Warfare of Art & Law Podcast
Warfare of Art and Law Podcast sparks conversation about the intriguing – and sometimes infuriating – stories that arise in the worlds of art and law with artist and attorney Stephanie Drawdy.
Warfare of Art & Law Podcast
Researcher, Writer & Advisor Frances Liddell on the Intersection of Emerging Tech, the Arts & Culture
To learn more, please visit Frances Liddell's site.
Show Notes:
0:00 Frances Liddell on justice and technology
1:30 Liddell’s background
2:50 CryptoKitties
3:50 NFTs
5:20 ORAgen
& DECaDE research centre
7:20 C2PA
8:15 tokenized rights
9:45 ORA use cases
10:30 themes from ORA interviews
12:15 YouTube as a supportive platform v. TikTok
13:00 smart contracts and licensing
15:00 perspectives on attribution
16:30 Emily Gould question on attribution
24:50 animation sector with stronger preference for attribution not open source
26:45 interviews revealed uncertainty on data scraping
29:50 lack of awareness about the environmental impact of blockchain
31:50 repatriation and blockchain and her work as associate research fellow with
Art & Antiquities Blockchain Consortium
34:50 Balot NFT - Balot sculpture in Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
37:30 ORA project status
38:15 ORAgen Fables
39:00 recommendations for creatives: to review C2PA & Content Credentials
41:00 Gould: responses during interviews about copyright concerns
45:30 location of individuals interviewed
47:20 impact of tech on issues of injustice - benefits/concerns surrounding decentralization
50:40 current work with ORA
51:30 Oluwatobi Aluko
Please share your comments and/or questions at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com
Music by Toulme.
To hear more episodes, please visit Warfare of Art and Law podcast's website.
To leave questions or comments about this or other episodes of the podcast and/or for information about joining the 2ND Saturday discussion on art, culture and justice, please message me at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com.
Thanks so much for listening!
© Stephanie Drawdy [2025]
So I think when we think about injustice it kind of all comes down to the idea of like what does equity really mean, and can we really use technology to address that? When I think ultimately it's quite a societal problem and that's not to say that technology can't kind of be part of that solution, but it's kind of recognizing there's a kind of social, technical kind of tension there kind of tension there.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Warfare of Art and Law, the podcast that focuses on how justice does or doesn't play out when art and law overlap. Hi everyone, it's Stephanie, and that was Frances Little, researcher, writer, lecturer and advisor who works at the intersection of decentralized and emerging tech and cultural and creative practices. What follows is a recording from a recent Second Saturday online gathering, during which Frances shares about her work, including her involvement with Origin, an unfinished software that addresses the potential value of media tokenization to assist professionals in the creative and cultural industries who deal with challenges regarding ownership rights and attribution. Frances Little, welcome to Warfare of Art and Law. And Second Saturday. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, yeah, thanks for being here. Thank you, yeah, thanks for inviting me. Perhaps we'll get started with you giving, if you would, an overview of your work and what drew you into technology and how it overlaps with cultural and creative industries.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, yeah, so I, yeah. So my background is really arts management and museum studies, um, so I I finished my PhD back in 2022 now, uh, which uh was a collaborative doctoral award with um National Museums Liverpool, uh, to kind of basically do the first empirical research study, uh, examining blockchain technology in museum practice, um, and I suppose that was kind of my first proper foray into kind of emerging technologies and particularly something that was so nascent and sort of unknown within the sector. But I fell into blockchain. I would say I sort of fell into it because I actually, yeah, I it's I was actually kind of researching internet cultures and open access policies doing my master's um. So, yeah, my, my dissertation was all about kind of looking at like what are kind of the opportunities and implications of of an open access policy for, for cultural organizations, um, and of course, within that you start looking at kind of open source movements and the kind of political undertones of all that. And of course, there was blockchain and, in particular, this thing called crypto, uh, crypto kitties, which essentially is um, a kind of blockchain game where people kind of bought and sold to digital cats, and I remember looking at being like what is this? Um, and it's all founded on this idea of digital scarcity and I was just like this is fascinating, um, and around that same time, uh, so 2017, 2018, uh, christie's had been doing quite a lot of work around this and, and there was a lot of discussion around using blockchain as an authenticational tool, uh, in cultural organizations and the art market in particular. Um, and so that's where the kind of my idea for this, my phd kind of, was born, really thinking, like what happens when you put blockchain in a museum? Like how does these ideas collide? Um, and yeah, from that, really it's just snowballed because, um, you know, I was kind of my phd was so well timed.
