006: beginning again from the middle
I haven’t written an email update for some time, but I’m returning to the format because I continue to think it’s important to maintain communication (even somewhat) outside platform capture. Which presents some irony as an opener, because longer term subscribers will notice this email is now being facilitated by Buttondown, not Tinyletter, as the service I formerly used has been discontinued. All previous SETI over SMTPs are lost (though this seems fitting for the conceit of an interstellar broadcast). We are beginning again from 006.
Beginning again from the middle is also fitting for the main thing I’m working on (currently doing the Creative Residency with IDEO) and want to share with you. You may know my project Lifeforms - it launched in 2021 so has been around for some time now. If you don’t, Lifeforms are NFT-based entities that “die” if you don’t give them away. They have been popular I think - among other reasons - because they engage in an act of market-refusal or market-nonconformity in a context (NFTs) that has been notorious for its embrace of markets. But it’s always seemed sad to me (and maybe even cruel) that there’s no possible outcome for any lifeform except to live forever or die from neglect. Is there any lifeform equivalent to a good death? The oldest lifeforms now are almost 3 years old - even if those caring for them conscientiously decide to let them go, this looks the same from the perspective of the chain as any other death. Moreover, I want to give something back to the community of people who engaged with lifeforms in such a market-driven context with care and attention for so long, and also serve as a retrospective for the project overall.
I am currently working on a new set of interactions available to those who have cared for lifeforms. First, lifeforms older than one year will be able to die a new way - not by disappearing (because you forgot about them) but by intentionally transforming into something new. They will no longer need to change caregiver every 90 days. Secondly, all addresses that cared for lifeforms before March 6 will be able to participate in a remembrance vigil, looking back at the lifeforms they engaged with and resulting in a new mint shaped by those interactions. My target is to launch these interactions the first week of June, and I’ll post a more exact date and time as soon as I have one. Here’s the project home page: Good Death. Finally, I will be closing mints on the original lifeforms project one week after these new interactions launch. It may have another future elsewhere, but that will be the subject of another announcement.
Unrelated to Lifeforms, I have work up currently in LA and Friedrichshafen, Germany. The one in LA is at Honor Fraser Gallery until Jun 8. It’s called Erotic Codex, and curated by Jamison Edgar and Alice Scope. My piece in there is Untitled, a video I made last spring where you lurk an AI nsfw content creator’s account on a fictional platform, made using a model I fine-tuned. I got to this work by reflecting on some of my experiences being a woman selling NFTs online over social media and the changing nature of the self within the affordances of emerging technology. I learned so much from making this work, both in terms of the platform logic of various online forms of sex work and the current state of machine learning. Some early related thoughts are commemorated in my Trust talk, and there’s considerably more that might get said somewhere, someday. The one in Friedrichshafen is a new sculpture from my Terraforming series and my video from 2022 about the history of Berlin’s internet infrastructure at the Zeppelin Museum’s Kryptomania exhibition. A new essay with some of my hot takes about “decentralization” will be included in its forthcoming exhibition catalogue.
Some other updates since I last wrote an email:
last Summer I did a research fellowship with Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation called Summer of Protocols - my work for this won’t come out until the Summer, but I spoke about it recently on Bankless (as well as protocols in general), and the CFP for this year’s fellowship is currently open (one more day!)
a number of other exhibitions, including Zeit at the Kunsthaus Zurich, Plural Prototypes at Gray Area in San Francisco, Exploring the Decentralized Web at the HEK in Basel, and Market Makers here in Berlin
I recently re-published my text, Being the Hydra, on my blog, since the website that initially commissioned it seems to have gone offline/restructured
I wrote a short playful piece on games for Mitchell Chan’s guest-edited edition of Outland: Games in the Expanded Field
also last Summer, I was part of the MoMA’s Postcard project as one of the first 15 artists invited to create a “prompt”. You can read a little bit more about the project and my contribution here. My prompt: “Draw nothing. Forge the signature of the artist after you. If you are last, forge mine.” Forgeries below
