CONTROL
DOCUMENT
type
by Michael Sullivan Smith
Tweets by @MSullivanSmith an RSS feed tracks the art's Twitter provenance from a 2014 grudge on centralized platforms
Twelve posts on Let's consider the use of the term “artifact” with the meaning it is
an unintended addition to a copy that is characteristic of the mechanism
used for its production.
Then lets consider the use of the term “archetype” as the original
that the copy is meant to flawlessly duplicate.
If the mechanism was conceived as creating archetypes instead of
copies, an archetype could be instilled with benefits from having
identifiable artifacts.
That is the innovative concept found in using multiple colors to make
each imprint of a fixed design unique in every instance of its
production.
This is an innovative concept that was applied to a high percentage
of beta projects while testing unique uses for the Strataprinter, and
these are in turn used here in building an understanding of the systemic
characteristics in another form of autonomous mechanism use built for a
higher order concept of art, where no actual products are found and
everything is digital.
These artworks basically use two trans-language instances; the three
crossing knot and the Woodstock logo; in naturally changing
compositions, for building a visual art into an exploration of literacy
that a certain appreciation of how the Internet functions brings. Once
this understanding is clear, the final building out of this third,
cognitively unique, way for art that requires the Internet to function
as a mechanism can be understood.
The
Blockchain Space
Back Story
This is about Woodstock, blockchain, and an unending
sequence of knots.
It begins in an artwork back in 1967. But from a 1992 encounter, when I
was asked if I could print a hand while demonstrating my patents at a
trade show in Indianapolis, it relates to Woodstock.
The show's focus was industrial parts marking. The man who asked
was from the Department of Defense. The question of faking a complex ID
left me thinking about the capabilities of the prints a printer was
capable of.
Two years later, when the 25th anniversary of the Woodstock
Festival was taking place in my back yard, a chance to satisfy what that
query in Indianapolis had set in motion was on my mind.
That became the origin story for over 55,000 individually unique
collectibles that are presently in the hands of an equal number of a
randomized sampling of autonomous individuals; a true Third Web
distribution of responsive "things" in an Internet of Things.
That brings us up to the present day, as Woodstock presents
another query and offers another opportunity during its 50th
anniversary.
This is where blockchain comes in; and what brought me mull over
this affinity between 55,000 random identities and Satoshi Yamamoto, the
near-mythical creator of blockchain's first object lesson: Bitcoin.
These fifty years fall in a very special timespan. 1969 marked a
watershed in the common creative vision of the post WWII generation.
They made the personal computer and the Internet. The systems that made
Satoshi Yamamoto's vision for blockchain are their creations.
I am pegging the first baby steps toward this period of
technological leaps to just prior to the original Woodstock; in 1967 and
1968; when art experienced the earliest emergence of a conceptual way of
thinking in the openly systemic way that made Woodstock, in 1969, move
the culture; just as Satoshi Yamamoto's 2009 White Paper on Bitcoin, as
a vision of a movement, has now.
Today, Bitcoin has moved blockchain to engage a community that
is three generations younger than those that shared in the spirit of the
first "Woodstock", but the expectations they communicate are no less
focused on the same objectives. The nexus between having roots in these
50 years of history, and the present narrative of idealistic blockchain
use-cases flying out as White Papers from everywhere today, is one
single story of one origin with one heritage and one trajectory.
So a White Paper where blockchain is an agent of an art is in
this story. It is about turning an Internet environment that embraces
consensus into nodes of an archive. Its about an entry point just
opening at this moment, coincidental with being fifty years after the
original Woodstock, that can't but see blockchain completing a circle
that will blur the difference between technology and art forever.
Nothing was ever going to happen without the Web
This is where an unending sequence of knots enters the
story.
Back in the early years before the first Woodstock festival, I worked
out a systemic art platform that infinitely generated knots. It was
inspired by the constructionist geometry of electronic circuitry that
had entered into the visual vocabulary of the time. I conceptualized
illustrating unique knots in the same way, only my vision stacked them
in a geometric system that proved each circuit to be one-of-a-kind,
forever expanding, infinitely. In 1967 this vision of creating the
technology that would make this a systemic art was far, far off in the
future, in what is here today in blockchain space.
Blockchain space is totally intriguing to me as a cultural phenomenon.
It defines a community of visionaries that have positioned an abstract
idea as a cutting edge technology, giving it a solid presence in an open
source, peer-to-peer, interactive network of programmers and developers
that are thinking like artists. I'd been on the lookout for this level
of engagement since the Internet began.
Within a few months of the end of 2017 I'd absorbed the principle
talking points of this space through Twitter. It's presence was strong
there, with many entering it just as I was doing my first research, and
it was already adding concepts that took it in way more extreme
directions than I had in mind.
I immediately got hooked on the frenetic pace the space had set for its
goal of creating a core knowledge-set around cryptography. I'd tried
squeezing that ontologically into a web site several years before. With
the blockchain way of seeing things I was putting my
http://www.greatknot.com web site through a face lift, and by early 2018
it was keeping up with what this now offered. Blockchain's vocabulary
was giving me the vehicle to adapt “immutable” and “non-fungible” to
ideas my art had in it a half century before, but had no words common to
a specialized group to give that meaning.
If you're writing about blockchain, dude, you probably aren't there yet.
I began to think of my web site as a trope for engaging this "space" in
my art. The common White Paper's form was left comparatively vague by
this space. The preference was to leave enough slack to continually
expand behaviors and test conclusions, and redirect focus, letting the
world of new ideas in. Adopting their freewheeling input-influenced
drive to my art's mechanisms of longevity was easy.
The best part was the game theory in the incentives that fascinates this
space. That, and Topography, were all the rage when I was starting to
think along these lines a half century ago. These influenced my art’s
acceptance of having no endgame. Its concept of stacking up creations,
and having their numbers accumulating to no end, for all eternity, was
fun to imagine as my machinations of mathematicians being made into
mechanisms. This way of reading blockchain fit right into my a focus on
provenance. Knot-styled concepts blend well with the evasively
cryptographic ethereal mechanisms of blockchain’s blocks and chains.
This connection was only unwieldy where the protocol used tokens like
money. That concept added nothing to my approach to incentives. My
speculative view of art considered this an annoyance, but this
resistance broke as I realized blockchain's tokens could bring in a
direct metric as analogs of value.
The only thing of importance to the art is what ultimately makes it
realizable. Of the several intellectual incentives advanced in the Web
site, the numbering of geometric repeats that form the pattern
underlying every knot's form is the closest to this token analog. Every
one of these modules ended up one in a series of consecutive numbers
that support the knot's identity.
Each integer fits the protocol for incentives, as a single unit, and
strings of these coma-separated whole numbers double as an individual
knot's public signature, so both accumulate in this progression. As a
number tally of the tokens in circulation, this is a precise barometer
of the state of the progress of the art.
There is nothing to blockchain but this. Everything else is an
application of the art.
With this, by late 2018, my art was conceptually legible enough to fit
into blockchain space. I'd styled the tokens as Cryptoknot in my White
Paper, and, even if they had no association at all with a core token
like Bitcoin or Ethereum, the bare bones requirements of a protocol,
formatting tools, and program code fit an Alpha level of a working
platform.
No nodes, no consensus; no blockchain
The system was ready for attracting users by mid-
summer, 2018. I’d revamped a Patreon page as home base. By early October
it was ready to have an open house and dive into incubating a training
program I’d laid out in the White Paper, reliant on picking up interest
from the blockchain community through Twitter and Steemit.
...but then came second thoughts.
I'd experienced over fifty years of technology cycles through buildups
and unexpected twists, and my exuberance for this self incentivized
blockchain space's passion, so fitting of the entrepreneur character,
was raising a caution flag. This emergent technology's exit from its
builder's familiar surroundings to be let loose into the wild on the
Internet where billions are oblivious to those patterns of familiarity
was only counting on those that are fascinated with blockchain.
The knowledge explosion in the technology these young enthusiasts hold
totally in their grasp is not one that targets a user space. Their
passion is based on the benefits of decentralization as an ideal of a
Third Web world. But there are three generations, living right beside
them, they're failing to see are already reeling from a world that is
overwhelmingly too decentralized from understanding generally.
More to the point: my misgivings are from what this community had
consoled me with in giving me the feeling they'd be able to put into
practice what I'd failed to in all this time. Now that I'd looked into
it, I saw them struggling with the same uncertainty. Too much knowledge
always exists, and has since way before the Internet, and blockchain's
mission makes this fact louder and clearer by making it about
transacting in trusted knowledge.
I totally get why this community frames the present iteration of
blockchain around Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies that are
testing the extremes of recognized value. The present world needs
reassurances. The individual's perception of basic truths, that never
had to be questioned before, is on a southward trajectory. There is an
unsettling concern blockchain space knows it is missing for what it
terms a “fair start”. The need to evaluate what is brought to our
attention has opened issues that we've never had to know about before;
ever!
Those with the passion to do something are too close to the problem to
be helpful, so I decided I'd better first see if the knowledge that
55,000 are already comfortable with can become training wheels for
working blockchain into this larger undertaking my knots represent need
to take on.
With that in mind, this first installment has set up the theme of the
next, where I will return to that Woodstock experiment I'd done twenty-
five years ago.
Woodstock'94
The machine layer has a few tricks left
A quarter century ago the potential was created to
draw together a community through an idea of individual identity that
would look today like stakeholders for a Distributed Autonomous
Organization. Its origins put a real face on what got us here and set
the stage for the posts of this series that follow.
The 25th anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock festival was an
opportunity that fell in my lap. I wanted to test producing things
nothing else but my patents could make. With a new technology at a
decisive moment in its market development I had virtually no
competition, and with the largest and most diverse promotion and sales
channels of the time, ranging from Pay-Per-View and MTV in cable outlets
around the world, to street vendors outside, and booth vendors inside
this three day concert; I had collaborators at my disposal creating
advertising for three months before, and up to three months after, the
event.
Well over a year before this I'd already thought through the
prototype, had primed an experiment, and only needed a market capable of
providing the end result I was after. This was the very guarantee I'd
dreamed of for reaching as large a random sample of individuals at one
time as possible, with the most perfect collectible product.
Woodstock'94 was what I needed to assure myself I could retain
attention on an idea, far enough into the future, for the experiment I'd
planned to play out. So, in 1994, I went after a license to reproduce
the 25th anniversary Woodstock logo just to have the potential of
proving what, indeed, I'm writing about being possible to do today.
Count on change to egg you on
The impetus for this idea was taken from the question
put to me a bit over a year before; in Indianapolis. The itch that left
will be totally familiar to a mindset that is stronger yet today. Every
challenge is really about the next step, where meeting it ups the ante
to be ahead of that next curve someone else may bring to the fore. A
conceptual artist cannot abide the thought of having missed something.
This particular "something" was my expectation that my mechanism
could create answers I would need to wait until a future date to know,
with certainty, it had been successful at proving out. That meant
planning to reach a distributed base that would be reachable today, by
planing for a world that would have needs for a entirely different use
for mechanisms.
This was on my mind because I'd devised my technology in the
1980s to make precise copies of a small design into conductive thick
film paste deposits on substrates, where the quality of multilevel
printed circuits was measurable in the precise flow of current between
discrete electronic components. When this precise control over x-y-z
topology was dropped as a concern after the industry turned from thick
film technology to integrated circuitry, the target market was gone for
my patents.
Since the early 1990's I'd been developing away from this
function of immutable output and toward a totally antithetical way of
thinking. This Woodstock'94 production was ostensibly to show adaption
of the fluid dynamics of my patented pressure controls worked with
colored pastes for a output that would do the exact opposite of the
cookie cutter sameness it was invented for. I was turning it into a
miniature painting process for a bench-top crafts manufacturing market,
and the Woodstock'94 use was to prove out a procedure that would
ultimate be useful in decorating metal.
Hiding in plain sight
But for proving what I was really fixated on at that
time, I needed a low priced, high volume Beta project. So instead of
enamel pastes, this was designed around pumping super thick baking
epoxies from air syringes through tiny nozzles onto a photographically
imaged monofilament fabric to make a color composition that transferred
the screen image, like a fingerprint, from the underside of it as an
atmospherically controlled diaphragm, using only tension, degree of
vacuum, and timer controls, to produce images that had never before been
attempted in production.
