes, right? And you see the process. You see the properties of the paint. I think that type of approach happens a lot in technology because when you create an artwork that demonstrates the properties of a material, you're like, look. Look at how I can bend this bit of technology. To demonstrate the properties of a technological substrate can be an interesting thing. It can be an important thing. And that is where the form comes out of the boundaries of the medium itself. I think that is how I would describe that, if that makes sense to everybody.
Ania Catherine: So not all artwork that is about technology uses technology, and not all artwork that uses technology is about technology. Then you have artworks that are about technology and use it, and you have artworks that are not about technology and don't use it. So that's, I think, an important distinction. When technology is the subject of the artwork, what it can do, then that is a very different thing. For me, in my mind, it eliminates some of the tension that you pointed out, Peter, because sometimes it feels like an artwork is trying to not be about technology, but maybe there's not actually a message. So then what the tech is doing becomes this story in lieu of a story or in lieu of a mission. Whereas I think there's a lot of incredible artworks where technology itself is the subject: the constraints, the affordances of technology are the subject of the work by design, not because you arrived at an image and you need to invent what makes it important later. So I think that's a little bit of a distinction that I want to make that helps clarify for me. There's not a tension but just nuances to identify, to help to understand what is what. What is a tech demo? What is an artwork that is about blockchain, that is using blockchain, that is about what it can do, that is made only through the constraints, that being part of the beauty of it, which I think there's many examples of.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it's a good point that these things can fall on a matrix. And what we're discussing is maybe where to place these things on a matrix instead of, you know, being at each other's throats. But maybe, matto, you can tell us. We've heard two voices that are maybe more going to be talking today about blockchain formalism. So maybe, matto, you can tell us more about protocol art and what you mean by it as an artist and a maker but also as a thinker who writes about it and who has been recently writing some really interesting stuff. Can you also give us that nutshell version of what you mean by protocol art?
matto: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, just to go off what Ania said, it's important to decouple the idea of working inside the constraints and affordances of a medium and being about that medium or about technology. I think it's kind of the nature of working with any medium to try to really rigorously explore what its affordances are. That doesn't inherently mean that this is hermetically inward looking, that this is a painting about paint. Not that that's an invalid approach or anything, but I don't think that those two things are tightly coupled necessarily, or at least not in my mind. And what I'm trying to do... protocol art is a moving target, right? I think it's useful in that way, and it's useful to keep it in motion rather than trying to box it in too tightly at this early stage. One phrase that Mat Dryhurst used, who you mentioned earlier, that I thought was evocative and interesting is the idea that we're in an era where media is downstream from protocol decisions. If we take something like Instagram, which is obviously not an artwork, but it's an important system, the images of Instagram are kind of a consequence of the protocol and the incentives and the structure of that system. I think that is a good example of these kinds of outcomes, and I think that's an interesting and relevant topic to explore as we live in a society that is shaped by technologically mediated systems. For me, the language of protocol obviously has a kind of a loaded meaning inside crypto. But I think we can also take it up a level of abstraction to say that this is art about systems and rules, which are, generally speaking, easiest to express through technology but in my mind not inherently about technology. It's more about what new types of systems are enabled, what new types of affordances are there to explore through this technology that are relevant to the world that we live in, which in a kind of circular way is very much shaped and impacted by technology. So I don't think we can fully separate these things. And I think then you have people who are more interested in this kind of very narrowly defined exploration of this technology that maybe will come under this umbrella as well. So again, I'm not trying to codify or be the definitive voice on this topic, but this is kind of how I'm thinking about it, to create a little context.
