Bloemenveiling Archive Box (#75)

Description: Moving Image created by GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), Custom Smart Contract, Ethereum - ERC-721 NFT An early piece of NFT art, Bloemenveiling was an online auction of short GAN generated videos of tulips; it used smart contracts on the Ethereum network to sell the work and bots to help drive speculative prices. The piece ­­was made in collaboration with David Pfau, an artificial intelligence researcher, and is the third in a series of work that looks at the relationship of the tulip to speculation, hype and value. Through the use of these types of technologies, which are increasingly embedded across different types of markets, it interrogates the way technology drives human desire and economic dynamics through artificial scarcity. A major use of blockchain in the art world is to introduce scarcity to digital works. This is in inherent tension with how these types of works should naturally behave: infinite tulips could be produced by the GAN, but the ones that are valuable are only the ones that are associated with the finite supply of tokens. Wanting to exaggerate this artificial scarcity that is a critical part of the blockchain process, the artist made the tokens self-destroying after a fixed amount of time. The smart contracts which enabled the sale and defined the work in the technical process were used to mirror how real tulips behave so that the decay and impermanence of the natural world was reintroduced into the digital world. The contracts were programmed to show the video, or bloom, for a week - approximately the same amount of time a cut tulip lasts - before the tulip became “blighted” and disappeared from the owner’s view. This allowed the viewer to appreciate it as a work of art as opposed to a commodity, by making it temporary and therefore difficult to trade, activating an unintended possibility that is built into the protocol and negating the original intent of NFTs as speculative assets. There was only one way around this blight. After the end of the week, if the owner were never to attempt to view the video work again, then the token would never be burned, preserving its speculative value but existing only as a signifier of the original work.