Hi Annie, Edward, Alan and Rob
Many many thanks to you all as always for your help processing this stuff.
Some thoughts in no particular order:
Annie, I share many of your misgivings. Like many blockchain projects
Plantoid asserts all kinds of equivalences between living and machine
systems that need to be challenged.
I also share your annoyance with the "conservatism" of equating voting
with payments (or market processes) with deliberative democratic
processes (this chimes with a prevalent argument in the UK that all
culture should be crowdfunded).
With our book <https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/100826>
are seeking out potential of interactions with blockchain technologies
for art (and artists and all those who want art to continue to exist in
the world). We want to continue to explore how commons and communality
can be grown as cultural resources in the context of blockchain
environments.
The exploration is full of uncomfortable perversities - including a dive
into difficult technical and financial abstractions (which can be felt
as a distraction from immediate and pressing political concerns).
However we think it's worthwhile and necessary because financial
services make up 20% of the total gross domestic product in developed
economies .And while the Web is the Internet of messages, and
communication, the blockchain is the Internet of programmable money
(think computer viruses with wallets in their pockets - and money to
spend and to bank). And also, as Rob suggests, critical artistic
appropriation of blockchain techs might make these otherwise invisible
forces and effects more perceptible and accessible for more people.
Finally the ongoing assertion by many promoters of blockchain that
because the code of smart contracts deployed across blockchains are
incorruptible by humans, they are an automatic improvement on all human
institutions, rings really oddly to artists ears. I think that this is
because artists (especially those that have worked with network media)
agree that corruption of meaning, intention and outcomes often occur
through decontextualisations. Rob's comparison of smart contracts with
spirographs rather than stormbringer (worth a trip to wikipedia
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormbringer>) is helpful - but I'm sure
it is possible to imagine good done with stormbringer and evil done with
spirographs ;)
Hope to continue this conversation because this stuff is really hard to
disentangle.
warmly
Ruth
On 29/09/17 05:01, Alan Sondheim wrote:
It depends, doesn't it, on what is meant by 'infallible'? They're
corruptible in terms of value and in terms of use; it's the old
use/exchange value conundrums here. They're corruptible because
they're not ideal; a prime number isn't corruptible, but protocols
are. What if a "distortive intervention" comes in the form of nuclear
war?
You're postulating an ideality somewhere between engineering and
Godel's neo-platonism I think and I'm not sure that position would
hold. These models exist in a real world of interactions after all.
How are we freed from deceit and usury when blockchains are used for
ransomware payments? There's a difference as well between the "meant
to" in terms of usage of blockchain, and the reality?
The anthropocene desert you describe is brutal in my opinion, allied
to Kristeva's clean and proper body; without ecosystems in depth,
without the dirt of the world, the cleansed future (or so I read it)
frightens.
Did you mean Labanotation? That's a good example; the interstice
between Labanotation and the real/grit world of dance is fascinating,
amazing!
I'm the first to admit here I don't really know what I'm talking about
since the details of blockchain elude me, as do the claims made for
it. That side, I've been reading what I can; I just don't hold to the
utopian vision that seems to accompany it.
Best!, Alan, and apologies for my ignorance
On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Rob Myers wrote:
Entities of code and rules are incorruptible and infallible (so it
is said), they are not subject to distortive interventions by
debased human institutions. They have no soul, it is true, but
they also do not weigh on ours. They are Spirographs, not
Stormbringer.
The blockchain's metronymic, reified, transactional model of human
relations is meant to free us from deceit and usury. We are
already homeostats in socioeconomic networks whose restrictions we
notice about as much as a fish notices water. Code at least makes
this explicit.
Plantoid is a way of paying for the creation and exhibition of art
- a difficult and worthwhile problem - in a creative way. If it is
too successful it will end up as the economic-aesthetic equivalent
of grey goo. The anthropocene desert will be filled not with
triffids but with plantoids and the artisans hired by their code
to create their offspring. Maybe these offspring will mutate into
relational artworks that choreograph decorative humanity into
their schemes, multitudes that dance and sway in time to
Lananotation representations of block hashes while wishing that
they hadn't opposed UBI quite so vehemently.
Or perhaps plantoids are simply oases in the contemporary desert
of the real, depicting something of the moment we find ourselves
in between financial crises.
Some of the real plants are in Terra0...
On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, at 12:28 PM, Edward Picot wrote:
Annie,
I love this response! - and I think you've really
latched onto something here. 'Being made of code and
rules is not the same as having a soul... Plantoid
seems to be conservative, reinforcing the
characteristics it started with...' There's a real
sense of claustrophobia and frustration about some of
the Blockchain-based artworks, unquestionably
brilliant though they are, in that although they seem
to be offering a commentary on the shortcomings and
limitations of the Blockchain, they seem at the same
time to be binding us to those shortcomings and
limitations, freezing us into that world, suggesting
that we are all going to be subject to this new
version of reality and unable to escape from it. Yes,
this stuff is creeping into every aspect of our
culture. Yes, we are all going to be touched by it and
influenced by it, directed by it, shaped by it, just
as we are by capitalism, mass marketing and mass
media. But no, it doesn't define us or completely
contain us. We can still be human in spite of it. At
least I hope we can: and I hope that along with
Blockchain art and the like, we can still have an art
that celebrates and explores the bits of existence
that the Blockchain and the like can't comprehend.
Beyond the plantoids there are still real plants.
Edward
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