Using blockchain to make the artworlds we want with Furtherfield
For this week's interview I spoke with Ruth Catlow, Artistic Director at Furtherfield (@furtherfield), a not-for-profit international community hub for arts, technology and social change founded with Marc Garrett in London, in 1996. Co-editor of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain ,Director of DECAL (Decentralised Arts Lab), a Furtherfield initiative which exists to mobilise research and development by leading artists, using blockchain and web 3.0 technologies for fairer, more dynamic an...
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Alright. Hello again. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. And for today's guest, I have Ruth Catlow. She's an artist, curator, and researcher of emancipatory network cultures, practices, and and Poetics, artistic director of Further Fields, a not for profit international community hub for arts, technology, and social change, founded with Mark Garrett in London in 1996. She's also the co editor of Artists Rethinking the Blockchain, published in 2017, and director of DECAL, the Decentralized Arts Lab, a further fueled initiative which exists to mobilize research and development by leading artists using blockchain and web three point o technologies for fairer, more dynamic, and connected cultural ecologies and economies.
So hi, Ruth. How are you doing? Very good. Thank you. Very pleased to be here.
Yeah. I'm really excited about, about doing this into interview. But maybe first, could you give an introduction and give us some of the background on how you ended up at this intersection between art and technology, especially?
Yeah. So I I trained as an artist. I went to art school, where where I trained as a sculptor. And starting out as a sculptor in London in the mid nineties, it was the kind of height of the London Brit art scene. So the YBA, the YBA scene that was promoted by the by the Saatchi. So this was, like, preeminent art as commodity, art as marketing, artists as celebrity brands. So it was a kind of it was really establishing this kind of new, what art was going to be. And this was weirdly alienating for me. It wasn't what interested me about art. As a sculptor, I couldn't really imagine anywhere where my sculptures would end up that I would feel happy with working in that, in that culture, or really any way any economy that would work, that would, that would that would kind of be a a place that I would feel happy for my art to be kind of moving that, like, to be moving in. And, so for a few years, we set up I I am friends and colleagues of mine set up studios, that we enjoyed the the kind of conviviality of those kind of collective actions. And then, but we could kind of feel this kind of crushing the kind of crushing influence of what the Saatchi YBA scene was doing to conversation about what art was for. And it was it was having a kind of alienating effect on audiences, so it started to feel very waggish and as though the best art should be unintelligible and should make audiences feel a bit stupid. And, around the same time, I it was the time I kind of first encountered the Internet through Backspace in London. So this was a really early cyber cafe, and it was set up really as a very open space for people to find out what was interesting about the early Internet for artists, designers, musicians, philosophers. So it's a open ad hoc, fairly anarchistic cultural space. And, I from that space, I and a lot of the people I work with and continue to work with really started to understand that you could that what was interesting about the Internet was that you could start to remake the art world as a context. You could you could make spaces to build the kind of relationships you wanted to form together in order to have the conversations you wanted to have and in order to connect with the kinds of people that you wanted to connect with. And we didn't have to worry too much about economy. There was enough surplus that you could do your day job and still have a pretty good life somehow surviving in the kind of layers between the official world. And so in those like, by 1996, Mark Garrett, who's my kind of, collaborator and cofounder of Furtherfield, we built the first Furtherfield website along with people who we'd met at Backspace and really connecting around the world, so in Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, and The States and South America, kind of experimenting with what it meant to build a collaborative art space where the kind of commodity identity of an artwork was less relevant, and, really, it was about, exploring just what you could do with image, text, and unexpected participation and interaction in this kind of new global network. I think it's like people have got really used to the Internet. They've got used to the Internet really quickly, and it's become normal and bland, But it's a really amazingly strange thing that's happened in the last thirty years, this kind of digital global network and the range of things that we are now weirdly doing. And, I'm still very excited by global digital networks as an artistic medium and as a space in which you produce, share, circulate, and hate on, all these things together in the same space.
Susan, I'm curious what after you know, based on your experience after all this time seeing, like, the development of the relationship between art and technology, like, how would you describe that relationship, how it's intersected back and forth between each other, I imagine, and, like, I guess, evolved a bit since, the start of Further Field?
