This past Tuesday, on the Widely Acclaimed JPG Discord, we hosted Paul Seidler and David Lisser , and talked about protocols becoming art, social interactions and crypto-social aesthetics, which is the upcoming Canon we will be launching next week.
These two amazing artists have been working with social relationships around their work, both on and off-chain, so making space for a conversation between them has been incredibly enriching for the JPG community, in order to begin preparing for the Crypto-Social Aesthetics Canon.
Next week, on Tuesday, at noon ET also on Discord, we will be hosting Sarah Friend, one of our favorite artists, that has been working with networked art, and focusing on coordination games, blockchain dynamics and theory for a long time. Alongside Sarah, we will be hosting rafa0x, a community strategist and theorist that probably you know from Mirror or Folklore.
Back to Paul and David now!
The Introductions
David: I am an artist based in the UK. t I have my own practice, but then I also work in museums and galleries as a technician. And given the present company, I am relatively new to digital working sort of 2017 onwards. And before that, I was sort of doing a lot of... what we called in the UK, socially engaged practice, often around sculptural objects or working with specific communities.
I've always been interested in what happens around the art or the art object, and looking at different ways to play with that. When I found NFTs, it felt like that playful aspect was something that could really engage with and maybe even exploit to some quite fun effects. The project that fits most closely with the idea of relational or crypto social or whatever we want to call it is something that I created towards the end of last year, a series of work called Cloudburst. In Cloudburst, the art object is essentially removed from the social aspect. There are 12 items, photogrammetric scans of bouquets of flowers that are then pulled apart and rendered to point clouds. What I did essentially was set up two wallets for when I auctioned these works, 50% went to myself, my own wallet, and 50% went to a newly created wallet for this auction.
And then when each auction was over, the collector of a particular token got given the seed word that related to that number. So, if they collected Cloudburst #6, they got the sixth seed word for this wallet. 12 seed words distributed amongst 12 collectors for a wallet that contained not a huge amount but a few ETH. And now, it's essentially up to the collectors to coordinate or possibly trick and connive or maybe find another way of working together to do what they want with these funds. 30 days after the final auction ends, I will clear the wallet and take all the money. So, there's a sense of urgency for the players.
Paul: I'm an artist and also sort of like a researcher in really broad terms, like how all artists are probably researchers now. I got into the blockchain space, specifically with the Ethereum space, in 2016 where I started terra0 with two friends, a collective through where we look at how smart contracts can be used to foster new relationships to natural systems, to ecology, and how these things can influence each other and how maybe new relations can be formed through this.
My personal practice is also research-based and I'm also interested in formal and generative systems, but also economic systems and sort of the intersection of these I would say. My latest work is Straylight that has a lot of these kinds of themes.
MP: Let’s dive deep into Straylight! I am very interested in the firm artist statement within the spectacular documentation you produced, so we could start with that first: “Straylight Protocol is a non-conceptual work of art – all immutable interactions within the work are formalized by the program code. There is no mysticism, no hyperstition, no interpretation, no trusted third party, no URLs, and no additional servers – the code functions as a formalized operationalizable concept. The semantics of the program code provide an immediate vector of utilization through the compiler itself. The conception of the artwork becomes only relevant through the proof of successful operationalisation. Only through the interactions of players does Straylight Protocol become truly generative – and is therefore process oriented rather than teleological.”** **
** Paul:** I think writing program code has a lineage in sort of conceptual work or conceptual art, but on the other hand, it's also something which is applied, which can be wrapped and is a formalized language, which...like the human language, is not super discrete in a sense as a programming language or assembly language. Something that is discrete. I come into Straylight from this notion that the concept and the code are essentially the same thing.
In Straylight, the protocol is producing the artwork. The protocol is, in a sense, the interactions, it's formulating the interactions between the players, then the artwork is generated through this process. Through the interactions of these people. The artwork is also constantly generated, which kind of makes this also like an infinite artwork or the infinite durational creation of artwork in a sense because it's on-chain and it's like can never be finished. The protocol itself describes all the relations and formalizes all these in the system, and then sees how the artwork is generated out of these.
Off-chain and on-chain relationships
Paul: Straylight is a multiplayer game, in which you have four different agents which are controlled by four different players on each map. The agents are turmites, which are Turing machines that were developed in the '80s. Turmites are a way of determining a visual state in a system, you can move your turmite but you can't completely control it
Straylight is not a kind of really precise game but a generative game, in a sense. It's basically people drawing together with really specific algorithms and finding patterns. The app functions both in Ethereum and Optimism, but is at its best in the latter where the fun is actually happening, facilitated by low computational costs.
