dissertation_04

Leo Marx said of railroads and factories as they increasingly dotted the landscape after the industrial revolution "…there is nothing inherently ugly about factories and railroads … to dispel the ugliness which surrounds the new technology, whether in a poem or a landscape, we must assign to it its proper place in the human scale. Artists have a special responsibility to incorporate into their work such ‘new and necessary facts’ as the shop, mill, and railroad." - Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden

Crypto art is undergoing a certain process of incorporating the new technology of NFTs into the human scale. What is an own-able digital asset? Are tokens as the tech currently functions that, or are they just links that fools share and trade unrelated tokens in reference to? Early crypto art seemed obsessed with the "great men" of the tech, the legends, the symbols. A giant stupid ethereum symbol or bitcoin B plastered over everything was the new factory and railroad obscuring the view.

Gradually we are trying to learn what it means to fulfill this responsibility of making the technology seem less ugly. We are trying to develop the language and style and ways of thinking about goods and objects and images that isn’t the endless boring simple reproduction that makes it too light to even hold or the ridiculous weight of things like cartoon apes or pixelated little people that feel to heavy to bear the value we gave them. We are trying to make a world intangible somehow less garish, less clunky. We are trying to answer the call as artists to assign the blockchain its place in the human scale.