Kelani Nichole on Building Trust and Cooperation in Experimental Media Art34 min read

We spoke to technologist and exhibition maker Kelani Nichole about TRANSFER gallery, and what it looks like to prioritize trust to spur collaborative curation and collective ownership through novel, decentralized technologies.

mai ishikawa sutton (MIS): To start us off, can you talk about your approach to TRANSFER? How did you get started with the project and what kinds of works do you elevate through the gallery?

Kelani Nichole (KN): TRANSFER was always a very experimental space, a gallery with a spirit of openness. I focused on solo shows with artists because that focus let me get experimental, thinking about bringing virtual worlds and online art networked art into physical space. It was about installing concepts in the space, not just through screens, but extending the work away from the screen and connecting with people in different ways. 

I often talk about the way we treated exhibition design more as a holodeck than a white cube. TRANSFER didn’t always present itself as a gallery. Oftentimes, you walked into more of a set design or a portal to a new world and it shifted from show to show, again, because one artist was taking over the space at a time and pushing what it meant to bring conceptual virtual artworks into physical exhibitions. 

2016 was the first pivot in the gallery’s programming. There was a lot of talk about equity in the art world, which has accelerated in recent years, but at that time, it was really about gender disparity. I took a look at my own program and realized that I had more dudes in the program than femmes, and  I was shocked looking at my own numbers. So I decided to dedicate my practice to working with women and female identifying folks who are really examining technology and intimacy, sensuality, and some of the softer sides of what it means to be human. Representation, identity, duty, spirituality – these were the themes that these artists were working with. So it was never something where TRANSFER became only a space for women, but it was a notable shift in my practice. During that time, I think the shows got much more personal and powerful.

I also developed something in 2016, called the TRANSFER Download, which is a format that has traveled the world and continues to evolve. We’ll be showing the Download this February at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami and I’m excited it’s going to have another moment. The idea with this format for physical installation of virtual art is to present a “download” of all of the ways that artists are working with media art. It’s a large format, three channel projection that responds to the space that it’s installed in. The magic of this thing is that it both addresses a place and an architecture. So every time the download goes up, it’s  room scale, so you feel surrounded by the piece, as if you’re immersed in it. 

There’s also a new curatorial selection each time. Each exhibition includes up to 10 different artworks, controlled with an iPad, giving the viewer agency to hyperlink and jump between entire worlds and draw new connections on their own. The format became a simple proposition to an artist studio, who’s maybe never worked with three channel, multi-channel, large format, or moving image, and it became a way for TRANSFER, as a gallery to then be commissioned by institutions to do exhibition design and augment their technology capabilities. The Download was pretty early on in the gallery’s history of developing this sort of alternative relationship to what it means to be a gallery, what it means to work with institutions, and what it means to have a hybrid practice between the technical skills to realize  this work in the world and the conceptual side of curatorial practice. 

In 2019, the gallery moved to LA and opened a physical space, and there was another big shift in the program, it became more about salon gatherings. We still did exhibitions in a space, but we had these full evenings where we would feed people and have conversations and spend time with the art in a different way. That program shifted a lot of my thinking, seeing the way people connect to the works in a more intimate salon setting. And I think moved me even further from what one might identify as a gallery. 

At that time, I had already started this series of experiments, which are sort of speculative design, but also software design experiments about reversing some of the power structures in the art world and giving back agency to artists and subverting what it means to be a gallery. These ideas of redistribution and equity, that’s where I entered the conversation with DWeb. That’s a brief  history of TRANSFER and some of the principles we’ve worked with.

MIS: It seems like TRANSFER has evolved alongside shifts in the conversation about digital media – how from the beginning, it has continued to respond to and even shape the thinking around the technologies and approaches that were being explored. Why do you think it’s important for experimental media art to engage with software? To examine the ways that it exists in our lives, as well as to play with the ways in which the artists themselves engage with software as a medium?

