The Blockchain Ecosystem And Its Rituals
A Conversation with Connie Bakshi
Los Angeles-based transmedia artist Connie Bakshi explores postcolonial identity narratives and the meaning of being human in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).
Her practice is based on a unique combination of different elements that bring together technology, traditions and rituals. Bakshi’s work also reflects an intimate and complex relationship with the different nuances of language. It is in the unspoken, however, that the artist’s voice finds its truest dimension.
An Alumna of NEW INC, the incubator for art, technology and design based in New York, she has exhibited at SaloneSatellite in Milan and won many awards, including a Red Dot Best of the Best Award and the International Takifuji Art Award.
In this interview, Bakshi speaks with an open heart about the experiences that have shaped her as an artist and guides the readers through a journey from AI to NFTs to Web3.
Beth Jochim (B): You are an artist and experiential designer with a background in biomedical engineering. Your work is based on the use of creative technologies combined with sensorial transmedia. Can you tell us your story?
Connie Bakshi (C.B.): I’ve spent much of my life toggling between the sensorial and introspective worlds of both art and tech, but I think my story has always been guided by a complicated relationship with language. Growing up as an American child of Taiwanese immigrants, my earliest memories were shaped by the dichotomy of my two first languages: Taiwanese and English. Taiwanese is a language of directness and clarity. Meaning and expression arise from inflection and tonality rather than sentence structure and singular words. It’s mostly a language of the unsaid. I think it’s somewhat telling that the Taiwanese word for “emotion” is kimoji, a borrowed term from the Japanese language. English, on the other hand, is a language rife with duality and dichotomy, with singular words opening up multiple meaning and expression, and sequence that imbues innuendo and allegory with even its shortest complete sentence — “I am”.
I was a classical pianist for most of my childhood to young adulthood. Living in a household with the broken speech of two languages, music was the first outlet for me to explore facets of communication that couldn’t be defined in words. Later, my time at Duke University was shaped by the experience of working with neuroscientist Erich Jarvis, who was researching the development of vocal learning in songbird brains. These language mechanisms are likely the closest analogue to those of the human brain. My role focused on capturing the neural patterns of vocal development in real-time, but our team investigation spanned genomics, bioinformatics, cell biology, and other avenues of inquiry.
I was always fascinated by the web of intricacies and interactions that make up the formation, expression, and comprehension of language. But I recall feeling that the “successful” communication of both written and vocal language required a precision and specificity that excluded nonverbal experiences that could only be felt in the invisible mechanisms behind language.While my background encompasses experiential design, film, and other media formats, it’s really these experiences around the unspoken, undefinable, and invisible aspects of language that shape the way I approach my process, technology, and AI.
B: Recently you have incorporated artificial intelligence (AI) in your practice. Can you tell us about your encounter with AI?
C.B.: I was introduced to AI last year by my friend Phil Bosua, who was working with the latest conversational and image synthesis models. In my work with artificial intelligence, I typically toggle between GPT3 and various diffusion models. AI has become an increasingly accessible tool and new models spring up on what seems to be a monthly basis. Each model boasts higher fidelity and parametric control ,but the connective tissue between most of these is the function of language-as-interface. As I drop my words into the white boxes reserved for text prompts, I’ve found that applying specificity of language triggers specificity of response. Shaped by the structure and codification of formalized language, the walls of the black box surrounding AI tighten considerably when I attempt to direct a conversation or paint an image with an imposed lens or deliberate outcome in mind.
I see parallels in the language around how we discuss the post-colonial experience across time. The objective truths that are defined by written and spoken language often trump, or even exclude, the subjective truth of the non-verbal. And our confidence in the specificity and classification of language can betray our innate drive to seek and understand the unknown. We’ve moved from the paradigm of “history is written by the victors” to the realm of critical race theory, only to find that truth isn’t black and white but a muddled shade of gray. It can be an uncomfortable place to sit, but perhaps it is a necessary one.
In my process with AI, I often look for the questions that emerge with the pas de deux of the double entendre or the interplay of the innuendo, abstract language games that evoke the anomaly in the machine. I also tend to work with recursion which, to me, mimics the social lens shifts across generational cycles. I wade through these iterations in search of mutations that retain some qualities of the initial image, but maybe point to something more authentic and that is regenerative on its own terms. And it’s usually the unexpected questions that come out of the process that are more important than the concrete answers.
