Unlocking Democracy: Addie Wagenknecht’s ‘What can be’

On October 28, we will launch What can be, a series of generative artworks created by Addie Wagenknecht linked to the [aside] protocol. This release will have two mains following features:

1- All purchased NFTs will be locked at mint time and will be unlocked depending on the outcome of the US presidential elections.

2- The 100 works will be divided into two groups, each with its own economic logic. One group, associated with Donald Trump, will unlock if Trump wins or remain locked for four years if he loses. The other group, associated with Kamala Harris, will unlock if Harris wins or remain locked for four years if she loses.

Introduction

Before delving into the details of this release lets recall that [aside] is a protocol that enables the immobilization of any NFT on the Ethereum blockchain and conditions its release to external phenomena, whether natural (weather, earthquake, storm), astral (solar eruption, planetary transit), economic (inflation, deflation), financial (stock market), demographic, or political. Once locked, these NFTs remain non-transferable for a dedicated period of time or until a specific real-world event happens, therefore restricting the tradability of the artwork by tying its commercial becoming to the outside world.

Believe Me: Reimagining the American Dream Through Failing Pixels

As the upcoming U.S. election approaches, Addie Wagenknecht revisits her work Believe me, originally commissioned for the Whitney Museum of American Art's Artport in 2017.

Jennifer Sclafani, an associate professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, identified "Believe me" as Trump's most-used phrase during his previous campaign. Sclafani's analysis, featured in a popular Scientific American piece, highlights how language shapes political persona. Wagenknecht's updated work focuses on reimagining American culture, including the national flag, echoing Jasper Johns' "Three Flags" (1958). She's been exploring the flag as a symbol of the American Dream and its failed promises for a decade. As the artist puts it, "like a cracked screen, we often view the world through it for ages before trying to fix it." The failed or failing pixels change the colors, spaces, and meanings of the project's imagery, which ranges from politically charged scenes to the vernacular of the online environment, familiar interface elements and Internet folklore. It questions how we perceive reality through our screens in an era of fake news and "post-truth."

The unlock process: the wisdom of crowds as a source of information and a condition for artworks’s liquidity.

The mechanism for releasing the works is simple to understand: we use the Wikidata API to verify the result of the U.S. presidential election on November 5, 2024. If the same winner is displayed on the corresponding page (Wikidata ID: Q101110072) for more than 4 days (see below) the group of artworks associated with the winner will be unlocked, meaning they will become liquid, exchangeable, sellable, burnable, etc.

How does it work?

To structure its data, Wikidata employs a range of standard properties, such as P580 (start date), P582 (end date), P577 (publication date), P585 (point in time), P571 (inception), etc., each serving specific temporal roles in organizing information related to a given subject. In the context of an election, such as the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Wikidata uses property P991 to designate the "successful candidate" of the election. The P991 category is thus used to organize information on any Wikidata page for an elected person, election winner, winning candidate, etc.

Wikidata being a collaborative platform, each person has the ability to edit information - which we will discuss later - and each modification made on Wikidata has an associated timestamp, allowing precise tracking of the date and time of the last edit.

It is thus easy to write a script that calls Wikidata's public API to fetch information regarding the presence or absence of the P991 property on a given subject, as well as obtain the latest timestamp corresponding to the last modification of this information.

Preventing Manipulation

We have seen that it's easy to retrieve Wikidata’s data related to a specific subject to determine whether or not it contains the information we are looking for and to verify when this information was added. Naturally, this process can be automated, enabling an agnostic and automated verification of the "truth."

However, some may argue that a malicious user could attempt to modify the Wikipedia page for the 2024 U.S. presidential election to unlock or lock all the works in the series. Fortunately, this type of tampering is easily preventable for several reasons.

1- Timestamp

The first and most important reason is that our protocol considers the timestamp of the last modification or addition of a P582 property. As we have shown, it's easy to retrieve this information. Therefore, we can use this data in the smart contract to ensure that the NFTs will only be unlocked if a P582 has been present for more than four days.

2- Community Fact-Check

Even if someone attempts to fraudulently add a false P991, the community will quickly correct the modification. It is nearly impossible for a high-traffic and highly controversial page, such as the 2024 U.S. presidential election, to retain significant false information for several days. Therefore, if a P991 has remained for four days, it indicates a high level of certainty that the information is valid.

Thus, our script, hosted on Vercel, interacts daily with the Wikidata API to retrieve information related to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election (Wikidata ID: Q101110072) and verify the identity of the winner (via the P992 property). It also fetches the revisions associated with this property to retrieve the timestamp of the last modification. If the information is less than 96 hours old, no action is taken, but if it is older than 96 hours, the [aside] protocol will lock or unlock the works accordingly, based on the result.

The use of Chainlink Functions

If all of this seems so simple, it's because [aside] relies on Chainlink Functions.

Chainlink Functions offers a a serverless developer platform for fetching data from any API and running custom compute using Chainlink’s highly secure and reliable network. . This allows us to seamlessly connect our [aside] smart contract to any API, leveraging Chainlink’s Decentralized Oracle Network (DON) without the need to manage the intricacies of building a custom connectivity solution.

Each [aside] ERC721 token inherits Chainlink's FunctionsClient contract, enabling us to make calls to the decentralized oracle network (DON) to retrieve data from the wikidata API.

Each time a batch of tokens is requested to be unlocked, our smart contract calls the Chainlink Functions router, requesting the execution of a specific JavaScript code to retrieve WikiData data. This contract then forwards our request to the DON, where each node executes the requested JavaScript, the DON reaches consensus using OCR, and relays the result to our [aside] smart contract.

If the data returned matches the weather condition required to unlock all artworks then they are unlocked forever. Otherwise, the function reverts and nothing happens.

We can picture this process like this:

Conclusion

With this new work by Addie Wagenknecht, we aim to demonstrate the flexibility of the [aside] protocol and the various phenomena to which it can be applied. Our use of Wikidata allows us to add a second source of information and truth verification to Chainlink’s decentralized and trustless oracle system, one that is shaped by the work of crowds.

However, it is crucial to understand that any verification process, any truth-verifying procedure, is never neutral. Truth is not a pure given, an objective fact that stands alone. It is always the product of a set of devices and powers that define its contours and dictate its conditions of validity. What we call "truth" is already a politicization of knowledge, a field of forces where struggles of influence and power play out.

Thus, Wikidata, far from being a source of absolute truth, is a space where truths are confronted and negotiated, a stage where crowd-sourced truth-making becomes a form of power. By using it to condition the liquidity of these works, we participate in this production of truth, where what is verified is not a single, universal truth, but rather a multitude of debated truths. In this process, truth always becomes that of the crowds: a collective, temporary truth, constantly subject to revision, which we adopt as our own truth.

With this new use of the [aside] protocol the liquidity of works relies on the truth produced by the crowds; the truth lies in its hands, and the crowd's vigilance will be our truth.

This first use of wikidata will enable us to explore other possibilities later on, opened up by the connection now established between wikidata, the art economy and the production of truth by crowds.