Dejha Ti: Peter, on your mentioning of no tech demos: that is one of Operator's rules for, in quotes, art and technology that we established in 2019. So it's one of several. The reason we released those rules for art and technology was really a guideline for ourselves, but it also served as a way to, when we would present our work, which was especially at that time examples of large-scale immersive works, works that used a lot of technology, works that, if you go to a museum, don't really look like art that should maybe be in a museum. Or there were a lot of skeptics around, is this art or is this just entertainment? And we felt, especially in 2018, when experiential marketing agencies kind of co-opted performance installation works... you know, the history of it. If you even look at Yayoi Kusama, for example. Ania and I were living in Los Angeles at the time. You can find Craigslist posts looking for hiring people to build infinity rooms. Like, what? Not for Kusama but just for Nike or Google or whatever. Fill in the name company. It's like, I don't think she was making a protocol. Yeah, an unconsensual protocol. It was just a method or a container for, you know, selling shoes or something. We at that time were getting a lot of phone calls or emails from agencies saying, hey, your work, it's experiential, there's installation, it's performance. And we think this would be great for fill-in-the-blank brand. But the one thing we have to tell you, and I hate to say this, is that it needs to be Instagrammable. Right? And we thought, well, okay, this isn't really... it almost created a sense of offense within us. And so we ended up creating this artwork called On View in 2019, which was commissioned by the Scout Museum of Art, which was kind of like a theoretical parallel to the selfie stage, in which we more or less created a site-specific work that was somewhat functioning, had the mechanisms of selfie stages. But then we had this installation focus in on what is surveillance capitalism. And so it was at that time, in which we were presenting that work, that we really felt a responsibility to speak to avoiding the tricks and gimmicks when creating art that happens to use technology. We always make this kind of difference. It's like, why is it art and technology? What is the separatism about? It's not art and clay or art and paint or art and blockchain. It's just art. And so to put the emphasis on the technology is already a terrible start. But anyhow, we made these rule sets. And so no tech demos was not about not using technology, because, I would say, almost 95 percent of Operator artworks use technology extensively. If you come to one of our presentations, we'll have a 200-page slide deck in which we go through how we make that from a process standpoint. But first and foremost, always leading with the concept. And whenever we use the technology technically, we also use it conceptually. And so the idea is that it's not enough for the artwork to demonstrate the capabilities of a technology. Or the idea that invisible technology isn't necessarily hype tech, for instance, and it's okay to hide the technology, and for an artwork that is a digital artwork to not even seem as if it's using any technology. Just to create a little context within what we mean when we say no tech demos, it's really to ensure that when the technology is no longer novel, does the work still hold up. Like Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway: Paik uses old TVs. Well, those TVs barely function. You probably can't even get replacement parts for them anymore. But if that piece is on view, it still hits the same, if not even more powerful, than it did the first time it was shown. So again, not leaning into the novelty of the technology for the work to hold up. It's this idea of, tech doesn't age well; the concepts do.
“So again, not leaning into the novelty of the technology for the work to hold up. It's this idea of, tech doesn't age well; the concepts do.” — Dejha Ti 11:51
Peter Bauman: Yeah, thank you for summarizing those ideas. It reminds me of that idea of just technology from a broader sense, going back to Donna Haraway and Joanna Zylinska, about just that: we are all cyborgs. We've basically been doing all this from the very beginning. And so when you think about it that way, then the distinction between, I guess, what is art and what is technology is less important. I definitely want to hear from malte. So, malte, you recently wrote a piece called "Computation in the Expanded Field." And, well, you can correct me if I'm wrong. It read to me like you had in mind some of Mitchell's ideas about blockchain and formalism while you wrote the piece. It read like you were almost responding to some of Mitchell's ideas, like from his Art Blocks talk. I guess, first of all, is that true? And then also, can you summarize your thoughts on protocol art, especially the ones that you put forward recently in that "Computation in the Expanded Field" piece?
maltefr: Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me. Actually, it was not at all a response to anything that Mitchell said. I hadn't heard or read about the talk by then. I'm not even sure if I knew that the talk happened, but I definitely hadn't heard it. I had written on Twitter slash X about this question of formalism for a long time, and I had a yearlong or longer debate with 113 about it. And I should probably also caveat that everybody else who has been speaking is an artist. They're practitioners. I'm not a practitioner. The reason why I started thinking about it is that some artists I'm just in contact with, like matto, like 113, were producing works that adhere to the requirements or confinements of Ethereum as a computation platform. It was more of an attempt at understanding why artists would feel themselves drawn to that and sort of make sense of it. Some of the concepts that were used by artists and by others in this space in just a colloquial way were basically a recoding of some formalist terms, like medium specific or blockchain native. And I was always super interested in the theoretical history of formalism, mostly because I thought it was so interesting that if anybody went to any art school and had read anything about art theory, the one thing they knew is that formalism is evil. If you didn't learn anything in theory at art school, you knew that Greenberg is bad and you had to be against that. You knew probably about October and that. So formalism was evil, and anti-formalism in every way was good. That's a very crude summary, but I think those are the theoretical ideas that many people leave art school with. And just for that reason alone I thought the history of formalism was quite interesting, because if you take a closer look, it's in a pretty interesting way connected to the history of modernism and then to the emergence of conceptual art and many other things that were