Unchained - How OG Crypto Artist Rhea Myers Sold a Never-Seen Artwork at Sotheby's - Ep.274

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Rhea Myers, artist, hacker, writer, and senior smart contract developer at Dapper Labs, has been making crypto art before NFTs were a thing. Check out this episode to learn about Rhea’s work as an OG crypto artist, why she believes concerns over NFT energy consumption are overblown, and how NFTs are changing the art world. Show highlights Rhea’s experience entering the crypto space what inspired her to make Bitcoin-based transaction art what blockchain art she was creating in 2014 how she helped Coin Artist create crypto puzzles what Rhea thinks about Cadence, the programming language for Flow what conceptual art and blockchain art have in common how Rhea minted her soul on a Dogecoin fork how Rhea came up with the idea of Secret Artwork (Content), which was recently sold at a Sotheby’s auction what cryptographic elements influenced Secret Artwork (Content) why Rhea was wrong about how the NFT industry would evolve why Rhea believes concerns over NFT energy usage are overblown how NFTs are changing the art world  what Rhea thinks about the NFT DAO movement what about NFTs make them so fascinating, in a legal sense, to Rhea   Read the sidebar — and see Rhea's artwork! If you'd like to see the art discussed in the show, be sure to check out the sidebar I wrote on Medium:  https://medium.com/@laurashin/how-rhea-myers-made-blockchain-art-before-nfts-were-a-thing-e6ac52d3abf9   Thank you to our sponsors! Ledger: ​https://www.ledger.com/start-your-crypto-journey/?utm_source=Unchained&utm_medium=Partnership_Podcast&utm_campaign=14-09-Ledger-US-Brand-Paid&utm_content=subj_Global__msg_brand_convenience__targ_Crypto Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021  Digital Asset Research: https://www.digitalassetresearch.com/      Episode Links   Rhea Myers Twitter: https://twitter.com/rheaplex Website: https://rhea.art/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertmyers/ Example Art Secret Artwork (Content) https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/natively-digital-a-curated-nft-sale-2/secret-artwork-content  MYSOUL https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/nft-joke-1234588596/  Is Art https://rhea.art/is-art  Proof Of Existence 2, 2014, Bitcoin Transaction https://rhea.art/proof-of-existence  Art examples https://rhea.art/art   Other Artists Rethinking the Blockchain (book) https://torquetorque.net/publications/artists-rethinking-the-blockchain/  Generative art (featuring Rhea Myers) https://medium.com/@mitchellfchan/nfts-generative-art-and-sol-lewitt-e99a5fa2b0cb  Blockade games + crypto puzzles ​​https://blockade.games/press/index.html https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.4528357/this-painting-is-actually-a-bitcoin-puzzle-worth-more-than-40k-and-someone-finally-solved-it-1.4529176  Unchained Episode: What Exactly Do You Get When You Buy an NFT? Three Lawyers Discuss https://unchainedpodcast.com/what-exactly-do-you-get-when-you-buy-an-nft-three-lawyers-discuss/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, all, before we begin, two quick announcements. First, if you having it fill out the Unchained Survey, please give us your thoughts on how Unchained is doing and what it could do better. Tulagi Survey Respondents will receive a BTC candle, which is scented with Satoshi Wood, Musk, Musk, Tulip bulbs, and Finite Minerals. Head to SurveyMonkey.com slash R slash Unchained 2021 to fill out the survey today. Again, that's SurveyMonkey.com slash R slash Unchained 2021. Second, as I mentioned earlier, I am now writing a blog,

on Medium. This week I have a little post on my interview with today's guest. And that's because she's an artist. And so what better way to compliment the show than to showcase some of her art? Head to medium.com slash at Laura Shin to check out the post and to see the art that we discuss in today's fascinating interview. Again, the URL is medium.com slash at Laura Shin and be sure to follow me there. And now on to the show. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started having crypto six years ago and is the senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time.

This is the September 21st, 2021 episode of Unchained. Looking for crypto market data that meets institutional standards, digital asset research, delivers curated and vetted crypto market data, get crypto pricing and verified volume data, crypto asset reference data, and token and blockchain event tracking. Learn more at digital asset research.com. Ledger is the secure gateway to buy, exchange, and grow your crypto. No need to use different platforms to manage and secure your crypto. You have one place for all your crypto needs.

Visit ledger.com and make your crypto journey easier and safer. The crypto.com app lets you buy, earn, and spend crypto all in one place. Earn up to 8.5% interest on your Bitcoin and 14% interest on your stablecoins. Paid weekly. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 with the code Laura. The link is in the description. Today's guest is Ria Myers, artist, hacker, and writer, and senior smart contract developer at Dapper Labs. Welcome, Ria.

So listeners of the episode with People Pleaser will remember that it originally featured two guests, but one guest's audio and video files were lost in the ether. And that person was Rhea, and I'm so glad to have her back now because Ria is a true OG crypto artist who was making blockchain-based art even before NFTs really existed, which is kind of hard to do as far as I can tell. So anyway, so Brea, why don't you get started by telling us what it is that used to do before crypto, how you got into it, and how you got into crypto art and NFTs, and also a little bit about what you do now?

Sure. So I went to art school a very long time ago, and I did digital art. And I just sort of, I decided that sort of rather than have a struggling career as an artist with most of my time spent making the money to support my art, I would have a struggling career in software development and take the money from that and use it to make art. So I sort of worked in industry. I kept making art, not least because making art is how I learn about things, it's how I understand the world, and I sort of just kept making sort of different kinds of art using computers.