Speaker 1:It sort of started out of first hype in 2018 with blockchain technology and the cultural sector, and it kind of ended at a time when suddenly there was another huge hype around blockchain and, in particular, nfts, or non-fungible tokens, which they are kind of these tokens that represent digital assets online. Online and through this technology, blockchain, you can basically exchange it and it allows you to basically build economic or all kinds of values associated with it into the token. So, yeah, there was this kind of huge market boom and suddenly people were selling digital art using NFTs in 2021, and then there was a massive dive from it. But suddenly the cultural sector kind of really woke up to the technology and they seemed to be really interested and kind of certainly interested in exploring and potentially experimenting with it.
Speaker 1:And so I sort of ended up kind of building this consultancy business around that, basically advising cultural institutions through educational packages drawn directly from my research and research since then, um, looking at kind of what, what could blockchain do for cultural practice? What are the potential kind of um implications of that and, um, yeah, kind of where do we go with it afterwards? Um, so, yeah, my, when we talk about emerging technologies, yeah, my, my sort of main one is blockchain, but of course, since then, there's kind of been just lots of kind of research around AI and the kind of emergence of that and also the collision of blockchain and AI as well. It's really interesting. So, yeah, that's a kind of a little bit about my background.
Speaker 2:I initially had heard you give a talk, I believe, for the Turing Institute. Since then we've done a follow-up interview around your work with Origin. So would you kind of describe that program and how you came into it, your scope and all these interviews that you've been doing for it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so. Yes, so Origin is part of a project, part of the research centre called DECADE, which stands for the digital, decentralised digital economy, and so I'm the postdoc research associate based up at University of Edinburgh part of that. So I joined the team October last year and but DECADE itself has been going on for since 2020, so, and their main aim as a research centre is to look at kind of applications of blockchain technology that are not necessarily monetary focused, so it's not about cryptocurrencies or any of that platform. It's really kind of looking at actually blockchain applications within the different kinds of sectors, and one of those being the cultural and creative industries. So Orogen is one iteration of a project that explores the themes of ownership rights and attribution. So ORA, which is part of it, that's what it stands for, and ORAgen is an online demo that we have, uh, where you can essentially create and remix different, uh, digital collages, um, the idea being that you kind of, as you do, that you can embed kind of very specific metadata and then you can kind of tokenize that as well through blockchain, um, so we created the demo really as a probe, really for an interview study, to present this technical framework called Aura, so to give a kind of quick background of what Aura is and the technology behind it. Essentially it uses two technologies blockchain and then this metadata standard known as C2pa, um. So we've already kind of briefly explained what an nft is.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, blockchains are a distributed ledger technology that essentially allows you to add, append only information um about exchanges or transactions that have happened in an ecosystem, and those exchanges refer to tokens, one of which are NFTs. So why this is interesting is that, then, that allows you to prove your ownership of particular media. And in the Aura framework, what it's doing is it's creating two distinct NFTs, one to represent an artwork. So say, I'm a creator, I've just made something, I'm going to tokenize it through Aura. You then have one NFT. You then have a second set of NFTs which are licensed tokens, so we call them tokenized rights. But essentially, through the underlying technology of NFTs, you can create kind of specific conditions about kind of how you would like others to use it. So that's kind of the other key part of what Aura does. And then the other end of it, it combines the standards called CTPA, which allows you to essentially embed particular types of metadata, but most importantly, provenance data, where provenance data is used more in the kind of computer scientist term rather than the art historical term.
Speaker 1:So it's not necessarily about the exchange of ownership but actually about when people edit or reuse it. It's basically building up all this information over time so that then that's completely stored in the file and then you can present that. So in Origin, for example, that's presented as a family tree. So that's basically what Aura does and Origin kind of essentially tries to present that in a really simplified way. And we've been using that as a kind of interview style.
Speaker 1:And originally actually we did it as an exploratory study over the course of sort of a few months late last year and the start of this year, where we were using it really to kind of reveal the tensions and challenges people face around attribution, ownership and licensing online, and that revealed some really interesting conversations. And in particular we developed kind of what we call nine use cases of Aura. We divided, developed kind of what we call nine use cases of aura um. I won't go into all of those now, but essentially what those are is that they kind of are divided into five interesting themes, which are attribution, prevalence and tracking, authentication, ownership and licensing and automation um, and then from that we um did a sort of neck. It did another kind of interview study, which was where you came in, stephanie, and we had essentially to talk and kind of to develop those use cases and in some ways to help consolidate what we had found and start to kind of really think about actually, what could Aura do for cultural and creative professionals?
Speaker 2:So yeah, that's essentially kind of where we've been with the research well, I do wonder, like are there any takeaways that you can share, or is that kind of uh to be revealed later? Or if you could give us a sneak peek into some of the the themes that you've taken away from from the interviews?
Speaker 1:yeah, I'm definitely can. Yeah, so actually we've just been writing this up as a academic paper. So this is this is good for my brain to to help consolidate it. But yeah, I think, um, there was perhaps to kind of bring out a couple of interesting kind of nuggets, we say, of the research.
