The Non-fungible Body? IRL < > AFK

Curator’s Essay, published in The Non-fungible Body? Performance and Digitalisation. (forthcoming, DISTANZ Verlag Berlin February 2023)

IRL < > AFK

The critique of “digital dualism” that theorist Nathan Jurgenson presented in 2011[1] declared the separation between “online selfdom” and “real life” to be an absurdity. As Legacy Russell (the current artistic director of New York’s infamous performance location The Kitchen) has commented, a differentiation between life on- and offline would indeed mean a “now-antiquated falsehood” that implies two selves that “operate in isolation from each other.”[2] In order to deal with this condition, Russell takes up Jurgenson’s suggestion: to use the expression “AFK” (away from keyboard) instead of “IRL” (in real life). Admittedly, the “age of AFK” best describes how our contemporary engagement with technology holds our physical selves in a permanent state of being connected while we seek a meaningful re-rooting of our social roles, habitual patterns, and beliefs in collaborative communities across and beyond our screens.

The performance discourse, however, likes to uphold its practices as a prime example of what Jurgenson and Russell would consider a distinctively IRL activity. Performance is said to focus on the processual, the momentary, the presence of the singular body. As a situational art form, it is known to question the commodity-form of artistic works and the predictability of social settings. Its liveness is (mostly) non-algorithmic and stays away from the loop. The speculative phenomenology commonly attributed to performance has an inevitably auratic appeal. Recent technologies and the changes induced by them however make a historically-situated understanding of performance—one that equates performance with the immediate and ephemeral—fall short of its complex, ever-shifting condition.

Looking to the relatively recent phenomenon of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), this festival project asks about the status of the body as a “non-exchangeable entity” in performance. Speculating on the topic of performance and digitalisation, the title “The Non-fungible Body?” served as its guiding theme. While the body and the digital tools it engages are increasingly difficult to splice, corporeal identities still remain important conduits for a variety of contradictory social and political processes. A Non-fungible Body? suggests a singular body—a body that through its singularity is irreducible, resilient, and complex. Similarly, the Non-fungible Body points to the coming together of artists and audiences as an essential aspect of performance; it focuses our thoughts upon the shared experience of meeting and experiencing; it implies the dazzling conditions of the ephemeral, and of the physicality and the affect that links performance to its subversive, assertively disturbing, and critical potential; it is seemingly an ideal term when it comes to capturing how performance art practices are commonly projected upon. Yet, what happens to those all too well known IRL assumptions in the age of AFK?  

I told you when I came I was a stranger (L.C.)

As aesthetic category, performance refers to artistic practices that are body-based and experimental, that explore artistic and political possibilities and the limits of physical actions and social spaces, and that deal with the body in speculative ways. Resisting ontological determination, its precise quality lies in its strangeness, its foreignness to an idea of “itself.” Any attempt to describe an ontology of performance would, consequently, neither make for a meaningful nor an interesting task.[3] This non-hermeneutic sense of receptivity and relationality allow to experience performance each time anew, as a sensuous live event. Performance, however, also reads as a normative term in a neoliberal economic system—where the term describes the “performance” of a “free market” as if it were personified. Under neoliberalism’s agenda of self-presentation and creativity, the speculative nature of human performance serves precisely as a quality that links to the appropriation of spontaneity, flexibility, and mobility, characteristics which have come to be regarded as core capacities of “performing individuals” in capitalist societies. The “financialisation of daily life” in technology-choreographed societies, as Randy Martin went on to call it,[4] comes along with an economisation of artistic expression. What is to be done against its unruly promise of “presenting presence,” that which drives the inflation of the corporeal condition in our performance-based economies?

AFK Singularities

Proving to how sparkling a work of performance (and dance) theory can be in a world governed by neoliberal rationality, André Lepecki unfolds a counter-analysis around performance’s critical capacities, how to escape from forms, times, and procedures. He grapples with its present-day intersectional terminology, looking to “singularities” as a key term. Following Lepecki’s attentive expertise, it is by moving away from an “aesthetic-semiotic policed consensuality” of art that singularities hold the potential to still articulate and actualise “difference” in a world overdosed on algorithms.