When that was worked out, for the next quarter century, I kept
what the real experiment was about a secret. What it meant, at that
moment in time, was totally useless for marketing purposes, because the
color process carried the day, anyway. It would have been totally
confusing to reveal the rest.
This secret is that each new impression in the production was
identifiably different from the previous one. Even though every one bore
the same graphic of the Woodstock'94 logo, the trick was in designing it
into a monoprint-type production vehicle where multiple colors were all
applied at one time from a process that naturally caused edge definition
changes between the colors as they migrate with each strata deposited,
leaving a barely noticeable difference in the composition that,
nonetheless, is discernible in the variety of unique impressions over
the full production run.
At the scale of the image this is unnoticeable, so at the end of
the day the only thing I could do was prepare for its use in the future.
For each production run a brake down was saved. Every object produced
had specifications and metrics recorded that the invention was uniquely
capable of controlling as details to be used to identify each one of
them.
Blending into the zeitgeist
This product is perceived today as a logo dropped out
of a tie-dye field of colors. The process has left the logo visible as a
sheen of a metal substrate against the gloss of Epoxy. The processing
records kept the date and output for each one of 150 different
colorations of the Epoxy, with runs of between 60 and 700 each. A print
on paper or into the record book documented the pattern with this run
number and date.
The uniqueness of the colorations, from the beginning, was
planned as something for individuality to identify with. The individual
owners of each one of these Woodstock'94 tags, regardless of how the
experiment turned out, was to see the choice of that coloration as their
own. The reason for bringing this more cryptic aspect of colors to the
surface now is that the characteristic of color mutability can be
identified to be a way of placing much more value in it as a collectible
than as a cherished souvenir.
From the data saved at the time of
production, it has become possible to match these printings from 1994
today to each coloration's migration patterns, simply by using photo
imaging technology to enlarge and compare one to the other. Over the
intervening quarter century the means and availability for examining
digital high resolution copies has grown exponentially.
What this really means
This has only been waiting for a methodology that
could authenticate that a tag that matches a record fits a registry. It
was waiting for widespread protocols, such as what works with
blockchain, to be possible before 55,000 responses brought this whole
concept under one means of assessing such value. A collectible feature
that works for my obsession with this as the meaning of this
Woodstock'94 experiment will have to be also the default for testing the
limits the concept of uniqueness in art for this to happen.
The statement this is making is about an intermediation of
automated control capabilities between a mechanism and materials, making
natural uniquities that humans are capable of discerning. Each of these
metal tags is actually in a collectible genre that keeps art at an
anticipation level even more deeply mired in mysteries. Disregarding any
association with the name Woodstock or its 25th anniversary logo, the
identifiability of a particular tag's multicolored epoxy print is aimed
at individualizing a unique place in a unique category of the most
valuable collectibles in a market. Bringing this aspect of this property
to the attention of this large number of Woodstock collectible holders
puts the whole market in touch with the potential of registered
rarities.
So the finale of this experiment, as it was always planned,
comes with each and every actual Woodstock'94 tag being matched up to
its digitally based representation in a registry. When, suddenly, the
disclosure of how much physical uniqueness is verifiable in 55,000
individually unique impressions of this high value Woodstock license, in
circulation for twenty five years, the dumping of this concept of a
systemic anomaly on a market just becoming accustomed to digital
possessions, places this large number of Woodstock'94 tag holding
individuals each in possession of something representing a new benchmark
in proof of authenticity.
Finally, a usefulness in all this
Over the twenty five years since releasing these
55,000 products into the wild, the Internet has made digital imagery
commonplace. The ubiquitous digital camera and screen of mobile devices
share images abundantly, making image recognition a priority of many
Deep Learning technology initiatives. The original purpose the
Woodstock'94 logo exercise addressed; prioritizing identifying the
differences between images where each is unique in the vectored
color/field edge-signatures that are literally baked in; permits human
vision to discern the identifiable differences between individual
features that are graphically the same, with the help of digital
enlargement.
But automatic image recognition systems have been evolving and
will soon prove more efficient and practical for this task. What that
brings to this course of inquiry, as this experiment continues to push
the envelope in seeing that the value of uniqueness is a stable system
of exchange brings some more surprises in the future, is a reassessment
of mechanisms in crypto and blockchain. This all is just beginning to
hint about identifying uniqueness in images, instead of digital hash
surrogates, and that brings up the perfect buy-in covered in the next
installments to this series.
The Tag
Remembering things that are memories
The whole narrative here on Medium looks deeply into
how art handles trust. The value of an art work's provenance is just
like a blockchain protocol's thread of attribution.
That is to say, what this is about is the experiment in the previous
installment, recorded as identifiable characteristics of chance, that in
being from a mechanized production of unique objects, is comparable to
images of the digital era for an exercise that demonstrates proof of
authenticity.
The theme of this work is understandable if it fits this criteria. The
geometry and plans for infinite knots this theme introduces, are capable
of being comprised of infinite forms, all originating in that single
system.
The examples here show how blockchain protocol makes art a bridge where
making, or keeping, things of value, supports fungible references to
transactions, giving them real, trusted value. Art makes things that are
a cross between the ID tag and the credit card.
For instance, I have a two-dollar bill. It is three things to me. First,
because these are seldom seen, it's reason for denominational existence
interests me. Next, I'm sentimental about it because it was given to me
by my son who got it at a Phish concert where he was selling Lorax tee
shirts. Lastly, there is a theme in the engraving that is curiously
limited to it alone.
I also have a twenty dollar bill with a different aesthetic; in a sense.
It is encrusted in the mud of the mosh pit at Woodstock'94. I consider
it an artifact just as I do the two dollar bill. Both are more valuable
than the purchase power they would have with no story behind them.
This is the concept I will use to close ranks on blockchain as I begin
to make it an example of an unencumbered way of turning trust that
stories are true, to trusting in the value of truth.
Nodes of knowledge of things
A constructive use for today's Internet that looks toward the Web's
function in the future, is used here as we go back to when the idea of
mechanisms alluded to the creative experience of work; as in handsaws
and wheelbarrows. That connection to work is part of this experiment's
endgame. Aligning that with the concept of making the value of
Woodstock'94 collectibles fit in with blockchain's sense of work is
essential to this appearing to be in blockchain space. The contemporary
imagination's sense of sharing stories, in the sense of triggering a
like-minded crowd to form an identity, needs to keep each unique
object's story associated with working toward a shared history and
shared memories.
The story that links a few hundred thousand individuals with these tags
is a parable that begins with why the tag was chosen and how this
experiment began. That goes back to the time before receiving the
license for the Woodstock'94 logo; to when the SignOn to the Spirit
program was initiated as a productive use for the inexpensive substrates
found convenient for testing the durability of Epoxy colors.
The ID tag was a perfect choice for playing with the word "tag" to match
these stampings. The dog tag form, combined with the meaning of the word
as a mark left at a place that would be found on a return visit, brought
this whole program together. The imprint of a multicolor butterfly was
the front, and the back had a number on it to match the owner to a panel
he or she had put their signature on. These are shown in this post, and
the program's banners and its information center can be seen captured in
many of the videos shot of Woodstock'94 that have made their way to
YouTube.
By the time the licensed art for the Woodstock'94 logo was in hand there
had already been several months of these butterfly tests; their tag
sales; and signature panels filled as visitors responded to the news of
where the concert was going to be held; scouting it out. A collection of
these numbered panels is used as the header of this post.
For the production of the Woodstock'94 tags the experience with these
was simply expanded into a stricter record keeping process. The “spirit”
of Woodstock as a festival of arts was planned to be captured in the
different multicolor compositions by having each come from an artist's
imagination. Each “edition” is a distinctly different “painting” of five
to seven colors, nearly all done by the artist Vladimir Bachinsky.
The 150 colorations have license attributions on their back; and also
there is a special coloration for direct MTV sales recognizable from the
custom commemorative design on its back. All of these were kept close
tabs on. Royalties on the logo use required auditing their production
and sale. But there were also tens of thousands for which records were
not kept, not just from the SignOn program, but many more.
The birth of a genre of collectibles
As this series of posts progresses, a concept will
emerge of image recognition that will have this all making more sense.
The tens of thousands over and above the 55,000 that we'll stick with
here; as the experiment with records that make establishing their value
easy; are equally different, one to the other, and are equally out
there, too. Everything common to this period of production has the same
indicators that make them a collectible type of tag, even beyond being
specifically related to the time of Woodstock'94. They're what's waiting
for these baby steps toward image recognition to emerge and make them
discoverable.
Among the wild cards are the many demonstrations that were done before
the license. The so called poster format had untold numbers distributed
as give-aways. A variant of this was actually used for a numbered
edition called media tags for their use by the event organizers as part
of press kits. There were a hundred of these, each serialized by laser
engraving. They are noticeable in videos on YouTube where interviewers
are roaming through the crowds.
The most appealing, in my opinion, are the just-for-fun tags made by the
production crew for themselves as they got the chance to play around
with the process. These have images of pot leaves, peace signs, skulls,
and the like. The most favored of these seen in the videoed crowds is
the ironic use of a colorful peace sign on a military dog tag. Most of
these are on the older hippies.
A number of requests came in for band logos. These were produced in
small batches by our production crew; as fans. A contract for Nine Inch
Nails came out of these that followed their “Self Destruct Tour” with
custom venue locations and dates printed on the back. This had nearly
all the overages sold to the Columbia House catalog, so nearly all are
out there.
There was great pressure to follow a merchandise manufacturing model
that, toward the end, became as outdated as the original patents. This
direction turned into a business that performed more as a homage to the
last of the art of making mechanisms that make things, as dozens of
imaginative interactive programs fell under that lens, like: the 50th
Anniversary of WWII and of the Korean War; the complete induction list
for the Baseball Hall of Fame; Kennedy Space Center International Space
Station missions; plebe and graduation classes of West Point; band tours
for P-Funk, and then Woodstock's 30th anniversary as Woodstock'99.
From this short half dozen years there are hundreds of thousands more
uniquely identifiable epoxy prints on aluminum tags. Between
Woodstock'94 and Woodstock'99, as this proof-of-concept track was left
to run its course of testing new substrates and develop new product and
program ideas; in the year 2001, all the prototypes and documentation
for these experiments were mothballed, and the technology was never
again used.
The foreseeable prophetics of blockchain
If the devices of these Beta tests had been in use in
different times, they, themselves, as mechanisms, may have been the
subject of this genre product of the tag; like tee shirts are; taken for
granted; and the tags would be left to be simply memorabilia. But due to
the times, these tags end up as actual objects of experimentation unique
to a world transitioning toward the virtual. In that light, this tag
output stands as a unique and rare signpost along the journey toward
finding different ways of seeing things.
In the big picture, co-opting this “chance” to tell this story of
testing the creativity of mechanisms, to take tags beyond being just
genre bling and way beyond the Woodstock'94 tags, is going to require a
stretch of the imagination. As a "beta" absorbing the changes happening
during a span of time when digital was becoming ubiquitous, and the
Internet was going through an introductory phase similar to what
blockchain is in now, the real thing being built here is a critical mass
of awareness in the owners of these tags.
This can be exploited as a user-base for a higher level beta's
experiments. An art of bridging between mechanisms of the past and a
digital future is right now showing signs of becoming as conceptual as
the Internet paradigm was in 1994. It was then when I first tried to
draw a picture of technology demonstrating a vision of blockchain's
impending arrival.
In that light, the way of utilizing Internet functionality that the next
installment of this series looks into will need to steer an unknown
cohort of 55,000 Woodstock'94 tag owners, by using an objective record
from the tag's production as 150 identifiably unique colorations, toward
becoming a Distributed Autonomous Organization. The story of the
original distribution initiated in an experiment is then made a test of
the reach and function of social media for attracting and sorting
through images of select individual properties assumed to be held by a
demographic that are users of Facebook. This shifts the focus onto the
algorithms that are continually looking for data within Facebook's
archives. Using this archive as a registry and search mechanism is
proposed to be co-optable as a provenance record for these tags, and
usable for establishing their value in a collectibles marketplace.
Raw Data
Forget everything you know about blockchain
In the previous posts we've learned why we have tags
and why they have images on them. That has been put in the context of
why memorabilia is important and why some is more valuable than others.
