By Laura Lotti and Calum Bowden
Essay from Cathlow, & Rafferty (eds.) (2022) Radical Friends – Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts, Torque Editions, UK.
Today there is a mounting awareness among art workers of the ways in which contemporary art is instrumental in extending the logic of finance. The rampant neoliberalisation of the cultural sphere concentrates risk on the individual art workers who go head-to-head for increasingly limited opportunities and resources. Faced with the collapse of legacy institutions, some artists and creative practitioners have turned to blockchain technologies to find answers to the problem of organisation in the cultural field, including its psycho-social pathologies and its economic sustainability. While the financial nature of the technology runs the risk of engendering familiar power structures and dynamics, the possibility it affords to transfer funds across borders, experiment with programmable co-ownership models and software-based organisations for transparent decision-making and record-keeping, known as DAOs, has opened up the imaginations of many to alternative forms of organising.
Established in 2018, Black Swan is a Berlin-based collective that deploys the conceptual and operational affordances of blockchains to pursue alternative approaches to the traditional art world templates for art making. Black Swan was conceived in the context of the Berlin art scene, deploying blockchains and DAOs to address the precarious reality of local artists and cultural practitioners, who often fall between the cracks of existing arts infrastructures due to the interdisciplinary or ‘non-canonical’ nature of their practises. Since blockchain technology is still nascent and limited in terms of its technical and financial accessibility, Black Swan has so far used it primarily as a means of rethinking the economics and organisational structures of the art world: Blockchain thinking, without relying on the technology itself. Through peer support, artist-led funding and community decision-making, Black Swan places resources into the hands of the users rather than the gatekeepers of the arts. In Black Swan’s cosmos, galleries, museums, and funding bodies have no influence over how their resources are used. Cultural practitioners are the active members of the system; they decide collectively on the use of resources, participate in the curation of initiatives and art projects to be realised (something that will be addressed in more detail below), and benefit from the value produced by their practices.
Black Swan’s research methodology has put play and games at the centre of technical development as a means to challenge the mystique surrounding blockchain and understand emergent behaviours around its uses, foregrounding the affective dimension of technically-mediated interactions. In role-playing games, working groups, and hackathons, Black Swan invites existing communities of creative practitioners to experiment with forms of interaction, modes of organisation, and sustainable economic models to test hypotheses around how we organise, in a safe, playful environment. This is used as a way out of narrow technological solutionism, to collectively arrive at modes of framing problems and experiment with alternative ecologies of artmaking.
Our first working group with nine creative practitioners met in Berlin in January 2021 and surfaced the desire for tools for horizontal resource management for art making. This working group is explained in more detail in the chapter “Cygnet Speaks” in this volume. Our research emphasised that one of the biggest challenges to collaborative initiatives is neither the lack of ideas or enthusiasm, nor material resources per se, but is rather the absence of context-specific tools through which artists can reach consensus over how to best use and allocate resources to their collective benefit. Since then Black Swan has been developing a kaleidoscope of methods and tools to power multi-disciplinary research and practice that are situated in and adapted to our context in Berlin. This is not about replacing legacy institutions with equally molar and centralised structures, but rather creating new pathways and ecologies within and between them so that new formations may emerge from their interstices. For Black Swan, institutions are edges – connecting relations – and not centralised nodes within a network. As part of this effort, Black Swan is plotting the creation of Black Swan DAO: a translocal and mutable source for distributing resources and value differently across interdependent art worlds.
Over the last three years, Black Swan has acted as a research and development working group exploring the possibilities of art-run organisations. Below are some of the evaluations we have come to at the end of 2021, in the guise of affirmations for artworlds based on solidarity and mutualism. True to Black Swan’s nature, these observations may be forked, forgotten or mutated from here on in and are only committed to paper as glimpses of close horizons.
Art-making is a mode of collective staking
An agreement is always a commitment, even before a formal contract. DAOs and blockchain mechanisms provide ways to make these commitments more explicit. One of these mechanisms is staking, the practice of ‘locking’ tokens into protocols to earn some kind of reward while forfeiting the possibility of trading them. A stake is a lock on liquidity that enables the circulation of other ‘values’ in a system. But as those involved in collective practices know, staking extends beyond technical mechanisms; it is a mode of relation that binds people together, socially and often economically. In fact, staking can take many different forms: one can stake in an idea, or project, or practice; it can be a way to assign responsibility, or to signal appreciation. Staking creates connections and networks, it is a game that creates its own rules as more people play it.
