Chris McCormack: If we might begin by defining what an NFT or Non-Fungible Token is, and how they have arisen through the advancement of blockchain technology. I’m also interested what initially drew you as a writer and curator to NFTs.

Sam Spike: I was first introduced to NFTs in 2019 by a friend who works in cryptocurrency. He works in the decentralised finance industry, which is sort of the leading industry within the cryptocurrency space. I remember sitting at dinner with him and him leaning across and showing me his phone and saying, “I’ve just bought this digital artwork,” and me not fully understanding and saying, “What do you mean?”, and he said, “Well, there are these things called NFTs, and they are essentially certificates of authenticity that certify the uniqueness of a digital file.” There isn’t really such a thing as an original digital file, as they are inherently reproducible an infinite number of times. However, an NFT is this record of ownership which exists on the blockchain which introduces artificial scarcity for that digital file. It is unreproducible, unique.

When you’re talking about NFTs and the market for NFTs, you’re talking about people who are actually buying and selling these records of ownership, not necessarily the artwork or the song itself.

CM: So the question of what it means to trade an image or object has been altered to one in which the coded element has become central to the work and how we value it. The artwork acting as a kind of glue which binds the token together and defines it as an NFT. It seems that the formal, aesthetic and social concerns which are intrinsic to art history have diminished in importance, as if the tangible idea of an artwork has become an inconvenience to those seeking to trade as quickly as possible.

If we consider the legacies of Conceptual Art and say Yves Klein’s Zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility, 1959–62, which involved the sale of documentation of ownership of empty space in which the buyer also had the possibility of completing the work by burning the receipt, these gestures were aimed at disrupting the way in which money and value were forged. I’m sceptical that the same interests are being played out in the case of NFTs.

SS: Interestingly there is an early NFT art project from mid 2017, by an artist named Mitchell F Chan, which is a recreation of Yves Klein’s ritual. Instead of burning a receipt, you “burn” a token, which means destroying its value by taking it permanently out of circulation. Right at the beginning of NFTs there were people who realised the legacy of conceptual art and how this technology could sit within that context.

One of the most radical, disruptive qualities of digital technology is that a digital file is never unique, so to introduce a layer of artificial scarcity is also to take a step backwards at the same time. It’s to make these things much more containable, controllable, but it’s also to negate that radical property of digital media, and turn digital artwork into something that’s actually quite skeuomorphic, in the sense of existing in a single instance like a physical object.

CM: Perhaps compared with video works of the past forty years, or even further back, if we consider the role of photography and film and its place within art history, all of these works are dependent on technologies specific to the period in which they were made but also inherently reproducible and copyable. So the reproducibility of digital files is not inherently unique, rather it is the way in which they are distributed that presents new capacities.

It’s perhaps also interesting to compare this suggestion of radicalism with the history of net art which rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, and which continues to be seen as radical, not least because the works sat so firmly outside the reach of commercial galleries as well as major institutional players, largely because of a lack of technological infrastructure to show these works and preserve them. Of course, we have seen attempts by galleries to try present this work as collectable, but it has never really cut through, and certainly not as effectively as that of NFTs. So while NFTs might share some of the language, at least formally, of net art practices, they are certainly operating in a very different space.

The question really becomes; who is really benefitting from NFTs? I was intrigued to learn how copyright law and resale rights might be factored into NFTs, effectively following that of Seth Seigelaub’s work in the late 1970s on developing a contract that helped financially support artists with any accrued value of their work over time. This seemed one element of NFTs that felt somewhat useful and beneficial to the maker, rather than solely those that might acquire a work.

SS: Resale rights are really interesting because they are one of things that people who really don’t “believe” in NFTs, who think NFTs are a fundamentally harmful thing, can sort of get on board with. The idea that you can code perpetual royalties for people is a great thing. So yes, it harks back to Seth Siegelaub. But there are many other examples of artists benefitting from NFTs, including pioneers of early net art and the post-internet wave that came afterwards. For example, Harm van den Dorpel, who has been involved in net art for the past fifteen years or so and has made a lot of software-based work. He recently released an NFT with the small, Berlin-based platform Folia, a series of 500 rather beautiful artworks called Mutant Garden Seeder which use a very sophisticated algorithm to mutate every day, week or month, indefinitely.