Now we are looking at how the thread of ownership that individuals hold
in the story of such objects identifies them.
The context of this has been made for us. A course leading toward
disintermediation in the collectibles market with the inevitability of
the decentralized Web3.0 Internet has already begun. So the opportunity
of gathering together 55,000 Woodstock'94 tag owners in one seminal
event of autonomous network building, for that market, while the
sovereign identity of Woodstock is being recognized in its 50th
anniversary year, could be the last chance to make this benchmark in
technology’s emergence forever set as a distributed ledger concept, to
mark a moment like no other to get the attention of the world.
Creations here are demonstrating that technology will soon be able to
recognize individually unique objects intentionally created to be
identifiable. Image recognition capabilities will exist for doing that.
So we are very close to the disoriented crowd being a distributed base
of individualized identifiers where every one is an image existing as
raw data filling some position... digital ledger or not.
Signs, sigils, symbols and signets
The experiment explained in the previous installments
anticipated a role where graphic-endowed objects had deeper,
cryptographic, meanings. A 1960s perspective may have brought an
idealistic approach, in 1994, guilty of thinking this would naturally be
sensed, evolve, and have interoperability with search engines that would
take the next logical step toward making an accompanying autonomous
hoard of information exist solely as digital images of verifiable
identities, simply through the need to rank and file them.
Had that been the course taken, aluminum ID tags made of materials
permanent enough to preserve such graphics until today would have made
their provenance a touchstone for the foresight of a blockchain and
consensus protocol, and a trustlessly evaluation methodology would have,
well before now, already been embedded in the Internet.
Nonetheless, blockchain is now here to let us see the irony in having a
technology described in the previous installment; patented for
controlling precise sameness; used to make identifiable variations a
litmus test for recognizing differences; still waiting for an age that
sees that. This unquestionably signals that both centralization and
blockchain are a long way from reaching the promise of the Internet.
Letting the market lead
Hindsight is reaching a state of art here. What could
never have been considered in this story of Woodstock'94 tags twenty-
five years in the past, suddenly can be alluded to as blockchain
protocol; as a reminder that many times the 55,000 owners of
Woodstock'94 tags may be ready to take a deep dive into its arcane
verification concepts... when this is about their possessions.
These are the times we are in. What I'd expected art to be on the
Internet by now has turned out taking a deviant course to become screen
candy as selfie pictures, memes and interactive game bling. Today's
collectibles market is only now in a tenuous stage of having absorbed
just enough awareness of blockchain to consider what is unproven to be
risky... and now there are digital registries: what should have been
here a long time ago as a foundation for taking away risk when actual
objects are valuable.
Now, the likelihood that a very large distributed base of these tags,
spread out across the country and around the world, will surface during
the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival in 2019 to become engaged
in a collectibles market, just as identity verification and
securitization use-cases are entering the world of blockchain, adds to
what is counted on being here; but is actually not.
The real kickoff is 55,000 realizing their stake in understanding how
blockchain benefits the value of their personal possession. What comes
next for them must be an idea that will prepare the world to experience
blockchain from the perspective of the qualities found in art:
appreciation of the links between sovereign identities and recording
them as digital image identifiers of their actual tag objects, with
actual provenance. Approaching images as references to private and
public keys (as where blockchain applies cryptographic surrogates from
randomly generated numbers) identifying an individual's published
possession.
Using an actual creation as source for such keys is the big idea here.
That's not going to work for blockchain. The protocol there is all about
building a house of cards. Its digital token structure, bet in a card
game on a reward for work that moves the game's progress toward
usefulness, isn't materially necessary where the value of a collectible
is expected to have already appreciated, with time its token. These
Woodstock'94 tags work in the opposite way to a token.
Tags were purchased on the basis of their representation of
completeness, having value in the licensed event memorabilia context of
a twenty five years ago event. The buy-in on value is considered already
complete.
Social media as an environment for art
The statement made by the tag is that data now has a
new perspective, valued by the scarcity, originality, and uniqueness
that the art market is governed by. When adding this new information
that's been hidden for years, this becomes the parameters of a new
system in a market that is always looking to the hidden corners for
newness.
Information at the intersection of art and technology opens up a
completely new aspect of ownership. It is far more complex than the
value of a curated souvenir or certified artwork in the way it orients
the holder toward a totally new story of the Internet where it is
expected that comprehension is as one unified group, equally, acting
together; building this newfound investment and reaping the benefits.
This system needs a nurturing environment, not an app. The holders of
these tags are learning that each tag has unique data, made purposeful
to them because there is an Internet. As an individual owner of a place
in a registry, their tag adds to their personality as a part of their
most familiar social activity on the Internet. How a distributed ledger
works and what that means to their social standing are concerns already
inbred into their relationship with social media.
The only way to receive a direct benefit from this chance windfall of
value is to grow it from an individual possession of a tag to a position
with the power to investigate the validity of claims from the other
55,000 owners. In terms of blockchain, this falls under a proof-of-stake
process where admitting any tag into the registry is in the individual's
best interest and accessing all 55,000 unknown owners is in the interest
of the market. So a constant reviewing of new entries into the registry
has every legitimate owner sharing the responsibility of protecting the
value of everyone else's unique tag, publicly, on the Internet, through
Facebook.
Street art performance and marketplaces
Facebook, as a platform, may be close enough to the gut level of a
network on the Internet to function as the neighborhood crack house, but
that is exactly what is necessary. Whereas blockchain is thought to be
mysterious, what Facebook does to function is barely reflected upon by
its users who just have to know it supplies what they want. Barely a
second thought is given to the workings of Facebook's familiar user
interface as it moves the intended signals between individuals.
In actuality, what Facebook is doing is no different from reading what a
node does for a distributed ledger in blockchain. Every social media
user knows their place in a parent/child structure of comment and emoji
communications they've sent to “friends”. Similarly, when this takes
place in a node mechanism's framework to reach consensus on a
distributed ledger decision in blockchain, it could just as well be
gathering a distributed base together on Facebook to achieve the same
thing.
Ignoring the immensely important issues of autonomy and decentralizing
authority, a centralized platform can expedite everything a blockchain
needs to do. And by using Facebook's gut level access to an archive it
keeps for the analytics attached to each Facebook identity, already set
up, as a protocol for a rudimentary lizard brain function, there is a
ready-made access to what the Internet really does today, which is
support a marketplace.
The way this would function is: a friend, making a comment to a post, is
also an identity on the Internet, and that connection assigns them a
connection to Woodstock'94 tags. In all subsequent social media
behavior, as in a simple thumbs up or down to make a decision on
authenticity in a consensus operation, their identity, by virtue of
recognition in tag owner activities, gives eligibility for involvement
in a governance protocol within the sub-thread architecture of a post as
part of a Distributed Autonomous Organization.
A transactional management system, acting as a decentralized market by
applying algorithms to a search context, is the most interesting
application of the Facebook archive. These archives absorb every
activity into each address identity, so tapping into Facebook's back
space is a collaboration with the users of analytics, which makes the
files at these addresses real identities, with statistics accumulated
through Facebook on this Woodstock’94 tag activity, also.
In summary, I am using the rare opportunity of these tag products, sold
in the months before and after Woodstock'94, existing in a virgin state
of value development, to test a social media platform for creating a
chain of identities open to the whole Internet, as a market that
blockchain token wallets would support in a similar situation. How
Woodstock'94 tags are worked into Facebook, as a recognized subject in
its knowledge base, so its data interconnections reach a vastly larger
decentralized collectibles exchange than otherwise possible, is what is
in the next installment.
The Meme
Meaningful Memes
There is a bit of “maker” identity that runs along
with the idea of graphics, and other stuff of hands-on origins that fit
a human sense of proportion. As this work gets nearer to the closing
topic, this will take on a higher degree of importance.
The foray into Facebook of the last post targeted the place on line
where each of these Woodstock'94 tags' 150 different color compositions
has the best chance to attract the maximum attention. 150 memes in 150
places with their threads are going to try their best to have 55,000
sub-places there join them.
Each meme is a representation of a color composition plus the number
made and the date of that run; from the production record. Each of these
tie-dye-looking arrangements of 7 or 8 colors backing up the logo is
totally different, one to the other. Their runs of between 60 and 700
look all the same but, on close examination, are each slightly different
from each other, too.
These Woodstock'94 licensed logo graphics are made from a rare process
of manufacture that purposely makes them collectible. No two are alike
within a run of tags of the same color composition. As previously
described in post two and three, the process simultaneously depletes and
migrates the colors from deposit to deposit. The difference between tags
can be observed in their magnification, and if two are absolutely alike,
the actual object is available to validate the true digital copy.
Finding the best match of platform features
Eight tags, randomly selected, made into this meme
format, kicks off https://facebook.com/greatknot. After being first
tested on a number of other social media platforms to find out if the
plan was practical, what worked out was using the meme's storage address
from a post on Steemit, to open the graphic in a separate tab when
clicking the image of the Facebook post. The new window has it in the
original high resolution in a 6X enlargeable viewer, with panning at the
highest zoom. This is perfect for a precise comparison to another tag
image to assess their differences.
This graphic file can also be opened in its own Internet page from any
browser, without needing to be in the Facebook platform. The tag in the
meme is a scan from the original kept as a sample along with the
production specs from the print run. The scan is on a black background
at 1200 dpi and cropped to a three-inch-per-side image area. The date of
manufacturing and the run number are inserted in the black background to
give it the appearance of an informational meme.
In each meme's
text, placed just after the number of tags of this color composition
produced, is the question “...is one yours?”. This is destined to be the
seminal invitation to the new web order. There is an origin story being
built here of putting individuals alongside these tags, and their record
of date and run numbers, in a class of individually unique objects
intentionally created to be identifiable.
Playing with a centralized system
The Facebook page, with its meme posts in this
exercise are created to attract the attention of 55,000 individuals;
bring them to recognize that their presence on Facebook constitutes a
Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO); and, as the original,
present, or future collectors of Woodstock'94 tags, connect with a
governance system natural to the logic built into posts on Facebook as
their attitude of judging the authenticity of what is admitted, or
excluded, in social media.
This is to ready 55,000 for a governance process I will need from them
later. But as a foundation for that, this practices a protocol where
images have been made to be the keys to understanding digital asset
development, and that all hinges on the most familiar Internet platform
in the world; Facebook; sharing a function made to benefit data
annalists, used here to track a provenance trail of ownership.
Every time a different meme is put up on this Facebook page, until the
total 150 separate colorations are posted, a graphic post is created at
the head of an architecture where a web of threads function as the
immutable input, like the blocks of a blockchain represent. An owner of
a tag that looks like the one in that particular meme will add a thread
that will follow a process for putting an image of their tag in a
comment that registers it under that particular post.
Those that register their image into a thread of its parent meme are
supplying something like a block of data that a public Internet
platform, like Facebook, recognizes as important to its function of
tracking trends and preferences.
In this, a trend or preference topic is the Woodstock'94 logo license,
and that makes it like a genesis block that an algorithm finds and puts
the tag with. Thus, every registry process is blended into a data bank
of provenance in common with all others who have gone through the same
process to make a tag findable as a valuable collectible.
Being a decentralized actor in a centralized system
Follow this process:
1.) look on https://facebook.com/greatknot/ to see if a tag has
been posted that looks the same as yours
2.) if there is one, scan the one you have (without the chain and with a
black piece of paper behind it) at 1200 dpi and crop the background to
just larger than the tag.
3.) if this image is to your satisfaction, click on the camera icon in
the comment under the meme that looks like it and upload the scan to the
comment
4.) left click on your uploaded image on Facebook, copy the location,
and put this address with your tag as its registry number.
The process you went through staked a claim to be a child of that
particular meme. You submitted it for acceptance into the registry by
posting it. It is available to be investigated and commented upon by
anyone on the Internet with access to this public Facebook page.
This submitting of a tag for registry is considered proof-of-
work; like in Bitcoin mining. Time and skill given to the digitizing is
the work. This work is directly related to successful registry in this
claim process, so it must be of the highest quality. When this is
entered as a comment on the Facebook page, Facebook immediately gives it
an archive location associated with that thread. That archive's code is
unique, and represents the prime source for identifying the value of the
actual tag in its digital state on the Internet. This digital asset is
what is sold as the right to possess the actual tag.
