Tulip Mania meant that] the order of the stock market was introduced into the order of nature. The tulip began to lose the properties and charms of a flower: it grew pale, lost its colours and shapes, became an abstraction, a name, a symbol interchangeable with a certain amount of money.”

- Zbigniew Herbert

An early piece of ERC-721 token art, Bloemenveiling was an online auction of short GAN generated videos of tulips; it used smart contracts on the Ethereum network to sell the work and bots to help drive speculative prices. The piece was made in collaboration with David Pfau, an artificial intelligence researcher, and is the third in a series of work that looks at the relationship of the tulip to speculation, hype and value. Through the use of these types of technologies, which are increasingly embedded across different types of markets, it interrogates the way technology drives human desire and economic dynamics through artificial scarcity. It was created as an artwork, for a gallery show, but was a fully functioning distributed app (dApp), existing as a working example of what it also critiques.

The blockchain is an abstract concept and does not lend itself immediately to visual or experiential expression. It is a series of complex, interconnected systems that are usually hidden from the end user. The process of creating our own Ethereum smart contracts and web front-end for auctions uncovered the massive inefficiencies and complexities inherent in creating a distributed app that are obscured if using a third-party platform. While a dApp looks and feels much like a normal web app – but much slower – the backend is often a tangled nest of components necessitated by the convoluted process of interacting with a blockchain. An inefficiency that was highlighted by working in this way was the enormous amount of energy needed to run the Ethereum network - minting a single ERC-721 token with Ethereum is estimated to require as much energy as a typical European household uses in a month. The extraordinary amount of duplicate effort required to validate work in a trustless system means that several supercomputers’ worth of computational power is used to build something that is about as fast as a 1990s mobile phone. The commodification of a replica of the natural world ends up consuming far more power than the cultivation of an actual natural flower.

A major use of blockchain in the art world is to introduce scarcity to digital works. This is in inherent tension with how these types of works should naturally behave: infinite tulips could be produced by the GAN, but the ones that are valuable are only the ones that are associated with the finite supply of tokens. We wanted to exaggerate this artificial scarcity that is a critical part of the blockchain process by making the tokens self-destroying after a fixed amount of time. The smart contracts which enabled the sale and defined the work in the technical process were used to mirror how real tulips behave so that the decay and impermanence of the natural world was reintroduced into the digital world. The contracts were programmed to show the video, or bloom, for a week - approximately the same amount of time a cut tulip lasts - before the tulip became “blighted” and disappeared from the owner’s view. This allowed the viewer to appreciate it as a work of art as opposed to a commodity, by making it temporary and therefore difficult to trade, activating an unintended possibility that is built into the protocol and negating the original intent of ERC-721 tokens as speculative assets. There was only one way around this blight. After the end of the week, if the owner were never to attempt to view the video work again, then the token would never be burned, preserving its speculative value but existing only as a signifier of the original work.

When we made this piece, it seemed obvious to us that ERC-721 tokens would be used as a way to securely grant the owner of a token the right to view a given artwork. After all, the token itself was little more than a digital certificate that had no inherent relation to the artwork it was meant to represent. Never did we imagine that there might be a market for NFTs even if the artworks which they represented could be freely viewed and shared by anyone. The logic of commodification proved more adept and malleable than we could have foreseen even a few years ago. It seems certain to mutate into yet stranger forms.

Anna Ridler (B. 1985) is an artist and researcher who works with information and data. She is interested in systems of knowledge, with a desire to know and to make this process of knowing available. She works with new technologies, exploring how they are created in order to better understand society and the world. Her process often involves working with collections of information or data, particularly self-generated data sets, to create new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums and how new technologies, such as machine learning, can be used to translate them to an audience.

She holds an MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art and a BA in English Literature and Language from Oxford University along with fellowships at the Creative Computing Institute at University of the Arts London (UAL), Ars Electronica, Edinburgh University and the Delfina Foundation.. Her work has been exhibited at cultural institutions worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern, the Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, HeK Basel, the ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, Sheffield Documentary Festival and the Leverhulme Centre for Future Intelligence. She was a European Union EMAP fellow and the winner of the 2018-2019 DARE Art Prize. Ridler has received commissions by Salford University, the Photographers Gallery, Opera North, Live Cinema UK and Impakt Festival. She was listed as one of the nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential by Artnet and received an honorary mention in the 2019 Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for the category AI & Life Art. She was nominated for a “Beazley Designs of the Year” award in 2019 by the Design Museum for her work on datasets and categorisation.