KN: Yeah, great question. I think that great contemporary art helps us understand our current moment, and helps us parse all of the messy complexities of reality. And so much of our lives since the emergence of the web, back in the days of Web 1.0, has been about networked culture and this hyper connectedness to technology. More and more tech is blurring lines of intimacy and identity in all aspects of our lived experience. So it just makes sense to me to work with artists who are also using these technologies, but using them in a way that’s subversive, that’s showing us something maybe we don’t see in our day-to-day experiences. 

My practice is hybrid. I’m a user experience researcher. And so in my day job, I would be building software that was meant to disappear. Then I would moonlight at the gallery. The artists were all about making visible those same things that my commercial practice was seeking to obscure. And that pattern became really, I think, a fertile place to play early on in my practice. 

I was always really compelled to work with artists who were asking hard questions and challenging our assumptions about technology, like Morehshin Allahyari who coined this term “refiguring technology,” which kind of encapsulates an entire movement of femme practice that was incubating in and around TRANSFER. Morehshin’s work in particular is about collapsing ideas of time and technology, but also reframing technology in light of the earliest inventions, which were actually coming from Arabic cultures. Morehshin is using her own context to bring us through this entire journey. It’s an act of intimacy, care and subversiveness. 

The other thing I loved about the show we did together is that the artist had this clear vision for her series  ‘She Who Sees the Unknown’ when we did this solo exhibition together, but it was just the start of a much larger effort. She knew it would grow and continue to evolve. This was a research-based practice. It’s a world building practice. And she’s just one artist in the studio, right? So when we did that first exhibition, we just showed one figure of Huma and established the concept of what it meant to have a reading room and research in the gallery alongside the artwork. That exploration of how a kind of hybrid research-based piece could present in the physical space was so impactful in my thinking about the space of the gallery. 

This idea of working in iterations, and showing something in the gallery that is still a work-in-progress is the way that I’ve worked a lot with artists in the space. I think Rosa Menkman is another great example of an artist who’s really leaning in from a software perspective. She’s doing some deep thinking about game engines, refiguring formal components like sky boxes and some of the affordances of light and reflection and the possibilities for moving image to not be confined in a square resolution. For example, what does it mean to see like a pixel? These are the kinds of playful humanizing questions that Rosa will ask in her work. 

Building video games is also a very iterative process. I remember when we first took her video game Xilitla which is this surrealistic sort of dreamscape to an art fair and it was so natural for a younger generation to pick up that work, to understand and discover some of the ideas that Rosa had about navigation and presentation and exploration. 

Another example, we did a show in the gallery featuring her work, ‘DCT:SYPHONING. The 1000000th (64th) interval’ which is this sort of retelling of Edwin Abbott’s “Flatland” that puts us in this relationship to how we see and what we see and the compromises that are made in basic resolution and what’s lost in that compromise. This was a VR work that we wanted to bring into the gallery. So we actually architected a huge sculpture, which is reminiscent of a spomenik, the Slavic futuristic monuments. We projected the virtual world onto this physical structure so that anyone who entered the space, wouldn’t see the person wearing the VR headset, you’d see this sculpture first, and enter the work that way. 

When VR first emerged in the gallery, it was a spectacle watching the person with a headset. Rosa, being a very sensitive soul, didn’t want the person experiencing her work to have that experience. So we created this entire stage design, this huge installation, just to give people a safe space to actually fully immerse in the virtual space, and then projected that back into the shared space of the gallery, creating a social experience of the virtual work.

So these examples are both about the ideas in these artists’ work, as well as illustrating how experience design stems from the concepts in the work. The openness and trust that these artists had to collaborate with me and others, in a way where they were kind of pushing themselves beyond the screen, which is their primary place of practice, into a much larger space, and really doing that together. 

MIS: You touched on, a little bit, your critiques with the traditional art world, and how artists are treated and compensated for their work. What do you think are one of the toughest challenges confronting digital media artists? And I’m curious about your unconventional entry into the space – how you come from being a UX design professional, but starting off with very hands-on experience curating a physical gallery, instead of having come out of the academic route. How do you feel this background shaped your unique thinking about these challenges?

