Satanic Panic - The Luther Blissett Legacy

The retrospective "Satanic Panic" invites the visitor to explore a handpicked selection from the 428 NFT video artworks of the Luther Blissett Legacy collection created by ARTOLDO crypto in memory of the super folk hero Luther Blissett (1994-1999). The exhibition reflects on the different selves of the Luther Blissett pseudonym which was used by hundreds of left-wing artists in Europe to produce art, perform pranks, and publish books. Their most famous novel "Q" may have been abused by right-wing renegades as inspiration for their conspiracy theory of QAnon.

Besides this historical political homage, the Luther Blissett Legacy goes one step further by employing a philosophical aspect of the crypto culture and establishing the suppositional protocols of Proof of Workerism vs. Proof of Prank. The artwork in the name of the credo of NFT may be seen as a liberation of slavery of work but at the same time as an orgy of capitalistic speculation, pure “cognitive labour” greatly subsumed by the capital once more in an eternal mocking. A concept prophesied about the destiny of industrial labour by some of the protagonists of a critical Italian radical current of political thought called Operaismo, i.e. Workerism, yet in a forward, joking and fresh interpretation. PoW and PoP (culture) combined form a bright communist anti-capitalist stance which the duo explains academically by hijacking the identities of recognised leftist professors and intellectuals using the same techniques as Luther Blissett but in an updated fashion for the Web 2 and Web 3.

Their white paper offers a deeper look into the world of the Luther Blissett pseudonym in the form of collected texts and interviews and an own understanding of the power to stay anonymous by transferring the actual (hi)story of Luther Blissett to the technical evolution of the Blockchain and the world of crypto itself - concluding their essay that Satoshi Nakamoto has much in common with the pseudonym of Luther Blissett which may be seen as some sort of reincarnation of the ideals of anonymity, as a reformation of the doctrine (FIAT dogma vs. the crypto millennialism, akin Luthers’ rebellion), and as miseducation of “received” canon.

  • ARTOLDO crypto
    NFT Artists
  • Sara Ferro
    Director
  • Chris Weil
    Director
  • Carl Fravel
    Curator
  • Pondweed
    Curator
  • Wundersaar
    Key Cast
    "Female dancer"
  • Chripto
    Key Cast
    "Male dancer"
  • ARTOLDO pictures
    Production
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Music Video, Short, Web / New Media
  • Genres:
    Metaverse, Crypto, NFT, Exhibition, Dance, Performance, Fashion, Virtual Reality
  • Runtime:
    8 minutes
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • THE GALLERY
    DECENTRALAND Metaverse (2022)
    1st - 31st October 2022
    Solo Exhibition
Distribution Information
  • ARTOLDO media
    Distributor
    Rights: Internet
Director Biography - Sara Ferro, Chris Weil

Sara Ferro (Milan, 1977) and Chris Weil (Bad Nauheim, 1988) form together the international duo ARTOLDO. She, 'WUNDERSAAR', he, 'CHRIPTO', both Crypto enthusiasts and artist avatars in the Metaverse. Since 2015 they are invariably creating throughout four-handed -as a collective -, micro, short, medium and feature-length films with exploratory outlook, experimental look and cineastic frown, dealing at 360° in “primae personae” with everything related to their moving images and video art, from direction to shooting, from editing to the soundscape, from conception to installation, from enlightenment to lighting staging, always with the pleasure of investigating and inquiring controversial realms.
The messages sent out through their works deliberately have a tone between the semi-serious and the vaporous, to conceal the vitriol of an invective that they instead prearranged to arouse in a subconsciously, by virtue of a digital transformation of the grumbling into an accelerationist incipit. To this end, they undertake forays into synthetic worlds and the less visible new media territories, where they can imagine the means to cross new frontiers.

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Director Statement

The Reincarnation of Luther Blissett: Satoshi Nakamoto

from Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594):

"Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light,
To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
To wake the morn, and sentinel the night,
To wrong the wronger till he render right."

While the first time-stamped mechanism in a digital document used in the Surety Blockchain has been invented by Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta in 1990, documented in their paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document" which later then served for the Bitcoin Blockchain of Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, there have been some important pioneers who developed the prototypes of modern blockchain technology as we know it today.
In 1982 David Chaum publishes his PhD thesis "Computer Systems Established, Maintained and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" and draws the first ideas of how computer cryptography may help to create consensus sorted in blocks. One year later, in 1983, Chaum describes in his paper "Blind signatures for untraceable payments" how to use cryptography in order to mint digital currency based on a blind signature. In 1990 Chaum founds in Amsterdam the cryptocurrency project DigiCash and sends the first transaction of a digital currency four years later in 1994, the same year the Luther Blissett pseudonym has been established.
In 1997 Adam Back develops the Hashcash project, based on a Proof of Work algorithm in order to prevent Spam emails - luckily it could not block Mail Art activism to infiltrate your inbox. Today in Italy, there exists a similar system called PEC, a verified authentic email system for sending and receiving formal emails, followed by SPID - a digital identity public service system.
While the first Smart Contract mechanism has been designed by Nick Szabo in 1994, the birth year of the Luther Blissett Project, it shall take more than 21 years before Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Jeffrey Wilcke will code the Ethereum protocol in 2015 with its particular Open Source Smart Contract attributes which are necessary to declare the ownership of NFTs.
Time back, in 1998 Szabo programms the first decentralised cryptocurrency called BitGold, much similar to the architecture of the later following Bitcoin. Another important milestone dated the same year is the document of the Chinese informatic engineer Wei Dai "b-money, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system" declaring the fundamental baselines for decentralised cryptocurrencies.
One year later, in 1999 Luther Blissett commits a symbolic suicide. The world needs to wait 10 years until 2009 before celebrating the birth of Bitcoin by the anonymous person or group Satoshi Nakamoto.

"But who will guard the guards themselves" - "Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?"

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