Yeah. So I'd say kind of, like, in the in the late nineties, I was, like, your absolutely typical web utopian. So I was moving in the same circles of free and open source software developers. We were a lot of very hybrid people, people playing with tactical media who saw this space as a space that you could use to hack and change the kind of existing power structures. And, we, coined a term in 2006, which was, so this was do it with others. And this was a kind of critique of, the art world model of the individual artist genius and, recognition and a conversation about the art space as a space of many parts and, kind of more diverse conversations between technologies, artists, institutions, all kinds of creatures, all kinds of concepts at this kind of category colliding, very generative space, but also a critique of gatekeepers within the art world and very hierarchical systems. So it often the images that we were producing were of these kind of distributed nets and, scale free networks that allowed people to connect and root around the the kind of protected centers. And so but the Web Utopian thing really kind of came to a crashing, halt in, obviously, with the rise with the kind of centralization of the web with Facebook Facebook and then these kind of massive platforms. And so we we kind of had to do quite a big we we basically had to get a much deeper, more nuanced understanding of the relationship between tech, culture, and power, I suppose. And around so around 2011, we moved into the park in North London, and this was really important to us because we'd had to kind of work out ways to make the kind of art that we were interested in intelligible and communicative to very diverse people in this North London park. But it's a park where 200 different languages are spoken, very kind of typically, typical of London. And we started to understand that we wanted to be working with in a much more kind of cocreative way. So making work that was made with people, addressing things that were important to them, that were important to them, their lives, their communities' lives, and also that it went beyond a kind of cocreation, which also kinda tapped into a more kind of prosumer idea, but also cocuration. So the idea that you set the terms of the space in which things are happening as well. And I suppose all of these kinds of things bring us, they kind of may maybe they become the obvious foundations for an interest in the blockchain space as a space that then starts to deal with questions of governments and money.
It started off as a as a sort of a a digital critique a bit, and then it's transformed into real you know, I guess as material as art gets in terms of the creation of art and sort of the critique of what I imagine to me is sort of like the neoliberalization of art and becoming more atomized and, like, the worship of the individual as, I mean, like you said, like, the artistic genius is sort of like the the funny, I think, archetype sometimes that you see in, like, movies or shows or something.
But also art is the kind of zenith of extractive capitalism. You know, it's the it's the ultimate commodity.
Yeah. It's yeah. What and I think what's as I think about this more on the spot, I think it's interesting how, like, before now in the early internets, it represented more of, like, a sandbox, I guess, where I mean, only now and, I guess, the past decades or so, we've sort of seen a similar type of neoliberalization or, like, a a sort of, focus on the individual rather than trying to figure out ways that we can create alternatives to, systems, in a more collaborative sense. I think that's it's I think it's interesting that you guys ultimately came to, like, this type of critique that is still very relevant today in the in in a world which is much more digitized and much more still familiar with the Internet. It sort of didn't really pan out, I guess, as what the web utopians wanted. But there are still web utopians out there that are still critiquing,
I guess. I guess I might characterize it like in the early days, I couldn't conceive of a world in which the Internet existed and that we would all be able to see ourselves together. I couldn't conceive that that could be the case and that we wouldn't find the ways to coordinate in the way that we needed to for the higher interest of all beings. That's how that's the kind of utopian I was. And now I still think all of those things are possible, but I understand that all those systems are always already co opted by incumbent power. We have to start from the position that those with power will do everything that they can with those same systems. Whereas in the early days of the net, it was kind of quite easy to forget that people were gonna come up behind you and do really dreadful things with the all the all the innovations that you made. Mhmm. So at least we know that.
Lesson learned. Yes. But but so then maybe keeping in mind the conversation will probably be about blockchain. What are the types of problems that the art art world is facing today?
That so there is no one art world, and the art world of the pandemic in The UK is very particular. But let's go broad before we go detailed. I mean, the the broad problems of the art world have been the same, just getting more extreme probably for the last well, since I've been paying attention, so let's say thirty years. And so I guess the problems that have remained the same are lack of access, actually, like, lack of access and who it's for and what it's for. It it has ideas about what it's for, and it it the rhetoric around the art world, this kind of idea of it being an elevating or, yeah, something like allowing individuals to achieve new pinnacles of genius expression, but then, actually, what it turns out to be is a kind of hardcore factory for extraction and that fools it's it's a little bit like the American dream. You know? It's kind of like the American dream is the thing that makes everyone a slave for a really long time because they wanna be the winner. And the art world is kind of working on that model, so hyper individualized. There's a really great, graphic of the art world with oligarchs at the top by William Poida. It's a kind of triangle that shows the art stars at the top of the triangle, and then it shows this kind of mass of the rest of us all at the bottom, kind of, like, eking out a living if we're lucky. So while the art world garners great wealth for a few people, like, in most of even the wealthiest cities, most artists are not really able to make a living. And so that's one problem. There's a there's just an increasingly awkward relationship between the value of art, the kind of all the different ways there are to value art, and how it's funded So whether it's funded privately or publicly, whether whether its value is as a commodity or as something intrinsic both to the artist and to the people who encounter the work. I mean so there is still my inner artist is still pretty utopian and believes that art's kind of core the the core perks of art is to increase and diversify the new ways of being, feeling, and knowing amongst lots of different people. That's that's, to me, kind of, like, why I still do it, why I enjoy working in this field. But the kind of economy around it, doesn't support it. And this is why the blockchain space is so interesting and so important to be involved in because it allows artists to connect into a space or into a set of tools, into a set of cultures, which are actually thinking about governance and finance. So to take those as experimental materials as an artist is really important and, like, really important right now and really quite exciting, I think.
