record

Thesis Info

LABS ID
00870
Thesis Title
Exit Strategy
Author
Eric Barry Drasin
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
MFA
Year
2020
Number of Pages
60
University
University at Buffalo
Thesis Supervisor
Matt Kenyon
Supervisor e-mail
mkenyon AT buffalo.edu
Other Supervisor(s)
Stephanie Rothenberg, Tina Ryan, Max Goldfarb
Language(s) of Thesis
English
Department / Discipline
Fine Art
Copyright Ownership
Languages Familiar to Author
URL where full thesis can be found
www.ericbarrydrasin.com/portfolio/exit-strategy-book/
Keywords
cryptocurrency, distributed technology, web3, conceptual art, design, performance, media art
Abstract: 200-500 words
Exit Strategy, is a hybrid webVR/publication created for Eric Barry Drasin’s MFA in Fine Art at the University at Buffalo. In response to the COVID shutdowns, this exhibition was reformatted and distributed over several digital platforms. It deals with our current moment in technology, art, value and possibility by using distributed technologies such as the blockchain as a medium. There are three main projects represented here: The Distributed Art Object Framework, Normcorp, and Dungeon Master. The “DAOF” (Distributed Art Object Framework) begins to outline a technological and legal stack which gives rise to emergent forms of digital property. This is presented as a speculative series of protocols, existing as an open source, distributed commons. This project uses the legal frameworks and language of conceptual art to help articulate how and why we must consider digital property as a fundamental right, open and available to all people. By encoding new behaviors into old containers of value, we redesign how an economy can function. Perhaps in fairer, and more interesting ways. The DAOF encodes the Artists Rights and Transfer Sale Agreement, a seminal legal text outlining a schema for artists rights and re-sale royalties. The DAOF creates an automated version of this contract, one that artists can freely use to edition their digital work. Extending the concept of the DAOF to a theory of distributed art, “Normcorp” is a project using the blockchain art startup as a sculptural medium. Normcorp self-reflexively performs its own value as a legal construction of value/financial instrument by blurring the lines between a startup as an art object. It collapses the legal containers for both by nesting the corporation into the art object framework. It then uses the Lean Startup methodology to “perform” its own value in the same way a startup would. Normcorp does not produce any product, except reifying the conditions of its own existence. “Dungeon Master” provides a foil to the utopian ideas presented in the DAOF. Dungeon Master is the world’s most brutal academic speed metal powerpoint band. Here we present our first academic speed metal powerpoint album in its entirety, “Fear and Trembling: on the Blockchain.” Dungeon Master presents an alternative vision of the blockchain, as I embody a character from the “Dark Enlightenment,” or a group of rogue academics and libertarians who seek to use these technologies to consolidate their power, disrupt democratic institutions and instantiate a type of “Neo-Feudalism,” whereby one’s access to capital more directly dictates one’s ability to influence political process.