There's a famous essay about techno-utopianism called The Californian Ideology by Richard Brabock and Andy Cameron. And I joked that I sort of took that as a manifesto. It's not. It's a critique. But I've sort of accidentally ended up tracking each development in technology and what goes with it and making art out of it. So I have sort of generative art bots on Tumblr.

that are still cranking out several drawings a day. I did some experiments with AI, like everyone else, a couple of years ago, and decided that it probably wasn't going to be a major direction for me, which is a shame because I've been looking forward to doing something like that since I was a kid. And then when I sort of moved to Canada eight years ago, because I met a nice Canadian and she married me and imported me, I was unable to work for a few months because we were sorting out my permanent residency and I was just staying here as a guest and I was walking around Vancouver a lot

looking at the sort of changing city skyline and going to a little crypto meetups because that was a new thing nobody really knew each other there so as a new arrival I was just sort of one of the many new people at this thing and I got to see sort of you know the fire in people's eyes as they talked about this world-changing technology. And I got to see something else in sort of some people around the edge of the room's eyes as they sort of saw this way to make exciting new businesses and maybe extract some money from the other people. And I was struck by this because I'd seen this before.

I'd seen this in the internet scene and the net art scene in the UK in the 90s. And so I sort of dug into it and I learned about the technology. and as I say, the way I learn and understand things is through making art. So I started making art about it. I crafted some Bitcoin transactions as art. That's something you can do if you're an artist. You just get to do something and declare it art, which is very useful to be able to do because if it goes wrong,

you get to say, hey, it's part of the artwork, this is great, which is just as well because I forgot about change transactions during my first Bitcoin transaction and sent all of the money that I didn't. send to the transaction I made to a miner. So some minor somewhere got a load of Bitcoin from me. So that was a good learning experience and a good art experience. So, yeah, I started with Bitcoin transactions, moved on to Doge Party,

which is the long-forgotten fork of the counterparty system, which works on top of Dogecoin rather than Bitcoin. And then when Ethereum was starting to be proposed, as a thing. I was just, I was just ready for it. I'd sort of done some work on other systems. I'd really dug into the ideas around it. I was enjoying playing with the limitations of the systems, and I saw Ethereum. It was like, my original pitch to myself was it's Bitcoin with loops. You can do all the cody stuff, you can do on Bitcoin, but you can sort of add more logic to it and then sort of do interesting things with that. So, yeah, I, 2014, I was making,

Doge party tokens, counterparty tokens, sending Bitcoin transactions, starting to look at how Ethereum could be used for art making, and not just for artworks, but for sort of commissioning art, for critiquing art, for exhibiting art. And around that time, or possibly just slightly before, coin artist from Blockade Games sort of popped up, like, you know, the character in a secret agent movie who comes along and says, hey, I've got a mission for you, would you like to do this?

And sort of she was doing these amazing, what's at the time called, alternate reality games, although they're now cryptopuzzled trails. And I'd seen the first one she'd done and not really understood it, but then realized there was something there and worked very hard and understanding it. And, yeah, I helped Marguerite out on sort of the actual cryptographic. element of some of the puzzle trails. She'd say, you know, I want to do this. Can we do this? I know these algorithms. Is there anything slightly different? And that sort of culminated in the painting she made called Torch Tarps, which is one of the doves and the flames and the chessboard

and all the flames around the edge. And, yeah, we came up with what we thought was a slightly more difficult puzzle for that than the ones that we had been doing pretty. previously because people had cracked those very quickly because a community had sprang up around them. And so we thought, let's give them a bit more of a challenge. We came up with, I think it was a six-bit encoding for the flames. I handed Marguerite, this written, what, you know, codes generated list, a sort of tall flame, orange, red outline curved left and that kind of thing. And she painted 160th flames with perfect accuracy at the feet that I'm still in all.

of. And we released it, the community descended upon it, and then nothing really moves forward for about two years. So the $2,000 worth of Bitcoin that Marguerite had put in the Bitcoin wallet that the flames represented the private key of went up in value during this time to, I think, about $40,000 US dollars by the time someone solved it, which left me being very nervous about having the private key on my laptop when I was getting to meet up. I had to sort of move that off. But yeah, that was sort of where things really, really took hold on my imagination. And I just sort of kept working through the, I guess, the project, the program I came up with when I first looked at Ethereum.

And as a result of that, I've been working on Ethereum since before the initial release. I've been working on since the TestNet. And so when Marguerite was doing a games company, I eventually said yes to joining up and working on the smart contracts for that. That was blockade games and that was brilliant. And then after doing that, after the first round of smart contract development was done, I moved to Dapper Labs in Vancouver. It was my first time working for a Canadian company in Canada. and they're lovely. They make these little things,

although I should be very clear, so I'm not here to represent the company. I'm here in the personal capacity. And when I'm there, I work on the cadence programming language, which is a really awesome smart program, a smart contract programming language. And it's sort of like Flows version of solidity?

Yeah, it's sort of, it is to flow as solidity as to Ethereum. It's a very, very different kind of programming language. which read deliberately so. I certainly first encountered Dapper Labs as the people who broke the Ethereum blockchain by causing so many transactions by people buying and breeding crypto-kitties

at the Ethereum Network just couldn't cope with the strain. So Dapper took their experience from that and sort of created flow to be more scalable for that kind of scenario and to make it more scalable and more robust. took everything that they'd learned from using Solidity and made cadence with that. I was quite sad to be stopping working on Solidity full-time because I felt that it was just about getting to the point

where it was nicely robust for the things I wanted to do and I wasn't having to sort of check what had changed or which bugs had been fixed on each version. And yet, now here I'm working on cadence. But yeah, it's a really, really, programming language in my personal opinion. And in my professional opinion, it's, it's perfect for flow. So yeah, you can't. One thing I will say is that I had some of my real life friends who are not into crypto, read my book. And hilariously, one of them,

even though CryptoKitties is not like a major plot point, it's definitely mentioned, obviously, because, you know, it's a huge event in Ethereum's history. But even though it doesn't super in depth into that when I asked her her thoughts in the book. One of the things she just had to say was like, oh my God, that CryptoKitties thing. Like, I think that's so crazy. Like, why were people? And she just like didn't get it. Even now, she still doesn't understand FD's. But anyway, so I actually want to go back to some of the Bitcoin art. Like, so what did you have to do? Like, what were those art pieces? I'm so curious. So there are various different traditions of art in what I will short-hand as Western or international art. Art historians can

