Editor’s note: This story is the first edition of Link Rot, a new column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet. The column will appear every other Monday.
Part of the mystique, and thus the value, of art lies in its durational capacity. As art historian David Joselit describes in his 2023 book Art’s Properties, a painting emanates its picture in an act of “infinite temporality that is given finitude by the possessive gaze.” “Infinite” is quite a reach, but in relation to the span of human lives, an artwork represents an existence that stretches past our brief timelines. If one has the means, owning this emanating material is possible. To be rid of it typically goes one of a few ways: you gift it, you sell it or you die. But what if, instead, you knew this object was doomed to stutter, glitch, or rot, turning from new to old in a matter of years? How does this change our estimation of the work? This problem has haunted new media art and troubled its position in the art world as well as its market for decades.
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New media art dealer Kelani Nichole thinks she may have found a fix.
At an event held at Pier 57 during the Armory Show earlier this month, Nichole launched the Transfer Data Trust, a data cooperative meant to make art “last 100 years,” according to one of the posters pinned to the walls of the conference room. Nichole has been dealing new media art since she founded Transfer Art Gallery in 2013, championing artists like Rosa Menkman, Lorna Mills, and Carla Gannis. As her interests turned toward decentralization as both a political project and a technical suite of tools, the gallery was shut down and reborn as the Data Trust, going from a registered LLC to a co-op.
I first met Nichole in 2021 as the NFT boom went into full swing. At the time, she was of two minds about the new attention. On one hand, it put a spotlight on the somewhat neglected category of new media art; on the other, she was intensely skeptical about the technical ability of NFTs to deliver what they promised: permanence. She likened them to “glorified receipts” that did not actually address the difficult problem of how to care for work that is constantly under the threat of obsolescence as the systems they are built on become outdated.
“What it means for a painting to last through time is different from, say, a video game—new media just doesn’t have the kind of longevity,” Nichole said after the launch. “The permanence of mutable objects is possible if we make sure we can preserve the intent of the artist.”
That is to say, new media works can survive into the future if a great degree of information about them is archived. Simply updating the systems that a work is stored on doesn’t necessarily mean the artistic qualities of a work will be saved. Imagine that in a century the screens we use are fundamentally different from those today. Perhaps “screens” themselves will be an outdated mode of display. Ensuring that a work retains the qualities of the software it was originally designed to be performed through means recording a lot of information and then—this is the hard part—making sure it isn’t lost.
The Transfer Data Trust is a complex network of tools, including a network-attached storage drive (a hard drive connected to other hard drives in the system), decentralized file storage software from IPFS and Filecoin, and a user-friendly browser where inventory, market, and conservation statuses are available to the artists, dealers, and conservators who are part of the co-op. Proceeds from sales are pooled into the co-op, creating a pot of funds that members vote on how to use, including decisions to conserve fragile works. The idea is that if there is a system in place to do the arduous work of storing and conserving works, as well as recording the artist’s intentions about how the work should be displayed, institutions and collectors will feel more comfortable acquiring risky new media art. Gray Area gallery, the Knight Foundation, and other art and tech institutions have sponsored the creation of the Data Trust’s many moving parts but it remains to be seen if these technical solutions to preservation will translate to adoption and consistent sales.
What I find interesting about the Data Trust is also what I found interesting about the NFT boom: both blur distinctions between art and data in a way that upends our definitions and valuations of both. During the NFT boom, it seemed that some digital artifacts were called art simply because we didn’t have another name for something that could be so valuable while defying what one feels should be valuable. Didn’t the spectacles of Duchamp, Pollock, and Warhol trickle down to the public consciousness as nothing more than a lesson on the shock of inexplicable value created by difficult-to-understand elites? If NFTs were shocking in their value, wasn’t that the basic premise for their being called “art”?
Meanwhile, data itself has long been profoundly shocking to art. As Lisa Nakamura recounts in her 2007 book Digitizing Race, “visual culture studies” had to be invented in the late 1990s because art historians found visual images created with computers to possess “no history, no mode of production, no distinct genres, and in short no material culture of their own […] [W]ithout these things, art history and indeed most materially based critique can have nothing to say about digital visual images. The reduction of all images to sets of binary code seems to pool them all into an undifferentiated soup of bits and bytes, understandably a nightmare for any type of scholarship.”
But Nakamura was writing about the state of things in 1996. What shocks of value like the NFT boom and technically complex inventions like the Data Trust reveal are the different ways people are trying to differentiate data, to unsoup-ify it.
In a July report on data cooperatives like Transfer, researchers for the Project Liberty Institute noted that fine art is one of the few markets outside of finance “capable of assigning value to data, especially in the form of Time-Based Media artworks, which are essentially data.” But not all data is equal. As Nichole put it, the Data Trust tries to answer a big question: how do we take back the value of our data from Big Tech? Is it possible to establish peer-to-peer sale of data “at the scale of trust,” in Nichole’s words, as opposed to the current system where Big Tech scrapes our data and sells it to advertisers, making them rich while exploiting us as disenfranchised consumers? If your data is valuable, maybe yes.
In 2021–22, I heard a lot about how blockchain would democratize the art world, revealing the gatekeepers as nothing more than unnecessary middlemen. Yet, as I learned more about the Data Trust and its quest for digital permanence, it became clearer why the gatekeepers–an ungenerous title for experts–exist.
Not every work of art can be brought into the deep future. Stewardship across generations is incredibly laborious. While many of us were promised in terrifying high school lectures that “the internet is forever,” we know by now that our camera rolls, entombed in old devices and overwhelming in their scale, sometimes wither away while our parents’ photo albums wait in closets to be opened every Christmas. To bring something into the future is to make it separate from that which will not receive the same investments of care. If the crypto space—whether its NFTs or memecoins or whatever comes next—is so often defined by extreme boom and bust cycles, it may have something to do with the fact that these are not arenas of value creation that are concerned with preservation, conservation, and a view towards the deep future.
As people like Nichole design systems meant to steward certain data into the future, data enters the era of its own difference. Soup no longer.