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My thoughts on Kevin Esherick's essay "Generative Anesthetics".
Before I dive in, I will say plainly that I am guilty of creating vapid long-form gen art, or at the very least buying into the myth that it’s the only (successful) way to release computer art on the blockchain. Naiveté, herd-mentality, greed, or all of the above – in any case, I am guilty. Now let’s get into it.
Good critique compels us to look in the mirror, and the bitterer the pill, the more we should consider letting it course through our veins before succumbing to outrage. Perhaps we’ve been astute adopters of trends, but parrots nonetheless. Perhaps we’ve indulged in the pervasive appeal of capitalism because who doesn’t want/need (it’s getting harder to untangle these two) money, which doesn’t make it less perverse. Perhaps we’ve wanted to create our own breed of geniuses because people who code (well or not, how would we know) are the ultimate powerful insiders in today’s techno-capitalist society. Perhaps in the grand spectacle of social media, where there are no gods, authors, or actors, we’ve shielded ourselves with the passivity afforded to us and have allowed market-serving engagement-farming algorithms dictate what becomes of us and of this culture we create much less than we consume. Whatever the case may be, Kevin’s critique of gen art and what it says about blockchain culture is incisive, and should prompt us to take an honest look into the culture of code art on the blockchain.
As Kevin made clear, an important aspect of how digital artists got to become players in the broader art market today can be essentially described as a moment when “NFTS bridged that gap [between digital art and capital] in a meaningful manner, [by] bringing a native financialization mechanism to digital art.” And what a triumphant moment it was, at least financially! Many of us only heard about the blockchain during this moment, and most likely because of the seemingly limitless flow of money between collectors and artists, many of whom also collected art. Kevin later points out that “if NFTs wed digital art with digital economies, then generative art consummates that marriage.” I think there was a precedent for the flavour of sales model that gen art eventually adopted and why this marriage seemed so successful: PFPs. I am aware that generative code art, with pioneers such as Vera Molner, was always a medium that explored the poetics and possibilities of randomness in machines. In that regard, I am not comparing PFPs projects to gen art projects from an aesthetic and technical standpoint. I am simply suggesting that from a market perspective, the sales model that PFPs employed answered the question of how gen art could be monetized almost too perfectly. I might even argue (a reach) that of the entire computer art legacy, “algorithmically-generated art that uses randomness to produce large collections of work”, to borrow Kevin’s definition, may have been identified as the most suitable type of work for the blockchain, given that they had randomness in common. This argument may not seem so far a reach when we consider that computer art has become synonymous with gen art on the blockchain, glossing over a rich and eclectic legacy spanning decades, diverse identities (yes that too is a problem with gen art), and a multitude of mediums, tools, and conceptual concerns.
I think of the relationship between gen art and the market as more like an arranged marriage. It goes as follows: the market, a rich and powerful force, comes to meet computer art, the parent of many children, in search for a hand. Amidst the computer art offspring, gen art most resembles its first successful partner, PFPs. So the marriage is arranged, but for gen art to be as successful as its predecessor on the blockchain, it must accept one condition: to begin and end with the market, to be defined by it – a double-edged sword that would ultimately become its triumph (economically) and its demise (culturally). While this contract ensured wealth and the dynamic spectacle of speculation, the trade-off was resolutely the stuff that great art is usually made of: poetry, playground, critique, mirror, balm (not in the sense of numbing but in that of recognition), meditation, dissent, resistance.
Kevin rightly points out that “if done right, [computer art] can inform us on the relationship between human and machine.” I take this sentiment with urgency because of the potency of using machine language to reflect our growing malaise for techno-feudalism and its insidious grip on every aspect of our lives and personhood. We’re in a fight for our agency over our existence: our identities, our cultures, our feelings, our relationships, our politics, our economies, and the neat data packages these are reduced to and sold to the highest bidder. Yet, looking at the blockchain, you wouldn’t know it. Despite its utopian rhetoric, the blockchain embraces the most fundamental and violent tenets of the market. Here, culture follows capital. Culture even begins with capital in the case of gen art or blockchain’s most revered art form, as Kevin argues: “It’s a literal monetary transaction that creates the [generative] artwork.”