sort of take me out and rough me up later for phrasing it in these terms. I'm just short-handed this. So one of the art movements that really interests me is from the 1960s and 70s in America, Europe and elsewhere. And that's conceptual art. And conceptual art was a reaction to a very specific set of historical circumstances in the art world at that time. You had the first generation of artists who had been professionally trained in anything resembling a sort of art degree type art school setting. You had the sort of absolutely iron grip of Greenbergian modernist art criticism. For those of you who don't know, there's this sort of one art critic who had amazing power

over the imagination of what people thought art could do, even if he didn't have the sort of actual power to make and break artists so much at that point. I think his first name was, was it Saul Greenberg? Oh, no, sorry, it's Clement Greenberg. Clement, great, that's right. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. It's an interesting name. You know, there was this entrenched system of art exhibition, of art review, of art promotion,

which if you're an upcoming young artist, firstly didn't have access to. And secondly, it just looked sort of really boring and sort of not very much to do with the art. So various different artists decided they weren't going to have anything to do with that. And they just sort of, they didn't know what to do instead of it.

So they just carried on. And over time, sort of the conversations became the art or different mathematical propositions became the art. or sort of, you know, proposing to do things that they couldn't actually afford to do because they weren't part of the gallery system, became the art. And this was sort of very interesting because whilst artists were always sort of proposed artworks or sketched out artworks or something, there's always been this sort of final stage of a patron or the market saying, okay, I will give you the cash to do this.

And conceptual art just short-circuited that it took that out of the loop, artists could sort of do the thing and the art world didn't say, no, you can't do that, and you're going to give you money for it. Now, the art world and capitalism in general likes nothing so much as something that it can't buy. So very quickly conceptual art became

recuperated by the art world and you will now find very, very, very stylish enormous great big text installations in galleries and sort of very carefully preserved little bits of computer print out from 1967 which are now worth tens of thousands

of dollars, whereas at the time the artist making it, basically parodying, you know, what people were doing with art at the time. But for me, the interesting thing was this encounter between art and commerce, this encounter between art and network technology at that time. People were sort of, you know, using cheap jets, travels, get around. They were using long-distance phone calls. They were using video systems, teletypes, the old text printing network. and the way artists made use both of the possibilities and limitations there

just struck me as a very useful precedent for how I thought blockchain art could go. So this was useful for me because I could say to the art world imagined audience that I was addressing, it's okay, you know this, it isn't a weird new technology that you should immediately hate and be scared of, it's fertile territory for making conceptual art, it's good resources. for including in conceptual art type works. And the other precedent, which I mentioned earlier, was the net art of the 90s and 2000s,

which in a very similar scenario to conceptual art, you had artists who were either embedded in universities, which had internet access to a higher degree than the rest of society, particularly in Europe, or you had people who were working as web designers or on e-commerce projects and who had access, not just to the technology, but too amazing, though it may seem to anyone doing web design now, the capital and free time to sort of be a web designer half the month and an artist, the other half the month.

And net artists were very much sort of going into or onto network spaces and sort of critiquing them. Not in a, oh, this is a terrible sort of way, but in a let's look around, let's see what's going on, let's think about this, let's reflect on it, and see what's going on here rather than just simply being swept along by it. And sort of calling this art rather than political intervention or anything else, as I said, allows you to get away with things that you couldn't otherwise. It's sort of people will take you less seriously, which allows you to do things which they will then think about more seriously. It's sort of a really useful effect. So with the Bitcoin transaction, I was learning how to construct Bitcoin transactions.

I was bringing in this history of conceptual art and of net art. And I was just sort of trying to demonstrate to myself and to others that there was something here for art. And so I started out with a self-portrait. Because if you take people around gallery who are not sort of totally, totally brainwashed by the art world, then they're generally very interested in recognisable imagery like portraits, and that's perfectly cool. And so, yeah, I put a portrait of myself on the blockchain,

which is actually the cryptographic hash of my 23 and me genome. So I can absolutely prove that someone with the same genetics as me has existed since some time in early 2014. So it's a sort of proof of existence kind of thing. And if you're familiar with the idea of proof of existence from that time, you can see we're already playing with the concepts and probably getting away with it. Sorry. Yeah. And by the way, so when I was doing research for this show, I just kept texting my assistant and like laughing because like this one, by the way, for people who don't know this piece of art is called My Soul. And so I was just like laughing and it's on Dogecoin or or what was it? Well, you put on Dogecoin and. Bitcoin or counterparty or I forget what the...

So my soul is actually a later one. So this is like a pure Bitcoin transaction with the Hashmogun. My soul, it was in philosophical terms, it's a bare assertion. So there were some of my favorite legacy artists, Petro Dollar Art World, some of my favorite Fiat art world artists were a couple of Soviet expats called Comar and Melamid, I can't remember their first name, sorry guys, who were working in the US in the 80s and 90s, and they were very into sort of parodying democratic pretension so that they would commission like phone survey companies at the time who would call people up,

say, what do you like in art? And they'd get 100 people to say, they'd then paint that, invite the people to the show, and they'd be horrified that they've got nothing that they actually wanted. So another thing that they did was they would buy artists' souls. So they'd give the artists like a hundred bucks, getting to sign a thing, signing over their soul to them. I think they managed to get Andy Warhol's soul at one point. So I thought, well, I can do better than that. I can cryptographically secure this, and I can fractionalize it, and this would be worth much more. So I originally issued a hundred tokens of it on the Doge Party system, which is a fork of the counterparty system on Bitcoin, but on Dogecoin, that sort of didn't really go

anywhere as a platform. So, you know, so much for the blockchain as a permanent record, the data is there, but until someone resurrects that system, hopefully as an art project, it's not going to be very easily accessible. So I moved that to counterparty and sort of, you know, people looks at it with benign amusement and confusion. And it wasn't until a couple of years later. You'll notice a trend here. Things sort of go out into the world and it takes a few years for people to really, really, really, really get through them. Yeah, a couple of years later, people started saying, hey, can I buy part of your soul? And I said, sure, let me just look into it. And I was talking to my wife about this and she was not unreasonably, terribly offended by the idea of anyone other than herself owning my soul.