That is really important because this identity will forever represent
the actual tag's data as a registered tag. The work in this proof-of-
work that consisted of making an excellent scan to digitize the actual
tag, and submitting it to governance through public comparison to all
other tags, vouches for its unique characteristics by following the
standards every one of the 55,000 tags also has in becoming registered.
In Provenance We Trust
The tag's digital image is the place in the thread
that is authenticated. The scan that makes the image is in an address in
the Facebook archive. The tag that was the source of the scan is in the
possession of the owner. The digital image and the numeric address only
verify registry of the authenticity of the original. When an offer to
purchase a tag is made the transaction is added to the thread and the
identity of the new owner and original owner become part of the thread.
So, it is as a holder of a child tag to a parent meme; as one of the 150
total color variations of that licensed Woodstock'94 graphic; that an
individual makes claim to authenticity of for their tag. This “work”
introduces that individual to an algorithm that pulls together the basic
concept that a base layer assessment has a higher complexity level than
the totality of the database. It's this group identity that is accepted
as what governs a distributed ledger decision of what fits a tag in the
registry, or not.
That sense of trustless identity gives this registry, under a
centralized authority’s recognition of a license to the copyright’s
value as an identify of Woodstock’94 tag, a sub-thread of a thread of a
post of a meme on a page of Facebook as a place in a market.
Participation in this registry only provides the value of a digital
identity via the archive address. Everything related to that numeric
code is certification of the owner’s physical tag, and any change in
that actual tag’s state or ownership is a sub-thread to that digital
image’s reference on the meme’s thread.
The digital image that matches the data in the archive is immutable.
Even if the original tag object ceases to exist, the virtual image and
the material on the thread remain as its record. As far as the
immutability of the whole registry and its DAO are concerned, it is in
their digital form.
A digital meme image translated to a numeric code is an artifact of the
early days of Web2.0 when centralization of platforms had not yet taken
hold, and the original research protocols the Internet started out with
were the open and free space of this Facebook archive. This
certification mechanism takes advantage of an opportunity that is a
remnant of a structure built on earlier paradigms. The logic of direct
digital authentication of an identity in an untethered Internet address'
file transfer protocol is what this work will move on to paying more
attention to in its referencing of a Web3.0 direction.
Mechanism Think
Sleight of hand
A simple summary of the posts preceding this is that mechanisms
represented there produced things with identities in platforms and
protocols that Internet users prefer to interact with. The Internet has
grown out of this. Consequently, a decentralized influence across the
Internet works only if it sells the idea of new mechanisms. In that
context, the legacy way to identify Woodstock’94 tags has been upended
suddenly, after twenty-five years, by making it a thing that is
individually unique. If a user connects that to a mechanism, and that
makes sense of this discovery of things by 55,000 uniquely different
others, all identify with places in a registry.
It is now time to segue into the second half of these dozen
installments.
“Mechanism think”; from my earliest making of tools for the first
systemic art works of 1967 to the reason for creating a setting for a
Webcam in 2001; has brought adaptive thinking as a creative medium for
art to my art. This is what brought an immediate mothballing of my
technology used for the tags when I realized the Internet had
transitioned from an audience amused by sleight of hand tricks into an
interactive mechanism.
That set me on a course toward building an artwork whose only purpose
was to get the attention of that sense of an Internet. My vision was a
of strange composite of the ephemeral, in the digital image, and the
permanence of stone, formed into the Great Knot land art sculpture
first; and, later, have me prepared for when this discovery of
blockchain’s readiness, now, brings a more familiar place for my more
refined art of the knot to the Internet. The digital image had taken
over my conceptualization of things to the point that my concept of
perpetual creation had become a participatory mechanism.
The provenance of Place
In 2016, after fifteen years of building the Great Knot sculptural
environment, I took it public with a published history about the site,
and a canonical set of shots taken from viewpoints I'd designed into it.
An entire aspect of my left/right-brain-split-website,
http://www.greatknot.com, expansively covers the gestalt.
The process of picture-taking is the main point of this conceptual art.
This is the most grand mechanism it is possible for a responsive mind to
have. As a conceptual artist I made an actual object as a work to
display a notorious presence so things that exist virtually as pictures,
made of it by others, in another's creative experience, can have
something that externalizes what inspires them.
There is a lot to parse in this, but it all comes down to shots, taken
from the spots I took them from in 2016, by arbitrary individuals today
(or in a future time), supposedly by pure chance, all find their way
onto the Internet to be together in a Google Images gallery. When
their's join together with mine there a conceptual art has been created.
Their equally unique semblances of the factual presence of the actual
sculpture demonstrates all our individual perspectives on its existence.
These perspectives are all from the point of view of the camera as a
mechanism. That is the “lens” on a picture that is factual to the
scene's object state. A momentary view is a virtual instance of the
sculpture created as a digital record of a unique data set whose
attributes strictly stem from a specific compositional choice that I, as
the conceptual artist, created. The picture must have something to
picture for the mechanism and operator of it to be the creators of
imagery that was made to be pictured.
Seeing the digital camera user as a “smart” mechanism, capable of
illustrating the scarcity of a moment, contributes to the value of the
picture. Considering the curatorial work of placing it on the Internet,
this binds the picture's identity to the conceptual art. Each posted
picture of the Great Knot sculpture is, by itself, a different capture
of the natural conditions of time and place hosted by an artwork created
for taking that picture.
The sheer volume in the number of pictures that may be taken of the same
view, looking into the future, is unlimited, in this sense. Each
snapshot has a value that is strictly based on the existential material
in the camera's metadata. The phenomenon of “capturing the moment”
allows the art to continue to be scarce forever... every moment being
different. The picture taken is an observer's memory of a present
encounter with their time's instance of the Great Knot, whereas the
picture, to the concept, is individually valued as an individualized
component of the art.
So the takeaway from the Great Knot is the same as the new revelations
of value in the Woodstock'94 tag explained in the past three posts.
Mechanisms making objects of fact are a honest broker for the value
found in every observer's chance encounter with an opportunity to
appreciate realizing it. Both the subjective view of the Great Knot and
the chance ownership of a tag that matches a meme are out of my control.
There is no control over who takes the photograph or when that random
photographer's creation will become an image on the Internet. It is a
part of the Great Knot's plan for its location to be an openly
accessible place that is most visible and most attractive to visitors.
So the choice of when to stop, and look, and press the button to take
the picture, is an individual's, not something arranged or permitted.
This makes the Great Knot a decentrialized example of permissionless
proof of authenticity.
A picture is worth a thousand perspectives
As mechanisms of systemic thinking there is no daylight between a
Woodstock'94 tag and the land art, in that both inspire pictures with
this unique approach to proving authenticity. Printing a logo with a
special process a quarter century ago, that's now the property of a
random, unknown individual I have no direct contact with, who has
discovered the value of their possession from a meme on the Internet,
and a picture of my Great Knot on the Internet, are one and the same.
The whole Internet is one large mechanism that continually crafts a
statement about everything going through some disintermediating
technology that could be making an art, depending on the perspective.
These pictures of the Great Knot and the memes of the tag are but bits
of code and metadata unique to the moment that they, or the graphic
characteristics of any object, are communicated on the Internet.
If it were not for a mechanism, metadata would be all the information on
both the tag and snapshot used to give them presence. Everything else is
just a participatory memory. The way the tag's logo is a recognizably
different visual in each impression is a way of freezing someone's
personal reflection on the Woodstock idea's cultural impact. That is
what makes both the tag and its picture, and the sculpture and its
picture, understandable. Each ends up an individual's post on the
Internet show a unique personal sense of being among others that share
an experience. Symbolic or factual, the behavior is totally human.
These are variants on the ways information distributes multiple
narratives of the same relationship. The tag is gathering a cohort from
among possessors of tags, and the Great Knot is testing the recognition
of a setting for doing the same thing. On the surface the use-case of
150 memes of memorabilia recognizable to billions of Internet users,
within their comfort zone of Facebook, introduces an understanding of
how keepsakes, instead of individuals, trigger a rudimentary consensus
behavior called governance. But, in truth, ever since it was first made
technically possible to decide which information is worthy of spreading,
a mechanism has done that.
The Logic of Actual Things
With the diversity of ways social media is understood, it cannot be
counted on to build a convincing cohort into a proprietary database for
these experiments. That is not the goal. What can be counted on is a
whole lot of these 55,000 tag holders suddenly finding value in their
Woodstock'94 tags, and a whole lot of the traveling public discovering
their picture of the Great Knot is placed in an on-line gallery, solely
as an intervention of an algorithm.
It's just a matter of time before social networking environments are
tasked with bringing consensus to the Internet through such sampling by
algorithms. Structuring patterns of reality on an observation of
stakeholders bootstrapping a system, without them ever knowing each
other, is the way this narrative has presented a concept that works to
get the attention of algorithms.
That's where this is going. The average user of the Internet is already
sharing unchanneled imagery, and social media's big data aggregators are
recognizing that human behavior has this mechanistic structure. They
count on having a knowledge of interests built on desires to seek out
information for understanding value, and this, through behavior, as a
competitive motivation that asserts itself as an expression through
consensus. What has been brought to the fore in the example presented
here is a rudimentary mechanism working in this context. It is showing
the content in imagery capable of intermediation in the auditing
processes of algorithms. In other words, the algorithms used for finding
matches are being trained to see similarities in diversity.
While purely sentimental meaning can still be embedded in feelings of
ownership of a Woodstock’94 collectible, or in the recognition of a
snapshot of the Great Knot, on-line; what is to be taken from this is
that its introduction to blockchain’s part in conceptual art is, that by
linking thoughts about things to things, the mind, as a mechanism, is
brought into an even deeper dive toward what’s inevitable.
Digital tags and snapshots are examples of ways possessions are built as
incentives to prompt us to learn more about this sense of mechanism. It
bootstraps a way of understanding blockchain, by opening a channel to a
deeper sense of what makes things go beyond possessions, and enter the
space of things that are more like extensions of a sovereign identity.
This obviously must capture the symbolic implication of the cultural
relationship with Woodstock’s underlying truth. That done, trusting in
this to have added value to a decision to let this be the mechanism
responsible for explaining disintermediation of the Web3.0 world, puts
these preliminaries behind us and moves headlong into the core subject
of this work in its second half.
The Ontology of Rabbit Holes
If you say so...
The past several posts have developed a story of 55,000 mechanism-formed
ideas. These take on the character of many unique things. Each is an
individual's unique possession. Now, twenty-five years later, an image
is made for each, making them 55,000 mechanisms. Numbers are assigned
until there are 55,000 unique references for each. Then the merits of
the relationships to their original ideas are merged with Facebook's
Web2.0 idea of a mechanism to make their 55,000 unique identities into
data-points to leave us with a narrative for how humans actually need to
assume the behavior of mechanisms to trust what actually exists.
To the extent that the manipulation suggested by this makes social media
do the work, a teachable moment is what has been created. But, beyond
that, a better example in passively waiting for the digital images to do
this on their own is given in the example of the Great Knot. Doing
nothing but keep fingers crossed, hoping that a critical mass structures
itself into an autonomous governance mechanism to formalize this
ontogeny into a verification process for identity will also work.
Through just letting an autonomous cohort function automatically, this
experiment in interactivity is meant to open consciousness to the
realization that there is always an actual possession and always a
surrogate of it in the Web2.0 world. What got baked in in the beginning
of the intermediation era; in the model of art; has always been there,
in copies carrying the attributes of the original's reputation.
That situation for securing an identity's true existence, from the point
of view of authenticating 55,000 Woodstock'94 tags in this trial, was
from the perspective of the Web3.0 world. That demonstration of the
feasibility of a guide/guardian protocol to bring into play the concept
of preserving the surrogates as interpreters of the truth -- that is
what has been set up in the first half of this work.
The second half
There is a vast change from that order of things now. Art makes a run at
not being a mechanism that builds tangible objects. To get a grip on
this, http://mssmith44.tripod.com/mapapp/procession.html tests a type of
web presence, carrying the title of "Paragraphs on Perceptual Art" to be
an interface with a virtual entanglement perspective. The title
references the influential Sol LeWitt treatise “Paragraphs on Conceptual
Art”; from the same 1967 year as the origins of my art of the knot. This
single page site was put together following Christie's early 2018 foray
into digitally rare art in auctioning an ERC721 ownership contract for a
Cryptokitty. It will bring everything together when this series is
completed.
