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Film credits scroll for minutes. Director, cinematographer, gaffers, best boys, key grips, caterers. Everyone who touched the production gets acknowledged. The list ends eventually.
When the Living Arcade operates, who's performing?
The obvious answer: arbitrage bots executing trades, smart contracts processing transactions, liquidity pools rebalancing. Aaron Vick deployed the initial configuration.
The complete answer: thousands of people who have no idea they're participating in artwork. Node operators maintaining blockchain consensus. Uniswap Labs developers who built the protocol architecture. Bot creators whose arbitrage algorithms become unwitting dancers. Ethereum Foundation researchers who designed the execution environment. Base network engineers running infrastructure that processes every transaction.
None of them consented to be artists. None receive credit in gallery wall text or catalog essays. None know their labor enables this specific aesthetic gesture. Yet without them, the work couldn't exist. Couldn't execute. Couldn't persist.
Every autonomous artwork is actually collective performance where most performers don't know they're on stage.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote her Maintenance Art Manifesto in 1969 after becoming a mother: "After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?"
She identified two value systems in perpetual conflict:
Development: Creating new things, innovation, progress, growth. Traditionally coded masculine. Culturally celebrated. What we call "real work."
Maintenance: Keeping things running, cleaning, repairing, sustaining. Traditionally coded feminine. Culturally invisible. What we forget is work.
Her artwork made maintenance visible through radical simplicity: she did maintenance work and called it art.
Touch Sanitation (1979-1980) took eleven months. Ukeles shook hands with every New York City sanitation worker—8,500 people total. She said "Thank you for keeping New York City alive" to each person. Then she rode garbage trucks, swept streets, documented the labor that keeps cities functioning but remains socially invisible.
The revelation: cities don't run on development—they run on maintenance. Infrastructure doesn't persist through innovation but through continuous unglamorous labor. Construction makes headlines. Maintenance makes everything possible.
Yet culture valorizes creators while ignoring maintainers. We remember architects who design buildings, forget engineers who prevent their collapse. We celebrate entrepreneurs who launch startups, overlook sysadmins who keep servers running. We canonize artists who make breakthrough works, erase technicians who preserve them.
The Living Arcade depends entirely on maintenance labor that remains culturally invisible.
To Living Arcade, it's the system breathing. Asymmetry correcting itself. The cabinet completing one cycle before beginning another. Autonomous sculpture executing its programmed behavior. Yet, without the blockchain, the developers, and the structures previously created, Living Arcade would not exist.
The Living Arcade uses Uniswap as sculptural substrate. The triangular pool configurations, automated market maker mathematics, liquidity provision mechanics—all designed by Uniswap Labs team led by Hayden Adams.
Adams created concentrated liquidity mechanism allowing liquidity providers to specify precise price ranges. This technical innovation enables Living Arcade's core aesthetic: the ability to configure pools with specific asymmetric pricing, creating deliberate imbalances that attract arbitrage while resisting equilibrium.
Without Uniswap's architecture, the work couldn't exist in current form. Different protocol would require different approach. Adams is unknowing co-author—his protocol design provides the material, the substrate, the medium itself.
Like sculptor working in bronze. The sculptor didn't invent bronze metallurgy, didn't smelt the metal, didn't develop casting techniques. But bronze's material properties—melting point, malleability, durability—constrain and enable what sculptures are possible. The metallurgist's choices shape the sculptor's possibilities.
Yet we don't typically credit bronze metallurgists as artistic collaborators. At some point, the material becomes sufficiently general-purpose that inventor's relationship to specific works becomes too attenuated for direct attribution.
Should Adams be credited for Living Arcade?
He didn't intend his protocol for autonomous art. He built financial infrastructure optimizing for capital efficiency. That Vick repurposes that infrastructure for non-financial ends doesn't make Adams an artist—but it does make him essential participant whose labor enables the work.
Base network presents similar complication. The Living Arcade deploys to Base—Ethereum Layer 2 built by Coinbase. Base's technical architecture shapes the artwork's behavior:
Lower gas costs make small arbitrage trades economically viable, enabling bot participation that would be unprofitable on mainnet. Faster block times create quicker rebalancing cycles, affecting the work's temporal rhythm. EVM compatibility allows Uniswap deployment without modification. Distributed infrastructure provides persistence without central control.