going on in contemporary art, especially North American contemporary art, both in theory and practice. One way to think about it, which I think is more interesting than just saying it's about material properties, is that it's actually about how meaning making functions. Much of turning abstract and much of turning formal is about, where do you find meaning? And the idea is that a practice can find meaning in itself, that it doesn't have to be about something other than itself but that it can find meaning in itself. The example, of course, is representational painting versus abstract painting, but also in film: how can film no longer be only about something other than itself but also about itself? You can find that in material properties. You can find it in different things on some very abstract level. I think that is an interesting comparison to the approach to Ethereum as a compute platform that you see among certain artists, like 113 and like matto, because you are no longer using the blockchain as a distribution medium for images but you are reflecting on the properties of that blockchain itself. And that doesn't mean in any way that works that use the blockchain as a distribution mechanism are less interesting or have less conceptual content. I think that's totally nonsensical. It just raises the question of, why are artists interested in the blockchain as a computing environment with these specific constraints? Since if you were interested in computation itself, there would be much more interesting computers than this specific computer. The way I thought about protocol art was exploring some attributes of, in that case, Ethereum as a distributed computation platform that make it interesting for artists. There are different elements that you can explore. There's this economic element: that you for the first time have this substrate that has a direct economic function, that is disintermediating. I think there's also just the pure interest in constrained computation, which is interesting to people since it poses a challenge. But then most importantly, I think there is this idea of a permanent cultural site that's really different from any other storage or recording medium. Artists, from my conversations, feel drawn to that, to the idea of permanence, which I think raises an interesting issue that's quite at odds with a lot of other ideas in contemporary art, and this notion that you have this almost matrix-like structure out there that's independent of any time, place or person and that you can almost carve into. So for me, protocol art is not a fixed theory, not a fixed concept. It's an attempt to just make sense of artists being drawn to Ethereum as a computation platform and experimenting with these specific constraints of a platform. I think constraints are very attractive to me and I think to a lot of artists.
Ania Catherine: So I hear that completely. There's something also in response to what you said, malte, and I love the piece. The text that Peter referenced of yours is great. The question of permanence being so important, which is kind of contra this idea of the ephemerality of art, that it's fleeting and that's why it's beautiful. So I immediately, because we're obviously working a lot with performance, want to touch on both constraints being attractive and also trying to take the most ephemeral art form that there is, which is performance, and then find a permanent home for it somehow. Figuring out ways to downsample motion data so that we can store it on chain and give this ephemeral moment some kind of permanent sculpture on the Ethereum blockchain. A lot of people actually have said to us, you know, you can just dance. They were like, why did you have to generate these sequences online? Why do they have to be stored on chain? Why would you try to do that? You can just dance. And so what you're saying about, even if there wasn't an output, the challenge itself: even as a choreographer, me having to go through movements and choose which part, which bones in my body, that I really needed in order to express a certain movement, so I could choose which bones we could afford to upload, meant that my job as a choreographer went from being in a dance studio going like this to sitting there and thinking about whether my wrist was essential to express this movement or not, because I could only afford to upload certain bones on chain because it was so expensive. I couldn't have the luxury of letting all of my bones express that move. So in that moment of doing exactly what you just said, artists finding ways to create within extreme constraints, I found making Human Unreadable just the act of choreographing what that means. And last thing: I actually thought at one point, this is so tedious. Could I outsource this to someone? Could I ask someone to go through and do the bone selection? But then I was like, no. This is such an important, intuitive, creative part of my feeling about what this move needs in order to be itself. The thought of outsourcing that as a kind of admin task was like, absolutely not. And then I realized that that bone selection was actually a new form of choreographing that did not exist until we had to figure out how to store movement on chain. So I think there's a lot of beauty in the constraints. These are just some of the things that came up while you were speaking, malte, about how I've personally felt the beauty and the challenge of those constraints.
Mitchell F Chan: I have a question about that project, actually. This is something that I've wondered about. I think we all remember when that project came out. I mean, it was so well received. People were really excited to see this technology used in a new way and to see a new art form kind of squeezed into the technological substrate. A question that I have is, matto was talking a few minutes ago about the ways that the art is now downstream of technological systems. He was referencing Mat Dryhurst, who used Instagram as an example. Based on how we scroll through it, what is the size of the device that delivers the image to us and how the algorithm delivers it to us is going to affect the type of art that we make. And you can jump in downstream or you can jump in upstream, right? It was really interesting listening to you talk about having to decide. I mean, you said two things there. One is that it was important to you that the dance be preserved on chain, that it be this permanent sculpture thing. But then having to decide which parts of the dance really are preserved on chain, therefore which are the art: those were economic decisions based on how much it costs to store, to essentially make certain nuances of your gestures into art. So did you find yourself choreographing under the influence of the economic penalties of certain dance moves? And do you feel like that constraint changed, helped, hindered the dance that you designed? Was that a good fit?