Speaker 1:Um, one thing that kind of was highlighted around attribution, for example, was the way obviously it revealed obviously a lot of gripes people had around the loss of attribution as they share on their work online, but also revealed some interesting approaches that individual creators used in maintaining that attribution. So, like, we had one person who kind of shared stuff on tiktok and spoke about how actually the timestamp for them was just such an important part of their content. Um, in part because people often remix and reuse without kind of clear attribution and that's their kind of source of being like well, that was mine, that's how I proved my ownership of it, which I think is an interesting relationship to the way blockchain works. Um, there was also kind of interesting point about how it's it feels like attribution is like a very user-specific problem when, actually, when we're thinking about how do we design attribution it's really a platform problem and thinking about how do we allow platforms to create a better environment for creators? Um, so things like the youtube remix button is quite a good example of that.
Speaker 1:Um, and actually one participant did speak about how they felt like youtube was a much better or more supportive place for creatives than, say, things like tiktok. Uh, because it felt like the content was always put first and tiktok was like there's a more subscriber-based model on youtube. Um, but they spoke, you know, this idea of the remix button. Actually, when you click on that, what it's doing is automatically embedding attribution of the video that you're choosing to remix from YouTube, and whilst that could also, you know, there are ways to kind of get around that quite easily. The idea is it's trying to encourage users to think about. You know, actually there is someone behind this content and I should be recognizing them. So, yeah, that's kind of just a couple of examples of the stuff that we're finding at the moment.
Speaker 2:I was curious too were there any nuggets, as you say, about the smart contracts and licensing and that kind of angle of protecting and broadening the agency for artists?
Speaker 1:um, yeah, there was quite a few points. I think the kind of overarching, um kind of sort of feeling that's coming out of the kind of discussion with licenses was that licenses are so complicated and like there is a desire for a simplified version of that, both from the user, in terms of being able to just discover and understand what those licenses mean, um, but also from, for example, a collection point of view, trying to find ways to automate. That would be really beneficial. Um, the reality is how smart contracts solve that. Well, it's that's really difficult to say. Can you really reduce every kind of agreement into code?
Speaker 1:It's not something that I totally believe, and actually there was a brilliant article that came out in 2017, actually by karen nevy, who writes about um sort of smart contracts not being street smart, and I I really love that idea because it's the reminder that you know contracts have a kind of social kind of background to it. Um, and, of course, it's like can you really allow? You know it's only when an agreement has very specific conditions that are not going to change is when a smart contract can really address those issues. Um, and actually, when it comes to collections, you know things change a lot, you know, just take things like orphan works, for example. You know there's there's a nice idea to be like could aura address some of those really complex copyright issues? But actually I don't. I it's difficult to really kind of be able to say, because the ultimate point of smart contracts is their rigidness.
Speaker 1:I was curious, too, about your perceptions at the beginning of the project and have certain ideas that you had evolved or shifted during your interview and research process for this yeah, I think, um, I think one thing that's definitely um come out from the interviews, um, and actually kind of stems a bit from, uh, my work on open access policies is is that assumption that attribution is always desired and actually attribution is quite there's a kind of political connection to it.
Speaker 1:So, you know, for example, there was one participant talked about, you know, hacktivists and kind of the artist movements represented in kind of net art and software arts from the early 90s, which is all part of that kind of open source movement, uh desire and the kind of idea of creating a digital comments where no one owns or claims authorship. Um, and that is interesting when you think about aura, because at the very core of it is trying to be like this is the individual author of this work and actually not everyone necessarily has that desire for that and actually by doing so kind of actually feels perhaps counter to their principles and their beliefs. So that's been a really interesting kind of revelation and a real reminder as well that actually these ideas are not always universal we're joined by Emily Gould.
Speaker 2:Go right ahead. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Hi everyone, it's really good to see you and thank you, as ever, for your really fascinating comments. It's so clear on all of your research, which is very complex in so many ways, and what you just said, actually about attribution and it not always being necessarily a priority for creatives and people having kind of different thoughts about it, just totally crystallized something I was thinking as you were speaking earlier, which is that and forgive me, this is going to be really waffly because I'm just sort of formulating in my head as I speak. This is going to be really waffly because I'm just sort of formulating in my head as I speak, but there seems to me to be a lot of sort of Conflicts trying to resolve themselves in the way that these new technologies are being sort of implemented and used by different stakeholders. Because, thinking exactly about attribution and I was thinking about this sort of slightly in the context of some comments I heard from an artist recently who was talking about it was in the context of sort of copyright consents and he was um, he's a really interesting artist actually and he a lot of his works take existing images and, uh, particularly bits of video and film and cartoons and he creates new works out of those. And he was talking about the fact that when he started his arm, uh, many years ago, he never really, um, he never really considered that it might be an issue that he had to go and get consent for use of these found works, because that's just how everybody operates this stuff's out there on the internet.
