https://rheamyers.cargo.site rhea.art Thu, 26 Jan 2023 14:23:27 +0000 https://rheamyers.cargo.site en https://rheamyers.cargo.site/art Mon, 22 Mar 2021 18:34:50 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/the-ego-and-its-0wned Thu, 26 Jan 2023 14:07:40 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/the-ego-and-its-0wned <img width="1920" height="1200" width_o="1920" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/66476ed24ddc7dab9fd6fbd0c21f64ccc236396917ec1e6468332c55dd1d987f/hugging-shark-friend.png" data-mid="166124662" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/66476ed24ddc7dab9fd6fbd0c21f64ccc236396917ec1e6468332c55dd1d987f/hugging-shark-friend.png" /> The Ego, And It’s 0wned (2023). EEG data, Ethereum DApp. Identity and intimate experience quantified, commodified, and exploited, in hypercapitalist exchange.The NFTs of The Ego, and It's 0wned combine EEG brain wave recordings of intense experiences with smooth data visualization aesthetics to produce a critical encounter with subjectivity, representation, and capitalism. NFTs allow the commodification of previously unenclosed phenomena from the commons of our shared experience. By doing so they expand the reach of the capitalist regime of property and ownership. The recognition of new labouring subjects also ultimately has this effect. Affective labour, cognitive surpluses, minority experience — whatever the critical impetus for formalizing each of these concepts may have originally been it ultimately renders them tractable to capital over time. The application of NFTs to performance art in lieu of an expansion of copyright to cover ephemeral phenomena is another example of this process. Why should performance art or body art be subject to a kind of art historical Cartesian dualism in which the content of the mind and the form of the body are kept carefully separate? The brain is also part of the body. It performs subjectivity. Recognising the immanence of subjectivity in the brain produces a new artistic object of representation. It also extends the reach of cognitive capitalism from the quantitatively extensive to the qualitatively intensive. This can be both embraced and critiqued through art. Trans people are currently seeing wider social awareness and attention, for good and for ill. Transgender experience is both dismissed and fetishised in the media. This is done by denying trans subjectivity, reducing being trans to a mere performance by an object. Rendering the subjectivity of that experience opaque will allow it to be further commodified. This is the dilemma of representation, in both the social and art historical senses. Taking ownership of this dilemma, ironically intensified via the blockchain, is both a reflection of and a critique of the capitalist logic of property. This is the diagram of The Ego, and It's 0wned. Each token presents a recording of the artist's brainwaves filtered through the ghost of "quantified self" data visualizations to evoke the subject (and subjects) of modernist art. In doing this, it performs a mutually problematic series of enclosures and objectifications that frustrate simple readings. This is what it is like now. If there is no space for us in technocapital's imagination as subjects rather than as objects then we must détourné its forms to make the same assertion made by every piece of art since Lascaux: I am here. https://rheamyers.cargo.site/type-opposite-images Thu, 26 Jan 2023 14:19:37 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/type-opposite-images <img width="5760" height="3240" width_o="5760" height_o="3240" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0e8bf21e6c59f6387ca159ff25cadd18f29250cf5c854412470dd1af172906e9/8.png" data-mid="166125960" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0e8bf21e6c59f6387ca159ff25cadd18f29250cf5c854412470dd1af172906e9/8.png" /> Type Opposite Images (2023), Ethereum ERC-721 NFT wrapping ERC-998 NFT. Vaporwave aesthetics’ evil twin. Type Opposite Images is a reversal or invert of Tokens Equal Text (2019). It composes with the original to translate the colourful vaporwave aesthetics of each token into the grim monochrome of its other - the imagery of a nuclear apocalypse started and populated by killer machines. This produce its evil twin, a reflection in a dark mirror. https://rheamyers.cargo.site/is-art-editions Thu, 26 Jan 2023 14:23:27 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/is-art-editions <img width="1920" height="1200" width_o="1920" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8a6a37ea94894a8645fc5758816bb3a08fe7882b7120b8a81293a89419b67b1b/is-art-token-is.png" data-mid="166127810" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8a6a37ea94894a8645fc5758816bb3a08fe7882b7120b8a81293a89419b67b1b/is-art-token-is.png" /> Is Art (Token) (2023) Ethereum ERC-721 Token. Own the creative power of a crypto artist. Is Art (Token) takes the artist’s power of nomination, of naming something as art, and delegates it to the artwork’s owner. Their assertion of its art or non-art status is secured and guaranteed by the power of the blockchain. Based on a common and understandable misunderstanding of how Is Art (2014) works, this is the first in a series of editions that inscribe ongoing and contemporary concerns onto this exemplar of a past or perhaps not yet realized blockchain artworld. https://rheamyers.cargo.site/facecoins Thu, 26 Jan 2023 14:17:01 