The Art Collective (TAC)
MetHaMathics Art Collective
Foundational Funding and Provenance Mechanism
The MetHaMathics Art Collective launches with BOGF — Buy One, Get Four (or Five) as both an AI-powered VR purchasing experience, an artwork and a demonstration of a collaborative model for making, funding, and circulating art and artisan skills. The underlying principle is simple: independently contributed parts of a work may participate equally in its eventual value rather than necessarily being paid for before the work exists.
Where a work is produced speculatively using VR, each independently contributed function in the real world — for example design, substrate, medium/materials, artistic execution, production, framing and gallery/retail — constitutes an equal share of the eventual first sale. No participating contributor is paid until the work sells, and each therefore shares the risk of its production and exhibition. A participant who does not wish to work speculatively may instead sell their materials or services conventionally. Whoever purchases that contribution absorbs its cost and the corresponding productive role and the gamble for the love of art continues. Equality therefore applies to participation and risk, rather than attempting to declare that an hour of labour, a canvas, a pigment or an original design possess equivalent monetary values.
This allows each execution to develop its own collaborative constitution, identity and relation with the owner. An artist might purchase their own canvas, paints and framing and provide the complete physical execution aspart of eth commission; another might collaborate with a specialist textile producer, ceramicist, framer or material manufacturer who elects to participate speculatively. Where an artist independently provides the entire material production of a work offered through TAC, the arrangement may consequently be as simple as an equal division between the artist and MetHaMathics as designer/collective/retailer.
One design, multiple executions.
BOGF establishes this principle through a work that can itself assume multiple physical forms. The originating geometric design may be commissioned as a painting, rug, wall textile, architectural wall tile installation or other material execution, as well as smaller accessible objects such as a T-shirt or key hanger.
These are not required to imitate one another materially. Different artisans, substrates, pigments, fibres, ceramics, manufacturing techniques and scales can produce different executions of the same originating design. Where choices are offered, a commissioner may select from an artist's palette, available medium, dimensions, materials and execution method.
In BOGF, the commissioning date has an additional artistic function: it constitutes “The Present” for that execution. Production information therefore becomes part of the work rather than merely administrative information surrounding it.
The MetHaMathics Register
Each qualifying execution may be entered into a public MetHaMathics Register, creating a persistent record of the work's origin and subsequent reported history.
The register can record the work identifier, design and execution, participating makers, materials and medium, date of constitution, relevant production information and subsequent recorded transfers. Ownership need not be publicly disclosed. The website allows the buyer to register under their own name, pseudonymously, or as an anonymous/private collection.
The register is a record of provenance, not a guarantee of physical identity.
The purchaser remains responsible for retaining the original bill of sale and any accompanying physical documentation. These provide primary evidence connecting the purchaser, transaction and physical object. The online register records the corresponding public trace.
A separate register of RGBY designs (Laborynth, MethaMatrix, Vetruva, BOGF) will be held in the future for expansion of the design distribution model. There, additional designers or panels of designers (collaborations) offer designers the opportunity to upload designs and for users to use their ideas to imagine different uses such as garden tiles or rugs based on home pictures). The current projects are designed as project design objects.
Accordingly:
The artwork is the physical object.
The bill of sale evidences the transaction.
The MetHaMathics Register preserves its reported trace.
No registry can eliminate the traditional problem of art authentication. An authentic work could theoretically be replaced by an exceptionally convincing copy while its legitimate documentation continued to circulate with the substitute. MetHaMathics does not claim to remove that possibility. In any ultimate provenance dispute, the physical object, documentary chain and available authentication evidence must therefore be considered together — as they are elsewhere in the art world.
Continuing provenance and voluntary contribution
When a registered work is subsequently resold, its new owner is invited to record that transfer with MetHaMathics. The owner may also make a voluntary contribution equivalent to 10% of the recorded resale value towards the development and activities of the proposed MetHaMathics Institute of Visual Arts.
At launch, this is explicitly a voluntary contribution. The Institute is not presently being represented as a registered charity, and the contribution should not therefore be described as a charitable donation. Its institutional or charitable status may develop subsequently.
A recorded transfer can nevertheless extend the work's continuing certificate of provenance: a publicly recoverable history connecting its original constitution with its subsequent circulation. The contribution supports the collective; the provenance record preserves the trace. Neither is represented as an infallible substitute for possession of the original documentation or physical authentication.
The result is intended as more than a sales mechanism. MetHaMathics treats the economic constitution of an artwork as another part of its artistic life: designers, makers, material contributors, exhibitors and collectors can participate in producing, sustaining and recording the object without concealing those relationships behind the finished surface.
BOGF — Buy One, Get Four provides the first execution of that proposition: one originating work capable of multiple orientations, meanings, materials and forms, accompanied by a collective mechanism in which its making and subsequent passage through the world remain visible parts of what the work becomes.
To access the BOGF(of) art collective and make your contribution and support art in the future:
