Radical friendship, cooperation, and transnationalism: in conversation with Ruth Catlow
(This interview has been edited and condensed by Stina Gustafsson and myself)
After Stina published her article on Blockchain + art, and later on we had the discussion at Görlicon, we decided to formalize our work into a paper. Through researching and asking friends, we came across Furtherfield, an organization and gallery working in the intersection between technology, society and art for more than two decades. Furtherfield, has in our view, managed to gauge perfectly the intersection between blockchain + art, and the members of this collective show this through their work, brought together in their 2017 book Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain.
Art shows, books, papers, and building new platforms for artists: this organization is studying a myriad of fields and developing new tools to manifest the relationship between technology and art in their own unique and extremely well-informed way.
Later on, Stina and I spoke with Ruth Catlow, head and founder (together with Marc Garrett) of Furtherfield, who defines herself as “an artist, researcher, and curator exploring collaborative networked arts and technology practices. I want to contribute to the redistribution of wealth and belonging, to better live the big questions of our day, with radical friends across difference, distance, and time”. The aim of this dialogue was to find guidance for our paper, but the conversation turned up to be too interesting to just quote it there, so we decided to turn it into an interview. This interview aims to show the more technical side of the Blockchain + Art discussion, while the paper will quote Ruth’s vision within the art realm.
- There were so many things last year that was happening with various artists, Christie’s and Adam Lindemann at Art Basel at Miami Beach, etc. This is the commercial art world trying to adopt Blockchain. Do you think that this is a kind of adoption for the sake of adopting it, or if it’s an actually genuine interest within the commercial art world?
Ruth: People don’t want to miss out on a business opportunity. I will put it as baldly as that. It’s also a new space, and there’s marketing potential. Some might think it’s a new territory opening up that they can occupy so there is the fear of missing out. But it’s a fast moving space so even since December 2018 some new commercial platforms like Arteia are coming online that propose to change artists’ place in the art world ecology for the better through their decentralised arts collection system.
In terms of artists working with blockchain technologies as a medium, in the art press, you mainly hear about Ai Weiwei and Kevin Abosch. This is irritating because there’s been so much really fantastic, deep, provocative work. Interventionist art has been going on in this space for a much longer time and is much more interesting in my view.
- From analyzing briefly, technically, Kevin’s (Abosch) artworks, the first one IAMA Coin, it’s obviously technically viable and it makes sense from an art point of view as well. The rest seem farfetched or lack depth. What do you think?
Ruth: There’s a whole body of work that is much more interesting to me in this area. Such as the work of Rob Myers, Mediengruppe Bitnik, Primavera De Filippi, Terra0, Jonas Lund, Sarah Friend, and RIAT.
Oftentimes, the innovation lies in the transmission and reception of the work. And like all information technologies, it’s social at its root, so when artists work with blockchains as a medium they are working with changes in sociality. What was brilliant about the early net art and web art was that it changed the relationship between the artist, the audience, and the artwork. Those are the things that fascinate me in works that are made with and about network technologies.
- Your last exhibition with Primavera (De Filippi) and Jaya (Brekke) was very interesting. How did this come about, and how you did you formed this sort of collective and made it happen?
Ruth: We are part of a pretty amazing international network of people who are thinking about the relationship between arts, technology, and the social impact of these things together, they focus on how the world is different because of network technology.
We’ve run a gallery and a commons lab and event space in the heart of Finsbury Park in North London now for 10 years or so. And what we’ve been doing is working with the artists, techies, and activists who are in our network to create exhibitions to show how new technologies are changing how power flows in society. They make the abstractions of technology that support power-shifts feelable to whoever walks through the door of our gallery.
During 2014–15, Rob (Myers, also part of Furtherfield) had begun to write a series of pieces on the relationship between art and money, art and accelerationism, and blockchain, especially Ethereum and smart contracts. He wrote a paper called DAOWO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization With Others), which invited our community to approach blockchain cultures and technologies with our Do It With Others (DIWO) spirit. DIWO sprang out of a Furtherfield campaign in 2006 that values collaboration in the network age, over the individual artistic genius of previous eras.