Speaker 3:You know, no artist knew art, that thought that. You know everything is building on something else. And you know, as obviously, sort of through his practice, um, and as the years went on, he realized that actually there are rules around this. And he was talking about how he sort of views his own art and when he feels like it's kind of the right thing to do that, he knows that he has to go and get consent from someone. And so I was just thinking sort of generally about those notions in the context of sort of attribution and the fact that for some people, you know that art is a kind of a collaborative process and they don't it's not kind of that they don't necessarily want to stamp something with their name and control something and kind of own it as property, um, and you know there's there's that sort of side of the coin versus well, actually you know that I've created something of value and I want sort of that to be respected by people who interact with it.
Speaker 3:Um, so that was one kind of issue where I think there are those kind of competing almost competing sort of philosophies and priorities and approaches that somehow can kind of work themselves out through through through sort of technology like blockchain and then smart contracts. Again, there's that sort of tension between um people. Maybe we just sort of take creative, say, digital artists wanting some kind of automation, some kind of way of sort of knowing that there is some protection around their works and they're always going to be dealt with in a certain way and they maybe can collect a retail royalty or whatever you know the outcome might be. There's some sort of automated control over that versus actually wanting a flexible approach, wanting to be able to deal with different stakeholders in in different ways and not wanting something kind of set out in stone and so yeah, so I guess just some comments and wondering whether you kind of you know, perceive those sort of conflicting interests somehow playing themselves out through use of these new technologies thanks, emily, for your question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and good to see you again. Um, yeah, really, really interesting one. I think it kind of makes me straight away think about that. I think you get it a lot within the blockchain community. Is this kind of desire that technology has to solve it? You know, and feeling like, um, you know well, you know, surely we'll all come together under this like, and technology will be able to cater for every need? Um, I think, certainly.
Speaker 1:Coming to the attribution question, I think there is a kind of argument like thinking about from the interviews. For example, um, one of the things that kind of came out which was like a really lovely idea was, um, one artist spoke about the provenance data that we present as a family tree in origin. Um, they were like, oh, it feels a bit like kind of kind of social media 3.0 or something, because it's kind of visualizing all these different people, um, and actually that kind of brings a different kind of value to attribution, where it's not just about like I'm going to be attributed because I want to represent my contribution or I want want it to be kind of to have the economic incentives. It's kind of almost just a way to connect artists together and that is something that is really important. For example, in roommates, cultures that kind of stem from open source movements, is that it's kind of about this idea of being able to collaborate with anyone and sort of strangers and peer to peer systems and thinking about kind of those sorts of themes. So there is a kind of argument that could could help to bring those kind of competing philosophies together in some way.
Speaker 1:The smart contract one, I think, is a bit harder, harder, um, I think there is kind of to kind of bring a perhaps another kind of kind of comment into this, and actually something that made me think about when you were talking was actually there is, of course, the other issue of kind of the ownership of that smart contract and and what that means as well. So it's not only just about what the smart contract does, it's about who kind of claims ownership of that. Um, you know, as you're saying now, you sort of felt like you know, if people just want it to be automated, which really stems from this desire, well, I just want, I just want someone else to deal with it. I don't get licensing, I don't have to deal with it. I'm an artist, that's what my job is. But I have to do this in order to create a business model, and smart contracts perhaps give that perception that they're going to be able to address that, that perhaps, rather than having to go through some other kind of fund, some other kind of licensing body, um, but then it's kind of thinking well then, how do you then manage and maintain that smart contract? How do you kind of yeah, I think there's kind of a maintenance kind of question.
Speaker 1:I think perhaps what is what I'm thinking of is of this sort of you know, if you're going to use technology to address these issues, how do you mentor, how do you manage that? How do you maintain that? And how do you give people the kind of skills to do that? Um, aura, you know, ultimately is a really complex technology that, you know, even I don't really like. As a qualitative researcher who's really an arts manager coming into this world, I don't even really have the skills to be able to read and manage a smart contract. So how can I expect artists to do that? And then you have to then think about well then you have to get platforms back into vault and and how do you manage those different relationships? Um, so, yeah, just to add a kind of another layer of complexity to it all.
Speaker 3:I think yeah, no, it's really interesting. As you were talking, I was thinking of two more kind of areas of, uh, sort of conflicts almost, and um, one being sort of inclusion and exclude, you know, excluding people from that community because, like you say, um sort of who is controlling this. And the other one was kind of control and lack of control, because you, if you are sort of beholden to a smart contract and a technology that you only understand to a certain level, and you, you know, I can't write code, I couldn't write, I wouldn't have the first clue how to, how to actually set one of these things up, and I would have to trust someone else, and again you get this kind of trustless community and actually we are trusting certain people to set things up in a certain way that we think is going to work in our favor.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, really fascinating going back to the uh open source view versus the attribution preference, were there certain types of creatives or certain sectors where you noticed that it was one preference over the other?