Ania Catherine: So I would say the budgets didn't affect the creation of the movement, but the fact that these movements were going to be generated through this algorithm definitely did. I originally created the library of 31 movements. Then we kind of, like, true analog dice roll, imagining, or we would actually run the model and have it produce sequences and then look at them performed in different ways and in different combinations. And so I originally just made a library of 31 moves that I liked that were kind of about privacy, hiding, transparency, all those themes. I had to change everything when I realized that the library of movements that I just liked was different than the library of movements that needed to exist in order for them to be paired in any order, with any tempo, in different facings and with each other. When I started seeing that some movements just didn't work when they were put in these combinations, I had to go back. We called it kind of like choreographic tuning, where I had to go back and I did adjust the movements in the library because of the sequences, because the sequences were going to be generated in the minting and I wanted to guarantee desirable results in the sequences. The fact that they were going to be put in random sequences through the algorithm, through the minting, did change the movements themselves, but the cost in the bone selection in that aspect did not.
Dejha Ti: It's no different than if you were creating an on-chain, long-form generative artwork and you had to deal with the fact that any output from this algorithm will be the one that is minted, or will be the ones that are minted, and you'll just have to live with that and they can't be deleted. So for Human Unreadable we had that double challenge of, yes, that had to be true in terms of what was drawn onto the p5 canvas but also for the dance itself. What we ended up creating was a method, a generative choreography method, which was always intended to be created and shared with other artists. So it was recently used at the Paris Opera House for Hermine Bourdin's project, used outside of our projects altogether. But I kind of do that mental map, so it doesn't feel so much like, I wish this paint would actually be water, or, I wish clay would actually be stone. It's just the material that you're working with and understanding the limitations and the constraints and the capacities and capabilities. So Human Unreadable is very much both the limitations and the capabilities of both the human body as technology as well as blockchain technology. Those two things come together to create what was possible, which was Human Unreadable. The beauty was that Ania was part of the development of that method, being a choreographer, knowing what we had, that close feedback loop. And so the entire method was created with the idea of, how do we downsample the data while still preserving the essence of the moves? That was the challenge.
Mitchell F Chan: So that's all really interesting to me. And that kind of begs the question for me in the context of this conversation. We opened by talking about this formalism, technological formalism, tech demos, protocol art. These aren't binaries. Neither's good or bad. It's a matrix. It's a spectrum. Where do you think that project fits on the matrix or spectrum that we're trying to establish through this talk and through malte's essay and through what matto's doing and all these talks?
Ania Catherine: I think it's trying to have it all.
Dejha Ti: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think it's greedy. I think it's really greedy. It's occupying places at once. I mean, malte, I was thinking of my own answer to your question: why are you attracted to creating art on the Ethereum blockchain? And in your writing, you know what Sarah Friend calls us. I think it was asset logistics, which made me smile as well. But the idea that there's nothing to mint and that the contract itself can be the art... we were creating an artwork in the context where there was something to mint. And not only is there something to mint. There's a whole culture around any form of blockchain art, and there's specifically a culture around generative art, specifically Art Blocks or fxhash. For us it was interesting to look at that as a site to create for. Culturally, not just technically. Culturally. That's why we used almost the traits as a conceptual container in which there were no visual traits. They were all traits that were choreographic. You couldn't search for the blue one or the red one. You could only search by the invisible choreography that you could not see. But for us, if we're using a technology, it's important for us to understand who created that technology, why was it created and how has it been used, because all of these things will be inherent in our work. Meaning, if I'm a typographer, if I'm a graphic designer and I'm making a poster and I pick a typography or a font, the font that I choose has a history. There's someone who created it for a certain purpose, and it's used in a certain way. And the way that it has interacted with the world... I'm bringing all of that energy and all of that culture into my poster design for whatever I'm creating, and I can't rid myself of that. And so when Ania and I use technology in an Operator work, we kind of interrogate and investigate both the technological history, how it's been used, but also its capacities. And then we have a tendency to abuse the medium and make it do things it's not supposed to do, like put dance in the blockchain. One of the things I found so interesting about malte's writing for World Computer Sculpture Garden is that it also wasn't minted. A lot of that work was maybe not anti-market, but it was at least resisting market forces.