B: Your explorations of narratives of postcolonial identity are carried out through a careful combination of traditions, technology and rituals. What are the reasons that lead you to develop this theme? What kind of space does this topic find in Web3?
C.B.: The pandemic was a big turning point in my practice and the themes I wanted to explore. At the peak of the pandemic isolation my grandmother passed. The Taiwanese nuclear family is a tight unit and my grandmother, born and raised outside of Tainan, lived with us as the family matriarch and my primary caretaker for most of my childhood. A product of both Chinese and Japanese occupations in Taiwan, she carried the scars of imperial rule and staunchly reinforced the Taiwanese language and familial traditions in the household.
My grandmother and I were close, but our conversations were tempered by my limited command of Taiwanese and guided by the unspoken rituals of familial life. I often saw this strange dichotomy between her version of Taiwan that she brought with her to America and the New World culture in which she embedded herself. She avidly tracked and discussed the evolving politics of her homeland and would travel back to vote in critical elections, she eschewed the fast food and frozen TV dinner diet that my family embraced for the traditional Taiwanese fare she would cook, and she dictated major family decisions through the lens of a silent code passed down from generations before her. But she loved streaming Charles Bronson on repeat, shopping online, and was often on her iPad or laptop doing web and social media deep dives well into her nineties. As she aged and became less mobile, technology and her screen became both the portals to and separation from a world that was outside of her influence.
As I look back on her life, her identity was an island in the white picket-fenced American home, contained within the confines of her walls, her traditions, and rarely extending outside the reach of family.
The dichotomies of the post-colonial identity find their analogues in the relationships we have with technology, especially within Web3. As Web3 teeters its way to a formal self-organization, I sit on the idea of imbalance. This shows up across the digital experience: localized data being engulfed by global metrics for the benefit of a faceless greater good, corporate economies driven by the dangling carrot of eternal green lawns and digital white picket fences, and technologies that connect our ideologies as easily as they segregate us.
But more than anything, I see in Web3 an implicit tug-and-pull between the histories that we forcefully cling to and the futures that we hurtle toward via seamless technologies that vaguely promise something better. My work and practice reside in the tension between re-examining the rituals and traditions (and, inherently, biases) with which we colonize new digital worlds and exploring the place where individual identity and autonomy live in the protopian crawl towards the collective better.
B: In an insightful interview with Right Click Save you said that “[…] when embedded within the framework of digital ownership, the NFT becomes a symbol of status, taste, community, and identity. Whether displayed [.. .] the NFT is worn as close to your digital skin as a latex bodysuit. “ If you were to explain in a nutshell what NFTs represent for you and your work, what would you say?
C.B.: Our daily lives and interactions are predominantly mediated by the plane of our screens. While studies around the physiological effects of the trend have long been touted across the media, I’m more interested in how our psychological desire for the sensorial starts pushing through the two-dimensional. In the rapid evolution of NFTs, I think this desire is manifesting in the way we want to create, consume and experience them.
In the space between the material and immaterial forms of experience, I think about packaging design and recall the earliest packaging of the American Express Centurion Card. The design team approached packaging as a medium for experience and their process was guided by the narrative and practices of a traditional English butler. Dressed in the impeccable black of pristine paper, the elongated box revealed an inner compartment that glided open with the tug of a seamless tab, the object of desire embedded only at the end of a prolonged, meditative pull — conveying the curated control of presentation deserved only by those of an aristocratic or elite class.
I bring this up because I think that an NFT is a package for the art or collectible embedded within it.
The NFT package within the blockchain ecosystem is a complex mix of narrative, interaction, social contracts, and desire — ingredients for the rituals that define our social expectations and behaviors in a market-driven ecosystem.
My collaboration with the Museum of Permuted Art (MoPAr) was an early foray into this realm of bringing a ritual layer to the interaction with NFTs on the blockchain. In our Rite of Passage collection, we drew from the rich source material embedded within ancient Chinese tomb guardian mythology to channel the experience of transformation between life and death, decay and revival, and collective remembrance. AI and blockchain technologies became the conduits by which communal stewardship and socioeconomic behaviors manifested as a new form of ritual practice.
