Kevin Buist

Jun 16, 2024 | outland.art | Kevin Buist |Gabrielle Schwarz

Commentary by Kevin Buist June 17, 2024 We can think of the blockchain primarily as a kind of clock. Bitcoin and other blockchains are stores of value, but they cannot store value without first delineating and recording time. As the original 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper explains, the basis for a decentralized digital currency relies on an accurate and indisputable record of the order of transactions.

May 23, 2024 | us5.campaign-archive.com | Brian Droitcour |Kevin Buist

Ordinals are sometimes casually referred to “Bitcoin NFTs”—they’re digital objects that can be traded using blockchain technology, though the way they work is fundamentally different from smart contracts on Ethereum or Tezos. The Ordinals protocol takes advantage of an update to the code of Bitcoin to store media directly on the blockchain, using a process called “inscription” because it writes the file data on part of a block.

May 15, 2024 | outland.art | Kevin Buist |Gabrielle Schwarz

Commentary by Kevin Buist May 16, 2024 The Bitcoin blockchain was made to record transactions, not messages. Relatively recent changes to the Bitcoin protocol support the creation of Ordinals, or Bitcoin NFTs, but there is also a history of scrappier, clandestine inscriptions that goes back to the very beginning of the blockchain. There are jokes, poems, conspiracies, links, and ASCII art forever embedded in the logs.

Jan 5, 2024 | outland.art | Kevin Buist |Brian Droitcour

Criticism by Kevin Buist January 5, 2024 Mitchell F. Chan has produced four NFT projects. They fall into two distinct categories: digital riffs on historical works of conceptual art, and artworks that take the form of playable computer games. While this oeuvre might seem to be divided evenly between high and low cultural sensibilities, all four projects are united by the idea that digital art objects can be more dynamic, and far weirder, than merely physical artworks could ever be.

Dec 8, 2023 | outland.art | Kevin Buist |Brian Droitcour

Criticism by Kevin Buist December 8, 2023 “The code is the artwork,” Kim Asendorf told me during a recent conversation. He quickly followed this axiom with a caveat: “But the visual is more important.” It’s a contradiction to identify both the invisible armature and its visual expression as the most essential element of a work. But the best art embodies contradictions, and there are plenty of them in Asendorf’s work.