LeWitt's beginning of his commentary in his “Paragraphs” with “the idea
becomes a machine that makes art” stages what allows art to be virtual
today. Though the possession of the art that this implies may be in an
entirely different dimension than Woodstock'94 tags or pics of the Great
Knot, it nonetheless represents the state they've been presented in
here. Their back story follows a course through the twists of fate being
played out as mechanisms struggled to reach out; and goes right up to
when virtual images evolved to the point where everyone accepted that
electronic media had eclipsed all need for signature relationships with
physical tools in art making. That makes the idea that LeWitt's
machine-making-art explains this twenty-five year old connection not so
far fetched an origin story at all.
My White Paper at http://www.greatknot.com is a mechanism. Interpreted
as conceptual art, it need do nothing more than have drafted the
specifications of my art. These needn't make anything. Nothing need even
be completed even if I happen to have started something. Like plans of
works by Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson, created during the same period
my plan for knots was first drawn up, that are executed today, long
after their deaths, in conceptual art's reading of art, art's value is
relative to what this White Paper and its meet-up space on Patreon says
is its value as a concept.
All Web3.0 art is conceptual
Make no mistake; there is an actual, physical, material work in the
making. Its been disintermediated from me, just as the Great Knot land
art sculpture is, to make it conceptual art. In the world of an Internet
of Things, every attribute and citation is preserved at the end of a
protocol action. What is going to be its link to my original conceptual
art are threads of a concept in Web3.0 from what must someday revert in
a temporal use to its origins. That's in the plan.
As an oracle, in contests that value specifications for their
trustworthiness, or in uses directly related to how much the idea has
been referenced as a precedent, or proof, for verifying a state of
origin, the “Things” of this conceptual art will have their reputation
staked, as a witness' is, on what is actually; for instance; a true work
of Sol LeWitt; which is to say, leaving any mark leaves a legacy. Art is
always perpetuating ideas in a history that has ended up reiterating
every practical function its ever been put to.
This treats the Third Web, in fact, as the ultimate form of conceptual
art. In an Internet of Things, things have lives, and lives have value.
In the present Web2.0 ecosystem, things are represented as virtual
reality inhabiting the dimension of a device. When that device can
associate value with virtual reality's relationship to it, it will have
developed the potential of populating a level of imagination that has
existed in the realm of art since the beginning of recorded time.
The trick in being an art planned to be interjected into the protocols
of a decentralized Web3.0 Internet, is that the art must be the fair
start established for its own genesis state. The conceptual art in my
White Paper is an example of an art almost totally geared to subvert
today's Web 2.0 way of fitting image recognition programs into its
curative operations. Its fifty year old thesis assumes that the
receptivity of big data to redundant image appearance in this work's
three informational meme themes of the knot, the Woodstock'94 tag, and
photographs of the Great Knot, will all be read as equally real... just
of different states of reality. As object categories, these three all
accept that Deep Learning will question their purely virtual paradigms,
and challenge that in a deeper dive into the conceptualization of
mechanisms blockchain consensus is needed for as totally new images
enter Third Web space.
The technology is on the way and the White Paper is ready to create that
state of confusion. By each knot being a meme that appears to display
the particular structure of a mechanism with a specification created to
design an image that the analytics in Machine Learning interpret and
identify as an image of digital, not natural, origin; it is a true fit
for this Third Web's recognition of the virtual reality of a state of
digital imagery.
However, this art of the knot additionally provides the Third Web with
images beyond description that fall into a category of mental objects.
These transcend this White Paper's world that is compositions in a
geometry of precisely placed repetitions of a finite set of linearities,
following a routine protocol of shapes developed into patterns bound by
lines, that act as paths passing in dimensions populating perceivable
space. This is easily imagined within a human's recognition of reality
as a plan. A mechanism without imagination could never comprehend it.
Setting up the Third Web
Fitting the human imagination in as a specification for the creation of
actual knots has been greatly simplified in just showing how the actual
Woodstock'94 tag's ownership is differentiated from a virtual image, and
fitting that to the present human perception of authenticity. The
important relationship the Great Knot offers is as a figment of
constructive space for a physical manifestation of this. But it is still
the actual stylistic colorations and natural changes in form in the
tags, where the truth rests in the image of a physical object; and when
the land art sculpture is set up to pose for its digital portrait; for
the record; that is what is being set up to capture a system of truth
here.
These show conceptual art principles that demonstrate that a virtual
relationship can grow autonomous identification qualifiers in the course
of being translated into cyphers to fit the Internet's digital state of
being. Setting the stage for a baseline value for primary source
identities is what would have the experiments eventually end up exposing
the paradoxical world of Web2.0.
More clearly stated, the Woodstock'94 tags introduced speculation that
Deep Learning capabilities have an ability to convey a conceptual
statement about the collaboration between the totally material past and
stewardship roles found in big data discoveries of significant
properties of that past. In this case, instead of leaving authenticity
as restatements of resources, the oracle's claim removes these
competitive pressures by assigning a “false” category to the natural
variables of virtual reality. This is a concept where every physical
object has a proof-of-responsibility; or reputation; task, making
consensus and blockchain necessary as the only truly responsible
verification proof of truth.
Philosophically, Deep Learning should only support a checklist naturally
grown as a chain of title or chain of evidence from threads of chains
big data algorithms glean in their image identification capabilities as
prospectively informative, and as these evolve through Deep Learning
into knowledge, the history, of what and when learning takes place from
it, becomes what human understanding is. That is the promise of a next
Web to the world.
This was the big idea, represented in the Woodstock'94 tag, as it
abstracted tags into a form that a Distributed Autonomous Organization
can be built out from; a form natural to a human way of comprehending
truth. Fact checking by the guardians of actual objects that are
referenced in such a history of authenticity, or are added to the source
of proofs that do not confirm this history, amplify a systemic
propensity toward “truths” acceptable to consensus that is supported by
knowledge.
This understanding of a decentralized knowledge base is helped
enormously by the posts that follow. The tag's immutable signature turns
out to be a paradigm of crypto-mechanical reproduction converging
different dimensions of attention onto a way of thinking that prepares
for the tests the White Paper on knots holds in store.
The White Paper
Creating a prime example
There are blaring inadequacies in any goal set on securing
confidentiality in blockchain when its public good is best recognized as
the ability to autonomously ascribe reputations to actions and objects
by making their value unencumbered by doubt. The significance in
reducing my art of the knot to a White Paper for conceptualizing this
premise as a system made of interpretable features of immutable knots to
build a platform that perpetuates both the actual and virtual
transaction of their value is what this post is about.
Knots are used to illustrate an ideal concept of trust for good reason.
They propose something that can demonstrate blockchain in the position
of being a core mechanism. Blockchain keeps order in my systemic probes
into endlessly creating knots, and follows the discovery of each knot in
a base that promises a way for me to continue generating their unique
graphic properties forever, as an autonomously functioning Internet art.
A White Paper is a statement of the intention to put something to use.
In this case, that is blockchain. As previously explained, this is in
the context of a conceptual art that has already been worked out for
some fifty years now. The web site that provides this statement is full
of all the things an artist gets involved in when zeroing in on a way to
make such a longstanding idea functional. The work you are reading here,
written specifically for Medium, is for sending the reader to a web site
to be involved in a White Paper that is about a function of blockchain
within this art.
This web site at http://www.greatknot.com is laden with visuals covering
all aspects of the concept. It developed as an immersion; as ways to
illustrate an approach to the virtual assets that explain and bring
meaning to the art; into the physically factual sense of perceptible
things. The site opens with several pages about knots as individually
separate vector identities performing actions common to what random
number generators bring to cryptography in the normal operation of
blockchain.
The specifics of that idea here, however, associates blockchain with a
systemic approach more oriented toward a platform built of a descriptive
geometry functioning as cryptography. What is assumed is this is easier
to grasp than the way blockchain is commonly presented. That is what was
lacking twenty years ago when the idea left traditional art, and I
adapted the generation of knots to a presence on computational display
devices that these vector graphic images displayed as descriptive
geometry. This was the first switch of the creative process away from
unresolved and hypothetical extensions of drafting methods that this art
had been stuck in since the late 1960s.
In a very similar way to how Cryptography and Game Theory found
themselves moving from obscure academic studies into Bitcoin and then
blockchain; for using their surrogates and incentives; this virtual
presence as vector compositions, with blockchain's arrival, has leaped
in concept from stand-alone computer single artwork in a wallet-like
memory media, as thumb drive art, to the purely digital form now
practical as a distributed registry using blockchain(ish) technology.
Building the base
Over the past decade all the original knots composed in vector formats
have been converted to the JPEGs and GIFs common to the Web2.0 Internet.
This removed the art from being localized in physical media by making it
just like any other digital picture, preparing it for image recognition
technology. Knots then found themselves on a parallel course with the
physical Woodstock'94 tag experiment in a conceptual art logic being
worked out around the logic of the Great Knot's fit into the Internet.
The bulk of the material in the web site is this content of an
information-Internet. The Internet was not ready yet for tokens that are
authentic as unique vector-based geometric entities.
The argument I'd brought to art is that, in the context of cryptospace,
the raster picture is a notion of virtual reality, and not the actual
thing of the Great Knot. A JPEG may supply information, but not
trustless information like the plan a knot can be built from. In an
Internet platform developed under blockchain protocol a destination
where a graphical knot is found must initiate a raster image of vector
content.
For the Internet that is redundant in something that is already digital.
Thus, my White Paper proposes a platform that presents knots as works
within a mechanism that has evolved around aspects of html-5 scalable
vector graphics (SVG), that can make this art's storage in an achieve
function as a purely autonomous collection of geometric components in a
Third Web technology of Things.
This twist is the essence of what the White Paper brings to blockchain
space. The art exists to build the specifications for a new view of what
an Internet ecosystem looks like in a Third Web activity. It requires
everything be designed into an interactive system and various levels of
observers and actors be drawn into even deeper dives, and absorb them
into even more experience with autonomous systems than in Web2.0. It is
showing an engine for perpetually generating new, unique knots forever.
The process for achieving this was initiated with a particular graphical
tool-set made for designing forms specifically recognizable as
interweaves. The proposed platform operations are based on having a
matrix foundation formed for designing circuits as the core of a stack
that conforms to a blockchain protocol for building its self-referential
sequence of blocks.
The protocol is confirming the immutable individuality of these circuits
in a sequence that guarantees difference, one knot from the other. That
difference is between the present and the previous and this truth-test
steadily drives the sequence toward gains in complexity. The way the
stack is organized into blockchain-maintained registries, built layer by
layer from newly authenticated geometric instances, never varies from
the overall substructure of the matrix that guides their compositions.
Systemic phenomenology
This is all treated in the detailed illustrations of the White Paper as
a systemic phenomenology. It's built out from origins in the “genesis
sequence” illustrated in the animation shown here. It comprises an
origin of all knowledge for the platform. Embedded in this sequence is a
fundamental system, displayed as the thousands of knots composed to show
this system in operation. This is the Genesis Allocation that sets up
the way that one single provenance record orders all subsequent knots
that the system builds, and will continuously build forever.
Included in the White Paper's process of initiation of the blockchain is
a vector geometry that fully describes the matrix's function. This is
the clear vector-developed animation shown with the title of this
segment; every line used to form the pattern drafted one by one as it
goes through the evolution of plotting the geometry. The descriptive
captions capture this in language. This is all then adapted as a
completed structure to the form of modules, tiles, and repeats to
demonstrate the matrix being applied to build knots.
This descriptive geometry goes back to the late 1960s. Only in the
twenty-first century context, with blockchain protocol, is a registry
potential brought to the White Paper, and the html-5 protocol allowed to
make this matrix and instance layers what unique knots are built of. The
layers form the core paradigm that all individually unique elements of
the art use to share this common vector formula to make the infinite
stack of all the knots that have ever been made.
