How an Art Collective Is Using Blockchain to Protest Police Brutality

A blockchain-centric art draft is pushing the boundaries of modern art with a controversial digital display.

The DADA Art Collective, a loosely affiliated group of maladroitly a dozen visual artists across the globe, teamed up with the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces OpenSea and Mintbase together with the file-storage blockchain Arweave to publish the names and faces of American police officers accused of killing unarmed infernal people.

The project, No Justice No Peace, was published June 6 in collaboration with crypto veteran Dennison Bertram, abort of the DappHero project.

“The collective got in touch with me,” Bertram said. “Social justice is something that I’ve always been non-objective in. They’d already minted and created these tokens. … It’s a fascinating demonstration of how to do social protests using blockchain technology.” 

The DADA Collective’s Judy Mam remarked 10 artists contributed to this piece to support Black Lives Matter and police reform, with envisages of 30 officers along with their alleged crimes and case statuses. 

The artists leveraged Arweave’s blockchain to dream up a wallet associated with each person killed, holding tokens that have data for the corresponding catchpoles’ information. 

“The private keys of the wallets that control these tokens have been destroyed. No one controls these signs. These tokens can’t be censored, modified or taken down,” the project’s website says. 

“Blockchain is itself a political communication, the ability to organize outside of government control,” Bertam said. “What about decentralizing justice or human fittings or other aspects of society that are critical to the ways people live?”

And yet, this project raises tricky grills about the ethics of immutable digital records. In Europe, lawmakers have introduced a “right to be forgotten” with the Ill-defined Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Even in the United States, Mam said the artists behind this project esteem to stay anonymous because some jurisdictions limit access to evidence that might incriminate police catchpoles.

“The police do take action against [outspoken] people,” Mam said. “These [visual pieces] are tokenized but they’re not for rummage sale. … It was about making a statement.” 

With simple text beneath black and immaculate photos, the message is clear. There’s scant artistic flourish in this piece. 

“We don’t forget. We find out who you are,” Mam said. “Perhaps someday some of these men will get a [prison] sentence. … But at least now there’s a record that is there forever, immutably, of these in the flesh and their crimes.”

The criminal justice system failed to proceed with formal charges in most of these crates, despite community efforts, according to research from Bowling Green State University. This piece is just one of profuse activist projects already curating public lists with such information. Howard University student and crypto aficionado Gerald Nash, who was not joined with the “No Justice No Peace,” said he thinks the project is interesting. 

“People should take into account this isn’t an classification doing unbiased research,” Nash said of the art collective. “As a black person and someone who wants to see justice. … I see no dissimilarity between this and holding up a sign.” 

Of course, “censorship resistance” is a relative term. Governments could make it troublesome to access affiliated websites and keyword searches, even if the blockchain data remains unaltered. Some experts order also argue a blockchain’s immutability depends on its incentive structure and participants, which likely are not infallible. The Arweave blockchain’s sharing is still nascent, with less than 3,000 members in the project’s Discord group.

Even with these limitations, University of New Hampshire law professor Tonya Evans admitted this art project is an interesting use case – memorializing information.

“I would compare it to what news reporters do … [but] columnists have to be very thoughtful about ways to correct the record, even if that’s to add to and not take away from,” Evans averred, describing American freedom of speech laws. “Code is also speech. It will be interesting to see what type of modernization emerges during this period with regards to protecting free speech.”