Visit the Modulation Studies Explorer to view and listen to the current state of the piece at modulations.material.work

Art is a way for us to explore and communicate shared meaning. The artist’s act of declaring something to be art is firmly established by Duchamp, but part of what gives art gravity is the impression of an artist’s commitment to a gesture or statement. I can stand on a street corner and declare: “Me standing on this corner is an artwork” but few will find it impactful because it doesn’t require much commitment. This dynamic is accelerated by the ability to generate synthetic images, audio and text using generative AI models. In the past a work’s level of detail or the volume of the work could be used as a measure of effort, but this link between effort and detail has been broken. As humans, we know what it means through experience to make an effort, to commit to something, and so we viscerally feel the impact of work which expresses commitment in this way. A work which embodies effort through commitment has a greater potential to make us pause and consider, to draw us into a moment of contemplation. An artist can use this expression of effort, this “proof of work”, to make a statement about their commitment to a gesture.

When 0xfff approached us in the summer of 2024 to be part of the World Computer Sculpture Garden exhibition, Neokry and I got together in Berlin to consider what we might create. We had been inspired by some of the discussions in the Mathcastles community and put forward by 113 about art-making in the “modular era” of crypto. The phrase “artchains” was starting to be used, and we wondered if we might have something to say to it. This led to our piece Modulation Studies.

Modulation Studies is a system in which an artist (in this case myself) creates daily generative musical studies by editing the configuration of a text-controlled synthesizer. In addition to the musical edits, I write a short text entry accompanying each study. The complete, character by character edit history of changes is recorded as they are typed in. Each session is recorded and verified by a zero knowledge rollup style artchain built for the piece. Visitors to the accompanying website can listen to the resulting music and replay the editing history of each session to watch and listen as I compose, struggle, make mistakes and finally commit each entry to the artchain.

There are a few new ideas here. Let’s start with the idea of an “artchain”. Artchains don’t have a canonical definition and this essay isn’t an attempt to offer one, but we’ll share how we’re thinking about the concept. First, some basic terms. One of the key approaches for scaling the Ethereum blockchain and making it more capable is an approach called “rollups”. Because making transactions on Ethereum can be very slow and expensive, rollups do computation off of the main chain and then “roll up” the result so that it can be stored on Ethereum. These computations are usually records of financial transactions, but they don’t need to be. Technically we could call what we’ve built a “rollup” but we use the term artchain to mean “a rollup that computes changes in an art system, not financial transactions”.

For Modulation Studies we built a “ZK rollup style artchain”. ZK rollup here means that it uses zero-knowledge proofs to prove that the transactions we claim occurred on the artchain actually did. Zero knowledge proofs can be tricky to understand, but the key idea is that they use cryptography to verify that a computation was done on specific data without needing to re-run the full computation. This means they can be used to prove the execution and state of our artchain without having to perform this expensive calculation on Ethereum mainnet. This allows us to do complex operations we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do while still maintaining cryptographic verifiability. This is important for Modulation Studies because not only are we storing the text created each day, but also the entire character by character edit history so that it can be replayed.

This artchain idea was the starting point for the piece, but without some meaningful artistic use for this technology we would have a tech demo. The first idea was that artchains would be useful for proof that a given artist had really created a piece (by virtue of signing with their wallet address). We realized that by having an artist connect their wallet to the artchain and create work inside it we could create a recording of the creation process. This was inspired tangentially by the recent trend we see of visual artists showing time lapse recordings of them producing images, to prove that the work wasn’t created by image generation models.

This idea of documenting a process over time in a verifiable way led us to consider the themes of time as an art material and also documentation, and the way these themes were explored by the conceptual artists of the 1960s and 70s. We were inspired by durational artists like Tehching Hsieh with his “1 Year Performances” and On Kawara with his date paintings and lists. Both artists infused simple gestures with weight and meaning through commitment, repetition and expression of effort. In both cases, the artists produced objects as proof that the process occurred, whether a date painting in the case of Kawara or a 16mm still frame of Hsieh as he punched a time clock every hour for a year.

These conceptual, durational performance works have always embodied a degree of tension between art about pure ideas, processes or actions and the need to interface with the art system via legible objects. This led artists to the use of photography, film, text or the creation of objects as documentation of the process. With the affordances of artchains, we recognized an opportunity to explore this theme through a new lens, and create a piece in which process and documentation are tightly bound together with cryptography.

The choice to use generative music creation as the performance focus came later in the piece. Early on we produced a version which allowed the recording of other types of media, and considered having other artists participate in the process. But as the idea of a durational, longer term performance came into focus we realized it would need to be one of us recording entries into the system. Generative music has long been a passion of mine, including in my career as an electronic musician under the name Matt Shadetek, working with tools like Max/MSP, Reaktor or hardware modular synthesizers. Importantly, the use of the term generative here refers to systems of rules that include some degree of randomness, as opposed to in the sense of generative AI models. Generative music is also very well suited to the theme of artworks that are live running programs, one we’re interested in as a studio and explore in our piece Cycles. We wanted to use our system to produce not just static outputs like single pieces of music, but to author a series of smaller systems themselves. To this end, I programmed a synthesizer framework in JavaScript, patterned after modular synthesizers, that allows me to make music by connecting various components where instead of using patch cords and electricity I’m editing a text file to define behavior.

Technology is dissolving our assumptions about what is possible and reshaping our society. The proliferation of synthetic media generated by AI and the way it transforms our perception of art dovetails with the fact that as the digital world becomes more and more important, our reality feels increasingly overwhelmed by psyops, LLM bot swarms, simulacra, and weaponized narratives. It becomes increasingly difficult to be convinced that we are perceiving a shared, consensus reality. Cryptographic proof then becomes more important than ever as an island of the real, allowing us to create shared truth and build consensus. Combining these two approaches, of expressing commitment to an idea by performing effortful actions over time and using cryptography to prove and verify that effort is an attempt to make a piece which responds to these unique contemporary conditions.