On Tue, 26 Jul 2016, at 09:40 PM, Kath O'Donnell wrote: > Hi Rob, do you mean that the blockchain art is carried within the > blockchain itself? or does the blockchain contain a reference to the > artwork, where it exists externally (online/physical). how large is > each blockchain piece and can it carry other data than hex(?) numbers. In MTAA's original, the flashing sign identifies what appear to be network cable directly linking two Macintosh computers as the "here". It's a playful response to the question of where the art is in net art. In my shameless borrowing it's a schematic "block" in an image of the kind that you get if you google for "blockchain diagram" (see the "preparatory" folder of the project for ones I didn't use). This is a slightly more plausible site for some sort of art than a wire, but only slightly. The Bitcoin blockchain contains a reference to this particular image (in the block the image mentions), but not the image itself. There are various systems that work like this: https://www.proofofexistence.com/ https://www.ascribe.io/ https://monegraph.com/ You can upload images and other media into the blockchain, although this is generally frowned upon as "bloat": http://www.cryptograffiti.info/ http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html Each Bitcoin block at present can store at most 1MB of data. You can put larger blobs of data into it, split over many transactions in several blocks, but see above note about "bloat". :-) You can create references to or upload anything that can be represented digitally, certainly including text, images, sound and video. Cryptographic hashing is fun. I put the hash of my genome on the blockchain to prove that I exist: http://robmyers.org/proof-of-existence/ putting all 20MB of my genome on there would have been a bad idea for privacy reasons as well as bloat ones. There are different blockchains that can store different things (NameCoin for internet address data, Counterparty for generalised tokens, Twister for microblogging, Ethereum for programs). There are also much more efficient ways of storing media and having conversations that nonetheless play nice with blockchains (IPFS, Storj and Swarm are all good ways of doing this). There's surprisingly little art in the blockchain itself as far as I know. This is a shame as I find it a very interesting environment technologically and socially, and prime real estate for net art style play. I'd be very interested to hear about any projects people have created or seen. Bonus links to more of my projects and writing on the subject: http://robmyers.org/abcd/ http://robmyers.org/category/crypto/ :-) - Rob.
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