So I'm actually not allowed to, I'm not allowed to sell these tokens. So they're just sitting there and sort of people have said, you know, can you make a proxy token for this? We'll buy that instead. No, it's still, you know, too much of my soul for the love of my life to be comfortable with me giving away. And I think you can understand that. And everyone does understand that when I say it. So that's good. That's, I find that hilarious because it is true that, um,

I think I texted him like, oh, I'd love to buy one of these. So good to know in advance that, you know, off limits. All right. Well, why don't we talk about one other one of your pieces, which is the one that you auctioned off at Sotheby's earlier this year. Tell us about that artwork. And I love the title. It's called Secret Artwork and then in parentheses content.

And so tell us about that artwork And then also what it was like to have your work auctioned off at set upies. Yes. Yeah, you can tell it's very serious modern art. If it has something in parentheses in it, if you put untitled in the parentheses, that, you know, that's it. I still go home.

Anyway, so, yeah, I mentioned earlier conceptual art. One of my favorite conceptual arts, not artists, but groups of artists. There's a very grumpy Marxist outfit called art and language who were formed in London, not London, sorry, in England and America in the 60s and sort of whittled down to sort of a couple of core members who were still going. And one of their early pieces was engaging with the certificates of authenticity that people make to say, no, you know, this small crumpled piece of paper with some gravy state

on it is actually an artwork by me. So these kinds of certificates were very big at the time. Guarantees on artworks, you know, that I guarantee that this is actually an artwork by me were very closely related. And so Art and Language sort of took this, ran with it, and made a perfectly black painting with a little certificate by it saying

that the content of this artwork is secret and known only to the artist. And, you know, sort of this is great fun, it's a fun concept, it's novel, and it sort of pokes gentle fun at the structures that had grown up to make this often deliberately unownable art, very, very, very, very ownable and syllable and exhibitable. So the reason I dug into this particular part of my toolbox was a nice curator and other kind of activity person called Sam Hart was curating a show in the old San Francisco

and Mint. And it was on, and they had a co-curator who I will go to hell for getting the name of. Sorry about that. But anyway, Sam was my contact, so sorry about that. And they were curating a show and they said, would you like to, it's on the theme of secrets. Would you like to do something? So I thought, oh, yeah, I'm looking at said Kay Snarks at the moment. do something with that, that'd be fun.

I looked at the code libraries and the explains what I said co-snarks at the time. And my reaction was, I'm an art student. I can't understand any of this. I don't know what's going on here. This is less spooky moon math and more math from another dimension where things just work differently. And the sort of the tool kits were there, but very rough and ready at the time. So I had to go back to Sam and say, oh yeah, I'm not going to be able to do this like

that, let's just do what we always do and do a cryptographic hash and do something with that. So rather than a nice blank canvas with a certificate next to it, I sort of came up with something that would be interesting to go in an artwork, created the cryptographic hash of the text of that, saved the original text somewhere in a bank vault or a cave in the top of a mountain or somewhere that people will not be able to access, having learned the lesson about not keeping things on my laptop. I personally genuinely cannot remember what it was now, but I can access it if I'm ever taken to court to prove that I did have an idea.

So, yeah, we took the cryptographic hash of that, that's secure until someone breaks Shar-256, and then that's sort of placed on the blockchain with the token as some data associated with it. And then there's a nice web front end, so like it's a DAP. The front end tells you absolutely everything it can about the token. It just scrolls it up the screen, like watching a block explore, showing new transactions coming in. So it tells you when the contract was created, the address of the contract.

It tells you the transaction that created the token, the number of the token, the cryptographic hash contained in the token. the transaction that creates the token, the block that created the token, the time of it, it tells you all of these are relevant details. It tells you them in written text. It tells you numbers, in shapes, in colours, in musical notes as one of my favourites. And you need to make sure. Emoji, yes, you have to make sure that you've got a good solid Unicode font installed on your device that's showing it. So it tells you absolutely everything in every way it can.

as this grand distraction from the one thing you want to know, which is the thing promised in its title, which is the actual content of this notional artwork. And for me, this is a nice, I'm going to use the word allegory in an artistic context, which will get me taken to art jail, but it's a nice parallel, I guess. It's a nice parallel to the experience of public key cryptography.

You have these two guarantees with public key cryptography. You have one of absolute secrecy, No one will be able to guess what has been encrypted with your public key. And you have this other guarantee of absolute identity. Nobody else can forge a signature that you have made with your private key. So you have this interplay of knowing absolutely everything about someone via their cryptographic key, via their public key cryptography system. And yes, at the same time, there's just something hiding behind it.

And sort of as I went on with this project, you know, that really became for me very much what it was about. Because I make art when it doesn't leave me alone, sort of the idea comes to me and I can't get rid of it. And after a while ago, I'm going to make you. I'm not going to think about you too much. I'll work out what you are about afterwards. And to be clear, I'm just sat there with a lightning bolt hitting me. I would be sort of reading lots and lots of crypto theory and looking at lots of. and lots of art, and my subconscious will be churning away in the background.

