@CSA2D7: Rhea Myers on life, art, nfts and the blockchain

Rhea Myers (@rheaplex) sits down on the McCarren Park Bench for a conversation about life, art, nfts (her monster child), and the blockchain with cameos from @iamwhitelights, @figure31, and @dr_slurp_! CSA2D7 Heya Rhea! Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Hi! AMAAMA (Ask Me Anything About My Art) CSA2D7 Your art is in many ways, on the blockchain, about you, so is it ok to also ask about you? Or was that implied Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Totes. CSA2D7 Wonderful! Can I ask - who is the most important person to you in your life? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) I'm an open book. It's just that that book is banned in several states. My kids are grown up now so it's Seryna, my wife, who is awesome. We met on LambdaMOO (which isn't unusual) in 2013 (which is) and U-Hauled. CSA2D7 I can google stuff, but I figured its more organic if I ask? What is LambdaMOO? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) It's an old MUD/MUCK/MOO, a text-based VR or chat system from the early 90s. It was very popular as a case study in virtual community back in the day. It's still running in someone's sock draw somewhere. So like an old text adventure (GO NORTH) but over telnet with other people. CSA2D7 Ah, this seems highly appropriate for you. You say that now that your kids are grown up - were they once the most important people in your life? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Absolutely, yes. I worked very hard to be a stable presence and influence in their lives. I succeeded sometimes. CSA2D7 My children are still young and not grown up, so I will agree with you to the extent that I can, for me that feels very much on the mark. Is Seryna an artist as well? Or admirer of your art? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) The challenges and rewards change over time but my mum has just turned 80 and is still making sure I'm OK. CSA2D7 Same Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) She is very spiritual (I am very not-spiritual, we talked this through when we met and respect each others ways of knowing the world) and writes and holds spaces and leads retreats and stuff. And is also an amazing graphic designer. She appreciates my art and is a good sounding board for it. When I say I can't sell MYSOUL because of her, that's entirely true. CSA2D7 Yea! I ask because in that interview with web3galaxybrain you mentioned that MYSOUL on Counterparty is not very liquid What do you mean when you say that you are "not-spiritual" is this relative to your wife or do you think objectively its not a quality you identify with? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Oh it's supersolid. Not liquid at all. It's neutron star matter. Both relatively and absolutely. I am a very boring atheist/materialist, I'm dust dancing not spirit in the world. I'm also a (formerly card-carrying) secularist so this is my problem not anyone else's. Which would be fine were it not for the theocratic turn in politics. CSA2D7 That's interesting, because I think I misinterpreted some of your work. You put your mind (the ego, its 0wned), your soul (MYSOUL), and your body (Fractionalized Phallus) on blockchains (ethereum, bitcoin), to me that feels spiritual-adjacent Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) It's the cry of the soul in a soulless world. CSA2D7 But you don't subscribe to this idea that the blockchain has this sort of capacity for great objectivity? OMNIPOTENCE! iamwhitelights (very excited to read along today, too busy with work to conversate <3) CSA2D7 If you find time, please do. I've enjoyed you popping in here. And Rhea I am so proud to have her in here today Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) MYSOUL is from Komar & Melamid, two expat Soviet artists who bought up artists' souls in the 1980s (including Warhol's). I liked the contrast between two supposedly absolute anchors, the soul of the highest eternal self, and the blockchain of temporal (literally) order secured by more computing power than you can imagine. I don't think the blockchain has objectivity that we can decant offchain. Like the rules of a transaction are absolute. They are clean, shiny math. But as soon as we try to get human truth in there we hit the oracle problem. So you are correct in the dialectic you see in the work. But it's all ironic, even my own position. I don't have a point outside the world that I can rain critique down on people's heads from secure in the knowledge that I'm right. It's as close as I can get to spiritual, though, yes. And it requires other people's attachments to moral, spiritual, and bodily integrity to work. And I have to have skin (removed) in the game, otherwise I'm just pointing and saying HA-HA! I'm an inveterate postmodernist in terms of my relation to the subject matter. But the work knows things I don't. My early NFT work is very eggy. Surplus value etc. I wouldn't want someone to not get spiritual import from the work if it's meaningful to them. But to me it's the bathos of contrasting the promise of blockchain with, well, being human. CSA2D7 For me, you and your work has this unmatched quality of utmost sincerity and extreme irony. We often think this line is bright, but for me, you hop back and forth and sometimes just combine the two qualities in this brilliant way. What do you mean by eggy? