The first of twelve posts taking Woodstock, blockchain and a 1960’s conceptual art on knots to the Third Web, and beyond.

1) Blockchain Space

Back Story

This is about Woodstock, blockchain, and an unending sequence of knots.

It begins in an artwork back in 1967. But from a 1992 encounter, when I was asked if I could print a hand while demonstrating my patents at a trade show in Indianapolis, it relates to Woodstock.

The show’s focus was industrial parts marking. The man who asked was from the Department of Defense. The question of faking a complex ID left me thinking about the capabilities of the prints a printer was capable of.

Two years later, when the 25th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival was taking place in my back yard, a chance to satisfy what that query in Indianapolis had set in motion was on my mind.

That became the origin story for over 55,000 individually unique collectibles that are presently in the hands of an equal number of a randomized sampling of autonomous individuals; a true Third Web distribution of responsive “things” in an Internet of Things.

That brings us up to the present day, as Woodstock presents another query and offers another opportunity during its 50th anniversary.

This is where blockchain comes in; and what brought me mull over this affinity between 55,000 random identities and Satoshi Yamamoto, the near-mythical creator of blockchain’s first object lesson: Bitcoin.

These fifty years fall in a very special timespan. 1969 marked a watershed in the common creative vision of the post WWII generation. They made the personal computer and the Internet. The systems that made Satoshi Yamamoto’s vision for blockchain are their creations.

I am pegging the first baby steps toward this period of technological leaps to just prior to the original Woodstock; in 1967 and 1968; when art experienced the earliest emergence of a conceptual way of thinking in the openly systemic way that made Woodstock, in 1969, move the culture; just as Satoshi Yamamoto’s 2009 White Paper on Bitcoin, as a vision of a movement, has now.

Today, Bitcoin has moved blockchain to engage a community that is three generations younger than those that shared in the spirit of the first “Woodstock”, but the expectations they communicate are no less focused on the same objectives. The nexus between having roots in these 50 years of history, and the present narrative of idealistic blockchain use-cases flying out as White Papers from everywhere today, is one single story of one origin with one heritage and one trajectory.

So a White Paper where blockchain is an agent of an art is in this story. It is about turning an Internet environment that embraces consensus into nodes of an archive. Its about an entry point just opening at this moment, coincidental with being fifty years after the original Woodstock, that can’t but see blockchain completing a circle that will blur the difference between technology and art forever.

Nothing was ever going to happen without the Web

This is where an unending sequence of knots enters the story. Back in the early years before the first Woodstock festival, I worked out a systemic art platform that infinitely generated knots. It was inspired by the constructionist geometry of electronic circuitry that had entered into the visual vocabulary of the time. I conceptualized illustrating unique knots in the same way, only my vision stacked them in a geometric system that proved each circuit to be one-of-a-kind, forever expanding, infinitely. In 1967 this vision of creating the technology that would make this a systemic art was far, far off in the future, in what is here today in blockchain space.

Blockchain space is totally intriguing to me as a cultural phenomenon. It defines a community of visionaries that have positioned an abstract idea as a cutting edge technology, giving it a solid presence in an open source, peer-to-peer, interactive network of programmers and developers that are thinking like artists. I’d been on the lookout for this level of engagement since the Internet began.

Within a few months of the end of 2017 I’d absorbed the principle talking points of this space through Twitter. It’s presence was strong there, with many entering it just as I was doing my first research, and it was already adding concepts that took it in way more extreme directions than I had in mind.

I immediately got hooked on the frenetic pace the space had set for its goal of creating a core knowledge-set around cryptography. I’d tried squeezing that ontologically into a web site several years before. With the blockchain way of seeing things I was putting my http://www.greatknot.com web site through a face lift, and by early 2018 it was keeping up with what this now offered. Blockchain’s vocabulary was giving me the vehicle to adapt “immutable” and “non-fungible” to ideas my art had in it a half century before, but had no words common to a specialized group to give that meaning.