matto: I can speak for a second to the World Computer Sculpture Garden show. I think that that decision to not offer anything to mint was a strong decision by 0xfff, who curated and organized the show. And I would argue that the show kind of was his piece for the show: the idea of making a contract that is a list of contracts that are artworks and that are dynamically, continuously changing on Ethereum. That is something that would have been difficult to do, at least in a durable and long-lasting way, using any other technology. I do think that malte's point about the appeal of the hopeful durability of Ethereum for artists is, as you say, as a site of meaning making, as a site of inscription: it's meaningful to put something here because it's going to be maintained by thousands of people, hopefully for a long time. I believe that it's pretty possible that the fact that we're putting art on Ethereum that can only exist on Ethereum will be the reason that the chain will continue to exist after it no longer has economic utility. That museums, or what future version of museums, robot museums or AI museums, that we have in the distant future will run Ethereum nodes to maintain and archive those artworks. Whereas ETH the token may well be valueless at that point. It makes it a more meaningful gesture, or at least we hope and believe that it's a meaningful gesture, to put works on Ethereum that can only exist there, because it is this kind of site of inscription.
Ania Catherine: In that way it almost seems like Ethereum is like a custodian of art, maybe even accidentally. I never thought about it in that way. But the fact that there's going to be so many people that are just keeping it alive, that people that don't realize they're keeping artworks alive by keeping the chain alive are making it so these pieces can last longer, not intentionally, which is kind of fun. You have these guardians that don't even know they're guarding these cultural artifacts and artworks forever without realizing it. That's really cool.
maltefr: I think the repurposing is generally an interesting aspect in the sense that Ethereum was never meant as a cultural site. So it has always been repurposed as such, whether it is used as a storage and distribution medium. But then of course it was never intended for artistic use of computation. It's always like a last use case. And then even if you look at the development of digital assets and markets, et cetera, many other blockchains have tried to incentivize artists, creators, collectors to use their chain, with these specific value propositions of, you could do all sorts of things with digital objects here. But never Ethereum, just because, for whatever reasons, leadership never believes this is the most important activity. It's not a gigantic market compared to DeFi. But it always retained this element of repurposing a technology. And if there's an element of uncertainty for the durability, it very much comes from changes to Ethereum. We saw that with certain ways contract storage works on Ethereum. Purging storage on Ethereum to enhance the chain is maybe the only possibility for some of these works to get permanently lost. So you do have this sort of undercurrent that this art has, if you look at the technology as a whole.
“I believe that it's pretty possible that the fact that we're putting art on Ethereum that can only exist on Ethereum will be the reason that the chain will continue to exist after it no longer has economic utility.” — matto 34:42
matto: To that point, I do think that if we get to the point where there's going to be irrevocable changes that will destroy this kind of developing art scene on Ethereum, we can always fork the chain and run our own nodes, and then we may really end up with a dedicated art chain. Obviously there are people trying to work on that idea, mostly through L2s and stuff. But I do think that at this point it would be difficult to unilaterally destroy this art completely.
Peter Bauman: Mitchell, how do you decide which works to use blockchain for and which not?
Mitchell F Chan: Well, a lot of it has to do with whether I'd like to make money off of this artwork. I think that if I would like to make money off of an artwork, then I associate a token with it. And it is a very convenient way of transferring ownership to somebody who would like to pay me good money for it. That's basically the decision process. But I have a question, kind of in general, for all artists about using blockchain. And I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. Obviously I used blockchain to make art very, very early. And I'm proud of the early works that I've done using blockchain and doing that thing of being about blockchain. And now I want to... we've talked about, okay, why is it important to engage with this protocol? And we've been hammering on permanence. Permanence. Permanence, okay? I've heard permanence since Rhea Myers wrote her paper in 2014, before the Ethereum chain was even on mainnet. But here's the thing about me. This is just my own personal opinion. I really don't care about any sort of material permanence of my work. All right? I was having a conversation with a curator just a couple weeks ago, and he said to me, so, what's your plan for preservation? And I said, well, the only plan is to make sure that people give a shit about this work and think it's good. As long as there's a handful of people who think that this is really good and worth their time, things will work out. And honestly, it will work out if these are stains on onion paper, if people give a shit, all right? So I've got some bad news for a lot of digital artists, which is: Fart Monkey Deluxe that is on chain, fully on chain? Fart Monkey Deluxe does not have the same amount of permanence as a Cycles or a Human Unreadable just because they're squatting on the same protocol. They're all archived. But now that that technological substrate can be taken for granted, there is a level of human interest that will be required to continue to bring those things into the world in the future. Anyway, all that is to say: imagine I'm an artist. I've never used blockchain before. Besides permanence, which, as I've said, I don't care about, why should I make art inside of the brutal constraints of the Ethereum blockchain?
