Digital conditions
Authorship on/of the Blockchain
Martin Zeilinger
This presentation offers a critique of the use of emerging blockchain and »smart contract« technologies for regulating authorship and ownership of digital artworks. It focuses specifically on attempts to create proprietary art markets, such as Monegraph, in which digital artworks that were previously assumed to be uncommodifiable become artificially scarce commodities. The presentation includes a brief introduction to relevant technologies, which were originally developed to disrupt the property models of institutionalized financial capital. These technologies are then linked to evolving digital copyright policies, which, although deployed on behalf of artists, represent a highly problematic extension of conservative intellectual property policy by technological means. Distributed database technologies have the potential to disrupt hierarchical, centralized circuits of ownership and property. They could therefore open up a radically new kind of Creative Commons. However, the digital art markets under consideration here are argued to obstruct, rather than encourage the formation of such a new type of commons. To develop this argument, the presentation draws on the work of digital artists such as Rob Myers and community initiatives such as Furtherfield, which employ blockchain and »smart contract« technologies to think beyond traditional concepts of authorship and ownership.