Origin Points
Hello, I’m Kirk Finkel [untitled, xyz]. Welcome to the untitled blog!
Through “untitled” I’ll be sharing the context and process behind new project releases. I’ll also occasionally post broader musings related to art, architecture and emerging technology. But for this first post, I thought I might share a bit about my background in architecture and how experimenting with cryptocurrencies shaped the way I create art today.
Seeking Social Architecture
In 2016, I was working for an architecture and urban design firm in New York City. At the time, most of my work consisted of public plazas, streetscapes, and master plans. I don’t think that it’s an industry secret that public realm projects are difficult to get off the ground and even more so to actually complete. All require (or should require) a tremendous amount of local engagement and ongoing public discussions about stakeholdership, zoning and gentrification. Despite how critical these discussions are, all too often, the people who are impacted most by urban development are the first to be removed from the planning process. It’s a frustrating reality for the practice of architecture today. It’s too black-boxed. And although newcomers to the profession are keen for change, it’s a slow process. When it takes a decade to build something “new” - disruption isn’t a daily occurrence - it’s generational.
In an effort to learn more about and confront some of these difficult topics, I organized a firm-wide ‘roundtable’ series to explore new technologies that might benefit our professional practice. In the process of researching, I came across an experimental social media project called the Steem blockchain (which has since become Hive). A friend of mine had worked on a DAO project while we were in graduate school together, so I was already crypto-curious and keen to learn more. This particular blockchain had a unique model that embraced a kind of influencer economy, where content creators and upvoters could earn cryptocurrency based on their activity on the platform. A social blockchain project was incredibly interesting to me during a time when I felt our design process was isolated from the public eye. This kind of platform could support a more transparent and engaged design cycle from concept to completion.
For the roundtable series, I put together a presentation called “Blockchain: The Future of Decentralized Design” and spoke broadly (meanderingly) about how this technology might be useful for architects in the long term. It was a rough slideshow with very few precedents. I knew very little about what I was sharing, I must have used the word “decentralized” a hundred different times. I was fascinated but had to go further down the rabbit hole in order to understand what the technology was capable of.
The Makings of a SoMe City
My first real experience using blockchain apps started on Steem. I began posting content via a blog account and it allowed me to dive into the broader ecosystem of cryptocurrencies. At the time, a blog “post” was very flexible and undefined. Users all over the world were sharing articles, images, tutorials, open-source code, or just links to interesting things out there on the web. So, if a post didn’t have to be an article - maybe it could become a building, even a city?
“SteemTown” began as a community art project in 2016. The goal was to use a post as a digital town hall of sorts. One where on-chain engagement (comments and upvotes) were used as building blocks for a kind of social architecture. Each week, I published an open call on my blog. The call was a request that followers share images of their IRL hometowns in the comment section of the post itself. Each building added to Steemtown was a 3D model directly inspired by entries and ideas in the comment section. Town planning decisions such as zoning for new roadways were decided on by the public and through stake-based upvotes. Over time a small neighborhood began to emerge, a collage of different places and experiences. To me, the town was a special experiment that aspired to visualize a global online community using the logic of a neighborhood.
SteemTown to BlockTown
As the town expanded, it became increasingly difficult to keep up with custom model making! At the very start of this project, my days were spent working at an architecture firm. By night, I was moonlighting as a crypto-town planner. So in response to the engagement that the project was receiving, I began modeling repeatable architectural units like windows, doors, roofs, etc. Eventually, these units became a family of repeatable parts that made modeling more efficient and the buildings look unified. And just like that - SteemTown evolved into something modular; BlockTown.
The block aesthetic and framework helped create a sense of continuity across the town, a visual identity that was colorful and fun to engage with. Model-making became more accessible and more like a game. And while I was still the ‘architect of record’, I didn’t want to be the only one modeling. I open-sourced the town by putting an editable 3D file of parts up on GitHub, and offered up cryptocurrency bounties to those that submitted buildings. The hope for this project was to build up a dialogue about placemaking in this global blockchain environment. In doing this, the town took on a kind of language and look unique to the “post” in which it lived.
Through this project - I hope to engage in a broader dialogue with fellow Steemians about their own sense of place and placemaking. These types of game-structured conversations are a fascinating way of learning more about what a person defines as his or her “community.” It’s a way of connecting to one another through the geographies we are deeply tied to and knowledgeable of. In a world of links, likes, upvotes and IP addresses, it’s exciting to find ways of bridging the digital divide and connecting with those on the other side of the screen. - the BlockTown blog.
The Park in Brooklyn
As the town matured, so did the broader world of cryptocurrency. And with new tools came new opportunities to explore how real-life communities could benefit from this online attention economy.
In 2017 I teamed up with an architecture school pal, Michael Lee, to try putting some of these community-building use cases into practice. Our first project together was called Steem Park, a modular public garden installation in Herbert Von King Park, Brooklyn. Through posting stories, interviews and histories of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood we crowdfunded enough cryptocurrency to build real park benches, flower planters and public signage. The global attention around this project generated enough value to make real local impact. No grant money or tax-payer dollars, just interest and attention.
The Park project was installed in July 2017, and that experience was more than enough to get us hooked. That summer, I left my architecture firm and Michael left his job so that the two of us could explore this new frontier of community building and value creation.
A Window into the Ether
The Park project was the start of a window into the broader network of creatives and coders making things with cryptocurrency. Together, Michael and I started a design lab called “Sndbox” and a blog called “Creative Crypto”. The blog allowed us to research while the lab gave us a platform to build and incentivize more projects like Steem Park. Over just a couple of years, we were very fortunate to be able to collaborate with incredible artists around the globe and work with innovative teams including; DADA, Blockade Games, Dapper Labs, SuperRare, Cryptonomic, CADAF, Emerging Innovations, NFTY NEWS and more. The people we met through these teams inspired us to dig deeper into the universe of Ethereum, where creativity was bubbling with new precedents and possibilities.
Return of the Blocks
At the onset of the pandemic, we decided to close up shop with Sndbox. It was a very difficult time and I wasn’t sure what to do or where to go next. As with most artists and architects, life-altering events had me digging through old hard drives, badly labeled desktop folders, scribbles and sketchbooks for ideas.
In the summer of 2020, I reopened my old BlockTown files and began collaging parts together for fun. I found myself making and rendering buildings again. It started as a kind of escapist archi-therapy at the height of a pandemic. Very quickly though, my late-night modeling habits manifested into a series of colorful and virtual environments that transported me out of my basement apartment and into the metaverse. My briefly immaculate desktop became littered with “untitled” study models of ethereal buildings. The magic of blockchain called out once again and “untitled, xyz” was born.
As this new chapter begins, the spirit of the blocks will continue to evolve and adapt alongside the tools that give them context to grow. I hope you’ll follow along - and participate (soon) - as new cities start to take shape.
