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Proof of Work — exhibition text and guide

Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, in the Schinkel Klause. 8 September – 20 December 2018; opening 8 September, 18:00. Exhibition text as published on the Schinkel Pavillon website (source); the guide passages below are from the printed English exhibition guide (29 pages, PDF dated 5 September 2018, artviewer.org), which gives the closing date as 21 December. Wiki reading: Proof of Work (Schinkel Pavillon, 2018). On harm.work as Proof of Work.

Exhibition text

Curated by Simon Denny in dialogue with Distributed Gallery, Harm van den Dorpel, Sarah Hamerman and Sam Hart, Kei Kreutler and Aude Launay

The explosion of interest in cryptocurrencies and distributed computing since Bitcoin's emergence in 2009 has led to experiments in alternative governance structures, financing, and peer-to-peer networking. This shift has seeded a cultural conversation that has inspired great creative production on both sides of the traditional ars/techne divide.

Staged in the Schinkel Klause – the Schinkel Pavillon's labyrinthine lower floor and a former GDR restaurant – this exhibition brings together works engaged with the culture around Bitcoin and blockchain, entertaining crypto as a possible new infrastructure for money, computing, and organizing. This includes artwork made by crypto builders, crypto experiments built by artists, and a small number of paintings and drawings that resonate with crypto, but predate Bitcoin. The organizers are also diverse, bringing to the show experience as technologists, artists, and curators – often in combination.

Rethinking decentralization, consensus, secrecy, privacy, religion, and societal and/or organizational structures has become popular in circles that discuss and explore the possibilities of blockchain-related systems. Berlin is a busy node in an international network of crypto-interested producers, gathering around amorphous discussion groups. The online group Crypto Circle – who use the office chat platform Slack to share ideas – various events, and collective »co-working« office spaces like Full Node in Kreuzberg are examples of such self-selecting groups and spaces relevant to many of the positions featured in the exhibition.

A transparent curatorial structure was adopted for selecting the artworks in the exhibition and reflects an interest in distributed decision making. A series of creators-as-decision-making-nodes were invited to propose positions they felt resonated with blockchain, pushing back on the idea of curating as a singular point of centralized decisionmaking. The result is a partial picture of activity in this area that is formed by a pre-defined organizational protocol. An organizational diagram is produced and exhibited alongside the exhibition, a record of this structure. The exhibition aims to highlight a non-representative cross section of the artistic activity being done in the wake of blockchain's emergence.

»Proof of Work« takes its title from the decentralized process behind Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. It is the name of the consensus algorithm used to confirm transactions and produce new »blocks« on the »chain«, or ledger that makes up a blockchain. From the Bitcoin wiki: »A Proof of Work is a piece of data which is difficult (costly, time-consuming) to produce but easy for others to verify and which satisfies certain requirements.«

Artists: CryptoKitties; Aria Dean; Distributed Gallery; Harm van den Dorpel; FOAM (Ryan John King, Ekaterina Zavyalova, Nick Axel and Kristoffer Josefsson); Sarah Hamerman and Sam Hart; Decentralized Autonomous Kunstverein (Nick Koppenhagen and Wesley Simon); Kei Kreutler; left gallery (Harm van den Dorpel and Paloma Rodríguez Carrington); Wayne Lloyd; Mark Lombardi; Jonas Lund; Rob Myers; Hayal Pozanti; Billy Rennekamp; Jason Rohrer; Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft; 0xΩ (Avery Singer and Matt Liston); terra0 (Paul Seidler, Paul Kolling and Max Hampshire) in collaboration with Georgia Hansford, Louis Center and Gregor Finger.

With a conversation program by New Models – Caroline Busta, Lil Internet, Daniel Keller.