This is true for the Contemporary Art world too. The idea of the individual artist genius celebrated by the global art market is a hangover from a bygone era whose historical groundings are shrouded in myth. Art making has always been an endeavour of collective staking, and even today an artist CV (a highly disputed tool in the arts) tells a story of collaborations with many different kinds of ‘stakeholders’, from studio assistants and curators, to galleries, collectors, university classes, residency programs, and much in between. While art collectives have long been part of art history books, within the neoliberal circuits of contemporary art, “the contemporary collective finds itself pressured to echo the strategies of the individual, finding success in the fullness of one […] it does little to invert the capitalist model it often is bred to resist against, collapsing in on itself and alienating its audiences as an overt vehicle of capitalism.” With the recuperation and individualisation of the collective by the art market, there is an urgent need for alternative organisational structures and mechanisms that support the heterogeneity of contributions in processes of art making. Peer-to-peer infrastructures can facilitate a process of “instituting otherwise,” providing the foundations for proto-institutions that renew the functions and commitments of legacy organisations to tend to the ecologies within which collectives are situated.
Black Swan uses blockchain mechanisms to support the commitments and trust networks that already exist among practitioners, without eliminating or replacing it with code, and build new bridges to extend said trust to institutional actors as silent stakeholders. The challenge is how to not stifle these nascent collective formations with too much formalisation, as emotional engagement is as key as protocol mechanics in running an organisation. In this regard, perhaps DAOs are a signpost or gateway to something else, rather than an end in and of themselves.
The organisation is mutable, liable to change
When artistic practices are overly constrained into rigid and static organisational forms copied from vehicles of capitalism, they result in extractive economic relations where a minority in creative leadership positions benefits at the expense of the art workers who produce art for wages. Far from the tyranny of structurelessness, Black Swan’s research demonstrates the ways artists use varied organisational structures and hierarchies in practice, deploying organisational strategies to suit tasks at hand. To rethink the organisational structures of the artworld, Black Swan starts by searching for new metaphors for organising that are mutable and liable to change.
Looking at the origins of the words organisation and corporate, we discover narrow assumptions about biology extended to the social sphere. Organisations and institutions can be thought of as shells and containers for groups of people. Organisations are formally constructed to achieve goals that individuals are unable or unwilling to achieve on their own. But as they grow in scale and complexity, organisations tend to ossify around ‘rational’ mechanisms that render them abstracted from the reality they are embedded in, and unable to adapt to the changing context. Modern capitalism is an organised society, where corporate actors are endowed with the capacity to act independently from the intentions and interests of their creators. People are either held by or excluded from institutions of the family, the corporation, and the state. A person's context-specific position within this matrix becomes at least somewhat deterministic of their ability to access resources, economic security, and a quality of life. But the rigid organisational forms upon which today’s society is constructed and the expulsion, exclusion, and isolation associated with them are recent phenomena. Until the 15th century such a notion of formal organisation was inconceivable, as the legal separation between public and private sphere had not yet been developed.
The biological metaphors upon which modern notions of organisation depend further naturalise the form and structure organisations take. The rationality, rigidity and immutability associated with organisations might stem in part from 15th century European assumptions about nature, based on a mechanistic view of the universe as a large-scale eternal machine. Taken with more recent thinking about biology and the philosophy of science, we see alternative possibilities for organisations emerge that map more closely to the dynamic, multi-linear processes through which artists create together. In the recent works of the philosophers Paul B. Preciado and Laboria Cuboniks, nature becomes a site of contestation and technological transformation. Preciado reveals how bodies are produced and reproduced through the pharmaceutical industry, pornography, and late capitalism. And Laboria Cuboniks calls for the potential of contemporary technologies to be mobilised upon gender, sexuality and disparities of power. As these authors show, the arrangement of organs that make up bodies are rendered as in flux, made and remade through media, technoscience, and economics. If we rethink the biological metaphor underpinning organisation in terms of this more recent thinking about nature, we can see organisational bodies as something that are fluid, mutable and adaptable, and that shift the ecology within which art is created. As Laboria Cuboniks say, “if nature is unjust, change nature!” DAOs are the most recent instantiation of the ways in which organisation can become unpinned from an immutable and ideal body form, though in practice most DAOs have a tendency to fall back on previous assumptions about what an organisation can be. Black Swan aims to change that.