matto: Besides permanence, I do think another angle of this to think about is that one of the characteristic experiences of our time is being a networked subject, existing in a world that's mediated by network computation. And as we talked about before, that's kind of affecting and defining a lot of the ways that we think and big parts of our lives. So making art that engages meaningfully with network technologies, or is network native, which is a little bit of a formalist-type term, but within a context, as you say, where you can make money and have some kind of idea that this is a fine art object, which is an important component of all of this and not to be swept under the rug. Ethereum is a multiplayer computer. Coming from the world of video games, for example, we've seen really culturally important games that are running on multiplayer computers. And then one person who's running servers decides to shut the server off, and that thing is basically completely destroyed. In this case we now have a kind of a multiplayer server that is much, much more resistant to this kind of rugging. First of all, for much of this artwork the code is open source. So if people wanted to redeploy it and run it on another chain, they could. Or a fork of a chain, if Ethereum becomes obsolete for whatever reason. And you have this kind of inherently multiplayer substrate to deploy on. So beyond permanence, the network nature of it, I think, is important to acknowledge and think about.
Mitchell F Chan: I think that's a great answer. And just to escape my devil's advocate stance for a while: for me, the best argument for Ethereum and blockchain is, although I've talked about the brutal constraints of it for storing data or whatever, it's actually one of the easiest network social interaction protocols to hack into. It's actually easier than setting up a chat server on your website. Even though it is a protocol with a lot of biases that shape the type of social interactions that people have downstream. That is true, but you can look at that and have fun with it. But as a social communication protocol it's actually quite easy to hack into. Sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I should have just left it being like, whatever.
Ania Catherine: I think what you said earlier about transactability... I am very against the idea that artists shouldn't think or talk about money, or the importance of being able to make money with what you dedicate your time and life to. So I'm pro artists making money in whatever way possible. And coming from the dance world and the performance world, where you train your whole life, push your body to all these limits and then in the end have nothing to sell. Mostly you're just in a service position of selling your skills and your dance ability to entertainment companies or movies or music videos. There's not really an outlet to have anything to sell if you make performance or movement as your art form. I think the transactability of the Ethereum blockchain and tokens, and pairing that with ephemeral art forms that haven't had an economy, really... you can't collect choreography. Usually performance is collected through notation or a derivative documentation. Like, this prop was used in it. Or in rare cases, notation. But you have to be a superstar for the notation to be collected. And then in that case the notation itself, like the paper or the sketch by Merce Cunningham, is actually what has value, not the movement that it depicts. So there really hasn't been a market for movement. I don't feel weird about introducing some sort of transactability to movement and dance using blockchain. I'm very pro, especially with cultural funding, especially for performance, and theaters shutting down everywhere. I think we need to rethink economies around performance, and I do think that blockchain can play a role. We're still very early in figuring out what that can look like, but I am curious and hopeful that there's at least some solutions. Not for everyone but maybe for some, which is some kind of improvement.
Dejha Ti: Mitchell, to answer your question, I don't choose a technology based on how easy or hard it is to use it. I wouldn't be like, Ethereum blockchain? No way. This is too hard because storing data just makes no sense here, or, the learning curve is too high. For me it makes sense to use a technology if it serves the concept of the artwork. And I also think a reason is, you know, a distribution system as well. So the financial aspect of it, 100 percent. Ania and I are just in the camp of, if we're going to use it as a distribution method, then we also have to use it as a medium and really interrogate what is the technology itself. And so we kind of put ourselves through a bit of pain in that process. For us it was a way to have both the technological capabilities as well as the culture that is interested in buying or trading or creating value around art. For us, we were like, what if people bought dance? And I think with these two things colliding, we were able to figure out, okay, how can someone who never thought about dance before be now super stoked to collect choreography and be bullish on collecting choreography and now be learning other choreographers and wanting to see performances? But yeah, never on how easy or how hard it is to use the tech.
maltefr: I would say, to the question of why you want to produce work that fits these constraints or is based on these constraints, and with the caveat again that I'm not a practitioner: you can express a belief, and you can help create, in the broadest sense, a really alternative vision of how an art world can function. If you take a big step back and you look at all the other ways you can release work outside of crypto, it's all tied back to this art world institutional complex that's somewhere between museums, collectors and galleries. And there's a certain way of how artworks are commoditized and sold. I'm not saying it in a critical sense, just in a descriptive sense. It has a very specific way of functioning. It's existed for a long time. It will exist for a long time, and you couldn't think of any alternative. And I think a crypto art ecosystem, a crypto art economy, is the only viable candidate for having something that's completely different: completely different participants, completely different people, completely different functions. You can participate in that economy in different ways. It doesn't have to be a completely stored-on-chain artwork. But I think the purest form of contributing to that vision and believing in that vision is right now to follow those constraints. So I see it as part of building out an alternative vision for how an art world and art economy could look. I think that's what makes it interesting. Not a belief or an interest in computation itself.