Buying art can be about owning something you love and supporting the maker in the process. Buying art can be about investing in an asset class that will accrue in value down the line. Buying art can be about signalling belonging to a particular social class and the indulgences it affords. It can be all these things, but if it isn’t at least the former, it has no intrinsic meaning. On the blockchain though, and in the case of gen art, it is more often than not just the latter two. How else could we explain hordes of people willing to put money into an artwork, sight unseen, if not for the promise of belonging to an elite group of individuals and/or making a good return on investment? What becomes of falling in love, of the curiosity we develop for the art we fall in love with and its maker? What becomes of the soft stuff of, around, and about art when our experience of it is determined by the whims of an unfeeling market?
I have fallen in love with art by randomly encountering it on my feed, and have been moved to engage in conversation with its maker to find more about or even acquire it. When we promote the blockchain, we usually paint this picture for people outside of it – the triumph of art on the blockchain is the successful collapse of the walls that traditionally separate everyday people from artists and art they might fall in love with. The actual story though is quite different from this one, especially when we consider what type of art is most successful on the blockchain and how one goes about acquiring it. I am not saying that these quintessentially barrier-free chance encounters are absent from the blockchain altogether, but rather that they are less likely to have happened with gen art. To paraphrase Kevin, those encounters combined amount to a footnote in the ‘success’ story of blockchain art, which is increasingly synonymous with the success story of gen art.
They do happen though, as I have hinted at, in the enduring subculture of Hicetnunc or Objkt for example, despite the fluctuating (ever closer to zero) monetary value of a Tezos. I will venture into saying that most of the stirring encounters I have personally had with art on the blockchain have been in this closer to zero if not zero region. They are wild, experimental, cunning, delightful, political, irreverent, participatory, and ultimately what gives me hope that there is a home for a more radical future on the blockchain. This is not to say that this flavour of art doesn’t exist or isn’t possible in the gen art realm. There is a smaller, perhaps less pumped, cohort of projects that I think can serve as a roadmap for a softer and more interesting future for gen art. Kevin named some of them which I completely agree with and will not go over again. I would only add to that fantastic list: Bjorn Staal’s Entangled, which was a masterful performance of the search for companionship while also taking a familiar individualist object, the computer window, and turning it into a communal one; Holladay Saltz’s irreverent process that urges software to not take itself too seriously; Luke Shannon’s plotter sculpture that uses randomness as a performance to reveal the poetics of a plotter machine; Minne Atairu who has exploited the blockchain’s powerful transparency architecture to autonomously document repatriated stolen African art objects in real-time.
Kevin’s essay brought me back to Gastaldi’s urgent call to bring the culture back to computing. “Computational practices have proven inseparable from the cultural environment in which they evolve”, Gastaldi argues. This is not only in the sense that culture shapes computing, but also that computing shapes culture. Far from being an indictment on the predicament we find ourselves in – inebriated with mounds of gen art collections that sell despite (because of?) their vapidity, Gastaldi’s assessment could actually be our saving grace. We have the opportunity to liberate computer art in our brave little corner of the world, and computer art is no stranger to liberation as recent/explorable history shows, so that should hopefully be easy enough (joking but also not). There are three bosses that beg slaying in this endeavour: (1) understanding the effects of our brand of gen art on our culture, (2) rejecting the hegemonic ‘engine’ through which computer art is currently produced on the blockchain, and (3) multiplying our perspectives on what computer art can be/do in/for our culture(s).
Understanding the effects of our brand of gen art on our culture. We’ve become too complacent in what we expect from our relationship to art. In Kevin’s words “the formal husk of a relationship is left in place while the color is drained out.” We don’t choose art anymore. We gamble with it: a combination of being in the right group chat, having enough coins to buy into ‘promising’ collections, at the right time, and ultimately deferring the act of falling in love with art ex post facto, when the thing is already ours and reveals itself into our wallet. Yet, it’s the honing of intuitions, the practice of discernment, and ultimately the development of taste that make the act of collecting nourishing at a human level. Then there is the satisfaction of enabling an artist to make more of the magic that enchanted us to begin with - the icing on the cake. If one is fulfilled by being good at making the right bets and profiting from them, why do it with art when trading or gambling would provide similar or stronger dopamine hits? Bringing trading and gambling cultures to blockchain art means it will never be a safe place for artists or collectors to develop their own voice, and we might as well all pack up and leave (which is sort of happening at the moment).
