Back in 2017, Julian Oliver produced a media work and fully functional prototype for harnessing wind-energy to mine cryptocurrency, bringing the costs for miners down considerably.
There is already a longer history of such artistic considerations to draw on, critique, and incorporate into the conversation. Recognizing that blockchain is a technology that won’t disappear, but remains an enterprise fraught with energy expenditures and lifestyle expectations, many artists concerned with its impact are seeking out better practices rather than abandoning the NFT space. (Ethereum has been claiming it will shift to PoS for some time, and the increased demand for a better system has led to announcements to expect a shift this fall.)ĭigital artists in particular have a chance to iterate in their explorations of climate and energy issues, to risk and fail and try again, as they attempt to both visualize and enact a better set of environmental politics. Tezos, a PoS cryptocurrency, has been around since 2018, but interest has risen recently, largely because of artists and art-and-tech designers committing to it for their projects. The forger has to commit a stake in the chain. PoS uses a pseudo-random process to assign a miner-now called a “forger” in this PoS landscape-the right to validate a block. The point is that energy demands are high, and that we live in an era when we need to reduce our carbon footprint across every area of our lives and insist that new technologies have that as a basic principle.Īn alternative exists called Proof of Stake (PoS) and some altcoins have been using it for a while. How researchers arrive at these estimates is a space of much debate, and getting lost in the weeds can be a distraction from efforts to make change. The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF) provides information on the energy consumption of Bitcoin every 24 hours with a variety of comparisons to try to understand what the numbers mean. This energy increase is an intentional part of the security in the system. Initially people could mine on a simple gaming computer, but the technology is designed to increase the difficulty of the puzzles as more people, or rather more computers, join the peer-to-peer network.
Sarah Ludy, Plants are everywhere you can’t see them (2021).Īt its core, the environmental impact is due to the currencies behind NFTs rather than digital artworks themselves: Bitcoin and Ether work on a principle called Proof of Work (PoW) in which computers solve complex puzzles to verify a transaction for which that computer or ‘miner’ is then rewarded with some amount of the cryptocurrency. Yet very few artistic gestures can hope to have the kind of real-world impact as Atken’s calculator: The site went viral, was mentioned in numerous news reports, and dramatically raised awareness about the ecological cost of NFTs, and by extension, of cryptocurrency. If you look at the content of many recent NFTs, you can find ample evidence of ecological concern and consideration of technology’s impact among artists, from Penelope Umbrico’s Sunburn (screensaver) (sold on PostmastersBC) to Sara Ludy’s conceptual work, Plants are everywhere you can’t see them (sold on Feral File). The website Cryptoart.wtf allowed people to check the energy of various art works-and the results were truly eye-opening.
In December 2020, as the hype over digital art assets started to spread far and wide with million-dollar sales on Nifty Gateway and other platforms, the artist and computer scientist Memo Akten shared some research he had done on the energy consumption of minting NFTs. At any time, the finance industry could have suggested or demanded design changes. But it was only with its arrival in the art world that the conversation around its climate impact went truly mainstream. Blockchain has been around for over a decade, actively disrupting the finance market.
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