B: Your interest in technology is rooted in the exploration of collaboration, identity and self-organization. How are these dimensions developing in Web3 today?
C.B.: It’s still a pretty young ecosystem. Web3 evolves daily and so do my thoughts about it. As with every new technology platform, it’s a new world ready to be seeded with ideologies and systems of power that would hope to improve on the last. I see a lot of good things happening across Web3: collective activism driven by connected ideologies; economic empowerment of the individual; crowd-driven regulatory bodies. But I also see the tendency to fall into familiar patterns of behavior that would create disparate silos versus the cross-pollination of ideas that are so critical for building fresh ecosystems.
I think a lot about the concept of appropriation these days. For example, I think of NFTs first as a counterpart and then, debatably, a feeder for the appropriation of art. But I also think of the very idea of cultural appropriation, a watchword of the 2010s that highlighted misrepresentations and propagated stereotypes of underrepresented groups.
Historically, appropriation has been a generational symptom of colonization that slips beneath the skin of social dynamics to pervade economic systems. The song remains the same.
I was really taken by this quote by Eduardo Navas I came across the other day that says: “The most beneficial approach, in my view, is to focus on appropriating the dynamics of colonialism, and redeploying them in ways that are fair and balanced for others.”
He was contemplating the futility of decolonization in light of habitual colonial ideologies. I’m warming to this idea of appropriation as subversion. If we’re talking about collaboration, identity, and self-organization, it’s often ingrained behavioral dynamics that stand in the way of these ideals. And if we’re to shift systems of power, it’s not always about introducing new models and regulations, but re-imagining the deployment of existing ones. I have a great love for the artists who play in this space — Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti of Operator and their subversion of smart and social contracts, Gretchen Andrew and her appropriation of search engine algorithms. There are others, but I’d love to see more as Web3 comes into its own.
B: In your collaboration with the Museum of Permuted Art (MoPAr), your work considers smart contracts as a way to re-imagine the preservation and management of culture. This is a good example where the blockchain becomes a subject matter. Can you tell us about the project?
C.B.: The MoPAr is a digital museum and collection of experiments on the blockchain, where collaborations with NFT artists explore the preservation, permutation, and evolution of historical art. In our Rite of Passage collaboration, we built our collection around the concept of ancient Chinese tomb guardians, sculptures traditionally placed in imperial tombs to ward off demons and to prevent the spirits of the dead from wandering the earth. I chose to reinterpret eight tomb guardians from museums with digitally accessible collections, a cross-section that represented the evolution of the sculptural art form. The resulting permutations were dynamic NFTs that came to life upon being minted, digitally eroded with lack of attention, and were revived with a transaction on the blockchain. The metadata of each NFT pointed back to its sculptural predecessor and the cataloging information of the institution in which it was held.
When it comes to identity and Web3, I continue to circle the question: what are cultural values and narratives that shape us and how do we choose what to make permanent and pass on? Historical art brought to the blockchain is a rich playground for exploring this question and the inevitable questions that follow. Where does a physical artifact live in a digital space? How do you fuse the information embedded within an artifact into permanent memory? What is the implicit value that the art holds and how does it retain and grow its cultural value over time?
In creating our collection, we were guided by the Chinese dynastic tradition of the imperial death ritual, which wasn’t about life coming to an end, but about a transformation between different planes of reality. AI was central to a translation of this theme, and the permutation process involved feeding cultural and historical information into GPT3 and bringing the subsequent conversations into an image synthesis model.
Throughout the process, I was especially drawn to the idea of using AI in concert with the blockchain as a way to negotiate between digital archives and human memory.
As we framed the NFT experience, we were in large part thinking about how we could appropriate the existing behavioral dynamics of a market economy and transform them into a ritual of building value and communal stewardship through the social contracts that dictate blockchain transactions. This meant creating a life and death cycle for these NFTs that both encouraged and was fueled by trade and transfer — transactions that reinterpreted interactions with and ownership of historical art, the collective memory of which I believe is an on-going community practice and responsibility.
B: Is there any project or thought you would like to share?
C.B.: For someone who withholds language from the machine I tend to wax poetic, so I think I’ve said more than enough. However, I’ll add that I’m working on a few different projects right now — some within and some outside of Web3. But I will be dropping a new NFT collection in the next month or so.
