Interview: Smart-contract as a medium

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Interview: Smart-contract as a medium
In conversation with Rhea Myers, Distributed Gallery (Alexandre Rouxel), Victoria Ivanova (Serpentine Technologies), Daniel Heiss (ZKM Karlsruhe)
July 4, 2024

Rhea Myers is an artist, hacker, and writer. She skillfully intertwines technology and culture, prompting them to question and interact with each other. The driving force behind Myers' artistic endeavours is her desire to comprehend the changing world that surrounds her. Since 2014, her focus has been on producing art centred around the concept of the blockchain.

The Distributed Gallery is a collective of artists, craftmen and engineers established in the contemporary art worlds since 2017. They are mainly known for the creation of artworks based on distributed technologies such as blockchains.

Victoria Ivanova is a curator, writer and strategic consultant, currently R&D Strategic Lead as part of Serpentine's Arts Technologies team.

Daniel Heiss is a curator at the Center of Art and Media (ZKM) Museum in Karlsruhe. In 2017, working in the ZKM’s exhibition technology department, he brought his knowledge of crypto to the ZKM’s programs.

Mimi Nguyen (MN): Welcome everyone to our discussion on blockchain art and smart contracts as a medium. We're joined by four remarkable speakers representing different facets of this field. Let's start with Rhea Myers, one of the pioneering artists in this medium. Rhea, could you tell us about your early projects and how you got started?

Rhea Myers (RM): I heard about Bitcoin through the P2P Foundation around 2011. That year, I did a blog post saying if anyone sent me a Bitcoin, I would draw them a Bitcoin and send it to them. Someone did contact me, but I didn't get back to them because I was worried that by the time I had done that, a Bitcoin wouldn't actually pay for the postage. So that's the start of my insightful and visionary engagement with the blockchain.

In 2014, I had moved to Vancouver the previous year. I couldn't work because my visa hadn't come through yet. So I was walking around rapidly gentrifying Vancouver and going to art events, which sort of turned into the short story Bad Shibe. I was just fascinated by the fire in the eyes of the people who were talking about changing the world and getting rich with this new technology.

Having sort of not understood net art when that was a thing, and having very thoroughly retrospectively understood conceptual art, I was primed to see the possibilities in this technological and cultural space. I was surprised that very few other people seemed to, and so I thought I would map out a possible blockchain art world.

Someone has just reminded me today on Twitter that it's 10 years to the day that part of that project, "Is Art," more generally known as "This Contract is Art," was published on the pre-release Ethereum testnet.

MN: I remember seeing "This Contract is Art" at the Venice Biennale in 2022 in the Decentral Pavillon. It really opened my eyes to your practice. Alex, you also started quite early. Can you talk us through your journey?

Alexandre Rouxel (AR): Our entry into the art world was firstly fully accidental, I would say. We started to work with Ethereum in September 2017, with the idea of creating a dApp for the book economy. A dApp that would allow anyone to create a DAO around their writing project in order to collaborate with editors, illustrators, writers, distributors, and so on. At that time we called it Whisper, the Amazon killer. It was, you know, like back in the ICO days, it was trendy to say that your project was a killer of something.

Our relationship with blockchain art was in fact more a relationship with what blockchain enabled us to do in terms of creation. In particular, what we found most interesting was DAOs for artistic collaboration around artistic projects. During our free time, we found it amusing to create artworks on Ethereum. Our artistic sensibility leaned toward the Dada and Fluxus movement.

Our first work was a ready-made token, which aimed to replicate Marcel Duchamp's gesture a century later. We created this token as a single-copy ERC20, designating it as a work of art. It's a long story, but that's how it all began. We got into blockchain art because we were already working on a protocol for collective creation on Ethereum. This made us sensitive to the artistic possibilities offered by the platform. A year after the ready-made token, we created the Chaos Machine, an interconnected jukebox network based on a collaborative playlist built by its users.

This is why we've focused on protocol art in recent years. Protocols facilitate collective creation and make it possible to bring together things or people that would never have met otherwise. I would say that protocol art is a way of bringing art and life together. We started doing protocol art on the blockchain to participate in this longstanding program of merging art and life, but this time using protocols as the medium.

