In April 2023, Peti Triot will unveil the first blockchain-based art installation in the renowned DESIEGO art gallery located in the heart of Seoul. The art installation operates as an anonymous messenger and visual retranslator, utilizing the Qamon messenger, which provides individuals with a secure and anonymous platform to express their thoughts and opinions, in real-time both online and offline. We contacted Peti Triot to explore the exciting world of blockchain-based art.
Questions
Why did you choose to create an art installation built around anonymity and social communication, and what message do you hope to convey through anonymity?
Forming social relations means creating a sharing process. A representative resource exchanged through relationships is “personal information.” Personal information, as determined by society, is of course a complete individual that is not created by the person themselves. Sharing personal information inevitably reveals the person’s determined place in society, their life’s arrangement and existence. So any 'I' in such a relationship cannot be free.
"Anonymity" goes beyond just excluding one’s name – it is excluding one's social existence from communication. Blockchain technology makes it possible to communicate absolutely anonymously without exchanging any personal data.
Can you describe the main concept behind the art installation, and how you hope it will impact society?
Intangible social media (hard/software) is frightening. Because it is not perceived, it penetrates our cognitive organs and exerts a tremendous influence that is permanently unrecognizable. Capital or finance is a representative intangible material of modern society. Art itself is intangible equipment, but it is the only power that people can use to defend against and attack society. And art makes intangible social attributes visible. Its representative form is installation art, which visually expresses social power or equipment. So, by making it perceptible and understandable to anyone, it is possible to examine the influence of other social attributes and descriptions related to it.
Peti Triot's installation art gives an image to intangible blockchains, tokens, and messages, and roughly expresses a network of relationships with primary machine properties. In doing so, we become aware that freedom of expression and social autonomy are being persecuted. And we finally realize that in order to overcome this, solidarity between classes, collective action, and considerable social costs are required.
As a conceptual artist, how do you think your art differs from previous works, including your own or works of other artists? How do you see the evolution of art?
Contemporary art is also an activity that is stripped of historicity and arbitrarily (or morally) placed on the horizon. Therefore, contemporary art follows the temporality of the 'present, now' moment, whose effect is volatility rather than novelty or differentiation. So, it is difficult to apply the concept of "evolution" that contains historicity to all art today.
Peti Triot’s work is a reaction against contemporary art, based on today's hottest potato – blockchain, and is a reactionary art practice that tries to contain a new time and history from the moment it became exposed to Everscale. Let us dare to stage a scene in which Descartes rejected all information (knowledge) of past humanity as the beginning of modern philosophy and expressed only "the thinking I" as the beginning of a new history.
In your opinion, are there any potential drawbacks or risks associated with anonymous communication, and how do you aim to address these in your installation?
The danger of communication arises when meaning is excessive, as it expands from two-way to multi-way. Peti Triot's messaging-based blockchain art thoroughly accumulates messages in one direction and creates a new story following Everscale's own algorithm and artistic ex-post fiction. The story is a volatile video that is published only on the Twitter of the account it represents. Later, it is recorded again with perforation (small holes) on the oldest medium – paper. It is Peti Triot’s one-way communication, which is recorded through storytelling and multiple media.
Can the messages left by participants not be traced back to them? Does the level of security impact the overall experience of the installation?
In Hans Haake's installation News, the fax machine just bundles all the messages. The visibility of the convergence is measured through the continuously printed paper. Peti Triot's art also brings all the messages together. The security risk of media convergence may lie in the capacity of the storage medium (blockchain, amount of braille printing paper), and the duplication (copying) and modification (recovery) of the output.
All of Peti Triot's output lies in the unspecified disclosure of outgoing private messages. However, once confidential information is disclosed to a minority, copying, duplicating, modifying, and recovering are no longer useful. Peti Triot’s art is a medium that only collects messages in accordance with the irreversibility of time and reveals them to an indefinite number of people, and it can be asserted that there is no security risk if we cannot time-travel.
How do you think the anonymous messages left by participants in the installation will be perceived and interpreted by the audience? What impact do you expect they will have on the audience?
Normal communication is based on relationships, and at the same time deepens and renews them. Peti Triot’s intention is to dismantle the relationship that maintains social power and continuously reveal the essence of modernity through the messages of completely unique modern people. Intermittent messages on the screen may be interpreted, or there may be users who want to ruminate and understand.
But more than offering such experiences, Peti Triot's art escapes social pressure and relational obsession and focuses on the record of the message itself thrown out into untraceable (relational) media.
These accumulated messages create a new temporality and historicity through artistic fiction. At this stage, Peti Triot’s art is only concerned with the speaker. The first audience for a message uttered by a speaker is that speaker themselves. The first observer of each message recorded in Peti Triot's art is also the person who expressed it: the writer.
Can you share with us the challenges you faced while creating this installation, if there were any, and how you overcame them?
Systems theory states that microorganisms (individuals) are likely to have systems similar to macroorganisms (society) in order to survive. The idea of Peti Triot's art lies in one-way communication, which excludes relationships.
Therefore, when it comes to explaining Peti Triot’s artistic world, we experience the paradox of having to simultaneously convey many ideas, multiple concepts and complicated thoughts unilaterally, with less efficiency and effectiveness. The NFT works prepared for Peti Triot's installation art and braille prints also suffered from these difficulties. So, to solve this problem, the most popular and effective offline exhibition was quickly planned and displayed as one-way communication.
What feedback and output did you get from your audience? Is it something that meets your expectations? Would you like to move on in this direction? Maybe you can share your ideas with us.
I can confirm that many people have been looking for untraceable media. Peti Triot's message box talks about really sensitive topics. After the borderline stage of people leaving meaningless messages temporarily or spreading heartwarming compliments, secret messages on a wide range of topics were shown to have been sent.
Summary
In this interview, we explored the world of blockchain art with the anonymous artist Peti Triot. We’re glad that Everscale is attracting more creatives and inspiring people to interact with Everscale and Qamon technologies. We see that they have the potential for creation of outstanding art that can shift people’s perception of anonymity and communication across the globe.
