Blockchain technology has allowed us to re-imagine the arts. As a movement, it’s been rife with seemingly disparate narratives: people adopting its cocktail of hashes & cryptography as a Rorschach test for their beliefs. It’s simultaneously the most anarchist, most libertarian, most egalitarian, most socialist, most freeing, most authoritarian technology. I’ve always seen it as a tool to empower creatives. That’s why I got into Bitcoin development in 2013: to help my 14-yr self in 2004 get paid. As a teenager, growing up in South Africa, my games couldn’t be sold online without jumping - like a videogame character - through many hoops.

There’s a lot that has been done to empower creatives. There’s a lot more to explore, especially in exploring new markets in the arts.

In a series of posts, I will explore three broad avenues that currently interest me:

This is article #2.

Generative Art Economies

Art is everywhere. This hasn’t been more true in our modern era, where anyone, and ultimately any thing could create art. With powerful computers & the proliferation of machine learning, it’s running head-first into art, and boy, is it fun.

Somewhere, in all the latent space of potential art, lies patterns that will move us, and we can task our friendly mechanical friends to go find them.

We’ve seen how powerful AI and machine-learning can be for enlightening us: Professional ‘Go’ players spoke about AlphaGo as if it gifted us a new perspective.

[European champion] Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he says. “So beautiful.”

Holly Herndon, who co-created (along with Mat Dryhurst), an accompanying AI to create an album together (PROTO), discussed how one should see the advent of AI coming into creativity.