If you’re writing about blockchain, dude, you probably aren’t there yet

I began to think of my web site as a trope for engaging this “space” in my art. The common White Paper’s form was left comparatively vague by this space. The preference was to leave enough slack to continually expand behaviors and test conclusions, and redirect focus, letting the world of new ideas in. Adopting their freewheeling input-influenced drive to my art’s mechanisms of longevity was easy.

The best part was the game theory in the incentives that fascinates this space. That, and Topography, were all the rage when I was starting to think along these lines a half century ago. These influenced my art’s acceptance of having no endgame. Its concept of stacking up creations, and having their numbers accumulating to no end, for all eternity, was fun to imagine as my machinations of mathematicians being made into mechanisms. This way of reading blockchain fit right into my a focus on provenance. Knot-styled concepts blend well with the evasively cryptographic ethereal mechanisms of blockchain’s blocks and chains.

This connection was only unwieldy where the protocol used tokens like money. That concept added nothing to my approach to incentives. My speculative view of art considered this an annoyance, but this resistance broke as I realized blockchain’s tokens could bring in a direct metric as analogs of value.

The only thing of importance to the art is what ultimately makes it realizable. Of the several intellectual incentives advanced in the Web site, the numbering of geometric repeats that form the pattern underlying every knot’s form is the closest to this token analog. Every one of these modules ended up one in a series of consecutive numbers that support the knot’s identity.

Each integer fits the protocol for incentives, as a single unit, and strings of these coma-separated whole numbers double as an individual knot’s public signature, so both accumulate in this progression. As a number tally of the tokens in circulation, this is a precise barometer of the state of the progress of the art.

There is nothing to blockchain but this. Everything else is an application of the art.

With this, by late 2018, my art was conceptually legible enough to fit into blockchain space. I’d styled the tokens as Cryptoknot in my White Paper, and, even if they had no association at all with a core token like Bitcoin or Ethereum, the bare bones requirements of a protocol, formatting tools, and program code fit an Alpha level of a working platform.

No nodes, no consensus; no blockchain

The system was ready for attracting users by mid-summer, 2018. I’d revamped a Patreon page as home base. By early October it was ready to have an open house and dive into incubating a training program I’d laid out in the White Paper, reliant on picking up interest from the blockchain community through Twitter and Steemit.

…but then came second thoughts.

I’d experienced over fifty years of technology cycles through buildups and unexpected twists, and my exuberance for this self incentivized blockchain space’s passion, so fitting of the entrepreneur character, was raising a caution flag. This emergent technology’s exit from its builder’s familiar surroundings to be let loose into the wild on the Internet where billions are oblivious to those patterns of familiarity was only counting on those that are fascinated with blockchain.

The knowledge explosion in the technology these young enthusiasts hold totally in their grasp is not one that targets a user space. Their passion is based on the benefits of decentralization as an ideal of a Third Web world. But there are three generations, living right beside them, they’re failing to see are already reeling from a world that is overwhelmingly too decentralized from understanding generally.

More to the point: my misgivings are from what this community had consoled me with in giving me the feeling they’d be able to put into practice what I’d failed to in all this time. Now that I’d looked into it, I saw them struggling with the same uncertainty. Too much knowledge always exists, and has since way before the Internet, and blockchain’s mission makes this fact louder and clearer by making it about transacting in trusted knowledge.

I totally get why this community frames the present iteration of blockchain around Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies that are testing the extremes of recognized value. The present world needs reassurances. The individual’s perception of basic truths, that never had to be questioned before, is on a southward trajectory. There is an unsettling concern blockchain space knows it is missing for what it terms a “fair start”. The need to evaluate what is brought to our attention has opened issues that we’ve never had to know about before; ever!

Those with the passion to do something are too close to the problem to be helpful, so I decided I’d better first see if the knowledge that 55,000 are already comfortable with can become training wheels for working blockchain into this larger undertaking my knots represent need to take on.

With that in mind, this first installment has set up the theme of the next, where I will return to that Woodstock experiment I’d done twenty-five years ago.