KN: I had my introduction to running a gallery in Philadelphia with a cooperative called Little Berlin. So my entry point into the art world was through a cooperative mentality. The way Little Berlin worked was so simple. Our rent was so cheap that everyone just paid $50 in dues a month. We could maintain an exhibition space, and members got one month out of the year to curate the space. So it was an undefined exhibition space, but everyone was supporting each other to produce shows. Everyone knew how to do something and together we did everything. 

At Little Berlin I learned how to do exhibition design, light a show, do curatorial research for a show, press a show, install. I learned how to do drywall! I learned how to do all this hands-on stuff, and I think that autonomy was so important to continue to develop a practice of resilience. I was always in situations where I was under-resourced, but I had so much autonomy and trust with my artists to really produce and take risks together. And we always pulled it off. Maybe it’s because I’m Virgo, but we always presented a high degree of production, and it always looked really professional but it was very punk, very DIY. 

I’m also really lucky in this regard – the way I made it work was I had my day job in tech, investing huge chunks of my salary in doing shows with my artists, traveling them all over the world, installing things globally. It was a huge investment for all 10 years of TRANSFER. That’s how it’s functioned. I think that having our skin in the game really brought a level of shared accountability. 

All the artists, by the way, are working artists too. They’re in education, for instance, or they’re software developers, designers, creatives. So we’re operating outside of the contemporary art  system, which is based on generational wealth. It’s based on, favoritism, relationships, who you know – it’s based on trust funds. We were operating in a completely different space; in a cooperative, self sustaining, and mutualistic space online. And even though we were presenting as a gallery, very early on I sensed that the more I learned about the contemporary art world and how it works, I knew that was not the right way to do business. 

For example, the idea of gallery representation, where you own a relationship, you own an artist. Galleries restrict access to that artist from other agents, defining geographic location, holding their inventory, and giving them terms stating they take 50%, even if gallerists don’t do much. The bad business dealings are rampant. Artists aren’t getting paid on time, all this horrible stuff is happening. And the story is even more complex, actually, in the history of art and technology. Because there’s another level of extraction going on, in which artists’ studios have always been the source of R&D for technology going way back to the 70’s. The ways that corporate and capitalist engagements with technology benefit from artistic practice is a problem that might never go away. I guess this is just the condition of capitalism. But I think that being in the commercial side of the tech industry gave me an understanding of maybe the way it shouldn’t be. 

MIS: You were able to, essentially, build out an alternative vision with a core team of people who shared this deep trust. And that you were able to manifest this outside of the traditional art world, you already knew that so much more was possible. Would you say that that’s a kind of ethos that you’ve always been able to carry through?

KN: We adopted some of the values from the best parts of internet culture and software development methodologies. We talked about iteration already, but also transparency, openness, and shared accountability. The gallery ran more like an open source project where each time we started to do a show together, we asked, “Okay, what do you have to bring to the table? Well this is what I can bring to the table.” And then the artist also showing in the gallery can do photography and they’re gonna help out. One artist might be able to come in and debug your work for you, if you’re an artist who’s new at working with the technology. And then others can give back skills or expertise in trade. So there was this network of resources, where myself and all of the artists were all giving to each other very openly. 

This mutualistic exchange and spirit of generosity was what I was maintaining by bringing a lot of funding and effort to the table for these folks. But they were also giving so much and we were all working with very, very, very few resources. So that also just brings, I think, this sense of shared ownership in everything we did. Sales were the last thing on our mind. It was all about ideas and art and putting things up. And of course, we meant to sell art, and we did. We placed many works with very important collections and continue to do so, but it was never about that. Oftentimes, we would open a show and there would be no prices. Like, it wasn’t about that at that moment. It was about getting the ideas into the world – and figuring out how they find support was always part of that process, but secondary to putting the ideas into the world.

