How drone graffiti and blockchain can work together
There is an exciting potential beyond the buzzwords of the recently launched The Drone Graffiti project. Beside this weeks great story about one of the first participants, Tom Edwards' farting unicorn and it's travels from the original owner, through the hands of Tesla and Elon Musk and into the public domain, I want to share some thoughts on how I see this potential.
Transgressing the ephemeral
A blockchain data structure can carry and share digital objects, like images, code and instructions. Connected to programmable drones worldwide, this technology can, not only be used to paint the same painting multiple places at the same time, but also to paint the same image across time.
This way it has he potential of transgressing the ephemeral nature of street art and preserve it through time. Basically, in a hopefully distance future, once the buildings along New York's Houston Street has long gone, it could still be known, which graffiti appeared when, on what and by whom. If the graffiti was made with blockchain programmed graffiti drones...
Structurally a blockchain allows for changes and additions. For forking the code and creating new generations. The main thing is, that the digital objects of a blockchain carries their own history with them. Most likely the day when all graffiti writers replaces cans with code will never appear. But with its potential for documentation a blockchain should be a pretty straight forward way of documenting graffiti in at least images, time and location, powered by crowdsourcing. And then tagged with the artists names it could make way for a great library of street art and graffiti.
As anyone who have been following this blog knows, the actual painting job, though easy to fantasise about, is actually super hard to effectuate. But while we are quite far from something real, now the dream is up in the air, shared by many. And that, at least, is a great beginning.