And so, yeah, this one came to be very much about the sort of dialectic between absolute identity and absolute secrecy and public key cryptography. And sort of, you know, it's as with much of the art that I've made about cryptoson, it's a nice way into thinking about those ideas. If you are unfamiliar with public key cryptography, and we're certainly not born, naturally knowing how RSA or ECC works. this experience of being able to provably see everything about something but not quite knowing what's behind it

is a useful way to start thinking about those ideas and it looks fun whether you project it or show it on the screen in the gallery it's got some movement in it which is always good for drawing the eye so I made this for the show it was exhibited in the show it was projected on the lovely solid metal walls of the vault of the old San Francisco Mint, which was absolutely delightful for a crypto artwork. And as is a common thread in these stories,

I then forgot about it for a couple of years until the Sutherby's auction was being organised, and we were talking about, you know, what I had, which was sort of both very early on and could be easily sold, because a lot of my early work I very, very deliberately made unsaleable due to sort of art world hangovers about man. being bad, and also to sort of critique the currency basis for blockchain and sort of obviously

cryptocurrency. So we went back and sort of tried to work out whether we could resurrect any of the Doge party pieces other than myself and whether sort of we'd have to try and sort of cross-chain transfer them to Ethereum or something because, you know, Ethereum was very much all they wanted the work to be. I couldn't transfer it to flow for various reasons. And so the work that sort of came up as the one, which was sort of the inception of early and saleable on the Ethereum blockchain was secret artwork. And the experience of selling was absolutely amazing. So without wishing to sound like someone's an awards show, the money was nice. I'm not going to lie. I sort of, you know, I had a tax bill to pay from last year,

and then the money will help with that. But the thing that was absolutely amazing was talking to people who had read artists rethinking the blockchain, the book that Furtherfield did that I had some essays in, who had, you know, looked at art and sort of got, you know, they'd sort of got what some of the early crypto artists, blockchain artists were doing. and sort of having the Fiat art world institutional power of something like Sotheby's going,

oh yes, there is something of interest to this work. Let us write it up in the way, which is understandable by the auction-going art world public. It was absolutely amazing. Like, you know, it's sort of very sad to be yet another art world rebel who has gone, hey you can't buy my work it's on this blockchain thing that you don't understand or you use to oh the validation from this hundreds of years

old institution is absolutely wonderful oh wow like you know I totally know that I am sort of I guess selling out there but I'm deeply relaxed with selling out so that's fine but yeah so you know the the institutional attention the art historical attention

they gave to it was amazing and then the sale went up and sort of everyone else's work went up to millions and millions of dollars and mine was hovering around, I think about $6,000 the night before the sale finished and I was really happy because I'd set up a little display which is refreshing and showing the price of my work to sort of make sure that number go up and it was like $6,000 or something And it was great. This is more than I've ever sold my artwork for before. I'm so happy. I woke up and looked at the screen and I thought, oh no, it's gone down because I hadn't realized there was an extra zero at the end.

So it's gone up from like, it's gone up tenfold overnight. And like that was just amazing. I was really, you know, sort of going from not just being the hypocrite about, hey, I don't need art world's validation to, oh, I'm so grateful for this validation to. making this resolutely non-commercial work. I don't need your money to. Hey, I've sold this for lots of money. That's amazing. So, yeah, it was just... And the thing that, to get back to my awards show speech, the critical attention that it got,

that that got me was amazing. Because having been not quite shouting into the void for... How long was it since 2014? seen like artistry thinking the blockchain was published in 2017. I thought, oh, this is great. You know, it's a book about blockchain art. There'll be dozens of these in two years' time, and this will be a fun historical time capsule.

There's still, to my knowledge, no other phrasing this delicately, sort of art-worldy books on blockchain. There are plenty of guides to making your own NFTs, and then I'm not talking about those, but sort of actual factual sitting artwork people down and saying, hey, what's this blockchain thing or sitting now crypto artists down and saying, hey, what's this art world thing?

Doesn't seem to have taken off in the way that, you know, I was hoping it would. So sort of people seeing Sotheby's auction and looking at, you know, the write-up and then looking at my work and sort of talking to people has been amazing because I wanted to create this dialogue between the crypto world and the art world because they're sort of, they're very mutually suspicious

the sort of anarcho-capitalist massive on the crypto side and the sort of socialist acetes on the art world side have fairly different worldviews to put it mildly, but I do feel that there's useful knowledge and work and value that can be bought from each side. And that's what I was trying to do from the start and seeing sort of very, very serious curators. And art theorists sort of notice that there is something here and start getting engaged with it.

As soon as we explain to them that it's not all about $70 million image sales that there's, you know, things slightly further down the long tail that they should probably pay attention to. That's been amazing to start having those conversations. Yeah. So I want to discuss a little bit more about kind of, you know, what the NFT art world looks like and your perception of where it's going. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. With over 10 million users, crypto.com is the easiest place to buy and sell over 90 cryptocurrencies. Download the crypto.com app now and get $25 with the code Laura.

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that tracks token and blockchain events like hard forks, soft forks, and client and application updates. Crypto data from digital asset research is available through refinative or directly at digital asset research.com. Back to my conversation with Ria. So you kind of said before the ad break something, I forget the exact phrasing, but just something about how you felt like the NFT art world, I think. think was maybe going in a different direction from what you originally expected. I can't remember how you phrased it.

So what did you mean by that? And what do you make of what we've seen so far? So I absolutely love NFTs. I think they're great. I think that artists being paid for art is a very good thing. And I have very little time for the frankly moral panic that we've seen from people who are determined not to think about NFTs. sort of the energy usage gotcha that came up earlier in the year

it was sort of based on terrible math, terrible attribution of terrible math and terrible thinking through of who benefits and who loses in this debate. The party political broadcast ends here, sorry about that. So the thing that's interested me about the way the art world on-chain has gone compared to what I was sketching out in 2014, I sort of viewed contracts as the obvious unit of production for arcs. I was thinking of net art.

I was thinking of generative art, which has taken off recently, and the old train is great. And I was thinking, you know, this is brilliant. We can write these little programs that are smart contracts. We can make it so that they can manage their own exhibition and get exhibition fees for that. And, you know, this will be great. And it didn't turn out like that.