The blockchain's purpose in this is to read this stack from its core,
carrying each knot's genesis information for all eternity. The repeated
instances of the matrix are the scaffold for this information, built out
in a modular pattern, from a structure that records the complex
relationships between each knot. A serialized modular numbering system
is the part of this framework that tracks the location of each digital
asset as a formal verification process. In addition to identifying the
coordinates in the vector code that prove the uniqueness of a place in
the progression of the matrix's systemic geometry, the numbers also
guarantee a one-of-a-kind serialized unit of exchange for the protocol:
Cryptoknot.
A game any child can play
Since its origins as a systemic art, and continuing over the past 50-
plus years, the premise, when dealing with knots, has always been that
they manifest this potential of being able to be made forever, without
any one ever duplicating another. Blockchain has finally arrived to keep
track of the trail of provenance required to make this so, and this
process of using this vector coding for the way blocks, at a
blockchain's scale, handle the storage and search demand for controlling
this infinite number of objects, by making accepted elements of its
architecture into incentive rewards, completes the White Paper's
concept.
Adding Cryptoknot to the system brings it an artifact with
functionality, from its modular format. In the incentive structure of
blockchain, working to earn Cryptoknot is the metaphorical parity used
here to the public key.
As the White Paper sketches out the basic operation of a platform, a
user is introduced to a game, devised to create an open source operation
for adding to the stack that is rewarded with Cryptoknots for uses in
and out of the platform's operations.
The benefit of interaction in the data development for knots, is that a
user gets to know blockchain tech in a format legible to everyone in the
world. Simply snapping nine repeatable vector instances into their
matching geometry on a matrix-patterned puzzle board, as a trial and
error completion to find a solution to adding a knot to the sequence is
a game any child can play.
This White Paper brings many subjects of contemporary concern together
in ways that can be illustrated by knots. No matter how simplistic this
may seem, the properties that this will go on to show from what all
knots have been found to have in the Alpha stage of this platform's
development are clearly exponents of systems theory that easily fit into
functions for distribution and use of cryptocurrency. The White Paper's
invention that simultaneously marks locations in a distributed ledger as
it places a unique knot, newly formed, into it, illustrates that every
module created in tandem with a unique knot, on the matrix, confirms the
structure of this distributed ledger. Through this process of inclusive
generation, blockchain protocol guarantees the knot form is also
immutable, and one-of-a-kind block locations can function in ways the
common virtual cryptocurrency's exchange metrics cannot.
That dive into cryptospace teases out the ancillary role the White Paper
twists the properties of knots into. As it guides the infinite amount of
systemic processing a vector world makes possible while making knots, it
also makes it easy to prove that an identity recorded on a blockchain is
embodied in the knot's geometric way of locating it, and that gives
Cryptoknot its value.
The tallying of modules that define Cryptoknot can bring the consensus
of autonomous nodes used for authentication of new knots to the
distributed ledger in numbers in the millions. The process of building
knots continuously, far into the future, and even on forever, can also
manage an economy. As everything is developed to work toward this end,
it is well worth the challenge of reading further.
Properties
Another functionality for knots
In the installments that have led us to this point, it's been emphasized
that this is an art that has found the structure of blockchain to
contain the technological means to support its need for performing a
strictly practical function. The art has since been adapted by way of
allusions to components and processes found in emergent trends that
traditional ideas of the notion of the value of art are grappling with
to fit into crypto markets.
The White Paper is intentionally light on this blockchain process.
Applying its own logic for fitting a rudimentary state of a systematic
archive into the protocol of the decentralized blockchain is
perfunctory. The fact that geometric patterns, instead of a file address
or the connected tissue of metadata (as examined in the tag and Great
Knot examples) covers its approach to information should be clear to
those generally informed about the space. The knot ecosystem is wholly
one of pattern recognition, but as a concept for human orientation. It
only applies machine responses to record its infinite number of
recognizably different unique things, where image codes used in off-
chain identities assume this function in similar use-cases.
The assumption is that images fit more of a culturally accepted paradigm
of the value of unique objects. And in this stage of blockchain
application, clearly formulating the knowledge of a visual pattern as a
thoroughly virtual system for registering the value of a possession
tests a way of presenting evidence of the unique properties of patterns.
Before the idea of an infinitely expanding sequence of knots (or the
principle of the blockchain, for that matter) can be put to a useful
purpose this possibility must be reduced to practice. Making a structure
that is easily analyzed with innate human skill, yet still function
within blockchain's cryptographic protocol, is what knots must be
certifiably capable of doing.
The White Paper has been initiated into blockchain space by showing that
the provenance of all knots and serialized Cryptoknot stem from
formalized behaviors. The process of building out a sequence of
combinations of all knots from three up to the eight crossings
demonstrates this. Just as the device that tested the concept of
controlled progressions in creating the Woodstock'94 tags did in
demonstrating that that system worked, this is the way a functional
application for creating a base for building value in knots is
accomplishes. Each individual knot in the growing sequence moves the
matrix as a mechanism of analysis into a newer place. This is engaged in
the emergent number of Cryptoknot. The growth of knots for the art is
thus perpetuated in proportion to the value of Cryptoknot as a
cryptocurrency.
Prime, and single and multiple combining properties
The building of knots is governed by analytical properties found by the
counting of the tracery elements that form the number of crossings in
the weave patterns. These analytics are supported by the knot allotment
of sequential identifiers that the blockchain starts out with. A visual
method qualifies a knot as a knot by following this series of 3 to over
110 crossing knots shown in an animation in the previous (eighth)
installment of this series of blogs. These are slated to form the
Genesis Block of the blockchain as the base for an initial sorting of
knots into the properties that will be defined here.
Properties of knots form the basis for making the combinations that
maximize the number of knots and numbered instances of the matrix used
in creating Cryptoknot. There is a sequential order for knot building
that supports the serial numbers of pattern modules in a vertically
stacked system (of matrix, knot, Cryptoknot) designed specifically as
the motivator and incentive for inviting blockchain space into merging
with this systemic art's functionality.
Simply stated, knots have been reduced to the form of graphic schematics
composing circuits out of directional elements. These elements
continually cross each other until they plot a pattern that ends up as a
closed circuit. Strictly sticking to what conforms to a progressive
numbering sequence, the matrix that contains these elements has hosted
over a hundred of completed knots, and from these postulates five
properties of the knot: Prime knots displaying no “skipped” crossing;
and Single, Duel, Triple, and Quad knots having one, two, three and four
skipped crossings respectively identifiable.
The “skipped crossing” is at the heart of the possibility of perpetually
generating new and uniquely different knots forever. The presence of the
skipped crossings in the progression supports the knot's relationship to
the concept of the expanding matrix. Skipped crossings make a place
where two circuits can be opened for joining together knots at their
respective skipped crossings and still retain their original geometry as
they force the modules of the matrix outward.
Property laws
As each knot with one or more skipped crossing is connected to all other
knots in the sequence that came before it, a compounding effect extends
the number of knotted circuits that the systemic art can make from the
individual knots. This begins with the three crossing knot; as a
“single” joined to itself; as the first in these combinations.
This is how the White Paper creates value. By emphasizing the merits of
keeping this pattern for identifying knots in the realm of art, there is
the existential quality of “property” ascribed to concrete information
that is the value base of an ecosystem. To make this point; of all the
certifiable parameters that it can have, the system places only one
limitation on the creation of a knot. In following the pattern of the
matrix, only the most compact concentration of “crossings” with the
least number of skipped crossings inside the outline of the knot can
qualify it as an authentic knot. To be used in these combinations there
can be only one that meets this density requisite. This idea of density
also prohibits “chaining combinations”.
These are laws that the White Paper sets for the geometry, and they
appear to be enough to have proven that the “tightness” function yields
only one design for each origin sequence identity. That concept is
enshrined in the Genesis Block. From the primes, and openable knots in
several hundred combinations made just using the legitimate linking
formed at the very beginning of this origin sequence, it is clear that
knot generation using combinations is exponentially continuous.
Beyond this, though, there are properties of scarcity and aesthetics
that display a behavior conducive to creating greater “value” growth
than others. In knots connected to each other in combinations; and in
all that remain single, these ancillary behaviors are graphically
analytical in the plan of the White Paper as uniquely identifiable
entities that further create incentive ideas more practical for working
out autonomous governance.
Standouts
Under half of the 100+ knots of the origin sequence are primes. All the
rest have characteristics that make them linkable with each other.
Inherent in the logic of the sequence is that, although primes are not
useful in this combining process, where they fall in the sequence does
mark a value point. Such a place would be where the knots that come
after identify with a lesser value; or, where each prime appears, a
value signifies that the number of crossings becomes the basis for
making that count be a special number in evaluating some position in the
governance of knots. The idea of their extra special status as rare
products of the art could also be a benchmark of valuation for all the
others, and the serial numbers of Cryptoknot that are related to their
search properties represent a key to some derivative use.
Restrictive protocol is a controlling factor. The simplest knot, the
three-crossing knot, as a single link circuit terminates the link
property when in a combination. This gives a value to combinations
between two single link forms nearly that of the most complex prime knot
they fall near in the sequence. In the White Paper all the single link
circuits in the original sequence, in combination with just the last
ones of the sequence, were calculated to equal around 1,200 two knot
combinations. That would increase the value of what is built in the
first 100+ genesis sequence by double if this were following the logic
of a rare collectible market.
This extrapolates to a potential that is even more obvious with each
two, three and four link combination knot in the original sequence that
the numbers of unique knots with higher values related to. As
properties, the genesis block allocation, as the “fair start” for the
blockchain, raises the total value of the system as it grows
exponentially. This, when considering that a high percentage of multiple
crossing skips in the origin sequence likely means a similar occurrence
as the sequence continues, this lends even more credence to the
hypothesis of infinite growth in the system's compound potential.
Esoteric properties
A valuation system is natural to the concept of this systemic art, and
perhaps all systemic arts. The practice of reserving of combinations of
single link forms and primes to establish the value of an origin
sequence is as much a guarantor of value as any retention of shares in a
prime mover system is. As the progression increases, and the number of
knots with more and more multiple links increases, this makes it obvious
that the earliest, in the sequences found in the White Paper, possess
properties of higher visual and systemic value compared to those that
follow.
Correspondingly, progressive devaluation follows the creating of more
products in a systemic art. The White Paper exhibits the genesis and
origin sequence developed far enough to prove out all the properties
that are in the knot's matrix-formed structure. That is the art. As it
exhibits material representations of knots with appearances that may
even make their graphic value more self evident, their clarity of
identity may end up to be more personally appealing, or even aesthetic,
as actual knots. The Great Knot is an example.
Whether expressed as graphics or as dimensional objects, knots may end
up more revealing of the nature of things than anything else yet
contemplated. As allusions to themselves in a myriad of material form
they may get to where they relate to nothing but their own place on a
matrix and its registry on a blockchain. The implication of a connection
between material existence and this provenance record could even end up
superseding a value system altogether and be a use-case that signals an
individual person's identity.
The White Paper proposes continuous generation of uniquely different
knots using these properties into the future, for as far as can be
imagined. This, on the highest level, stimulates the imagination to
transcend anything valued on this plane of existence, and grasp the
creative ideas that art is about. Owning the digitally rare plan of a
knot that will always exist somewhere in the Third Web, and beyond,
defines value.
On the most basic level, as the next installment will show, this makes
for a great game.
A Game Of Knots
Truth or Dare
In the previous installments of this series, analytical systems played a
tangible role in introducing a one-on-one relationship between a
mechanism and a user. In this the several ways a systemic art's
procedures created an ecosystem broadly suggested blockchain space. Now,
a game of knots devised to illustrate a break between digital assets of
individual selection and the behaviors of things that function in an
Internet world view, makes that space one where facts can be real or
virtual, or somewhere in between, in an interactive game that is set in
motion with the generously endowed Genesis Block as its theme. This game
is an autonomous way to participate in the ecosystem of a blockchain, as
it is fueling a perpetual movement forward driven by a highly
understandable graphical way of showing the rational state that the
distributed ledger brings to stabilizing an Internet with provably
truthful content.
In this game, the motivation to create the first alpha knot (the one
beyond those that are supplied in the Genesis Block) is to own a
cryptographic character as ascribed in the logic of the graphic pattern
of the matrix that all knots are built upon. For this, the sequence of
the Genesis Block must be known. What is defined by the modules that
make up the matrix, in the identity of the location of the last
individually unique knot's structure, is what the Genesis Block holds to
inaugurate the blockchain. That number attached to that particular
module or series of modules, and each that comes after it, is an
instrument of identity for a token of digital currency the White Paper
refers to as Cryptoknot.
