Robert Alice, an artistic project promoting blockchain culture within the visual arts is set to launch the largest work of art in the history of Blockchain technology with a public auction at Christie’s, New York on October 7, 2020. Portraits of a Mind enraptures the founding code behind Bitcoin into 40 hand-painted, decentralized transcriptions. A global portrait of Satoshi Nakamoto, the work is a symbolic expression of decentralization. Once distributed, the project will attract a network of 40 collectors stretching across the world, where no one individual will hold all the code.
Korea IT Times had an interview with Ben Gentilli, the artist and founder behind Robert Alice about 'Block 21' focusing on blockchain and his insights into the artwork
Q: Can you tell me about your background and when you first started creating art?
A: I have been making work all my life, trained in art history at university and have worked across the art world in London at Sotheby’s, with stints in Vancouver and Hong Kong - working for a small museum. My practice until now has been only a very private endeavor, until I decided to leave Sotheby’s focusing on blockchain and developing its visual culture in a much more public way.
Q: How did you discover blockchain and what drew you to it as an artist?
A: I have been involved in crypto for a long time, but felt that bar some awesome work by Simon Denny, Nicholas Mangan, Larva Labs (Crypto Punks), Eve Sussman and others, the visual culture surrounding the space lacked the conceptual and aesthetic sophistication it deserved as a defining movement of the 21st century. Portraits of a Mind is my contribution to this space.
Block 21 is to be sold with a non-fungible token (NFT) and I am super passionate about the possibilities of this space which also attracted me to the blockchain. Early projects like the CryptoPunks are landmark masterpieces that will be part of the museum's collections in decades to come. By showcasing and selling an NFT at Christie’s I hope other contemporary artists will take a look at the NFT space, not just for its radical creative potential, but for its real potential in giving artists more control and a better stake in their practice over the long term.
In terms of what drew me to blockchain: I am a firm believer in crypto and its place in our future and yet was disappointed in the lack of real engaging work in the space. Blockchain, unlike the Internet, suffers because it is not an inherently visual medium of place, it is textual and ledger-based. Yet its histories and the complex cultural and political dynamics out of which it was born fascinated me, particularly the founding myth of Satoshi.
Though too early to say how Satoshi’s code will affect real and systemic structural change in the world, it undoubtedly has achieved for the first time a glimpse at an alternative model to a global capitalist financial system now over 400 years old. Even in the case of potential failure — this will be a powerful legacy. A decade on, Bitcoin has outlasted perhaps even the expectations of its founder, who wrote in 2008 that Bitcoin could help ‘us’ “win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years”.
In its short lifetime to date, Satoshi’s work has made the world begin to reevaluate their relationship to money, re-raising fundamental questions about the very nature of it and most importantly central banks' ability (and right) to control it. While the prize for Bitcoin and its offshoots as a community is much larger, this is meaningful enough. For the first time in centuries, a global monetary system exists outside of the control of the state.
There have been few other inventions in the twenty-first century that rival the transformative potential of Bitcoin or its story. Bitcoin, in this view, is an outlier, not because of its inherent technological innovation (as many notable technologists have commented, much of the technology used has been in place for decades), but because of what it is innovating, and how it went about it. The radically provocative act of making one’s own money — a currency that is largely anonymous, difficult to tax, borderless and close to impossible to shut down — presents a major existential and conceptual threat to not just the economic welfare of sovereign nations but their very reason of being. Money is, in short, the one thing we the people are prohibited to innovate. For without a centrally controlled money supply and therefore taxes, the state ceases to function.
Added to its revolutionary potential was its creation myth. The anonymity of Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin’s subsequent rapid growth over the course of the last decade is nothing short of science fiction written for the real world. In an era of growing state and public surveillance both physically and digitally, Satoshi’s story takes on an order of magnitude. People are not found anymore. It is not though just anonymity in which Satoshi’s story rebukes many of the established societal foundations of our late-capitalist world: a worthy disregard for fame and applause, a total disinterest in wealth, altruism without recognition, the presence of raw unfiltered yet disguised genius and its inherently anti-establishment guise - it defies societal norms in the most spectacular fashion. A survey of history both modern and ancient finds a little parallel to it. Yet while casting aside many societal norms of our time, it resurrects many older cultural narrative structures — that of the unknown or undiscovered genius, the archetype character of a masked hero or vigilante, or the parable of David versus Goliath. Little today comes close in stature, it is one of the true contemporary myths of our time.
Q: Can you tell me about your influences - whether contemporary, modernist, or (post-)conceptual artists or developers working in tech or other fields?
A: Of course, from a modern side - Simon Denny I think has done a huge amount of work in promoting and explaining blockchain technology in the art world. I really respect his work and look up to him hugely.
The work comes with an NFT. This is the first NFT to be auctioned at a major auction house and is a landmark moment in space. I love and follow the work of figures such as Larva Labs, Snark Art and Async. I think they are the most interesting creative developers in the digital NFT space.
The work resurrects the conceptual practices of Roman Opalka and On Kawara; investigating the idea of bodies of work as both conceptual blockchains and decentralized network structures themselves; as well as the artistic processes of transcription, seriality. Opalka’s 1- infinity and Kawara’s date paintings are themselves artistic blockchains.
The art of the written record finds no greater match than in the work of Polish conceptual artist Roman Opalka (1931-2011). His seminal work 1965 / 1 – ∞ (1965-2011) was a lifelong project to paint the numbers 1 to infinity, themselves a form of portraiture and as well a record of time itself. The work carries many prescient similarities to the structure of blockchain technologies - their narrative consecutive structure, their indexing of time, their decentralization through distribution, their insistence on the power of text as code, their potential for infinity. It was a project matched perhaps only by the work of Japanese conceptualist On Kawara (1932-2014) who married an interest in cryptography with another early set of blockchain projects, the Date paintings (Fig. 11), in which he rose every day and paintings the date of the day on a pre-established sized canvas. These are both landmark conceptual art projects from the 60s. Portraits of a Mind in its own block chained structure seeks to reshine a lens on these early blockchain artists and pioneers, resurrecting their conceptual structures for a newly decentralized age.
Other artists include Jack Whitten and his abstract portraits as part of the Black Monolith Series particularly his work A Gift for Prince and also Jasper Johns Target paintings in their semantic encryption. And the work of Hanne Darboven.
Q: Could you provide some of your own insights into the artwork itself? What do you hope it will help accomplish?
A: I think Bitcoin suffers from its early history and myths around a lack of transparency that is starting to be dispelled. I don’t think this history should be whitewashed - it’s hugely important and a large amount of the early infrastructure in bitcoin is here because of it. But it’s just an overweight narrative - there are other longer more complex ones.
In each work, an algorithm has found a set of hex digits that together are highlighted in gold. These read a set of coordinates that are unique to each painting. 40 locations across 40 paintings - each location is of particular significance to the history of bitcoin.
Importantly, these locations are not just from 2008 - onwards, but stretch back thousands of years through the history of cryptography, privacy, libertarianism and money. The idea is to show that Bitcoin is intimately connected to our past and the building blocks of it have been provided by some of the most important thinkers in the 20th century and before. I want to help show where Bitcoin has come from in a deeper way and that I hope that reframes many of the narratives that circulate around it in a more complex or nuanced way. With the launch at Christie’s, it is an opportunity to celebrate this codebase on a global scale as well as NFT culture and see both passes through a house that has sold many of the masterpieces of the past.
