Proof-of-concept prototype for a Decentralized Artist Archive and Cultural Value Exchange Cooperative
We are prototyping the TRANSFER Data Trust as a non-profit cooperative trust, with automated organizational governance models, to be established as a Data DAO.
A decade of experimental artistic studio practice has been developed and exhibited at TRANSFER gallery, in over 80 global exhibitions, featuring the work of 65 international artists, resulting in hundreds of time-based media artworks. Many have been acquired in the first edition by museums and public institutions. The value we have built together represents a significant set of assets, with demonstrated financial and historical value, which are at risk of loss. In addition, through the past 10 years of programming TRANSFER has prototyped different solidarity models for artists to create equity and reverse the extractive power dynamics of the contemporary art market.
In the first phase of this project, we intend to establish the model for the trust, based on 10 years of collaboration, and onboard the assets of core TRANSFER artists. These founding artists will be active participants in the development of data structures, workflows and best practices, along with test participants for interface refinement and hardware and software deployment. At the end of this phase a decentralized storage network will be in place with founding nodes, During this prototyping phase, the data trust equity model, participation and governance will be fully designed in collaboration with the founding artists. Results of this phase will include visualizations of the network, hybrid virtual/in-person events, exhibitions, documentation and case studies, publication about the trust and our model. Estimated total users: 15 Founding Members.
In the second phase of this project, we will incorporate the cooperative trust with commited artworks, establish the equity through a liquidity pool, and publish a set of interfaces, documentation, case studies and resources for a larger number of participants to opt-into the cultural value exchange protocol. The outcomes of this phase of the project will be a number of interfaces for preservation and transactions: everything a studio needs to prepare works, store them, produce catalogs and offer works for sale, loan or screening. The second phase will result in an open source HTML/JS based application layer backed by FVM with additional L1 integrations that runs in the browser that anyone can deploy, a truly decentralized interface for participating in the value exchange network.
At the end of a sucsesful second phase, hundreds of artworks will be stored in a preservation grade format and backed by FVM. Artists will have agency over their inventory, and preventative conservation will be completed that ensures the value of their artwork for their lifetimes (and beyond). The TRANSFER Data Trust will hold a set of assets representing over 5M of potential revenue, 10% of which will be committed back to maintaining the trust.
With a successful prototype, the concept will open up to our partner organizations. Funding proposals will support deployment of new Data Trusts on this model, aiming to grow the pool of participating artists in collaboration with partner organizations, representing a critical mass of contemporary artists managing their assets with decentralized conservation methods. With scale, the contemporary art industry will be incentivized to participate, and the most optimistic outcome is a shift in the power dynamic giving more agency and equity to the studios that maintain their data on this model.
Getting this right will demonstrate how FVM can be leveraged to deploy a Data DAO for conservation of Contemporary Art, and will provide a toolkit, to implement a critical mass user base with large volume data needs. If scaled, it can also bring forth a monumental shift in the artist’s relationship to the equity in their work, similar to the historic The Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement of the 1970s from Seth Siegelaub, and lawyer Robert Projansky. A more contemporary source of inspiration is art.coop which has informed the solidarity models prototyped by TRANSFER through the pandemic.
Given an unsuccessful outcome, artists will continue to struggle to maintain their historic media artworks. Hundreds of artworks will remain at the risk of loss. The artworld’s imagination for decentralized technology will remain limited to NFTs and extractive approaches to creating cultural legacy. Risks for a successful outcome include complexity of the infrastructure, mis-estimation of the resources needed for producing scalable outcomes, tech industry instability and catastrophic climate change.
The TRANSFER Archive was first prototyped in 2017 with a github commit of a front-end concept, hand coded on material design framework and developed in collaboration with our artists. The goal was to reverse the extractive power dynamics of the contemproary art gallery, in favor of artist rights and transparency with relationships, the currency of the artworld. The prototypes were tested with 6 studios, and findings were recorded.
These learnings led to an experiment in 2018 to establish a decentralized museum collection called The Current Museum (http://thecurrent.art). In that phase, a decentralized storage network was prototyped and deployed using IPFS, and a museum collection was founded by a community of people. A real-world care network formed around the data it was collecting and stewarding, and we invented new behaviors for decentralized data stewardship that were piloted with over 200 members. Three rounds of acquisitions and a year of programming generated learnings that helped refined the needs, behaviors and approach.
During the pandemic, TRANSFER iterated on the ideas of solidarity economoics with 'Pieces of Me' (http://piecesofme.online) turning the focus to how artists can regain their agency in the boom of crypto. At the front lines of this cultural shift, artist's rights were being commoditized and stripped away in real time. This exhibition sought to re-distribute 30% of every sale to all exhibiting artists, recognizing one peer's sucess can boost an entire scene. We also experimented with soverign hosting of metadata files to create a truly decentralized exhibition with left.gallery, and upgraded NFT contracts to consider the complexity of a media artwork from a conservator's point of view, not just a single, immutable file, but a complex package of data that requires love and care.
In the next iteration, the TRANSFER Data Trust aims to establish a non-profit trust to hold and redistribute the equity we have been building together for a decade. Once the proof of concept is established and running, we aim to onboard a broader community of practice into the cultural infrastructure and ideologies through partnerships with historic artist-focused organizations.