1/ As follow-up to my @hicetnunc2000 revenue-split feature request: It was really great to see - at least in principle - many people are agreeing there's a need AND will/desire to support such a feature. I will try to explain my own thoughts/perspective in some more detail...
2/ For me this isn't primarily about tool makers getting a piece of the cake. It's about at least _attempting_ to provide some form of _economic feedback loop_, an incentive built into the platform(s)...
3/ ...a mechanism to provide attribution, recognition & sustainability for those groups of people who ensure that much (not ALL!) of the digital art on offer on various (not only NFT) platforms could actually be created by their respective artists in the first place!
4/ For artists using open source tools, where would their profits be w/o these free tools? Would many even be able to afford the commercial alts (if they even exist) in the 1st place? Would they have the actual skills/time/muse to create their art (incl. tooling) from scratch?
5/ For those who are now attempting to say: Which tools? Where to draw the line? Is an illustrator supposedly splitting revenues w/ their pencil maker or even w/ the logger of the tree the pencil was made from? Well, they already are doing so, if they paid for it... 😘
6/ As a photographer, of course no credits are due to the maker of the camera. But you too pay for that privilege via the purchase of your equipment. Likewise this can be an investment: Citing @Hasselblad or ALPA somewhat automatically elevates ones art, but too comes at a cost..
7/ A form of revenue sharing exist for most other profit-making activities in our capitalist society, but free software tooling & culture remains the outlier here. IMHO it's in the long-term interest of everyone involved to acknowledge the bigger picture here. Economy v charity!
8/ Digital art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Esp. art created using open source tools hardly ever is _solely_ result of the artist's own efforts. Where's your 3D render w/o literal lifetimes of time/effort by @BlenderDev? Where's your in-browser XR experience w/o @threejs_org..
9/ Well aware the art world eschews the word "tool". It's too utilitarian/working-class - anathema. But this is by design/convention to isolate the discussion & elevate the artist as separate entity/commodity. This separation is _artificial_. It's a mechanism of the art market...
10/ ...a mechanism, which through various gatekeeping practices, ensures only the holy trinity of patron/collector, gallery and artist remains, with everyone else excluded from any economic flows & leading to constructed/overinflated prices, values (and egos, let's be honest...)
11/ An an aside, please also see @julian0liver's recent related thread (👏):



and especially this:
12/ However, esp. for digital art, this distinction between creativity/skill/craft/technique/tool is ever more blurred, to say the least. The popularity of said open source tools has amplified this and to some extent is harmful to the efforts and these tools/platforms themselves.
13/ Over time, the freely accessible nature of these tools has encouraged a pretty consumerist & entitled behavior, which didn't exist to that degree in earlier days of open source (IMHO was more balanced)...
14/ How else can we explain most of these projects are having 10000s of users treating these tools as products/commodities vs. only dozens of contributors (if at all) working on them as a collective good/interest & are expected to just provide? Why is this considered normal?
15/ I've got to admit there were many painful moments in my distant past, seeing other people making minute changes to existing projects I'd created for toxiclibs or quite obviously using my libraries at the core of their project, only for them to never even give credit/ack...
16/ Another aside: In my DevArt Co(de)factory project (2014) I've tried to emphasize that many creative works are of a derrivative nature only and when they are, to (automatically) provide a history of influences. It would be amazing if @hicetnunc2000 could do something similar. Screenshot of the visual edit history/timeline of a 3D objec
17/ Back to my original @hicetnunc2000 proposal: I did imagine this to be a per-objkt, fully opt-in setting and 3 step process: 1) Define the number of splits, 2) Assign an address for each split 3) Mint object. This way many other revenue-split use cases can be dealt with...
18/ My #CharityNFT series about @Mono_Lake could have benefited from this mechanism too. As other people have already pointed out, this _is_ a great example for smart contracts in general. Now any collector of these pieces will just have to trust me! 😇

19/ Of course the UI for defining splits could/should be extended/refined over time, e.g. to provide a curated list of addresses of known/active open source projects to chose from. But these are niceties, not as important as implementing the actual mechanism itself...
20/ Fin: Over the 10yrs my #1 issue w/ this whole scene & the NFTs craze: On the one hand we've got groups of volunteers dedicating (currently sacrificing) their spare time, sleep, evenings/weekends working on largely _tooling_ for enabling new creative expressions w/ computers..
21/ ...OTOH are artists who pump all their time & energy into using these tools for production & the marketing of quick-turnaround (in the vast majority of cases), profit-making works (w/ some feeling stepped on their toes when pointing out [a part of] the larger picture) /Fin

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More from @toxi

30 Apr
I've just posted this NFT-revenue-splitting-to-support-opensource-projects feature proposal for @hicetnunc2000 and would very much love your support/upvote or at least thoughts/consideration:
hicetnunc.featureupvote.com/suggestions/18…
Isn't it ironic a 3D render, GIF, art piece made w/ open source tools not just quickly yields more income, status & higher incentive than putting in 1000s of hours working on the tooling/frameworks/community which allowed people to create & benefit from such works in 1st place?
As much as we celebrate digital art, its democratisation, diversity, free access etc. - where's the acknowledgment from the NFT crowd of the thousands of people who've been working on these creative tools used to make the hot-selling works NFT platforms are being flooded with?
Read 9 tweets
13 Feb
1/ Painful realisation: The more I've learned, done & created over the years, the less I know how to even talk about it & get somewhat frustrated not being able to produce an elevator pitch for my last 10-15 years of near daily activity
trying to create...
2/ ...an alternative ecosystem of tools & concepts for creative coding. So here's a 🧵 to summarize my #PCD2021 talk a bit more: I likely missed _most_ of the key points I wanted to make on Thur, esp. the parts I didn't even get to present due to running out of time...
3/ ...with too much (time) spent on oldskool roots & anecdotes, which albeit important for larger context and maybe interesting to some, are not _that_ important in larger picture... I'm sorry!
Read 27 tweets
16 Sep 18
@EmmanuelOga I was going to blog about this topic, but never seem to find the time for it. In short, I still love & use CLJ(S) for some of projects, but at the same time find TS is possibly more suited for my purposes/interests and IMHO provides a somewhat better balance overall... /1
@EmmanuelOga Some parts of thi.ng/umbrella are heavily influenced by my experience of working w/ CLJ fulltime for 5+ yrs, but adding a spin to it. Compared to CLJ, TS gives me more flexibility to break out of certain lang aspects/features when they're really not warranted/wanted /2
@EmmanuelOga Of course CLJ allows that to a large extend itself, but then quickly becomes unwieldy (YMMV). Syntax for doing relatively maths-heavy or non-standard / low-level stuff (even just using arrays vs CLJ vectors) is quite verbose & hard to read (in contrast to rest of lang). /3
Read 12 tweets

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