Computation in the Expanded Field

The artists in "World Computer Sculpture Garden" explore computation and networks with an understanding that the contemporary art world has yet to grasp the significance of these phenomena. Perhaps their work constitutes the beginnings of a movement—though not an "-ism" or school.

Over the past years, the work produced by these artists has been labeled in various ways: "on-chain art," "runtime art," "blockchain-native art." I prefer to describe it as “protocol art,” because these artists are primarily concerned with foundational structures or sets of rules that precede and define a computing environment.

Protocol art is distinct from the "new net art" that embraces the internet as a mass medium and aims to "lower the bar of production," as Alexander Raubo put it. ^[1] Protocol art relies heavily on technical literacy and, as a result, is often perceived as hermetic. The blockchain is not a distribution channel for images but rather the material of the art itself. ^[2] Here, the material is no longer understood as matter in the formalist sense but a given set of technical constraints adopted for artistic purposes. This lends protocol art a tendency towards purism, a tendency that is, perhaps, most pronounced in 0xfff’s ascetically reduced visuals, which also pervades the presentation of "World Computer Sculpture Garden."

Protocol art has its own history, its own reason, and its own discipline. "World Computer Sculpture Garden" is the most encompassing effort yet to properly contextualize this scene. As a curatorial gesture, the first pure contract show serves as both a programmatic intervention and a direction-setting work.

The challenge of writing about the emerging scene lies in the constant flux of both the art and its categories. Writing should here not claim the authority to categorize or canonize but should instead serve as one node in an ongoing conversation. As a result, the following text is a collection of fragments approaching this exhibition from various perspectives.

I. Computer

When the exhibition’s title refers to the “world computer,” the word "computer" should not be understood in its usual sense as a singular physical object. 1936, before the devices now recognized as computers even existed, Alan Turing defined computation as machines with a set of action tables that “can be used to compute any commutable sequence.” ^[3]

Blockchains like Ethereum are computing platforms in line with Turing’s definition. Both the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Solidity, its native programming language, are Turing-complete, meaning they can execute any computational task. The EVM should not be thought of as a set of objects but rather as abstract machines composed of software, which in turn controls the hardware responsible for executing computations.

Ethereum's actual compute power is unremarkable, and no artist is interested in the blockchain for its computational capabilities per se. Instead, artists are interested in Ethereum as a “credibly neutral” world computer. ^[4]

Unlike any other platform, Ethereum’s distributed computation allows artists to release immutable code-based artworks that operate in a permissionless and decentralized environment. Though never intended as a space for art, this permissionless computing platform has been reimagined as one, functioning simultaneously as archive, gallery, and economy.

II. Sculpture Garden

The garden is a pre-modern, if not ancient, site for experiencing art within an enclosure of nature. The attention of visitors to gardens is often organized around sculptures or monuments, made from materials like stone and bronze that embody an understanding of form as pure and unchanging.

In modernism and beyond, however, the fate of sculpture was to expose this heritage to finitude. The notion of sculpture as an autonomous object began to unravel. Sculpture became transient. Directionally, it was no longer about forcing form onto timeless materials, but rather about the accidental assemblage of everyday materials. In the 20th and 21st centuries, sculpture became "unmonumental," ^[5] and with this shift, the garden as a site for sculpture became largely anachronistic.

The term "world computer sculpture garden," coined by 113, initially seems like an unlikely concept—an idea that feels distinctly non-contemporary. Yet it connects meaningfully with this history.

Protocol artists diverge from the contemporary obsession with transience and finitude. Instead, their decidedly "unmodern" interest lies in the permanence and immutability afforded by decentralized blockchains.

In a collision of past- and future-facing concerns, the artists aim to store code-based artworks on the blockchain permanently, thereby rendering the chain legible as a potential site for cultural artifacts. The blockchain thus takes on the role of a garden, with computer programs as sculptures, running live, where any user can encounter them.

III. Medium

Exploring Ethereum as an artistically repurposed compute platform has resulted in works that engage with the unique properties of the chain. Therefore protocol art explores computation as a medium. More precisely, it explores distributed computation as a new site for artistic meaning-making.

The language initially used to describe some of these attempts—such as "native to the blockchain" or "blockchain as a medium"—has invited comparisons to formalism. According to the understanding of formalism that has been notoriously dominant in the United States, modernism forced each art form to undergo a process of self-criticism that supposedly showed that “the area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to its medium.” ^[6] This brand of formalism understands medium as matter: the material properties of canvas determine the painting’s condition of possibility. Painting was no longer an image of something and it did not derive meaning from the outside. Instead, painting was about nothing but itself and it found meaning within its material constituents .