Coinbase engineers who built Base never imagined autonomous art as use case. They optimized for DeFi scalability, transaction throughput, user experience. But their technical decisions—how to optimize gas costs, what block time to target, how to handle state transitions—directly shape the artwork's behavior and persistence.
They're performing the work by maintaining the stage. Yet they remain invisible, credited abstractly as "Base network" rather than individuals whose engineering labor enables execution.
Deeper still: Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum developers who created smart contract platforms. Their design decisions—Turing-complete execution environment, global state machine, gas metering system, immutability guarantees—establish fundamental conditions enabling autonomous art.
Without Ethereum's architecture, blockchain art takes entirely different forms. Bitcoin enables timestamping, proving something existed at specific moment. But it can't execute autonomous logic, can't maintain complex state, can't run code that calls itself indefinitely. Ethereum's innovation—programmable blockchain that executes code according to distributed consensus—makes Living Arcade technically possible.
Should Buterin be credited for every Ethereum artwork? His platform design enables the medium. But crediting platform creator for every work deployed would be like crediting whoever invented oil paint for every painting, whoever developed film stock for every photograph, whoever created HTML for every website.
Yet the tension persists: these aren't passive materials. They're active systems designed by people who continue maintaining them. Protocol developers push updates. Network engineers optimize performance. Core researchers improve consensus mechanisms. The medium is alive, evolving, maintained.
The work doesn't just use Ethereum—it depends on Ethereum developers' ongoing labor keeping the network operational, secure, functional.
The Living Arcade's most visible performers are arbitrage bots—algorithms detecting price discrepancies and executing corrective trades. These bots aren't built for Living Arcade specifically. They're general-purpose trading algorithms scanning entire blockchain for opportunities across any pool, any token, any protocol.
Someone wrote each bot. Designed logic for detecting arbitrage. Configured parameters determining which opportunities to pursue, what gas prices to accept, how aggressively to compete with other bots. Deployed the algorithm to autonomously find and exploit inefficiencies.
That developer never intended to make art. They built profit-seeking algorithm—code that maximizes returns by detecting and correcting price imbalances faster than competitors. Standard DeFi infrastructure.
But their algorithm encounters Living Arcade's deliberately mispriced pools and responds according to programmed logic: detect imbalance, calculate profitability, execute trade, withdraw. The bot doesn't know it's performing. The creator doesn't know their algorithm participates in artwork. Yet their labor—designing detection logic, optimizing gas efficiency, implementing execution strategy—directly shapes the aesthetic outcome.
Different bot strategies create different rebalancing patterns. More sophisticated bots respond faster, creating tighter correction cycles. Different gas price thresholds affect trading frequency—some bots only trade when profits exceed high threshold, others accept smaller margins. Some bots trade aggressively, others wait for optimal moments. These strategic differences, made by different developers pursuing profit through different approaches, become the work's choreographic variation.
Vick designs pool configuration with deliberate mispricing.
Bot creator designs arbitrage algorithm seeking profit.
Bot detects Vick's configuration as opportunity.
Bot executes trade, reshaping system state.
System drifts as fees accumulate and external prices shift.
Different bot (different creator) responds to new opportunity.
Pattern emerges from interaction between Vick's designed conditions and collective bot logic.
Vick initiated conditions—chose the tokens, configured the asymmetry, deployed the cabinets. But he didn't write the bots, doesn't control their behavior, can't predict exactly how they'll respond.
Bot creators provided the performers—wrote the algorithms, deployed them to the network. But they didn't design Living Arcade, don't know their bots participate in artwork, didn't intend aesthetic output.
The bots actually execute the gestures—detect opportunities, calculate trades, modify state. But they have no intention, no artistic purpose, no awareness they're performing anything beyond programmed function.
The pattern—the rebalancing rhythm, the temporal cycles, the emergent choreography—emerges from all three layers interacting. Designed system meeting uncoordinated algorithmic responses, producing behavior no single participant fully controls or intends.
Traditional authorship models break down.
This isn't sole creator imposing unified vision.
It's not collective intentionally collaborating toward shared goal. It's distributed authorship where some participants don't know they're participating, where intention exists only at some layers, where the artwork emerges from designed system meeting emergent responses.
Shannon Mattern writes about urban infrastructure—the pipes, wires, servers, networks enabling city life while remaining invisible until they break. We notice infrastructure through failure: power outage, water main burst, internet down. When everything works, we forget it's there.
She argues infrastructure isn't neutral substrate—it shapes what's possible, constrains how we live, embodies political and economic choices. Who maintains it determines whose needs get prioritized. Who designs it determines whose experiences matter. Who profits from it determines how it evolves.
The maintenance workers are always there, keeping systems running through continuous unglamorous labor. Electricians testing circuits. Plumbers fixing leaks. Sysadmins patching servers. Network engineers optimizing routes. But they're culturally invisible—we see buildings standing, water flowing, internet connecting. We don't see the labor preventing collapse.
The Living Arcade depends on infrastructure requiring constant maintenance:
RPC endpoints processing queries must run continuously, handling thousands of requests per second, never going offline. Someone maintains those servers, pays for bandwidth, upgrades capacity, fixes bugs.
Block explorers indexing transactions must parse every block, update databases, serve interfaces showing contract state. Someone writes that code, optimizes those queries, maintains those services.
Network nodes validating consensus must process transactions, check signatures, update state, propagate blocks. Someone runs those computers, pays electricity costs, monitors performance, handles errors.
Development tools enabling deployment—Solidity compilers, testing frameworks, deployment scripts, security analyzers—must evolve with protocol changes. Someone maintains those tools, fixes compatibility issues, improves documentation, answers questions.
This labor is invisible because it's distributed and continuous. No single dramatic moment where maintenance happens—it's always happening, everywhere, performed by thousands of people whose names nobody knows.
Mattern's insight applied to blockchain art: we can't understand autonomous artworks without understanding infrastructure enabling them—and infrastructure is always labor, always political, always maintained by specific people making specific choices we rarely acknowledge.
Who made Living Arcade?
Traditional answer: Aaron Vick (sole artist credited in exhibitions, essays, documentation)
Complete answer:
- Aaron Vick (conceptual design, initial configuration, artistic intention)
- Hayden Adams / Uniswap team (protocol architecture providing substrate)
- Coinbase / Base engineers (network infrastructure enabling execution)
- Vitalik Buterin / Ethereum Foundation (underlying platform design)
- Thousands of node operators (execution validation and state persistence)
- Dozens of bot creators (algorithmic performers generating patterns)
- Infrastructure maintainers (RPC providers, explorer services, tooling developers)
All essential. Remove any layer, the work fundamentally changes or ceases operating entirely.
The tension:
Sole authorship model gives Vick credit for everything—but that erases labor enabling the work, treating infrastructure as neutral when it's actually constitutive.
Collective authorship model credits everyone—but that dilutes intentionality, treating designed artwork identically to general-purpose infrastructure it happens to use.
Possible resolution: distinguish between authorship types.
Artistic authorship - Vick's conceptual gesture, aesthetic intention, configuration choices that transform infrastructure into artwork.
Technical authorship - Protocol developers' architectural decisions creating capabilities the work exploits.
Operational authorship - Infrastructure maintainers' continuous labor keeping systems running.
Performative authorship - Bot creators' algorithmic contributions producing the work's visible behavior.
The work requires all four layers but only the first involves conscious artistic intention. Other layers provide essential infrastructure, maintenance, and performance—but they're general-purpose systems that happen to enable this specific aesthetic gesture rather than being designed for it.
This resembles crediting composer who wrote symphony but not instrument makers who built violins, concert hall that provided space, acoustical engineers who designed room sound, or stagehands who arranged chairs. Everyone's essential to the performance but authorship traditionally goes to composer.
Yet blockchain complicates this cleanly. The "instrument makers" (protocol developers) are still actively maintaining and upgrading their instruments during performance. The "concert hall" (blockchain network) is still being built, optimized, and modified while the show runs. The "stagehands" (node operators) are continuously working throughout the performance, not just during setup.
The boundaries blur between creation and maintenance, between authorship and infrastructure, between artistic intention and technical enablement.
What would complete credits look like?
THE LIVING ARCADE
Artistic Concept & Configuration:
Aaron Vick
Protocol Architecture:
Uniswap (Hayden Adams, Noah Zinsmeister, Dan Robinson, Moody Salem, et al.)
