On a blockchain and under her black wings

I put some art on the blockchain. There’s been a tiny seed that was planted deep as the blackest night or Glenn Danzig’s soul inside of me a while ago. That seed was finding out what this whole Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT, formerly known as blockchain) is good for. Further, what is is good for with creating and putting stuff out there on and in the Internet.

There it’s mine, all mine. Like Golem I can hoard this, but now digitally and you don’t have to worry about me jumping on your back above a molten pit of lava because you’re trying to get it. This is the interesting thing though with this whole blockchain/decentralisation/data world that I’ve found myself living inside of for the past two years, and that the best uses of it, namely property, provenance and asset management have been glossed, while the world was blinded by the sheen of get rich schemes and volatile digital currency prices. Everyone seems to have forgotten that a distributed ledger is mainly a good way to verify things and one of the things we should be using it for a lot is for art. By art I mean also the non-visual and moving kind as well.

Actually digital in origin and function

Part of the hesitance to put any artwork or illustration, I’m not sure what to call these things, recently has been the idea of outright theft and at the very least lack of attribution. I’m not exaclty innocent with these sorts of things, but I make every endeavour to give credit where credit is due. I’ve also been waiting, and I’m not sure for what, but this is just the first step maybe. The second step is likely something along the lines of what Async Art is doing, where you can own and sell programmable art. Not only that, you can sell and buy parts, or layers, of that art.

Now imagine one of these goofy illustrations of mine that did things. Imagine it did things like I was told that art was supposed to in the early 2000’s when the Internet was full of hope, bright eyed in the morning, ready to create and make people smile and punch the sky. Imagine parts of this moving, maybe animating, I’m not sure, or changing tone or colour. Imagine it, well, sort of lived digitally, but that it was still a store of value or an asset like an oil painting you buy at some art fair in some posh little village because your girlfriend talks you into it. This is what art can be really. It can be new and exciting but most of all it can be fair. The artist can still own, and thus sell and be able to make a living somehow off of their art and the Internet without giving it away free to be paid in requests to do more work for free and being paid in Exposure.