Decentralized Autonomous Art (DAA)

Abstract / Overview

Decentralized Autonomous Art (DAA) is a project that relocates the conditions of artistic existence away from a fixed center such as the artist, artwork, viewer, or institution, distributing them across multiple agents, places, information, actions, and temporal processes. Autonomy here does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. It refers to a condition in which a work can continue to develop through changing relations without being reduced to a single governing center.

Full Text

Decentralized Autonomous Art, or DAA, is a project originating in a declaration presented on December 20, 2022. Its central question concerns where the conditions and authority that constitute an artwork are located, and whether art can continue to exist without relying on one fixed center.
Modern artistic systems often assign distinct roles to artist, artwork, viewer, museum, criticism, market, and education. Although these positions may appear separate, authority concerning artistic existence and value can become concentrated in particular people, objects, or institutions.
DAA questions this concentration. A work is not completed solely through the act of a single artist. Viewing, use, sharing, movement, documentation, reinterpretation, and changes in its environment can all participate in its continued formation. By distributing the conditions of artistic existence across multiple relations, a work remains capable of transformation in new situations.
Autonomy in DAA does not mean that an artwork becomes isolated from people or complete in itself. It describes a condition in which no single agent or institution fully controls the work. The work continues through its openness to multiple relations. Autonomy is therefore sustained through relational openness rather than isolation.
Decentralization also refers to more than a technical network model. What matters is that existence, meaning, value, and decision are not concentrated in one position. Artist, viewer, place, information, time, and institution can each participate in the generation of the work while retaining their different positions.
DAA can also be understood as a reconfiguration of questions already present in earlier practices such as Web Installation, Smart Art, Quantum Theory Art, and Derivative Art. Problems of interface, relation, observation, and derivation are reconsidered here through decentralization and autonomy.
From the later perspective of Generative Studies, DAA is an important practice for understanding existence as something generated through multiple possibilities of connection rather than explained from a fixed center. The absence of a single center does not imply the absence of order. It opens a condition in which new relations and new forms of workhood can continue to emerge.

Keywords

Decentralized Autonomous Art; DAA; decentralization; autonomy; distributed relations; workhood; interface; self-externalization; generation; co-being