Rejecting the hegemonic ‘engine’ through which computer art is currently produced on the blockchain. First, the gen art ‘engine’ and the dynamics it creates “encourage artists to overproduce”, to quote Kevin. It thrives on scale and speed. On one hand, the decidedly human artists behind the machine are frequently burning out. Those who can afford to release one collection and make enough to last a few years have more flexibility than the newcomers in the game who have to bend to its laws.
Second, this situation creates a ripe environment for taking conceptual shortcuts, grabbing onto generally palatable aesthetic directions that often are, as Kevin puts it, “monetized rehashes”. His comparison here of gen art to zombie formalism is even more apt, considering we, the artists, are often overworked, anxious, and fatigued. Our wetware isn’t adapted to the speed and scale at which gen art has been produced and marketed over the past couple of years. It shouldn’t have to be. This is not Silicon Valley after all, and we are under no illusion that what we’re making (art) is to save the world. There are also no KPIs and no fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, unless we are unknowingly catering to those of the platforms we mint on. We are artists. Sleepless nights should be our choice, hopefully accompanied by luxurious naps throughout the day.
Third, the gen art ‘engine’ greatly restricts what kind of work is made. In this case, ‘engine’ actually describes the boilerplates minting platforms require projects to fit into. It feels a bit like trying to apply for an app’s placement on the app store - feudal. They dictate the rules that help uphold determinism, which we are told is a critical feature of code art for the blockchain. The artwork should stay the same no matter the window size (but what if I want to play with the window size?). The artwork should always be the same given the same hash (but what if I want it to be interactive, or a story, or participatory?). Then there are softer rules, like having a frame around the work being good practice, allowing someone to download a higher resolution for printing, etc.
None of these rules are bad in and of themselves, but it’s the fact that they are effectively mediated by what Kevin calls infrastructural behemoths that doesn’t sit well with me. He goes on to suggest these behemoths could be the “great work of longform generative cryptoart” but on this point (perhaps only there), I disagree with him. Because of the reputation these behemoths bestow on gen art collections and artists (curated/verified vs. not), they not only stand as the middle man between the artist and their audience, but effectively decide which artists even get to be visible in the first place. This kind of influence reminds me of the influence big tech companies exert on software production in the name of security, except for us on the blockchain, it’s in the name of a highly subjective thing, ‘taste’.
To be clear here, it may seem like I am dragging gen art platforms through the mud but I don’t think they should shoulder the blame for our present culture. A culture is a complex system with many nodes and we all (artists, collectors, platforms) create it through our actions. It, in turns and in time, creates us. This same culture requires platforms to function in the way they do for the most part. For one node of this complex system to change, we all have to want something else, reassess our values and priorities, and incentivize them accordingly.
Multiplying our perspectives on what computer art can be/do in/for our culture(s). I could proclaim that we should embrace more forms of computer art, such as sculptural works, performances, games, participatory experiences, immersive installations, etc. But that feels redundant. For one, because they exist in our ecosystem, they are just not as lauded. And also, because I assume I am going to be asked to what end, cleverly sneaking the question of whether and how they make money. They should exist. Period. They should exist because we want to create them. Period. Lord help me if I have to attend another crypto or gen art conference and look at art on TV screens. Code is more. Code can do more. Let’s let it.
I am going to end what ended up being a long rant mostly in agreement with Kevin, by addressing the “the code is the art” argument. It may be so but only for people to whom it is legible, other coders. Besides if that were truly something we believe, we would have seen more exposition and commentary of code in a public way (it happens by the way, just between coders). Code is a language of instruction that tells a system what to do. It’s written for the benefit and understanding of the system. It doesn’t have to be elegant, it doesn’t have to be efficient, it just needs to work. Code can be art though, like Mez Breeze’s Mezangelle, Ted Warnell’s Lascuax Symbol.ic, entries to the Perl Poetry Contest, or Ishac Bertran’s anthology of code poems. These examples support a thesis on the aesthetics of code that I find myself particularly drawn to: “like poetry, the aesthetic value of code lies in its execution, not simply its written form. However, to appreciate generative code fully we need to ‘sense’ the code to fully grasp what it is we are experiencing and to build an understanding of the code’s actions.” (Cox, Geoff, Mclean, Ward. The Aesthetics of Generative Code. 2006).