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/facecoins <img width="1920" height="1200" width_o="1920" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a3bf8444269a822a510417044da0f0b130a16fde7e5d02b49ca31e623e862500/facecoin-edition.png" data-mid="166125509" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a3bf8444269a822a510417044da0f0b130a16fde7e5d02b49ca31e623e862500/facecoin-edition.png" /> Facecoins (2023), Ethereum ERC-721 NFT. A blockchain portrait that starts with you. Facecoins is a tokenized edition of the classic Facecoin (2014) with a twist. The genesis block and the colours of the proof-of-work bitmaps for each edition are derived from the Ethereum wallet address of its owner. This makes each edition a kind of portrait, or search for a portrait, of the owner, or of their blockchain identity. https://rheamyers.cargo.site/nothing Thu, 26 Jan 2023 14:13:34 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/nothing <img width="3000" height="1688" width_o="3000" height_o="1688" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b1644445a49ca109ddefd5961a9f3cd067ec5b6c46007d03511dc3da5f9ad3af/nothing-6.png" data-mid="166125073" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b1644445a49ca109ddefd5961a9f3cd067ec5b6c46007d03511dc3da5f9ad3af/nothing-6.png" />Titled (Information as Property as Art) [Ethereum Null Address] (2022), ERC-721 Token Own the unownable. An NFT representing the Ethereum "null address", making the unownable ownable symbolically. After Joseph Kosuth. Included in the collection of Albight-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY. You can buy the remaining editions here: https://feralfile.com/artworks/rhea-myers-nbn https://rheamyers.cargo.site/one-doge Sun, 26 Jun 2022 03:19:42 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/one-doge <img width="600" height="1067" width_o="600" height_o="1067" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cac5d60a8e5035bb83b515b06dcc9ad167f17faa7091d82d42654ee752d31003/one-doge.png" data-mid="146387493" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/cac5d60a8e5035bb83b515b06dcc9ad167f17faa7091d82d42654ee752d31003/one-doge.png" /> 1 Doge = 1 Doge, 2019, Ethereum ERC-721 Token “1 Doge = 1 Doge” takes the form of an image of a Bitcoin address, describing a Dogecoin meme, registered as an Ethereum NFT. That meme is 1 “Doge = 1 Doge”, and the naive typography and colour palette of the image comes from “Doge” memes such as those used to promote the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. This assertion may resemble the law of identity, as seen in Plato's Theaetetus (and the writing of Ayn Rand...) but here it is "proven" ironically rather than taken as an axiom, reaching inside a statement of economic fungibility that has become an expression of faith in the lasting social value of cryptocurrency separate from its volatile dollar value. NFTs are secured using public-key cryptography. Public-key cryptography uses a large, unguessably random, number as a “seed” to generate the “keys” used to encrypt, decrypt, and “sign” messages such as blockchain transactions. Public key signatures can be used as “proofs” that a secret is known to the signer without them having to reveal it until a later date. 1 Doge = 1 Doge misuses this terminology and the technology that it describes to perform one of the key functions of art: ideological closure. To provide a non-tautological proof that 1 Doge = 1 Doge, we create a Bitcoin address starting with “1Doge” from a cryptographic key seed value also starting with “1Doge” when read as digital text rather than a number. A cryptographer or philosopher would laugh at such a proof. And yet the improbability and accompanying effort of finding such a match with a piece of software known as a “vanity address generator” impresses the imagination as much as it tickles the funny bone. It resolves the tension of having to believe a bare assertion, turning it into precisely the kind of playfully comic rhetorical sleight-of-hand that Dogecoin memed itself into being with.https://institut.co/artwork/1-doge-1-doge/ https://rheamyers.cargo.site/certificate-of-inauthenticity Sat, 20 Mar 2021 21:22:52 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/certificate-of-inauthenticity <img width="3840" height="5290" width_o="3840" height_o="5290" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/daf6cc955c5c75af1555a4e51c4bbacb5bfeb7a836ffcd0dbd7883d8c2469b7f/Urinal04-cropped.png" data-mid="103126149" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/daf6cc955c5c75af1555a4e51c4bbacb5bfeb7a836ffcd0dbd7883d8c2469b7f/Urinal04-cropped.png" /> "Certificate of Inauthenticity", 2020, ERC-721 Tokens From 2011 to 2012 as the "Shareable Readymades" project I commissioned the awesome artists Chris Webber and Bassam Kurdali to create three 3D printable models of commonplace objects - a urinal, a balloon dog, and a pipe - that had become part of canonical art history. The artists retained copyright on their work and the results were placed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license with the attribution to myself as the person that commissioned the work. I did this in order to critique the production of neoceonceptual art by artists such as Jeff Koons and the processes by which art history cordons off models of commonplace objects as signature works by Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp and others. Furtherfield