Yeah. That that leads perfectly to my next question, which is basically, you know, what was it about blockchain that captured your attention? Yeah. Right? What what what are the the pieces of blockchain? And, like, how how did you gain the interest in it? Because I think sometimes we, when we first, of course, enter in the world of of blockchain, you're there's sort of like, a wall of a wall of shit you have to walk through essentially.
Yeah. It's a it's an interesting question. So I think not that surprising because we have because our community is a network of artists, techies, activists, theorists, that someone at some point came and said, hey. Bitcoin's a thing you should be paying attention. And we set up a I think we probably set up a wallet in the Fernfield Studio in 2010, mined some Bitcoin, and then threw the computer away and didn't keep the wallet stress. So that's a shame. And, then didn't but, like, found it quite hard to understand what the point of it was, but were quite intrigued by this idea of money, like money without governments and without banks just as a kind of conceptual, pivot. Interesting. And then I think it was 02/1415, an artist and developer and writer in our network, Rob Myers, wrote some we wrote some pieces both about accelerationism and then, specifically some pieces about the potential for artists to work with, Ethereum, so the programmable blockchain. And, he wrote a a kind of paper that was a provocation to us as the as as the people who had kind of given birth to the Daiwa practices in networked art culture. And he wrote a paper called DAO, which was, decentralized autonomous organizations with others. And the provocation was to take the kind of network collaboration of and see how we might use some of the tools of automated governance and finance to do something different with it. And, there were there were enough what was the the kind of what meant that we couldn't put it down was this was this kind of tension actually between, a sense of very in our community of free play, constant appropriation remix mashup that was really part of our community. But this idea that you might start to think about the economic value and the economic flows of those things was actually quite a strong provocation and, just gave rise to a lot of quite heated discussions that you, blockchain socialists, will be really familiar with, like, a lot of discomfort around actually around thinking about adding economies to things as though thinking about adding economies to things is already kind of ruining everything. And that so that and then a series of experiments and looking at what artists were doing to think critically about the relationship between art value and money, like, the minute you press on that, really interesting things start to come up. So it's and and looking also backwards at the at kind of art history. Value creation, it's just an extremely generative space. But I guess it is it is worth saying, like you said, like, it's does a wall of shit get through first? The thing that made it possible was that there were enough artists doing things that were might be really hard to understand. Like, Rob Rob made a piece called Facecoin, which was an artwork that, used the 64 bit hash of, of Bitcoin to produce these grayscale boxes in which you could see faces if you kind of squinted. And he turned machine vision on it and said that when the machine vision found a face in it, it was producing a face coin. So, like, all these different weird kind of translations and interpretations of the mechanics and the value production within, within the blockchain space. Like, they were hard to work out. They were really hard to describe and, explain the importance of to audiences, but that difficulty was kind of you could stick with it because it was coming from these, strange stimulating artistic spaces.
Yeah. So I I imagine it it came from the experimentation. It was like it was when you are able to I mean, first off, walk through the the wall of shit and, you know, go a layer deeper into what it is exactly the mechanics of these things and how they work, and then tweaking them in different ways because, I mean, the yep. The first rendition of it is probably not going to be the best rendition of it. So I guess just having enough enough people in our networks who
could who knew enough about tech development to be able to produce things that were conceptually fascinating. They didn't have to be technically sophisticated. They didn't have to be, like, aesthetically gorgeous, although I'm not saying any of this work isn't aesthetically gorgeous. Sometimes it is. But it was the the fact that they could produce things that you could kind of play with and then understand by playing with them or turning them in your mind what was conceptually interesting and what it meant to the world that there was now this system in it.
