“Right-Click to Save: Preservation, NFTs, and Distributed Ledgers” presented by Bell, Harsanyi and Ippolito

Symposium:

• ISEA2022: 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More presentations from ISEA2022:  

• Summit on New Media Art Archiving: Panels

• Right-Click to Save: Preservation, NFTs, and Distributed Ledgers

• John P. Bell
• Regina Harsanyi
• Jon Ippolito

Venue(s):

• MACBA – Convent dels Àngels, Barcelona, Spain

• Artists have experimented with cryptocurrency incentivized distributed ledgers such as blockchains since the advent of Bitcoin. In parallel, crypto advocates frequently claim that distributed ledger protocols will ensure an accessible and immutable record of anything registered to it, including artwork. This panel examines this idea with nuance, neither buying into the mass deception around NFT marketing tactics nor rejecting the reality that a subset of artists are creating significant, challenging works that inherently utilize these technologies. Preserving the asset may seem to be in the regular wheelhouse of preservation professionals, who have decades of experience developing guidelines for saving software-based art, but ledger-based technologies have their own preservation promises and challenges.

Video:

Keywords:

• non-fungible tokens
• preservation
• distributed ledger
• blockchain
• digital art