Ruth and all,I've been doing some more thinking. I kind of agree with Alan that you don't actually want to make any money out of selling shares in nothing - otherwise you're participating in the process you're pretending to satirize. On the other hand the whole point of the satire is that the artwork itself doesn't exist, the only thing that exists is its value; and you can't make this work without having value involved, and ideally some kind of market-style transaction, or a satirical version of a market-style transaction. And the other thing I was thinking is that I don't know how to code any of this stuff myself, which means that some other poor sod has got to do it, probably Rob, who I'm sure has got lots of other things to do - unless I'm prepared to actually learn how to set something like this up, which would probably take a good few weeks, or maybe forever...
The obvious solution to the making-money conundrum is just to give the money to a 'good cause'. That would be fine, but it's not particularly satirical. So then I started to wonder whether it would be possible to have a built-in refund with every transaction? I think it probably would be, actually, from what I know about the code (not much), because every transaction seems to take place between identifiable blockchain addresses: so if you can send them a share in nothing, you could also send them back the money they paid for that share in the first place. That would be quite a good joke, but even better would be if every time someone bought a share, it had the effect of creating a load more shares - let's say another trillion, just to make it completely absurd. So that the whole idea of buying shares for the sake of their scarcity, because scarcity enhances market value, would be completely turned on its head. If you started off with a trillion shares, and a trillion people bought one share each - or even if one person bought them all - not only would they own a trillion shares in nothing, and not only would their money be refunded in any case, but the effect would be to create a trillion trillion shares, so that their portion would be almost infinitely watered down. Now, whether you could actually code that I'm not at all sure, and I've been hesitating about whether to suggest it in case it's completely impractical; but assuming that it could actually be done, something like that would be a rather nice way to play the blockchain at its own game, I think.
As regards your suggestion of giving nothing exactly the same boundary as Finsbury Park, I like it. In one sense it doesn't matter where you put nothing, of course, but in another sense it would be nice for people to arrive somewhere and think to themselves 'There's nothing here'. Of course there's always something, anywhere you go, but you very often don't appreciate it because you've got other things on your mind: expectations, wishes and so forth. Giving yourself a chance to appreciate what's actually there, instead of what you are expecting to be there or what you would like to be there, is an aspect of mindfulness. But so is focussing your mind on nothing: trying to free your mind from the thoughts and concerns that usually keep going round and round inside it. The classic mindfulness exercise is to concentrate on your own breathing, and set everything else aside apart from that. Another one is to close your eyes and listen to whatever sounds are going on around you. Or you can concentrate on relaxing the different parts of your body, one by one. But all of these exercises are supposed to get you closer to a state of receptive emptiness, an attunement to nothing. So I think of nothing as having two aspects: there's a satirical aspect, which is all about the way market values first get attached to art and then supplant it, and how the blockchain threatens to kind of amplify and enshrine this process; but then on the flipside there's a spiritual aspect, which is about freeing your mind from all that kind of nonsense.
What do you think? Does this move things forward? Edward On 23/10/17 15:52, ruth catlow wrote:
Dear Edward an all!Love the context setting here - the physical artwork as a tiresome encumbrance for investors and its eventual disappearance as an attractive feature for potential collectors.Then some responses to your proposalRe: presentation - Furtherfield would consider presenting nothing as a permanent public art display in a site that maps exactly to the boundary of Finsbury Park where Furtherfield Gallery is based - in a column of the same height as the nearest mobile phone mast. An artwork that people move through and animate with their presence and indifference.Or presentation methods could be forkable.Re: pricing of shares- we need an elegant and considered way to set the price of shares. I don't know what that would beYou can buy fractions of cryptocurrencies. My whimsical feeling is that all cryptocurrencies have something like personalities - that are expressed through their market value and volatility, hyper or anti inflationary natures, initial distribution protocol (Venture Capital vs Air drops), and the nature of the products or services provided (like prediction markets, provenance and proof of identity), where applicable. I think that Ed Fornielis explores this beautifully in his work Finials <https://vimeo.com/206410037> These are tamagotchi style creatures which are kept alive and either thrive or die according to the performance of data generated from specific "large structures" - companies, currencies, football teams, rainfall etcI’ve always had a penchant for pyramid schemes - we could look at a system that makes nothing collectible via Maecenas and then accrues capital via resale