About

The distributed·gallery is a collective of artists, philosophers, craftspeople and engineers working in the contemporary art world since 2017. It is a gallery only for those who believe in it. Unknown to the art world, we declared ourselves a gallery in 2017 to exhibit our own first work: the Ready-Made Token, a unique but fully liquid ERC20 token sold at auction on Ethereum. A ready-made gallery for a ready-made token: the art world took us at our word, and the hack became part of the work.

Since then we have built machines and protocols. They include a crypto-jukebox that burns banknotes, a slot machine that draws Ethereum private keys, an uncensorable archive of Michel Foucault's lectures, an NFT copier and a time-lock that sets artworks aside from the market. They have been shown from the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin to Art Basel. Recent projects extend this practice into artificial intelligence, experimental software and digital forms of intervention: a conversational performance that gives voice to an artificial Foucault, and a participatory encyclopedia of the « mediocre class ».

The evolution of the arts has always been coupled with the evolution of technics. Peer-to-peer networks and blockchains let artists create works whose operational, aesthetic, conceptual and political logic was previously out of reach: immutable, uncensorable records, large-scale money printing, content certification, digital scarcity.

We use these technologies to redistribute domains that are usually kept apart: art and venture, venture and life, life and art. Against the overinterpretation of « artistic intentions », the exhibition is nothing more than a specific, situated experience of a protocol — i.e. a set of technical, economic and social rules that extends beyond the artwork itself.

A protocol is nobody: nobody gives orders, and yet everyone plays along. We find that slightly creepy and rather fun, so we do what carnies do — set up a booth, build a machine and let you pull the lever. Our machines and their exhibition may have a limited life span: the protocols they open to will live forever.

A gallery usually decides what counts as art. It stabilizes a hierarchy of the visible inside a building. The distributed·gallery takes this center away. The institutional function is broken down into small distributed operations, so the gallery becomes a procedure that makes things visible rather than a space that confers legitimacy. Selection is no longer held by one curator: it can be collective, algorithmic, stochastic or situational. The curator becomes a gradient.

The artwork changes with it. It is no longer an object fixed for contemplation but something in transit: copied, forked, locked, reactivated in each environment it passes through. Its value lies less in the stability of the object than in the quality of its trajectory. Now that generative AI produces far more images than any institution can show, the question shifts from what to show? to how to keep meaningful differences alive in a saturated space? Our answer is to design what we leave empty: delays, silences, unfinished states and open questions are resources to protect, not gaps to fill.