The Data Trust, developed in partnership with Gray Area, Fission, and Arts Equity Group, is a milestone development in TRANSFER Gallery’s decade-long journey. In 2023, TRANSFER announced the pausing of their gallery program to reflect on the distant early warnings from artists, and archive artworks from our 85+ international exhibitions. This shift marks a renewed focus on the speculative design of an automated, non-profit cooperative trust model that integrates the perpetual purpose artist trust with cooperative organizational structures. The experiment is backed by modern technological practices such as encryption (smart contracts) and decentralized storage to facilitate efficient management and accrue value in a new way for experimental media artists.

Key Features

Decentralized Archive: A peer-to-peer network for art conservation, ensuring a robust and distributed approach to preserving artworks.

Artwork Equity Management: Using smart contracts to manage and grow the value of digital assets, offering a new dimension to art asset governance.

Long-term Sustainability: Designed to maintain artworks in perpetuity, ensuring their preservation and accessibility across generations.

Roadmap for 2024

Prototyping: Powered by Fission, prototyping decentralized inventory management and proof-of concept for our decentralized data network.

Artwork Restoration: Reviving the 10 years of exhibitions at TRANSFER to produce condition assessments and conservation treatments for the historic inventory.

Establishment of the Artist-owned Archives: Implementing a decentralized data storage network in the studios of our artists.

Cooperative Trust Business Model Development: Adopting an iterative design and development methodology to develop data structures, workflows, and best practices across the studios. We’re modeling the value exchanges that have been powering TRANSFER cooperatively over the past decade.

Public Engagement: Hosting events and programs in Miami, NYC, and SF to share the development process and engage the community.

Outcomes

– A decentralized network across multiple regions, owned by artists and built for long-term art conservation.

– Efficient resource pooling and time-banking expertise from specialists in various fields.

– Prototype of a toolkit for artists to host, enabling a self-owned system for art management.

Sustainability Roadmap

– Establishing a treasury from the equity of artworks for ongoing maintenance and conservation efforts.

– Expanding the model to benefit a broader community, providing resources for others to establish their own artist-owned trusts.

– Continuous development and enhancement of the trust model, ensuring its relevance and effectiveness in the changing art and technological landscape.