Decentralized Autonomous Art / Burak Arikan

Transcript

hello everyone um thank you for the invitation first of all the Jaws Joseph and the eat Prague team it has been Delight to be here in the city of Prague and you know it's a beautiful city and it's great to engage with the community in the eat Prague conference I also appreciate that date invite that they invite artists to a blockchain conference to talk about their work this is a rare thing as you may know so I really appreciate for that so um I'm going to talk about uh today like four of my works these are like two of ones are prayer blockchain error from 2008 seven and then two works from

post blockchain area like this around this time 2023 and you will see uh my art pieces are not simply visual or like you know representational they are like systems incorporating software art and data and networks and they don't really fall into categories of like visual generative art or AI art and these are like really systems um that kind of you know that are machine readable that means you can access these works from multiple facets and interfaces um and basically you'll see the examples there basically um

so um I'll start with my pocket around 2008 during my studies at the MIT media lab I was invited to a meeting with this company called MasterCard as you may all know they want to visualize the global transactions they have you know around the world and after I met this I left this meeting I felt really you know uncomfortable because they knew a lot about like all of us yeah so I decided to check my own bank transactions uh what's going on there you know to see my like spending Behavior basically and I basically also checked the the you know the privacy policy they have about the you know consumers and there you can

see things like you know they share your information with third parties this is all obvious for us now but they also say that for instance if you request that we not share information with them they still share this information there's no out you know no way out so as you may be aware today like you know they not only share the data itself but also make analysis on this data and make predictions about us and sell that too which is obviously more valuable to them because they want to Target ads to us in everywhere possible so to expose this practice to the general World in 2008 again this is before it's not on Revelations and so on and so forth so I want to really use my own bank transactions to make predictions about my own behavior and and this and

expose this to the world so basically I run the software I built the software which is pulling my data every night you know and and making analysis and making predictions about my behavior and what why I would buy next every other day so as a result every morning I will check my RSS feed this was an access feed at the time and sometimes I would follow this this results other times I will just intentionally you know alter my behavior just to be you know unpredictable in this uh in this world so I lived this type of software for two years and uh you know and this system had like these two multiple components like you see in the exhibition view there are

like you know three different uh components first one is this what I call transaction graph and this animation shows the um the basically how I model the prediction system there simply every transaction is a node and they are linked to one another if they share a category of is it my phone no okay if they share a category about their uh you know transaction type for instance this can be a thing like a coffee or a ticket or you know grocery you know dining Etc and after or they are connected to one another one another if they also share things like

um you know time of the day day of the week or like the weekday weekend and so on so forth these similarities basically build this model and then from there I will run like different algorithms to reasonably make predictions about my future transactions and also um uh sorry maybe go back yeah and also I uh turned turned this RSS feed into a dashboard but you can see regular purchases in white color current predictions in red and correct predictions in green um the basically attach these transactions became open and public to everyone not just exclusive to the banks themselves and finally in this work I store the receipts those physical receipts into a box and then Mark them

if they are predicted correctly and so you should sleep with all the information on them as you may know the other transaction details they become a physical proof of predictions and I call them ready mates from the future as a joke also because unlike the champion ready mates which you may know they are like picked from the industrial produced objects and signed by an artist and these are the ready-made that their existence were predicted ahead of time and they are marked also with the prediction itself okay so around the same year also I worked on this project called metamark it's like 2007 when social media was getting

popular and you know the old days of Facebook and they opened the API iPhone just started and so on Thursday those days basically I built I was questioning like this idea that you know what's our value as a user to a social media platform you can never know about this information by just asking it to them obviously because they will not tell you so so I established the stock market to collectively find this out okay on meta markets you'll initiate an IPO of your social media profile like Facebook profile for instance and and you agree to share your profiles into thousands to turn your profile into a thousand shares and and keep half of it for yourself and the

other half for sale in the auction in a Dodge auction IPO you would I mean the auction will set the price for your work for your shares and your friends mostly buy from these shares and keep in mind this was before Bitcoin so everyone who joined the platform received a certain amount of virtual currency that I invented that I made up and then their accounts they have this this currency and they use that to join these auctions and buy and sell these shares of different people and you can see in these metrics for instance this dashboard shows the market price dashboard next to a social media like a dashboard they want next to each other it's because

