Provena: Building the Future of Cultural Infrastructure

Provenance is fundamental to trust within the visual art ecosystem. It records the history of an artwork, including its creation, ownership, exhibition, conservation, and movement over time. These records support authentication, valuation, scholarship, cultural preservation, and market confidence. Yet despite its importance, provenance remains highly fragmented. Information about a single artwork may be distributed across certificates of authenticity, invoices, gallery databases, auction catalogues, institutional archives, insurance records, artist websites, and private collector files. As artworks move between artists, galleries, collectors, institutions, and the secondary market, information can be duplicated, disconnected, lost, or become inaccessible. This fragmentation creates administrative inefficiencies, limits transparency, weakens long-term stewardship, and makes complete artwork histories difficult to reconstruct.

This Master of Technological Futures research investigates whether provenance should be reconceptualised as a form of digital cultural infrastructure. Rather than asking only how technology might authenticate an artwork, the research examines whether shared digital infrastructure could support the preservation, authentication, stewardship, and governance of artworks across Aotearoa New Zealand.

The project centres on Provena, a proposed digital provenance infrastructure and evolving research prototype. Importantly, the study does not assume that Provena is the correct solution. Instead, the prototype functions as a research artefact through which stakeholder needs, governance questions, privacy concerns, cultural values, regulatory requirements, and potential implementation pathways can be investigated.

The central problem is not simply a lack of technology. Digital certificates, blockchain systems, NFC technologies, cloud databases, and collection management platforms already demonstrate that provenance information can be recorded digitally. However, technological capability has not produced a universally adopted provenance system.

Research into digital infrastructure suggests that successful systems depend on more than technical sophistication. They require interoperability, governance, shared standards, stakeholder participation, institutional trust, and sustained adoption (Hanseth and Lyytinen, 2010; Star and Ruhleder, 1996; Tilson et al., 2010). From this perspective, fragmented provenance represents a broader socio-technical and ecosystem challenge.

Different stakeholders also experience provenance differently. Artists may lose visibility over works after first sale. Galleries maintain separate inventory and collector records. Collectors require privacy and control over sensitive information. Auction houses and secondary-market participants conduct their own due diligence. Museums and institutions maintain specialised collection systems. Government agencies and collecting societies require reliable information to administer regulation and public policy. No single stakeholder necessarily holds a complete record of an artwork throughout its lifecycle.

The research is particularly timely following the introduction of the Resale Right for Visual Artists Act 2023 in Aotearoa New Zealand. The legislation establishes a legal entitlement for eligible visual artists to receive royalties when qualifying artworks are resold through the secondary market. However, effective implementation depends on the ability to identify artworks, recognise qualifying transactions, maintain reliable records, and support accurate reporting.

The research therefore examines whether existing provenance systems adequately support the legislation and whether legislative, operational, or infrastructural gaps affect its intended outcomes. This creates a wider research question: Can legislation achieve its purpose when the underlying information infrastructure remains fragmented?

The issue also has international relevance. Artist resale royalty frameworks operate across more than ninety jurisdictions, while many art markets continue to rely on disconnected systems and reporting processes. If evidence supports the need for shared provenance infrastructure in New Zealand, the findings may have relevance for comparable international contexts.

The research extends beyond conventional definitions of provenance as a record of ownership. Kaupapa Māori perspectives introduce relational concepts including whakapapa, kaitiakitanga, manaakitanga, and whanaungatanga, which broaden understandings of how artworks may be connected to artists, whānau, communities, places, knowledge, and future generations (Mead, 2016; Smith, 2021). From this perspective, provenance may be understood not only as a chain of transactions, but as a record of relationships and responsibilities.

This is particularly significant when considering the long-term preservation of an artwork's meaning. The cultural and contextual significance of an artwork may exist beyond the physical object itself, including the circumstances of its creation, relationships to place, artist intention, community knowledge, and stories that may otherwise disappear over time.

The research therefore investigates how Māori concepts of relational continuity and stewardship might inform future digital provenance systems, while also considering questions of governance, privacy, access, and Indigenous data sovereignty.

How might digital provenance infrastructure support the preservation, authentication, stewardship, and governance of artworks across Aotearoa New Zealand, and what evidence supports its future implementation?

The study adopts a qualitative, inductive, and practice-based research methodology. This approach is designed to allow findings to emerge from stakeholder experience rather than testing a predetermined commercial proposition.

Primary research will involve semi-structured interviews with participants across the visual art ecosystem, including artists, galleries, collectors, art inheritors, secondary-market participants, government and collecting-society representatives, and commercialisation stakeholders. Interview data will be complemented by document analysis of legislation, government reports, academic literature, industry publications, policy documents, and existing provenance systems.

Findings will be analysed using Braun and Clarke's six-phase thematic analysis framework (2006, 2022), enabling recurring patterns, tensions, and stakeholder requirements to emerge systematically from the evidence.

The research follows the Double Diamond framework, progressing through four iterative phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. Initial research will map the existing provenance ecosystem and identify stakeholder experiences. These findings will then inform thematic analysis, prototype refinement, stakeholder evaluation, and the identification of future implementation pathways.

Provena is positioned as a research artefact, not a predetermined commercial product. The prototype enables participants to engage with tangible concepts rather than discussing hypothetical infrastructure in the abstract. Stakeholders can evaluate potential approaches to artwork registration, provenance continuity, privacy, governance, ownership transfer, cultural stewardship, and regulatory reporting.

This creates an iterative relationship between research and design. Stakeholder evidence informs the prototype, while interaction with the prototype generates further research insight.

The intended outcome is not to prove that Provena should exist. It is to establish whether the evidence supports digital provenance infrastructure, what form such infrastructure might take, how it should be governed, and under what conditions stakeholders would adopt it.

This research sits at the intersection of information systems, cultural heritage, creative industries, public policy, platform theory, Indigenous research, and digital governance. Its central contribution is the investigation of provenance as infrastructure rather than documentation alone.

By integrating stakeholder research, kaupapa Māori perspectives, policy analysis, and iterative prototype development, the study seeks to generate evidence about how artwork histories, relationships, and responsibilities might be preserved across time.

The project will produce three interconnected outputs: a Master's-level body of research, an evidence-informed Provena prototype, and an investor pitch deck exploring future implementation pathways.

Ultimately, the research asks whether the visual art ecosystem requires more than better records. It investigates whether provenance could become a shared form of digital cultural infrastructure capable of supporting trust, stewardship, policy implementation, and the long-term preservation of artworks and their associated stories.