Speaker 1:that's an interesting question. Um, there was perhaps just one kind of standout sector and I don't know. Again, our interview study was. You know, there was 21 people in total in the end, which is quite a large.
Speaker 1:Interview study, in the grand scheme of things, is not necessarily be a representative example of of every view, um, but we did have a couple of participants from animation and I certainly felt like there was a stronger sense or desire for attribution in that field.
Speaker 1:Um, and me speculating on that, I wonder whether it's because it's a, an industry that has very much become commercialized in the last 10 years or has much more, has a stronger commercial incentive or focus now. Um, and I again like, because of the move in social media as well, to more like reels and video and so forth, it does make me think that maybe it's people in those industries that are feeling a bit more protective of their stuff and feeling uncertain about where they go and also they use I mean, one participant spoke about how much they're so reliant on social media to share their work and to build a reputation that they then use to, for example, teach animation. Um, so there's this kind of fear of being like well, I've produced so much content. It's just there on online and you know now that we see the likes of I mean to take AI, for example it is this kind of thing about well, what if that happened like, what if that's taken? Where does that leave me?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah and uh. Another use case and it's kind of seems to be a bridge from this concern is, uh, data scraping, and was there a general consensus? Had people already experienced that?
Speaker 1:I'm just curious, like what the range was there was certainly a lot of uncertainty about it. There was no one that was extremely one way or the other, which I thought was quite interesting, again for the amount of artists that we engage with. Um, you know, I had thought surely there'll be someone who's probably already using AI or completely, you know, shut down the conversation. You know I was sort of ready for both sides, um, but yeah, I think, and what's interesting? Um, so DAX brought out a really interesting survey from 2022 that was surveyed a thousand artists about how do they feel about AI, essentially in different forms, and what we found is quite reflective of the survey's findings no-transcript, and you know, there was going to be a really high percentage again where they were like we need a licensing model that ensures that you can embed, you know, things like a monetary remuneration practice and so forth.
Speaker 1:Um and the partners that we spoke to pretty much were saying the same thing, which I think is um interesting that you know, still, two years on, we're still kind of in the stage of perhaps fear and unsure about it and where to go. Um, and yet the technology itself has accelerated so quickly in these two years, you know, just in the way that, like, I find it so frustrating now that you go on to google or you're searching and it forces you to have an ai response. You know, that sort of thing is kind of already like it's forcing people to engage with it, whether they like it or not, and yet there feels to be a stagnation about actually where we, where, how are we helping creatives in kind of addressing these concerns, um, whether they, you know, whether it's just simply engaging with it or helping to protect themselves from it as well?
Speaker 2:your response. It kind of almost seems like a response to one of my next questions, which was what are your thoughts about overarching misunderstandings or concerns, uh, about ai and its overlap with the creative industries?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean certainly. I mean there is this, this kind of classic narrative around AI and um, you know that there are. I mean, what's what I find so fascinating about uh studying emerging technologies? They all have this kind of narrative and mythology around them, that sort of sticks with them, um, and despite the fact the realities are often quite different, um, but I would say one kind of concern or like misunderstanding. Perhaps it's not a misunderstanding, but there's perhaps a lack of critical discussion with AI around the environmental impact of it.
Speaker 1:And I say this from the context of you know someone that's worked in blockchain technology for you know, six years now and in 2021, that was kind of one of the big major implications of blockchain. People were really concerned about the environmental impact of it, as they should have been, because of the way the main blockchain Ethereum used for the art market at the time was using a particular way to mine or syndicate transactions using proof of work. In essence, that just requires a huge amount of energy and power to do that particular way to mine or syndicate transactions using uh called proof of work. In essence, that just requires a huge amount of energy and power to to do that. Um, so they actually have switched to a much less energy intensive approach called proof of stake, um, but at that time that was kind of one of the big concerns, um and it.
Speaker 1:I sort of had assumed that with the emergence of ai, this kind of discussion would come up again, particularly as concerns around or trying to push for a more green sector is still very prevalent and yet people are still much more open to experimenting with ai um. So I thought that was quite an interesting kind of relationship, and it's not to say that there is no conversation about environmental impact, but it doesn't feel like people are as aware that when you search and use AI chatbots, for example, that is very energy intensive and actually is having a huge environmental impact really unequally across the globe. So there's kind of an interesting kind of colonial conversation to be had there which, yeah, I think needs to be tapped into a bit more.
Speaker 2:Sort of on the flip side as a benefit not necessarily less impact on the environment. But this conversation about repatriation and how blockchain has been used with that you've worked a bit on that. Would you share your experience?