Since then, we’ve just been running a series of DAOWO labs, exhibitions. We published a book. We’ve made films. Now we’re working on some blockchain infrastructure. But we’re looking at doing things that are trying to replicate a sense of cooperation, community-building, transnationalism between different groups of artists — to replicate a sense of radical friendship which has always been core to Furtherfield’s approach.
- What’s your experience in regards to onboarding of artists into the blockchain, and if you see this means as viable coordination mechanisms?
Ruth: The problem isn’t just the technical barrier, it’s also that the blockchain space is really off-putting to lots of artists. It looks like the worst of speculative capitalism to most people. And for artists who are working with a socially engaged practice, it makes no sense at all, a return to pure commoditisation of art — with a transactional approach. This is a problem even before we get to the technical problems. Engaging those artists in a process where we build something that is appropriate for our needs and the things that we need to do, that’s also complicated too.
So for me, it’s all about “What is the new gain for a community? How are you articulating the new relationship that you have created with your DAO? And how do people understand that through the interface?” I think that are the things we need to get right. It’s about what is the value proposition for the new social relationships that you’re creating? And I think if we get that right, then people will get involved.
There are a few beautiful new projects emerging. Zien by AxNA allows people to invest in an artist studio, and then the artist pays the investor dividends based on any income they make over the year. The investor comes to some agreement with the artist. The dApp is in prototype mode at the moment. The creators are doing really nice, careful work. I think this seems uniquely well tuned to the actual ecosystem.
- Do you see Furtherfield as being some kind of organization that helps lead coordination and helps people find their own way in this ecosystem of technology and art? Not only in Blockchain.
Ruth: I guess all of our work aims to increase the number of people who feel that the organisation of society is something about which they can have a say. Debates about governance are increasing in intensity in the Blockchain space. And the resurgence of interest in DAOs connects with a need for people to feel more empowered to work together on joint ventures, beyond business, and in more-than-human systems. This is one focus for our work at the moment.
We also want to provide as many different ways as we can for people to get involved in cultural experiments, to join and input into the networks of people who are building planetary-scale infrastructure. It’s so important that local pieces of knowledge and living communities are not forgotten in the pursuit of the perfect mechanism design! And then at the same time, it’s hard even for us, who have been in this space for a long time, to access the means to experiment with infrastructural developments. So another pressing issue is how we bridge to the development economy or the ecology of development, to inform what gets built and in whose interests.
The chat with Ruth is much longer and interesting. Stina explored various artists, discussed the viewpoints from the art world’s perspective, and we analyzed a couple of great projects in this novel space. In this excerpt we wanted our audience to learn about the exciting projects that have been happening at Furtherfield and how they see our tech world.
Our paper aims to embody all of this and more under the provocative name “There’s no such thing as Blockchain Art”, and through it we will explore different verticals of study: the problems arising from marrying these two industries, the grassroots organizations working on the field, such as Furtherfield, and of course, NFTs and memes.
Please stay tuned, we are working together with Fanny Lakoubay (snark.art) and Maya Byskov (Centrifuge) to research, structure and write the paper. Even though there is no main net launch at the end of this project, like any other Blockchain initiative, we are experiencing slight delays on our roadmap. But we’re well on track and will publish hopefully in May.
Additionally, we will be curating, together with Fanny Lakoubay and Adeola Ogunwole, ETHBerlinZwei’s culture room, which is more than double the size of last year and has a very special concept we’ll share soon. The hackathon will also feature different experience rooms, and the Bauhaus reconceptualization we have done around the image of ETHBerlinZwei will be manifested in the hackathon as well. We opened Pandora’s Box once again — art and blockchain are complex and fascinating, and we cannot wait to materialize all our ideas. Watch this space!
More on Furtherfield and their DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab
