On Friday November 25th, 2022 in Berlin, Germany, JPG and Tomb Series hosted an event featuring a panel with Kei Kreutler, Gilbert Again, Matteo Pasquinelli and David Rudnick, moderated by María Paula, co-founder of JPG.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Maria Paula Fernandez: We're here to talk about the relationship of communities and smart contracts and memory, what's on chain and off chain, and money. Why not? Let's keep it a little broad so everyone can find something to relate to. We’ll dive deeper into all of that with our panelists.

I'm gonna start with our honorable head. [*gestures at a small silicon bust*] A legacy silicon emulation of postmodern writer Gilbert Adair, he was sculpted with lifelike precision by Lisa Buscher here in Berlin. So it's a derivative work, a derivative instrument, but it has real human hair.

Then we have Kei Kreutler. You're a writer, you're an artist. I met you when you were working in Gnosis, but I also have been reading your amazing writings about DAOs. if you wanna know anything about DAOs, just type Kei Krutler, I'm sure you won't be disappointed. 

Then we have Matteo Pasquinelli. A professor of media, philosophy at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. And I've heard that you are also the person to talk to when it comes to theory for AI.  

And then of course we have David Rudnick who probably most of you are here for. David is a London born graphic designer based in Ghent, Belgium, working out of terrain. terrain is a space for visual systems research and production where the Tomb Index was designed and produced. And I have to say also that David is notoriously funny on Twitter. So maybe let's start with an intro to the Tomb Series and we can take it from there. 

David Rudnick: Sure. The Tomb Series is a project which at its heart contains 177 objects which are referred to in the project as “Tombs”. They are individual drawings of what appear to be digital, optical media, storage devices, data discs, MiniDiscs.

Each of them have their own visual identity and name, and they're presented in the context of the project in the Tomb Index, which is the book on the table. It forms a sequence, a catalog of these 177 objects.The Tombs exist both as images there, but also they are objects that will have digital counterparts that will be published as NFTs. They are divided into different sections we call “houses” in the book, and each house has its own parameters, behaviors – different aspects which are governed by a smart contract and will have a different release mechanism.

All of this adds up to a very strange, unusual body of image and language, and I think the best way to feel like you have a hold on the territory of this project's operation probably comes through the Index itself. As a graphic designer, to be able to do a project that allowed myself and the studio to explore some of the possibilities of work on chain, some things which are technologically novel or unusual, and still have at its heart a very traditional, information technology – the book. And this also gave us an opportunity to explore what the possible boundaries, parameters for innovation were in both of those spaces, in a traditional publishing format, and publishing on chain.

MPF: Have you ever heard of the term Phygital?

DR: figital? Oh yeah. Like P H Y G. That's, it's been knocked about a bit in the last year hasn’t it. Yeah, not a great term. like physical, digital 

MPF: Yeah. it's a big meme, on NFT Twitter, where I live. It’s interesting that such a broad project like Tomb Series would be reduced to such a redundant, but reductive term because when you're talking about your project there's so much more there to me. But how do you define your response to those two terms?

DR: I think the project is built around the part of any work that allows it to exist as a source across these media boundaries. Sometimes it'll be a printed object, sometimes it'll be a digital object, but the viewer’s experience of these things – their recognition of the image, the language it contains, like the name of the Tomb, it’s in a sequence, what house its in etc, those things are neither physical nor digital, they’re not housed entirely on the blockchain, they’re not fully contained in the book either. The viewer combines those aspects, its a blend of memory, experience, the viewer form the port that recognises the work in different formats. These components of the work exist, but they are phenomenological.

And they exist as memory. They exist as cultural constructs and the way in which we encounter those things. And thats an essential component of all culture, on and off chain. We can fetishize certain entry points and say ah, the digital art is valuable, or the physical art is valuable. But to me neither medium creates the value, what art creates is this nexus of phenomenological, and the value is breathed into it in the perceptions and memories of the viewer. The Index, the blockchain structure, are designed to formalize and present that nexus for the Tomb Series, to preserve it to time, fasten it in two different mediums.

Gilbert Again: Ok but I want to start with a question about that. These mediums, one term that's like a bridging term between the two, in this project. “Drawing”. The first piece of Tomb Series commentary that I ever saw was a quote tweet of David's announcement that just is a close up of a tomb, and the words you drew this. What is a drawing? What is a digital drawing? When you say drawing and we see these things, what does it mean? 

