Smart contracts and the becoming-curatorial of digital works of art

Abstract

This essay examines a “becoming-curatorial” of digital artworks that are augmented with blockchain-enabled smart contracts. It argues that embedding executable code in digital objects enables artworks to exhibit quasi-autonomous, self-governing behaviours that can displace the curatorial agency of human intermediaries and redistribute it to computational agents. By analysing projects such as Sarah Friend’s <i>Lifeforms </i>and Harm van den Dorpel’s <i>Mutant Garden Seeder</i>, the essay shows how programmable tokens can inspire (and enforce) non-financial value propositions such as stewardship and care. I situate these works as agential assemblages that involve artists, audiences, markets, and software objects, and which thereby challenge inherited notions of authorship and private ownership. Against the commodity logic often associated with “crypto art,” the essay reads programmability as a curatorial instrument for imagining more-than-human art ecologies, while also making visible the ways in which speculative tendencies can short-circuit such ambitions. Ultimately, these technologies are described as social experiments that interrogate existing value regimes and test recalibrations of agency within the hyper-financialised Web3 landscape.