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To preface, this piece delves into the philosophy of WeeeArt, a blockchain powered artwork marketplace selling generative artworks. Check out the live version at art.weee.network.
Digital assets such as artwork, fonts, and code have always been a challenging concept to apply the ideas of ownership to. How can one own something so easily duplicated? What does it really mean to own the rights to a piece of digital information?
Before I delve deeper into the quandary that is digital ownership, why do we care? Ownership in the physical world meant, in some form, wealth and power. It was natural for humanity to find a way to create wealth and power in the digital realm. We have created a few constructs around the problem of implementing digital ownership (I’ll brief on the problems later); the goal was not to solve the problems of owning digital projects but to find ways to make money off of digital works. This ushered an age of SaaS services, license keys, and web portals.
For a while, we ignored the problem of true digital ownership. We were fine with paying for a license key, API calls, or access to a web application.
Why revisit digital ownership? Firms are making money from software just fine right now. Beyond just a personal curiosity, I believe the right technologies, tools, and interest are available right now to pursue such an impossible endeavor. I will argue that I do not have a complete solution to deliver true digital ownership.
Before delving into the “solution”, I want to highlight the problems of translating ownership into the digital world. My thought experiment led me to three key ideas that digital ownership needs to replicate from the real world in some form.
- Scarcity
Owning a physical product means that there is one less of the product available for consumers on the market. The fact that their is a finite amount of each product creates value to owning the product. I own this, and you don’t. If you want to obtain my product, you have to get it from a limited pool of suppliers.
Obviously, with digital images, scarcity is near impossible to imitate. A digital image can be instantly copied and redistributed at the marginal cost of some time, electricity, and storage. Worse, a copy of your image is undifferentiated from your original piece. I own this, and so can you at no cost. You can enjoy the digital image just as much as I can with my copy. Without scarcity, it is hard to argue for any monetary value to a digital image.
In the modern landscape of digital imagery, value is placed on rights to download the image, and rights to use the product in commercial applications.
2. Unique value to ownership
Frequently forgotten by other blockchain art projects, owning anything implies an exclusive access to a “feature” of the good. With physical artworks, it can mean something subtle: placing the artwork anywhere you want in your room, view your artwork whenever you want, destroy it whenever you want. These “unspoken” features to owning a physical good creates the foundational value that the other two points rely on. Why bother own something if not owning it gives you the same exact set of features? Owning implies a use of the product, or an enjoyment that nobody but the owner can acquire.
Digital images suffer from a problem of unique value to ownership. An owner and a random user gets to enjoy the same rights to the image. Both can enjoy the details of the artwork, download, and redistribute the image just as effectively as the next.
3. Appreciation and depreciation of value overtime
This is an interesting point and one can argue, not needed in the world of digital ownership. Physical goods’ value change over time. Using a car depreciates the value, while maintaining a vintage car can potentially appreciate the value of it. Time is a factor when accessing the value of a physical good. When was it made? How was it treated by the previous owners? Is it new? These are all legitimate questions one will ask before buying a physical good.
I think this point has never been considered for digital images, and why bother? The very fact that we don’t have to consider the changing value of a digital product due to use and wear makes the experience of buying digital services so much easier.
Glancing over the merits of appreciation and depreciation for digital goods, I want to wargame possible ways to add appreciation and depreciation to digital images. In short, it is impossible. How does using a digital image possibly depreciate its value? How does one treat carefully a digital image? The fact that the digital image is absolute, each bit of information unchanged (for the most part) as it is printed, distributed online, or saved into storage makes comparing to a “used” and “new” image a trivial matter.
Before I delve into WeeeArt, I want to point out that WeeeArt is not some silver bullet that will solve and resolve the problems facing digital ownership of images. WeeeArt is a scoped down answer to digital ownership. More so, it is my attempt to push the blockchain space in the right direction in regards to how ownership should work with blockchain.
How does WeeeArt interpret the previous three ideas? By disregarding the first point and implementing the last two.
To note, the rest of the piece implies some basic knowledge of nonfungible assets, how blockchain (specifically Ethereum) operates, and some common sense.
WeeeArt is a nonfungible asset economy of generative artwork. Powered by ERC721, owners “own” a token with a unique identifier known as the “key”. In effect, I created a proxy for digital images. The key encodes all the necessary information to recreate your artwork. Instead of owning the download url to an image, or a certificate verifying ownership, owners own the “key”.
I would like to say, that is why WeeeArt’s current scope is only generative artwork. Generative artwork creates uniquely exploitable features for this endeavor. Programmatic art allows art to be recreated with 100% detail at any resolution, and still have the expressive power of traditional mediums.
Using the “key” system for ownership creates a few interesting effects. First, it is NOT just a certificate of ownership. It doesn’t just work as a way to resolve disputes to “ownership” of a digital image (if you call that owning).
For each artwork in the WeeeArt token economy, a lower resolution version of the artwork is distributed freely and openly around the internet. While obviously this voids the scarcity point I brought up earlier, WeeeArt cares about the scarcity of the key. Only one person can own it and once one does, he has control over selling it and using it.
Once one owns the artwork, one gains access to a unique feature to the artwork. They can request a higher resolution render for their own enjoyment. With a request put into the smart contracts on the blockchain, the WeeeArt network will generate the resolution of the image needed. Because artworks are meant to be enjoyed, higher resolution rendering creates a strong unique value to ownership. One can take the higher resolution render and print it out, use it as a wallpaper, or simple marvel at the details of an artwork.
To prevent distribution of the higher resolution render, some counteracting features have been implemented. First, the download link is only accessible by the owner of the artwork with a signed message. The render is also only available for a short window of four hours to download. Finally, requesting a high resolution render costs the owner a fee; the fee hopefully disincentives the owner to not openly distribute the higher resolution render. None of these are perfect solutions to the problem, but they act as deterrents. Instead, I use this flaw to WeeeArt’s benefit.
By storing each render request onto the blockchain, one creates a unique situation with value assessment. Render request, for a lack of a better word, is a “use” of the key. A “use”, as the third point brings up, can change the value of a product to prospective buyers. The render history stored on the blockchain creates an interesting point for resellers and buyers. Each render requested spawns an uncertainty to buyers. The previous owner rendered at 3080x3080. Could there by a 3080x3080 resolution render be distributed around the internet? Do I have true exclusive access to the artwork at that resolution? These uncertainty principles can potentially depreciate the value of an artwork. This effectively creates depreciation; using the key changes the value of the artwork.
If you are still here, this has been a long journey through a rather outrageous thought experiment of mine. Again to remind you, this is NOT a complete solution to digital ownership.
I would like to point out that WeeeArt is a growing and changing project. It was the creation of many thought experiments, sleepless lights, and restraining orders on my frustration. I will not ask people to buy an artwork on their, but to engage in the conversation of digital ownership with blockchain. I believe that the space is going in a trajectory, that bluntly put, is simply slapping blockchain on artwork and calling it a day (Not to say all projects are like that. Shoutout to dada.nyc!). The dialogue needs to be different and I hope that WeeeArt can start the conversation that would lead to a more dynamic and innovative space for digital ownership.
I am completely open to disagreeing ideas. In fact, that was the point of this piece! My work is predicated on a few assumptions I made. With WeeeArt available online, I hope that criticizing voices will help guide my work into a more fulfilling direction for its original mission.
-David Sun
