[NetBehaviour] TOKENOMICS Re: comments on blockchain, art, etc., discussion with Ruth

Tue Nov 7 11:43:33 CET 2017

Hi Ken,

Welcome to the list and thanks for sharing your project on the list.

As you can see we're a varied community, actively engaged in examining the processs of change at different levels, whether it is artistic, political, cultural, social, technical, contextual, alongside grounded - networked, community values.

>My interest in blockchain is something of an attention filter.
>It’s like moving house; you have to go through all your stuff
>and box up only the things you NEED to bring with you; facebook,
>youtube, twitter - get rid of it.

>We can simply move completely over to the next web, and as a
>consequence reclaim some of the old passion of the early internet.
>Time to build again; scout ahead.

My own personal interest in the blockchain comes from an anarchist position, where disruption of the 'supposed' clean shift from 'all life on earth' to Fintech is challenged all the way. My other intention is to explore and build (collectively) alternatives to libertarian and neo-liberal narratives dominating everyday people's lives, via top-down implementations. And, because I'm a critically curious human being I'm interested in contemporary forms of technology and how these engineered shifts in society change us.

At present, facebook, youtube, twitter etc, are diverting the collective gaze from building their own artistic/cultural/technical contexts on their own terms. I agree with you there is an urgent need for decentralization of these power systems, dominating people's attention as I said in my recent editorial on Furtherfield, "Like cows nonchalantly munching at the metaphorical graze". https://www.furtherfield.org/digital-cash-cows-now-editorial-2017/

>Artsmesh (http://artsmesh.com) was always meant to be decentralized,
>and we achieved that goal partially - embedding gnuSocial as a repository,
>but for the most part keep it focused on LIVE. With blockchain, it’s now “Buy Live.”

This is interesting, do you mean by 'Buy Live' that is networked live access via tokens?

>expertise outside of the old rusty vessels/institutions.

Well, that's Furtherfield and many of the people who use this list ;-)

>And what about the new language of fine art - its now finArt!

I think 'finArt' is not a new thing, even though the term's context may include a contemporary edge in respect of blockchain and bitcoin culture.

>So those are two filters acting on my psyche, blockchain and live. But yet another filter
>seems to be emerging, a strange movement of cutting edge research from academia
>to finance! Who would of thunk it? The white papers are exciting and ground
>breaking, unlike the quicksand of much of the recent academic discourse in the arts and tech.

Well, in regard to academic discourse in the arts and tech, on the whole - it has always needed to be broken down and decentralized, as has the arts. There has been some great writings out there which have thankfully reflected upon how culture is being changed by technology and what this could mean, in ways that challenge top-down assumptions and their narratives.

So, my other take is, are we by moving into the blockchain technology merely 'setting up/adding' more elitism on top of other froms of elitism, and deluding ourselves by thinking that we are opening things up for better?

Are we really just building more (complex and unreachable) walls, and new enclosures?

For instance, there is a feeling of the wild west in most of the bitcoin and blockchain rhetoric which is just horribly, shallow and sexist. A modern day wild west, a 'Californian Ideology' version of it, alongside the usual unquestioning (old fashioned, unreformed) white male, with far too much money and power making investment decisions on things they either do not know the consequences of, or don't care.

Peter Linebaugn, in his brilliant book 'Stop, Thief! : The Commons, Enclosures, And Resistance', writes about the cowboy novelist, Elmer Kelton, and about the 1883 Canadian River cowboy strike in Texas. Saying, "The cowboy's independence has been perverted into egotistical individualism of American manhood by Hollywood, which figures him as a gunslinger and the "Indian" as a killer." Even though there may be some brilliant exploiters of this technology where the projects and ventures are for the good (we'll see). It is at best, another way of diverting our energies from saving the planet?

It is not only the physical, cultural, political, proprietorial and technical, enclosures we need to change, but also enclosures of the mind. Can the blockchain help us do that?

Wishing you well.

marc

Co-Founder, Co-Director and main editor of Furtherfield.
Art, technology and social change, since 1996
http://www.furtherfield.org

Furtherfield Gallery & Commons in the park
Finsbury Park, London N4 2NQhttp://www.furtherfield.org/gallery
Currently writing a PhD at Birkbeck University, London
https://birkbeck.academia.edu/MarcGarrett
Just published: Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain
Eds, Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones, & Sam Skinner
Liverpool Press - http://bit.ly/2x8XlMK