MN: The Chaos Machine is actually one of my favorite works. I love its simplicity and how beautifully it explains the concept of blockchain art in a tangible way. Daniel, I believe you got into Bitcoin around 2011 and then had a journey through generative art. Can you tell us about that?

Daniel Heiss (DH): I think we all share a common fascination with this new technology. I first read about it in 2011, as you mentioned, but initially ignored it because I didn't understand it. However, it kept appearing in my newsfeed more and more. By 2012, I started reading extensively about Bitcoin, gradually understanding and becoming fascinated by the idea of a decentralized, trustless digital currency.

As Rhea said, there was this "fire in the eyes" when I started talking about it. I remember the confused faces of my friends when I tried to explain this digital currency concept to them. For me, it seemed like a perfect system, an art form in itself through its algorithm.

That's why I continued to follow it closely. I began looking into mining and had ideas about art installations using blockchain, though I lacked the means to realize them in a public space. It wasn't until 2017, while working as a freelancer, that I had the chance to create an installation for ZKM's "Open Codes" exhibition. This marked the beginning of my exploration of the connection between art and blockchain technology, which has now evolved, somewhat accidentally, into the NFT collection of that time.

MN: Looking back, it's impressive that you introduced a major institution to blockchain art in 2017, especially considering it's now 2024. We're big fans of what you and your team are doing. You're playing a crucial role in championing this art form and giving it a voice within institutions.

This brings me to a question for Victoria. You're doing PhD research with Serpentine about blockchain. Could you walk us through how you got into this space and what brought you here?

Victoria Ivanova (VI): My fascination with blockchain comes, oddly enough, from my interest in financialization. This phenomenon has had such a significant impact on our lives, especially since 2008, though its roots go back much further. I was interested in exploring the cultural space as a laboratory for alternative logics of financialization - ways to invert the typical paradigm of socializing costs and privatizing gains. I wanted to consider what a resocialization of gains might look like if we could experiment with financial instruments, such as derivatives, in an art context.

In 2015, I collaborated on a project in New York with artist Diann Bauer (who has sadly passed away) and theorist Suhail Malik. We ran an experiment creating a show of "zombie formalist" artworks, but the actual art was in the derivative contract on those paintings. The idea was to interest a new collector base in investing in these derivative contracts, which deviated from standard art market practices. The project wasn't successful, partly because enforcing the terms of the derivative contracts proved too cumbersome.

This challenge of enforcing contractual terms wasn't new. In the 1970s, Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky faced similar issues with their artist's resale contract, which aimed to allow artists to retain resale royalties and some control over their artworks' circulation.

When I discovered blockchain shortly after our 2015 project, I realized it could be a perfect medium for enforcing more creative contractual agreements between artists, collectors, and other stakeholders in artistic projects.

In 2016, I collaborated with Lise Soskolne, founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), an organization that issued certifications for U.S. institutions complying with fair payment practices for artists. We explored whether the 1971 contract I mentioned could be revived using blockchain as the infrastructure.

In 2018, I joined Serpentine, hired by Ben Vickers, who had already conducted various blockchain-related experiments with Ruth Catlow. My task was to develop an R&D department exploring how specific technologies could reconfigure the basic infrastructure of the art world. We shifted our focus towards examining art, technology, and society as an emerging infrastructural constellation that sometimes overlaps with, but is quite distinct from, the traditional art world.

We started a blockchain lab dedicated to prototyping new organizational forms in this emerging art-technology-society ecosystem, with blockchain as the foundational layer. We're currently working on phase two of this project, though I can't reveal many details yet.

In parallel, I'm working with an NGO called Radical Exchange on a system called "partial common ownership," based on Harberger tax principles. While it has an Ethereum foundation, it can also function as a non-blockchain-specific license. However, using blockchain is advisable as it facilitates easier enforcement of the terms artists might want to include in their partial common ownership licenses.

MN: It's fascinating to hear how you all approached blockchain from different angles. Alex, with Olivier of Distributed Gallery you created the [aside] protocol. Can you tell us more about how you're using smart contracts as a medium for artistic expression?