Lepecki’s vision of singularities builds upon the philosophical writings of Georges Didi-Huberman and Gilles Deleuze. As a differential process that opens to unexpected potentials instead of following an economy-backed determinacy, singularity is described by Didi-Huberman as a “complex multiplicity generator of strangeness.”[5] For Deleuze, who expressed himself on plural singularities in the context of his philosophy of immanence, singularities constitute “turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, ‘sensitive’ points.”[6]

This non-compromising proposal of singularities is not analogous with the individual, or a constructed idea of tokenised scarceness where any element can become valuable because a set of characters and metadata make it unique and special. Rather than delineating or defining the selfness of a subject or the status of an object, singularities point to the very condition of our existence. They re-situate the conceptual within the corporeal, as a space of resistance to rationality and sovereign conditions of power. To say it in the most general terms, Lepecki describes singularities as a capacity to unravel an “actualization of a difference,”[7] in the sense that “something happens.”[8] Countering the paradox of an individual and unique subjectivity in our social settings, singularities propose (and perform) processes that access the unknown and
uninsured.

Singularities remain outside the spectrum of the programmable. They cannot be turned into code, neither hash-tagged or “searched for.” In the context of a highly mediated bankrolled world, it is indeed quite tempting to regard performance as that “IRL art form” that gifts us with body-based practices only to push questions of representation into the extreme and question the predictability of situations. “In Linz. My body will be there, only there”: it was with these words that Beatrice Didier announced her participation in the festival. Intending to resist a verbal quantification of (mere) human presence, Didier would share a space with audience members for hours in total silence. Or, as artist Sarah Trouche writes in her contribution to the festival and this book, performance “invites [us] to experience a moment of sharing, in the light, through the prism of choreography, to make us rethink our immediate environment.”

The advent of the Non-fungible

Whereas performance art proper mobilises the concept of singularities to give testimony to shared presence as a socio-political power, as well as to embrace the unpredictability of experience and time-spaces of not knowing, the notion of singularity is mobilised to a very different effect when imported into the language of tech. In particular, the conceptual grounds of NFTs are pegged out by an envisioned singularity. The following section will examine terminological intersections, therefore demanding that we move further into the territory of crypto language as we come to approach proximities and celebrate collisions.

While digital files can infinitely be copied, NFTs were presented as an invention to finally solve the “rightclicksave” paradox: digital certificates of authenticity that are stored immutably on a digital ledger, the blockchain, able to secure authorship and ownership rights. NFTs are code that generates material value through introducing scarcity into the landscapes of digital data. The art market has praised this non-interchangeable asset function as an elementary quality, prompting calls for a paradigm shift in creation, sales, and collection processes.[9] Raising into increased public awareness from 2017 and experiencing a peak during the pandemic in 2020, artists and institutions have since shown much dedication to exploring the technology’s potentials.[10] Many have pointed to the inventive factor that NFT assetisation would finally enable creators to capture revenue from their secondary market, to receive commissions or royalties for each time the asset, which they hold the copyright to, is resold. Yet, unlike its whimsical prognosis of revolution and democratisation in early days, the NFT art market has meanwhile “shown to work in a similar way to the traditional art market.”[11]

In the realm of performance, artists have mostly been tokenising documents from their performances. An image or video file of a performance would be minted as what we could call a performance-based NFT. It is a different case for projects that instead employ the blockchain as artistic tool, and which explore its qualities to initiate, keep proof of, or even disrupt social processes.[12] With her performance “Caught in the Blockchain,” Sara Lanner unravelled such synthetic perspectives during the festival, deconstructing both metaphorical and literal deployments of the blockchain’s performative configuration. The performances of Yiannis Pappas and Jianan Qu took a similar approach, inviting audiences to question the linkages between our physical existence and its meta representations.

                        NFTs and blockchain – Nexus Web 3.0

Most recently, in 2022, NFTs of a video fragment from Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (performed in April)[13] and Marina Abramović’s NFT collection entitled The Hero 25FPS[14] demonstrate the uninterrupted curiosity of genre-pushing artists to interact with the NFT form – and, of course, its market. Both their projects present typical examples of performance-based NFTs that rely on bold visuals and the transferral of performance documents to the blockchain. They create new opportunities to establish an exchange between the immaterial art form of live art and the market, but not only that. Upon the release of her project, Abramović, moreover, expressed a wish “to see what other ideas people have in this Web 3.0 space to help save our planet. People who demonstrate heroic vision […].”[15] In order to approach an understanding of Web 3.0 accelerative enthusiasm, one must indeed look to its underlying promise: to dismantle centralised powers that have historically ordered (art) economies.

