Bookshelf
Software for Artists Book #002: Untethering the Web (2022)
Short Summary
Disclosure:Ā I will buy whatever PioneerWorks puts out - delighted to support one of the coolest centers for culture/arts/sciences around. Also fun to support the editors &Ā authors, all of whom are inspiring a much-needed dialogue about how we can shape the future of the internet to be less extractive and healthier for all of us. The collection itself is a mixed bag for me; the most constructive and helpful pieces have a thoughtful, sober, but still deeply optimistic take on how to avoid downfalls of crypto-capitalist incentives. These are most of the works, but I specifically appreciated the realism, proactivism, curiosity, and agency (ie:Ā call to individual action) from Martinez, McFedries, and Rennekamp. The few less helpful pieces, imho, are those that frame web3 as a cooperative panacea, one that should avoid capitalism at all costs because "money ruins everything". IĀ was a touring artist for years...IĀ get it...we'd all love for artists to make more money, for us to be less slave to the desk job...for big corporations to be less extractive. I hope and want crypto to help figure that out. Capitalism is not perfect (and often actively terrible!), so while the inspiration for these takes is IĀ think well-worth listening to closely, I'd ask them to go beyond unspecific language about money-bad, to move past resigned too-cool-for-school nihilism about current world-fucked. As Martinez writes, "The future will be built with or without our input, so as cringe as the "metaverse" or Bored Ape NFTs may be, IĀ propose we take on the difficult task of looking past those (perhaps) misuses of the technology, towards greener networked pastures, and build the systems we want to see in the virtualized world" (Martinez - 25). š¤
Notes
From Tommy Martinez:
"The future will be built with or without our input, so as cringe as the "metaverse" or Bored Ape NFTs may be, IĀ propose we take on the difficult tak of looking past those (perhaps) misuses of the technology, towards greener networked pastures, and build the systems we want to see in the virtualized world" (25 - Martinez).
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From Trevor McFedries:
In response to the question/comment "A lot of artists are skeptical of anything that feels financially oriented, for good reason. The creative class has been traumatized by capitalism"....
TM's response: "Yeah. My artist friends are like, "Booo capitalism."Ā But I'm like, "Man, all this stuff is happening with or without you. Your work is effectively being speculated on, and you are engaging with galleries or collectors or record labels, which are all part of the same machine....I'mĀ really interested in folks not only acknowledging that they're a part of this game, but proactively participating in creating a better structure for all of us" (45 - Trevor McFedries).
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From Billy Rennekamp:
"One day I was talking to Oliver [Laric] about Cory's [Arcangel] seminal piece, Super Maria Clouds (2002) [in which Arcangel modified a Nintendo cartridge to erase everything in Super Maria but the clouds]. It's iconic and everybody sort of knows it, and we were like, "Yeah, that piece is so killer."Ā Then he was like, "But would rather make Super Mario Clouds, or Super Mario itself? IĀ would love to figure out how to make something that could be both at the same time. How to do that is a massive question" (92 - Rennekamp)
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"All these things that we're talking about are basically just ways that artists can monetize their practice, beyond selling their work as a luxury good. There's just such a long history of artists being years ahead of the world's mainstream ideas, but they almost never benefit from the ideas that they bring to the table. NFTs present a creative monetization route for the value that artists create, which we've historically been given very little access to...There's this idea of the artist as a scout, checking out new boundaries -- whether it's social boundaries, technological boundaries, or culture, political, etc... For me crypto just felt like an insane boundary to explore...Then there was this obvious extra potential around compensation where I felt like , 'Oh, look, there's a very direct way that I could be paid for scouting out a new boundary.'Ā Like prospecting, you know what I mean?"Ā (93-94 - Rennekamp).
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"The metaphor that IĀ sometimes use is that the early money pumped into these kinds of projects is like manure. If you just put a dump ruck of manure onto a bunch of seeds, you're going to smother everything with shit. So it's this question of, 'How do you not drown in this, but rather have just enough to fertilize things?'" (96 - Rennekamp).
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"The crypto space has a lot of good players, and al og of bad players. When evaluating a project, I like to ask myself, 'Why would this person continue to work on it when it's hard?' Or, 'Why will this person continue to work on it even if it doesn't work out right away?'...If you're evaluating whether something's going to work or not, it's often not about whether the idea is good -- it's about whether the person and the team are going to keep working until it's good."
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"IĀ think this new kind of community is shifting how we define individual identify. When I"m asked for my bio, I'll often list my professional positions, some projects I've worked on, and then at the end I say "I'm a member of Are.na, Build, New Models, and Trust." I feel like those aspects of my identify are becoming more and more important. It's sort of like a constellation of social configuration that denotes my social circle and where IĀ align my values.
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