From Speculation to Stewardship: Preserving Digital Culture on the Blockchain

The art world was upended by the disruptive new market that emerged and quickly sought to adopt the interests and tastes of its patrons. Major auction houses led the charge – their business model was a natural fit – aligning with the speculative aspects of the new market. Galleries experimented with offering NFTs, and museums followed suit, by alluring donors with NFT-based membership and ticketing and opening up their collections to NFTs. 

In the years that followed, the art world evolved beyond speculation about the NFT market and the transactional aspects of blockchain toward the potential the technology offers for preservation and storage. After a period of frenzied crypto-oriented experimentation, arts organizations began slowing down and thinking about this technology on longer timescales. An emerging group of artists and institutions have begun exploring how the core components of blockchains – decentralization and encryption – can help preserve culture for the next 100 years and unlock new potentials for cooperative data stewardship.

Surveying the vast landscape of ‘blockchain in the arts’ today three distinct categories emerge: Engagement, Collecting, and Preservation. The first category is the most prolific – museums and cultural organizations engaging their audiences with tokenized on-chain experiences. These transactions are preserved on the blockchain’s ‘immutable public ledger’ as a lasting record of an exchange. Engagement initiatives are primarily led by development and educational departments within the institution, and take the form of ticketing, participatory programming, or new membership models. These initiatives aim to cultivate a new donor class or grow audience, and oftentimes are presented under the auspices of tech literacy. For example, the MoMA Postcard project, a “participatory blockchain art project,” was framed as “an invitation for anyone to learn, experiment, collaborate, and create value together with web3 technologies.” More recently the Metropolitan Museum of Art launched ArtLinks, a blockchain-based game which “presents an innovative way to engage with the Museum.”

A similar focus on transactions is at the core of the second category, Collecting. Many museums have acquired NFTs, including LACMA, The Centre Pompidou, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. NFTs represent a new way to handle exchange of ownership of digital assets. The chain of custody is recorded transparently and available for all to see online, along with the artwork. Curatorial is the driving force for acquisitions, but given the format of NFTs, their addition to a museum’s collection is primarily an engagement with the legal functions of the institution. Once acquired, NFTs enter into a museum’s accession workflow which treats a born-digital artwork in a much more robust manner.

Herein lies the opportunity of the third category, Preservation. In the broader GLAM ecosystem (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) future-thinking cultural institutions are experimenting with blockchain-based storage for preservation and conservation of their archives and born-digital artworks. The standard for preservation-grade storage is ‘3 copies, in 3 locations,’ and archivists have long adopted the mantra ‘lots of copies keep stuff safe.’ Immutable and verifiable storage on blockchains like Filecoin offers additional benefits, with cryptographic proofs that archives are being stored in their original form. Storing the bits and bytes that make up an archival information package on the blockchain – as opposed to a single display copy or on-chain code snippet included in NFTs – requires a deep engagement with the infrastructure and departments within an institution. Such an initiative at a traditional museum would require collaboration across curatorial, registrar, collections, and conservation, which handles identity and iteration reports, treatment plans, condition assessments, and other essential documentation that ensures a born-digital artwork will last 100 years.

The Internet Archive is leveraging decentralized storage for its collections, which has become a crucial cultural record at this moment as information disappears from the internet. The Prelinger Library boasts an essential collection of cultural ephemera, and is exploring how decentralized storage can ensure the longevity of their collection and offer more resilient and censorship-resistant access to the data in their sprawling archives. University archives such as Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab are enhancing discovery and engagement with open data and exploring new ways to preserve digital information using decentralized storage. 

Institutions experimenting with blockchain-backed preservation are leading the way for a huge shift in the way we understand our data. Culture at large is coming into an awareness of the precarity of data and the value it represents.Technology companies have amassed huge fortunes from user-generated data, and the political implications of the extractive practices of these giants have come into view. Mass exodus from social media platforms and divestment from big tech is shifting the landscape of how we understand the power of our data.

Looking back across the history of art, artists are often the drivers of new ways of seeing and the catalysts of change in moments of cultural upheaval. One group of artists is working to explore how blockchain-backed storage can shift the value of data to creators. By leveraging these technologies to explore distributive justice and data sovereignty, they are prototyping a new system of value for data. 

TRANSFER Data Trust is a group of international digital artists building a cooperative model of data stewardship which transforms our current understanding of the financial and cultural value of data. The initiative seeks to create a ‘proof of concept’ for resilient cultural infrastructure which is fully owned by the creators themselves, freeing data from the hands of big tech. By leveraging the power of blockchain-backed encryption to take ownership of data in a new way, they are demonstrating a different path forward for cultural legacy.

Such a shift will require careful collaboration and value realignment across the cultural sector. The momentous shift of NFTs was driven by rapid speculation, but the transformative power of blockchain technologies is operating on a much longer timescale. At its core, blockchain is an immutable public ledger which is actively recording a great shift in power across sectors.Traditional art institutions engaging more deeply with this technology beyond tokenization will activate a new era of cultural value creation. 

This article is authored by

Kelani Nichole, Kelani Nichole is a technologist and the founder of TRANSFER, an experimental media art space. Her curatorial focus is on artists refiguring technology through critical practice. She has been producing immersive installations of net art, video games, virtual worlds, and generative art since 2013. Her independent curatorial projects include HeK (House of Electronic Arts), Arebyte, Pioneer Works, Gray Area, Christie’s New York, Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, and Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Main Image: MOMA postcard project