#monegraph

Fighting Fraud And Piracy With Blockchain

Anyone who has ever posted a photograph or original piece of artwork on the internet knows that credit is fleeting. No sooner is it pinned, retweeted or shared then any metadata or watermark linking it to its source is stripped away or simply left behind as it spirals across social media platforms. By the time it reaches the end of the viral chain, even if someone wanted to offer proper…

How This Man Made the Leap From Artists to Entrepreneur 

How does a lifelong artist transition into entrepreneurship? Easy: He relies on his creativity, like everyone else.

It’s a Saturday in December and things are not going well for Kevin McCoy. His year-old startup, Monegraph, released a major software update the previous evening and the bug fixes aren’t documented properly, the marketing materials aren’t complete, and the interfaces are barely holding together. The release, it seems, is a work in progress.

But then again, this CEO is a work in progress too. Until recently he just called himself an artist. Since the 1990s, McCoy and his wife, Jennifer, have been making art out of internet media -- using an online ad network to distribute 1 million absurdist banner advertisements, for example. But now he’s taken on perhaps the hardest challenge in the arts: He’s trying to turn a creative passion into a business, relying on his artistic instincts to build something completely different. That does have its benefits, though -- like right now, when the artist inside him knows that even failures can be fascinating.

“All of my artwork is about building systems that generate meaning,” he says, sitting in his Manhattan workspace. “Monegraph is about building systems that generate value. I’ve relied on what I’ve taught myself as an artist to teach myself what to do here.”

At Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference in spring 2014, artist Kevin McCoy and technologist Anil Dash developed an exciting new technology which uses the Bitcoin protocol to create electronic ownership certificates for digital art called Monegraph.

Monegraph’s “Bitcoin for digital art” which “which allows artists to digitally sign their work using [a] cryptocurrency,” provoked spirited discussion both in the media and in the FRONT COMPANY office about this technology’s sweeping implications for the future of digital art.

FRONT COMPANY was particularly excited to learn that Monegraph’s team would be joining the art consulting firm's founders Pip Deely and Mark Brown as inaugural members of the NEW INC technology incubator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in September. And, with the FRONT COMPANY-curated exhibition of digital art LikeNewLandscape opening in fall 2014, timing was perfect for a collaboration that would experiment with adapting the Monegraph technology into a physical gallery space.

FRONT COMPANY approached exhibition artist Joe Hamilton to participate in a Monegraph experiment for the show. Joe’s work was selected for two reasons; his work in LikeNewLandscape entitled Regular Division expertly embodied the exhibition’s theme of re-envisioning the history of landscape painting through a modern digital lens- and secondly, in the past Joe had sold video works together with a framed print that had a USB stick containing the editioned artwork embedded in the frame.

   (Joe Hamilton, Hyper Geography, 2011)

Joe’s innovative way of selling a digital work paired with a physical vessel containing the true original artwork file illustrates how artists (and sometimes their galleries) have begun to develop their own solutions for selling digital art. Perhaps a physical Monegraph “token” could provide an artist such as Joe with a useful new tool for sharing and selling their artwork? According to the artist, “I believe in making my digital work freely available to anyone online but I also like to make unique collectible objects as part of these works. The monograph project is interesting to me because I can further connect the physical and online parts of my artworks by embedding the monograph tokens inside my framed pieces.”

The Monegraph token prototype was laser-cut in a three-layered acrylic tablet which displays a “public key” on the front, allowing anyone to lookup the artwork’s ownership record. By peeling back an opaque rear layer the private key is exposed, allowing the holder to claim or transfer ownership of the work, which is recorded in the blockchain via the Monegraph platform.

According to Monegraph, there are pros and cons to each of the various blockchains they have experimented with, and their newest partner, technologist Chris Tse, will be working on rolling out more advanced implementations in the near future.