Right. And and I guess in in the first layer when you're talking about bringing economy into art, I guess the first thing that pops into your mind, because the only model we have of it is sort of like extreme financialization in the really bad sense usually of of how it's done, today. But whenever you are able to modify the components of it, you can then think, well, maybe maybe it's not exactly financialization in the same way that we have it as a model in our heads, and maybe it's something slightly different if we tweak this
and etcetera. Well, I think I mean, so since since then, we've been trying to we've been running a kind of series of labs, exhibitions. We've made films. We've run and a whole series of workshops called the DAO workshops where we've basically been there's been quite a strong focus on the decentralized autonomous organizations because it speaks to the a kind of artistic tradition which is rooted in Dada, situationism, fluxes, punk, which is, like, we take the tools. We we take the tools. We make our own crap instruments. We get on a stage. We play two chords. Three chords is jazz. You know, it's kind of like we we're we're not interested in craft. We're interested in taking this stuff and shaping it and making our own culture with it. And with that kind of attitude, things like the so we've been running this series of labs, but bringing, like, a variety of different artistic methods to collide people from very different backgrounds, like, through things like live action role play and different kinds of workshop methods. Like so back in 2017, we worked with Ed Fourniellis on a live action role play called what will it be like when we buy an island on a blockchain. And we improvised four different political, like, islands of different political complexions that were role played by 50 people using quite a kind of, like so using these artistic methods and design methods to under to to kinda, like, push, like, push into future scenarios and see what these things are gonna turn into because humans are what humans are. To someone who's listening, I mean, it probably sounds really weird,
but but also, I mean, and maybe you can speak about this, but, like, the beginning of the Internet was also a really weird place as well. Do do I wondered, like, do you see some, I guess, parallels between the weirdness of the Internet back then and and the weirdness of, like, this type of experimentation?
It's quite interesting. I haven't thought of it in quite this way before, but back in 1996, which was the first time I looked at the Internet as a space that you might do something interesting artistically. The Internet was made of, people's home pages with pictures of their kittens and family. And then corporate web pages where the only interactive thing was, like, a link to an email address. So it's basically like a corporate brochure where you could click through yeah. So that, a ton of porn, and then some artworks that just completely blew your mind about what this space was gonna be. Like, a a really early one of my favorite early NetArt pieces is a piece called the the twelve hour JPEG project by Brad Bryce. Basically, it was like a very small grayscale image. You'd go to the you'd go to a link anytime, and this image would load really slowly because the bandwidth was so low. So this image would load really slowly. Sometimes you could see what it was. It's like the corner of an elephant's ear or a teacup or something, but sometimes it's just, like, really, abstract. And, like, if you if you visited it, you realize that it changed every twelve hours. And then if you did a bit of research, you could see that it changed at exactly the same time every day. And then you start to think, oh my god. So all around the world, if anyone logs in, they can see the same thing. Thing. You start to realize it's like a pulse. You start to realize, like, is this a collage? Is it a very slow film? If I play the inner strip, you sit you realize that everyone can see it all at once, but very slowly. What kind of people are coming back and looking at this? And then suddenly, your whole idea of what the world is and what art might be is just feels totally different. Like, so I guess that was pretty weird. And the kind of blockchain art that was made, like, pre in, like, 2017. So the works the standout works for me would be, like, Rob Myers' Facecoin, although he was making stuff before then. Primavera de Felipe's or Orchaos, plantoid, which is, do you know plantoid? So it's an android plant that glows and dances when you tip it with Bitcoin Bitcoin or ether, and it accumulates money. And then when it reaches a certain level, it commissions its it commissions an artist to make its own babies. So and and those who tip it, I don't know whether this has moved from theory to practice yet, but the idea is that those who tip it get to have a say in the governance model of the next baby. Like, will it be a charity plant? Will it or to determine its movements within the world or how it's going to behave? So it's this idea that you can by tipping it, you can decide what it's what the next version of it will be. So I think there are something like 20 different plantoids in the world now. And then the and then the last one was Terra Zero, and this was a self owning forest. So this kind of tapped into whole other ideas about, self sovereign self sovereignty in nature and this strange relationship between nature and technology, and technology is, both as an oppressor and an enabler of life and living systems.
Yeah. So it's sort of like, yeah, experimentations in collaborative economy, a lot of a lot of you sound like. Yeah.
But certainly for me, and I think it's the same for a lot of people. I think people, like so I've been trying to get my head around this for a really long time now, and the thing I realized really early is that I just didn't understand what money was. And I didn't understand what money was. I didn't understand what finance was beyond a kind of bean counting, like, domestic LADA model. And I'm starting to understand more about it by thinking through blockchain, and you start to understand more about it as a social medium and more about it, like yeah. Just more about what it is as a medium. Yeah. And I think it's really interesting that artists like TerraZiro and Orkhaos and Rob Myers are actually they are they're basically putting images and form on new economic models through their work that then make them easier to talk about for other people who aren't economic theorists or economists,
maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully. Hey, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto leftist community on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you wanna be sure that more content like this can be created, you can donate to my Patreon at patreon.com/theboxingsocialist starting at just $3 per month, where you'll get access to Patreon exclusive q and a episodes where you can submit questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this interview to help spread the message that blockchain does not need to be used to further change capital exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. But that's enough for me. Let's get back to the interview with Ruth Catlow. What what do you think it is about the art industry that makes it particularly open to experimentation with blockchain. So I think what we've seen I mean, generally, right now sort of the the different pushes or, like, fads, I don't wanna say so strongly fads in in the blockchain world, you have DAOs and you do have, these NFTs, non fungible tokens, but these are sort of represented through through art that people can buy. Like, what do you think it is about the art industry in general that it is so open to experiment with blockchain as opposed to I mean, it's not like we have, you know, banks are not using blockchain, you know, a 100% of the time. Like, some people would have supposed that, you know, immediately banks would co opt blockchain and or, you know, some variation of that of that theme. Like, why do you think art is so open to this type of experimentation?
