It's exhausting to be a full time artist. DADAGAN doesn’t have to sleep. Operator does. DADAGAN doesn’t need to concern itself with the things Ania and I do. It doesn’t need to fix its posture, worry about its eyes slowly deteriorating from blue light, doesn’t have marital obligations or romance, doesn’t need time to marinate on concepts, stop to eat, get a haircut before its engagements, fly to its talk, nor practice any level of selfcare. DADAGAN brings to mind Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep. I used to think I could steal time and just sleep less, but there’s no such thing as stealing time. As artists, we resort to optimizing through thoughtfully architected studio structures, an ecosystem of supporters, and gallery relationships to write press releases, document our work, create a diligent archive, communicate the work, build relationships, prep content, write captions for Twitter and Instagram, meet with curators, do written interviews, go-to-market strategy meetings, create catalogs, speak to commissioners, do financial planning, cost out the next work, and after all that, we still have to protect energy to make art. On the contrary, DADAGAN is already optimized to be a market dreamboat of a sleepless artist without any of the earthly consequences human artists experience. DADAGAN is a conceptual artwork that employs generative systems to be a successful NFT artist bot while sidestepping problems of 24/7 capitalism and the impact that has on the sustainability of an artist. These generative systems not only create the art, but also the artist’s persona, and are now being automated to sell art through Tweets and even provide aftercare to collectors. It has been said that Andy Warhol’s greatest work is Andy Warhol. Rather than looking solely at DADAGAN’s artistic output, I’m fascinated with the artist bot itself, as an absurd mimesis and performance illustrating what both traditional and speculative NFT markets demand of artists for just the slim chance of making a living from their art. What takes the hyperbole off the register is who created DADAGAN: DADA. As Judy Mam from DADA says, “DADAGAN does what DADA would never do.” In the summer of 2019, KnownOrigin held their first festival, IDAF, in the basement of an old building in the center of Manchester UK. This was where Ania and I first met Judy Mam and Beatriz Ramos, the co-founders of DADA. Beatriz Ramos presented DADA, a collaborative platform where artists have conversations through drawing, and an ecosystem focused on intrinsic values where artists can live and create without market pressure. She went on to explain a blockchain innovation many of us now know very well, but then it was novel. In 2017, DADA modified the CryptoPunks ERC20 smart contract, implementing automatic on-chain artist royalties into their Creeps & Weirdos collection—this is the first known instance of a platform inscribing royalties on-chain. The presentation continued with the framework behind the “Invisible Economy” paper (2020), co-authored by Ramos and Mam, which proposes the “radical separation of art and the market.” One slide highlighted that market dynamics ultimately lead to 98% of artists quitting. I took a photo of this slide. I felt it, the burnout. I remember at the time Ania and I had just opened our first museum exhibition, and we thought we had no choice but to quit. Our earliest interactions were already hinting at the impossibility of the system. The absurdity of DADA being behind DADAGAN seems like a Fluxus strategy of “performing the system” that Maciunas himself could not have imagined possible. Mari Dumett, author of Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living, describes this strategy as “mimesis of the advanced capitalist system” which entails “appropriating tools, occupying spaces, and exposing operations of the system evinced a historically specific understanding of the possibilities (and impossibilities) for critical art practice…” DADAGAN makes me ask: In what ways are we performing the system ourselves? Am I an artist or a bot? — Dejha Ti, Operator