The (increasingly) mythological story goes back to 2008 when the concept of blockchain was first introduced with a “Hashcash”: a method to timestamp data-blocks without requiring them to be signed by a trusted party. The following year, blockchain’s founders – a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto – implemented the timestamp-logic as a core component of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.[16]Structurally, a blockchain is a decentralised, distributed digital ledger of records (called “blocks”). It functions to track transaction records across many computers; therefore, no block in the chain can be altered retrospectively without simultaneously altering all subsequent blocks.[17] A decentralised computer network and a distributed time-stamping server manage the blockchain database. Relying on its participants to verify and audit transactions “democratically” – that is, without involving a central clearinghouse or market-maker – the platform was able to settle the transfer of property rights in the underlying digital token (Bitcoin) simply by combining a shared ledger with an incentive system designed to securely maintain it. The validation of newly arriving digital assets to confirm their uniqueness and authenticity excluded the flawed factor of the human. The chain was championed as a fully algorithmic performer: finally, computer code could “be trusted to organise society (money, identity, voting, trading) in the absence of coercive oversight from people.”[18]

“Decentralised” “distributed” “dispersed”
“open source”           “transparent”             “networked”

It should by now have become obvious what the crypto jargon likes: the idea of itself as a global and borderless, transcendental experience. Perpetually selling its salutary potential, it presents its seemingly autonomous data structures, “without any locus of control, rhetorically stripping away localities of power from its imaginary.”[19] In practice, this monumental promise of blockchain tech proves quite a paradox, as nomadic flows of data (and money) in fact materialise through infrastructural passage points that often correlate directly with structures of governance and political interests of control. Or, as Charlotte Kent scribbled, “all of blockchain’s claims for equity and radical equality, if it isn’t designed to be accessible, sustainable, and therefore materially ethical, then it’s more of the same networked obfuscation of the means of production.”[20]

In the art sector in particular, platforms for all sorts of non-fungibles have been established, mirroring the crypto economy’s development from an initially secretive and de-facto decentralised practice to a publicity-friendly marketplace. These digital architectures each purport to maintain the conditions that allow artistic works and collections to be minted, showcased, and sold. Still, digital tokens and blockchain are largely surrounded by a peculiar optimism that has great similarities with the lingering promises of early Web 2.0 technologies. Remember the time when user-generated content, participatory culture, and interoperability were considered as empowerment tools to democratise information production?[21] We witness similar indications of some grand authoritative social change in repetition for Web 3.0, where a vocabulary of decentralisation and democratisation is widely employed to de-emphasise economic determinism, and is again packed into a discursive framing that is particularly affectionate towards the language of performance.

Documentation and Tokenisation

The process of tokenisation brings up the question of how performance “enters” the space of a document, and, concurrently, how performance documents themselves become works of art that are then put on the market as tokens. In a larger sense, considering how the form has evolved, conservation is generally not to be seen as external to performance practices. Processes of curation and documentation co-constitute how a performance work materialises. As a dispositive that realises itself in practices of conception, production, reception, recording, documentation, and mediation, performance then reaches beyond the present moment. Besides the interest of institutional gatekeepers and the market, artist-led spaces for performance such as the archives of Boris Nieslony or Lee Wen testify to makers inherent concern regarding the aftermath of liveness.

Since digital times, the recording of live performance, including performance art, has evolved into mainstream practice. Social media economies have expanded artists’ communication networks and increased their works’ visibility, simultaneously producing new forms of dependencies to communicate artistic practices through the (pseudo) ritualistic need to stage feasts for the algorithm. SoMes age of the “Extreme Self” relies on the re-enforcement of feedback loops to produce not singular but individual normative subjectivities. Among the festival artists, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos’s manifold performative practices especially reflect how corporeal agency is set out to compete against algorithmic multiplicities and their behavioural programming.

