What if museums were funded by the internet and allowed pieces to stay close to their cultural roots in a way that made sense? Religious artifacts are displayed in temples, mosques and churches. Arkive bought the original patents for the first electronic computer and is launching out of stealth this week. Tom McLeod, the company's founder, was interviewed about why a museum is needed.
Nobody in their right mind would pitch a coin startup to me, and I am generally pretty bearish on the technology. It is with great reluctance and grumpy-old-man-ness that I am willing to leave the door ajar to the possibility that this may actually be a sensible use of the technology.
One of the company's goals is to create a community of everyday people who want to own and create culture by opening access to museums. Something museums have traditionally had a monopoly on is deciding what art is important enough to preserve and worthy enough to be displayed. The company is going to be a counter-weight to the fact that only a small percentage of collections are being displayed to the public.
The company's founder isn't new to rodeos. He had a number of exits in the past, including Pagelime, which he acquired in 2015, as well as LolConnect, which was snapped up by Tencent three years prior.
"Arkive is an entirely new down-up model where everyday people are part of the collection and defining an item's artistic historical relevancy and place in culture." When we decided to start Arkive, we wondered if the Smithsonian was owned andcurated by the internet. We want to build a community that is part of defining historical significance.
The original patent was acquired by Arkive.
Arkive's collections arecurated by its members who vote on which items they want to acquire The idea is to replace, store and manage all historical provenance, quality and condition on the block chain with non-fungible token. The tech is used to enable fractional ownership of items and capture the Metadata of them.
The original patent for the ENIAC was the first item the community chose to purchase. As a historical artifact, the patent is a wonderful question.
The Arkive team is excited about the patent.
The idea for Arkive came from a storage company that got out-competed by another company and its deep pockets. He didn't pay much attention to the tents, bikes and snowboards that were stored.
When you view religious items in secular spaces, it dramatically changes their impact. Tom McLeod
Every day there would be a cool or interesting item in the store. McLeod told me in an interview that the most unique and valuable things were put into separate rooms. Spider-Man No. 50 would be something we would have. Slowly, and over time, those rooms became more and more similar to galleries or museums. I would go in those rooms at least once a week.
People on the internet have a lot of interest in obscure things. These are regular people with special interests. They have passion and knowledge even though they don't have the money to buy it.
Arkive was an idea at one point. If you took all the knowledge of the commons and put people in a place where they could communicate it with each other, learn from each other, and be a part of the acquisition committee, what would it look like? The idea evolved into an on-chain museum. I build what I say I am going to build. I am not sure if that means it will be a success. I am going to build a museum on-chain.
I wanted to know why he couldn't just build himself a museum with a website, instead of using the technology.
There are a lot of things that the coin does well. It is already known that it does a good job of fractionalizing contracts. It does a great job of ownership. If you don't have the chain, you could probably do that without the middleman. Voting and fractionalization of ownership is possible with the use of tHe digital currency.
Along with ownership, voting and contracts, there is another aspect of the ledger that works for art as well. We don't usually know NFTs as much as we should.
The technology is in its infancy and the simplest and least compelling use of it has been seen. The bare minimum of value that you could create using just the core is if you say you can take an attribute that can be permanently locked onto a blockchain.
The combination of those two things made me realize that we had that kind of infrastructure at Omni. You would give us your stuff and allow us to keep it for a while. It is the only way we could have insurance. We returned the ownership when it entered our cars. That was the way we were able to keep insurance going. When we thought about who owned what and where, it became a huge problem for us because we had to have a constant chain of custody. When you give it to the driver, it gets scanned with a barcode and then you give it to the guy on the truck. After leaving the truck, it went to the photo station. They were scanned in the warehouse. You reverse it all to get it back. The line around chain of custody was very intense.
We are not talking about the time frames of a tent that you won't use until your next camping trip. The core of the ideas for the museum began with tents and bikes and kayaks.
Voting, verification of voting, lack of fraud, who actually did what, this is the wallet that signed up, this is if you could move all of the provenances of the items on-chain. There is no way to make a better representation of a meritocratic system like a committee at the top of the museum. It is all public since you moved those objects on-chain. What happened to it? Which one was it?
Arkive is bored of the shenanigans going on in the art world and points out that a lot of those shenanigans are coming up again in the NFT world. Everything can be verified and checked by anyone who wants to.
Is it possible to do that with a database. If there's enough money or emotional connection with the items in play, then databases can be changed.
There are pieces of our idea that you could duplicate. It wouldn't be subject to the same taint. You would have to open source your database. A big open source database with a lot of trust and verification is called aBlockchain. I decided that this was the best technology to use. Things could come out of fractionalization if you look down the road. I don't care if token goes up or down or if they are speculating. When it comes to the transparency of who owns what, where, when, why, and where is it now, I think the coreBlockchain technology works well.
A very complex NFT bundle is being created by the company to store all the rich data around the items in the museum. It claims that using the chain can enable levels of temporary lending of museum pieces. The company doesn't currently plan on creating a physical space.
"Maybe I'm tired of running giant warehouses full of things, but I'm uniquely positioned to do that." I know what it takes to run a museum, so I think the founder/market fit is very high. I know how to store expensive items around the country.
The challenge with art and artifacts that is all-too-familiar for modern museum goers is highlighted by the company's vision.
We don't need to put a work from an indigenous artist in the British Museum. We can put it in a museum that is close to where they were inspired or where they want it to go. We can maximize the impact by talking to them directly and working on a partnership that matters to them. There are a lot of articles on religious art and how it was intended to be used in religious institutions. They were supposed to be in temples. Most of the most important religious art is in museums. It dramatically changes the impact of religious items when viewed in secular space.
Lynn Hershman Leeson's 1985 work Seduction was Arkive's second artwork. Arkive is open in a new window.
Seduction is a vintage print by Lynn Hershman Leeson and will be part of Arkive's traveling exhibition in late 2022. The print will enter into a long-term residency at a prominent public location.
A short video of Seduction was also produced by Arkive.
A $9.7 million funding round has been announced by the company, led by Offline and TCG.
"This is not a museum in the metaverse filled with expensive digital images of expensive monkeys and NFTs" said the lead investor in Arkive's round. In this economy, alternatives are showing better returns than the rest of the market and we believe that Arkive's model presents a new way to appreciate how things of value are becoming sources of value
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