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) There's a desperation to it. The need to communicate and understand given finite resources. In computer science there's the joke that "there is no problem that cannot be solved by an extra layer of indirection", and obviously that isn't true, but sometimes you have to approach things obliquely or take the long way around to be able to get there at all. By eggy I mean the work is saying "Hey! Hey you! Yes, you, the artist! You know you're trans, right?" To which my answer would have been "lol no wtf are you talking about". Subconscious denial is a good example of something that you have to go around obliquely. I generally only really understand the art after I make it. I know that I need to make it and I've learnt to not question that and not get in my way. But the work about identity flags, inauthenticity, assembled aesthetics, distraction from secrets - past a certain point things have to become obvious. Unless you're me. ("Egg" is extremely online slang for someone who doeasn't know/accept they're trans yet. Egg theory is annoying until you need the language, at which point it can be a life raft.) When you're making the work you're too busy making it to really think about it. Or anything else. Which may be the psychological function of the work. It's funny because the work looks so dry and it's like no, this is what it takes to keep things together, this is the mask that expresses what's underneath. I was at college in the 90s and I gave a slide show (actual factual chemical photography slides) about my work when that was the task and everyone was surprised by what went into the work emotionally. Just this desperation to walk on the earth, to be part of the world, for the intervening sheet of glass to be removed. But if you lack a proper understanding of the problem your solutions won't be appropriate. And there was a big bit of the puzzle missing for me. Which, with the benefit of hindsight, is why I locked in on encryption and public key encryption in particular. And yes I am sincere in what I do. Embarrassingly so. CSA2D7 Same, although I am not embarrassed by my displays of sincerity (yet!). This link between your identity (a sort of secret self yet to be revealed) and encryption is what I was thinking about when I was reading your writing on The Ego and Its 0wned How does the media reduce being trans to a mere performance by an object? And does this relate to you using your body as a sort of object-NFT in Fractionalized Phallus? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Oh yes decryption became a metaphor - I mean really an experience - in that. TEAI0 is more about commodification of minority experience, but the mis-use of data visualization stripped of context definitely camouflages. The media (and let's agree that we can shorthand something real as "the media") want attention-grabbing stories and so reduce lived experience to narratives that make The Heros Journey look like Plotto. In art and in society there's a genuine value to inclusion and representation, but its shadow is that making things tractable to the market makes them exploitable by the market. So with TEAI0 it was about that commodification, reduction, and exploitation as the price of Being Seen And Valued. It was a kind of step beyond body art, commodifying mental states as represented by EEG data. Seryna used to work with EEGs so she hooked me up for the scans. There's an old Jeff Koons line, "Exploit yourself". This is that I guess. With TFP I had this resource of -uh- the body part cast and psychological disavowal wasn't enough of an excuse not to do something with it. The work for the show of the same name at Nagel-Draxler was being assembled at the time it was becoming obvious that Trump was going to win, and so the projects I was finishing for it recognized that environment. TFP was meant to be sausage-slice coins but as soon as I got the glitchy shark-jaw forms from an early test render I dropped that and embraced the glitch. It was when noted soyboy Mark Zuckerberg talked about companies needing more masculinity that the whole "Sure! You can just buy in the master signifier of masculinity using the technology you like!" angle made perfect sense. The TFP page takes you on that journey. A friend of mine wrote a notorious piece called "The Gender Accelerationist Blackpaper" which got quoted by the Heritage Foundation who were behind the USGOV presidential decree about gender. It's a small world and the connections don't make any sense much of the time. But when historical tasks come knocking you can't really pretend you're not in. The futurists had riots to paint. Oh Seryna originally wanted me to do a sequel to TEAI0 called "Go Fuck Yourself" using the same materials but welp the limits of my commitment to art fall short of that sadly. The quotes here really show the materials the project came from: [Editor’s note: Rhea inserts a link to the fractionalized phallus, which I removed for algorithmic purposes] But yeah the advice is "don't talk to the media, they will take quotes out of context and misrepresent you". And I understand the pressures that lead to that. And it's the price of visibility. But I would like a pony just once. I hasten to add that all the art media I've spoken to have been lovely. CSA2D7 I like to think (when I'm writing) that if I'm misrepresenting someone, I'm really just showing them a version of it they haven't considered. Not that I'm intentionally doing that, but there's this space for interpretation that a good writer needs IMO and everyone has a right to interpret what is publicly available Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Oh yes I'm not trying to roll back the death of the author or anything. I have news/entertainment media in mind when I'm saying this. CSA2D7 But I know what you're saying - it can be evil in other ways and driven by market-incentives "making things tractable to the market makes them exploitable by the market" Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Yep. CSA2D7 The market is this other thing though (when I say market, let's say stock market or some thing that tries to be efficient) that has a claim on relative OMNISCIENCE (I know we talked about onchain being blind to offchain) Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Submarine warfare in the space of reasons. Yes the modern fantasy of the market is this incoherent computational deity (in the sense of an inhuman agency that represents a limit on or ground for reality) that strangely rewards people for their efforts in about the way you'd expect if its faithful were being rewarded in accordance with factors other than those that the market is meant to reason about. I regard markets as fuzzers, not calculators. They defer calculating prices perpetually. But as a state religion they are a useful subject of critique. And the art world's disavowal of them, doubly so the nonprofit artworld, makes them a useful object for critique as well. "Who pays for this?" is not a question one is meant to ask in polite society. (The answer is always "someone who owned slaves/busted unions", although mediating this through taxation seems to salve people's consciences.) CSA2D7 Do you view Canada as having a big government to its citizens? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Oh yes. And it wants to be bigger. I'm from a post-war mixed-economy environment so I'm used to a big state and to it being shrunk as a bad thing ("Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher!"). I've had to unlearn a lot. CSA2D7 Is there a difference between arguably being a subject and a citizen (moving from England to Canada)? I dunno, maybe that's dumb question in today's world. Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Canada is more obviously a product of the crown than the UK is, weirdly. Or maybe I could just ignore the background radiation that I grew up with better I dunno. The crown owns all the land in England. So if you live there you're just borrowing where you live from this mafia family that is trying to wait out modernity. In Canada we stole the land from the locals so uhhhhhhh well it's not great. Canada really is a hybrid of the UK and the US. CSA2D7 The story of many lands Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) I had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen and her descendants when I became a Canadian citizen. Figure31 Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) in between other responses, would love to hear about your take on "ownership" of digital objects. seems like in your works you really embrace the idea that something can be owned truly (somehow beyond a legal framework maybe? not sure if there's more there), but then the object/subject owned is kind of cynical if not ridiculous at times and that puts ownership into perspective. wondering if you subscribe to the idea that ownership is all a big joke we tell ourselves or something else, maybe we just leave a history of traces on things with our names on them and pass it along to the next trace maker. thinking of phallus and ego mostly. trying to wrap my brain around what is it that is being owned by a collector (and sold by you) beyond the file/print. leaving a space open too to consider that you may be just practical about it and make some artwork and sell it and that's that. Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Ownership is an interesting bundle of ideas. I've been interested in it since I was at art school in the early 90s. Personal possessions, living space, absentee property, land, and commodities are all very different things and thinking of them as "property" can misguide us. I said somewhere that property regimes are generative - that is, they create the kind of property (as property!) that they describe rather than recognizing some pre-existing state. What I love about NFTs is how they unbundle the things that make up property - possession, exploitation, exclusion, reputation, entitlements, responsibilities, and let us explore and remake that. I used to call blockchain property "quasiproperty" but I was wrong. Blockchain realizes the cypherpunk dream of personal property without the state. And yes property is all primogeniture anxiety. Which as a trans woman is an alien concern to me. 😺 With Canada I wish that "we are all treaty people" was the actual state of things. Can we model this on the blockchain... :ShibaThinking: CSA2D7 "Blockchain realizes the cypherpunk dream of personal property without the state." Incredible statement Figure31 Yeah I was going to underline this too Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) The central problem of anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-communism is what you do with the commodity form of property (absentee ownership of goods) in the absence of a state that holds the monopoly on just violence. There are no good answers to this. The terms of the debate about cryptography, the individual, and the state, were set in the 17th century and haven't changed since. We have to save the state from itself every generation or two. Figure31 "I used to call blockchain property "quasiproperty" but I was wrong", where/when was the switch? Any specific event/experience/novel thing? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Erm I forget. There's a piece called "recanting quasiproperty" in the book, which iirc goes into this. It was quite a shift of position for me. It may have come from (sigh) Nick Land's writing on the matter (and not on anything else). CSA2D7 Does this apply to NFTs as well? I feel like it gets more muddled. A lot of what is produced is the product of making them tractable to the market and exploitable by the market. From kind of thinking about crypto and blockchain as solutions to governance to NFTs as arguments to the old world art market Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) The practical part of blockchain ownership was driven home to me by Sarah friend talking about just using an NFT to represent ownership of a piece of digital art - there is a genuine affordance for artists here. Sorry does what apply? 