A new kind of drawing system. One that enables information-asymmetric artworks through zero-knowledge proofs
Imagine: unknowable drawings. Unknowable linework. Unknowable paintings. Fully kept secret from the public via cryptography.
Where an artist can then also use zk-proofs to reveal mathematically verifiable claims about aspects of the underlying drawing.
Thus a public may come to understand a piece, but only in relation to the claims that the artist expresses as cryptographic proofs and code.
A publicly-verifiable evidence of a work’s existence and features. A fact lens as a kind of painterly abstraction, and window onto an unknowable piece.
The first public instance of this system’s machinery was posted to Ethereum L1 in 2022.
There are a few steps to consider with this drawing system:
1) An artist privately makes a digital drawing
2) The artist then encodes the drawing into an impenetrable cryptographic data structure – one that can be safely given to the public without risk of revealing the underlying work. A drawing or painting itself as a kind cryptographic public key.
3) Next, the artist can generate proofs with a zk-SNARK system, allowing for claims that can be put into the public, and verified by others
For a concrete example, imagine an artist has a secret drawing, yet make claims about how many lines exists inside a given region of the canvas. The artist can produce mathemtically-verifiable evidence that there exists a line inside the encoded drawing that is contained within a given spatial bounding region. Thus they have a way to prove a the existence of something one could call a drawing, and reveal a diffuse abstract feature of the drawing, all without revealing the drawing itself.
The public can then feed those proofs and the cryptographically encoded secret drawing to a verifier program to be sure of the artist’s claims.
The artist makes publicly distributable claims, a kind of fact lens onto an unknowable drawing. Artist choreographed knowledge-asymmetric glimpse, as an entry in the tradition of painterly abstraction
0x92096a1D7C864ed51e35ce4dcE15AA8183D143C3 0x5Cc0B449fc6F0588a06Ca21939BC52eD54D94f6f 0xB95a08fEF90E719457dEc84B80737E1987f25622
The visual forms on display for Unit’s Uncomputer show represent an interpretation of abstract but verifiable features of an unknowable drawing