And I've thought a lot about sort of not so much where I went wrong, but where I went different. And it was that sort of inherited art world disdain for sort of artists directly having anything to do with money, which is a very interesting social and moral phenomenon that we don't need to dig into here. But whenever you encounter people getting upset that artists are making money, do just pause for a moment and think, hang on, who else are you upset gets paid for their work? what's that all about. But anyway, so, yeah, I thought, hey, this is great. People will make smart contracts and there'll be, like, self-exhibiting and then self-agreeing to be included in books,

and they'll manage their own reproduction rights and that kind of thing. And this was very much because I was trying to avoid commodification of things as money, I'm trying to avoid financialization for Artwell's ideological reasons. And this meant that when I was doing a book launch for artistry thinking the blockchain at the Hacker Space DeControl here in Vancouver, the people on before me were from this little startup called Axioms then talking about their CryptoCutis project, which everyone was very interested in, but that I only knew had sort of, you know, congested the blockchain.

So I was totally on a different path at the time where NFTs were becoming a formalized thing. It took me ages to get my head around the punks. It took me ages to get my head around counterparty originally. And Cynthia Gaiton and Skriller on the old art on the blockchain podcast were instrumental in me getting my head around that. So, yeah, I was sort of looking in the wrong direction for ideological reasons. NFTs came in. People started making really interesting things from out of the gate. I'd love evolutionary art.

I'm a big William Latham fan, who's this artist who did sort of swirly, nautilus shapes and computer graphics that were evolved, artificially evolved forms at the time when you needed a room full of equipment to do that. And the kitties having little genomes on chain, I absolutely loved. I didn't love everyone leaving after the kitties team talk

when I was meant to be talking about my book, but some of the teams stayed and they were great. So, yeah, I was looking the wrong way. People did interesting things with NFTs. I did start using NFTs where it made sense for a project. And then over time, you know, I just noticed the prices going up at the start of the year. We had the B-PAL sale. And everyone suddenly didn't know what NFTs were, didn't know what blockchain was,

but they knew they didn't like it. And for me, the difficult thing about this was I'd noticed that lots of young, sort of marginalised people who I followed on Twitter were suddenly getting their first art sales. And they were getting money, which they wouldn't otherwise have, which was going on education, on rent, on food, on medical expenses, on medication. So there was a good here, there was good being done here. And we can view this as like a tiny fraction of the $70 million NFT purchases, but there was still a wider new entirely NFT art world native community here, which was benefiting financially from the fruits of their labour in a way which they otherwise wouldn't and in ways which were genuinely making their lives better.

And sort of for those of you listening who aren't really into making people's lives better, they're also helping the economy moves. So whichever angle you're coming from, this was a good thing. And if I tried to mention this, it's like, oh, you know, they're human shields. If I tried to mention that the energy usage of Bitcoin is interesting, but not a lot to do with Ethereum and certainly nothing to do with proof of stake-based blockchains. people just genuinely didn't want to hear it. It was like telling them that they're in their fairies at the bottom of the garden.

It's just like totally mental shutdown. Just out of curiosity, when you say, because Ethereum does use proof of work, are you saying that because they use GPUs rather than A6? So, oh, yeah, sorry, so I live on the planet Earth. I'm a big fan of Planet Earth. Ironic provocations, I post to Twitter, notwithstanding. I think the earth continuing and my kids being able to live on it is probably on balance a good thing. Bitcoin's energy usage is massive.

A lot of it comes from waste energy, from centrally planned energy production, which would otherwise be created but not use. Some of it comes from renewables. Some of it comes from sort of waste hydrocarbons. So even within Bitcoin mining, the picture is more complex. the argument that it's energy that could go to other things is kind of refuted by the fact that it doesn't. And the idea that it's wasted energy is refuted by the fact that it's being used to secure Bitcoin, which is a use. But also that, you know, this is not energy that has been created X-Night-Hillow to do Bitcoin.

And if we sort of bombed to the capital of Bitcoin, it would stop using all this energy. That's just not how it works. However, it does use a lot of energy, and it being more efficient would be and will be a good thing. Ethereum uses a lot less energy to do the same thing. NFTs by artists use a tiny fraction of that energy, and if they stopped doing that, it would still run. There's obviously an echo of the wider environmental crisis here, in that if I stop driving my gas-cushling car, then so what, everyone would be. need to, and that's a distraction from, you know, shipping container ships and the U.S. military anyway. But, yeah, you know, I'm aware that it's possible to make this kind of excuse for needed systemic change.

But then Ethereum is going to proof of stake anyway. And there are existing proof of stake systems flow, which you may have heard of. It's an excellent proof of stake system. And some of the other popular chains at Artists are now on our proof of stake systems. And I've encountered people who simply refuse to believe that proof of stake uses less energy. It becomes an article of faith. So, yeah, to unpack that, sort of, I look at this and I see a sort of, yes, alarming, but decreasing over time and to decrease more in the future use of energy. And so I'm sort of less worried about that and more worried about paying artists and developers and sort of everyone.

else who is doing interesting things in this area in the meantime. But yeah, sort of watching the NFT art world emerge, watching the platforms emerge, watching artists sort of explore different aesthetics in there, watching different controversies emerge, has been absolutely amazing. It's sort of, I was late to the net art scene. I wasn't really in that because I was sort of busy with a young family and everything. But, you know, getting to watch this sort of new art world blossom from first principles has been absolutely amazing. And I absolutely love NFT art.