gallery in London (who meta-commissioned the Balloon Dog model) exhibited the works with "certificates of inauthenticiy" that I detourned from Sol LeWitt's certificates for their wall drawings. Then at the #BlockchainLive18 show, also in London, Ruth Catlow and Dr. Charlotte Frost of DECAL and Futherfield produced gold castings of the Balloon Dog model and registered the resulting "Cryptopuppers" on Arteia's blockchain art registry. I hadn't planned these developments but they diagonalized the project in interesting ways. The former recapitulated conceptual art's capture by the very systems of sale and ownership that it had initially sought to escape. The latter mapped this onto the constant development of technosocial phenomena within successive waves of Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook's "Californian Ideology" by taking a 3D printing project that was meant to be free-as-in-freedom and making an expression of it exclusively ownable with cryptographic certainty on the blockchain. As "Rare Art", blockchain token-based digital editions have become the latest expression of ownership of value that would previously have escaped capture. The technology of blockchain-based digital certificates of "ownership" of digital art images was initially developed ironically ("Rare Art" comes from "Rare Pepe" trading cards). It was then captured by startup capital that cannot explain its contradictions. In its Rare Art iteration, Ethereum ERC-721 Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for digital image URLs are presented as solving the problem that digital art is infinitely reproducible and therefore cannot be sold as a rare asset. They establish authentic provenance and ownership where this was not previously possible. It is difficult to represent off-chain truth on-chain, however. It is prohibitively expensive to put bitmapped digital images on-chain. And it is impossible to make sure that a digital image is represented uniquely even within the same smart contract on a single blockchain. This means that we must trust the claim that the image represented by each ERC-721 token is what its creator claims. The authenticity of Rare Art images is threatened by "piracy", where an artist's images are copied from one Rare Art platform to another and sold without their consent. It is also threateded by "trash art", where the art produced is an undeclared auto-tracing or other mechanical transformation of stock images. Artists who feel entitled to the monetary and reputational value of the art they produce regardless of the method used and collectors who feel entitled to react simply to the price of Rare Art tokens are clashing over matters of authenticity in platforms that were supposed to render such questions moot. Why not turn this risk into value and make a virtue of inauthenticity? To make the link between off-chain truth and the problem of authenticity explicit I have created a Rare Art edition of Certificates of Inauthenticity for the Shareable Readymades series. If you own one of these tokens you can prove that I have not made the instance of Urinal, Balloon Dog, or Pipe that you have 3D printed or placed in virtual reality (which the CC-BY-SA license on the work gives you full permission to do). Print out the certificate that you own the NFT for and display it proudly in a physical gallery, or display it as a digital image on a virtual wall. Then if anyone questions the authenticity of the art that you are displaying and your right to own it you can answer them that the art is provably inauthentic and that you have no more ownership of it than anyone else. And that you know this to be true with all the cryptographic certainty of the blockchain. <img width="600" height="600" width_o="600" height_o="600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/22fdfd7d0082b3c4edcd1247e0974244db3133a4d6fb0554dc2e7801d2390c11/1e254bb5-d0a2-4c6f-9d0a-c89fe3463850.jpg" data-mid="102703143" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/22fdfd7d0082b3c4edcd1247e0974244db3133a4d6fb0554dc2e7801d2390c11/1e254bb5-d0a2-4c6f-9d0a-c89fe3463850.jpg" /> CryptoPuppers, 2018, blockchain-registered gold plated metal cast from 3D printed model with inkjet prints https://twitter.com/IsDecal/status/1044900069693108229 “This new incarnation of Rhea Myers' classic work "Balloon Dog, Shareable Readymade", originally commissioned by Furtherfield, comprises an edition of 1000 miniature gold balloon dog sculptures linked to the blockchain. Each handmade version of the 3D printed original is unique in its own way and functions as a non-fungible token. "Balloon Dog" was originally created as an ephemeral digital file for 3D printing that anyone could use to re-democratise an icon of blue chip contemporary art. It was a post-scarcity commons approach to art that everyone and therefore no-one can own. In contrast, this is a limited edition of luxurious physical instantiations of the artwork (each with its own own "certificate of inauthenticity" signed by the artist) anchored to the art historical world of provenance and ownership as well as blockchain verifiable value via Arteïa’s collection management system. From post-scarcity abundance to artificial scarcity and provably rare digital ownership as a way to establish and protect the unique value of artworks. This is a provocation for artists and collectors to engage with new digital critical and financial value