So, you have these worlds or NFTs, which are overwritten maybe like 1,000 times or something with a million different patterns and are continuously sort of evolving. While people play, you begin to spot certain categories of players: some players like more sort of pattern making which are more structured, while some like more things which are more destroyed or kind of eroded.
David: With my projects, the relationships are entirely off-chain. In fact, it's very much an off-chain piece in that sense: there is no sort of protocol, there is nothing written, there are no instructions. Connecting with the buyers is core: essentially, one of the things I was worrying about was what if someone buys it and I actually don't know who they are or I can't communicate with them? Thankfully, everyone who did buy a piece, I managed to track them down eventually or I already knew who they were. At first, I didn't even know whether I should be taking control and introducing everyone to each other - or whether merely by taking part in the auction, you were signing yourself up to try and take on responsibility and your own sense of ownership and autonomy as to how you react to the situation. I did eventually put together a Twitter DM group, which is where everyone is chatting. I'm monitoring the wallet, but not the chat.
For me, the main learning from the interactions was maybe overestimating people's motivation. People’s attention is limited and so is their time. Perhaps if the auctions had gone for much higher money and then correspondingly there'll be a larger amount in the wallet, the motivation to try and work together or to maybe even kind of undermine others to try and get the money might be quite high. I even did research beforehand to work out how many seed words someone needs to brute force it and I don't think anyone taking part has even considered trying to do that, to my knowledge. ** **
Trent: I am in the group chat, and a lot of people have proposed different things. The difficulty of social coordination is super real in the group chat, and throughout crypto, just like general coordination apathy. This is one of the reasons protocolization can be helpful. However, it is interesting, these random 12 people just throwing out ideas. You've got the altruist who just wants to give it all back to David and they're just so happy with their work and they just want to, you know, reward him and then you've got me, the anarchist.** **
On collective storytelling
David: Ghosts in the Carnery is an interactive story, exposing the hidden histories of lab-grown meat. For a number of years, I've been working on the idea of making sort of pseudo artifacts from that industry, whether they are from the future or from the past. For the Ghosts in the Carnery series, I minted one piece, which is at the beginning, almost of a detective story and with sort of clues and objects hidden within the image itself, and the collector of that piece then essentially got given two forks to choose. Almost like if anyone played those Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were little. And I gave every collector a decision of which I pre-made the next two artworks, and the accompanying text, and they would just choose which door to push. The series itself developed into sort of an ongoing pseudo-detective story about the origins of cultured meat that's sometime in the late 1890s or something. ** **
MP: As we’re now in the collective curation/storytelling realm, I remembered Straylight’s Haeccity mode. The documentation says: “Wouldn't it be cool if you could deploy a contract, which defines the moving logic of your turmite? More to come here." ** **
Paul: At the moment, how the turmites are moving is constrained by the smart contract itself, right? So, you have the system of termites but they move to certain patterns. And theoretically, what you could do is you could deploy a contract, which has a logic essentially of how your turmite would move, and then the protocol would call this contract in accordance with your NFT. So, this would essentially mean you could build your own moving logic for your termite, which sort of would make some turmites fully programmable by people who want to write their own contracts.** **
David: Someone could write a function into that contract so that the turmite responded to real-world activities…
Paul: You could couple it to real-world things or also, define the movement based on the other turmites, right? Like completely based on the other turmites or something.
On Crypto-Social (Relational) Aesthetics
Paul: For me, one of the things that rings true from personal experience, is that everything is sort of relational. I think specifically within the history of relational art, which I'm not too familiar with, it feels like there's also a lot of things, which seem to be more like gestural and performative than really about the kind of sort of imminent ways in which a system works, right? Or imminent ways in which a kind of group is working, or new kinds of interesting things emerge through the interaction of participants
Crypto-Social Aesthetics is a good term to differentiate the works from the historically defined art practice (of relational aesthetics). When we look at decentralized systems, which make these formalized interactions possible, there are also different ways in which people interact. So it’s good to classify them differently.** **
The conversation has been edited and condensed.
If you liked what you read, these conversations happen once a week, live on the JPG Discord’s voice channel, on Tuesdays at noon ET. Join us here!
Cover image: Terra0’s installation at Merkle Root:Berlin curated by MP Fernández and Stina Gustafsson, photo by Hannah Rumstedt