MIS: Within the traditional art market, many come from a perspective of prioritizing how to make the most money off of artists. Maybe exploitation is an extreme word, but in many cases it actually is that. Whereas you’re starting from a place of wanting to make meaningful art, creating a space to show that art, and having trustful relationships based on what people want to build together. That’s a completely different way of approaching galleries and curation. Which gets me to my next question. You said that the first gallery that you were involved in, Little Berlin, was a co-op. Can you talk a bit about your effort to transform TRANSFER gallery into a cooperative structure?

KN: Yeah, exactly. The TRANSFER Data Trust is how we’re currently thinking of this cooperative value exchange network. It’s also a decentralized artist archive. So it’s half about infrastructure, being peer-to-peer mutualistic infrastructure for storage and preservation. But more importantly about doing that together – archiving together and creating context for each other, as we’ve always done at TRANSFER. 

This is a little bit of an aside, but I think it’s a really nice note of mutualism and collectivism. Lorna Mills was the first to do it, and this tradition emerged at TRANSFER. When an artist had a solo show, they would use their closing reception as an opportunity to invite a bunch of artists into the space and we would do these massive GIF screening closing parties. So the artists would propose a theme, other artists would submit GIFs, and then we would install them and play them at the closing party. That meant a solo show became a platform for your peers to also be shown at TRANSFER. The artists would all put these shows on their CV and what emerged is a whole community of people showing experimental work. 

So the artists were doing that curatorial work. I wasn’t doing those curations, they were doing that themselves. Faith Holland curated ‘GIFs to Have Sex By’,one of my all time favorites, and Carla Gannis produced screenings a number of times, including our largest one ‘NarGIFsus’. Daniel Temkin did one called ‘NETVVORK’ where he invited artists to make forgeries of other artists and attempted to sell the GIFs in Bitcoin (this was in 2013). The artists at TRANSFER would come in and open up the space to other artists. 

The Data Trust is really just about trying to now formalize, in a way, all of these very generous value exchanges – nonmonetary value exchanges – that the gallery has been operating on for the last decade. So I’m starting with a few of the core artists, some who I just mentioned, who’ve been really the heart of the program and the heart of these exchanges. We’re spending the next year to co-design what it means to formalize these kinds of exchanges. And we’re hoping to codify them into a business entity, which resembles an artist’s trust. We’re modeling more on the framework of a perpetual purpose trust, in which things like a collection can be held and maintained as a nonprofit, with the sole purpose for that collection to exist in perpetuity. 

We’re combining that model with some ideas that are emergent in the world of data DAOs in the Web3 decentralized web space. There’s a very simple observation that I have honed in on: in this moment of transformation, media artists are in such a unique position because there is a decades-long history and well-tested approach at valuing media art, namely through conservation and appraisal. 

The art industry is one of the only industries that can put a monetary value on data for it to be insured, for it to be loaned, and to hypothetically be held in trust. So it’s quite a lot that we can do in this space to articulate value in a new way around data and data-based studio practice. Our hypothesis is that we can hold that IP, hold that value in a different way, and grow equity around it. See it evolve through time, have it re-valued, have it re-appraised, actually think about what it means to perform data and how that might add to the value of the data. 

These are all very tough things to do. They’re based on trust and human labor – that will never go away. The special thing about TRANSFER is that we’re always operating on human scale at a very personal level. It’s less about trying to replace human labor with automated contracts or relationships, but it’s more about using the efficiencies in automation. Decentralized storage is one huge one. But also, there’s a lot of administrative overhead on a lot of the exchanges in contemporary art. Not just selling things, like NFTs, which handle a transaction and a receipt. But there are all these other complex exchanges which essentially are a give-get relationship. 

I’m really interested in automating a lot of those exchanges, and also making transparent all of the real labor that goes into building this kind of cultural value. Because cultural value is very different from speculative value, which is something that hit digital art and digital arts hard during the height of NFTs. So this is a way for me to push back on that and show a better alternative; to show another path forward where we can think about value, building value, pooling value, and holding value, and not have that be some “to the moon,” token-based, transactional relationship.

