Aesthetic Commodities through a Collective Filter

Surveying relationships between cryptoart and performance art and introducing a data performance that involves creators and collectors as awkward product recommendations

This post has two parts.

The first explores the intersection of cryptoart and performance art, arguing that despite their differences, there are intriguing overlaps between them.

I then use this positioning to justify and explain the existence of a new little project: “Collective Filter.” It is a data-driven recommender system, showcasing how data patterns expose the social and commodity relationships within the cryptoart ecosystem. I frame it as a kind of data performance. I explain this curious framing at length and motivate it through the work of others.

1. Dimensions of Cryptoart Performance

One extension to the cryptoart concept, less recognized I’d argue, is its potential relationship to performance art. Performance is a broad concept. Some have argued that all art is ultimately some sort of performance art. In his book Musicking, Christopher Small proclaims that “all art is action — performance art, if you like — and its meaning lies not in created objects but in the acts of creating, displaying and perceiving.”

From C. Small’s “Musicking” (1998) here

The phrase “performance art” typically denotes a particular tradition that has emerged in more stationed taxonomies of expression. In Jonah Westerman’s Tate 2016 feature entitled “Dimensions of Performance,” Westerman argues that performance resists easy medium-based definitions. He describes how performance challenges traditional norms of artistic mediums and categorization: “…performance is not (and never was) a medium … but rather a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world.”

Westerman discusses Beuys’s Information Action (1972); collaboration + estrangement

Consider some of these elements in Westerman’s amazing essay. He highlights a synergy between collaboration and estrangement. Viewers can be compelled to participate, to make the performance work, but they must also be apart from the performance; they can be looking in while being in. The POAP might be a kind of rudimentary illustration of this tension. We connect and participate with an event, but are mere members of a flock, a subjection. Collaboration is central to several cryptoart projects, including those that change and respond to that viewer participation. In a recent project, cryptoartist miragenesi had collectors contribute elements to a single evolving piece by the act of owning it together: “ONE.”

miragenesi’s ONE: unity of collectors through ownership

Westerman also highlights a dimension of representation and reality: “reality and representation not as opposites but as co-determining concepts.” Cryptoart has related traits at its core, the boundary between digital and physical reality, where a representational encoding in mathematics allows participants to transport properties of the physical world (like ownership) and project them into a new digital reality.

This dimension is expressed in cryptoart, and there are many specific examples. Cryptoart has bridged this digital representation and physical reality in performances that involve technologically-augmented organics, human intelligence models, programming into reality, celestial events on-chain, on-chain social monitoring and more. These often involve a visual modality — the ever-present “JPG” — but they have the dimensions of performance at their conceptual core.

SHL0MS illustrates operating at the boundary between cryptoart and performance art.

So the “cryptoart” concept is itself a loose one, resistant to simplistic definitions akin to Westerman’s argument. Jason Bailey (Artnome) offers a wonderful discussion more than half a decade ago about this. He identified some common features of cryptoart and cryptoartists such as self-referentiality, permissionlessness, digital nativity and more. His take was flexible, tentative, schematic. A big-tent definition frames cryptoart as anything that criticizes or celebrates or makes use of this new technology, perhaps expressing interesting relations through it (even if it is not “about crypto”).

Artnome’s classic criteria for cryptoart

Bailey’s article sketches a definition that is similar to Westerman’s position on performance — cryptoart cannot be crisply defined, it has various loose features, it is not subject to particular media or expressions other than bearing some kind of relationship to “crypto” through expression, conception, subject, use, dankness.

Despite these potential relationships between cryptoart and performance art — that there already is performance cryptoart — sharp differences between these traditions are evident. Another dimension considered by Westerman is ephemerality, the experiential in-the-moment qualities of much performance art¹. Cryptoart often embraces a certain kind of anti-ephemerality. In much cryptoart, minting is a critical act that defies ephemerality. Minting is to associate artist and collector strictly, a stable stationary abstract mathematical mapping that exceeds the moment. And perhaps even more prominently, ephemerality is deliberately provoked in the on-chain cryptoart project. The mint, ownership, financialization, the frequent focus on the hallowed “JPG” and more may represent some departure from Westerman’s dimensions.