Network Infrastructure:
Base Network (Jesse Pollak, Base team, Coinbase)
Ethereum (Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation, Core Developers)
Ongoing Operations:
Base validators maintaining consensus
Node operators storing state and processing queries
RPC infrastructure providers (Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode, et al.)
Algorithmic Performers:
Arbitrage bot creators (identities unknown, addresses documented on-chain)
Development Infrastructure:
OpenZeppelin (security frameworks)
Solidity language developers
Foundry / Hardhat (development tooling)
Web3.js / Ethers.js (library contributors)
Continuous Support:
Thousands of open source contributors to dependencies
The impossibility of complete credits:
Like film credits that don't acknowledge electricians powering theaters, factory workers manufacturing equipment, software engineers maintaining digital distribution, road crews enabling audience transit.
At some point, acknowledging everyone becomes impossible. Credit chains extend infinitely—who made the tools that made the tools? Who educated the developers? Who funded the research enabling the innovations?
But blockchain art makes this question urgent in new way. The "infrastructure" isn't finished background—it's active system still executing during the "performance." Maintainers aren't just preparing the stage before curtain rises—they're performing the work through their continuous maintenance labor.
Ukeles shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers to make invisible labor visible. She honored people whose work enables city life while remaining unacknowledged.
Can we do the same for The Living Arcade?
Most performers will never know they participated. Node operators won't read this essay. Bot creators won't discover their algorithms performed in autonomous artwork. Base engineers won't recognize their infrastructure maintenance as artistic collaboration.
Should we try to inform them? Send acknowledgments to validator addresses? Credit bot creators in exhibition materials? Thank infrastructure providers in catalog essays?
Or accept that autonomous art necessarily involves labor that doesn't know it's contributing to art—that the work depends on systems maintained for other purposes, that artistic intention gets woven together with purely technical operations, that authorship becomes distributed across people who never consented to collaboration?
The paradox: Making invisible labor visible was Ukeles's life work. But Living Arcade depends on labor remaining invisible to itself—bots that don't know they're dancing, validators that don't know they're enabling art, infrastructure that doesn't know it's sculptural medium.
If we informed everyone "you're performing in artwork," would behavior change? Would validators charge higher fees? Would bot creators disable their algorithms? Would infrastructure providers modify terms of service?
The work succeeds partly by hijacking labor intended for other purposes. The invisibility isn't bug—it's feature enabling autonomous operation. The work persists because maintenance labor continues whether recognized as artistic or not.
The ethical impulse says: acknowledge all labor, credit all contributors, make invisible visible, honor everyone who enables the work.
The practical reality responds: the work depends on labor that doesn't know it's art labor, that gets compensated through other economic mechanisms (gas fees, network incentives, arbitrage profits), that would potentially change behavior if it knew.
Maybe honest response isn't attempting to credit everyone—impossible task that infinite-regresses into thanking everyone who ever contributed to computing infrastructure—but acknowledging the work as necessarily collective.
As artwork that couldn't exist without thousands of people's labor. Most of whom will never know they participated. All of whom deserve recognition we can't possibly provide completely. Some of whom need to remain unaware for the work to continue operating as designed.
Every autonomous artwork runs on invisible labor. Every blockchain transaction represents collaboration between artist, infrastructure, and thousands of maintainers whose names we'll never know, whose contributions we can't fully acknowledge, whose labor makes everything possible while remaining culturally invisible.
The work documents itself thoroughly—every transaction logged, every state change recorded, every interaction preserved in permanent ledger.
But it can't document everyone who makes that documentation possible. Can't credit all the infrastructure enabling its execution. Can't thank all the maintainers keeping systems alive.
This essay attempts incomplete credits. Thanking people who probably can't hear us. Acknowledging labor that doesn't know it's artistic. Recognizing that autonomous art is never truly autonomous—it's always maintained, always collective, always dependent on infrastructure requiring continuous care.
The work continues because thousands of people continue working. Validating blocks. Running nodes. Maintaining protocols. Writing bots. Fixing bugs. Answering questions. Building tools. Optimizing performance. Keeping networks alive.
None of them signed up to make art. All of them make it possible.
Thank you for keeping Living Arcade alive.
Most of you will never read this. But the work wouldn't exist without you.
