Digital Provenance has rapidly evolved over the past few years, and as technology continues to advance, so does the potential for tracking and verifying the origins, authenticity, and ownership of art and other valuables. This article explores the history and development of digital provenance and its impact on the art world, as well as the potential for future advancements in the field. From blockchain technology to AI-driven solutions, the future of digital provenance promises to revolutionize the way we authenticate and protect valuable assets.
The Importance of Provenance for Digital Art: Exploring Traditional and Blockchain-Based Methods
Digital art has rapidly become a popular medium among artists and collectors alike. However, the intangible nature of digital files poses a challenge for tracking the origin and history of a particular artwork. Enter blockchain technology, which allows for an immutable digital ledger that records transactions without the need for centralized institutions. Since the first NFT was minted in 2014, digital artists and collectors have praised blockchain for its usefulness in tracking provenance.
Blockchain-based provenance allows for multiple purposes. It documents the date an artwork is made, stores on-chain metadata descriptions, and links to the crypto wallets of both the artist and buyer, thus tracking sales history and making it easier to estimate a piece’s valuation. However, the art community isn’t abandoning its traditional archival methods just yet.
Regina Harsanyi, a time-based media specialist and assistant art curator at The Museum of the Moving Image, recommends that artists and collectors familiarize themselves with the whole array of tools, including NFTs, used to document an artwork’s story. Digital art provenance goes all the way back to a cryptographic function known as a checksum, a string of numbers and letters used to detect inconsistencies in a digital file. Any changes to the file’s pixels will result in a different series of characters, thereby verifying if a file is the same as the original.
Digital artists have also used various hardware solutions as both storage systems and provenance verification tools. These devices have ranged from floppy discs, cassette tapes, and CD-ROMs to USB and external hard drives. Nathaniel Stern, an American interdisciplinary artist and scholar who has minted NFT artworks on Quantum, SuperRare, and other marketplaces, says he has built his circuit boards when creating multimedia exhibitions.
Certificates of authenticity are still commonly used by traditional and digital artists alike, along with gallery-issued documents such as invoices, labels or stickers, sales ledgers, and curatorial spreadsheets. Appraisers and collectors can also verify information by contacting living artists for oral histories of their work.
Blockchain-based provenance has changed the narrative around provenance in both exciting and questionable ways. While helpful, traditional appraisals take into account if an artwork was ever owned by a notable figure, unlike Web3, where many NFT collectors prefer to remain anonymous. Despite blockchain’s usefulness in tracking provenance, the art community continues to rely on a combination of traditional and blockchain-based methods to authenticate and track the origin and history of digital art.