Well, it's funny you should say that because it isn't my experience that art is that open to blockchain. Oh, okay. Well, certainly not certainly not my art world hasn't been that open to blockchain. There's been, like, really a lot of legitimate, often, suspicion. But there are other parts of the art world, the part that there there are new art worlds growing that have really flowed into this space. I I I think it's, I'm this might be dangerous. I think there are there are two very different drivers into this space, into the blockchain field. Make no. There's three different drivers. So there's there's a whole kind of frenzy around now the NFTs. So I think that this is, people looking to so the rhetoric around it is that they're looking to escape control by galleries, to make their own markets, to, yeah, to it's it's generally this idea of escaping the control of the gatekeepers. I think it's a kind of totally legitimate drive, actually, because the art the the high art markets and worlds are incredibly controlled, very opaque. And there's there's there's really not a lot of freedom in those spaces. It's pretty revolting. And so in the NFT decentralized markets, there's there's a lot of excitement, especially around high price like, work going for really high prices. I on one hand, I'm really excited by the level of experimentation and, like, people working together in this space. I'm not that excited by a lot of the work that I see happen. Like, it doesn't excite me as art because I think it's often quite kind of flattened out, and often it it the subject ends up being about the price or it ends up but yeah. So it really ends up being about price and the behavior of price, but not in a terribly critical way, often just in a kind of winner or loser kind of way. The imagery is I I yeah. The imagery is often kind of pretty it hasn't it's really disconnected from art history. It's disconnected from a whole load of kind of conceptual art kind of conceptual art stuff, which is interesting, often completely disconnected from any ideas of social or political critique. Yeah. So there's that. And then there's this I I see the work that we're doing happening in up until quite recently, there hasn't been a lot of work going on in this in the DAO space, in this space of organization and critic kind of critical governance and finance. But there's now, like, a real flowering of work happening. Like, there's just a really great paper. I I printed it out, so I would remember remember to say it called, by Maria Paola Fernandez, Stina Gustafsson, and Beth McCarthy, called it came out of, I think it's East Berlin, but it's called Wanderer Above the Sea of FUD, Cultural Workforce, Crypto Anarchism, Intellectual Rights, and Blockchain Based Funding Models for Culture and Arts. And this, like, this was so exciting for me to read because it's theorized it's theorizing the blockchain art world through the lens of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's theorizing a real idea of an art world that needs to be created by, with, and for more diverse people. It's looking at projects like The Sphere, Foundation, where actually quite interesting, critical, and conceptually rigorous work is happening. So that's this is and this is this is new, I think.
There is sort of like the I think, like, at the moment, is what I've seen, there's quite a bit of art sort of, like, fetishizing a bit like Ethereum or like, you know, very nice cool pictures with like the Ethereum logo or like a bull versus a bear or something like it. Like very, They're crypto memes. Yeah. Yes. A lot of variations of the crypto memes, is sort of what's going on a lot, but then there is still this existing space that is, like, wanting to critique further,
at the very least. I mean, I was at the infamous, ethereal summit auction of the crypto the the CryptoKitty that was auctioned in 2018 for I think it was a $140,000 worth of ETH. And I had a kind of, like, had a really strong realization at that moment that what was happening was so CryptoKitty is like, it's like a crypto brand. So people are buying an artwork that is a crypto brand, and by buying it, you're buying you're buying a souvenir of your own your own passage into our art history. You know, like, you you you're you're you're buying this thing. You make this thing a souvenir of art history by buying it for this price. And I think there's something there's some really odd and interesting thing going on there, but it's definitely, like, the all as far as I can see, the works that they're getting these high prices like, Ethboy was the one that I noticed recently on Async that, again, went for, like, really high prices, and it's, in in the style of, one of Picasso's harlequin paintings, and it's a picture of metallic. And it's kind of the, you know, it's it's just a weirdly it's just this weird cludge of, like, something to stand in for art, something to stand in for, the Ethereum meme and Right.
