Shall We Remix?
A preliminary proposal for remixing Crypto Art across platforms
By Beatriz Helena Ramos
This is the third of a series of articles about crypto art issues.
Read: Don’t Stay In Your Lane
We believe the value proposition of crypto art is not scarcity, but volume and scalability. Art is about process. The more experimentation and collaboration, the more interesting outcomes that emerge. It is always surprising to see our art through someone else’s lens. Art is free to evolve in unexpected ways.
Here is a simple proposal for a permissionless art remixing mechanism that is interoperable and independent from any platform. Artists can opt-in to allow remixes of their work. This mechanism could be a token. If you have it in your wallet a remix button would appear next to your artworks. If you have art in SuperRare or Known Origin, the remix button would appear on those platforms and would allow anyone to remix your work.
Hitting the remix button would open a window to mint the newly transformed artwork. This new minting may happen in SuperRare or Known Origin under a new remix smart contract. Or the minting may be completely independent. For instance, in the case of an artist who is on Mintbase but not on SuperRare, they could still remix work minted on SuperRare but it would open a new window in Mintbase to be minted there.
This new NFT would automatically bring the metadata of the original art into the smart contract, including attribution and ownership. It would also include royalties to the original artist and collector. This mechanism seems technically quite feasible but there is a challenge with the distribution of royalties.
Ethereum limits the number of calculations in a transaction. This means that after a few remixes the transaction won’t be able to handle paying royalties. A possible solution is to have a wrapper contract that attaches royalties to each new NFT iteration. It is also possible for the wrapper contract to mint the new NFT with its own royalties incorporated.
Mol Le-Art is advancing the concept of decaying royalties. I think this makes a lot of sense for remixing art since with each new iteration the art is transformed and becomes a unique artwork. The further the original artwork is from the new one, the less artistic influence it has, so it makes sense that royalties decay accordingly.
Since each iteration is unique, the most valuable one may not be the original, or the second iteration, but the fifth iteration. The incentive is for the art to be remixed by as many people as possible. The more people that remix my work, the more royalties I’ll get. It becomes a permissionless collaboration while always guaranteeing royalties for the value artists create with each other.
Each new art iteration can be sold in the primary market and then resold in the secondary market. Royalties are distributed to all contributors and collectors. It becomes a tree of infinite royalties.
This is just a preliminary idea to start a conversation about ways in which we can legitimize creative collaboration and shared value. I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas to make it happen.
Thanks to John from SuperRare, Matt from Softspot, James from Known Origin, and Stamford from Mol Le-Art for their technical input.
Our new RxC task force dedicated to crypto art starts on Thursday, September 10 at 2 pm EST / 8 pm CEST. We’ll be discussing some of these issues in the context of The Invisible Economy which explores and challenges the belief systems behind these problems. If you are interested in participating, drop us a line here or on Twitter @powerdada.
