Decentralized Avant-garde: How Artists Are Building a Cultural Memory Infrastructure Beyond Big Tech

Throughout history, artists have been the catalysts for major shifts in culture. A quick survey of the past 60 years shows how artists have shaped innovation in technology. Artist Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Labs Engineer Billy Kluver’s “Experiments in Art and Technology” in the 1970s anticipated technological innovations like CCTV, chat rooms, and digitized graphics, and squarely established a practice of experimental “R&D” within technology corporations. In the 80s and 90s, artists were among the first to form vibrant networks of exchange on bulletin board systems, the predecessors of the World Wide Web. The artistic avant-garde that emerged in that era, known as “Net Art,” served as the creative model for early internet communities, which evolved into modern social networks. Similarly, generative algorithmic art experiments in artists' studios date back to the 1960s, with pioneers like Vera Molnar and Manfred Mohr anticipating the emergence of generative AI via visual culture.

Standing on the shoulders of these giants, contemporary artists working online have anticipated the seismic shifts in the technology landscape we are experiencing today, post-Web 2.0 and AI. As every aspect of our lives fell under the control of Silicon Valley giants — communication, commerce, travel, even our intimate relationships and identity — artists were showing us another possible world. Their work took shape as online public art, distributed moving images, social media interventions, and virtual worlds that reflect on how decentralization might offer alternative means of shaping digital value, identity, rights, privacy and security, and access to knowledge. As popular culture now becomes aware of the precarity of data and its immense value, we are facing a collective crisis. 

In order to regain control of our digital spaces and identities, we should once again turn to artists to reframe our understanding of the future of the web and find new ways forward.

Embracing Decentralization to Reimagine Cultural Infrastructure 

For the past decade, I have been working with a group of extremely online artists at TRANSFER. Presenting as a contemporary art gallery, but operating more like a co-op, our exhibitions and experiments with decentralized infrastructure have culminated in a new model for stewarding data, outside of the grasp of Big Tech. Our overarching goal is to preserve the cultural heritage of networked moving images, video games and virtual worlds, immersive artworks, and online public art. Given the rapid evolution of the media landscape, institutions have struggled to keep up. Traditional institutional practices designed for scarce physical objects can’t adapt with the volume and rapid evolution of digital media. By embracing decentralized tools, we are shifting power away from centralized institutions into the hands of culture creators.

Starting from a small scale allows us to reimagine how a resilient cultural infrastructure might operate. The current cultural landscape — from the contemporary art market to the music industry — is built on extraction from artists. Instead of looking to agents and institutions, we are establishing our own store of cultural data through archiving and stewardship. This requires not only realigning how we value our own work, share profits, and sustain our practice, but also extends to the actual infrastructure that carries on this legacy.

Getting Hands-On with Data 

In our experimental model, artists become nodes in a network, managing their own archives on Networked Attached Storage (NAS) drives locally in the studio, and leveraging decentralized protocols like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) to create an encrypted peer-to-peer private network for redundantly storing each other’s works. If one node goes down, it can be restored from all the other nodes in the network. Similarly, local-first software for data collaboration allows the artists to move away from third-party-controlled platforms such as AWS, Google, or other corporate servers. Instead, the NAS drives allow the artist studios to host their own copy of the software that runs directly on the node for access to their data, meaning there is no external corporate dependency or risk of censorship. For a third layer of redundancy, “Archival Information Packages” are placed in cold storage via Filecoin storage deals.

This model fosters a direct and personal relationship with data. In our post-Web 2.0 world, individuals have an entirely abstract relationship to data: we all create user accounts, sign terms of use, and give our data over to the convenience of easy-to-use interfaces. Taking back the management and care of this data requires sweeping behavioral change — getting hands-on with infrastructure and dealing with all the messy complexities of migrating off these systems. It means sorting through metadata and design standards that will connect our data together to unlock its value while still retaining ownership. This hands-on approach to stewarding data through time presents a prototype for a new future, where linked open data is interoperable across autonomous data cooperatives, becoming stronger as more creators take back ownership of their digital intellectual property.

Building Direct Relationships with Data

A single artist archiving is a lonely activity, but the value of data is only unlocked when it is amassed into meaningful data stores. This requires a data cooperative business entity to manage and grow value across markets. TRANSFER is exploring the boundary between financial value and cultural value through a data co-op. 

Financial value is straightforward: artists’ works are valued within the contemporary art market, which is one of the few markets to have a system to appraise the value of data via Time-based Media Art. But the knowledge and IP embedded in artists' work represent an enormous amount of cultural value beyond market price — as a historic record of social media’s evolution and the political upheavals they questioned, as context within art history, and as a vision of the future they imagine. 

The data we collectively gather becomes valuable in multiple forms: not only as collectable artworks but also for generative outcomes, like unlocking hidden histories in the anthropological record of the web, or training large language models. On a long enough timescale, the preservation of data by an automated cooperative infrastructure that extends beyond any individual artists’ lifetimes will create an invaluable cultural legacy that stands the test of time alongside traditional institutions.

Operating at the scale of trust, we believe this vision is sustainable. Mass adoption and rapid growth are not our goals; instead, we work slowly, with intention, focused on keeping our technical debt low so that a conservator or researcher 100 years from now might easily reconstruct this cultural record. The power of small-scale innovation is in illustrating new possible futures. Imagine a world where everyone has a direct relationship with their data, understands where it is stored and how it is leveraged, owns it fully and can capitalize on the value it represents. Such a decentralized future is within reach, but it will take all of us to realize it.

Author Bio

Kelani Nichole is a technologist and the founder of TRANSFER, an experimental media art space. She has been exploring virtual worlds and decentralized networks in contemporary art since 2013. Nichole builds alternative technology infrastructures, and designs immersive exhibitions of interactive media art. Currently she is a visiting scholar at NYU Tandon School of Engineering Integrated Design and Media (IDM), where she's developing the TRANSFER Data Trust – a decentralized archive and cultural value exchange network with a mission to cooperatively steward data, ensuring preservation and access across generations.