DR: I guess it's a part of the mythos of this project. I say that the Tombs were individually hand drawn; that I drew them on Photoshop, CS3 on the trackpad of my 2010 MacBook Pro.

But I think what I mean by “drawing” is that there was no part of them that didn't have to make a translation from my mind through the hand to reach its final form. That there was no part which was randomized or imported from, elsewhere or the product of a generative system. The colors all had to be ordained, the names had to be ordained.

The structure which I tend to keep returning to, not just in my work, but when trying to make sense of historical bodies of work, time and again, is that of a poem. A sequence of language where the prosody and the rhythm and the cadence frame how the viewer encounters it that is what creates the meaning.

So in order to control those aspects, I wanted compositional control over where each aspect of them would be considered, ideated. So that's why they're drawings, in that I wanted to specifically imagine and translate each part. It's much like me choosing their names is as much an aspect of them being drawings as me choosing their colors. And it's why I don't think they could have been generated while considering how each component affects the whole.

GA: One clarifying question prompt is when I look at them, I think they have these layers of abstraction. If we understand them as MiniDiscs, when you look at them, you're looking at the back of the disc. So the facade is, in a way, fictionalized. Their audio or data media is not visible. There's something abstract and inaccessible about what we understand there.

Their content is hypothetical. For me, that's the kind of compelling thing that, well, I've looked at these images since whenever that was, April 21, really consistently, and they've maintained my fascination, I think for that reason. That there are those layers of abstraction. 

But another thing I’m curious about for that reason, if  you've ever touched on why you call them Tombs and not MiniDiscs.

DR: Well, a Tomb and a MiniDisc are both boundary objects for the reasons you describe. They are a facade that contains something beyond that you cannot see, but that the mind wants to access. I think that aspect of human culture, and I know Matteo has mentioned the idea of ornament, like facades of buildings; when you walk down the street as a public citizen in public space, and we interpret them as thing which contain private space, private lives and romance and tragedy and love and entire universes of being that you don't access. You see the facade, you imagine the inside. And this is part of what it's like to be a being in a social reality. Interpreting facades. And similarly as well, I think we are now beings for whom a great part of that world that we consider to be The Real that we share takes place in immaterial, virtual space, takes place in environments that ultimately, Have no stable front end, have no fixed facade, have no resolution point, no boundary object.

Maybe this project is almost an epitaph for a tomb, a kind of a moment of recognition of that magical, fantastical idea of having touch points that were our gateways or boundaries to an infinite world, that could become meaningful to us, powerful to us. Maybe that's something our generation will have to come to terms with the loss of. The people who will be born 20 years from now, there will probably be no frame of reference when they look at a Tomb image, no memory, no nostalgia or recognition in them. So something like this becomes more like a Tomb than a MiniDisc as time goes by. 

MPF: Kei, in relation to these pieces, and hearing you speak about it, something that struck me is that relation to having control of every part of the labor process so that it is an experience, a site or a moat to memory, rather than just a particular object. And this is interesting to me because I think of a lot of contract art, or kinds of art that's based on contracts, also are processes that manifest the same result.

Kei Kreutler: Well whatever the contract generates – it could be NFTs, it could be another form – I see it as bringing a kind of site specificity to the work. That site specificity is basically a pointer that says this object persists in these different places over time. And I think that's interesting because the placeness of these objects is not so much about where they occupy in the world, whether it's on a server, whether it's a distributed ledger, it's much more about the fact that they were created at a specific time and then they persist through that time in different places.

So, it's this ability to almost use a calendar system to create places for digital objects. Then you get a very interesting kind of philosophy of what technical objects are. The object itself might be abstract, but what is recorded in specific terms are these aspects of its creation.

Matteo Pasquinelli: This is also the recognition that some of these processes of social abstraction that can be highly abstract indeed, and they can permit different scales of extraction on top of them; of the economy, of the technological infrastructure, of the history of culture, scaling up to this super-extraction fuelled by AI.

Sometimes they die, they encounter their own terrible destiny. They become this niche that is unable to reproduce itself, like in the case of many days. The extraction exhausts its resources. So basically, they dry up. I think it's a kind of reflection on the destiny of some of our projects when they encounter their own niche, they end up in a different way from what maybe we expected. in this large game of abstraction. We seem to always have the ambition to control this, to play with it.