MIS: A major critique with NFTs is that much of this media, you can actually just, of course, take a complete copy of the files and then just own a complete piece. TRANSFER is about celebrating openness and free culture, which stands in contrast to the reigning method for people to purchase digital art and “own” digital art, which is to essentially create some kind of artificial scarcity around ownership. 

In this case, if it’s a digital piece of work and it’s an NFT, how would you see things playing out with the data trust, in terms of the relationship between an artist and somebody who’s a big fan of the art? How would technology mediate that relationship between those people? 

KN: First, I want to say that most of the work in TRANSFER’s archives are open on the web. We have been working for 10 years to build an understanding for collectors about what it means to own something that everyone else can access. How that can be an act of patronage and how it’s very different from a scarcity-based model of collecting, and how that is actually so much more in line with artistic practice. We know that true patrons throughout the history of art are the ones who have taken these kinds of risks, and who have been first to support these new models. 

Here’s a great example. It’s a recent one, but it’s one of the newer works in the TRANSFER Data Trust. And it’s a series from Huntrezz Janos, and it’s called Infilteriterations. Huntrezz started using Instagram’s AR face filters when the tech was still in beta, in the studio, and in a personal, very thoughtful, but also subversive way. These early face filters that Huntrezz made are so powerful. It was during the pandemic, and it’s really this reflection of a technology in a place and a moment. So these series exist on Instagram. They’re open. They’re free for everyone to use, they always will be. But one collector can own each one also. Then there’s one AP, meaning that the artist in perpetuity, retains the right to do what they will with it. This is one thing that is very different from NFT’s because there’s just one copy in that system. Everything is flattened to one file which is a precarious way to treat a media artwork, which is made up of many, many files and exists across many versions and many iterations. 

So in the case of a work like Huntrezz and these filters, one of the things that we’ve done is we have a sort of intervention into the lifespan of these works. We’ve freed them from the Meta ecosystem by re-engineering the face filters on an open source pipeline in partnership with graduate researchers from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering Integrated Design and Media Program. Now they just load in your browser. You don’t have to be a part of the Meta ecosystem and give your data over in that way to experience these works. This is one example of how artworks might be revived or moved forward in time and affordances, even though they might have been created in a specific Web 2.0 moment they can actually have a life beyond that. 

So the idea of the Data Trust is this kind of engineering and maintenance is very specialized work to do. Our hypothesis is that maybe if we’re cooperativising and doing it together – so say five artists have a work that needs a similar sort of engineering treatment – we can engage a researcher or a set of researchers to do sort of a batch update on these works. So that a collector in the future who’s going for something challenging like this Huntrezz work, has the reassurance that the work will still be functional down the line. In the case of Huntrezz acquisitions, the collector gets a Mac mini that’s prepared for them to install and play with the filter in their own home. Everyone can use it on their phones, but only the collector gets to have this large installation version of the work that will stand the test of time. 

We’re playing with some levers of scarcity to create a deeper relationship and identity with what it means to own or steward the piece. But also making sure they’re open and accessible through time. If a collector ever were to have an issue with the current version of the software, they could come to the trust. The idea is the trust might have a set of resources for collectors to even make appeals for treatment or put up a sort of call to treatment. Automation can help maintain this, for example  if there’s multiple requests that could be triggering a call to find an engineer who’s interested in the research area. 

I think there’s all kinds of community-based-relationship automations that can create efficiencies around the specialized labor and care that it takes to maintain open, available, public artworks through time because internet infrastructure is constantly shifting. So the big shift we’re going through right now is decentralization. And, again, I’m very interested in the technology layer of decentralized storage, because right now there are generations of studio practice on hard drives in the studios. It’s such a precarious place for all of this data. So if we can, together, archive our work, hold sovereignly on our own nodes, we can start to overcome this precarious situation. Studios own their infrastructure, have hard copies on NAS drives and we have redundant copies on the decentralized web, we are seeding each other’s work in that way. These are the infrastructures I think that could bring forth a huge redistribution of power in this moment. 

