Serpentine Arts Technologies

Institutional profile

Serpentine Arts Technologies is presented by Serpentine Galleries as a programme combining artist commissions, creative R&D, and strategy. Its official Blockchain programme page places the Legal Lab within that programme and describes the lab as an online research project, running from September 2019 onward, on how law can support collaborations across art, science, and technology. Serpentine's Future Art Ecosystems page describes FAE as an annual strategic briefing. These pages establish a programme of commissioning, inquiry, and public strategy inside Serpentine Galleries; they do not establish a separate museum or a collection-preservation operation.

Demonstrated practices

1. A commission can be a live, browser-based work with a fully named production record

The work page for Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT dates the project from 21 May 2026 onward and specifies web and mobile access with subtitles. It describes a game built from the fictional world of Below the Blue Line: negative online comments become events in a post-apocalyptic world, and a real-time feed presents factions and competing accounts of truth. The player decides whom or what to let through a door; those choices produce different viewpoints and endings. The page names Serpentine Arts Technologies as commissioner and producer, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley as lead artist and concept creator, Beyond Code Collective as a collaborator, Fonz Morris as developer, and the curatorial and production team.

The public record demonstrates network-native commissioning through the work's medium, access surfaces, interaction, credits, and current status. Preservation status is not stated.

2. FAE3 turns infrastructure research into a dated, downloadable artifact

The FAE3 launch page dates the online release to 25 November 2022 and calls FAE3 an annual strategic briefing. It describes interviews with specialists in art, decentralised technology, innovation policy, and civic practice; prospective strategies for existing and new cultural organizations; and a participatory Pol.is workshop asking how to build a more interoperable cultural sector.

The exact report, Future Art Ecosystems: Art x Decentralised Tech (FAE3), is a co-written and edited publication with named contributors, advisors, researchers, designers, and an associated artwork. Its opening pages place the report after the decentralised-technology hype cycle and set out a “long(er) view” of cultural infrastructure. The report maps legacy institutional systems against decentralised proposals, then develops its argument through interviews and operational questions. The result is public research with a method and an edition. Its prospective strategies remain recommendations; adoption requires separate evidence.

3. Legal inquiry is attached to concrete production and transaction problems

The Legal Lab's exact paper, The Legal Ambiguities of Art Collaborations and their Compatibility with NFTs, is by Alana Kushnir and dated 27 May 2021. It examines how NFT-platform terms handle collaborative authorship during minting, sale, and resale. The paper tests the problem against platform terms, distinguishes a singular-author assumption from the actual labor of artists and technologists, and follows the consequences through payment distribution, resale royalties, moral rights, and crediting. It ends by asking collaborators to establish rights expectations and platforms to make their terms more compatible with collaborative practice; it also states that the paper is not legal advice.

The practice translates a production problem into a public document that identifies the relevant terms, affected collaborators, unresolved ambiguity, and possible design response.

4. One inquiry is published through several public surfaces

Serpentine's materials give an inquiry different forms without treating them as interchangeable. I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT is a playable web and mobile commission with an access statement and production credits. FAE3 has a launch event, a downloadable report, a public workshop, and a separate artifact site. Legal Lab has a programme page and a direct PDF research paper. Together these surfaces give the work, research argument, event, and credit record their own public routes.

Close reading of public scholarship

The I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT page begins with what the player does and what the system does in response. Its writing moves from premise to mechanic: the graphic-novel world, the simulated feed, the factions, the door, and the consequences of choosing who enters. The page then shifts into a production register that names the commission, producer, curator, artist, developer, and collaborator. That sequence keeps the work legible before it explains the institution around it. It also avoids a generic claim that technology “changes society”; it identifies a feed, a gate, a choice, and a different ending. The limitation is material and consequential: the page documents a live online work as ongoing, not a preservation test or a stable historical snapshot.

The Legal Lab paper uses a more formal research voice. Its headings follow the transactional sequence—collaborative authorship and minting, first sale, resale, royalties, conditions of sale, moral rights, and crediting. It moves between the wording of platform terms and the practical situation of a collaborating artist and technologist. It shows how a sole-author warranty, automated payment rule, or broad platform licence fails to describe the work's actual production. Its date matters: the reviewed terms and platform list belong to May 2021, and its legal analysis cannot be treated as current legal advice without jurisdiction-specific review.

FAE3 uses a different register again: a named, co-authored briefing that combines systems diagrams, interviews, vocabulary, historical framing, and prospective recommendations. Its writing openly moves between diagnosis and speculation. That makes the document useful as an institutional-thinking artifact, but it also marks the boundary between a published ambition and a demonstrated operational change.

What the Museum should adopt

• Commission network-native works with records that name the artist, developer, curator, producer, collaborators, access surface, device constraints, current status, and external dependencies.
• Publish infrastructure research as a dated artifact with named authors, contributors, method, source terms, and a clear label for recommendations that have not become policy.
• Make collaborative authorship and rights part of the acquisition and commissioning record: identify contributors, permissions, display and distribution rights, credit expectations, resale or revenue rules, and the governing jurisdiction.
• Give each inquiry the public form it needs: playable work, concise access record, longer essay or report, event documentation, downloadable artifact, and machine-readable identity where applicable.
• For chain-native works, test one exact commission through the whole lifecycle—commission, contract, mint or deployment, access, transfer, attribution, rights change, and migration—before generalizing the model.

Where the analogy ends

• Serpentine's cited pages demonstrate commissioning, research, legal inquiry, and strategy publication. They do not demonstrate an accession workflow, chain custody, condition reporting, or long-term preservation. Do not import a preservation claim into this profile.
• FAE3 explicitly formulates prospective strategies. Its discussion of public cultural infrastructure is an argument and a design horizon, not evidence that its proposed interoperability or governance arrangements exist in the Museum.
• A playable page marked “ongoing” proves a current access route at the research date. It does not prove fixity, reproducibility across devices, source-code retention, dependency control, or future access.
• The Legal Lab paper's platform terms, examples, and legal analysis are dated 2021 and jurisdiction-sensitive. They are research inputs for a rights review, not a substitute for legal advice or an adopted Museum policy.
• A commission-led R&D programme has different obligations from a permanent collection. A chain-native museum must add title, custody, rights, preservation, correction, and accession gates after the experimental phase.

Sources

Access date for every source below: 2026-08-04.

Revision history

• 1.1.0 — 2026-08-04: hostile audit revision; changed status, added claim-level links, close readings of the named work and research artifacts, removed preservation and institutional-independence implications, and separated demonstrated practice from prospective strategy.