Speaker 1:yeah, sure, so, um, yeah, this is such a fascinating um area, so, um, I would first of all recommend people, if they're interested in this, in this topic, to go have a look at the arts and antiquities blockchain consortium, or the aabc, which is this initiative that I'm associate research fellow at um and I was awarded that fellowship, uh, from my phd project, um, and, in particular, this idea of shared guardianship that I was trying to develop in relation to nfts, um, and trying to think about the idea of what would digital property mean if you take a more relational approach to it, but with the addition of blockchain added into that, so this kind of decentralized idea. So, from that project, we had essentially created a series of NFTs from the collection, in collaboration with a group of participants who had chosen those objects and then they kind of added their own personal story about it and then we put those into the metadata of the NFT and my argument, being based on the findings of that, was that the NFT becomes a representation of these different layers of ownership where, on the one hand, you know the physical objects remain in the museum and, in fact, the digital, digitized version is actually something that's openly available. So you know they don't have a claim of copyright on it but they own the token and they own that experience and that creates this really interesting idea of being like well, I need to care for it and look after it because it's my experience, but also it's something that represents the museum. So kind of build that connection with the, with something that is also a national museum. Um, so from that there's been, you know, that kind of was built around um, kind of there's been some such interesting research over the last 10 years around digital repatriation or the idea of kind of when you digitize, uh, cultural artifacts, who claims ownership of the data? Um, and kind of creating indigenous data sovereignty and what does that really mean? Um, and the addition of blockchain is kind of so fascinating in that way because, as a decentralized technology and to kind of go back to the narrative thing again, you know it is as a, it's got this ideology or something that is kind of, you know, sort of breaking away from centralized forces such as, say, centralized culture institutions, and think, actually, does it kind of add that stronger layer of claim and sort of authority and power that just simply owning kind of the files and so forth doesn't necessarily do so.
Speaker 1:There was actually a really interesting project that took place I think it was 2022 or possibly 2021, called the Ballot NFT.
Speaker 1:That took place I think it was 2022 or possibly 2021, called the Ballot NFT.
Speaker 1:So that was basically about this sculpture the Ballot sculpture that is based at the Virginia Fine Arts Museum in the US and, in essence, these Congolese plantation workers decided to take the digitized version of that from the website and make a series of nfts from it, um, and they did that with basically to provoke the institution, because they had been in long going conversation about, uh, trying to repatriate the physical work, um, and in fact, had, like, not had very little success.
Speaker 1:So they basically were doing this to fundraise, but really to kind of create a provocation of being like well, actually, if you're not going to repatriate it, we're going to take the digital version under fair dealings and make a stake in kind of using blockchain, this idea that, like the digital and physical like, whilst we think about the digitized version being a kind of twin and they run parallel to each other, in actual fact, what we see is that they continuously shape one another, even though they might have very different lives. They may exist in two separate worlds, but actually they have a continuous effect on each other and I think the ballot NFT is a really nice example of that about how you could use blockchain to bring a new force to that, because they were using this token not to claim the digital version, but actually to influence how they can reclaim the physical objects.
Speaker 2:For the work you've done with this, with the aabc. Have you had any feedback from individuals about this way of of opening this conversation and and creating this investment, uh, from individuals in the objects?
Speaker 1:um, no, not directly. Um, so a lot of the work, apart from the shared guardian publication that I published back in 2021, I haven't directly been able to publish my reflections on this yet, but it is something that I'm sort of hoping to do eventually. I think it's a conversation that is important to have, but also one that is kind of continuing on. That is important to have, but also one that is kind of continuing on, and I think there is a lot of potential with thinking about blockchain as a force to challenge institutions when it comes to decolonization.
Speaker 2:And you mentioned that for the Aura project that you guys are preparing an academic paper. Where is the project now and what should we be looking for going forward?
Speaker 1:um. So we've got um we'll have a publication out quite soon um, openly available with um, our partners, digital catapult, uh, which is actually based on a workshop we did back in january. So, um, if you want to learn a bit more about the projects, that should be available soon. But at the moment what we've done is so.
Speaker 1:Origin was always meant to be it's unfinished software and we were always going to think about how do we develop this into something that's much more engaging and interesting, because actually, when you go onto the website, you know the idea really is that you're going through and creating these collages with someone like me like a facilitator there to kind of talk you through and discuss it. So we have created a new interactive called Origin Fables and it's a collective story writing sort of interactive where the idea is that everyone has to build a backstory about a particular object, but in doing so, what you're doing is kind of building a provenance graph and obviously you're being attributed to it and each contribution represents an NFT. So that has. We've just done a pilot of it and it went well, which is great, and we're hopefully going to have a web application for it available soon. So, yeah, I'll be shouting about it on LinkedIn before long, so you can find a link then.
Speaker 2:Are there any recommendations that you might share with creatives when they're approaching attempts to share their work but also protect it, or just different anything that you might want to share with them, or recommendations you'd have?
