Misha Libman - Snark.art - Ethereum London

[Applause] okay so yeah we're from New York with no cart and when we started out we probably took her maybe kind of a light-hearted look at blockchain more from how can this technology be used in cases that are outside of finance or supply chain can it be used for something creative and at that time this was end of last year we saw the initial projects maybe you're aware of projects like crypto punks and crypto kiddies these are like the first types of projects where they achieved something that's called digital scarcity so this is an idea that you know five years ago if you created an interesting photograph that photograph was easily replicatable and the idea of tokenizing the photograph all of a sudden created an instance on the blockchain that could not be duplicated and that was the project that was called crypto Punk's which was these 10,000 generated kind of funny-looking 24 pixel by 24 pixel images of punks punk girls punk guys Punk zombies and immediately after that project another project came to be which would became extremely popular called crypto kiddies and what cryptic kiddies did was something kind of different in that they added a certain level of interactivity so beyond digital scarcity you all of a sudden if you have two kitties you could breed them and create another kitty not sure if I could say that these projects from artistic aesthetic are very sophisticated but they were super interesting and when we started looking at projects like this we decided what else can be done and this is kind of how snark that art came to be we were kind of involved fairly heavily with the art community in Brooklyn in New York I participate often on video art projects and so we decided that we will become a sort of a laboratory where we will provide almost like a technical arm for artists to try to use blockchain as a medium not necessarily to create a like to tokenize their existing artwork only but maybe do something else with it and there's something else we didn't have really an answer for but we were very curious to see what artists would come up with and it's actually quite interesting that is for them the concept of blockchain technology is actually not that difficult to understand and so some of the ideas that they come up with are little bit you know they don't have a serious business use case but they're actually quite fascinating nevertheless and so we created the kind of our own little mini curation board because we have lack of resources it's just ten of us working on this project and we can't really do more than a couple of art projects at a time and we are getting ready to release our first project which I will talk about in this presentation and then maybe I'll talk about some issues that we're facing and also some other projects that we're considering and then maybe we can have a chat afterwards so the types of experiments that we are currently looking into are things like communal experience which is where in the traditional and this is related to collective ownership it's in the traditional sense people used to buy art put it on their wall enjoy it in the privacy of their own home maybe occasionally it will get loaned to the museum and be seen outside of their homes or maybe they'll invite some friends over and see the artwork at home but we're actually interested in seeing what what if an artwork and belong to thousand people and what if maybe these thousand people can somehow enjoy this artwork together and how can this be achieved through the blockchain and the is kind of the first project that we're doing and I'll explain what that means then there's different aspects of performance art so imagine a performance where the actions are driven by let's say the blockchain community that votes for certain actions to happen or there could be validation of action it's essentially a performance that can be validated by blockchain and sponsored by people sitting anywhere in the world they just are curious to invest in an idea and the smart contract then distributes the funds based on the validation that the act took place so these are the types of things that we're playing around with but the first project is its work by New York artist Eve Sussman so she created this work about 15 years ago it's it's a piece that was inspired by painting from 1656 by Diego Velasquez called las meninas this is perhaps one of the most significant works of the Western canon it's it's also extremely controversial let me just go to the Swart so this is the painting it's perhaps what's interesting about this work there's a couple of things that raise the controversy about this work what Velasquez essentially paints himself in the image but also you know it raises a question what is he looking at and why is the mirror in the back reflecting the king and queen of Spain it sort of doesn't make sense quite make sense so it raised a lot of questions as far as you know the set up in the room and this painting has inspired a lot of works for example Picasso did something like 50 or 60 studies of this painting and there's been several other works that were created using this as the basis but what Eve was specifically interested in is - she kind of saw this painting more as a film still and what she was wondering about is what if it's a film still than what happened before and after this specific steal it's also this painting predates photography by maybe two three hundred years yet it has this kind of very kind of the characters in in the painting have a very strong psychological presence that's more common in today's photography something like it's in a barn a photograph or other type of family photography and so she was very curious to explore the space and so what I'm gonna show a little bit is how this work was initially created and then kind of what Eve wanted to do with this specific artwork so the artwork itself is a ten minute video this is actually I steal from the video that's actually a replication of the original artwork and there's a couple of interesting other controversies that I'm aware of is this cross on Velazquez because if blockchain existed in 1656 it might not have been a controversy but everybody knows that Velazquez got knighted which is the reason he has this cross in 1659 so there's some controversy of whether or not the cross was painted after the original painting was painted but let me just go into a little bit kind of what we want to do with this piece so what Eve wanted to do was if if she wanted to look at this as a video kind of to go into the space she was also curious to see can we go into pixel can we do pixelate this video and almost deconstruct the entire set and so this is kind of where the blockchain is involved what we're doing is we're dividing this piece into over 2,000 little Real Estate's of a screen so essentially each future collector would own a square of the entire work and the actual experiment is in collaboration it's kind of can these two thousand or so collectors collaborate to try to recreate the piece or maybe partially maybe in coal and this is kind of what Eve is interested in because the work itself is currently sitting in at least there's a at least two museums in New York and MoMA and we in New York it's in several museums in Korea and Spain but it's barely ever shown today and Eve who has the last