This creation of the Cryptoknot feature through the knot sequence
evolution within a game of knots accounts for all the different knots
being identified and retrievable through blockchain technology's
distributed ledger. The blockchain records the winners of the game and
instills the incentive to continue making the knots that add to the
sequence. By rewarding work with both the certified ownership of a knot
and the distribution of newly minted Cryptoknot, this game creates a
system for keeping new knots being generated, continually, forever.
A game for Makers
The White Paper's Alpha version of this game is a competition to own
things whose value has the potential to rise through speculative gains
in a purely digital collectibles market. This is the incentive for
downloading the elements of a matrix pattern with positions to fill, and
the nine shapes whose instances fit onto those positions, like puzzle
pieces. Playing with these elements until the pattern of overlapping
circuit traces of a particular knot is made is done by using the matrix
modules as a game board that is infinitely expandable. And as it expands
to accommodate ever more complex circuits built on it every time a knot
is added to the sequence, the expansion adds to the numbers of
Cryptoknot that are put in circulation.
The components of the game are the sequence in the blockchain as
directions, the SVG graphics, an open source graphic program for playing
the game, and the link to a DAO's distributed ledger with its challenge
that communicates the beginning of the game and the winners.
Playing the game follows one simple rule. The contestant is judged by
the ability to pay attention to a logical sequence and have the next
match in it. The judgment call on what that correct match looks like
comes from a Distributed Autonomous Organization made up of experienced
knot creators. This DAO manages the game by accepting the first to come
up with the correct answer, registering it in a blockchain as next in an
endless sequence of knots, and passing their authority on to the
respondents to the present correct match.
Being ahead of the game
Any number of submissions can flood into the DAO, but only the earliest
time stamps are scrutinized and only the correct knot with the earliest
arrival time owns it. The other correct submissions, after that, are
each credited with an incentive they are free to use once they have
fulfilled their duty of sending out the call for the next in the
sequence, and judging what is returned from that, as the DAO for that
next round of competition. Once those prescribed number of incentives,
controlled by the game play, are distributed for this work, they
represent the most recently calculated value of Cryptoknot in
circulation.
The way blockchain protocol is embedded as a factor in this is that all
the players are positioned as nodes that host the mechanisms and links
used for creating the knots. They have the Genesis Block, so they know
what is coming up from studying the genesis sequence. It is expected as
part of the game play that all the nodes will follow a more or less
common strategy to get ahead of the game and plan to submit something of
their individual particular interest into the distributed ledger. The
vector elements available in the White Paper, and the shareware draw
program that is freely available, are ready to adapt this hands-on game
to skill sets that make this a high intensity game.
The web site http://www.greatknot.com has had all these elements in
play, in public view, for over half a decade. The conceptual art and
description of the processes that are behind this game have been out
there on public display for over half a century. Sufficient time has
been given to allow universal adaption through open source interplay.
Just as practice play, among those who have a passion and awareness for
systems thinking, ample time has been given to develop meaningful levels
of expertise.
If such denizens of distributed systems theory have competitive
sequences to bring to bare, the Alpha move in this game will be a
telltale moment. The next knots to be logically called for are not a
mystery. The prescribed order is baked into the sequence. It has been
displayed in the White Paper and explained on social media over the
course of the year 2018. Once the current one is registered the next in
line is obvious to those that have studied the primary sources.
As such, competitors will perpetually be waiting for the next starting
gun. Immediately upon the sealing of the newest knot into the record, a
call is triggered, resetting the system for receiving the next
submission. Because of the nature of knot classification and the way
combined knots form places in the sequence with their own way of
restraining the protocol, those that know systems will rationally form
ways of jumping ahead to select the next next-in-line winning knot to
have ready to submit as soon as the call goes out.
Making a race to infinity into an art
So the game is a race where it's strategically possible to have an entry
responding instantaneously to the automatic call for the next new knot.
As a competition triggered by a chain of events contestants are alerted
to in the signal that resets this continuous game, simple observation of
processing factors, embedded in the concept, benefits those that are
ahead of the game. This is a built-in bias since the object of the art
is to push this creation along by whatever draws the attention of the
largest audience, and such enthusiasm creates a pace that is responded
to by those of willing to develop training and skill.
The amusement value this level of competition brings to the distribution
of Cryptoknot is planned to add to public spectator involvement. As a
process open to all the Internet, it welcomes everyone in the world to
be interested in observing the competitive game play that knot making
can bring out. Anyone that wishes to participate in this equal
opportunity to work out a way to own a registered knot can join in the
game play. As interest evolves into a possessive sense of awareness in
the competition, spectators will expect master play in the game and give
encouragement to winners they follow, participating by sharing insights
into tactics; what a culture that is drawn to a game naturally does.
This enthusiasm for the game brings something else out. As it creates
and registers ownership this is not the only activity. There is another
game in the way the creation of knots affects autonomous operations that
are automatically responding to sell orders from knot owners and buy
orders from those that have accumulated Cryptoknot. Bids are made on
every reading of the market changes that new value represents with every
win in newly minted Cryptoknot. Transfers of ownership that are
reconciled in the blockchain bring another activity as more rare and
higher priced knots enter through the game by attracting higher prices
in Cryptoknot. This is a market and it is assumed to become very intense
as Cryptoknot arbitrage makes wealth that is built around assets secured
by knot ownership.
This is an insular system. The game makes the knots, and the knots make
the Cryptoknot, and the Cryptoknot is the currency that buys the knots.
That makes for an economy based on secured assets whose value is only
internally generated in an ecosystem. In this, the law of supply and
demand will ultimately find the most frenzied play of the game when
cycles of rapid response to calls are easiest to anticipate by
speculators. That is designed in to the game as plays that compete for
obvious knots that speed up the production cycle. Its sole purpose is to
build the Cryptoknot supply to rapidly inject liquidity into the system
to make it expeditious to turn over lower value knots for those of
higher value.
This takes place when there's ample Cryptoknot available to make the
best competitive offers for prized properties. The game is issuing more
tokens in the periods when combining knots begin to demand extended
scaffolding of the matrix, and the logic is easy to anticipate as
modules grow out like fractals. At these times of high levels of
activity, opportunities for buying in to the value as art open up.
This brings out the real role of Cryptoknot in the system. They offer
the only entry point for converting those that are spectators in the art
market to be buyers of knots. Those that have been following the value
of knots, but have no taste for competing on the level of skill that
builds them, will snatch up any tokens that are traded out of the
system, and return them right back, to be in the action by putting them
in the hands of those selling their knot. That is what will be unpacked
in the next episode. It will project the way full implementation takes
over, as an artwork, to be a perfect application of blockchain space.
Cryptoknot
Infra becomes Cryptoknot
There has to be a really good function for cryptocurrency for me to add
it to my art. I am as much against this influence as I've been with
gallery interests over the years. Even the idea of it as the metric that
sent me deeper into blockchain's parallel to my registry concept, ceased
being convincing once I began to see the stretch it took to justify
tokens in a non-fungible ledger's world.
In my White Paper the idea of the “Infra”; short for infrastructure; is
the functionality that tracks the system's perpetual addition of new
elements by giving each addition to the knot sequence a location for
finding it. That is why there are numbers assigned to the modules of
each pattern's infrastructure.
As each of these modules began being abstracted into a progression of
numerals, which continue from the previous set used in the previous
addition to the sequence, this function as a finder for locating one
individual knot, among the infinite number of unique knots in a search,
began looking much like a numeric identifier mechanism that acts like
the public key serving the same purpose in blockchain.
This is the way a vector graphic concept became associated with the
random number generator that creates the identities common to
cryptocurrency. In the incentive systems that the protocols of a
distributed ledger use to reward work, an answer had appeared to my
dilemma of needing a representative way of incentivizing those in
Patreon being trained to build knots.
Blockchain logically led Infra into becoming Cryptoknot. Every knot of
the system adheres to the logic of its state of the art for producing
tokens. By allocating a value to the Genesis Block, I simply made
Cryptoknot a condition of what was already in sync with the fair start
value set for the blockchain into a state at startup.
The vector image that is submitted for the Distributed Autonomous
Organization's acceptance into the knot sequence was designed to use the
Infra's purpose of exactly repeating the matrix modules underlying the
newest knot to make a serial number beginning with the next after the
highest integer of the last accepted knot's group. The most previous
knot shows the circuit formed of all the puzzle pieces exactly as the
next does, making the highest number reached on this most recent
submission the total of the Cryptoknot the new knot puts into
circulation.
A cryptocurrency is born
Thus, Cryptoknot entered the system. Each module's use in a new knot
makes a serial number in an order that began with the first knot found
in the genesis block of the blockchain. The order is easy to grasp.
Exactly one module is all that is needed for the least complex knot, and
by tiling these modules out toward an infinitely large number of them,
an infinitely complex concept of a knot will have an infinite number of
contextualized Cryptoknot.
The arrangements of puzzle pieces, in the previously explained game of
knots, fall in place on this scaffold and grow new knots on toward
infinitely large numbers. With Infra already planned to function as a
“finder” for the system, interpreting each as an coin recorded as a
Cryptoknot merit award, became the distribution plan of a
cryptocurrency, and, thus, the successful designers of new knots, whose
submission did not win the knot, have their attention kept in the game.
This gave the White Paper a proven solution to a self-contained
environment, where decisions are formulated around the concerns of a
distributed group keenly aware of what knowledgeable participation means
to managing a dynamic database. As new knots are added continually, the
complexity of analytics need to be continually monitored and adjusted to
constant changes. Having Cryptoknot gives a participant the skin in the
game needed to formalize an active response mechanism for maintaining
the protocol.
The game of solving a puzzle, with the first contestant to respond with
a new knot owning the knot, and all the others that came in with the
same solution, up to a limit of the number of Infra underlying this new
knot, gaining its serialized Cryptoknot as a badge of competency,
encouraging their continued entry into future competitions to accumulate
more tokens of the value they bring to the game.
As value is built, a second level of competition enters, where
Cryptoknot develops an exchange rate based on its use to buy knots.
Cryptoknot is the only currency used to buy knots. This brings an
incentive alignment, like in Monopoly, between owning the best
properties, and the rarity of properties of knots described in the White
Paper that make them valuable. Banking Cryptoknot to accumulate what is
needed to own a knot thus comes into play and a basic economy sets in.
As knots come on the market to sell to accumulate more asset value to
buy a more special knot, a competition to have Cryptoknot increases its
value as a currency.
A perfect merit-based economy
In a merit-based economy, a self-supporting ecosystem is the best
environment for individuals to demonstrate a strategic understanding
that the game is not to own the lake but catch the fish. The Cryptoknot
goes to the first to respond not by luck but by playing the game.
Accumulated Cryptoknot is more fluid as an asset than the knot created,
because using it to choose the value of knot to own is how the game
continues. Winners of knots of lower value are going to sell them to
have the Cryptoknot to buy one that gives them more stake in the game.
The logic of every knot's serial group of consecutive numbers, once
assigned as Cryptoknot alongside their knot in the distributed ledger,
is to have their original owners remain permanently connected to the
merits of that particular work. Such connections between the individual
and their choices remains in the distributed ledger forever.
This instills a concept of a pantheon of those with high accumulations
of Cryptoknot and valuable knots that directs interest in the game
toward trust in the governance tasks related to the next knot that is
accepted. It becomes a spectator event for the Cryptoknot community.
With this, the game assumes a social character whose story grows an
awareness of the collectible nature of knots. Those that manage to
remain in the governance circle of the DAO as experts in creating new
knots become champions. Attention is heightened beyond the winner of the
knot to the winner's circle.
For obvious reasons, the demand for most new knots in the sequence is
sub-par in comparison to those that came before. That results in many
transaction opportunities resting in the products of this conceptual art
being in demand. So there needs to be a way to balance the distribution
of Cryptoknot toward interest in entry level investment in the lower
value knots. This is where an exchange rate for Cryptoknot that is not
stored up in the ownership of a knot and sold off-chain enters the
picture.