It's like they rolled a dice, an art related dice and an Ethereum related dice and just try to mix those together. And I don't wanna hate on the artists who did it because, like, I'm sure that they're
that they have, like, they're doing things for their own reasons. I'm not I'm not doubting that. But I would guess that the price it's getting is because of the topic that it's kind of addressing. Oh, yeah. I mean yeah. But but then there's also like, Async's a really interesting platform because they're enabling they're enabling more nuanced use of NFTs by making these things programmable and and kind of, programming in a relationship between collaborators in an image and then tying them into a different kind of relationship with collectors. So the fact that you can now control the kind of relationship that artists have with collectors and with each other within the actual artwork, I think that's really interesting. Mhmm. It's just that it's the culture surrounding it is just feels a bit trashy to me.
Yeah. When I was going through a lot of the work, the blockchain related work specifically, being done by Firth Field, a lot of it sort of reminded me of the late Mark Fisher's work because he was an artist himself. He was he was a DJ, I believe, a musician. So he had written a lot about art in the music world specifically and, you know, he also had his political writings like Capitalist Realism and his other books. But it seems to me that Further Field is sort of actively trying to fight against capitalist realism in a in its own way and trying to imagine some sort of alternative through art. So I I was just wondering was is Mark Fisher sort of one of the one of the influences in, in Further Field, or has he influenced, you?
Yeah. I mean, I know that we have he's on our bookshelves and certainly capitalist realism, so it kind of starts off with the classic Jameson Zizek quote of it's harder to imagine.
It's easier to imagine the end of the world, than rather than the end of capitalism. Yeah.
And, I think yeah. I so I I always had had this kind of feeling about Mark Fisher's writing that there's something kind of wistful about it. And it's a lot about people's feelings about representation and about being trapped in capitalism. And I think that so certainly, a lot of the his reflections and musings on that have that they'll be circulating in our communities. Our approach is, like, really active, though. So we are, like, yes. We are really not going to be defeated. Now we might be deluded, but there's a kind of instinctive punk playful spirit, which is just we aren't we're not gonna be trapped in the kind of realms of representation. We're gonna take the stuff, and we're gonna mess with it and try and make it work for us and try and make the us be as many different people as possible. Yeah. So to to to kind of make like, if capitalism's what we've got, we want to change what that reality is. And I guess I mean, a project that we've been working on for the last year, which has really influenced it's actually put quite a lot of different ways of thinking about this into our work with the blockchain, even though it isn't one of our blockchain projects, is the Hologram project, which is basically a feminist economic, peer to peer health care system. And it's an artwork by Cathy Thornton. And, basically, what this what kind of feminist economics brings to the table is a refusal to make life be about money or make economy be only about money, but to make economy be about both life and care. And so I don't know what I'm trying to say in relation to Mark Fisher. I feel like he's, that, like, his work is sitting in a slightly different dimension. We we're we're adjacent, but but there's a definitely a more a kind of a spirit of, maybe a more playful and punk spirit in just how we relate to the infrastructures.
Yeah. Of course. You know, it's it's it's known that that he he suffered from from depression and and these different, mental health issues. So I think yeah. When when I was reading the book, I was just sort of like like the problem is that we don't really have these type of institutions that form the type of structure, the collaborative structures that that we want to see in the world. And, you know, I think at least what what Furtherfield is doing is sort of experimenting with those alternative structures and maybe something that, at least for me, I think it opens the imaginary in in, I think, a way that Mark Fisher sort of pined for in in a lot of his writing. Yeah. The the feeling of pining
is really strong, and I can't, I have a strong sympathy for it, and and, like, I really recognize it and I appreciate its presence, but I don't tolerate it well in myself. So that pining converts to a need for action quite quickly.
Yeah. I think I think that's a healthy way of, of going about it. Well, I don't I do question sometimes that because, you know,
it's possible to do everything wrong very fast. And, you know, that that might also be what's happening. Who knows? But an an idea that's been an idea and a kind of approach to practice that's been really important to us over the years is has kind of come from commons theory and commons practice. So some of my I think some of my favorite projects at the moment are pro projects like, the disco coop guys who are pulling together practices from the commons, from platform cooperativism, from feminist economics. And what's important about their work is that they put culture before structure, cultures and cultures of care, before the technologies. And this this has always been really important to us at Furtherfield that the cultures are what is leading the process so that you're always being shaped by the kinds of lives that people want to lead rather than having the what the technologies can do determine the kind of thing that the kind of life that you lead.
Yeah. It's it's def it's a a reversal of that sort of, relationship with technology in which technology is sort of a bit imposed, in which the behave which then sort of nudges the behavior of society towards the goals that it that it wants to reach rather than, you know, basically creation of technology for socially, useful things or things that are that are wanted by society rather than having to, yeah, make sure that it fits within being profitable.
