Scenes from the First Rare Digital Art Auction | Hacker News Reader

Scenes from the First Rare Digital Art Auction

theparisreview.org

51 pointskawera38 comments

Finally David Thorne will be able to get its spider back: http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html

Hey all - I was the organizer of the Rare Digital Art Festival, cool to see this on Hacker News! I'm happy to answer any questions about the event, rare digital art, etc.

Well I guess the question I have is: how the hell does it work?!

Rare Digital Art / Crypto Collectibles are "assets" on the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain that have two qualities:

- They are rare

- They have meta data that associates them with something we would consider "art". That could be a music file, movie, but is most often an image or a "card".

People buy and trade them either to collect them because they think they're cool or to "play" them if they're associated with a game. Some artists create extra incentives involved in owning their art - for example one I know keeps a locked playlist on Soundcloud that only people that own his token can listen to. In all cases, any assets you buy will end up in a "wallet" that you can think of like a trading card binder. This wallet is public, so anyone can see what you own and prove that you own it.

Rare Digital Art takes a lot of forms and is an exploding medium. Rare Art Labs (rareart.io) helps traditional artists make RDA, Spells of Genesis is a card game using RDA, Crypto Kitties is like tamagachis on the blockchain, Rare Pepe Wallet takes the "rare pepe meme" concept from Reddit and makes it real, etc.

I might see how this could work with a movie or music file, but not an image. The premise behind the value is the exclusive ownership of the image. But you can just screenshot it. I don't understand how any notion of "ownership" factors in here.

There are thousands of Van Gogh paintings as digital images on the web. The original is the one with value.

I still don't understand how this creates digital scarcity or rarity. I'm not messing, I really want to understand exactly how 1 copy of a bunch of bits could be worth more than 0.

There are a scarce number of digitally/cryptographically signed copies on the blockchain. The art itself is still infinitely replicable, owning the signed "authentic edition" is not. That does not mean something to everyone but means a lot to collectors and passionate fans.

Yeah but the real one is tangible and not copyable in the same way. Digital copies are exactly the same as each other. The "rarity" is completely artificial and pointless. Everyone has the same desktop picture, but oh boy, I own the digital signature!

Q: In what sense does the "real" Van Gogh painting differ from a good forgery?

A: Otherwise pointless authenticity.

Q: So why do people spend so much effort identifying forgeries?

A: Because people, for some terrifying reason, value otherwise pointless authenticity.

Why assign value to anything other than food and shelter? It's enjoyable, people like it. If that terrifies you the world must be a scary place.

Nailed it - I'm not sure video will be a good use case for RDA although I think there will be some interesting instances.

For example: Sweepers Clock is a video sold as a limited edition art asset today, using a paper contract and traditional auction houses. It's very hacky and buyers often are worried they'll just "print" more copies, but it still sells and has value. I think rare digital art would be perfect for this kind of thing, less so a Hollywood film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXNT4T56EmM

Were you implementing the ERC-721 token standard? This(digital art auctions) was the first application I thought of when I first heard of non-fungible token standards.

That's a complex answer but the easy answer is there are various standards for digital collectibles and based on the type of collectible we'll implement the appropriate standard. ERC-721 is appropriate for "collections" of 1of1 assets.

Follow up if you don't mind, obviously some works of digital art are rather large in terms of file size, iirc tokens are rather limited in the amount of data they're allowed to contain, how are you pairing tokens to assets?

IPFS hashes are stored on chain and the file is stored on the IPFS network as long as someone is swarming it. As a backstop in case no one else is swarming the file, Rare Art Labs keeps a swarm running of all RARE Network assets.

Hey I always asked myself if this is art. In a research project I made animations from simulations, the idea was to explore the limits of communication in open science via social media. The effect was in the order of 10^7 views/year. I always believed that there is an art side here, especially from looking at the original simulations, which were heavily compressed in order to fit in a goldfish attention span. Would love to see them running on big walls or living inside cheap flat screens.