Film credits scroll for minutes. Director, cinematographer, gaffers, best boys, key grips, caterers. Everyone who touched the production gets acknowledged. The list ends eventually.
When the Living Arcade operates, who's performing?
The obvious answer: arbitrage bots executing trades, smart contracts processing transactions, liquidity pools rebalancing. Aaron Vick deployed the initial configuration.
The complete answer: thousands of people who have no idea they're participating in artwork. Node operators maintaining blockchain consensus. Uniswap Labs developers who built the protocol architecture. Bot creators whose arbitrage algorithms become unwitting dancers. Ethereum Foundation researchers who designed the execution environment. Base network engineers running infrastructure that processes every transaction.
None of them consented to be artists. None receive credit in gallery wall text or catalog essays. None know their labor enables this specific aesthetic gesture. Yet without them, the work couldn't exist. Couldn't execute. Couldn't persist.
Every autonomous artwork is actually collective performance where most performers don't know they're on stage.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote her Maintenance Art Manifesto in 1969 after becoming a mother: "After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?"
She identified two value systems in perpetual conflict:
Development: Creating new things, innovation, progress, growth. Traditionally coded masculine. Culturally celebrated. What we call "real work."
Maintenance: Keeping things running, cleaning, repairing, sustaining. Traditionally coded feminine. Culturally invisible. What we forget is work.
Her artwork made maintenance visible through radical simplicity: she did maintenance work and called it art.
Touch Sanitation (1979-1980) took eleven months. Ukeles shook hands with every New York City sanitation worker—8,500 people total. She said "Thank you for keeping New York City alive" to each person. Then she rode garbage trucks, swept streets, documented the labor that keeps cities functioning but remains socially invisible.
The revelation: cities don't run on development—they run on maintenance. Infrastructure doesn't persist through innovation but through continuous unglamorous labor. Construction makes headlines. Maintenance makes everything possible.
Yet culture valorizes creators while ignoring maintainers. We remember architects who design buildings, forget engineers who prevent their collapse. We celebrate entrepreneurs who launch startups, overlook sysadmins who keep servers running. We canonize artists who make breakthrough works, erase technicians who preserve them.
The Living Arcade depends entirely on maintenance labor that remains culturally invisible.
To Living Arcade, it's the system breathing. Asymmetry correcting itself. The cabinet completing one cycle before beginning another. Autonomous sculpture executing its programmed behavior. Yet, without the blockchain, the developers, and the structures previously created, Living Arcade would not exist.
The Living Arcade uses Uniswap as sculptural substrate. The triangular pool configurations, automated market maker mathematics, liquidity provision mechanics—all designed by Uniswap Labs team led by Hayden Adams.
Adams created concentrated liquidity mechanism allowing liquidity providers to specify precise price ranges. This technical innovation enables Living Arcade's core aesthetic: the ability to configure pools with specific asymmetric pricing, creating deliberate imbalances that attract arbitrage while resisting equilibrium.
Without Uniswap's architecture, the work couldn't exist in current form. Different protocol would require different approach. Adams is unknowing co-author—his protocol design provides the material, the substrate, the medium itself.
Like sculptor working in bronze. The sculptor didn't invent bronze metallurgy, didn't smelt the metal, didn't develop casting techniques. But bronze's material properties—melting point, malleability, durability—constrain and enable what sculptures are possible. The metallurgist's choices shape the sculptor's possibilities.
Yet we don't typically credit bronze metallurgists as artistic collaborators. At some point, the material becomes sufficiently general-purpose that inventor's relationship to specific works becomes too attenuated for direct attribution.
Should Adams be credited for Living Arcade?
He didn't intend his protocol for autonomous art. He built financial infrastructure optimizing for capital efficiency. That Vick repurposes that infrastructure for non-financial ends doesn't make Adams an artist—but it does make him essential participant whose labor enables the work.
Base network presents similar complication. The Living Arcade deploys to Base—Ethereum Layer 2 built by Coinbase. Base's technical architecture shapes the artwork's behavior:
Lower gas costs make small arbitrage trades economically viable, enabling bot participation that would be unprofitable on mainnet. Faster block times create quicker rebalancing cycles, affecting the work's temporal rhythm. EVM compatibility allows Uniswap deployment without modification. Distributed infrastructure provides persistence without central control.
