𝚂𝙴𝙸𝚉𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙼𝙴𝙰𝙽𝚂 𝙾𝙵 𝙶𝙴𝙽𝙴𝚁𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽

The early days of blockchain-indexed generative art would fit right in The Man Who Was Thursday [1]. To the exterior observer, it is an uncanny society of policemen pretending to be anarchists. Everyone in that space appears to be eager to make offers that seem far too idiotic to be refused. And yet, the space endures.

If it does endure, it must mean that something is being produced, distributed or even traded. It is unclear as of yet what the something is, and whether that something is also being consumed. However, some things in this space are very familiar to both the contemporary ethnographer and the up-to-date accountant. The narratives over the languages-which-are-not-languages, and how their forces could compound, have been recently rejuvenated. In order to understand what blockchains did to generative art, we will first have a quick look at what more traditional financial tools did to synthetic biology.

Formal analogies

On August 3, 2006, partners of the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the founding of a decade-long research programme. The purpose of the project was to formalise a new discipline known as “synthetic biology”. The academic groups involved were to operate the “design and construction of new biological entities such as enzymes, genetic circuits and cells, or the redesign of existing biological systems.” By treating genomes as software and cells as hardware, researchers would usher a new technological revolution. Formal languages would replace human effort with non-human ones on a new scale.

During its ten years of existence, the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) did not yield any major biotechnological revolution. But it did help the emerging of social ones. Among these, the company Ginkgo Bioworks managed to translate these narratives into accountancy-compatible ones. The discourse of a future ability to use formal languages (here, “rewriting” DNA) was translated into a discourse of a future exponential revenue.

This discourse proved to be very successful for some time. When it began trading on the NYSE (through a SPAC merger introduction), this company was valued at close to twenty billion dollars. The synthetic biology narrative was the only actual product. Facilities were loaned, machines were bought, teams were hired. And then the situation changed.

It is still early to draw lessons from these financial adventures. Many exogenous factors can be factored in, and many pictures of the context can be painted. Quantitative indicators are too weak and qualitative ones too diverse to address precisely what made it go so high and fall so low. Nor does it allow anyone to make any predictions for the future. But in very broad terms, one can say that the circumstances that enabled a narrative to prosper have suddenly left everyone engaged in it gasping for air.

The art market and the unnatural language economy

Generative art spaces are arguably following a comparable trend. The context in which it prospers relies on similar metaphorical registers. Formal languages, in that case mostly but not only JavaScript, are used to scale the manufacturing of items, often referred to as art pieces, that (potentially) convey meaning without a syntax, that carry significance without a lexicon. Once again, a narrative of an exponential production of value is made available to bridge dreams of sudden wealth and a Microsoft Excel-based mode of pseudo-rationality.

An astute collector in one of these spaces recently wrote that “we are basically purchasing the algo when collecting then which I find incredible”. This claim is both wrong and right. On an individual level, the collector is only holding the receipt of a transaction whose reference serves as an argument to the “algo”. The IPFS-hosted repository isn’t a material or an immaterial good whose use could be restricted or made exclusive. On a collective level, the situation is less clear. If both the author and the buyer are convinced this is effectively what is happening and behave accordingly, one could support the idea that there was such a thing as a purchase “of the algo” for as long as the belief was publicly and somewhat consensually held. It seems that most collectors’ representation of what they are buying lies in the middle: something is being bought, but no one is exactly sure what it is and why it has value save for the putative willingness of others to buy it.

Generating generators

The core difference between the two cases compared is that while both milieux are made of roughly the same types of people, they are arranged in very different ways. In both cases, an elite class of technicians have managed to monetise their skills and/or reputation in a more creative way than the usual punctual performance (be it an art piece or an academic article). In both cases, a class of younger technologists have been given simplified tools to experiment without having to care for the success and failures of the generations that came before them. But in the first case, the world is at stake: cells, not hardware or software, are supposed to become the new factors of production. In the second, nothing is at stake: generative art was there before blockchain indexing, and it will still be there after it dies. This lack of stakes changes the way responsibility is (un)attributed: in generative art, no one is to be held responsible for anything but what they believe in. And this may change at any time.

This complete freedom is transformative because it enables all parties to engage in the co-construction of all the selves in the space. An author publishing an interesting generator cannot truly hide the way it has been crafted: the formal language they use is known to all authors of comparable skill. Research in this milieu is, in theory [2], never stored on private servers either: all determinants are to be made publicly available, with no ways to hide them. Taking part in this space as it currently is leads to adding to it, voluntarily or not.

Defeating alienation by seizing the means of generation

Trading hashes of blockchain-indexed generative art algorithms can look like senseless speculation to the uninformed observer. However, a more careful analysis may yield a slightly more nuanced perspective. Some of the means of generation, for example through the fx(hash) platform[3], are essentially community-funded public goods by design. The cost of running the platform is not borne equally by all the actors taking part in it: the fee is not computed as an absolute value but as a percentage of sales, regardless of their personal usage of the infrastructure. The temporarily successful authors pay to keep the lights on so that everyone can keep experimenting.

This does not invalidate the acknowledgement that most of the financial flows seen in that space are essentially speculative. However, the qualitative assessment of the nature of that speculation is harder than one would think. Some actors did design automatic systems that trade high volumes of hashes, regardless of the outputs they produced. But to many, trading hashes is a proxy to achieving a feeling of ownership.

In the early 2020s, the daily experience of workers in many parts of the world is of living on second-hand time. Very few things are owned, and most things are rented. One does not own copies of movies or songs anymore. Even features of the most recent cars, though already built in, need a monthly payment to be activated. Young workers are being priced out of the real estate market. The economic sense of such systems is clear: it enables wider access to a large array of goods while limiting the amount of capital people need to freeze for that level of access. But it also means that everything lies on one’s ability to keep paying. Nothing is an acquired good anymore, everything is a rented temporary service.

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Publicly indexing repositories stored on peer-to-peer networks and trading the hashes that can be fed to the algorithms they contain is therefore less politically inert than it may seem. Platforms that have positioned themselves as frameworks whose purpose is to support artistic research (such as the aforementioned fx(hash) platform) have enabled other generative projects to flourish. By projecting an image of ownership and using it to nurture a feedback loop of persistent exploration, the generative art milieu has initiated its own regeneration.

[1] Chesterton, G.K. - The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) - ISBN0375757910 (ISBN13: 9780375757914)

[2] It is possible for a generator to send a request to a private server and get a response in return. This is theoretically forbidden by most platform guidelines, though actual enforcement varies.

[3] The author is a user of the fx(hash) platform and owns pieces that are available on its marketplace.