The organisation is united through shared vibes
Beyond the formal mechanisms that define the scope and domain of operation of an organisation, what an organisation actually holds in common is something that is practiced, performed and renegotiated at each encounter. It cannot be “engineered” a priori. Shared vibes may lead to shared values, but not the other way around. The theorist Peli Grietzer describes a vibe as an aesthetic unity in a world or in a work of art, that is a “surface-accessible, world-making structure.” In other words, a vibe is an aesthetic form that operates beyond and below what neoliberal policy reductively calls social cohesion, producing collective formations through resonances that traverse pre-established social contexts. Vibes are recursively related to intersubjectivity: vibes are both preconditions for, and effected by, the sharing of subjective experience by multiple people. A vibe might encompass an array of commonly-recognised phenomena and structures including difference, noise, ambiguity, the sacred, the profane, the unknown, and the ineffable. Shared vibes are produced through intimacy and common references and already emerge within local and translocal art scenes. The musician Ezra Koenig (via Grietzer and in turn via Elif Batuman) describes a vibe as a local colour with a historical dimension: ”What gives a vibe ‘authenticity’ is its ability to evoke – using a small number of disparate elements – a certain time, place and milieu; a certain nexus of historic, geographic and cultural forces.” A vibe erupts beyond the singular and the static towards a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements and cannot be fixed or pinned down (attempts to name or describe a vibe always reduce its complexity). As Koenig suggests, a vibe demarcates a temporality unfolding across spaces and cultural contexts. It marks the creation of a locality that is not bound by geographical constraints. Black Swan’s experiments with moon cycles in Cygnet further reveal ways that coalescing around the rhythms of alternative, more-than-human, temporalities might be used to create more equitable common substrates for art making.
Formal organisations like firms and corporations are only possible if there is a separation between public and private spheres. Emerging in the modern era, corporations are imagined as bodies for groups of individuals to act and exchange within. The creation of these abstract corporate bodies has come to depend on the reduction of complex identities to absolute values, which serve more as regulatory ideals than as means of caring for or nourishing collective bodies in flux. While organisations and corporations might publicly declare they are held together by goals and values, economists such as Ronald Coase reveal the ways in which firms arise because of profit incentives, and grow disproportionately large when transaction costs within an organisation are lower than between organisations. If our collective bodies are no longer to be based on profit maximisation or binary and absolute ideals, what else might act as substrates for people to act in concert? As information technologies and blockchains make the cost of transacting between organisations effectively the same as transacting within an organisation in terms of time, coordination effort and economic expenditure, the contours of individual and collective bodies become more entangled in mutualistic metabolisms.
Searching for a “north star” or a mission without having a commonly-held vibe only leads to an articulation of values that is vague, cliché or overly moralising. Providing a lens for reexamining the declared values of the contemporary art world, political theorist Rodrigo Nunes shows how delineating political differences through ideological positions reduces politics to a set of choices between absolute values. He demonstrates the bifurcation of leftist politics through an analysis of two left-wing melancholias centred around the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the protests of 1968 respectively – the former emphasising state action as the driver of social transformation, and the values of unity, leadership, hegemony; and the latter stressing the initiative of social actors, putting emphasis on the values of plurality, autonomy and bottom-up organisation. Nunes argues that in constantly demarcating their mutual difference through the reiteration of abstract principles and values that function as negations of each other, these two sides ensure that common ground cannot be found.
We see analogous dynamics at play in the Contemporary Art world: on the one hand, large institutions aim to renew themselves in a top down manner, attempting to fold any innovation or existential threat into their own brand; on the other, small initiatives operating entirely outside of established circuits in a “horizontal” and “autonomous” way miss out on network effects and the benefits that come from leadership and institutional support. Nunes finds a way out by thinking organisation in terms of specific problems and not merely conceptual relations: “common ground is a condition for responding to actual situations instead of just reiterating abstract principles or reproaching reality for being unlike our model.” Here we see how abstract values and principles end in questions of measurement and assessment against unattainable ideal states. Vibes, and the needs and desires that vibes articulate in practice, might provide better, more transversal, organising principles and enable the adoption of mutable structures to address common problems which demand varied approaches.
