DISTRIBUTED GALLERY
The distributed gallery is a collective of artists, craftmen and engineers established in the contemporary art worlds since 2017. They are mainly known for the creation of artworks based on distributed technologies such as blockchains.
The evolution of arts have always been coupled to the evolution of technics. Today, technologies such as peer-to-peer networks and blockchains enable artists to create artworks whose operational, aesthetic, conceptual and political logic was previsouly out of reach: immutable and non-censorable data recording, large-scale money printing, content certification, creation of digital scarcity, etc...
The distributed gallery makes a creative use of these technologies to experiment a redistribution of usually separated domains: art and venture, venture and life, life and art. Thus, it aims to counteract the overinterpretation of « artistic intentions » and advocate for a more authentic approach of the artwork: here, the exhibition is nothing more but a specific and situated experience of a protocol - i.e. a set of technical, economic and social rules overflowing the artwork as such. Our machines [and their exhibition] may have a limited life span: the protocols they open to will live forever.
The Chaos Machine, 2018
Materials: Oak wood, steel, slate and glass
Dimensions & weight: 192 x 52 x 52 cm / 198 pounds
Required floor space: between 8 et 10 m2 Electricity: 220 V
Exhibited at “Perfect and Priceless” show, Zürich, Kate Vass Galerie, 2018-2019
Description:
The Chaos Machine is the second blockchain-based artwork of the Distributed Gallery deepening the links between art and money. One year after the poker-like joke of the Ready-Made Token (appropriated Richard Prince scam), the Distributed Gallery engaged in a more physical artwork.
In one word, the Chaos Machine allows anyone to insert a banknote inside; once inserted, this note falls into the window space and is deposited on a heating resistor. In exchange? The machine will randomly play music and offer the user, via a smart contract, the possibility to integrate a song to the playlist. At the moment, this machine exists in two copies. One is on display at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin and the other in the Perfect and Priceless exhibition. As soon as a ticket burns on one of these Chaos Machines, music is played on each one. So, if one hears music coming out of the Chaos Machine but no bills are burning, then it means that someone else is burning bills on the other Chaos Machine.
Is it a crypto-jukebox? Or a sophisticated toaster? In the special edition of the Chaos Machine, published on summer 2018 by R.U.S.T editions, Bernard Aspe, a french philosopher call it the Exterminating Angel, maybe because the Chaos Machine shows in a spectacular way, either the passage from a fiducial currency to a cryptographic currency, or even the emptiness inherent in any monetary abstraction.
Unlike the Ready-Made Token, the Chaos Machine is a physical artwork, designed to be reproducible. In order to become a virus-like machine, the Distributed Gallery left the plans and the code available for anyone to build their own Chaos Machine.