DR: It's interesting you say that they die. Luke Miles, who's the contract architect on the project, @worm_emoji. When we were publishing the book, he said you probably did this just in time; maybe we were in the last six months where viewers would see these works and not just assume they were AI generated.

When you say the extraction dries up. That possible interest by the viewer, Oh, why did he do this? Why did he do that? Will not be how people will read these images any more. Because they'll just assume that I fed, I trained stable diffusion on 2000 MiniDiscs and it spat out a bunch and I cherry picked some nice ones or whatever. 

MPF: But isn't it equally worth it if you are the person that has fed the algorithm that's able to generate the future?

DR: Hmm I’m not sure. I've heard a lot of discussions in artistic circles about the future of professional practices, image creation practices based on the rapid increase in the capacity of image synthesis and AI models.

There's a massive part of that conversation that's missing. The question is always asked the same way, does it matter from the artist's perspective? Does it matter from the artist's perspective? And the question that's interesting to me, and I think is it being asked and is a very dangerous question not to ask, is does it matter from the viewer's perspective?

The way I read an image, the way I have learned to understand when I see any product of human endeavor is in part, based on me trying to parse and interpret the human decisions that went into the product of what I'm seeing. And what if a viewer emerges, that simply learns never to ask any of those questions? Because the answer is always, well, it's inscrutable, it was the AI’s choice. The process is mystical, gnostic. Takes place in a language we can’t speak. Art returns 2000 years into the past and becomes magic again.

MPF: I think that we're dealing with very new technology, like with the latest edition of stable diffusion. The recent controversy is because it's so real, but we’ve been at that point for what like, three months? And just that long ago the technology was cruder, almost charming, and this wasn’t a concern, and now suddenly it is. We're dealing with a technology in its infancy, and that's true of other technologies as well.

There's people and there's community efforts in crafting the narratives and crafting the way that technology should be perceived as well. I'm also worried about our AI overlords taking over the world, seizing the means of cultural production and everything. But at the same time, I know that humans have this incredible capacity to create narratives and to create work and worlds that persist over time. And that is able to shift, a little bit the viewing experience.

Of course people will say, yeah, and AI totally made this, but also, people will be able to identify different things, like the narratives that the works are being formed around, and that they can observe in a way we now are not able to say about these technologies, maybe more unbiased.

KK: But I think memory could be one of these frameworks through which we understand. Yeah. Just in the same sense that David you say your memory is very much what's creating these pieces. And yes, there's like some technical objects, the memory of a CD, the memory of certain objects and just references that are embedded there, but they're channeled through you.

But the difference is that with these models from the artist's perspective would be that you're relying very explicitly on the technical aggregation of other people's memory output. And basically as a kind of consumer or as a kind of participant in this particular project, in general how much does it matter for the viewer?

I think if we understand it as what we are viewing or participating in is like an aggregate of other, many memories, trained over many different periods, and to also observe, where do those memories come from? Then we can have a kind of more culturally holistic way of saying the work is not so much the specific labor product of one person, but a kind of memory creature over time, and where was that drawn from and what were the technical substrates that allowed us to have that memory persist.

GA: I would say that's a good moment to introduce the smart contract layer of the project, which is the first contact that I had as a writer with the Tomb Series. I wrote a piece of speculative fiction in which I tried to imagine an artifact that could be recovered from one of the discs, and when I did that, I was actually very anxious to publish it.

I thought, everything I already said appeals to me about the aesthetic of those objects, is that they're hidden behind these layers of abstraction. I thought if I now publish something that says this object has an association that is speculatively the content of one of these objects, that this might break something for someone. because that might tie those two images together in a way that they would rather have left open or undefined.

What's so interesting to me is that you don't see it that way, that this smart contract, part of the project that's about to be launched – Recovery. It actually completely authorizes and formalizes that mechanic whereby anyone can propose, a digital object to be recovered from one of the tombs. And the community that exists around the project in Discord, can vote to, to authorize that recovery.

I find it super interesting that you aren’t protective of that kind of associative layer. Things can happen that might break people's perception of an individual Tomb, and I admit I find that very counterintuitive. I wonder if it's a kind of generational thing. If it were my work, I would not do that.