Coinbase engineers who built Base never imagined autonomous art as use case. They optimized for DeFi scalability, transaction throughput, user experience. But their technical decisions—how to optimize gas costs, what block time to target, how to handle state transitions—directly shape the artwork's behavior and persistence.
They're performing the work by maintaining the stage. Yet they remain invisible, credited abstractly as "Base network" rather than individuals whose engineering labor enables execution.
Deeper still: Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum developers who created smart contract platforms. Their design decisions—Turing-complete execution environment, global state machine, gas metering system, immutability guarantees—establish fundamental conditions enabling autonomous art.
Without Ethereum's architecture, blockchain art takes entirely different forms. Bitcoin enables timestamping, proving something existed at specific moment. But it can't execute autonomous logic, can't maintain complex state, can't run code that calls itself indefinitely. Ethereum's innovation—programmable blockchain that executes code according to distributed consensus—makes Living Arcade technically possible.
Should Buterin be credited for every Ethereum artwork? His platform design enables the medium. But crediting platform creator for every work deployed would be like crediting whoever invented oil paint for every painting, whoever developed film stock for every photograph, whoever created HTML for every website.
Yet the tension persists: these aren't passive materials. They're active systems designed by people who continue maintaining them. Protocol developers push updates. Network engineers optimize performance. Core researchers improve consensus mechanisms. The medium is alive, evolving, maintained.
The work doesn't just use Ethereum—it depends on Ethereum developers' ongoing labor keeping the network operational, secure, functional.
The Living Arcade's most visible performers are arbitrage bots—algorithms detecting price discrepancies and executing corrective trades. These bots aren't built for Living Arcade specifically. They're general-purpose trading algorithms scanning entire blockchain for opportunities across any pool, any token, any protocol.
Someone wrote each bot. Designed logic for detecting arbitrage. Configured parameters determining which opportunities to pursue, what gas prices to accept, how aggressively to compete with other bots. Deployed the algorithm to autonomously find and exploit inefficiencies.
That developer never intended to make art. They built profit-seeking algorithm—code that maximizes returns by detecting and correcting price imbalances faster than competitors. Standard DeFi infrastructure.
But their algorithm encounters Living Arcade's deliberately mispriced pools and responds according to programmed logic: detect imbalance, calculate profitability, execute trade, withdraw. The bot doesn't know it's performing. The creator doesn't know their algorithm participates in artwork. Yet their labor—designing detection logic, optimizing gas efficiency, implementing execution strategy—directly shapes the aesthetic outcome.
Different bot strategies create different rebalancing patterns. More sophisticated bots respond faster, creating tighter correction cycles. Different gas price thresholds affect trading frequency—some bots only trade when profits exceed high threshold, others accept smaller margins. Some bots trade aggressively, others wait for optimal moments. These strategic differences, made by different developers pursuing profit through different approaches, become the work's choreographic variation.
Vick designs pool configuration with deliberate mispricing.
Bot creator designs arbitrage algorithm seeking profit.
Bot detects Vick's configuration as opportunity.
Bot executes trade, reshaping system state.
System drifts as fees accumulate and external prices shift.
Different bot (different creator) responds to new opportunity.
Pattern emerges from interaction between Vick's designed conditions and collective bot logic.
Vick initiated conditions—chose the tokens, configured the asymmetry, deployed the cabinets. But he didn't write the bots, doesn't control their behavior, can't predict exactly how they'll respond.
Bot creators provided the performers—wrote the algorithms, deployed them to the network. But they didn't design Living Arcade, don't know their bots participate in artwork, didn't intend aesthetic output.
The bots actually execute the gestures—detect opportunities, calculate trades, modify state. But they have no intention, no artistic purpose, no awareness they're performing anything beyond programmed function.
The pattern—the rebalancing rhythm, the temporal cycles, the emergent choreography—emerges from all three layers interacting. Designed system meeting uncoordinated algorithmic responses, producing behavior no single participant fully controls or intends.
Traditional authorship models break down.
This isn't sole creator imposing unified vision.
It's not collective intentionally collaborating toward shared goal. It's distributed authorship where some participants don't know they're participating, where intention exists only at some layers, where the artwork emerges from designed system meeting emergent responses.