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. I think one thing to go have a look at is the CTPA metadata standard. It is kind of openly available for everyone to use and actually there's a website called Content Credentials and in essence, that allows you to embed this standard into your digital media and you can straight away start to document provenance data. Uh, you know, into and into your work um. So if you're interested in exploring it, you know it's there ready and waiting and um. I know there's been kind of a couple of key kind of platforms and um. You know people like the bbc are kind of engaging with it as well. So it's, it's one of those things I'm sort of I think in the next couple of years it is going to be, you know, hugely adopted um. So I would recommend that um and yeah, I think you know it's just sort of.
Speaker 1:It's just one of those issues with online and sharing is that you just have to be ready to take those risks, you know. But, like you know, there was a lot of challenges raised in the interviews about kind of. But, like you know, there was a lot of challenges raised in the interviews about kind of and concerns about sharing, but also there was a lot of positive. You know positivities about it. You know people. You know recognize how important it is to be discovered and actually how so many people's business models are built upon social media, and for good reason. You build a really strong community that become your cheerleaders, your supporters. So whilst there are these kind of negative points, it's always important to remember that there are some real positives to engaging with social media.
Speaker 3:Can I ask a quick question, frances? A very boring lawyer's question. But the people who you talk to in your interviews and generally in your work, are they generally sort of worried about the law copyright law mainly, I guess? Are they worried about it? Are they? Are they? Is it a concern for them? Is it something they think about in the context of their work? And you know they worry about infringing other people's work and they worry about people you know infringing their copyright, stealing their work, and do they generally kind of know the rules and want to apply them? Or it's just not of interest and they just want to do their work and you know, and they hope that the technology will help them, they don't see the law as kind of either a friend or a foe, I guess yeah, it's a good question, emily.
Speaker 1:I think there was a big mix because obviously I was also spoke with, you know, people who worked at cult institutions and are well aware of the kind of legal frameworks that they have are subjected to. I think, from an individual's perspective, like it didn't naturally come up that way. Copyright law, you know, it was something that I quite often kind of talked a bit more about in context of licensing, and then we sort of spoke about it. Um, there were obviously a few kind of people who spoke about the kind of the theft and the stealing kind of element and that sense of like that's mine, but they didn't necessarily directly talk about copyright or indeed no one necessarily like identified the rights associated with that. But I think is quite interesting.
Speaker 1:Um, and you know, to bring another example into this, you know, coming from like in 2021, with the market boom of nfts, I found it so fascinating that there was a real kind of or lack of understanding about the difference between owning an NFT and copyright, and there was a lot of people assuming that they could do things with their NFT when they couldn't, and and indeed the other end of it as well creators putting NFTs out there without any clear creative commons licensing or so forth.
Speaker 1:So I think there is definitely, you know, I think there is a need for a kind of clear understanding of what the legal frameworks are and what they do. You know, even just things like when I search images on Google, for example, I find it fascinating that you really have to go into the search. You have to be very specific about, like I want creative commons licensing. It's not straight away there, and having that and just having a bit more awareness for users, I think would just be hugely beneficial in helping people to understand what you can and cannot do with an image online yeah, that's really interesting for us.
Speaker 3:It's in times very much with what I hear from um creatives. I was at a seminar recently and it was about um. It was about copyright and the exceptions to copyright, so fair dealing and fair use and what you can do with someone else's copyright work, you know, without getting their consent, really, and the different mechanisms and frameworks for that and how it differs in different countries and um, and there was somebody from a very big, well-known gallery, from their legal team, and they said if we tried to start telling our artists what to do, we would quickly find that our gallery would just shut down. It doesn't work like that. We have to try and find ways of sort of you know, helping to protect artists but letting them, you know, find ways to do their work without sort of you know always being the break and saying you know being very sort of risk averse, I guess.
Speaker 3:And the guy who was talking about a really interesting artist who does this kind of cartoon work and takes all these found images, he said it's often very surprising um, who turns out to be, who turns out to be a party who is very, very sort of protective of their rights. So he would use things by you know massive companies like warner brothers and um, and actually found out, you know, just sort of discovered through his practice, that they weren't necessarily the people to be worried about. It would be somebody who you know, a kind of a somebody who had just, I don't know, done a few illustrations for a small book, who happened to see their work used in this artist's work, who he would get a letter from and yeah so really really surprising sort of results of you know the approach that he takes in his art.
Speaker 2:I had a question before and it's kind of bringing it back to the fore of the pool of people you talked to, where they were located and, depending on where you are, the laws that govern all of what you're doing kind of highlights the need for protecting yourself individually when you are looking at the way there is no consistency across the globe with all of these standards.
Speaker 1:Yeah, completely yeah, and you know I should emphasize you know a huge amount of portion, I would say, were probably from the UK.