rights - distributed to Netbehaviour contributors - who could choose to split the profits (or not) with FurtherfieldHmmm Cheers Ruth On 22/10/17 13:40, Edward Picot via NetBehaviour wrote:Dear all, See what you think of the following: Works of art offer unparalleled opportunities for investors, both individual and corporate. They have proved their worth time and again as hedges against inflation. The only disadvantage is the physical work of art itself. Valuable art is increasingly bought, not to be displayed, but to be hidden away in warehouses in ‘freeports’: tax- and customs-free spaces where objects are, legally, indefinitely ‘in transit’ between countries. Shares in valuable works of art are now being offered for sale online, for example via Maecenas (https://www.maecenas.co <https://www.maecenas.co/>). Investment in art is thus being spread out from the privileged few to the slightly-less-privileged not-quite-so-few. If you’re not rich enough to buy an entire work of art, you can buy a fraction of one instead, without ever seeing or touching the original. You don’t even have to know what the original work of art was like. All you have to understand is its market value. The more successful online investments in art become, the more likely it becomes that the works of art themselves will be permanently hidden from view. They will cease to have any meaningful existence in terms of physical form, expressiveness or aesthetic quality. All of this will be dissolved and sublimated into their market price. The next logical step in this process is for the artwork itself to disappear completely, and for the market value of the work to be the only thing that actually exists, right from the outset. Therefore, today, we are offering you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You are invited to buy shares in nothing. Nothing is a completely unique work of art. It’s uniqueness lies in the fact that it doesn’t exist. It is an absence, wrapped in a negation, buried in a nullity. Even though it has no physical dimensions, nothing does have a precise geographical location. For the sake of security, to preserve value and avoid taxes, it will be held in permanent storage. The location of this storage may vary from time to time.Nothing is currently stored at *51.57057,-0.09667**- **the Furtherfield Gallery, Finsbury Park, London. * *The method of storage is itself unique. In Flann O'Brien's novel **/The Third Policeman,/**one of the policemen (MacCruiskeen) has a hobby of making tiny boxes, each tinier than the previous one. He keeps them one inside the other. When he unpacks them, the **last five**are completely invisible, and in fact there's really no way of telling if they exist at all. 'The one I am making now,' he says, 'is nearly as small as nothing.' * *Nothing is being kept inside MacCruiskeen's tiniest box, and anyone who would like to visit the Furtherfield Gallery to view it in storage is welcome to do so, **during normal opening hours**. * *Please be aware, however, **that nothing, and the box in which it is stored, are both**completely invisible.* *In keeping with Furtherfield’s copyleft philosophy, nothing is being licensed on a creative commons basis. Anyone is welcome to reproduce and display nothing, provided they give fair attribution to Furtherfield.* *Also in keeping with Furtherfield’s open and democratic principles, we are making **one**trillion shares in nothing available, at a price o**f **************each.**Questions: Firstly, for Ruth and Mark, would you be happy to have nothing on display at the Furtherfield Gallery? An empty room, an empty plinth, an empty box, or even a pin with nothing balanced on its tip?**Secondly, for Rob, is it practical to offer a trillion shares in something? And what's the smallest cryptocurrency amount that could practically be charged for each share? In my innocence I was thinking that you could charge one BitCoin for each share, imagining that a BitCoin was probably worth about 50p, but when I looked it up on line I see that a BitCoin is now worth about four and a half thousand pounds. Is it possible for people to pay for things in fractions of a BitCoin, for example a thousandth or a ten thousandth of a BitCoin? In order to do so, if they didn't have any BitCoin already, would they have to buy at least one, ie. stump up several thousand pounds?**It looks as if the cheapest of the cryptocurrencies is the Doge, which is about 46p at the moment, and you can get a few of them free as a starter deal. So I suppose the cost of a share could be one Doge: they're less well known, but more fun. Is that practical? Could you make a trillion shares available via the BlockChain and charge one Doge for each of them?**The other alternative would be to make very few shares available, and charge a lot of money for each of them, which would be more like the proper elitist art market, and therefore perhaps a bit more satirically pointed... But probably nobody would buy them. And if anybody did buy them, you might end up feeling as if you were endorsing the whole art market system.**Edward * _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- Co-founder Co-director Furtherfield www.furtherfield.org +44 (0) 77370 02879 Bitcoin Address 197BBaXa6M9PtHhhNTQkuHh1pVJA8RrJ2iFurtherfield is the UK's leading organisation for art shows, labs, & debatesaround critical questions in art and technology, since 1997 Furtherfield is a Not-for-Profit Company limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales under the Company No.7005205.Registered business address: Ballard Newman, Apex House, Grand Arcade, Tally Ho Corner, London N12 0EH.
_______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
