Lost Provenance & Potential.

We create, from half told stories in our head, to the seeds of masterpieces sketched in margins, we create.

It seems to be an innate drive, an overflow of thought or feeling, a refracted echoed response of our life’s experience, an explanation for the dreadful and divine. These creations push us forward even as they preserve the moment we step in to during their creation.

Within monumental works such as the Book of Kells and the Bayeux Tapestry we created out of dedication, duty, or by the demand of something larger than ourselves. Throughout history the self has often been sacrificed at the foot of creation or lost in the mix of collaboration. In fact the unsigned works outnumber the signed by an order of magnitude.

It’s not that this lost authorship detracts from many of these works, nor is it from some place of privileged indignation that I think the loss of this provenance matters. It is simply the loss of potential understanding I find some lament in.

To know what the weavers thought of the Bayeux tapestry as they worked on it, how keenly aware one was of the propagandised elements within it, did it add to their lives, was it mere duty, a job? Were they Nuns as often thought? Was it something that unified a village? The impact and intent of those involved on an individual level expands our understanding of historic culture. It expands an understanding of us.

Without provenance we lose the potential for this understanding, we are forced to guess, to infer. And the smaller the artwork, the more nice the artist, the less we can infer or guess at. Yet it is within these niches that we perhaps have the greatest need for an understanding of authorship.

The marginalised are at many time the least researched subsets of our societies. By elevating the individual alongside the artwork we preserve a fuller picture of the world around us. We flesh out and are able to think more of the missed out and marginalised.

The power that cryptographic art provenance gives to help change this in the future is fundamentally positive. By linking your curation, your creation, and your exploration of digital goods in one place, not only is the initial provenance preserved, but a fuller picture of the artist along with it.