MIS: That’s a good segue – I was actually going to ask you about the decentralized web. So the context by which we met was through the DWeb community, which is stewarded by the Internet Archive and many other organizations. And you touched on that problem of all this art being held on these hard drives and the potential of having collective management of this data. Can you elaborate on that? For instance when we think about the concept of the “cloud,” it’s designed to obfuscate the infrastructure that we rely on with digital networks, right? Like, we’re just supposed to just click on stuff and not think about where or what the “cloud” actually is.

You talk about where art is stored on a physical device, and the relationships that are required to maintain that, both in terms of upkeep and access. What are some of the opportunities in rethinking what that looks like in a decentralized context? But also, what are the challenges that you see in making that reality?

KN: Yeah, I mean, the first challenge is that if this works well, conservation is always about artists’ intent. That’s how we move ideas through time from a conservation perspective. So that’s going to be different for every single artist, right? Again, it’s human scale labor. This is never going to scale, to be someone’s VC pitch, it’s never going to be this kind of one-size-fits-all, democratized kind of thing. This is a different kind of thing based on care and cooperation. And what sets TRANSFER’s efforts apart from most of the Web3 space is that the technology we’re designing is based in an existing community of people who have real world results. Over the past decade, we’ve been modeling value exchanges in a new way. 

There’s two key layers to this infrastructure. One we already are very familiar with in the form of IPFS, which is like a protocol for data exchange. So building on that notion, having protocols to describe data in every possible way and any future way, and having that also be open, transparent, forkable, and federated, and truly open to make your own. Those are the principles we’re designing from.

The second part is exactly to your point about the “cloud”. And this would be a good time to bring up the forthcoming Gray Area DWeb curriculum for creators which aims to teach artists how to maintain their own infrastructure. We all have to own this infrastructure. We have to do this ourselves. We have to sit in front of the computer and get comfy with the command line. Be able to boot up our drive, check out our disk space, make sure things are seeding and be responsible for this new infrastructure that we’re going to start to maintain. 

We know right now that this is all still emergent technology, and the sophistication of peer-to-peer and decentralized infrastructure is changing rapidly. But still in the early days, and the DWeb shit breaks all the time. That’s one of the risks. This is an experiment. This is why I think of it almost more as a speculative design exercise. If at the end of this, we’re able to even implement the nodes in 10 studios which are redundantly storing each other’s work, we’ve created some level of resiliency that didn’t exist in the world before that effort, right? Whether or not the speculation of the business model and how it could be profitable and sustainable, whether or not those things actually move forward, we leave behind this very physical record. And more importantly, it’s a project through which artists are being supported to design those infrastructures for themselves. 

DWeb Camp last June was a big moment for me to move this project forward. But I wouldn’t say I’ve really announced it, or it hasn’t really started, because I’m still looking for the backing to pay the artists and conservators for their time and labor to co-design the solution together. I have a lot of hypotheses, which are very powerful and could reach a lot of people. But I need to make sure that the people who helped me see these things in the world and articulate them can be compensated in equitable ways as we build out the system. We want it to feel good. And so I like to say we’re moving at the speed of trust. 

We now have a lot of interesting leads on how we could fund some of this labor. And more importantly, we have backers to give us the disk space to start to establish this infrastructure. At this point, it’s really just getting the artists comfortable to engage with this hardware, and start to think through some of these big ideas like, what does it mean to describe your work for the future? Do you do that by medium? Time period? Do you think about themes? Do you think about series? Are they ongoing? Time functions very differently in time-based media artwork, so the more traditional ways of archiving and classifying things will never accommodate this work, just given the nature of their fixity. I think these new affordances of the web really can, in a new way, unlock the potential for us to archive, document, but also create new context across these artworks, and to create efficiencies and ensure they’re maintained and cared for in new ways. And have that not just be about flipping, trading, buying or selling artwork, but about all the other exchanges of value around it. 

