2005 – 2019
the gift
The Work of Art in the Age of loss-free Mechanical Reproduction — digital collages, free originals, and a price that always doubles.
2005 – 2019
The Work of Art in the Age of loss-free Mechanical Reproduction — digital collages, free originals, and a price that always doubles.
the rules
rule #1
the original image is free to download
rule #2
the price of a unique piece is always doubled
rule #3
a buyer gets the money back when the next unique piece is sold
rule #4
the last buyer gets the final tableau
concept
"The unique value of the 'authentic' work of art has its
basis in ritual."
— Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction
"The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it
becomes images."
— Guy Debord, The Society of the
Spectacle, 1967
THE GIFT is a long-term project about original, copy and value in the digital sphere. Its digital collages — remixes built from material found on the net — were published online under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA), each on its own domain, each with the original file free to download. The screen is the canvas; the countless small images collected on the net are the paint.
Where painting derives value from scarcity, digital work can be reproduced without loss — as often as there are screens in the world. THE GIFT abandons artificial scarcity and replaces it with a rule set: the original is a gift, but whoever insists on owning a unique piece enters an art game. The price of every unique piece doubles with each sale. A buyer gets their money back when the next piece is sold — and becomes co-author, since a piece only turns unique once the buyer co-determines and co-signs it. Openness and speculation, generosity and market logic, run in the same system.
The cycle began in 2005 with the first collage, massivestructuraloverload.de; the rule set went online as sellingthe.net in 2006. From there the work travelled through a long series of physical "configurations", and was put to its final market test in 2019 — at a gallery and at an art fair.
"Sellingthe.net turned the endless reproducibility of the digital into the artwork itself." — after Ilona Koglin, PAGE magazine 09/2008
the collages
"The basis of my images — like the tools and the result —
is digital. The monitor is my canvas; the images I use are paint
and brush. These pictures are by nature bound to no medium: every
copy is an original, and every original is also a copy. They can
be reproduced losslessly, as often as you like, and are subject
to no technical limits of edition. They are freely available on
the net, released under a Creative Commons license 3.0 for any
use."
— from sellingthe.net, 2006
Every collage lives on its own domain — its digital canvas — and every original is still free to download. Rule #1 never expired.
the configurations
Between 2006 and 2019 the collages appeared in physical space as numbered "configurations" — prints, screens, sculptures, downloads, projections. Each configuration answers the same question differently: how do you exhibit a work whose original lives on the net?
die grosse kunstausstellung
khm rundgang / art2.0
blaues haus / keenag gallery
my multiple hybridspaces
feldstärke
eexistence gallery
b.l.a.s.t
moff magazin
abteilung für alles andere
km.temporaer
the pirate bay
sellingthe.net, the website
the market test & echoes
2019 · the market test
On 1 February 2019 the rule set finally met the actual art market: Selling the new project, a metamodern ritual and art game about selling, buying, owning, creating and speculating with art — staged at Galerie Falko Alexander, Cologne, as part of the group show ALL IN/6 with Arno Beck, Matthias Danberg, Anna Nero, Michael Reisch and Roland Schappert.
Sixteen identical hand-signed prints of the_new_project (thenewproject.de). Image no. 1 costs 2 €. The price always doubles. You get your money back if someone buys the next piece. Together — and with the power of the market — a new and unique piece is created. Or you just download it. #letsmakemoneynotart
installation views, Galerie Falko Alexander — an artgame as a capitalistic ritual: sold pieces leave their frames; each empty frame carries its doubled value (2 … 256), the remaining identical collages wait below.
Half a year later the mechanism went to the fair: at art berlin 2019 (12–15 september) the doubling sequence of the february happening hung in the booth of Galerie Falko Alexander as a wall work — and the game ran again, this time with dystopia_deathstar as the work on sale.
legacy
Free original, priced edition, transparent rules, the buyer as co-author — the mechanics THE GIFT tested between 2004 and 2019 are the mechanics the blockchain later made infrastructure. Since 2021 this practice continues on-chain: the drops.
press & mentions
The collages have been featured and discussed at FAZ, PAGE, designboom, Nerdcore, Gulli, Trendhunter, Lost At E Minor, Empty Kingdom, C-Heads, uFunk, artschoolvets, Bloodyloud, Picame, Diskursdisko and others.
projects — floriankuhlmann.com