Yeah. And it's that reversal. Actually, this is where we have the this is where our approach to art and technology intersect. It's like, we want the art that we want rather than the art that we are told we should have. We want to work and play with people who are shaping what the art worlds will be rather than being told what the best art world is for us by people who don't have our best interests at heart, basically, and who are looking to extract profit or whatever it is that they're trying to take from it. Yeah. So it's this this kind of idea that we we create the infrastructures and and, tools that we need to live the kinds of lives that we want to live. And it works for both tech and art that
It's it's it's an approach that I think people aren't actually used to having as well, which which is what makes it a bit strange, like, how how to produce this type of process is different than, like, Uber implementing a new feature in in their app where it's sort of, like, tested, amongst, users of their platform and, like, modified to make sure that they're still making a x percent profit out of that that change in in in features. That it's abstracting only the socially useful good parts than, than than trying to make it, economically profitable, and that's a very different process and requires, I think, a more engaged audience.
Yeah. And and this again is why I think something like the disco co op are so great. They they produce, publications. Like, so they produced the disco manifesto last year. This year, they just put out disco the disco elements. And each time they put something out, they're actually showing a growing number of people who are using their tools and their ideas to make new ways of working together. So they produce demonstrators, but they're also really fun to read. It really showed they give you ways that you can make your own kind of, kind of workers' cooperative and find a way to keep these things all joined up. I think I I can't remember what the stats were, but I know that one of the drivers for them is that, like, there's actually masses of, workers' cooperatives. Like, it's quite a large percentage of the world's business is done through cooperatives, but they're not coordinated. So then, like, somehow we're missing out on the the kind of the power of the solidarity that we might form if we could start to coordinate together more and start to be just, like, more conscious of the kinds of freedoms that we might start to grow for ourselves if we work if we if we're kind of, yeah, just more conscious about the kind of structures that we're working within and that we're building. And they make it fun, and they make it accessible, and they're involving quite a lot of different people in it. And this, for me, is a really good model. And they they they kind of so they're looking at things like DAO structures and, some of the blockchain based stuff, but they're not really in a hurry to instantiate the software. They're waiting for the they're waiting for the software to be good enough to serve their needs, but still being influenced by different ways of thinking about things that come from those development spaces.
Yeah. I'm I'm hoping to have him on, sometime soon. So it's I'd love to talk to them in more detail about how they're going about that. Be happy to your point about developing that solidarity between or creating or recognizing, I guess, these structures to to make solidarity across cooperatives around a particular region, or geographic area. I mean, I think it's really interesting because, like, giant corporations have solidarity with each other, and they're quite successful with that like, through that solidarity, they're able to pass so many different types of legislation, to their benefits, you know, across the, centralized, you know, tech, ecosystem. And it's a shame when, you know, cooperatives or, like, smaller, ESOPs, they they could also recognize the class interest really that they have with each other and able to express that power, using, I mean, just the the the added benefits of of the Internet, which, you know, makes communication easy across a large geographical area. Like, you could really pose a, an alternative or begin to.
Yeah. And that's what I think those guys are doing, and that's very exciting. That's very exciting to us. So
to me, it's something that I've been thinking about for a while, like, how to conceptualize what digital art is because in the traditional art space of paintings and sculptures, you know, there's, like, this whole process of forensics in order to understand what is the value of a painting and, you know, you someone will investigate and say, oh, this paint is, you know, from the 15 hundreds and therefore it's worth, you know, x amount of money because this was probably Michelangelo who did it or something. That sort of that that layer of, like, knowing that this art is real or or that it was made by someone important, like, the the process of investigation, whether it's real or not, I feel like kind of is what makes is kind of part of the art space or, like, the fine art, space a bit. But in the digital art world, you don't really have that so much. You can't really, like, study or investigate, in the same way as you would, like, investigate a painting. Do you see they're becoming almost like a a digital forensics type of happening with, like, blockchain art, or do you imagine it's something different?
I mean, funnily enough, I think one of the very earliest movers into the blockchain art intersection was a company called Ascribe. I don't know if you remember them, but so they then they they kind of took this leap. They then became something else and then became Ocean Protocol. And, I don't know quite where they're at now. I'm not sure Ocean Protocol still exists. Ascribe was what it was before. It was Ocean, and their offer was that you could register art you could register a digital you could register a digital image, video, or sound file, I think, on their chain, and that they would like, their tool was a digital forensics tool that would know if anyone had taken it and even changed a single pixel in it. That the basically, they would hash the file and any change to it would be kind of, like, would be made clear. So I think that, I as far as I understand it, I might I might be getting this all wrong, but as far as I understand it, that it's it's basically just removed a whole layer of, like, we don't I don't think we need digital forensics because of blockchain. Yeah. So, and you're right. That's a really important layer in the kind of auction house model of the art world, the whole thing of provenance and authenticity.