MIS: You’ve touched on this a little bit about where you’re going with the project, but can you talk a bit more about what’s next for TRANSFER with the Data Trust? Also tell us about your hopes for the DWeb curriculum for creators? What might that mean for your project specifically, both in terms of upskilling artists technologically so they can maintain the archives and access to their own works, and also in rethinking their relationships to each other as creators?

KN: At this point in the project, I have been working with Fission, a great development team for months. Over the summer, we’ve been having weekly check-ins, we’re running a backlog through GitHub. We have this amazing prototype of what one of the entryways into this Data Trust might feel like for a collector or researcher, or someone from the public, coming to experience the catalog of artworks.

So it looks kind of like a catalog. It presents kind of like an Artsy, where there’s an artist profile with the work details, but some notable things are different, such as transparent pricing. We’re developing this flow where someone could request a loan or make an offer to acquire a work, and we’re making  all of that transparent, to show some of the labor and exchanges that are creating value. What’s special about working with Fission is they’re building infrastructure for the decentralized web. And so they’re approaching things in a very different way. 

While an end user might not be able to see it, everything that loads in the TRANSFER Data Trust catalog is actually in the decentralized web. When a person enters the trust, it says “start trusting” on the website, and you have to authenticate. But you’re not creating an account where we collect your data, instead what you’re doing is authenticating your browser as a file system for our inventory in the trust. So you pull down the data from the decentralized web and create redundant copies as a node. Right now, that is really just stored in IPFS. The vision in the future is to connect a certain level of authenticated data to the actual source of that data on the artists’ server. 

So I think what we’re proposing is a really different relationship to data. That’s what we want to be talking about and telling people, and what I hope comes out of this prototyping effort is a very lightweight toolkit. It can be easily deployed at the level of the studio, if other people want to cooperate, form trusts, and create similar ways of thinking about their work. But I think there’s also a story that we are currently validating, and we’re getting ready to preview all this during Art Basel Miami this year as a sort of a report of where we are right now. We’re hoping to test and learn on the language of what the trust does for collectors and how we’re thinking about value both in terms of cultural value, but also appraisal, and building wealth and equity for artists in their lifetime. 

Typically an artist’s trust comes together posthumously or later in life. We’re doing that now much earlier with still emerging artists, and mid-career artists. Where we’re at now is looking more deeply at some of the potentials for automation. We’re essentially writing smart contracts, frameworks for exchange, give and get, systems of reciprocity. Starting in plain language, we’re describing the exchanges we’ve made that have powered this incredible program for the last 10 years. 

I’m working with some smart contract developers from the Filecoin Foundation, who are supporting the project now, to start to understand what an infrastructure might look like around these kinds of contracts, within the realm of decentralized smart contracts. So that would be for the governance of the trust. For example, instead of a board, I want to have an automated governance system for this trust. So it’s more about the cooperative. Everyone who’s giving actual work or value has a stake in that, not just financial investors holding tokens.

All of this is still something that needs to be modeled with legal experts. I’m very lucky to have been brainstorming and collaborating a bit with the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. They have developed a set of resources they call “Exit-to-Community”. This transition from a gallery to a nonprofit cooperative trust that maintains artist’s data in perpetuity is a model for what an exit-to-community might look like for the artworld. It’s a possible way forward for galleries or people who have been thinking about their investment in this way. So that conceptual economics piece is our focus over the next year.

We’ll also be spending a lot more time with the artists and talking about what worked and what didn’t work over the last 10 years. When were our shared expectations met and when they weren’t. Thinking through how we measure success together, for example TRANSFER shows always get amazing reviews, but we’d be lucky to see one or two sales from a solo show – we’ve placed works with great collections like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Thoma Foundation so great placements, but few sales. We’re in the process of being very open with each other in the next year about where that value worked well, and where it didn’t, and how we can model a better path moving forward. And also having deep conversations about what we can automate and what we can’t automate, and what we still need to do as humans together building trust in virtual spaces.