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> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [NetBehaviour] TOKENOMICS Re: comments on blockchain, art, etc., discussion with Ruth
> Local Time: 7 November 2017 2:04 AM
> UTC Time: 7 November 2017 02:04
> From: netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
> To: netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
> Kenneth Fields <kfields at ucalgary.ca>
>
> Hi,
> My interest in blockchain is something of an attention filter.
> It’s like moving house; you have to go through all your stuff
> and box up only the things you NEED to bring with you; facebook,
> youtube, twitter - get rid of it.
>
> We can simply move completely over to the next web, and as a
> consequence reclaim some of the old passion of the early internet.
> Time to build again; scout ahead.
>
> Artsmesh (http://artsmesh.com) was always meant to be decentralized,
> and we achieved that goal partially - embedding gnuSocial as a repository,
> but for the most part keep it focused on LIVE. With blockchain, it’s now “Buy Live.”
>
> So Artsmesh is ‘banking' on the fact that the 'live event horizon' (NOW) will become a site of value.
> In other words, the closer you are to live/now, the more valuable and trusted will be the ‘signal.’
> Live media acts as another filter, because it's a more skill-intensive space to command.
> With live presence, we share a more direct signal path; there is a relationship of veridicality, where
> no mediating entity can insinuate their non-contractual influence between our two negotiated presences.
>
> So those are two filters acting on my psyche, blockchain and live. But yet another filter
> seems to be emerging, a strange movement of cutting edge research from academia
> to finance! Who would of thunk it? The white papers are exciting and ground
> breaking, unlike the quicksand of much of the recent academic discourse in the arts and tech.
>
> So Artsmesh is currently on the DApp/move:
> https://www.stateofthedapps.com/dapps/artsmesh
>
> We’ll blockchain our mesh-odology (currently server based), and track peers as bitcoin/ethereum does,
> issue shared IP contracts between musicians and audience at the point of hitting the broadcast button,
> and gradually move to decentralized storage, live CDN carrier, governance of the Mesh community
> and federated intermeshes (because as easily as you can mint your own token, you will be able to mint your own
> blockchain off the Ethereum blockchain) - and as a side effect, we’ll be able to financially support and credential
> expertise outside of the old rusty vessels/institutions.
>
> And what about the new language of fine art - its now finArt!
>
> See you on the mesh.
> Ken
>
> Syneme
> Central Conservatory of Music,
> Beijing, China
>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 6
>> Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2017 18:38:34 +0000
>> From: ruth catlow <ruth.catlow at furtherfield.org>
>> To: netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
>> Subject: [NetBehaviour] TOKENOMICS Re:  comments on blockchain, art,
>> etc., discussion with Ruth
>> Message-ID: <63c23aa6-8f02-d691-ca33-f552529bba76 at furtherfield.org>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
>>
>> We can talk about the existence of art on the blockchain as an entry in
>> the ledger.
>> If there is no entry in a blockchain ledger the art probably does not
>> exist or impinge on the blockchain- and so what?!
>>
>> But I love the introduction of Beuys and Guerrilla Girls to the
>> conversation because their "work" purports to  take place in humans
>> (transforming them all into artists) and the changing behaviour of systems.
>>
>> But how do we conceive of what we could call the "core" work in relation
>> to the economic life of a Beuys object or installation, and the
>> documentation of a Guerrilla Girls action?
>>
>> Here is a "tokenomics" project under development.
>> Could the artist consortium model explored here
>> <https://medium.com/singulardtv/tokenomics-101-the-emerging-field-of-token-economics-e253b9e72ba3>
>> work for us?
>>
>> Bests
>> Ruth
>>
>>>> For entities we are claiming exist outside of the blockchain, the
>>>> data that
>>>> claims to register that existence is a proxy for them. We cannot
>>>> validate
>>>> the correctness of that claim using the blockchain's consensus rules
>>>> in the
>>>> same way we can for a simple value transaction if we wish to validate
>>>> the
>>>> fact of the registered object's existence outside of the blockchain.
>>>> Something about being outside the text. We can only validate that
>>>> person X
>>>> placed a record on the blockchain, and possibly that later they sent
>>>> it to
>>>> person Y.
>>>
>>> This does seem to relate to the ontology of capital itself.
>>>
>>>> We use such proxies when buying and selling physical property such as
>>>> cars
>>>> or houses, or more pertinently when buying and selling conceptual art.
>>>> Certificates of authenticity for conceptual art are even more
>>>> material than
>>>> blockchain records. But I feel they are still proxies for the work
>>>> rather
>>>> than being the work, although this may just be the conceptual art fan
>>>> in me
>>>> speaking.
>>>
>>> What I wonder about is in a sense the derailing of conceptual art,
>>> which was a reaction at the time, at least among many artists, against
>>> the materialism and mercantilism of the gallery/promotion structure.
>>> Given that a conceptual work can be incorporated into blockchain,
>>> which itself is an abstracting, is it necessary then to go into a
>>> discussion of 'buying and selling conceptual art'? Isn't this a leap
>>> which many artists, at least at the time, wouldn't make; doesn't it
>>> reduce conceptualism to the usual marketplace phenomenology, instead
>>> of the radical gesture that, at least for some, it embodied? For some
>>> reason Beuys comes to mind - he wasn't a conceptualist, but his
>>> teaching and art occupied such a radical position - as does the work
>>> of the Guerrilla Girls etc. ..
>>
>> Hi
>>
>>> - Alan
>>>
>>>> - Rob.
>>>
>>> New CD:- LIMIT:
>>> http://www.publiceyesore.com/catalog.php?pg=3&pit=138
>>> email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
>>> web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285
>>> current text http://www.alansondheim.org/uy.txt
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> NetBehaviour mailing list
>>> NetBehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
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>>
>> --
>> Co-founder Co-director
>> Furtherfield
>>
>> www.furtherfield.org
>>
>> +44 (0) 77370 02879
>>
>> Bitcoin Address 197BBaXa6M9PtHhhNTQkuHh1pVJA8RrJ2i
>>
>> Furtherfield is the UK's leading organisation for art shows, labs, &
>> debates
>> around critical questions in art and technology, since 1997
>>
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