Inevitably, Web 2.0 culture has curbed the value of digital content for the purpose of serving its loop. Dedicated to an unruly realisation of a controlled and monetised performativity, it makes even the AFK artist body live under the constant risk of suffering algorithmic death.[22] This performance-economy forms the backdrop to contemporary artistic performance practices and the documents they produce. Most performance documentation happens in the form of still and moving images. Among other strategies employed by artists are instructions and choreographic notations, or performance protocols. As .jpeg and .mp4 records of “events,” performance documents are often condemned to circulate in a sea of creative junk food across the social networks. Now, quite recently, performance-based NFTs have expanded the status of .jpgs or .mp4s. and turned simple files into digital assets.

 // colour-graded performance photographs that simulate arctic light / a written contract on the objects kept for the reactivation of a performance / hyper speed video-reels with performance fragments / tokenised performance / performative acts made for social media / live re-enactments of past works //

Performance artists have for decades relied on selling documentation of their works as an additional way to financially support themselves. None of this is without precedent; the histories of conceptual art, photography, film, and video offer significant models for the circulation of art though documentation and ephemera. Digital tokens further expand the methods of performance acquisition into virtual realms. With their current NFT-backed practices, the works of David Henry Nobody Jr. and Jan Hakon Erichsen exemplarily stage the medial and the performance as co-extensive forms with Instagram currently being their main medium for performance. In their cases, it is through the medial’s practical performativity, and it is only through the medial that performance arrives at its audience-related form. Over time, both artists have gained a substantial community of followers across Web 2.0 spaces, and part of this audience of spectators has also grown into an audience of collectors of their tokenised performance works. Tokenisation has enabled them to digitally authorise their performance works, but without implementing changes in their artistic approach and the works’ aesthetic quality.  

The appeal of digital assets is clearly derived from their potential to validate an artist’s or creator’s “authenticity” (and not authentication), giving each monetary transaction the semblance of someone’s trusted presence, meaning their economic performance. Their artificial ontology rests on a contract-based scarcity to create value. The digital token contractual format, then, presents less an invention in terms of aesthetics than in terms of transaction. In fact, in the post-war decades of the past century, artists have been engaging with very similar ideas related to immaterial value and contract-backed authenticity. Made in the last three years of the artist’s life (1959-1962), Yves Klein’s “Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle” sold nine versions of an immaterial zone, an empty space that existed only in conceptual terms and has been called a prototype for the questions surrounding NFTs (or even Proto-NFT). Klein likewise “kept a ledger recording all sales and resales of these empty zones”, his receipt-based work could be considered “an analogue precursor to today's modern blockchain technology”.[23]

In “NFT culture,” authenticity equals ownership and provenance status through the sequence of its transfers. Before and besides NFTs, however, in the case of a performance work being acquired by a museum or a private collector, it would usually be passed along with acquisition documents, including a certificate of authenticity.[24] In a contemporary context, a minted performance document is therefore not awarded authenticity through a digital token, at least not more than it might be through a signed score on a piece of paper.

The Non-fungible Body? Localising technology with |in| the body

With our festival’s programme, we have tried to conceive a self-reflexive and historically conscious invitation to bring performance into the realm of institutional space, hoping to experience its skilled and unforeseeable unfolding in a shared setting of artists and audiences. Contrasting the art of performance with contemporary crypto jargon signalled trouble,[25] it should come as no surprise that our title ends with a question-mark. What emerges when you bring together the live and its mediation, art that acts “directly upon the nervous system,”[26] and a format that domesticates movement into editions and wallets?

The writings of Lepecki and Russell exemplify how the calibrated dimensions of digitalisation and the performance-economy have shifted the condition of performance as an art form. Neoliberalism’s permeation of subjectivity and its emphasis on the performance of a self-empowered subjectivity form the background for discussing performance-related questions of the singular and “non-fungible” artist body. To realise its full AFKculture presence and reach “beyond the moment,” performance – like any other art form in times of permanent record-keeping – must likewise rely on digital tools for its documentation and dissemination. Yet for performance, the notion of “singularities” (as Lepecki understands them) and that of a crypto-inflated “non-fungibility” stand in stark contrast.