as you know stock market basically Supply demand and speculation they all Define the price but at the same time there was a crucial role of the social media here because people actually they primarily bought and sold from the people that they know okay so we combined the social media with like a market system in a simple single platform like that it was a fun experiment people also discussed in the comments of these shares like you know the valuation itself and what what formulas we should use to really calculate the fair value of a market of a social media for instance those type of discussions were taking place in this platform maybe around 3000 people were engaged

um uh these people basically discuss these ideas together and we had to shut down the web platform after a while because of the operational costs and and it was also to the time when you know the Bitcoin was just emerging around 2008 uh nine one thing we learned from this experiment uh uh basically uh this this concept of user Labor uh and we kind of built a standard or proposed a standard let's say and use on The Meta markets itself to can basically measure the activities of users and then make calculations on their value on any platform in general anyway so coming to today uh social contracts um this is the work I've done

in 2013 uh 2023 sorry it's a series of living artworks as nfts when you mint the social contracts in Ft it traces the um contracts that you own from you know an FTP that you own from a contract and and the other accounts to own from your contracts and the other and those accounts what other contracts they own so it's like a multi-degree network of your owners basically or from your collection and then that builds a graph a kind of a collector's graph and where you can make predictions about future Acquisitions of these mentors the admitting account

um so these interactive graphs reveal the social patterns in nft art collecting and in these graphs you can identify accounts that share you know similar tastes with you or accounts and some of whom you might know and people your friends you know maybe or famous people online or something or others could be knee found connections and there are many of them like around 900 of them and each of them are sprinted by some individual and then they basically some people meet multiple and then they basically explore these their collections through these works if you zoom into one of them for instance um you can these are interactive pieces

you can zoom in Click track you know open open these nodes when you by clicking on them here like for instance you can see the nft details they're linked to openc or eater scan and so on and and they you can explore the multiple steps of links between individuals and accounts accounts and contracts in the back to construct accounts and so on so forth so you can navigate in these graphs to this way so those blue lines for instance represent the prediction be between the minting account and their future possible acquisitions and you can also explore them in the same way so the closer that accounts to each other in terms of proximity the more

common contracts they share so the layout of the algorithm graph is also relevant to those relationships um just a living artwork you may ask maybe so each nft is updated periodically and evolves with each transfer of ownership so on on transfer basically each team collectors data added to the graph and together they they grow and grow over time and then it change the form and provenance of the work obviously for instance one example different artists they kind of send this nft to each other and the as they build these Rings kind of and from those Rings they basically you know explore their

Collective collection let's say um also in terms of traits of this project these nfts you can see hnfd has metadata including like attributes of visual form but also attributes about their data inside the graph which is provenance you know the past ownership similar accounts and predicted contracts the account the addresses of the contracts um and on open C you can utilize these metadata to navigate the entire nft collection obviously but um with this data that's also inside the graph it's another way of navigating the entire graph mechanism that we built here

and you can search a name for person or a ens name and now see where do they exist as a similar account in other other people's graphs and then click on one of those explore further you know the details of that particular piece and and then continue basically you know jumping from one account to another to another contract and so on like the way you explore social media in general so uh with social contracts basically uh the act of collecting becomes a integral part of the work and then he and in essence it basically states that nfts are already a social graph they provide a social graph for us

and blockchain is obviously uh inherently produce these implicit social relationships for us so it's a you know it's just for us to really explore this and use this social layer it says already out there I want to thank uh I'm grateful for my collaborators for this project the jpac space the dot space a protocol and a community uh focused on creating nfts you can check their website jpeg.space I also want to extend my thanks to the you know the jpeg Community for their incredible support and engagement with social contracts project because their participation truly brought these pieces to life lastly I want to talk about the prompts project

so this is a collaboration with my friend Sam Hart we basically built a social transmissible nft system that you will see we have been working on this slowly over the years and during the covet times especially we are inspired by Concepts like digital artist communities you know Surf Clubs and scenes fluxes events event scores especially instruction-based conceptual artwork uh temporary autonomous zones and and blockchains inherent you know verifiability and coordination capacity so we want to basically enable verifiable collaboration among artists based on different creative prompts and