artistic proof copy of this work out of a 12 editions essentially this is the last one and what she's interested in is in this kind of communal ownership let's give this work out to thousands of people and hope that it doesn't just sit on a shelf in the museum but maybe has kind of a life beyond where it's at today so basically to create this work you had to recreate the original space that takes place in Alcazar Spain this is the actual reconstruction that was built in Brooklyn in the warehouse the piece you could see like a short video of this reconstruction so they each studied the original documents of architectural drawings and some historical documents to get a perfect replication of the actual space the paintings and the walls were replicated the dresses on the outfits of all the characters were replicated to every detail and this is actually this building is a like it's very close to where I live it's a nice condo right now it's the whole thing was raised like since Brooklyn got popular that's very difficult right now to find spaces like this you may know this guy you watch games of Thrones so yeah a lot of work went into the actual creation and the piece is quite beautiful I only saw it one time even though I've known me for seven or eight years I only saw at one time in the museum setting which is I'm actually super excited that the sport will be released and maybe get to be seen more so this is actually a recreated space and and so now we begin to see potentially what the last case is looking at or Eve's interpretation of what he's looking at because what's actually inside the frame of the painting is only half as interesting as what's outside and so she's actually trying to be almost like a fly inside the room and explore the space before and after the what we know as Las Meninas the painting this is also interesting what we see actually in in the TV screen is actually exact it's a replica it's it's this painting the original painting with all the characters removed and this is the actual space that was rebuilt so they were trying to be as close to the original detail as possible and so now here we're starting to see the original artwork this is just maybe a minute of and here even though we're showing this randomize this is really just for illustrative purposes because what we're trying to do is we're gonna distribute the piece of space down so you so that we can't have people just pick and choose which squares initially but we want to have a large community of owners owning the piece and our kind of main interest is to see how they collaborate post-sale so once they own the individual pieces can they collaborate can they use the mechanics that we're programming in a smart contract to learn the pieces to each other and and to start recreating the original piece actually find the randomized version also quite fascinating because I've been working on this for maybe three or four months and so I've seen a lot of variations on the piece visualized with only let's say half of the people participating or a quarter or none and so we're trying to see how we can randomize it or show it in a different way here we see the individual atom this is the where each individual square we're calling atoms and in pieces called 89 seconds optimized this is what the an individual owner of each square would get as a result which he feels is actually strong enough where it can be viewed as a like as an art piece on its own although each square is only 20 pixels by 20 pixel so you could create a very tiny TV screen to watch it or maybe you could expand it on a lot on a larger scale and it also has it carries the Sutton for the entire ten minutes and a ten minute soundtrack of the piece the soundtrack is created by this guy Jonathan Butler who's just the famous composer he worked he for 20 years worked with Matthew Barney and he created the scores for his movie so the each individual atom also carries this complex soundtrack that goes with it here it's kind of hard to see but this is maybe some examples of what we're we're trying to invent maybe of ways that this artwork can be how it can be viewed when people collaborate in this example I think something like maybe 60% of people choose to participate and 40 do not choose to participate so then we need to figure out what to do with these missing squares whether we just randomized the randomized them whether we hide certain digital information out of them average them a scholar it's still kind of an open question how it's ultimately going to be viewed in the kind of a screening setting and we tried different possibilities sometimes we initially started with just black squares but then it has this kind of feel of Japanese silkscreen and looking through the screen but you still it's quite interesting to watch especially the sound still carries quite a bit of an effect but this is the this is an open question and it's also a question for in more of a decentralization as well because initially we're thinking that we will be acting as a centralized point for screenings but ultimately every optimist tokenized and people can create their own screening experiences they could program their own players and we need to just decide on certain rules of this behavior we are exploring possibilities because generally what we find is that majority of people are lazy it's not that they you know they will actively choose not to participate it's just they have a lot of things going on in their lives and we need to either create incentives for them to participate potentially or we need to punish them for not participation not participating and these are serious questions because what we're dealing with this is a kind of individual ownership versus communal ownership and as an individual you have full governance over the piece but once the work is distributed among a community if somebody chooses not to participate it would it it kind of ruins my experience if I do choose to participate so if only 5% we anticipate that maybe like just naturally only maybe from our conversations with people and kind of blockchain gaming companies or social networks they're telling us that active participants are generally something like 2 to 5 percent at most they say if you get 5% you should be super happy and so what we need to also figure out is maybe some rules currently the smart contract that governs the the loans is written only in the weight that that may be at the point of sale or when people are buying these squares they could choose to be either active or not active or maybe always agree to participate on a new loan request but they have a option to always pull their piece out this is just maybe we just decided to go with a more simpler case initially but our hope is to maybe create something maybe in future pieces not necessarily in this artwork but in future artworks that would allow us to make elements that are maybe more fair or that would preserve the balance between individual ownership versus communal ownership yeah so I mean more or less that's kind of what we're working on as I said before we are fairly new and we are exploring the space we find the ideas that were being that are being mmm pitched was quite interesting some challenged some notions of blockchain and we want to explore that as well some things sound great just on paper but to create small use cases in an artistic