Month: March 2021

by molly h

molly’s notes leftover:

Cryptokitties…such an image/idea…money as expressive medium (felix stadler) because words and ideas circulate like currency – stamp the dollar bill with anarchy, antifa, Harriet Tubman! A token is something which exchanges and can circulate…at some point we step outside of circulation itself, which social media tends to escalate?
is there any point in chasing ones own tail…?
will cryptoartworks require vaults?
online communities have been monetized before…discussions around the specifics – “sharing””ownership””meaning”
reinvesting language and value with the value of meaning to serve esp margins
what does this have to do with internet of things?
object-orientation?
will processes develop price tags they do not already have…?
strategies like performance for sale

*is there room for generative slot machine aesthetic…?
*how original is original when originality died long ago ?

art posted by geert lovink on nettime:

Tokenize This! by artist, Ben Grosser, who writes:

Tokenize This is a net art work that proposes one possible structure of resistance against the threats posed by NFTs. The site, available from [the link], produces upon each new visit a “unique digital object” that includes a custom color gradient and guaranteed exclusive identification code, all referenced by a matching URL. Yet different from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a 404 “not found” error.

In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once. While this structure doesn’t block someone from selling an NFT that points to a Tokenize This page, it does ensure that the page it points to will never be seen by the purchaser of that NFT. Most broadly, the work acts in opposition to the capitalist ideologies embedded in NFTs and the ways in which cryptoart markets have already thrust an often anti-capitalist and anti-corporate art medium into a 21st century gold rush get-rich-quick kind of frenzy.

‘Saturday – vertical and horizontal properties of lace’ (Sketch: Molly Hankwitz)

Timezones being what they are, I went to one event today…Dada art women talking about making meaning in communities through collective ownership. Their site dada.art is a drawing platform, where communication is through drawing and being recognized and being part of a broader community of users. Platform replacing old idea of ‘community of users’ being an ‘online community’ as cloud computing and platform-tech has now made possible elaborate social community sites. Good place to while away an hour drawing.

The talk, Invisible Economy, was presented by 3 women. They hold no end time for any of their meetings. They are making an economy not based in assumptions of private ownership or typical hierarchies. Social anaarchy!

NFT License

Able to attend part of Ruth Catlow’s talk and DisCO talk on community cooperative financing at MoneyLab Berlin today! So excited to tune in to part of this amazing project initiated by the amazing Geert Lovink from xs4ll, nettime, etc.

Later, went to the Community-Call in…still arranging my teleconnection…was intrigued by the progressive economist, Akseli Vitalen, who got us thinking about NFTs and art history through the lens of Foucault on Velasquez’s Las Meninas, and work of Eve Sussman’s piece on Las Meninas where she made a film (actresses and actors play the parts and start to move out of the configuration they exist in as ordered by Velasquez). The economist began talking about Sussman’s piece at the end of heated debates around validity/potential of NFTs. Introduced Foucault’s book The Order of Things as one of his six most favorite books, and pointed out Foucault’s long analysis of Las Meninas as ‘constructed knowledge’of how spectatorship worked in 1656. Since the painting is a favorite, I have been delighted to revisit Foucault’s analysis and Sussman’s ’89 Seconds at Alcazar’ being transformed by NFTs.

Sussman’s video found a second life with NFTs. She worked with a firm called Snark.Art – a blockchain-savvy agency that works with artists, creating innovative formats – to carve the video into a 2,304-piece grid. Collectors could purchase one tiny fragment as an NFT. Each of these “atoms” is only 20 x 20 pixels, and can be viewed as a tiny movie. They called the new form “89 Seconds Atomized.”

‘Las Meninas’ is a very large ‘oil’ painting of an ‘infanta’ or child queen, the central figure, standing in a group of bridesmaids and joined by several children at distracted play along with a large dog lying comfortably in the foreground. Velasquez paints a painting about himself painting a portrait of the King and Queen, who appear reflected in a god’s eye mirror at the back of the space. Hence, we are looking at our audience: painter, children, dog – from the perspective of the King.

Askeli talked about the invisible viewer being invited to see from this perspective, Viewer is King’s POV, and Eve Sussman’s piece in which are reenacted moments before and after the “moment” captured by the painter. He described how Sussman applied the new economic logic or ‘the work of art in the age of financial redistribution’ (my phrase) by breaking the screen into “Atoms” and about his ownership of an “Atom.” It is Akseli’s argument that with NFTs we are not only engaged in some new form of potentially radical economy, but in a new form of ‘art history’.

I do not know what to make of this creative approach…but it does appear to be quite substantial and drawing much attention. I have jumped in almost 4 years after MoneyLab started and into even longer projects on this subject. Ruth Catlow has been working on money projects for at least this long.

Link to Foucault’s “take” on the painting.

by molly h