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.
Produced in the context of the ONB Labs Web Residency, Austrian National Library, Vienna, 2021.
labs.onb.ac.at/artspace/cryptographics/
Exhibited in the xCoAx 2022 exhibition with a paper published in: XCoAx 2022 Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, 312–17. Porto: i2ADS, 2022. https://doi.org/10.24840/xCoAx_2022.