Another example is a project I worked on with Tim Berners-Lee, who created a tokenised representation of the source code for the World Wide Web. It was a perfect example of an NFT being used to represent something that couldn’t have easily been sold in a natively digital form before now. The historical and cultural significance of the original source code of the web could coalesce within this one token that someone could own. There is a prevalent feeling among people working in crypto, or so-called ‘Web3’, that they are trying to recreate the open and decentralised vision of digital interconnectivity which was the original spirit of the web, and was absolutely the guiding philosophy behind Tim Berners-Lee’s decision to release the web for free.

CM: Isn’t there some contradictory element here, whereby Tim Berners Lee’s ideals of the internet of a freely distributed system of information are being overturned here, specifically as NFTs are traded as unique and singular files rather than shared and open to all?

SS: I don’t necessarily think so. There would be if the source code had any present-day functional relationship with the world wide web as a set of protocols. It might be contradictory had it somehow tried to monetise the web as a network. But by tokenising this old code, which is no longer functional, he created a nice, signed historical artefact. Proceeds from the sale were also used to promote the web as a public good that should be accessible to everyone.

CM: It’s also perhaps also worthwhile considering the term ‘token’ itself, which implies something that is an asset to be traded, as if a chip on a roulette table. As far as I understand it, the minter of an NFT is the sole proprietor of the work. A process which maintains the sole authorship of a given work, rather than enable a shared or broader networked way in which an artwork is not only constructed but how it might be disseminated or traded. This is particularly important to raise given the number of collaborative works that are produced and sold as NFTs, specifically as images, films and music are largely a joint process.

SS: This was originally true, but if you look at a platform such as Foundation, which is one where a lot of early net artists and digital artists have gone to mint their work – artists such as Rafael Rozendaal or Jon Rafman for example – they have developed a system called Splits, where you can code multiple royalty distribution into the token. So if I sell my work of art and it’s a collaborative piece with other people, they will all receive a share of the money and the secondary sale royalties, and their involvement will be recorded on the blockchain as well.

As the NFT space currently works, artists almost always receive a percentage royalty on every secondary market sale. Much of the time, because most trading takes place through certain platforms, those royalty hand-outs are actually handled off the blockchain by the platforms themselves. They take the money and they divvy out the correct percentage to the artist. That is fundamentally not a trustless process, and ideal of trustlessness is at the absolute core of blockchain culture: this idea that we can’t trust people but maybe we can trust code.

CM: It seems hard to imagine artists who are not already involved in these worlds of technology, blockchain and bitcoin, gravitating towards these models of production. NFTs are also incredibly costly to produce, so there is an inherent narrowing of access to this world. It also counters the idea of a broader, democratic way of how artworks might be traded until it does become more accessible to a broader amount of people. This in turn has led to a certain type of aesthetics being made, one which brings to mind the juvenile and solipsistic feeling of a teenage bedroom of inside jokes and tasteless humour.

SS: A greater diversity of work is happening. For example, Tom Sachs, who you might not have expected to make an NFT, has recently done a project that was really popular. Sachs really leaned into the fact that for the most part, people who collect NFTs are doing so to speculate on their future value, but they are also having fun. NFTs are a game. Admittedly, they’re not a very accessible game on Ethereum because they are expensive, but the attitude of most NFT collectors is that they are people who grew up playing games such as Pokemon, or who really love collecting baseball cards or whatever else, and it’s the same kind of game, the same kind of fun in collecting. The Tom Sachs piece really embraced the gamified aspect, which is so native to the medium.

As for accessibility, the two main problems are that it’s still not that easy to use most blockchain applications. You have to download a wallet. You have to very carefully custody the private keys to that wallet. When you start buying and owning crypto assets, you’re taking an immense amount of responsibility for the ownership of those things. There’s no way that if you lose them, if you’re sloppy with your security, you can ever get them back. That’s quite scary, but it’s what happens when you remove the middlemen.

Most technologies aren’t inherently good or bad. It’s always a mistake to take a technology – at least most of the time – and say this a good thing or a bad thing. It’s how they’re used that really defines the benefit or damage that they do to an industry or to society.