From the exhibition guide

The guide opens with the curatorial protocol as a diagram of names, a short introduction (the text above, with small variations), and a glossary of terms (Bitcoin, blockchain, consensus, cryptocurrency, decentralization, DAO, Ethereum, game theory, hardware wallet, mining, Proof of Work, token). Its first byline adds Anna-Lisa Scherfose to the organisers: "Curated by Simon Denny in dialogue with Distributed Gallery, Harm van den Dorpel, Sarah Hamerman and Sam Hart, Kei Kreutler, Aude Launay, and Anna-Lisa Scherfose." The section Curatorial Nodes states: "Curatorial nodes and protocol selected by Simon Denny." Each node's biography ends with the positions that node selected. The entry for van den Dorpel:

Harm van den Dorpel (b. 1981, NL) makes sculpture, installation, works on paper, computer generated graphics, and software. Rooted in the conceptual heritage of net.art, van den Dorpel's works often simulate neural networks. The role of technology in his works is a means to an end: a tool to increase the understanding of our experience. He has engaged in the cryptocurrency context in a number of ways – an early example being selling work for Bitcoin to a museum in Vienna in 2015, the first transaction of its kind. He founded Left Gallery, a gallery which hosts and distributes digital artworks with blockchain, alongside Paloma Rodríguez Carrington.
(Selects Harm van den Dorpel p. 25, left gallery p. 27)

Harm van den Dorpel (pp. 25–26)

Harm van den Dorpel's Nested Exchange Series is a group of abstract drawings and Plexiglas assemblages that generate their patterns and shapes using an automated process designed by the artist. The artwork produced is a record of a moment in this automated evolution. This mirrors blockchain's ledger system, which also documents and displays all activity on its network.

To produce each artwork, two designs are taken from a determined population and then communicate by swapping a node from their respective structures in a process that can be described as "gossiping." This process is designed to encourage diversity. Each specimen is designed to evolve towards being as different from all the others as possible: The total amount of information shared among all specimens in the population does not increase over time and is rather merely recombined towards an optimal diverse distribution. The record of changes in shapes driven by this process produces new designs as a kind of snapshot of a certain moment. These snapshots can be compared to a blockchain ledger in that they are a record of all activity that made them. The chromosomes of the specimen are stored as nested recursive "tree" structures, similar to those used in linguistics.

Checklist:

HARM VAN DEN DORPEL (b. 1981 Zaandam, NL. Lives and works in Berlin, DE.)

left gallery (pp. 27–28)

Launched by Harm van den Dorpel and Paloma Rodríguez Carrington in 2015, left gallery is a blockchain-based art gallery that commissions, produces, and sells downloadable artworks. Works are stored and bought on the blockchain. Upon purchasing a work, the buyer receives a download link via email that allows them access to the file. Ownership of the work is stored on a blockchain and is verifiable as unique.

The animated lecture left gallery Explainer by Harm van den Dorpel is an attempt to make clear some of the conceptual and economic reasonings behind their blockchain-based online gallery. The animation follows a style and logic often used in online university lectures championed by Khan Academy, a popular online learning video series endorsed by Bill Gates, Google, and other Silicon Valley figures invested in independent learning and alternatives to conventional education models. Having trained in computer science and art – but not in biology – Harm van den Dorpel also gained much of his own understanding of cell division and genetics from Khan's videos.

Connections between digital ontology, artificial scarcity, tokenization, and provenance on the Ethereum blockchain are made in the animation.

By combining his scribbly drawing style with subjective annotations, van den Dorpel hopes to make the cerebral and often complex subject matter of this project accessible – and perhaps sometimes even funny.

Checklist: left gallery Explainer, 2018. Software, no sound, loop, 21 minutes.

Other records

Installation photographs on Art Viewer (photos Hans-Georg Gaul) caption the two panels as "Harm van den Dorpel, Lammer Asbestus, 2018, Multi layered UV prints with white channel between CNC-cut plexiglass, packaging material, screw system, 100 x 100 x 3 cm, Courtesy the artist and Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam", and Wyn the same. harm.work catalogues the two panels as Lammer Asbestos and Wyn (generation unknown), 100 × 100 × 4 cm.