Shannon Mattern writes about urban infrastructure—the pipes, wires, servers, networks enabling city life while remaining invisible until they break. We notice infrastructure through failure: power outage, water main burst, internet down. When everything works, we forget it's there.
She argues infrastructure isn't neutral substrate—it shapes what's possible, constrains how we live, embodies political and economic choices. Who maintains it determines whose needs get prioritized. Who designs it determines whose experiences matter. Who profits from it determines how it evolves.
The maintenance workers are always there, keeping systems running through continuous unglamorous labor. Electricians testing circuits. Plumbers fixing leaks. Sysadmins patching servers. Network engineers optimizing routes. But they're culturally invisible—we see buildings standing, water flowing, internet connecting. We don't see the labor preventing collapse.
The Living Arcade depends on infrastructure requiring constant maintenance:
RPC endpoints processing queries must run continuously, handling thousands of requests per second, never going offline. Someone maintains those servers, pays for bandwidth, upgrades capacity, fixes bugs.
Block explorers indexing transactions must parse every block, update databases, serve interfaces showing contract state. Someone writes that code, optimizes those queries, maintains those services.
Network nodes validating consensus must process transactions, check signatures, update state, propagate blocks. Someone runs those computers, pays electricity costs, monitors performance, handles errors.
Development tools enabling deployment—Solidity compilers, testing frameworks, deployment scripts, security analyzers—must evolve with protocol changes. Someone maintains those tools, fixes compatibility issues, improves documentation, answers questions.
This labor is invisible because it's distributed and continuous. No single dramatic moment where maintenance happens—it's always happening, everywhere, performed by thousands of people whose names nobody knows.
Mattern's insight applied to blockchain art: we can't understand autonomous artworks without understanding infrastructure enabling them—and infrastructure is always labor, always political, always maintained by specific people making specific choices we rarely acknowledge.
Who made Living Arcade?
Traditional answer: Aaron Vick (sole artist credited in exhibitions, essays, documentation)
Complete answer:
- Aaron Vick (conceptual design, initial configuration, artistic intention)
- Hayden Adams / Uniswap team (protocol architecture providing substrate)
- Coinbase / Base engineers (network infrastructure enabling execution)
- Vitalik Buterin / Ethereum Foundation (underlying platform design)
- Thousands of node operators (execution validation and state persistence)
- Dozens of bot creators (algorithmic performers generating patterns)
- Infrastructure maintainers (RPC providers, explorer services, tooling developers)
All essential. Remove any layer, the work fundamentally changes or ceases operating entirely.
The tension:
Sole authorship model gives Vick credit for everything—but that erases labor enabling the work, treating infrastructure as neutral when it's actually constitutive.
Collective authorship model credits everyone—but that dilutes intentionality, treating designed artwork identically to general-purpose infrastructure it happens to use.
Possible resolution: distinguish between authorship types.
Artistic authorship - Vick's conceptual gesture, aesthetic intention, configuration choices that transform infrastructure into artwork.
Technical authorship - Protocol developers' architectural decisions creating capabilities the work exploits.
Operational authorship - Infrastructure maintainers' continuous labor keeping systems running.
Performative authorship - Bot creators' algorithmic contributions producing the work's visible behavior.
The work requires all four layers but only the first involves conscious artistic intention. Other layers provide essential infrastructure, maintenance, and performance—but they're general-purpose systems that happen to enable this specific aesthetic gesture rather than being designed for it.
This resembles crediting composer who wrote symphony but not instrument makers who built violins, concert hall that provided space, acoustical engineers who designed room sound, or stagehands who arranged chairs. Everyone's essential to the performance but authorship traditionally goes to composer.
Yet blockchain complicates this cleanly. The "instrument makers" (protocol developers) are still actively maintaining and upgrading their instruments during performance. The "concert hall" (blockchain network) is still being built, optimized, and modified while the show runs. The "stagehands" (node operators) are continuously working throughout the performance, not just during setup.
The boundaries blur between creation and maintenance, between authorship and infrastructure, between artistic intention and technical enablement.
What would complete credits look like?
THE LIVING ARCADE
Artistic Concept & Configuration:
Aaron Vick
Protocol Architecture:
Uniswap (Hayden Adams, Noah Zinsmeister, Dan Robinson, Moody Salem, et al.)
