The Physical Impossibility of Provenance

for provvenance purposes only

thank you all, truly unbelievable will do my best to articulate some of the thinking here below

a combination of influences the most recent and obvious being the "provenance" debate spun up by the backdating of physical work hirst here claiming that some pieces are dated based on when the idea was had, vs when the work is physically finished

a ludicrous premise to most, and also an incredible insight into the subjectivity of value

it just so happens that the most notable sculpture in question is this 3 part display which maps perfectly to the three black checks which also do or don't exist depending on your philosophical persuasion

"The Physical Impossibility of Provenance" is a comment on how difficult it is to establish provenance of an artwork in the "real" (atomic) world it takes a lot of resources, expertise, and still runs mostly on trust many historical examples of fake work in huge institutions

permissionless, digital networks can establish bottom up provenance around intangible objects that far exceed the level of "verification" you can achieve with oil on canvas (or shark in formaldehyde)

the reason for the title "1988" is a nod to the way traditional art institutions present artists, usually by their birth year (and a tongue in cheek backdating reference, butterfly effect, if y never happened then neither would x, etc)

what's most interesting to me about the ability to publish work that has cumulative, networked provenance is how much context will exist around artists' careers in the near future and why minting work on infrastructure that is likely to continue to exist is a massive component of that

also comes back to a very core part of the vv thesis: the network as a canvas since early last year, we have been running experiments against these ideas in both the checks and opepen collections checks as the pursuit of absolute scarcity opepen the opposite

have huge respect for @ourZORA in particular for building cultural infrastructure that has unlocked a massive amount of sovereign creativity and more abundant attitude toward the value of digital provenance it's also where both checks and opepen were born

back to the idea, was ace to see people playing with the model "irl" enforces the incredible paradox of an infinitely replicable (but provably scarce) object

that inspired a prompt:

95,000 museums in the world makes me wonder how many of these we could get "in" notable places using a network of 35,000~ people below courtesy of @aaraalto in MoMA (v rough test) perhaps the first $3 piece of art in the lobby

@aaraalto a true inversion of the provenance story - bottom up digital consensus an infinite, permissionless "physical" and global exhibition (I am cleaning up the model so it will work better)

@aaraalto to really go down the rabbit hole on the parallels that exist here blockchains are triple entry accounting systems physical coordinates are created by triangulating signals from satellites some tokens are more notable than others some coordinates are more notable than others

@aaraalto "MoMA" 40° 45' 41.4324'' N 73° 58' 41.7756'' W

@aaraalto model improved

@aaraalto easiest way to play with it, go to zora (mint link at the top of the thread) and hit the ar button bottom right

@aaraalto h/t @aaraalto and @traf for the ui here proof of exhibition soon if you find yourself somewhere notable, you know what to do

@aaraalto @traf 🇮🇹