Son[i]a #363 Martin Zeilinger

Ever since Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin White Paper in 2008, the blockchain has sparked vigorous public debate and managed to carve out a place in the collective unconscious in a wide variety of contexts beyond the speculative bubbles of cryptocurrency. The promise of disruption and radically different new opportunities connected to blockchain-related technologies has also been amongst the main talking points in countless digital art projects – even if that promise has often not lived up to the hype. Researcher Martin Zeilinger’s work stems from a deep fascination with the grey area where these protocols and art intersect. Far from the naive triumphalism of Web3 evangelists, his approach focuses on the artists and projects that actually try to integrate some of the salient features and affordances of distributed, trustless ledgers into their practice.

In this podcast, we talk to Martin Zeilinger about the poetic and political potential of the blockchain, while at the same time tracing a somewhat fuzzy timeline that connects 1960s conceptual art to smart contracts, decentralised autonomous organisations and a host of consensus mechanisms.