AR: Let's recall what [aside] firstly is: a protocol that enables the immobilization of any NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, and can condition its release to values, external phenomena. It could be a natural one, whether earthquakes, it could be astral, it could be economic, it could be financial, it could be demographic, and so on. And once they are locked, the NFT remains non-transferable for a dedicated period of time or until a specific event fetched by our Chainlink oracle happens.

Therefore, what [aside] protocol is doing is restricting the tradability of the artwork by tying its commercial becoming to the outside world. [aside] is a way for us to show that it is possible to create new economic system rules we define by ourselves. Anyone who has worked a little on Ethereum knows well that what has excited most people with Ethereum, the fire in the eyes, is the fact that it is a technology that facilitates economic experimentation, which was previously reserved to an elite, politicians, financial folks, big corporations, and so on.

MN: I tend to overuse the word "medium," I know it's a bit annoying, but it's a new channel through which artists can say something different and critically approach their practice. The term "protocolism" is actually one I borrowed from Primavera. She and I were chatting in a chateau in France, and she shared her thoughts on what she believed would be the next big thing. This idea ties back to what Victoria mentioned about the infrastructural angle.

Rhea, in your case, you're doing a commentary on the space, on its economic aspects, and on the price of Ethereum. Can you talk us through this idea? It's simple, but I love it because it's essential for this project and explains the protocol very well.

What opened my eyes about your project is that I see it as a performance. Traditionally, performance art has been very much embedded in the present - happening right now, ephemeral. But in this case, because it's based on a smart contract, you're designing a performance that will happen in the future. The artwork's behavior will change at some future point, which we don't know exactly in your case because it's when Ethereum hits 10,000. We were joking that by the time the project is released, it might have already hit 10,000. But it shifts the whole medium of performance from now to the future.

RM: Yes, I remember when Ethereum looked like it was going to the moon, and we were worried we'd have to change the project so it would unlock when Ethereum dropped back down to 10k.

The history of Net Art is filled with examples of performance in unlikely ways and environments. Whether it's plays in IRC, the old chat system, or poetry on mailing lists, or art found via early web browsers on unlikely sites. The strategy of Net Art was very much a performance of aesthetics and artistic experience for an audience that didn't realize it was an audience. They thought of themselves as people using a technological system for work, research, or entertainment. But Net Art got there first, ready to give you some reflective power over an environment that was trending towards hypercapitalist, reactive behavior.

What I've come to love about blockchain - and Primavera is awesome, I very much agree with the idea of protocolism - is that Ethereum and other smart contract systems give you a singular plastic medium for expressing aesthetics, rules, ownership, and value. The last time we had something like that for art would have been in the early 18th century when you'd go to a print dealer in town, buy a print on paper with paper money, and have the transaction recorded in a paper ledger.

Having this singular plastic medium is incredible, and it's why organizations like Furtherfield, Serpentine, and Radical Exchange have zeroed in on it. It's a medium and a space of possibility. While rapid innovation by venture capital has distorted both the perception and reality of the technology, it hasn't changed the fact that this is still a singular medium we can use.

From the start, as others have mentioned, there's a belief central to blockchain and all new technologies: you have to believe it will continue to exist and grow, weaving more of the world into its territory. My last project, Portents, was a fictitious take on that role of belief in the very real success of Ordinals. My love of Dogecoin and Doge memes comes from that community's use of virtue ethics for community growth - the Bill and Ted style "be excellent to one another" is why it was so successful.

With Ethereum, the question for every project is "When moon?" - when will I, who claims to be interested in this for cultural and technological reasons, see the fulfillment of my actual economic motive for getting involved? Ethereum reaching 10k is obviously a focal point for attention. I remember when Ethereum went to $12, and I thought it was amazing. Now it's trading at several thousand dollars, which is weird. Some have pinned $10,000 to the year 2030, ignoring any possibility of hyperinflation before then. It represents the fulfillment of belief in this future, both psychologically and financially.

