**This past Tuesday during our Discord community call, we hosted artist and Graph Commons founder Burak Arikan and artist 0xHaiku. We discussed conceptual art in relation to their respective practices, and how they work with their communities to create their compelling works. **
The JPG team would also like to extend a special thank you message to Masa (abirdwhale) who acted as a translator to 0xHaiku, who chose to speak in their native Japanese language in order to preserve the nuances in their expression during the conversation.
Receipts and Provenance
Burak Arikan: I'm an artist working with data software networks for over 15 years. I have been building a diverse range of projects in this field, including a private coin, and I create platforms for experimental art economies. I've been super interested in the creative platforms, reflective platforms, where people can build creative things together, which is also what brought me here (to JPG). I also write about blockchain networks, and I’m founder of Graph Commons, a platform for mapping and analyzing data networks in general.
In 2008, I created My Pocket, artwork I showed at ETHBerlin 2019, a program that predicts what I will buy next every other day, based on the data on my bank account. I used financial data information combined with the predictability of regular consumers, which was shown as a map, tracking net relationships between transactions, and produced receipts from those transactions as evidence of those predictions.
0xHaiku: I mainly create conceptual NFT projects. I use the blockchain as the tool to construct my work because it has many functionalities, which I find very useful to express my conceptual ideas. I’m not very interested in the price (of the artwork) or financial aspect (of NFTs), what interests me the most is people's engagement with my art projects.
One of such projects is Receipt, in which there is an online cashier on my website and minters can put their preferred price and the artwork of the resulting receipt actually contains the price the minter puts into the cashier. Additionally, each receipt tracks who the owners have been/currently are.
In this work, what I wanted to express with this project is that the transaction itself has some kind of value: I think that the activities or actions of NFT collectors will become the value in the new art space. Within traditional art realms, who owns certain artworks is quite an important factor, and Receipt relates to that aspect as well.
Burak: I think your project is really good, Haiku, I just checked your website while you were talking. It's amazing that every number becomes a mint there, beautiful. And back tracing the provenance itself into the piece is fantastic. I am working on a project that explores provenance as well, yet in a different way - I’ll explain. Here in this Discord stage everyone understands that who buys from whom matters as much as the work itself. This, as Haiku mentioned, is not new. Within art history, some art movements and canons, actually emerged based on the collectors, for instance, the famous Young British Artists movement, started with Saatchi (collector) who bought lots of work from Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and many other artists within a particular circle in the '90s, mostly graduated from Goldsmith’s, that organized warehouse exhibitions. This was solidified by two canonical exhibitions called Brilliant! and Sensation, and it was a huge phenomenon back then.
I'm interested in these new types of relationships that emerge from this world. And both my upcoming artwork and previous ones are about finding the relationships between transactions. Creating links between links, which is a concept in network science. Based on the categories of those transactions, and the times of those transactions, like the day of the week and hour of the day, or so on, so forth, those kind of start creating some categories that you can track, and they create link between those transactions and you can start categorizing them and analyzing them and make predictions about them. A long time ago, for my work Artists Collector Network (2011), I surveyed the two groups about their collections, and with that information I built a map out of it and started making predictions which collectors will buy from which artists in the future based on the previous connections. It's just like those social media recommendations. It's a bit like that. You use the network, the graph behind those relationships and to make predictions for the future. Currently, I'm working on something like that right now using the data that's freely available on NFTs.
Now in the NFT world, we can see ownership and changes of hands, within seconds. And those transactions, those collections that are emerging, are followed by collectors, wallet watchers, bots and whales to find the next big thing. All this causes different shifts in how communities perceive the value of collectors, artists and artworks. NFT collection is a very social thing. The transaction kind of creates a social link, as well, between the artist and the collector through the artwork. And as they aggregate, they create these layers of layers of value: in meaning as well as financial value.
Trent: One of the things I'm hearing relating to this idea, is that there are relationships between the transactional relationships and the social relationships. In our capitalist society, we can almost reduce every relationship to transactions. I think one of the interesting things about the blockchain is that it codifies that thinking directly into the protocol - there is really no distinction between financial and social relationships, they become one in a really interesting way which is well reflected in your upcoming work.
Participatory, generative poems
William: 0xhaiku recently released Human-Readable, which are fully on-chain generative poems, and they're created using bitcoin style seed phrases. The point of this is to create poetry that can be born between technology and people. 0x Haiku, when you work with a generative text project like this how often are you surprised by the spontaneous, aleatoric results?** **
0xHaiku: I really like the randomness of generative art. In addition to working with that randomness, I'm trying to make art projects where the will of participants may be reflected in their art piece. In Human-Readable, the poem is generated using words similar to the standard BIP39 used in bitcoin wallet seed phrases, and consists of 12 words and follows the 5-7-5 syllable haiku rule. All of this logic is implemented in Solidity. The minter has to choose a generated poem, and then type in the “seed” words they see on the screen, in order to mint the artwork. Through all this, and using the randomness of generative art to interact with the minters, I feel we’re co-creating the art.
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 is My Pocket by Burak Arikan (Exhibition view, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, 2009.)