Beyond the hype and financial speculation, blockchain has increasingly been used as a medium for artistic inquiry, recasting the relation between art, technology and money under a new light. As different consensus models are deployed to verify the state of the decentralized ledger, the question of trust is rearticulated in technological terms. But does that really provide an escape route from years of social evolutionary mechanics or is it opening a more-than-human labyrinthian door? Shifting the focus on how authenticity, ownership and art itself are produced through this novel technosocial apparatus, blockchain also reshapes the relations between artwork, artist and audience.
We invited artists and thinkers Ed Fornieles, Sarah Friend, Paul Seidler and Sam Spike to a conversation about these themes, exploring oracles as frameworks for knowledge production, the aesthetics of trust, the relation between the automated incentives and community curation, and the tensions between community, contracts and capital that pervade these peer-to-peer networks.