experiment is actually not as difficult as building some kind of larger use case for a company that needs to have the level of security and everything that would you know create a situation where you have years of development here you could create a relatively easy use case and challenge some things like are we really is this really about truth and transparency or is there a way to kind of mess around with the system can we you know we're working with friends and Brooklyn who are doing for example the you know the maybe you know like the forum project which is like kind of a decentralized geolocation system and that proves that you know they have this whole like essentially talking Curie registries for validating locations or validating points of interest and this is again something that is interesting but maybe we can create an art experiment around that maybe could be performance where performance needs to be validated in specific location or place and that's basically what we do it's not that art and this is our first experiment that's gonna go live it's already up for pretty kind of reservation but we're gonna go live in about three four weeks and that's it yeah well some guys didn't think you'd be learning about art on the Wednesday night they don't meet up let me start a few questions here by just asking why will you know if if there was a reason why you chose it there in platform for this project I think it was just when we started we had very limited knowledge of developing tools on the blockchain and this one seemed kind of most maybe documented at the time when we I mean we started programming in February maybe now there's you know for another project we would consider another plot another blockchain but for this one there was just for this specific use case everything was there we already had smartcard tracts written by other kind of projects that had the elements that we need it and so it was an easy place to start but again we're open to using other blockchains as well awesome any other questions all right here it's it doesn't involve any time I mean right now if you purchase a token of this specific artwork it gives you the ability to participate in screenings and so your ID you know you could kind of currently the waste program you could give up your rights to say no so essentially you accept any loan request but we don't know if that's the right model but if you don't choose it initially then you just have to basically keep watching and then somebody will ask you can you give me your piece for a day like November 17th is my birthday and I want to show this at my house in Kazakhstan could you please give me your piece and the the loan function also Carrie could potentially carry financial compensation so they could offer you money for your piece although our hope is that it's gonna be mostly done for free but we do understand that this work is in major collections and somebody like a week in Museum in New York may want to do a show and so they may want to incentivize people to participate and so they may offer some compensation so you'll get I don't know ten bucks for the ten pounds for you know giving up your piece for a week and so it will just leave your wallet and come back ten days later so that's that's all for this one but for other projects that they're much more active so the project that we're thinking of doing a performance where it has a certain voting mechanism where you have to be constantly following this like narrative and voting through the blockchain as far as the actions that's something that will be more active but this one is just the decision whether or not to participate or not to participate okay come back here with you where do owners come to kind of coordinate to to borrow in length like what platform or what app facilitator it's just going to be for now centralized on our platform I mean theoretically the contract will be published and so then somebody else can create some other place for them to let's say if there's gonna be some kind of blockchain online movie theater and they want to organize the screening they could sit theoretically call these functions but for now it's just gonna be on our platform we'll just create like a button where if you're willing to pay the gas it takes to transfer the tokens over into your wallet and send them back a certain number of days later then you'll be able to do so okay the other questions did you delete the original video so everybody collaborates the original video was never released in in full so if you google it right now I think there's maybe on Vimeo you could watch about a minute and a half of the original the video files will be stored we're gonna start on the ipfs and they're gonna be there's still debate whether there should be encrypted or not because ultimately again it's kind of one of those questions with art whether or not what does it matter that somebody duplicates or sees the file it really becomes about the token ownership but what we're discovering at least now there's like because of Eve is fairly significant artist especially in the New York art scene we have a lot of potential buyers for these squares that are from the art world then they they don't like the idea that it's you know sitting there in you know open so we're kind of debating whether or not to encrypt or not encrypted but it's one of those questions that we have to resolve in the next three weeks okay love question that here we go thanks it's not really a question but you mentioned voting a couple of times all right you mentioned voting a couple of times yeah there's a really nice in theory or project called Eragon yeah yeah I would recommend having a look at that cuz they've just released a really nice UI you can do like veteran groups yeah yeah yeah you know we're we're this project yes thank you okay any final questions here we go back at where we started with Steve here we go Steve hi there was a very fascinating presentation actually understand when you actually look at the marketplace for setting and buying and selling tokens is that something that you've considered yeah I mean yes yes we're probably if anything these projects at this point are more of an investment what we're looking to do is we want to grow a community around snark people who are interested in this type of an experimentation so for the specific project we could have a potentially 2,000 people getting involved it's initially going to be sold on our platform so we're gonna take some percentage of the sales to justify the cost of development yes yes of course yeah so yeah initially the pieces are sold facedown so you don't know which piece you're gonna get but after the initial sale you'll know you'll see the provenance of all the owners and then you could make beads or if you own a piece you could offer it to buy and sell that's one main cessation strategy another administration for example for performance work where there isn't anything like an artifact one maybe actually there may be artifacts that may be solved there might be physical or non-physical we don't know but we're looking into some idea of some kind of token economics where maybe initially we'll give out some tokens so people can kind of direct the behavior but ultimately we also want to create a marketplace for those tokens to justify the cost of development for this project [Applause]