Blockchain technology does not only promise to store our data forever; it also promises to establish a certified, guaranteed, and binding social relation between those who interact through it. The resulting interactions are articulated through performance terminology; they are claimed “authentic” and are considered transparent and publicly traceable. NFTs, as an essentially contract-based form, therefore feed assumptions that they hold some kind of objective truth. With digital tokens, we actually witness the introduction of a mechanism that signals itself as a mathematical truth-machine against which the physical artist-body must stand as a currency agnostic. In view of its highly mediated surroundings, Catherine Wood arrives at the conclusion that performance’s liveness “injects a degree of unruly evasiveness that possibly allows for more accurate representation of the conditions of life than something that is fixed and can be possessed in its entirety.”[27] No method of capture will retain full capacity of the singular act of performance. No solidification will allow for keeping an experience and the relation between one body and another. It goes without saying that a performance is a performance and a book about a performance is a book.[28]

Whilst the internet, as Legacy Russell writes, was “not built as a material for our bodies,”[29] its vast and hegemonial infrastructure provides us with codes and conditions that need to be dealt with. Indeed, there is still much to define in this new space between art and blockchain, and to do so without confining practices to unalterable terms, categories, and legacies. Performance-based forms of engagement allow for socio-technical approaches, which, as we say along with Rebecca Schneider, “resituate[s] the site of any knowing of history as body-to-body transmission.”[30] Exploring the potentials and limitations of performance technology require its adoption – an engagement that will consequently produce knowledge on its systematics and social implications. These are the paths where singularities may oscillate. In even considering such proposal, like Lepecki’s project, The Non-fungible Body? is a (tough) love-letter to performance, one that (albeit written from an AFK perspective) yet forms an attempt to express and critique its entangling forces.

Notes

[1] See Nathan Jurgenson, “Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity” (2011), https://nathanjurgenson.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/digital-dualism-and-the-fallacy-of-web-objectivity/.

[2] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (London: Verso, 2020), p. 30.

[3] See Jonah Westerman, “Introduction: Practical History, How we do things with performance,” in Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices, ed. by G. Giannachi and J. Westerman (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 1.

[4] See Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).

[5] Georges Didi-Huberman, Survivance des lucioles (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), p. 81.

[6] Giles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: European perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 52.

[7] André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 7.

[8] Ibid., 22.

[9] For more background to NFTs in the art context, see Alfred Weidinger (ed.), Proof of Art: A Short History of NFTs from the Beginning of Digital Art to the Metaverse (Berlin: Distanz, 2020); Anika Meier, “Wallet Art. Der perfekte Loop,” Kunstforum International 278: pp. 328-33; Kolja Reichert, Kryptokunst: NFTs und digitales Eigentum (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2021); and various volumes of the online magazine Rightclicksave.

[10] Reflecting upon the phenomenon and situating it within the history of digital and media art, the OÖLKG was the world’s first museum to present an exhibition on the very topic at the Francisco Carolinum Linz in June 2021. See OÖ Kultur, Exhibition – Proof of Art: A Short History of NFTs from the Beginning of Digital Art to the Metaverse, 11.06.2021 - 12.10.2021, https://www.ooekultur.at/exhibition-detail/proof-of-art-eine-kurze-geschickte-der-nfts-von-den-anfaengen-der-digitalen-kunst-bis-zum-metaverse-21be2?expired.

[11] Anika Meier, “THE NEW ONLINE ART WORLD IN THE POST-NFT ERA,” Art Düsseldorf (2022), https://www.art-dus.de/nft-guest-essay/.

[12] Artists who work conceptually – meaning in a performative but not live context – with blockchain technology and engage with the topic of the body include Kevin Abosch, Cassils, Rhea Myers, ‍Rachel Rossin, and White Male Artist among others.

[13] See Thomas Oberender,“Aus Theater wird Krypto-Kunst. NFT zu ‘Einstein on the Beach’.” FAZ (28 April 2022), https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buehne-und-konzert/nft-wie-eine-theaterszene-zu-krypto-kunst-wird-17984917.html.

[14] Arriving to the NFT space at a comparatively late point, the artist comments that she felt the need to await a feeling of conceptual conviction for her first engagement with the “performance of blockchain.” Abramović’s The Hero 25FPS NFT collection launched on 25 July 2022. See “Marina Abramović Charges into the Metaverse,” interviewed by Angel Lambo, Frieze (25 July 2022), https://www.frieze.com/article/marina-abramovic-hero-nft-interview-2022.

[15] Quoted from Jessica Klingelfuß, “Marina Abramović’s debut NFT drop celebrates heroes of the Web3 era.” Wallpaper Magazine (22 July 2022), https://www.wallpaper.com/art/marina-abramovic-nft-web3.

[16] See Jeremy Clark, “Foreword. The Long Road to Bitcoin.” In Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction, by Arvind Narayanan, et. al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

[17] See Christian Catalini and Joshua S. Gans, “Some Simple Economics of the Blockchain,” Rotman School of Management Working Paper No. 2874598, MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 5191-16 (20 April 2019), http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2874598.

[18] Jack Parkin, Money Code Space: Hidden Power in Bitcoin, Blockchain and Decentralisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) p. 3

[19] Ibid., 36.

[20] Charlotte Kent, “In Search of an Aesthetics of Smart Contracts,” RightClickSave (28 March 2022), https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/in-search-of-an-aesthetics-of-smart-contracts.

[21] See Jesse Damiani, “White Male Artist wants to know if you’ll buy his $HT NFTs,” Forbes (19 July 2021),https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2021/07/19/white-male-artist-wants-to-know-if-youll-buy-his-ht-nfts/?sh=4110c5e238eb.

[22] See The Extreme Self: Age of You, ed. by Shumon Basar, et al. (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2021).

[23] Khabir Jhala, “The original NFT? Sotheby's to offer a receipt for an invisible work by Yves Klein for €500,000,“ The Art Newspaper(22 March 2022), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/03/22/sothebys-selling-receipt-invisible-yves-klein-work-paris.

[24] Among notable projects that focus on the potential of positioning performance in the art market has been A Performance Affair at Brussels Gallery Weekend in 2018 and 2019, as well as the ongoing Performance Exchange by Rose Lejeune in London.

[25] … or at least readiness for heated debate.

[26] Giles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (Cambridge: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2004), p. 36.

[27] Catherine Wood, Performance in Contemporary Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2018), p. 227.

[28] … even if that book might feature compositional strategies that play out writing about performance as itself a performative act.

[29] Russell, Glitch Feminism, p. 134.

[30] Rebecca Schneider, “Performance Remains” in Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History, ed. by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), p. 145.

[31] Siehe Nathan Jurgenson, „Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity“ (2011), https://nathanjurgenson.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/digital-dualism-and-the-fallacy-of-web-objectivity/.

[32] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (London: Verso, 2020), S. 30.

[33] Siehe Jonah Westerman, „Introduction: Practical History, How we do things with performance,“ in Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices, hg. v. G. Giannachi und J. Westerman (London: Routledge, 2018), S. 1.

[34] Siehe Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).

[35] Georges Didi-Huberman, Survivance des lucioles (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), S. 81.

[36] Giles Deleuze, Logik des Sinns. Aesthetica (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), S. 76.

[37] André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2016), S. 7.

[38] Ibid., 22.

[39] Für weitere Hintergrundinformationen zu NFTs im Kunstkontext siehe Alfred Weidinger (Hg.), Proof of Art: A Short History of NFTs from the Beginning of Digital Art to the Metaverse (Berlin: Distanz, 2020); Anika Meier, „Wallet Art. Der perfekte Loop,“ Kunstforum International 278: S. 328-33; Kolja Reichert, Kryptokunst: NFTs und digitales Eigentum (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2021); und verschiedene Ausgaben des Online-Magazins Rightclicksave.

[40] Eine Ausstellung im Francisco Carolinum Linz im Juni 2021 hat dieses Phänomen beleuchtet und in der Geschichte der Digital- und Medienkunst verortet – das OÖLKG hat damit als erstes Museum weltweit eine Ausstellung zu diesem Thema gezeigt. Siehe OÖ Kultur, Ausstellung – Proof of Art: Eine kurze Geschichte der NFTs, von den Anfängen der digitalen Kunst bis zum Metaverse, 11.06.2021–12.10.2021, https://www.ooekultur.at/exhibition-detail/proof-of-art-eine-kurze-geschickte-der-nfts-von-den-anfaengen-der-digitalen-kunst-bis-zum-metaverse-21be2?expired.

