| date | website |
|---|---|
| 2021 | https://terra0.org |
| collaborators | code | Paul Kolling, Max Hampshire | https://github.com/terra0project/ |
We deeply favor a materialist reading of tokens as always entangled with their site and event of production. In earlier experiments with the medium of unique non-fungible tokens we explicitly bound tokens to manual and artistic work as additions to the already existing computational labour involved in the Proof of Work system in which they were embedded. The relation between existing token economies and the related externalities was already present in Flowertokens and the original terra0 contracts, and in Two Degrees we continue the line of thought with an NFT consisting of image data generated in the summer of 2019 with the help of a LiDAR scanner operating in a forest in southern Germany. The resulting point cloud shows 3-dimensional space with its machine-read depth planes.
Two Degrees addresses the relationship between global warming and the critical survival of the imaged (eco)systems in an obvious manner: just as the real forest will disappear as soon as a certain threshold in global climate change is passed, so will the NFT. Via an oracle on the Ethereum blockchain, the annual average temperature increase will be monitored (using NASA’s annual report as a data source), and once it rises above a certain threshold, the NFT token can be ‘burned’, or removed from circulation by anyone. The work will thus exist only as long as the global average temperature stays below the tipping point.
Through this simple condition, the work will exist only as long as the global average temperature stays below the two degree celsius ‘tipping point’; the NFT and the spatial record of the forest will disappear when the real forest disappears. The work also addresses the speculation of the art world in the context of an increasingly rapidly changing world and deteriorating environmental conditions, and thus can be seen as a blueprint for how artists can use their agency to gain political influence through the creation of potential assets and speculative objects. Although this is to be understood as a metaphor in a single case, it is at the same time a proposition for mechanisms to incentivize owners to act consciously in the future.