While the works assembled in “World Computer Sculpture Garden” share an interest in the unique properties of their medium, this inward focus is not motivated by an aspiration for autonomy and qualitative distinction from mass culture, as the formalist thesis once suggested was the unifying feature of modern art. Instead, protocol artists’ interest in the medium is driven by necessity. They are drawn to Ethereum as a unique site for distributed computation, and they adapt their works to its formal constraints. The restrictions are not an end in themselves but a means to operate within a credibly neutral and permissionless site.

While the approach may thus seem to echo certain formalist concerns, protocol art should not be mistaken for a reinstatement of medium-specific formalism. The medium is not the message. As Mat Dryhurst has suggested, the classic notion of media is “downstream of protocol.” ^[7] These artists are not interested in questioning the essence of distributed computation; instead, they ask what it can do.

IV. Idea

In 1968, curator Seth Siegelaub invited seven artists to participate in a group exhibition presented as a 64-page printed book. Before this, Siegelaub had considered what the most appropriate environment would be for the emerging art forms referred to then as "information art" or "idea art," and later as "conceptual art." The resulting exhibition, known as The Xerox Book, is remembered as one of the most radical curatorial interventions to give shape to conceptual art. In response to claims of dematerializing the art object, Siegelaub created an exhibition format that compelled artists to push these claims to their logical conclusion. He also standardized the conditions for the exhibition, requiring the works to conform to the technical constraints of the distribution method. ^[8]

Six decades later, "World Computer Sculpture Garden" emerges as a successor to this conceptual gesture. Like the Xerox Book, the exhibition exemplifies the principles of protocol art, marking itself as the first of its kind—a purely contract-based show. The exhibition lacks any physical spatial dimension, instead presenting itself through a minimalist website featuring text in Courier typeface and Unicode characters as its only visual elements. By doing so, it avoids what Sarah Friend has described as the token’s "asset logistics," ^[9] referring to the automatic commodification and indexing of minted works on marketplaces. This deliberate absence of commercial elements, offering nothing for sale, is programmatic: "There is no mint. I love you." ^[10] The essence of the exhibition unfolds "beyond the visual"; it intentionally rejects imagery, visuals, and traditional aesthetics, challenging viewers to engage with art in a purely conceptual form.

Protocol art in general, and "World Computer Sculpture Garden" in particular, continue the anti-retinal tradition that originates with Duchamp and extends through conceptual art. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” ^[11] The experience of art in this context is no longer one of aisthesis—a sensory perception—but rather one of conceptual imagination. The works presented in this exhibition engage the viewer not as a passive consumer of visual imagery encountered on marketplaces, but instead as an active, software-literate agent, curious to interact with and explore the pieces.

V. History

While "World Computer Sculpture Garden" engages with the history of modern and contemporary art in numerous ways, its defining feature is its ambition for discontinuity. Art history is written to rationalize new artistic phenomena that resist existing categories. Meaning is granted only to what fits within this narrative. Hence contemporary art’s obsession with citation, its risk aversion, and its struggle to reconcile itself with computation and the internet.

Contemporary art's focus on transience, which we encountered in the discussion of the sculpture garden, is linked to this inability to envision a different future for art. With a newfound belief in permanence, reimagined as technological time, protocol art has also regained its ambition for the future.

History is “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,“ says Stephan Daedalus. ^[12] The most radical gesture of “World Computer Sculpture Garden” is to awaken from this historicist nightmare. To leave the 20th century. All explorations of distributed computation as a unique site for artistic meaning-making point in this direction.

      ⚘                      ⚘
              ⚘
 ⚘                     ⚘         ⚘
          ⚘      ⚘
     ⚘                     ⚘

I would like to thank 0xfff for organizing this exhibition and providing me the opportunity to consolidate thoughts developed over the past two years in writing and conversation. His kindness and rigor have greatly shaped what we describe here as "protocol art." He also gave me the space and support I needed to complete this text during a particularly stressful time.

I am also grateful to 113 for his relentless pursuit of many of the issues explored here. Conversations with him sparked much of what has been developed in this text.

Finally, I want to thank sssluke, whose contributions were crucial to the development of ideas that led to this show, and for our discussions over the last two years.

---