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art-making as a process of encryption

image as a placeholder for value

the edges of the image as property

any rando can now turn your artwork into an NFT

cultural artefacts as the material basis of cryptocurrency

a guarantee of value hinging on scarcity and intellectual capital

unresolved concerns about quality, ownership and authenticity

creepto

replace the word “art” with “nft” and “EUR” with “ETH”

non-fungible tokens, fungible art

conflating the exchange with the exchanged

transubstantiation

infinite reproducibility vs. artificial scarcity

language less related to art, aesthetics emotion or story

language more related to business, transactions, collecting and ownership

edition of _

 

Rosemary Lee
Rosemary Lee is an artist and researcher whose work addresses the cultural influence of technology.
rosemary-lee.com
About the Artwork
Cryptographics considers the recent phenomenon of cryptoart, which involves associating digital artefacts with blockchain, often tokenising artworks with non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Ostensibly intended to give digital creators more control over their work, this practice has recently been the subject of heated debate, as well as setting off a feeding frenzy by artists and speculative investors. Cryptographics takes an artistic interpretation of this topic, highlighting the way that while tokenisation is intended to preserve unique digital assets, it treats content as interchangeable. Working with found text fragments from the internet and images from the ONB Labs collection of historical postcards, the work negates the representational role of images, reducing the images to mere fields of pixels.
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