zero glimpse sunflower one (for unit)
by Mathcastles
A piece with features to be revealed and evolved over the month of the show. Starting with this small writeup.
A new kind of drawing system. One that enables information-asymmetric artworks through zero-knowledge proofs. Seemingly esoteric in the early 2020s, but a premonition of an inevitable nearfuture infrastructural ubiquity of these techniques in the daily lives, thoughts, and identities of humans everywhere.
This piece expresses a drawing that can only be understood or known via zk-proofs that reveal mathematically verifiable claims about aspects of an otherwise unknowable artwork. These proofs serve as (spatial) fact lenses made possibe via programmable cryptography, explicitly as a kind of painterly abstraction and entry into that canon.
Thus a public may come to understand a kind of unknowable painting, but only in relation to the verifiable claims that the artist expresses as cryptographic proofs and code.
A publicly-verifiable evidence of a work's existence and features. A fact lens as a kind of productive window onto an otherwise unknowable piece.
The first public instance of this system's machinery was posted to Ethereum L1 in 2022.
There are a few steps to consider with this drawing system:
1) An artist privately makes a digital drawing
2) The artist then encodes the drawing into an impenetrable cryptographic data structure - one that can be safely given to the public without risk of revealing the underlying work. A drawing or painting itself as a kind cryptographic public key
3) Next, the artist can generate proofs with a zk-SNARK system, allowing for claims that can be put into the public, and verified by others
For a concrete example, imagine an artist has a private drawing, yet makes claims about how many lines exist inside a given region of the canvas. The artist can produce mathematically-verifiable evidence that there exists a line inside the encoded drawing that is contained within a given spatial bounding region. Thus they have a way to prove the existence of something one could call a drawing, and reveal a diffuse abstract feature of the drawing, all without revealing the drawing itself.
The public can then feed those proofs and the cryptographically encoded secret drawing to a verifier program to be sure of the artist's claims. The claim of drawing/painting is only understood through the provided fact lenses, and the public enacting their verification. This of course also raises questions about what satisfactorily (even mathematically-computationally) is sufficient for the classification of drawing or painting
The artist makes publicly distributable claims, a kind of fact lens onto an unknowable drawing. Artist-choreographed knowledge-asymmetric glimpses, as an entry in the tradition of painterly abstraction
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