Speaker 1:But what I always find fascinating when I read up on kind of the latest kind of legal literature around blockchain and nfc's is it's so often us oriented. I feel like I know so much about us copyright law, um, and funny enough, there isn't like as much about uk and I actually don't know a great deal from the european perspective. And again that's changes again and, as you say, stephanie, like there is, there needs to be perhaps a way to be able to navigate this really complex landscape in a way that's manageable, and particularly when you think about at what point are you searching for a copyright. You're probably trying to find an image really quickly for a presentation. You don't have the time to be, you know finding, you know doing that detailed research that's quite often required to find the correct person to speak to, finding their contact details and emailing them. There are too many barriers there for people to actually be able to perhaps be bothered to do it properly, and I think that's perhaps even just the biggest concern that we have immediately.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then, taking it one step further, one of the questions that I had presented to you and I would ask your thoughts now is are there injustices that you see with the emerging technologies or more ability to achieve justice through emerging technologies? Is there one or the other that you've experienced or see for the future?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is such an interesting question and it made me stop and think for a while. Actually, I was kind of, yes, injustice, where does that fit? Because, of course, you know, I think one of the fascinating things about studying blockchain, for example, is the rhetoric around it being democratising and that it's going to change. You know, this kind of unequal landscape, particularly from an arts perspective. But as you research more and the kind of as I reflect more around it, it's realising that decentralisation can mean so many different things to different people, and yet they all come and flock to this, this kind of technology, and thinking it's going to be the solution to their problems, um, so what I mean by that is like, for one end, um, you know, blockchain stems from kind of a crypto anarchist and kind of cyber libertarian kind of political, um kind of reflections where people are trying to use it to basically, you know, break away from government bodies controlling how they exchange with each other, um, to maintain a sense of privacy, um. But then, on the other hand, you have people flocking to it from a more socialist point of view and taking on cooperative principles and taking a more participatory approach to decentralization and thinking actually this is going to help us be more collaborative in how we approach uh, kind of working together, um.
Speaker 1:And then you also get decentralization from a creative point of view, or kind of thinking about their economic models and thinking, well, actually I'm going to use this decentralized tool to break away from those intermediaries that have been exploiting my recent, you know, or kind of my creative work, but every kind of situation, idea that you know, yes, you can decentralize, but actually what you gain are pockets of power, because people, unless there's a structure to it, people will always gain the system. And then what's worse is that then you don't have a democratic approach to take those people away. So we see that as a really good example of what's happened with the blockchain art ecosystem. What we see is just a replication of the winner takes all approach. You know people say there aren't any intermediaries, but actually artists are not early, they're not winners in that world. Um, you know, there's just certainly just new monopolizations, uh, but in a different format. Some things like art, open sea and so forth.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here and sharing about what you're doing and I am curious, going forward, are you continuing with the Aura project and what other projects might you be doing, if there's any that you want to share about, and what other projects might you be doing, if there's any that you want to share about?
Speaker 1:Yes, so we'll be continuing with the origin work. So, yeah, the interactive that I mentioned, we'll be doing another sort of study around that and sort of developing our understanding around aura. So yeah, that's kind of the main project on the horizon for now. And yeah, I'm looking forward to having kind of a physical interactive that people can kind of the main the main project on the horizon for now, um, and yeah, I'm looking forward to having kind of a physical interactive that people can kind of play around with um and and doing some sort of again just being back in the field and and sort of speaking with people and learning um. It's one of my favorite things to do is just to watch people kind of explore these technologies are there any other questions?
Speaker 1:yeah, I have a question, hi.
Speaker 2:Stephanie um hi toby go right ahead yeah.
Speaker 1:So I just wanted to ask is, or just in the nft space or is it just the nft space?
Speaker 1:I just wanted to ask um, yeah, so actually, whilst it uses nfts blockchain, we've been quite careful about not engaging the NFT space with it, so we've only been in the interview study. We only engaged artists and creators who are kind of more I mean, there were digital artists but who did some engaged with blockchain, but generally speaking, they were what we might see as more the traditional cultural and creative industries. We might see as more the traditional cultural and creative industries. Um, and we were careful of that because we were really interested to kind of learn more about, kind of how, people's perceptions of the technology. Um, you know, I think certainly there's an argument that aura probably would be readily adopted within kind of the nft community, because they already understand what nfts do. So then it's just simply kind of embedding this other, this metadata standard. So, yeah, no, it is something that we're trying to engage kind of the whole of the culture and creative sector, not just the NFT community.
Speaker 2:There will be links in the show notes to learn more. If you were intrigued by this podcast, it'd be much appreciated if you could leave a rating or review and tag Warfare of Art and Law podcast. Until next time, this is Stephanie Draughty bringing you Warfare of Art and Law. Thank you so much for listening and remember injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.