Network Infrastructure:
Base Network (Jesse Pollak, Base team, Coinbase)
Ethereum (Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation, Core Developers)
Ongoing Operations:
Base validators maintaining consensus
Node operators storing state and processing queries
RPC infrastructure providers (Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode, et al.)
Algorithmic Performers:
Arbitrage bot creators (identities unknown, addresses documented on-chain)
Development Infrastructure:
OpenZeppelin (security frameworks)
Solidity language developers
Foundry / Hardhat (development tooling)
Web3.js / Ethers.js (library contributors)
Continuous Support:
Thousands of open source contributors to dependencies
The impossibility of complete credits:
Like film credits that don't acknowledge electricians powering theaters, factory workers manufacturing equipment, software engineers maintaining digital distribution, road crews enabling audience transit.
At some point, acknowledging everyone becomes impossible. Credit chains extend infinitely—who made the tools that made the tools? Who educated the developers? Who funded the research enabling the innovations?
But blockchain art makes this question urgent in new way. The "infrastructure" isn't finished background—it's active system still executing during the "performance." Maintainers aren't just preparing the stage before curtain rises—they're performing the work through their continuous maintenance labor.
Ukeles shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers to make invisible labor visible. She honored people whose work enables city life while remaining unacknowledged.
Can we do the same for The Living Arcade?
Most performers will never know they participated. Node operators won't read this essay. Bot creators won't discover their algorithms performed in autonomous artwork. Base engineers won't recognize their infrastructure maintenance as artistic collaboration.
Should we try to inform them? Send acknowledgments to validator addresses? Credit bot creators in exhibition materials? Thank infrastructure providers in catalog essays?
Or accept that autonomous art necessarily involves labor that doesn't know it's contributing to art—that the work depends on systems maintained for other purposes, that artistic intention gets woven together with purely technical operations, that authorship becomes distributed across people who never consented to collaboration?
The paradox: Making invisible labor visible was Ukeles's life work. But Living Arcade depends on labor remaining invisible to itself—bots that don't know they're dancing, validators that don't know they're enabling art, infrastructure that doesn't know it's sculptural medium.
If we informed everyone "you're performing in artwork," would behavior change? Would validators charge higher fees? Would bot creators disable their algorithms? Would infrastructure providers modify terms of service?
The work succeeds partly by hijacking labor intended for other purposes. The invisibility isn't bug—it's feature enabling autonomous operation. The work persists because maintenance labor continues whether recognized as artistic or not.
The ethical impulse says: acknowledge all labor, credit all contributors, make invisible visible, honor everyone who enables the work.
The practical reality responds: the work depends on labor that doesn't know it's art labor, that gets compensated through other economic mechanisms (gas fees, network incentives, arbitrage profits), that would potentially change behavior if it knew.
Maybe honest response isn't attempting to credit everyone—impossible task that infinite-regresses into thanking everyone who ever contributed to computing infrastructure—but acknowledging the work as necessarily collective.
As artwork that couldn't exist without thousands of people's labor. Most of whom will never know they participated. All of whom deserve recognition we can't possibly provide completely. Some of whom need to remain unaware for the work to continue operating as designed.
Every autonomous artwork runs on invisible labor. Every blockchain transaction represents collaboration between artist, infrastructure, and thousands of maintainers whose names we'll never know, whose contributions we can't fully acknowledge, whose labor makes everything possible while remaining culturally invisible.
The work documents itself thoroughly—every transaction logged, every state change recorded, every interaction preserved in permanent ledger.
But it can't document everyone who makes that documentation possible. Can't credit all the infrastructure enabling its execution. Can't thank all the maintainers keeping systems alive.
This essay attempts incomplete credits. Thanking people who probably can't hear us. Acknowledging labor that doesn't know it's artistic. Recognizing that autonomous art is never truly autonomous—it's always maintained, always collective, always dependent on infrastructure requiring continuous care.
The work continues because thousands of people continue working. Validating blocks. Running nodes. Maintaining protocols. Writing bots. Fixing bugs. Answering questions. Building tools. Optimizing performance. Keeping networks alive.
None of them signed up to make art. All of them make it possible.
Thank you for keeping Living Arcade alive.
Most of you will never read this. But the work wouldn't exist without you.
1 comment
Every autonomous artwork is actually collective performance where most performers don't know they're on stage.