Simon de la Rouviere kindly offered feedback on this post. In that feedback, he shared an intriguing reflection on performance at the very core of cryptoart. I share his remarks verbatim,

Besides the more dynamic examples, cryptoart (even the images hosted in servers), in general requires ongoing leaps of faith. It’s because the visual representation isn’t the actual work. It’s both the work and the actual token. Because of this duality, the visual representations are performances or holograms of its more cryptographic state. In a sense, right-click-save feels a part of that performance art even when detractors see it as dunking on it. By right clicking and saving you are participating in the medium.

Abosch, “A Vendre,” at LeMoCA’s Cryptoart Revolution in 2021 (sources: 1, 2)

2. “Collective Filter”

Lately, I’ve become tempted to operate outside these constraints despite their correlation with cryptoart. I became further inspired in this direction by the experiential qualities of on-chain destruction and recovery, fiddling on another artist’s ideas by expanding them into new tools, and by grafting a computational experience on top of someone else’s mint.

I am obsessed with data and patterns that emerge from the raw mappings of data. My work emanates from data. It’s at the heart of crypto — in crypto, data relate in curious yet unavoidable ways. It’s a public resource, crisp and precise and indexes much. I created Collective Filter as a kind of data performance. Collective Filter is an interface that uses data. It is unremarkable in many ways. It’s a recommender. It has familiar buttons. Elegant CSS animations. And more. But it has some unfamiliar features, ones that are experienced.

Collective Filter required a bit of work. I used 100,000 transactions and cross-ownership on 1,000 projects to build a recommender. Art in data connected by ownership becomes data product. A machine-learning model. The filter forces its users, creators and collectors alike, to feel these relations. And they cannot control them. This is true IRL, too. When you create something, and let it go, there’s substantial loss of creative control. We now find ourselves in a decentralized digital reality. I can detect, measure others who own what you’ve created or collected. Collective Filter provokes a reconception. You are content, data, latent advertising whether you like it or not. Your projects created or collected have meaning inevitably funneled through that reality. The data it generates cannot be avoided in the awkward, error-prone or inconvenient relationships measurable from it.

Collective Filter is not made to seem like an obviously bad Amazon simulacrum. I could have put “for sale” stickers on it. I could make it seem like a scattered, chaotic commentary on the dizzying effects of automated crypto FOMO financialization. I considered this. It felt forced.

My goal was to make it be real. From data. Its own little thing. And to make it, to the extent I can, useful even. The more I can do this, the more you are a commodity projected into a jangle of monetized products related by their prior ownership in data and rendered so as to recommend you to others, and recommend others to you. “Related products.” “Products others have purchased after viewing this one.” Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t.

There is some precedent for this in performance art — expression by various recombinations of seemingly authentic technicals. One strikingly related to Collective Filter and cryptoart itself is the amazing and seemingly forgotten ConceptBid from 2001. A “platform that allowed users to bid on conceptual art ideas rather than finished artworks,” and even “a self-contained socio-economic system with its own currency.” Just read this summary of ConceptBid and not imagine digital performance art as sometimes far ahead of its time. It challenged conceptual art by framing it as a commodity, ownable and purchasable (before crypto even existed). It was, simply, a familiar website:

From the Internet Archive’s sampling of conceptbid.org (2001)

Collective Filter casts a similar projection. Into our era of data science and machine learning and our even more connected world.

Try it here. There is no mint. Just curious data.

Notes

1. Westerman actually identifies a relation between ephemerality and “the archive,” and argues that ephemerality is too centered (under the theme of challenging simple medium-based definitions). This was my least favorite section of his great essay. It comes across as an effort simply to maintain the rhetorical flow of these polar tensions.

I have creative projects and writing you can check out here. I’m on X and Farcaster and you can engage me in chats here.

Thanks to diid and Simon de la Rouviere for discussions and wonderful input and ideas that shaped the above content.

Other (crypto+)artists related to the above that I’d like to share:

• James Bloom and exploring the relational properties of technology
• SHL0MS often has elements of performance throughout
• Bard Ionson as raw performance mixed with more
• gmoney and 9dcc can be beautifully performative
• Forthcoming on-chain performance by teto and tokenfox this upcoming week called “Post Mortem” involving 7 days of interaction and engagement
• Rhea Myers’s contracts feel like performance to me
• Mitchell F. Chan producing a market performance
• Exegesis of Jonathan Mann for my part: performance within performance within performance
• Survey of recent performances relating intimacy and technology by artist Lauren Lee McCarthy on outland.art, consistent with some ideas discussed above: “As digital art is neatly organized into boxes within boxes, performance offers a way to escape the frame.”