these are prompts not for AI but for the artists to execute okay um so excuse the corpse is the first instance of this project called prompts uh it said it's a you know system that throws inspiration from a surrealist and old surrealist drawing technique this traditional method involves uh basically folding a paper and drawing on the top part passing to someone who draws the middle part they pass to someone they draw the bottom part and then they completely they complete a single body and so we took that and turned into into nft system or maybe a smart contract system what's best to say and and then

it extends the erc721 smart contract more standard enabling a verifiable collaborative altering system the functions that exist in this contract is basically the extra functions that exist are creating a session you when you create a session you don't this you create a token ID but it's not mintable yet it becomes mintable when all contributors join and add their part it becomes a mintable token SD token after that moment you can also change the price update the price of your portion of your work um so as an example from the visual interface again this is one of the clients that we can build you can build multiple of those obviously for the

smart contract you basically go and create the first session an empty canvas and you draw your own part the head right and and then you add other people's accounts to this your friends your collaborators and then you submit this as an old chain call to the contract which then records and data the SVG data and the IP and the Json metadata of this entire thing is stored on ipfs as well and it's all accessible obviously from any system out there and once you are invited as a contributor to this session you can also create your own sessions yourself and this way the network grows organically and socially over time and

and there are only a thousand sessions that we set as a supply limit for this experiment so it will gradually become mintable all these different nfts currently we only have seven I think we call them corpses as nfts you know seven corpses out there and you can go to the page and zoom in zoom out you know scroll them and explore who actually builds these works together who who collaborates with it with one another as artists and you can see the names and these are ens names usually um and so you can basically enjoy this you know deliberative and thoughtful process of artists you know creating a visual dialogue between each other one last thing about this work uh the

lineage of the you know discussion of Rarity and and value obviously uh is these are these don't only come from the visual quality of the work but they come from the people who contribute to these drawings okay so who's involved with this work is kind of the important part that will drive the value and the meaning of the of the work you can follow prompt Studio on Twitter and join the Discord Channel we have and it's all available on the links as then on the account and you can see some of the artists and if you want to draw you can if you want to join you can join the channel and ask for invites and one last thing I want to talk about briefly is this new project that I'm working on at the moment this is not

live it's called time to live and I will finish with this time today Project basically invites artists to create a living artwork or each of them creating a living artwork with an agency like the way Gene was talking about maybe and and and then they should also create these artworks that are living together so different artworks that are like each of them I have autonomy and they work together or they live together in some way so to explain this concept imagine if the you know if this project was conducted in the 60s for instance I can put some names here and pieces you may be familiar or not so for instance

Han sake who built this condensation Cube on the center top he would you know send the humidity values of his box to vitakonji who's following a stranger on the streets of New York for instance and then he's like footsteps but he's he may be adjusts his walking speed based on the humidity levels coming from the other artwork and then maybe uh the patterns he creates in the city of New York is maybe translated to guide the boards psychogeographical Maps you know in another project and then maybe the patterns that emerge in the in these Maps may be translated into Giant English like self-destructing sculptures

possibly right and then in a way that it modulates their speed of bicycle wheels and stuff like that for us in that work and then the maybe time of Destruction can be translated to Yoko Ono's piece where she's performing on the stage and audience comes and cuts pieces from her body for more clothes and maybe that time limit is actually limiting people's participation in that cutting piece and lastly her heartbeats are translated into the hansakis piece where the in the room it may be modulates the temperature of the room which actually affects the condensation itself or no I mean it's like Computing the full cycle here like that you can see how different artworks can have

different agencies in their own way in their limited way and then can affect each other in different ways so to realize something like this in today's world uh um artists will have to create you know outputs from their work also they will they should take inputs to their work right and then modulate their work in some way of course to enable something like that they have to agree on a protocol and this protocol somehow has to exchange some it has to exist on blockchains so that we have a more you know decentralized independent system and then this way we can maybe create this idea of time to live together yeah so basically um

for me um I'm at the moment building the system in different levels um you know on one hand collaborating with different artists on the other hand developing the action mechanism and the system architecture in general so my goal is to really facilitate long-term collaboration and collectivity between artists that is independent of any existing you know time or place so if you'd like to contribute your welcome uh I'm open to call you know conversations about this uh I'm available on Twitter Discord you know everywhere in real life here as well so that's about it okay thanks so much we may have maybe a couple of minutes

for the questions if any okay I think we're cool [Music]