😅 CSA2D7 I think its still property but the question for me is what kind of property is it when so much is shaped by the market and market forces on the artist Not in the way it shapes your work because you are always consciously engaging ... I guess its unfair for you to comment on the whole of blockchain art 😂 Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) I think NFTs are a good example of how property regimes are generative. Prior to ERC-721 you could kind of make them but the floodgates opened when that standard came out (I have worked for Dapper labs and know one of the authors of the standard). And the market hasn't not-owned them. Their price and their cultural significance has certainly seen a lot of churn. But if I'm being naive here it's the flaw with looking to concepts all the time. CSA2D7 I agree with you on that Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) I mean I created it so I can speak for my monster child, yes. The market is an ontology (it models what is real, and what kind of things are real), and an epistemology (it allows us to know things via prices). Within the market it appears complete, that's the efficient market hypothesis. But feminist work about care and decolonial work about slavery kind of undermines that. NFTs as a generative property regime doesn't affect any of that other than to expand the ontology of the market. What the market purposely excludes and collapses isn't solved or affected by NFTs merely existing. I still hold to the old Cory Doctorow quote about trying to make information harder to copy being like making water less wet. Owning digital property leads us down the dark path of DRM. NFTs take the high road of delaminating ownership from exclusion. "Recanting Quasiproperty" claims to be from 2021 - [Editor’s note: Rhea inserts link to a google doc “Recanting Quasiproperty (2021)”] CSA2D7 Your monster child is a hilarious description. For the longest time, I wanted to ask you why your onchain works had a significant offchain element (usually your work is stored on IPFS or some other server), but I think your essay "The blockchain is not permanent free storage" kind of answered that But can I also ask about your work "Buy Nothing" which is also kind of a counter to that essay? Or that is my interpretation of "Buy Nothing" - which is, what are you really buying past the smart contract? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) The early stuff is very much about onchain state. The later stuff is about property separate from that. IPFS kinda squares that circle. But people need something to look at either way. With "Buy Nothing" you are buying as close to nothing as you can get - the word "nothing" in #00000 black on an #010101 black background. It's a jab at Buy Nothing Day, the annual advertisement for the glossy designer lifestyle magazine "Adbusters". I've kind of converged on using Foundation when the code of the contract isn't important to the reception of the work. So with Buy Nothing it's blockchain ownership that's the focus. Figure31 last comment: so property on the blockchain is different. at the moment it's fairly predictable because we use standards and the eth network is proven stable and safe. but any concerns or thoughts on the longevity of this new type of property? ways you imagine that it could evolve with new standards? any particular weaknesses in that property type you see via the "unbundling" you mention? Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Chain forks and chain death are always a thing. The text of "Certificate of Inauthenticity" tries to handle this, and I was reassured that it does so in a similar way to the Model DAO Law when that came out. But we can always create new proxies, we can use the same keys to send the property somewhere else, we can patch standards or wrap code. I'm more worried about people trying to get fiat state law to privilege NFTs in some way - keep NFTs rubber hose property. I think that "weaknesses" depend on the model something is being evaluated against. NFTs not granting the right of excluding others is a weakness compared to land or a painting but a strength relative to the problem of having digital property without trying to turn everyone's computers into locked-down spyware. So I'm hopeful. I do want people to not be surprised by the consequences of unbundling, though, so I guess on that front as always I'd like to see better education and more conscious exploration of consequences/affordances. CSA2D7 "When designing blockchain systems, keep as much information offchain but anchored onchain as possible and regard doing so as a key design objective" Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Yes I worked through that at Dapper. You want the pareto-optimal balance of expensive onchain proof and fragile offchain storage to establish the ownership and value of a digital asset. My early stuff was very anti-ownership due to my euro-lefty-artworld background. I don't regret this artistically as it was necessarry to construct a critical position at the time. Financially on the other hand… CSA2D7 What can we really do about the consequences of unbundling though? dr.slurp Can't take it with you Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) We can exploit them for social capital by complaining about them on social media. 😏 Or we can exploit them. To do the latter takes more understanding. CSA2D7 MYSOUL is always with me Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) My new project really brings "soulbound tokens" into the afterlife… CSA2D7 This feels like an appropriate place to end the conversation 😂 Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Incidentally for the property question and some others this is my definitive statement on that, still - [Editor’s note: Rhea inserts a link to “Blockchain Poetics] You can get it in "Artists re:Thinking The Blockchain" for free as a pdf, or you can give my lovely and hard-working publishers some fiat for it in "Proof of Work". Thank you CSA2D7 thank you everyone! I love talking about my art so if anyone has any questions any time do just ask. CSA2D7 Thanks so much for coming on to the bench. Big moment for the chat and for everyone. And it's great that you are part of the discord and can chat anytime, but this focused intensity was really great for me Will throw it into a google doc and send to you to post on X if you like Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Thank you so much! This was awesome. Oh wow thank you! Figure31 thanks for your time&thoughts! Rhea (pronounded ree-aah) Thank you for your excellent questions!