Open Culture in the Arts - Berkeley 2024

[Music] so yeah I'm the executive director of gray area uh we as colani mentioned are um deal with culture and Technology applied for social good so why do we do that we treat uh Technology Innovation and sort of Art in the sort of same as part of the same practice um because historically they sort of have been and what does this do you know artistic thinking um when coupled with uh technology art science Humanities um uh translates across disciplines uh so you can get better collaboration it helps interface with the public so you can communicate um communicate with the public different sorts of technological innovations in a lot of ways and um also helps broaden perspectives to understand how our Technology Innovation uh impact and affects Society so transfer as I mentioned is an experiment I started in 2013 was a brick and mortar Gallery in New York for eight years then open to space in La for two years before the pandemic since then many institutions have caught up but one thing transfer always did differently is that we experimented with solidarity models and open culture so one of our first shows um was a virtual world exhibition inside Second Life which was mirrored in the gallery we sold art in Bitcoin in 2013 an incredible artist luro abidon saw that future and opened up that space for us in our creative practice um we also have done a number of solidarity experiments uh I want to give a Content warning before I switch to my first slide so if you are sensitive to flashing images please look away for a moment this is the transfer download um this is an exhibition format that um I developed in collaboration with a young technologist Harvey Moon and an artist and and the idea here is that it's a physical installation format for virtual artworks and what this did is it gave artists an opportunity to work with large format three Channel moving image many emerging artists who didn't have access to that kind of technology or capability and so it's a very s simple concept you come into the room there's an iPad there with many many works on view and it gives the um audience control that's also an experiment with a reversal of power within an Institutional context um but this opened up a whole series of experiments that um had me thinking about new ways to open up access and collaborate with institutions you can see here this was commissioned by the Toma foundation in Santa Fe which is an incredible public collection of media art so what does it mean for a gallery to be commissioned by an institution kind of playing with all of these rules and pushing at them in different ways uh many other experiments um led up to where we're at now at 10 years last year we announced the the formation of a new entity called a Data Trust this is not an idea we created but it's one we're applying to Art um and essentially what this is is the core of it are artist Studios so typically a gallery holds inventory it's a very centralized thing as is much of the art world so instead the artist retains agency over their work the art is held in the studio on a decentralized storage Network um and artists are seating backups of each other's work so this is about archiving and longev and preservation um and then also we're allocating space on those NAS Drives to run node libraries so um the dweb curriculum for creators is a curriculum I'm teaching as a part of and we're trying to get artists actually hosting and owning their own infrastructure and it's been a really fun experiment we are starting at small scale and building at the speed of trust but essentially um as we get this um Network in place we then um prepare the artworks into our IAL information packages and we have them appraised so the Contemporary Art world is very unique in that it is one of the only industries that has a way for putting a financial value on data and essentially time-based media art can be appraised so if you're an artist and you have databased artworks those artworks can be valued by an appraiser so we're experimenting with what this means in the filecoin ecosystem so we're going to be leveraging fvm to do all sorts of Interest interesting things to represent and hold that value um and that flows into the Data Trust which is also funded by some art grants and some other support um and then an audience experience will essentially come directly from the artist studio so we're trying to remove the intermediate of the gallery and really open up a cultural infrastructure where the artists have agency in a new way um and so that decentralized catalog is a first piece you can go to trust. transfer. Art to play with our catalog um it was built in collaboration with fion rip fion Long Live fion um they have recently dissolved or denucleated um but they build protocols you all might be familiar with um winfs ukan and ipvm um and so we believe this leads to a bunch of open IP and we do fully intend to once we get our trust up and operational to open source everything from the code and the interfaces we've developed to the business model which is a new hybrid between a cooperative and a Perpetual purpose trust and we would love people to Fork these models and you know build it out and potentially scale it into a more open cultural infrastructure um and I think you can all sort of imply different kinds of applications for the IP here um everything from AI training to decentralized compute and digital Asset Management does anybody know like the for the National Endowment for the Arts what the entire budget for the United States for a year is any guesses on that $220 million for the entire United States is the uh National Endowment for the Arts budget and so we're in a place where Public Funding is limited um and Technology funding generally does not value arts and culture as a priority you know in its funding and one of the things for San Francisco in the Bay Area particularly is that um you know why has this place been successful um because there was sort of this cultural infrastructure and investment um I was just in Hong Kong uh a couple weeks ago and they just announced $500 million in funding for like art and Technology you know projects there there's you know they call themselves the greater Bay Area out in Hong Kong now the Pearl River delta um so there's other places that understand this infrastructure is important I think the United States needs to sort of catch up from all sectors of sort of public private Partnerships and other sorts of uh nonprofit organizations and things this is if you're interested in this sort of like space and way of thinking there's a series of books um from our friends at Serpentine Arts Technologies team uh if you don't know Serpentine galleries in London uh it's worth sort of like checking out what they're up to they're sort of uh uh leaders and you know curatorial in a lot of other ways in the art space but there's a series of uh studies interview studies called future art ecosystems uh the latest is on public AI um so as you heard um SJ and friends talk about earlier you know what does it look like to have publicly funded stewarded accountable AI systems and these this series of Publications looks at different things like the metaverse and crypto and public Ai and things like that as culture infrastructure directly uh in the arts space so if anybody has any ideas we're open to you know come see doing all sorts of things very agile so yeah all right thank you all [Music]