DR: Maybe it is generational? Because I feel like, it's predicated on, a baseline belief that I have, which I think is one which is, like a kind of latent truth, which society is acknowledging images are fully permeable now. The aegis is off, they are unprotectable. you cannot withhold, you cannot publish anything on the internet that cannot be immediately right click saved and stolen, remixed, recontextualized, repositioned. You cannot put it forward in, in a format where someone can't append any message – political, symbolic – to the object itself and, to try and stand there and gate keep the meaning of the work is is like a futile, an exhausting gesture that i’m not sure an artist should be engaged in now.

Instead, providing tools to make the reaction to the work useful is, I think, a more interesting possibility offered by work on chain. Not just like the specific structures in this project, but I think the way in which you can create now taxonomies of like from the initial instance to the secondary reaction, the second or third order reaction, and that those can become visible to others in the chain. You can see the way in which images become interrelated, which parent and sibling generations emerge. It's not for me to tell you what these images mean. Maybe that era, that idea of an artist, has been exhausted by our technological reality.

But what I can do now is build a superstructural framework around the image via which people can create, hopefully, community value, language value, within that structure, emergent out of the way people react, remix, recontextualize them. 

MPF: Well with the advent of all of the AI tools possible for creative production, maybe it is not that you're supposed to give away the control, but as you said Matteo, also maybe this idea of control is simply not possible any more. But control is very native to human nature. How do you view it? 

MP: Well with the latest AI tools, foundation models to do everything, basically generate images of any sort, digging up the cultural heritage at any level of depth, you, that's a form of monopoly.

But indeed, the results are interesting. David, the last thing you said when you said superstructural. Or a superstructure for community value production. So I'm interested in this other scale, and maybe what value emerges when it is combined with this tremendous capacity for generation. That is the way today, indeed, through new technologies, through new forms of contract and arrangement of this society, we have developed, new form of autonomy from value. From the same time, through this process, autonomy from the object of art. So we are basically divesting you from autonomy, from this canonical figure. And they put value in art and information on the same level.

MPF: Value as in monetary value or value as in cultural value?

** MP: **right? Value as in the money form that could be also understood as a commodity form. But we are basically, Re-engineering that form, like we are engineering the art form. And you said, what was your definition? superstructural. the last thing you said. 

DR: to propagate superstructures for supporting community and language value.

MP: Yeah, that's the thing. So when you have this widespread forms of social obstruction where you intervene, where you recorroborate, reorganize, reinvent forms of social bond and which scale into that. So that's the level I'm interested in. Then of course, you have monopolies of data.

MPF: I'm very curious also. I don't know much about AI, but I'm very curious to see how you view AI in the age of monopolies. 

MP: Well AI drives datasets that are one of the most fantastic forms of data accumulation we've ever experienced. So much so in fact, I even am asking, with AI, what is a kind of epistemic limit?

Because the game is over. You have these foundation models like dall-e, stable diffusion – they will come out with a few others in the next years – that you are seeing now emerge into the public. But that's also somehow, a closing of the game. Because now that these models are seeing successful adoption it accelerates the gap between them and emergent models. So only big companies, only people that have that extensive amount of data, and all access to cultural heritage.

To make the model useful you have to have scale, and the local knowledge, including if you want indigenous knowledge, only corporations and states that have access to that data at scale, will be able to build and to train. Large models. And all the others, even at our university for example we play with training, machine learning models, but it's like a hobby.

MPF: So that's the question. It tends toward Monopoly?

MP: Yeah, absolutely. [laughs] But I think that's also happening a lot in the crypto sphere. For example with clients. The clients are like, the piece of software that allows you to connect to different blockchains, initiate activity, and you need the clients to actually connect to the blockchain, otherwise you wouldn't be able to. Currently we are seeing the clients that we use to connect to Ethereum for example are being bulldozed by big players that have lots of funds. And probably this shouldn't happen in a world that we have been building as a decentralized. But also, in a decentralized space the opposite creates its own problems - its not straightforward to regulate against monopoly, to obstruct a centralizing process. Kei I'm wondering how you see this in your practice. 

KK: I think it's an interesting kind of broader question because when you refuse or you take your position to not gatekeep meaning of something, of a production of something, there's always a question of inviting participation.

Others create that meaning, and then who, or what entity is able to get the surplus of that meeting or kind of control or feedback in that meeting? And it can be, in the case of AI image generation, like large corporate monopolies, in the case of crypto, you have the thing of open source software then feeding into large VCs, taking that code, forking it, and then creating a product that other companies can't compete with.

