Seeing Blocks and Crypto Bros installed in Telematic San Francisco, CA, 2018.
Seeing Blocks and Crypto Bros
Book, 48pp., color, 8.5” x 5.5”, limited edition run of 50, 2018.
In collaboration with Emily Martinez as Anxious to Make.
Description
How do cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work? What is a blockchain? And, what does a typical Bitcoin owner look like? Seeing Blocks and Crypto Bros is a book featuring answers to these questions in the form of drawings, which were commissioned from sixty cloudworkers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Drawings range from the mundane and stereotypical (such as a Bitcoin owner depicted as a nerd wearing a MAGA hat) to the complex and eccentric (such as the blockchain drawn as connected nodes of random numbers, presumably meant to represent cryptographic hashes). Taken together, these drawings offer up a layman’s perspective on the complex and often obscure functioning of cryptocurrency and the blockchain, and point to the absurdly comic nature of technological beliefs in utopic crypto-fantasies.
Documentation
Exhibitions
“Eternal Boy Playground,” Telematic Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Dec 15 2018 - Feb 2 2019.
Press + Publications
Credits
This work was made possible by a generous grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York, NY.