[41] Anika Meier, „THE NEW ONLINE ART WORLD IN THE POST-NFT ERA,“ Art Düsseldorf (2022), https://www.art-dus.de/nft-guest-essay/.

[42] Zu den Künstler:innen, die konzeptionell – d.h. in einem performativen, aber nicht einem Live-Kontext – mit Blockchain-Technologie arbeiten und sich mit dem Thema Körper auseinandersetzen, gehören u.a. Kevin Abosch, Cassils, Rhea Myers, Rachel Rossin und White Male Artist.

[43] Siehe Thomas Oberender, „Aus Theater wird Krypto-Kunst. NFT zu ,Einstein on the Beach’“. FAZ (28. April 2022), https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buehne-und-konzert/nft-wie-eine-theaterszene-zu-krypto-kunst-wird-17984917.html.

[44] Die Künstlerin, die vergleichsweise spät Zugang zu NFT-Space fand, sagte, dass sie für ihre erste Beschäftigung mit der „Performance der Blockchain“ ein Gefühl der konzeptionellen Überzeugung abwarten musste. Abramovićs The Hero 25FPS NFT-Sammlung wurde am 25. Juli 2022 gestartet. Siehe „Marina Abramović Charges into the Metaverse,“ Interview mit Angel Lambo, Frieze(25. Juli 2022), https://www.frieze.com/article/marina-abramovic-hero-nft-interview-2022.

[45] Zitiert aus: Jessica Klingelfuß, „Marina Abramović’s debut NFT drop celebrates heroes of the Web3 era.“ Wallpaper Magazine (22. Juli 2022), https://www.wallpaper.com/art/marina-abramovic-nft-web3.

[46] Siehe Jeremy Clark, „Foreword. The Long Road to Bitcoin.“ In Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction, by Arvind Narayanan, et. al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

[47] Siehe Christian Catalini und Joshua S. Gans, „Some Simple Economics of the Blockchain,“ Rotman School of Management Working Paper Nr. 2874598, MIT Sloan Research Paper Nr. 5191-16 (20. April 2019), http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2874598.

[48] Jack Parkin, Money Code Space: Hidden Power in Bitcoin, Blockchain and Decentralisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) S. 3

[49] Ibid., S. 36.

[50] Charlotte Kent, „In Search of an Aesthetics of Smart Contracts,“ RightClickSave (28. März 2022), https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/in-search-of-an-aesthetics-of-smart-contracts.

[51] Siehe Jesse Damiani, „White Male Artist wants to know if you’ll buy his $HT NFTs,“ Forbes (19. Juli 2021),https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2021/07/19/white-male-artist-wants-to-know-if-youll-buy-his-ht-nfts/?sh=4110c5e238eb.

[52] Siehe The Extreme Self: Age of You, hg. v. Shumon Basar, et al. (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2021).

[53] Khabir Jhala, „The original NFT? Sotheby's to offer a receipt for an invisible work by Yves Klein for €500,000,“ The Art Newspaper(22. März 2022), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/03/22/sothebys-selling-receipt-invisible-yves-klein-work-paris.

[54] Zu den herausragenden Projekten, die sich mit dem Potenzial der Positionierung von Performance auf dem Kunstmarkt befassen, gehört A Performance Affair beim Brussels Gallery Weekend 2018 und 2019 sowie das immer noch laufende Performance Exchangevon Rose Lejeune in London.

[55] …oder zumindest die Bereitschaft zu hitzigen Debatten.

[56] Giles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (Cambridge: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2004), S. 36.

[57] Catherine Wood, Performance in Contemporary Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2018), S. 227.

[58] … selbst wenn dieses Buch kompositorische Strategien aufweist, die das Schreiben darüber selbst als performativen Akt darstellen.

[59] Russell, Glitch Feminism, S. 134.

[60] Rebecca Schneider, „Performance Remains“ in Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History, hg. v. Amelia Jones uand Adrian Heathfield (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), S. 145.