The epitome of what people bought hoping to make money were the 10k profile picture collections that copied the cypherpunks and were epitomized by the Bored Apes. I love playing with language and aesthetics, so a "10k drop" can simply mean dropping 10 letter K's. Once I made that link, it became irresistible because it trivializes but retains the impact of experiencing a 10k drop. The aesthetics in the project, which are genuinely things I like, have been turned up to 11, so each image has its own unique, striking, and often anti-aesthetic quality. This reflects my experience of 10k drops - they all had striking and often anti-aesthetic designs. The deliberate ugliness of the competently rendered Bored Apes was key in turning them into something more than just pretty illustrations.

So, bundling together belief in the future, belief in future value, belief in future value as realizing returns on speculation, and tying this all together with aesthetics - it's a kind of history painting. It depicts what it felt like to experience a 10k drop, and more broadly, the experience of getting involved in crypto or any ideology or economic promise. Rendering it as typography falling across the screen in garish colors and textures gives you something to look at while thinking about all this.

MN: I love this 10k joke as well. When we first saw the title, we thought, "Oh my God, is it going to be 10,000 NFTs?" But I love your twist on that. Looking back, you mentioned previous net artists who were already using this mechanism of performance based on future and uncertainty. One of my favorite projects is the Bitnik one from Darknet, which was always randomly sending different orders to the museum. You never knew if it was going to be a gun or a pair of fake jeans. It's a hilarious project, but also embedded with meaning.

RM: The Darknet Shopper. Yes, that's wonderful.

MN: Because of that project, I actually started to log into the darknet just to see what was out there on the marketplace. That experience taught me more about blockchain because I had to go through all this decryption, encryption, and understand the filtering and indexing of Google versus darknet browsers and search engines. It opened up for me exactly what you guys are talking about - this new layer of internet, this new layer of computing towards decentralization. Going through that hands-on experience was the first time I could really understand it.

RM: Yes, because one of the memes against cryptocurrency was that only criminals use it, which is statistically completely untrue. The same people saying that were getting very worried about healthcare being criminalized and people being potentially excluded from full personhood in law. Not to answer with "blockchain solves this" meme, but not everyone using cryptocurrency to buy something the state disapproves of is buying drugs or paying for harm to happen to others. The Darknet Shopper showing what's out there is great.

More broadly, cryptocurrency does have a use in justice that looks criminal to a state that is criminalizing basic survival. For critics of blockchain to confuse that, when they don't in other areas of their political thought, is frustrating at times. But that doesn't have much to do with 10 letter K's falling down the screen. And I must make it very clear that the K's do not stand for ketamine.

MN: Daniel, as someone working with an institution, how do you see the interplay between centralization and decentralization in blockchain art?

DH: The start of our blockchain activities at ZKM goes back to the "Open Codes" exhibition in 2017. We created an installation featuring a mining farm in the museum, which generated a small amount of cryptocurrency that we could use within the context of the exhibition.

We began conducting workshops for visitors interested in this new technology but who had never had hands-on experience with blockchain. We handed out paper wallets containing small amounts of Bitcoin to the visitors. Over the course of a full day, they set up their own wallets and started transferring crypto between each other, trying it out for themselves.

This was one of the main ideas behind the installation. It wasn't about mining Bitcoin for its own sake, but rather using it to engage people, educate them, and give them practical experience working with the technology.

As a side effect of this idea, where we wanted to generate some value to distribute to our visitors, we ended up with more than we distributed. We invested this surplus in the first NFTs that came onto the market, like CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties.

As an institution, we're not typical museum-like collectors with a huge board of curators deciding what work to acquire next. Instead, we're more about participating in the environment as it happens. This has always been our approach to blockchain-based engagement. It's been entirely self-contained since then - for me, it's like an art project in itself. It's a museum collection developing out of its own resources; we've never exchanged any euros or dollars into crypto or vice versa.

It's a self-evolving collection, small but serving as a kind of documentation of what's happening from our limited perspective. Of course, we can't be part of everything and we miss some things, but we're happy to include one of each drop from [aside], thanks to their generosity.

We're particularly interested in these kinds of NFTs or drops because they align with our focus on smart contracts as a medium. We're very technically interested in this aspect, not just in every normal token or image tokenized and released on the blockchain - we can't document all of those.

But we can document specific developments like time-locking smart contracts for NFTs. Time-locking itself is a fascinating topic for us as a museum with a collection. We've been playing with this idea for a long time, considering what it means to lock something away in a museum's collection.