So there is this kind of like digital morality, in which we all participate, we craft this meaning. We've taken away the gates, but it's almost like at the end of the path with no gate, you have this epic mansion now, and it’s like everyone's in the yard creating this meaning it will persist through time. Right now how that value accumulates may not be clear, but I think if you look at cultural models, its almost theological in a way; there will be some sort of entity that's more easily able to capture that value and that I think that gets hidden from a lot of the kind of models that we have of, of production at the moment. How meaning still persists and is made within the community. And that's actually the kind of value that persists through time. Where does the line of that capture really matter the most?

MPF: Is there a way to preserve meaning and narrative and memory? 

KK: Yeah. I think humans couldn't exist without that. I think its something in the undefined space alongside the elements on the chain itself. Like  the basis for the culture is the objects on chain, but the actual culture is people interacting with those things on chain.

Also, it's not that the memory is stored in the object, but the people telling the story of that object, is the thing that has to keep it going. So I think that there is something in that kind of story that, that, resists, resists, in some way… 

MPF: A transaction hash, for instance.

Matteo, how you see it from the perspective of media preservation as well. And, looking at the fact of the matter is Ethereum and this transaction history and, the way that people interact with the objects, are very much immutable and on chain.

So how do we organize efforts from the perspective of media preservation and archiving to generate a lasting memory?

MP: That’s a great question. I was really impressed with this idea that even money can be understood as this technology of forgetting, right? I'm really impressed by the attempt to fight against forgetting. But your question; which was about the encoding of this process. So we're talking about automation of labor knowledge, and with regards to the market, really that’s your area of expertise. But I'm interested in this other thing that you just said. The idea of encoding each passage of the social transactions, the social bond. Pretty ambitious.

In the introductory essay to the Tomb Index there is this reference to Alois Reigl and the idea of the ornament. The ornament is actually what is left outside of the natural history of technology. So technology evolves, there are rules, they're a morphology we can follow, but then something is left out and that actually comprises the role of the ornament; and forms the framework for the static and political and culture role of the ornamental selection, Reigl said each civilization express itself better in the ornament, in this leftover. And maybe you can explain, David the way it entered into this process. 

DR: To look at that and Maria Paula’s question simultaneously, yeah, there’s this promise which has been spoken of a lot about what the emergent paradigm of the blockchain will do for the intersection of life, art and commerce where all instances of interaction are potentially recorded, traceable. There's a part of me that sort of rejects the idea of this as a novel phenomenon. Because it's like, yes… that happens already. Every physical action, everything we do has some sort of index, has some sort of impact in the world. Just… It's messy. It's not just data, its physics, its language, its memory, its all these things. It's not easy, it's not centralized, it's not a single language code base you can search to find those responses. The impacts of transactions that took place hundreds of years ago are affecting our daily lives, and we're part of chains of being that have political and social consequences where all of these things are to some extent recorded, but they're being recorded in this morass of physical and emotional and social process. But they don't have a single, searchable and also codified body of language that translates that all into one thing. So really whats novel is not the technology, but the monopoly. And there's a part of me that doesn't find that emancipatory at all. It's a part of me that finds that quite totalitarian; the dream that everything will be in one language, this master language, the God language of the chain that all meaning and value can be derived from.

Which is why the parts of the project that might at first seem a bit silly, mythic, the names, the houses, what some people might call “lore”, are the least compatible or translatable parts to the on-chain aspect, but also I think what makes life and culture so interesting and fascinating and varied and rich. And maybe why you can have 177 objects in this book that are ostensibly all highly similar and yet unique and have their own names and potential histories, and all of them may have their own story to tell for a viewer. I think that's the, maybe the compatibilist to me, that's the, that's me not taking a dogmatist position – not anti chain and nor am I some physical essentialist who believes that like nothing can be encoded and everything is in the experience. But saying that it's in that confusing gap between memory and nostalgia and belief and recognition and what that sore object is that I think the interesting things happen. But maybe what those interesting things are to me is what you Matteo points out Reigl refers to as ornament.

I want to just really quickly come back to one thing, which you said a couple of minutes ago, about meaning and about narrative. I think one thing that has influenced the way that I made this project, but influenced the way I made my work and the way that I approach it. Being a designer and propagating things for other viewers, and why I don't use the word artist to describe my practice and why it doesn't bother me, is that I don't believe meaning is transferable.