A systemic coup de grâce for fiat
Any Cryptoknot speculatively banked to accumulate sufficient value to
cover the purchase of a knot on-chain; whether done on-chain or off; is
inflationary. Cryptoknot going out of the system would normally come
from individuals removing themselves from play. But individuals that
consistently earn Cryptoknot through master play will strategically
orient winnings in a way that hedges their value against the enthusiasm
their divesting builds as it allows new blood to enter the market. By
selling to those that will drive up the market value of the lower priced
knots they increase the value of their holdings.
This is where blockchain's distributed record thrives as a market
indicator. The nature of Cryptoknot value throughout the whole range of
the knot sequence is a record of value that is an aggregate of the value
of all knots in the entire thread of registered knots. That makes every
new Cryptoknot a fractional record of changes as every new knot's value
as a collectible goes through a transaction.
Up until full autonomy is reached in the system operations, I reserve
the initial knots created in the sequence as a way of checking inflation
by holding them as my network leader stake in the Genesis Block. But as
each knot added to the sequence beyond these holdings gains the
potential of throwing the value equation out of balance by continuously
putting new distribution Cryptoknots toward the purchase of earlier,
more rare ones in the sequence, even earlier ones can go on the market.
The name of the game is to own the best drivers of value as the highest
net worth collection in this knot economy. The economy is continually
growing the value of the reserve in the Genesis Block to balance this
out.
This would be the only leverage on the price of knots in this wholly
internalized knot economy except for the fact that the White Paper sets
digitally rare categories for some knots that will naturally command
higher numbers of Cryptoknot to buy them. This makes the value of
identity in this blockchain space fluid enough to maintain a balance
simply by astutely anticipating scarcity. With Cryptoknot as a
fractional value of a knot and the knot as a non-fungible collectible,
the fraction as a factor of the string that is the new knot's crypto key
keeps the demand for new knots issuing new Cryptoknot into circulation.
Speculation on the limited chance of rare knots of higher value
appearing as the sequence grows is designed to keep this in check.
But there is also a foil to keep this supply of Cryptoknot from being in
excess of the demand. This is applying it to off-chain speculation.
Numbers of Cryptoknot needed for investing in a knot will fluctuate as
the exchange rate goes up for purchases of individual Cryptoknot off-
chain. An exchange rate averaging the price all knots sold for in a
value based on fiat makes the knot market on-chain move with the
pressure it creates off-chain. As this makes the exchange rate for
Cryptoknot put knot value in a balancing act, every new knot becomes a
validation of trust in what the value the Cryptoknot brings to the
system, in fiat, and encourages stability in the value of all knots as
investments.
The price of a knot is always in Cryptoknot and knots never leave the
system. With the value of all knots spread across the value of all
Cryptoknot to account for the average value of one Cryptoknot, there is
no real value until Cryptoknot has an off-chain exchange value set by
free market factors, totally separate from the Distributed Autonomous
Organization's merit-based decisions.
Knots and Cryptoknots are innately valuable to the system, and fiat is
not. Relative to the way their qualities are set by the White Paper's
logic of scarcity, those knots that have the greatest impact on the
value structure of the system will have that in accord with their
appearance in the sequence. That is where the Cryptoknot gains in value
and the knot becomes a speculative investment that is reflected in the
exchange rate.
As participants in the game cash out of the system, they permit
Cryptoknot to either come back into the system or be retained in wallets
as investments waiting for the best purchase or exchange opportunity. As
the system is perpetually growing ,there is a stability inherent in the
way supply and demand balances its value with pressure from this outside
influence. This dynamic is expected as the collectibles market
recognizes that the knot never leaves the system, only Cryptoknot can
buy a knot, and the system’s relationship with blockchain makes its
longevity secure.
Collectors, with no experience in making knots whatsoever, entering the
system, will drive up fiat exchange value as knots build a criteria for
value. When the whole economic system becomes subject to such an
atmosphere this is even more beneficial to the building of knots. As
risk opens it to derivatives speculation, the game of creating
Cryptoknot incentives to stimulate the market supersedes the reason the
art needs a competitive environment to flourish because the concept of
eternal growth has become an established one.
Next
Decentralization
In the past eleven posts a tale unfolded of blending two ideas into an
understanding of blockchain. Wrangling these subjects into the new
language of the blockchain community when it has not yet agreed upon its
own value of vocabulary has left me skeptical of what has been written
in these posts, just because everything that surrounds the field is so
inconclusive.
The leap of faith I'd counted on, in “seeing” something as code, is
still valid. But, on the scale of Internet usage, its ideas of
popularizing decentralization and autonomous governance of a crowd
sourced organization, as a goal, has just turned into an visceral way of
“seeing” what I must tackle first.
Setting out, as I have, in a direction of co-opting social media's grip
on a centralized Internet to imprint on it this experiment in crowd
sourcing as a Distributed Autonomous Organization, I still hold that
there is nothing capable of acting to stop the functions of these
platforms from being a distributed ledger, if this subversion is
“viewed” as a perpetually available transaction vehicle found profitable
to the social media ethos.
I've speculated that this chink in the armor makes the plan practical
and, in moving to assemble a spectrum of individuals with nothing in
common except for an experience that ended up in this experiment,
authored my narrative, basing it on their discovery of ownership of
something unique creating a circumstance where individual enthusiasm
increasing the value of something sends a social media signal. This
compounds the catalyst of a Woodstock'94 collectible into importance and
it is that notoriety which is positioned as a mechanism of blockchain.
The Internet opens the door to this in previously unimaginable uses as
transactions that are, by nature, autonomous and decentralized,
transpired through social cues commonly anyway.
Should 55,000 Woodstock'94 tag stakeholders come to experience knowing
how distributed records and formal verification works, to the point that
their attention to my White Paper's narrative is their next step in
enlightenment, I would have given blockchain a great boost in
popularity. Shaping the very foundations of understanding to trust
provenance as the creator of value is everyone's goal for this space.
Universal Language
This obviously implies a plan.
When I ran into blockchain in 2017, it interrupted my follow-up on the
publication of a history the year before. I was creating a finder for
organizing the research materials that went into the book. What I was
following as metadata standards, for cataloging and digital archiving,
is what actually sensitized me to blockchain. Getting blockchain
processes to correlate with my art stems from that preoccupation. My
“speculative” trusting of common Internet resources, over those of
historians, is what attracted me to trustless witnesses and oracles and
distributed consensus as a mechanism for fitting this art into
blockchain space.
Actual historic artifacts are easily seen as objects of value. My
adoption of the production records became my narrative for suggesting
that the Woodstock'94 collectible is a paradigm I could build into
something uniquely valuable when timed to the fiftieth anniversary of
Woodstock. Similarly, documents, as objects that smart contracts make
into non-fungible assets, are a natural subject for something that has
value as a paradigm for an object having information that can
authenticate facts surrounding a past event.
In following this forward, documents analyzed as contextual digital
artifacts, and nested in a block of the blockchain, are a way of
preserving and protecting the idea of provenance that the posts I've
authored on Medium spell out.
Their sequence of events build a totally unique situation that has a lot
in common with the basic philosophy behind what my art holds as its
inalienable identity; in its creating sequences. Creating, and
registering creations, continually forever, as a system, dovetails,
through this, with blockchain protocol and its autonomous governance. In
terms of applying artifacts as mechanisms, both digital or actual, this
relationship, now, forever illustrates objects valued by their
relatively perpetual immutability.
It is this that has become the third idea to make these twelve posts on
Medium into a 160 kilobyte page initiated as
http://www.greatknot.com/#2. Where concepts with links are a block of
distributed ledger “matter”. This now follows the form of the
consolidation of Twitter posts made to honor the 1967 “Paragraphs of
Conceptual Art” treatise of Sol LeWitt in the fifth post here. A single
page compilation with links through multiple archives distributed across
the Internet gives life to this prime source.
The inevitable
That page demonstrates how there is an application with a future in
creating proof of authenticity. In searching out attributes of
provenance for intellectual properties, alone, there's a purpose in
continually bringing a lens to Internet discourse. As an assurance to
society that truth is unavoidable, pretenders and counterfeits that have
long allowed skepticism to thrive, are all equally weeded out in this
process.
But even as this ease of access to investigation is considered, the
grooming of Deep Learning to somehow automate the role of the skeptic,
threatens to bring an outcry for a human check valve to govern it.
Before the pressure that this brings to the natural skepticism in human
nature brings this backlash, blockchain has to be brought into the
process.
Truth must be first authenticated by knowledge. What Deep Learning cites
as fact is information, and an agreement on the provenance of a fact
among humans, understanding a world of sources, is what is necessary for
information to be factual. For a fair start on knowing the truth, Deep
Learning needs this use of blockchain as a police lineup operating a
ledger as a witness. Even if it only assures attribution, blockchain's
genesis block, as the proven identity picked out of such a lineup, must
be at the core of a Deep Learning algorithm's sense of skepticism.
The stories presented in these twelve posts should be taken as parables
on how identities are created, their message falling as a Third Web tale
of distributed consensus applications that stress dissipation of that
“how” into a spectrum of knowledge to where a record beyond reproach
leaves nothing but trust.
In these posts I have introduced a degree of interoperability between
Deep Learning and blockchain paradigms to lead to a foundation for
validating information; as a fact detector; scalable enough to be a
productive use of blockchain technology; a “killer app”. What my art is
conveying is that the idea of using centralized frameworks built around
employing an interactivity that is styled around tracking identities,
will blindly process Cryptoknot into a place in a registry that the
interoperability between human and digital capabilities will easily
adopt into resources; and such adaptive game-play that fits blockchain's
best practices is limited to knots.
As described at the outset of this tale, fifty years ago, at my knot
art's moment of genesis, a tried and true concept; a legendary parable;
became internalized as an authenticity paradigm useful for making such a
tight system of observable differentiation that any opportunity for
confusion in attribution, or deviation from the straight-forward
direction of the art, fails before having the chance to be tried. That
is what is now communicated as the standard of functionality that fits
blockchain.
These twelve posts are in Medium to establish this content in a digital
publication format that has the respect of the intellectual community.
As this content is embedded in a blockchain, transcribed to code, in
line with its thesis, its origin and provenance, along with the place
and owner of the original concept, is following the procedures that
Cryptoknot; and Woodstock'94 tags; in that narrative, lay out in their
individual planned blockchain applications. A knowledge base contained
in that consolidated block of information can be staked against the
attention that may subsequently be spent on verifying and registering
claims against it, so access to the information in this original thesis
can end up either retained as the truth, and its value win out, or if
found bogus, and its claim disproved, be changed to a quantifiable
misconception. The risk in writing absolutes isn't challenged unless
read.
The mechanism for proving fact must always be in a system open to
correction. Documentation of an origin of a fact and consensus on
attribution for it, to certify truth, is not absolute. In the art,
Cryptoknot is real within the scaffold that underlays each knot approved
as the next addition in the art's procession toward infinite numbers
related to infinitely different forms of knot objects. More nuanced
truth is going to need more latitude than that of this paradigm of the
absolute, and that is why there is enough room in the concept imagined
for knots to identify every conceivable truth needing a point-of-view.
The scenario that creates this absolute is initiated when any serial
number from an identity comes from the system's coma-separated string
for a knot; its public key; and the registry of one single numeric
progression within that string holds one Cryptoknot as an identifier
that acts as the token a document has for its certification that has
been verified by a consensus stake in a fact. Operationally, the
acceptance into the blockchain that contains this Cryptoknot surrogate
of a fact is staked against a whole knot's value in its share of
governance in the system. This certification application supplies the
fuel that makes the art move progressively onward, forever, into
infinite complexity... holding all this truth in trust, and giving
Cryptoknot's value a social value that is, conceptually, a fact
guaranteed by a fact. The responsibility for that knot confirming the
validity of the fact appended to it, after those with a stake in the
knot have worked to make it absolutely verifiable, assures the value of
it as fact.
What this thesis highlights is that geometric plans of knots are
innately capable of becoming actual objects; incarnate. This gives them
an absolute relationship to value. So, even though it is illusionary to
the extreme, the choice I leave to a potential 55,000 souls this thesis
is directed to, and to every reader of these twelve posts, is of a value
decision about a higher reward potential in a paradigm of scarcity that
has a tremendous affinity to what blockchain can make useful. While the
future of blockchain is on the average reader's mind, this art has
brought attention to a story of artifacts that can make the whole Third
Web paradigm shift useful.