Normally, when something enters a collection, it stays there forever. You could easily implement this with NFTs by burning them or time-locking them for, say, a hundred or a thousand years - no problem.

We've also had students explore topics like lending protocols in their master's theses. In the DeFi world, this is a common concept, but what does it mean for us? When we do an exhibition, we have items from our collection, but many come from other collectors, galleries, or museums, and we use lending contracts. So how would you do this with NFTs?

One student researched whether you could implement this as smart contracts, where an NFT transitions ownership to the museum for a limited lending period and is automatically returned afterward. In the end, this was just a thought experiment, probably not very practical for various reasons.

But all these possibilities enabled by smart contracts - this self-executing aspect that's at the core of NFT technology - are very interesting to us.

MN: As we wrap up, I'd like to ask all of you: Do you think "blockchain" or "smart contract" should be considered a distinct medium in art, separate from just "digital art"? Rhea, what's your take?

RM: There are two ways to look at this. First, there's the work that I and others do, which uses blockchain as a core medium. In this context, discussing the work without mentioning blockchain would be a misunderstanding. So there's definitely a place for "blockchain art as blockchain art."

The challenge is that there's also a much larger, wonderful use of blockchain as a representation of ownership and value for various digital art forms. We could argue that this is similar to how prints are categorized in institutions, where screen prints on Perspex and linocuts on cotton rag are grouped together despite their differences.

I'm hesitant to be a blockchain snob and say we need a special category for work that uses blockchain as its core material, separate from work that simply uses blockchain for ownership representation. At the same time, I don't want to see blockchain art completely subsumed into digital art, because there are distinct concerns and approaches.

Digital art itself is incredibly diverse, and while some academics argue it goes back to the dawn of human creativity, I think electronic binary computing is a distinct medium. Placing this in a distributed, decentralized network of control is interesting from a cybernetic perspective.

But then, do we subdivide painting into acrylics and watercolors? Should blockchain art be part of a broader "network art" category? I'm trying to avoid being elitist while also not reducing everything to an undifferentiated mix. Perhaps categorizations like "digital art/blockchain" or "digital art/network art/blockchain" could be useful, but at that point, we're deep into ontological debates.

AR: Oh yeah. It's a tricky question. On our side, we aim to counteract the over-interpretation of artistic intention and advocate for a more authentic approach to artwork. What we present is a protocol, and for us, the protocol is the artwork. In fact, the artwork is nothing more than a specific and situated experience of a protocol, which is just a set of technical, economic, and social rules that overflow the artwork itself.

What interests us is the effect on the public. For example, the feeling of owning an artwork that I've bought and minted, but which isn't really in my possession until a world event has occurred. This event unlocks the artwork, connecting the NFT owner's experience to the outside world.

That's why, when we wrote about the [aside] protocol, we used Merleau-Ponty's famous concept of "the flesh of the world." It's about putting the art economy into direct interaction with its world. It's a way to get the economy out of its self-contained bubble by chaining it to the world.

DH: I'm not an art historian, but from a technical perspective, I have a clear answer: it's definitely its own category. Smart contracts enable certain things that weren't possible before.

This isn't primarily about the visual representation of artworks. It's still a digital asset, but take on-chain generative art as an example. It's a new development in the medium. Generative art has been around for a while, but there was always the question of whether the computer or the person was the artist. You could generate, discard, and regenerate until you liked the result.

Smart contracts changed this by making the algorithm itself the artwork you deploy. You have to think about every detail of your work in advance, before the drop, and consider every possible outcome. Once you deploy the work, you give up control. You hand it over to the smart contract, which then generates a defined number of representations of your algorithm.

This is something new that came with smart contracts, and for me, it's definitely a distinct category. Whether it will be recognized as such in encyclopedias or elsewhere, I don't know.

MN: Thank you all for these insightful perspectives. It's clear that blockchain and smart contracts are opening up new possibilities in art. As we conclude, I want to thank all our speakers for sharing their experiences and visions. We'll be watching with interest to see how this field evolves, especially as we await Ethereum hitting 10k and the unlocking of Rhea's project. Thank you all for joining us today.

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July 4, 2024