in contemporary artworks.” Massive thanks to Dr. Charlotte Frost and Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield for making this happen. <img width="912" height="1005" width_o="912" height_o="1005" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/37e4a7c0a52ea089ccaf37e539057f0fcdab7a51af87fc8afd51fadd0d3f4dfe/shareable_laf_martelli.jpg" data-mid="102703701" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/912/i/37e4a7c0a52ea089ccaf37e539057f0fcdab7a51af87fc8afd51fadd0d3f4dfe/shareable_laf_martelli.jpg" /> (Image - Bruno Martelli) Artwork of the Century, 2016, 3D print with laser-printed certificateMassive thanks to Furtherfield for making this happen. https://rheamyers.cargo.site/local-maxima Wed, 24 Mar 2021 17:24:55 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/local-maxima <img width="938" height="587" width_o="938" height_o="587" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/95135722aefa779462ed5af7d7f61db4cf36f4c98250c0bfc77e4991ce7616c1/lm.png" data-mid="103127393" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/938/i/95135722aefa779462ed5af7d7f61db4cf36f4c98250c0bfc77e4991ce7616c1/lm.png" /> (Local Maxima: SLFT2, Square, 2019) Local Maxima, 2019, GAN-generated images and giclee prints In classical AI research, a “local maximum” is a solution to a problem that cannot in itself be improved but that is not the best possible solution. Where a singular mathematical specification of a problem is possible, local maxima can be avoided using search strategies other than simple “hill climbing”. Art does not have such a specification, its search space consists entirely of local maxima. Generative Adversarial (neural) Networks extract aesthetic surplus value from images, rendering it liquid. Training a GAN deterritorializes their form, generating new images with it reterritorializes it. Contemporary AI burns capital to produce discrimination, here discrimination between images that resemble the learned source material and those that do not. The source material in this instance is my own previous work, playful compositions from the 1990s. A GAN was trained on them and then applied to simple geometric shapes, transferring the extracted “style” of the source images leavened with the perceptual artefacts of GAN training. Reducing (or promoting) artworks to flows of aesthetics that can be continued indefinitely is deeply challenging to art history and connoseurship. GAN generated images tend to Pollockian all-overness, or to the same local sense but global semantic incoherence as Markov chains or a Francis Bacon painting. The conception of “style transfer” that all of this involves is deeply challenging to art theory. https://rheamyers.cargo.site/tokens-equal-text Sun, 21 Mar 2021 22:28:04 +0000 rhea.art https://rheamyers.cargo.site/tokens-equal-text &nbsp;<img width="7183" height="2363" width_o="7183" height_o="2363" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d92ccbb8884e66aa256fd1e4377f21911149fbab8a6563aba724b18334074fee/16.large.png" data-mid="102787019" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d92ccbb8884e66aa256fd1e4377f21911149fbab8a6563aba724b18334074fee/16.large.png" /> Tokens Equal Text, 2019, Ethereum ERC-998 and ERC-721 tokens"Tokens Equal Text" consists of an edition of 32 Ethereum ERC-998 composable tokens each of which owns four child ERC-721 non-fungible tokens. The ERC-721 tokens have short descriptive texts encoded as their ID numbers. This makes the ERC-998 tokens compositions of those text fragments. The content of that composition can be decrypted if the viewer knows that the token IDs can be misread as text rather than numbers.That content can be further decrypted if the viewer recognises that these fragments of text describe key visual tropes of the Vaporwave movement. Vaporwave is a 2000s Internet-based musical and cultural genre devoted to the sampling and ironization of muzak, digital kitsch aesthetics, and consumerist signifiers of wealth and property, from the the long 1980s. Its status as appropriation art puts it in a precarious relationship with the ownership of the sources of its tropes as intellectual property. The question of whether a given trope fits the aesthetic of Vaporwave is key to the genre's accompanying discourse, with canonical tropes establishing the content of that aesthetic. A composition of textual references to these canonical tropes at least admits of the question "is this aesthetic"? Which is the key question of art and art criticism, however crookedly reflected.Using Ethereum Web3 browser app code to displaying the texts of tokens in visual compositions using "aesthetic" (in the Vaporwave sense) typography and colours nudges along a positive answer to that question, and thereby to decryption of the work’s content. It also prevents the recovery of that content from being a mere puzzle. The easy recovery of the work’s content foregrounds the presence of compositional and indexical structure that reward contemplation.The "Rare Art" market demands something aesthetic to own. "Tokens Equal Text" loops this desire back through references the complexly unownable aesthetics of Vaporwave in order to both satisfy and frustrate it. By doing so, it places the anxieties of blockchain “true digital ownership” into a state of mutual critical interrogation with the anxieties of the art market.Preview and purchase tokens here: https://opensea.io/assets/tokens-equal-text