NFTs: the new 'Hypegeist'?

 

 

 

In Frank Wilczek's latest book Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality he made an interesting point that stuck with me:

"Our ancestors inhabited a distinct sensory universe. It is difficult to imagine a world without eyeglasses, mirrors, magnifying lenses, microscopes and telescopes, artificial lighting and flashlights, clocks and watches, smoke alarms, thermometers, barometers, and a host of other devices that enrich our perception in many directions. Yet that was the world in which humans lived over most of our history."

Many people see the blockchain as that sensory extension, or as some see it as the ground-floor, like the Model T was 100 years ago, or the talking head 60 years ago in television. But look at what became of them as the "ascended" from the ground floor: "carmageddon", and how TV began to rewire our brains in myriad ways.

Contemporary art over the last 15-20 years has been partly about setting art free, just like Napster set music free in 1999. Twitter in 2011 made the Arab Spring possible (supposedly to make Democracy possible), and now it's established that Facebook made the insurrection possible (See the AVAAZ report). Freedom in some sense is a constraint--the primary one being uncertainty. But most people want security, not real freedom where you don't know what's next.

I think the blockchain solves the Napster problem by laying claim to a digital Originals, which the Internet couldn't reconcile. It hasn't yet solved the huge problem of it's high energy use. (the Ethereum blockchain uses the annual energy of Ecuador). It also is in the same place that Twitter was in 2011, seen as a panacea. The NFT in my understanding is a essentially a Certificate of Authenticity, with useful smart contract functions. But it shouldn't be the reason to create art.

Consider this hypothetical if the blockchain existed in 1955: 

Picasso goes into his studio one morning and by noon he's created a small provisional painting--perhaps a study for a larger work. Then he creates the Certificate of Authenticity and forwards it to his lawyer to be notarized. Then the piece is put into a safe and on the front of the safe is a little eyepiece to view the work. Perhaps the safe also has an elaborate diorama in which you can see the work placed in a room. It is then put up for sale. A collector makes the winning bid of $70M and he gets both the painting and the safe. The piece is exhibited, and is viewable only through the safe’s eyepiece. It's sort of like going to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa: There are a hundred people in the gallery to be in the presence of a magical object, but nobody can fully see the brush strokes and craquelure. Our understanding is that it has an essence or numinous quality, has extreme historical and cultural importance, and perhaps is the reason that you spent thousands of dollars to go to Paris to see it. Some people think, “What's the big deal? It’s a pretty small painting". In Picasso's case the painting he made that morning was just a study.

About 10 years ago, the artist David Datuna created a large work titled Viewpoint of Millions which incorporated Artificial Reality through use of Google Glass (long defunct) which were provided to gallery patrons (apparently only 12 pairs were available). (Datuna was also the duct-taped banana artist who sold it for $120,000). While it might be interesting to peer into different layers in the work, this was easy to do with the naked eye looking at the layers in a Jasper Johns flag for example. Ironically, it is still somewhat of a privilege to actually see the Johns flags in museums. The version most of us see are on the Internet or in books, which are still an inferior experience to seeing them live. Even Google Art Project, which allows us to zoom into the details of artwork (sometimes even better than the live experience) is still a distortion of reality, as the color gamut is not what the eye sees in ambient natural light. 

On music and artificial intelligence as the panacea to set it free:

On Monday mornings I get the results of a Google Alert on AI Music. Last week there were several articles about Aimy Moon, who/that is an AI pop songwriter created by A.I.M., apparently a Korean music production company that facilitates the composition of music using deep learning and neural network technology.

As some of you may recall, perhaps 20 or 30 years ago there was an AI music program called Emily Howell developed by David Cope, a music professor, which would use algorithms to create mostly piano pieces and some of them were quite beautiful. Now they're just repackaging it with the obligatory NFTs and other hype. This is a very old idea (1980s)--as is AI for that matter.

I still haven’t fully understood why we need to mechanize creativity. There is one ambient piece Sound of Night on Aimy Moon that sounds like a Brian Eno ambient work, perhaps as it would have been created with generative algorithms such as KOAN, a generative music program that was used rules (algorithms essentially) to mechanically compose the music. Back then the metaphor that music composition was similar to how nature creates form through rules was kind of a zeitgest, and perhaps in some ways also hype ("hypegeist" if you will) because lots of people were accepting it wholesale without considering whether it had any "nutritional" value.

Like greenwashing from the aughts, everyone is on the bandwagon as a marketing campaign to sell a collective understanding (not truth) of the technology, which shifts the focus to knowing how to use a new tool, and never making anything of substance with it. Some see the NFT as a "brush", but I'm not buying it. 

(See my piece What Else is There To Do?)