People talk about meaning as this thing which passes between subjects and I think that signs, symbols, languages, things which exist in the midst between other minds; those are viewed by multiple subjects at once, subjectively, non-contingently. I don't see the same thing that you see. We make gambits and guesses of what we can put into the arena, into this podium that other people might see that might produce memory or might land, might leave them with phrases, leave them with images, leave them with things.

We never know what those things are. They're irretrievable. They're inobservable. To describe that as meaning – as some concrete substance, which has value and we can ascribe capital to is a total fallacy. Which is why I find the blockchain also so interesting because it's propagated in large part socially by people who totally  believe this, who totally think that we can translate the world into concrete items of value, which are objectively observable and that we are creating public truth, public fact, public meaning. By putting these things into its space. I think that's part of why I feel like a designer, like why did the studio do this project? Why did I start making work on chain? I know a lot of people are like, duh, it's because you know NFTs are hot. Really? I have to say it was potentially the easiest way for me to torpedo my practice. But I think this is a frontline I had to engage with. this is this is a space which, we're watching a very one-sided conversation emerge about, like what the value of culture is and how culture works and, how it might be organized in the future and I think that it's the time is now to maybe explore where the weird permeable in defined bits that the blockchain doesn't get exist.

And that's why I think Kei, your highlighting of memory and the way in which these things enter into this space is brilliant because we intuitively have come to understand memory is something which is not fact. Which is fallible, subjective, which is… fungible, to use a crypto native term

I think just by using the word memory, you complicate the value proposition of the blockchain, in a really interesting way. Because it very clearly helps illustrate that there are some things it's likely never going to be able to deliver.

KK: Yeah, definitely. And related to the paradigm of the blockchain, but you don't even necessarily need the blockchain. You can take it to like any kind of database system or even just like early attempts that like taxonomically organizing knowledge. And we have this sense that once we put it in a system, That knowledge is there and we'll somehow have a societal memory of that knowledge, right?

So whether it's a database of all of the butterflies that have ever existed or whether it's all of the NFTs that are on chain, we have this idea, it's there, it's preserved. It will persist through time. And I often think of this kind of hypothetical, it's very contrary to that, but it could be that actually the most likely result is that things that we put in the database are the things that we end up most likely to forget, societally.

Because we put them there. We say, okay, they're preserved. We don't activate them, we don't tell stories about them. They just lose circulation. And that all of the knowledge that we've preserved could actually very well be all of the knowledge that we lose. So it's like in using the word memory rather than preservation, or rather than archive, I want to highlight that memory and persistence and experience exists individually between people and the meaning made there and the meaning that kind of persists through that social relation.

And it has very little to do with the medium itself. The medium is secondary to that. I think that we lose sight of that. It's a really wonderful calendar, or data system that we've invented with on chain stuff. But it's really important that we activate that, through projects, through conversations.

Because otherwise it's all just kind of dust, which is also fine with me. A lot of stuff doesn't need to continue to exist.

About Tomb Series: The Tomb Series is a series of 177 individual works, referred to as Tombs, published in a 240 page hardcover book format – Tomb Index – and deployed on chain as individual 1/1 artworks, plus a smaller series of screenprint editions. Each Tomb consists of a depiction of an optical data disc on a black void, drawn by David Rudnick using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CS3, using the trackpad on a 2012 Macbook Pro. No 3D or additional rendering software is used in their composition.

The 177 Tombs are divided into eight “Houses”, with each House constituting a discrete body of work launching with different contracts, behaviours, interactions, mechanics, platform launch partners, even on different blockchains and with unique physical components. Tombs in one House can affect the behaviours of Tombs in others, some Tombs will be extremely straightforward to access and view, others may require unlocking or discovery, or the fulfilment of certain conditions in order to access them.

About JPG: JPG builds web3 native cultural infrastructure. After launching in 2021 the product Exhibitions, an easy to use interface that allows users to create NFT exhibitions regardless of who owns these, and stores the exhibition data on-chain on Arweave, thus creating a history of provenance beyond the ownership changes that Ethereum registers, and now JPG has launched Canons, a community-sourced contextual data layer for the NFT ecosystem. This curated archive is stored on-chain via Arweave and incentivized through a NFT-based reputation system.

JPG Canons are currently in its alpha version. To explore the Canons and to participate of the governance and propose NFTs, visit our website.