And sort of as someone who has written very thorough sort of critical art theory around the idea of using blockchain to make art around the idea of tokenization, there is something here. There is something art historically, art critically here. It's very interesting to look at. And, yeah, I just sort of, not uncritically, obviously, but quite separate from any other concerns. I'm just loving seeing what people are doing and getting paid for for the first time and getting critical interest for for the first time and the communities that are emerging. So I think it's great. Yeah, I was going to ask you because I don't know if you saw the MEP museum director basically kind of said he didn't really see anything that was worth.

the Met doing with NFTs? So that's weird because he should probably look in their collection in that case. But so I think that's standard, that like no disrespect to the Met. I don't know that particular person. So this is a general comment rather than any kind of this. But yeah, that will get column inches. That will get headlines. That's a perfectly reasonable thing for some.

someone from a long-running art world institution to say, it's completely wrong. It's completely completely wrong. We see some very interesting things happening in NFT land. Tell me how it is that you think NFTs are changing art. I'd be so interested to hear that. Totally, totally. Sorry, yes. Yes. NFTs are reinvigorating existing genres. Portraiture, which I mentioned earlier, there's some very interesting portrait work going on in NFTs. I know that they are portraits. And by that, you're talking about like profile pics, like pengues and royal board apes.

Yeah, so PFPs are interesting. Coldies, 3D things are really interesting. Coin artists early paint, just paintings, which are tokenized of Vitalik and people. and artists like Josie who are doing sort of different, you know, pictures of people. And it's sort of the fact that you can get attention and revenue from doing this

and that you can play with it sort of technically and aesthetically means that there's this genre which, you know, if you say to the average art critic, hey, there's a show of portraiture, they will roll their eyes at you. And just regard it's the most outdated thing possible. We're seeing here the start of experimentation with, you know, the genre as outdated as portraiture in a new and interesting way.

We are seeing imagery and kinds of art that otherwise are pretty much by definition unsaleable. I mentioned generative art earlier, which is sort of art created by little computer programs. You can download the source code for most generative art programs from GitHub. Now the artists can, you know, create things with that and sort of, get paid for that and that gives them more time to work on it and more critical attention for it. Yeah, just sort of people talking about different experiences in art. I've seen sort of African artists tokenize their art, get revenue for that, get critical attention, transgender artists, many, many different kinds of experience, you know, are blossoming in this new NFT art world.

and even if we accept for a moment that there is nothing of interest there today for artwork institutions, which I find absolutely incredible and would sort of raise both eyebrows out, the momentum that this technology has given to people means that there is work being done that wouldn't be otherwise, and it's going in directions that it wouldn't otherwise, and there will be something here. It's like the impressionist jumped on steam trains and the results are still hanging in museums sort of 150 years later.

So, yeah, I think they are giving new audiences with new capital, new access to new art, and within that, it's enabling experimentation. I remember back in the 1980s reading one of William Gibson, the cyberpunk authors, early books, and one of the characters in it works in the gallery in Europe, selling art that is too expensive for anyone to own the whole of, so that they're just spending their day buying and shelling shares of art to deal.

So this is fractionalized art. And yes, this is something that you can do with existing financials, systems, but blockchain technology just makes art fractionalization incredibly easy. It makes collaboration to sort of collect and curate and sell work. Again, people can already do this, but it makes it fantastically easy to set up a DAO, start buying crypto artwork, start sort of exhibiting it on different virtual and real platforms, and to create a new context for the art. And it sort of, it meshes nicely with new currents in art,

which are technologically based, like AI art, like digital illustration art, like I already mentioned, generative art. And it gives them, it gives them sort of a re-anchor, a reality anchor in people's minds. It's like, you know, why should I pay you for this thing that you've spent your life learning how to make when I can just press a button and 20 come out. It's like, well, I can establish the provenance of this one,

the I, the person who has spent my life learning how to make this, have attached to this NFT, you can't press a button and make 20 of those. So, yeah, it's sort of, yeah, it's a world of possibility. And people are making good on that possibility, even sort of beyond the platforms that are making sure that people get paid for their art or make art fractionalizable or, you know, so that you can set your artwork today or night and make it configurable in interesting ways. And let's also talk about DAWS because I think those are intersecting with NFTs in an

interesting way. There's been some curation DAWS. Obviously, when we did the People Pleaser conversation, she talked about the pleaser doubt, which has sprang up spontaneously. So what are, what's your take on what's happening with DAOs and how do you feel like that's changing art curation or how will it change our curation? So I think DAWS are great. I, I've followed them since the People's Republic of Doug on the Ethereum test now, which is a very early attempt of a doubt. I know about that. Yeah, back when they were still called decentralized autonomous corporations.

I haven't read the books that everyone else has read that have sort of proto-dows in them, so I had to come to them fresh. And sort of like everyone, I watched the Dow hack on Ethereum chain with horrified fascination. It was like a very slow motion, very low-tech version of the hack at the end of Neuromancer, whilst I'm mentioning William Gibson novels, I knew it would take down some years to recover from that and it has taken down some years to recover from that. We've had some very good experiments in the meantime,

not to single out any projects because I shouldn't, but there have been various sort of art commissioning ones, which have been great. And the toolkits have built up. And I mentioned earlier that you can get away with more with art. And sort of art isn't, you know, food supplies to part a country, it isn't national security, it isn't people's medication. So if you get it wrong with something dealing in art, you will lose people money, you will harm people's reputations,

people will be sad, but it's not as life or death with apology to all of my artist friends, as other systems that you can see blockchain technology being applied to. So yeah, Art DAWs are an obvious way of doing things. I like artist groups. I mentioned art in language earlier. And I was desperate to see people use the blockchain for stuff other than immediate production of art. So, yeah, the emergence of collection, curation dows like pleaserdale,

like Fingerprintsdale that bought some of my work, which is an interesting experience. I'm obviously implicated in some of this so take anything I say about it with a pinch of salt but I'm excited by this this is precisely what

blockchain technology should do it takes sort of human organization, human coordination and sort of makes it as easy to organize and allocate capital to projects as, like the metaphor I think I used before, was if you imagine it's the difference between having to set up

like a movable type press from the Renaissance and sort of put every letter that you're going to print into a thing and then squeeze something there. It's sort of that compared to the Apache Web Server where you can spin up a Linux instance on a cloud server somewhere, spin up a web server, write some code to configure it, and you've got something published in, you know, 10 minutes, with global reach, with the ability to add all sorts of things to it.