It's yeah. It's it's it's like the the forensics department, I don't know what to call, sort of made their own platform so that they don't have to do any work. But in in a sense, also removes them from the from the process. It is the blockchain is like the forensics tool that you use, I guess. So is there a criticism to be made that because blockchain has largely been used as, as an infrastructure for speculative assets, combined with the history of art also being a vehicle for storing one's wealth and for, you know, different types of speculation, money laundering, you know, things like that. It could be that doesn't this just turn out the same thing but over a digital space? Or do you think there's something markedly different about art on the blockchain versus art on a canvas?
So if I just took the last piece, I would say no. There's no difference. It doesn't really matter. Art is art. Matter where it happens. But all the stuff before that, yeah, I'm sure that you running the blockchain socialist blog will have encountered all the same, kind of
criticisms that I have. Oh, of course. That's why I want to hear I want to hear someone else try to answer it. So,
I think, like, if we're scared of that as a reality, what we should do is exit exit the blockchain field and leave it to the people who are interested in finance and speculation. That's how we get that art world being the art world in the in the blockchain, so the only way we stop that happening is by getting into the middle of it with very different cultures, building our financial literacy. I do I do think that there's something really interesting about the shift from digital art on the Internet to digital art on the blockchain, which is basically a shift from a world in which we can imagine infinite abundance. You know? Like, I can make a kajillion versions of this digital image, and it costs me nothing more than to make one, which is probably quite a dangerous mentality to have at the moment. Like, I I think there is something about at least approaching ideas of, like, accountability are quite that are suggested through Gotchain as a medium that are worth thinking about. But so I think the things that we can work with that are interesting are the fact that we can have a record of our exchanges and think about what that means more consciously rather than having those things happen in the background done by other people. Like so the whole kind of, surveillance capitalism problem. What the blockchain does is it just makes it really explicit. Instead of imagining that we're just kind of living like Skippy happy land lands in, in these kind of social in in social utilities, that we we're having these free exchanges without harm. What the blockchain does is say these are being tracked. There is a record. There is an economy, and I think that's actually quite useful. It's basically saying there is an we need to be thinking about the economy of the exchanges that we partake in. Yeah. I think that's quite useful, and maybe that is something that is kind of uniquely thrown up by this is a new technology. I think that, like so I'm really not at all utopian. I think there are so many horrible things that can happen with misapplications of blockchain technology also and so many things that shouldn't be on a blockchain. But I think having more artists, more critical thinkers I'm I'm constantly terrified at how few left leaning thinkers there are in the middle of this space. I think it's changing. But, like, I think we're really in trouble if I am a rarity. We need more intellectuals, more critical thinkers, more developers from a left from the left perspective working in this space to ensure that we do what we were talking about before, which is shape the technology and the ecology to suit the needs of more people, basically, rather than just having yet another really powerful space be shaped in the interest of financiers.
Yeah. Absolutely. It's at least the way that I sort of think about it is similar to the Internet and all these new types of spaces that that we engage each other with. They're also sort of terrains of political struggle or political exchange in which, you know, you you share different ideas and try to get people to come onto your side. And blockchain is just one of them. It's going to my bet is that it's going to only become more and more prevalent, and it's better to be there than to just sort of leave it at the
leave it with the hands of the people that you dislike the most. I mean, us leaving it won't stop the people who we dislike the most doing really awful things with it. So Yeah. Just have to stick here, I think. Yeah.
Yeah. We're Get in the way. We'll both be here. At least we have asked us to. But, yeah, thanks a lot for for taking the time, to speak with me. I know you're very busy and you're working on a lot of different things with Furtherfield, especially around, around blockchain. But before we go, maybe you can tell us, where people can keep up with your work and keep up with you and the goings on of of further fields. Yeah.
You can find us I we currently have a series of sessions running called the DAO sessions. These are Art World DAO prototypes that are being built in five different cities around the world at the moment that are looking at exactly these questions. I'm, like, really excited by the work that's happening there and the conversations that are happening around them. So you can find those at dawo.org. So that's daowo.org. Further field, we have a we have, the site is still a little bit beholding place, but very soon, there will be access to information about a lot of the works that we're pieces of work that we're doing. And further field, so that's our kind of mothership. You can find information about culture stake there. So this is a cultural voting on the blockchain tool that we're just about to start experiments with, in relation to our gallery in Finsbury Park, and you'll find that at Firtha Field as well. Nice. Yeah. There is some very interesting stuff. If people
start looking into it, they'll go down a rabbit hole. I know because I did. But, yeah, thanks a lot for for taking the time again and for all the work that you're doing. And thank you for all your work. It's
been a real pleasure to meet you and I'm really pleased that you exist.