openstudio blog

OPENSTUDIO artist Dara Kilicoglu shows his new work “Broken Heart” in several pieces. All the pieces in his gallery together forms a heart shape. When his work is bought by people, his art will never get together but will be distributed in the OPENSTUDIO community. It will probably be a collector’s item soon, may be you can invest in one of the pieces.

Dara told us that he will put up these pieces for sale starting at 9pm GMT+2 Istanbul time on Sunday (Dec 17). Pieces will be sold one after another, so you can only buy one by one. During this sales process he will be tagging his work with the lyrics of the Neil Young classic “Only love can break your heart”.

http://market.openio.org

a stock market in life is a market that uses the value generated by the immaterial labor of visitors at different urban spaces in Oklahoma City, Boston, Munich, and Istanbul. These spaces will be connected with each other via a streaming video server for the duration of the Upgrade! A Day in Life event. For each location, sensors mounted in the entrance register how many people are in the room at any one time and send this information to the Stock Market central server. The number of visitors define the fair value for each place. Each location has 100 shares and the shares gain or lose value depending on the speculations in the market and the number of people in the local rooms.

You can contribute to the value either by just visiting the physical locations or by trading in the online stock market. The market is open now, you can sell and buy shares using the buraks you will have when you register – 25ß.

When you save your piece, go to your repository in your profile. Click on the piece you just saved. In the piece page, see the tools you have below the piece. Click on the “Include in my gallery” check box. Set price from the given menu. “Save Changes”. Now your piece is on the market.

Here is a screencast of how you do it:

I hadn’t caught on to why L. Nichols was commissioning and collecting works related to the theme of “blood.” And then this poster appeared on OS.

Smithsonian Curator Dr. Barbara Bloemink writes in her response to The Coming of AI,

“Of course anyone can mount an exhibition of their own, however the whole point of museums is the implication that there is a form of discrimination among the whole work available, by someone with alot of experience and knowledge of the art.”

The question of a museum versus a gallery. The large versus the small. Is TCM or UAM really larger than L. Nichols Gallery? Unfortunately we’ll never get a chance to visit the museum … as the museums have now left town.

I find this to be an unfortunate development. But an interesting one indeed. I really wish I had the 999 buraks necessary to have funded UAM. I wonder if another museum might try to arise. What would be done differently to get community support? Are museums necessary in OS? Personally, I think so. I’ll save my buraks for that important date.

It was an awkward moment. An artwork offered at -8b (the equivalent of a free 8-burak credit) sat in the open. It was an offering from Armando to Brent due to a mispassed commission. I wondered if it was going to last the night. An hour later it was picked up by a third party.

Coke and fries plus 8 free buraks. My guess is that it was an impulse purchase by mistake on behalf of Stephanie. Opportunism? Or accidental gain? Either way is perfectly fine of course in the world of OPENSTUDIO.

In the real world, similar things happen. I recall getting off a small turboprop in the rain at night and as we were filing off the plane, I saw a 20-dollar (real USD) bill on the ground in a puddle. Everyone was behind me and waiting for me to move ahead out of the rain. For a brief second, I wanted the free money. But then I felt the peer pressure of being pushed along in line overweigh my own opportunistic senses. In the end, I got drier sooner. That’s not a bad thing either.

PLW-er Kate has been talking about this for a while — a world where you could easily “hire a designer.” And now it is real. You go Kate!
At first I was a bit nervous to click on the ‘Hire!’ button … but then I was unafraid. Yes! I wanted to commission Armando along a particular theme. I don’t even know Armando. But I’ve liked what he has shown.

The question of, “How much do I offer Armando?” came up. I thought of Jeevan’s paper on the signaling quality of the burak in OS. Jeevan’s poitn was essentially that “money talks” in a literal sense within the OS world due to the lack of a messaging feature.

Should I commission Armando for just 1b? No. Clearly he was of too high a caliber. I finally settled on 8b. Which is 6.7% of my total savings. If I were more wealthy, 8b may not be such a big deal. Does it change Armando’s passion for the commission by knowing he is working for the rich, or for the poor? What will Armando do? What is he thinking?

PLW‘ers have invented a new AI — the “Angel Investor.” This invention arose from the emergence of two “institutions” and a request for capital.

How much capital should the AI have available to her? What kind of responsibilities should this capital imply? The Thomas Crown Museum and Urban Art Museum have provided the first draft of this pact:

But the question is whether 5K buraks (times two) are available to the AI.

If today’s transaction volume is 17770.47, they probably need to consider that 5K buraks is 1/3 of the total volume. Access to that much capital would cause inflation, as the real Burak pointed out.

Assuming that the AI can negotiate on a reasonable amount with TCM and UAM, at what point do the TCM and UAM become investors themselves? And also, is there room for the smaller galleries to compete in this landscape? When will the TCM or UAM begin to acquire the smaller players? How long will the TCM and UAM be able to maintain their important promise of purchasing “without discrimination of artist or content”? I wonder.

I had observed various options considered by the OPENSTUDIO team for the front page. The current state is more limited than some of the paths considered, and of course is modifiable, but the constraints presented are not all bad.

A variety of patterns for selling artwork seem to have emerged. I have heard the term “flipping” used quite a bit — the idea of buying an artwork, slightly modifying it, and re-selling it at a higher price while it is still fresh. If it works in the real estate market, it should surely work here in OPENSTUDIO.

How an artist moves from poverty to riches is something that we’re curious about here in OPENSTUDIO-land. Kate Hollenbach will be shortly rolling out an alpha version of a commissioning system for OpenStudio members. Not sure where that will lead to — but that’s really our point. Thank goodness for open-ended research!
I once used the unstudied approach of buying artwork high, and then selling everything for 1ßurak. This was my advertising poster:

It wasn’t a terribly good idea of course economics-wise, but it felt good to give things away. OPENSTUDIO artwork can be FREE, which is a nice thing to do. There’s a funny bug in the system where money can be given away as well by setting negative prices to an artwork. Free money + free art. That’s good stuff.

Then I saw this member’s recent artwork today and forgot another asset that hasn’t yet been exploited:

This certainly gave me cause for a smile.

Carl Andre’s drawing Three-Vector Model (1970) clearly describes the possibility of art production. Generally, the “availability of economic resources” vector works through a patronage model, that is, a rich person or family supports artists directly or through an organization like museum or some other foundation. This model evolved from the historical form of funding art (organizations such as church, temple, or palace commissioning artists to make art, decorate temples, etc.). However, today’s resolution of information exchange is so high that I think this “traditional” patronage system does not function well in our contemporary conditions. For example, even though I am a low-income person, I want to be able to support the artists I like from my small budget. I don’t want to donate to the pool of a museum or some other institution in between. Like the way I can email to an artist, I want to support the artist directly. Of course, I can’t own the piece in this way, which is not important since an artwork is not a commodity. If I just can get relative credit by having my name attached to the art piece, I am good. Today, if something like page rank is a value in this society, my name digitally connected to an art piece is enough for reputation, or in other words, a sufficient return on micro-investment in culture.

Possilibity of art production (a replica of Carl Andre’s Three-Vector Model, 1970)

Member Jeevan Kalanithi writes about signaling theory, art, and the Burak.

OPENSTUDIOAsSignalSystem.pdf