And, yeah, sort of Dow's do this for corporations, for charitable trusts, for partnerships, for LLCs, for all kinds of organisation you can think of. And I've been watching the legal side of this very, very closely. Prima Veria di Philippi and the co-author did a good book called Blockchain them for the law, which talks about this a bit, and the Koala Project, which I know she's a big player in, just published their Dow model law, which I am not a lawyer, and this is a purely personal capacity, but I think that's great. I recognised a law of the problems they were trying to tackle, and I thought they did it in a massively creative way, so I do think that

sort of even if it's not enshrined in law in every jurisdiction, every jurisdiction around the world. I think it's worth Dales looking at that to have a think through how Fiat law may come knocking for them if they are not careful. But yeah,

the ability of individuals to sort of get together, pull their resources, sort of move democratically towards a shared common goal. I think that's brilliant. I was very interested in like blockchain co-ops early on and I think,

you know, whilst obviously getting venture capital, into curation. Dow's isn't exactly like a co-op. The affordances there can be used for that kind of thing. Yeah, it's funny you bring up Prima Vera DeFilippi. She actually ran some workshops that I attended. I think it was in the first year that I started covering this. So like all the way back in 2015, if I remember correctly.

So I'll have to check that book out. So just out of curiosity, and this is the last question, but where do you think the NFT space will go, you know, in the next year? So, and by that I mean even, you know, we can talk about Dow's or what you were talking about this, you know, with the law or even, because I feel like we've talked a lot about visual arts. So even if you have thoughts on other types of, you know, creators, that would also be interesting to hear. So I'm My deep dive has been in visual arts I sort of I love the Holly Plus

Dow because I'm a big fan of sort of vocaloid style music I like Hatsunamiku and I'm a big fan So I don't know this now Holly Plus is It's Holly Hudson from the In Depends podcast so yeah She's sort of created an AI version of her voice and licences through the Dow, and I think that's a really interesting way of getting ahead of the use of that kind of technology

to quote steal people's voice. But beyond that, I've got my nose to the two-dimensional plane of art, and I can't really go much further than that. I'm very excited to see sort of, with apologies to all my free culture friends, I'm very excited to see sort of major IPs really leaping on to the blockchain. Obviously, sort of working at DAPA, sort of we've got Top Shot and we've got other ones that are publicly known to be coming up and some of those are ones I personally love. And it's sort of just, you know, the ability to get that connection

to a brand because I'm not a big no logo fan, unfortunately. I think brands can be fun. That's good. At the other, that's completely the other extreme, as I said, seeing more and more people bringing in a few points that are simply excluded by mass media and finding an audience in a place for that. Using NFTs, I want to see that take off and continue.

And so that people to be surprised by the art, like and what it means and sort of whose lunch they are paying for. And then I think sort of there are now so many NFTs out there, people are going to find more things to do even with ones that aren't game tokens. Like there have been various attempts at getting people sort of bring their tokens together and use them for game type things. We did one of those when I was blockade, and that was great fun. But I think, you know, sort of people using punks and other portrait-style images as their PFPs

is the first step towards sort of people getting more functionality, more value, more use from NFTs in ways that probably weren't originally intended for them. And we're going to see, you know, systems and projects and companies springing up to say, hey, you know, you should do more with your NFTs. Here are some fun things you can do. And as someone who is hashtag not a lawyer, but sort of greatly enjoys reading law with the knowledge that there is no worse interpreter

of legal texts than a software developer, I've been very interested to see the NFT art world slowly rediscover copyright and how this works in art and how artists think of this versus how the mass media thinks of this. Because artistic, technological and legal ideas of originality and copying are very different. And NFTs combined all three of these, which means there are very interesting tensions emerging. We had the art theft panic a couple of years ago, sort of the various punks, loans with people trying interesting legal theories to justify.

And so the whole question of, you know, what do you get when you buy an NFT? It's certainly not the copyright, which I know, surprise is many people who buy them. But what is it? And I'd be interested to see, hopefully not case law, because I don't want anyone getting sued over this, but more clarity coming through over, you know, what does it mean to buy and sell an NFT, what rights do you get? How does this interface with genuine fair use and sort of appropriation and remix art in a way that we don't recreate the losses that what I personally view as cultural freedom has experienced over the last few decades as you've needed more and more

and more permission to get around more and more and more legal and technological impediments to sort of just depict the visual environment that you find yourself in. So, yeah, sort of I want the NFT art world to continue growing, to continue bringing up, sort of bringing new people and new voices into it, to sort of realize some of the surplus value all of these NFTs have, and to, if not, get its legal house in order, and to be clear, I'm perfectly happy with the terms of service. I've signed on the different platforms.

on and that kind of thing. But, you know, to sort of get some clarity for everyone so that we avoid any kind of big lawsuits over NFT art, and we can just all get on sort of producing art, selling art, buying art, and creatively transforming art to within the limits of this shared consensus hallucination of sort of legal and artistic reality. Yeah. And if people are interested in the legal issues. I did do an episode with Tanya Evans, Stuart Levy, and Ulta and Doni on all of this and it was super, super, super fascinating. So I will put that in the show

notes for people because, yeah, lots of misconceptions around that. All right, Ria, this was so fun and exciting and interesting. I just love learning about your work. So where can people learn more about you and your art? Yeah, I have a website. at rhea.art, that's r-h-e-a-a-a-art. If you go to ria dot-art slash newsletter, I'm starting up a good odd-fashioned email newsletter so that people don't miss out on things that are happening with my art, because to my surprise, delight, there are lots of things happening with it at the moment. And I'm on Twitter as

Rea-P-E-A-P-L-E-X, and they do respond to questions as long as they're nice. Yes, good policy. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Yeah, thank you. It's been brilliant. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Ria, check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony You, Daniel Nuss, and Mark Wardock. Thanks for listening.