Signe Pierce looks to blockchain technology to digitize the art economy

Signe Pierce is a multimedia artist whose work spans performance, photography, video, photography, video art, art direction, GIFs, and web-based art. In 2013, she gained recognition with her award-winning short film American Reflexxx. Her latest project? Tokenizing her work on Foundation — her latest collection dropped in June, featuring still life images from her “Jangular Lilies” series.

Sara Reynolds and Maggie Valentine of she256 spoke to Signe over Instagram Live last month. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

How would you define art futurism?

I like to compare it to the idea of art history. We often talk about hierarchal perceptions of art through a historical gaze, so I spent a lot of time thinking about how to bridge the consciousness gap people have and why digital art must hold just as much importance as classical mediums. Art futurism is about evolving your perception of what art is, what art can be, how it’s bought, collected, traded, sold, exhibited, and coveted.

For me, art futurism involves getting it out to the people. I want it to be something that everybody values and understands. Partially through the commodification of the art world, we have come to think about art as this pretentious, old-guard thing that you can only see when you go to galleries. In our contemporary era, art can be anywhere, and we need to learn how to value and appreciate it to get more people interested.

How do you think blockchain and crypto fit within art futurism?

I want my career and life as an artist to be about getting people interested in new ideas, new technologies, new art forms, etc. The reason I’m interested in blockchain is because it’s a way to democratize the way art is collected, traded, and sold so that it can benefit artists.

When art is bought in a traditional way such as through a gallery system, once it gets handed to the collector, it probably goes either into a private collection or ideally, into a museum or an institution. In actuality, it often just goes and sits in a shipping container and gets used as stock. As an artist grows bigger, it will get more valuable. Then, it gets sold again in 10 years while the work’s been…