“Performing Systems: Extending Media Environments via the Blockchain”
Like many artists working with emergent technologies, Benton C Bainbridge designs custom systems to make his media art. Bainbridge discusses his latest collaboration: Performing Systems. This platform enables real-time media artists to extend their systems and “play” the entire art ecosystem from creation through provenance, exhibition, collection and archiving. Bainbridge and co-creator Eric Barry Drasin created Performing Systems and Moving Pictures Gallery as a tool to enable Visual Performance artists to collect each other.
Performing Systems is a conceptual experiment in which real-time audiovisual artists improvise within the Moving Pictures Gallery platform to measure cultural value in a post-blockchain era. Artists’ video and sound feeds are recorded, then singular media artworks are selected from the feed and uploaded to a secure, permanent storage system along with digital provenance.
Performing Systems asserts a near-future ecosystem at the intersection of emerging technologies and societal attitudes. In this possible future, Digital Media Artists and their patrons can assert the value of ethereal artworks.