The organisation is maintained
Whether supported by technology or not, an organisation can work sustainably over a long period of time only if it is constantly maintained. Maintenance is about repair and renewal of the social and technical mechanisms that allow the organisation to operate in the first place, enabling it to adapt to and individuate through the milieu with which it is enmeshed. As Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin put it in the context of alternative ways of conceiving social networking: “individuation is also always a temporal and existential process, rather than merely social and psychological. By projecting a common will to a project, it is the project itself that produces a co-individuation of groups and individuals.” Like other organisational frameworks, a DAO works as a funnel to attract and catalyse “common will” and turn a “projection” or vision into a project – that is, a plan or coordinated activity. While the will is not lacking, most of the initiatives emerging out of the blockchain industry today feel like business as usual and are not daring enough in the visions they project for the futures they want to realise. Part of the blame lies in the deceitful optics of decentralisation with the misguided emphasis on eliminating structural hierarchies in order to eliminate power imbalances; the other part is in the lack of curation in the original sense of the word, which is to say the lack of actual care for the relations that DAOs can facilitate.
Black Swan aims to address this by clarifying common misconceptions around both terms, beginning with curating. Curare – to take care, to cure, from curating as taking care of bathhouses in Roman times, to the priest who cared for souls in Mediaeval times, to looking after collections of art and artefacts in the 18th century… What new inflections and metamorphoses are to be found in the meaning and practice of curation within distributed digital environments? Black Swan’s research demonstrates the ways in which community facilitation is a key capacity needed by cultural institutions of the future. As artistic practices and experiences are moving online and increasingly unfolding beyond geographically-bound localities, facilitation needs to be embedded in the core mechanisms of an organisation. It needs to be cultivated from within, in order to manifest its caring, and carrying, function. The shared vibes at the core of translocal art scenes require care and curation to be sustained, reproduced and be liable to change.
Black Swan’s research also demystifies and seeks to break down the ideas of the “Decentralized” “Autonomous” “Organization” within DAOs. Decentralisation, as a technical principle, can be invaluable to foster infrastructural resilience and reach, but it is not about eliminating or automating hierarchies. Instead it should be about creating and supporting useful and mutable roles in order to meet the needs of given initiative. Autonomy is always a mix of automation and labour, the labour of care for the infrastructure of humans and machines working together to generate $urplus. And Organising is always a mix of horizontal, vertical and transversal strategies.
Manifesting a Black Swan
Black Swan is a project researching the organisational forms at play in the artworld today. It responds to the ways in which legacy institutions have failed the artists they supposedly serve by imagining, role playing, and building new organisational frameworks and arts infrastructures. Following Marina Vishmidt, Black Swan moves from institutional critique to infrastructural critique, to engage and intervene within the interlinking material, historical, economic, affective, and subjective conditions necessary for the art institution and its critique to exist and reproduce. From past research, play, and critique, Black Swan has distilled these four affirmations, that we have presented above, as guiding mantras to accompany us in the realisation of alternative ecologies of art making:
Art-making is a mode of collective staking, or in other words, mutually beneficial contributions and commitments should be explicit in art making.
The organisation is mutable, liable to change, or collective bodies and the metaphors they are based on should allow for adaptable, task and context specific organisational structures.
The organisation is united through shared vibes, or collectives craft and hold their own mini worlds in common.
The organisation is maintained, or new art ecologies need to be cared for, curated, and tended to.
At the core of Black Swan’s effort is the awareness that what is ‘wrong’ with art-and-technology projects — their inability to square radical modes of inquiry and collaborative labour with the demands and expectations of corporate and military funding, institutional support, and instrumentalised science — is precisely what is most important about them. That current collective practises cannot fit the rigid, KPI oriented structures of current institutions, and instead require organisational structures that reflect their dynamic, distributed, interoperable nature. Black Swan is developing building blocks for such organisations, for the institutions of proximate horizons. These may take many forms, all at once: a solidarity-based translocal art circuit (as opposed to a ‘market’), a proto-institution for multi-disciplinary research and practice, a community-led micro-residency program, a self-curated knowledge repository, a mycelium network connecting different, heterogeneous hubs, and many more that cannot yet be imagined.
Black Swan does not want to replace the current artworld with an equally rigid monolithic and universalising structure. Let a hundred artworlds bloom! Neither does it promise utopian visions. Utopias are closed systems and only exist within clearly defined boundaries and specific contexts. Utopias are futures of the past and are not equipped to confront the challenges of the present. As Donna Haraway says: “The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before.” Building future artworlds requires being rooted in the present and looking beyond myopic frameworks inherited from modernity, building friendships and tools that may be capable of seeding many possible, if unimaginable, artworlds from the ruins of art, critique, and age-old institutions.
[Bibliography on request]