After the social media meltdown I lost interest into sharing more. Here [0] is a page with direct links to the animation postings, for the rest anybody interested can find more from this hint.

[0] http://chorasimilarity.github.io/chemlambda-gui/dynamic/rawu...

That's super interesting - if you're interested in pursuing this further email thelab@rareart.io I think we could put together something very cool.

thanks, done.

Digital art in unencrypted form can never be rare. It will only be rare if it is painted by a homomorphicly encrypted algorithm that contains vector or any infinitely scalably primitives. This would ensure that screencaps never capture the "real" thing at the heart of the asset. Clearly, this takes a lot more work than what was done here. But it is the only pure way to not scam people on assets that can be easily cloned.

Real 100% serious art world talk:

"Paradoxically, an object whose image is very widely spread is a rare object, in the sense that few objects have their images spread widely."

This is from McKenzie Wark, who is not known as a joker. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156418/my-collectible-ass/

is there any examples of this idea?

Lots and lots of math. I dont believe the program to black box ofuscator/encryptor has come to fruition yet. But lattice methods were teasing it out. We do have homomorphic encryption that allows for basic operations like addition and multiplication on the ciphertext. But not turing complete black boxed behavior. Thats a twinkle to aim for.

The assets can never be cloned because the asset is not the file. It is the blockchain asset cryptographically signed by the artist. Just as you can make a photocopy of a book but can't clone a signed, first edition book so it is with rare digital art.

Didn't need an explanation. The asset is NOT an asset. "This pipe is not a pipe!"

Somewhere in all this we need to study people's willingness to do things they don't understand. Humans have been creative risk taker as well as sheep through out time. I wonder how many of these people are creative risk takers and how many are simply followers.

What motivates people to do this? Is it fear of missing out? Is it the potential to be a part of something new? Is it greed?

All of the above, but I would add in many cases people truly do want to own the art because they admire the artist or admire the creation. There is some intense creativity going on in the space right now.

This is a great way to make a lot of money but doesn't provide a lot of value. In fact, it destroys one of the most important parts about digital media: that it can be instantly copied exactly. We need to continue teaching people that it's perfectly acceptable to make exact duplicates of something, not head in the opposite direction.

It actually doesn't destroy that - it assumes that quality will never change and adds a new asset type to digital files. You end up with both collectible/signed/authentic versions and the infinitely replicable copies. It allows artists to implement scarcity without implementing DRM.

Implementing scarcity seems like a totally undesirable thing to do, unless your only motive is money

Yes - artists deserve to be able to make money from selling scarcity and authenticity. 100%. If they can do that while not restricting access, it is the best of both worlds.

This is a great project, thank you :)

What is being destroyed exactly? Almost all art in galleries are privately owned.

The article itself says nothing stops you from copying the digital art either. But that's not dissimilar from those factories in China pumping out cloned replicas of famous art:

> Just as you can share reproductions of the Mona Lisa, someone could still copy and paste the image, but the provenance and price history of the original are accessible to all. The original of these works is identifiable and cannot be replicated, which is why they are called “provably rare.”

It's just an alternative form of property rights, ownership claims, and selling art. A decentralized version of something that already exists. That's arguably value-add here in the crypto aspect depending on your worldview, or at a minimum the perpetuation of what already exists. Nothing is being destroyed.

Most of our complaints against copyrights are typically regarding the arbitrary (US) congressional laws around it and the anti-competitive anti-progress behaviour that the movie/music industry is notorious for. Where consumers just want to get easy access to full libraries of high-quality content. This development does nothing to help these companies achieve that easier and it also takes congress/centralized law out of the picture.

It's amazing that someone paid six figures for a cryptographically-assigned virtual cat. I would ask though, is this the future of art collecting? Or, a by-product of the crypto hype wagon?

It's both a product of crypto-hype and one of several futures of art collecting.

Except the value of a CryptoKitty or Rare Pepe is unlikely to continue to be worth anything in a few years, because let's be honest, it's not very interesting art.

That's your opinion. Art is a matter of perception.

Walter Benjamin is rolling over in his grave.

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