The #ArtProject

Making Meaning With Magic Internet Money

“To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so.” — William Blake

By way of introducing the #ArtProject being built by Truebit, Jessica Angel, Status and others, I want to ask one big question. What is the function of art in a digital and decentralized world?

Beyond all the talk about price, what cryptocurrencies really offer is the ability to take the concept of value into your own hands and mould it without asking permission of anyone.

Decentralizing and making transparent the protocols by which we create value means nothing less than changing our shared history; “changing humanity” as Andreas Antonopoulos argues. To those who say that this is idealistic nonsense and that quantitative measures provided by mechanisms like markets are more relevant to understanding the impact of such technologies, I offer you a man obsessed with motorcycle maintenance:

“Ugliness [i.e. fixation with price alone] is not the result of any objects of technology […] Quality, or its absence, doesn’t reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.” — Robert Pirsig

How we relate to anything is always prior to how we discover its price. This post is all about how we can encourage the people working on these technologies to relate to them in ways which could change history for the better; ways which really will alter the warp and woof of our connected fabric so that we might become even marginally more aware of just how far-reaching the web that binds us truly is. This, after all, is my temporary answer to the function of art in decentralized networks: to reveal in more dimensions than previously imagined our relatedness.

Artists have always been the people in society tasked with seeing into the heart of what something means and journeying back to relate their vision in a moving and memorable way.

It is more important now than ever before that the poets and the painters, the sculptors and songwriters, step up in order to direct the narrative about what money really is, and how it can be used in tandem with decentralized media — creative commons protected from tragedy by cryptography — to redefine what is valuable such that more people can access and create it according to their own needs and context.

The Decentralized Art Community

The DAC’s first project — the Dogethereum Bridge — is intended as a bridge between beautiful expression and transactional value; between the virtual and the material; between decentralized structures in silicon and the analogue, carbon world. It is a way of making physical digital space and allowing people to explore decentralized networks in a tactile and kinaesthetic manner.

Blockchains offer a shared, single source of truth and — as Keats said — “beauty is truth; truth beauty”. Our goal is to relate the beauty of digital structures responsible for transactional truth and communicate artistically the different meanings — the different worlds — we can build through alternative media for the creation and distribution of money.

It remains the artist’s job to sing the lie, to paint the line, that reveals truth. The DAC is about bringing together the people capable of unveiling — in profound and creative ways — what it might mean to live in a world where value itself has been reimagined.

We have a philosophical imperative to direct constructive and creative cultural understandings of decentralized networks. Whenever confronted by the new breed of corporate finance ICO bros, or skeptical mainstream journalists, I am always reminded of Denise Levertov:

“I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”

This is what art using programmable money; what stories and structures inspired by the blockchain and digital bridges, are all about: showing people that the horizons of the possible really do stretch much further than any of us previously dared to hope. We must awaken the sleepers and show by using such technologies artfully (and sincerely) that there are ways of telling or painting or singing or sculpting which transmit value by means not only of the message, but also by virtue of the very media over which they are broadcast.

We are here to set free more people from the mundane and offer them a glimpse of what it might mean to make meaning independent from any trusted human institution. To explore the sorts of value that the pursuit of such meaning can generate, both for individual creators and their communities. To liberate more humans so that they can spend their time thinking about how to manipulate dynamic media capable of carry value due almost entirely to the way they connect us.

“From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.“ — Virginia Woolf

Join us on telegram for more.