Re: <nettime> Can an on-chain record become artistic material?

[Paul van der Walt via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hi,

I risk excoriation for being "inculte" as the French would say, but i feel like this is a pretty artificial / self-imposed "tension" being drummed up for artistic merit. If we purposely encode things in one way, then choose to shift around our frame of reference... I don't know.

The question seems to boil down to "can we encode an Earth-wide instant", and clearly we can with a UTC timestamp (we might store it as int64 nanoseconds since the Unix epoch, as widely-accepted example).  There's a difficulty with leap seconds but i suspect that's not what they're worried about here.

..or does this make me a humourless engineer?  It can (and clearly does) provoke thought, so on that level i guess it has "artiness" (caveat emptor / IMHO / etc.).  Curious to hear what the more credentialled among us might say.

Cheers,
A sceptical reader

On Fri, Oct 16, 2026, at 01:14, Robert Cline via nettime-l wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'd be interested in hearing some critical perspectives on Catch-22, an 
> on-chain conceptual artwork built around 22/2/22.
>
> Its Ethereum deployment has a single immutable timestamp, yet the same 
> instant was February 22 in Los Angeles and February 23 in New York.
>
> The work interprets this tension between technical consensus and the 
> human conventions through which time becomes meaningful.
>
> What I find interesting is how something as seemingly objective as a 
> blockchain timestamp can acquire layers of meaning beyond its technical 
> function when viewed through different frames of reference.
>
> I'm curious whether this holds up as a meaningful piece of conceptual 
> art, and to what extent the blockchain itself contributes something 
> artistically essential that a conventional timestamp wouldn't.
>
> I'd be interested in both skeptical and sympathetic readings.
>
> Best,
> Robert Cline
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