“I think we need to rethink economies around performance, and I do think that blockchain can play a role.” — Ania Catherine 44:48
Mitchell F Chan: What's really interesting to me about what Dejha and malte have both just said is they've talked about working with this technology not so much for any particular technological property of the medium but for the culture that is around it. When malte talks about the opportunity to build a new type of art world, he's talking about a culture that has started to coalesce around this technology. And it's the same with... I love what you said about getting people to collect dance. That was awesome. That was an amazing moment when this project came out, that people had never thought about dance. We're doing it because there was this culture around, essentially, tokens. And I am so on board with that. When I was making my first blockchain project in 2017, the Digital Zones, and I was writing the essay about that, the entire backdrop of that essay and that project was imagining a world where tokenization made people able to purchase and invest in and feel ownership over things like dance, performance, relational, conceptual art, all that stuff. And so I do believe that that culture is enabled by technological properties. But once those technological properties are established and the seed of that culture starts to form, to me the more important thing than remaining pure to a technological expression is providing sustenance and nourishment to that culture. Because we all see it. We got a nice little moment where people want to buy. People are really excited about your protocol, you know, perpetually dynamic sculpture and our dance projects. But I think we've all seen over the last four years how fragile that culture is. And there's nothing about the permanence of the technological substrate itself that translates over, that bleeds out to the permanence of a culture where people care about this. We're like three bad tweets away from people just going, bullshit coins, man, and not caring about our dance or conceptual expressions anymore.
Dejha Ti: Right. Very true.
Ania Catherine: It's so real. No, I think you're totally right, Mitchell. But it's funny. The second that you asked the question about why use blockchain, I instantly went to, why would I use my body? So many... you don't need to sign up for a wallet. You know, why would I... But I love the question because it then got me thinking about, why any media? Why any medium? There seems to be a lot of tension around the idea of focusing too much on ownership and making artworks into commodities. And I think that is important to discuss. Now, I also feel like there's room for both, because art practices are so unsustainable. They're getting increasingly difficult. Art and experimentation and creative risk, which are essential ingredients for art, take time, and time is getting increasingly expensive. And so while I understand and I appreciate and I really hope and I want more people to work in ways that have nothing to do with ownership or transfer of value or a focus on transaction, I think it is actually really important for at least some people to focus on that aspect of it, because I don't think governments are going to keep supporting the arts. Even museums right now don't have money to support projects, especially ones that are ambitious with technology. And the people who are left supporting those museums, a lot of them are dying, and young people are not showing up to fill in the shoes of patronage. We're really in a huge moment where culture and art is shifting in immense ways. I think sometimes it feels like if you mention being able to make money with your craft, or if you mention leveraging momentum around trading tokens and generative art in order to get people to maybe care about dance so more dancers can earn money, then it's kind of like, but why is there so much focus on ownership? But I think we need to talk about both. Unless everyone has secret trust funds. Then we don't have to. But most artists I know, they can't think about art because they're thinking about money.
matto: Yeah, I think that's a really important and unignorable dimension of this. And just talking about, like you're saying, museums aren't commissioning projects, much less ambitious projects. For Cycles we spent 13 months working on it, with three people. That just wasn't going to happen in almost any other context. Being able to put that amount of time and effort into a project... it's exactly as you say. We don't have trust funds. We're working artists. We're not crypto rich yet. We have to earn. So having a structure where that is possible. And for me, going back to the earlier topic, to be able to do that independently, in a disintermediated way, where nobody can come in and say, well, wait a minute, that's not fashionable anymore. We're not doing that. Or, so-and-so just had a show with exactly this similar kind of work, so actually you're not going to get shown, or whatever it is. For our project we did everything independently. No gallery, no platform, no external sales force or whatever. So we know we can go to market when we want. We have a rough idea of how much we potentially can make. We don't know if it's going to work, but we can scale the project to the size that we want, ask for the amount of money that we think we need to support it and do that. So as a platform for artistic independence, being able to have a distribution channel to go directly to a collector and to have a relationship with that collector, where that's not somebody else's collector but it's your collector, I think is super, super important. And it's something that really is enabled by the technology. Making work that defies the commodity form or those kinds of things, I think, is a very, very open question. A lot of people associate crypto art with NFT or token-based art, which is absolutely, I think, a simplistic understanding. We're in very early innings of this stuff, and everybody has kind of clustered around a set of commodity standards and practices. This is a programmable computer. You can literally do anything within the affordances of that medium, and it's hooked up to a money network. So the idea that the only way to have an economically sustainable art practice is by selling digital objects in the form of commodity tokens, I think, is shortsighted.
Peter Bauman: I have a couple follow-ups. A ton has come up that I want to ask about now. But I wanted to jump in there just to wrap things up. Any quick final thoughts on anything? Just last things you wanted to say or get in before we shut it down?
matto: I can say one thing quickly, just to go back to the blockchain formalism type discussion, to go back to your document for a second. For me, fundamentally, when we bring up the term formalism, it harkens back to Greenbergian formalism, which in my mind was this kind of narrowing, essentializing. We hear words like purity. It's this really kind of wedging down to where you get to this super purified... To me it kind of pushes you into this kind of minimalism. For me, or the way I think about it, is I'm like a maximalist who's forcing himself into these tiny constraints. I have lots of things that I want to do, but then I'm encountering this medium that has these harsh constraints, as Mitch mentioned. And that collision and that tension produces... it's just a lot of fun as an artist to try to wrestle with these constraints. But for me it's much more about how we make things that reflect and create meaning through the technology, rather than putting a microscope on the technology itself and saying, look, this is the inherent material nature of the blockchain. With a piece like Cycles: Cycles was really about time. Well, it happens that the blockchain is a very interesting kind of clock, so that then we can say new kinds of things about time through using that. For me it's not inherently about Ethereum. It's, what can we do on Ethereum that we couldn't do in another medium?
maltefr: I would follow up on that in the sense that the one thing I wrote in the essay on the formalism question, which I think I would still say today, is that formalism was about finding out something apparently essential about a certain medium. And a lot of the criticism has been about that. It's anyway way too early to have any grand theories about this sort of protocol art that we see emerging. But if anything, I think it's very much not about finding something out about Ethereum as a compute platform and its properties, because they are known. It's really about what you can do with them. And one crucial aspect, of course, that also ties back to all those questions about monetization, money, et cetera, is that another critique you can make of formalism, but really about that whole complex of how the artwork is positioned in the gallery or the museum, is that you always have this rift between the pure art and the dirty selling. In principle you don't have that rift, or you don't have that lack of transparency, in crypto. It just has a much more healthy relationship to art. That doesn't mean that everything needs to be a token that's tradable. But it does mean that if something is for sale, it gets rid of all this nonsense around an apparent difference between a market and the artwork and just has a more transparent relationship to that, which has directly contributed to artists being able to monetize their practice in a more sustainable way and disintermediating all sorts of middleman layers.
Peter Bauman: I think there's also an important point to make a distinction between ownership and marketization too. Digital ownership is one thing, and that's something that, we mentioned her already, but Rhea Myers has talked about for over 10 years: kind of the fundamental issue of blockchain being digital ownership rather than marketization. So, for example, something could be owned and free. That doesn't need to necessarily have a market attached to the ownership. At least when I talk to a lot of curators or people outside the space, one thing that they talk about a lot is this kind of hyperfinancialization. And I always like to make that distinction with one of the maybe core blockchain principles, which is more related to ownership. But anyway, to return to a dyad that we were on before, summing up what you just said: when it comes to crypto art, digital ownership is inherent to the technology. The commodification and the hyperfinancialization is a culture that surrounds the technology, and that culture is influenced heavily by the fundamental principles of the technology. But it is still a cultural layer that can be manipulated, stripped down, changed, subverted.
Ania Catherine: When I said ownership, because I think that's an important distinction you made, Peter, thank you, I meant the criticism around financialization, which I don't see as a criticism because I like when artists make money. But of course you can own something that you didn't buy with money.
Mitchell F Chan: So also the idea that we're setting up some dichotomy between the virtuous fine art world as not being hyperfinancialized or just a big asset trading platform... we're just more honest about it in crypto. It's more naked. It is accelerated and emphasized. But the idea that fine art is not a financial platform is obviously... yeah.
Peter Bauman: Thank you to everybody so much for this great chat. I'd love to do it again. I'd love to continue it. I think we could have gone on for a while again, but I think we're on question two. So yeah, thank you all. Good times.
Ania Catherine: Yeah. Thanks so much for having us, Peter.
Mitchell F Chan: Yeah, thank you. Nice time with you all.
maltefr: Yeah, nice to see you all. Have a good one.
matto: Bye. See you.
Peter Bauman: You too.
