With a very simple and poignant gesture, pointing to a modernist one, Rhea Myers represents the first Bitcoin transaction as an abstract coloured grid. Her body of work holds numerous sophisticated narratives, full of interest towards the history of art, and conceptual art in particular, as a fulcrum for critique and discussion of the current technological, social and economic futures, projected by different actors in Web3, from protocol developers to artistic groups. The special sensitivity to beauty of code as a language (up to an ideology, coded into a digital exchange protocol, which Bitcoin is), lets her find a variety of forms of thought and image on the matter (her book, Proof of Work. Blockchain Provocations 2011–2021, is highly recommended for expended thinking on blockchain and nft culture, as well as politics of technology in general).  

8 Bit Palette, Squares, 2018.

The first transaction between two people on the Bitcoin network was sent from the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto to the late Bitcoin developer Hal Finney on 12th January 2009. At the time the ten Bitcoin sent were worthless, now they would be worth tens of thousands of dollars. This transaction represents the beginnings of Bitcoin as a social and economic rather than just a technical phenomenon.

Here the full code of that transaction is presented in the language of (post)modernist abstraction rather than as a string of hexadecimal numbers.

First Transaction (Bitcoin Raw Transaction)

Diagram

MUSE0

NFT Mine Offset: ETH Ethereum Miner 3 GPUs

In a talk with an executive of a large (and evil, as those should be) social network a few years ago, who was in charge of its arts and culture department, I once stumbled upon an obvious, but spot-on delusion. Describing the interface of the social network, they mentioned casually, that it works precisely like a white cube gallery: neutral and welcoming any user to make with, in and out of it whatever they wish. Surely, the neutrality of a white cube space has been refuted and played around with for decades in academic writing, institutional and independent artistic practices. Web interfaces have also been theorised and critiqued as precisely the controlling, ideologically rich and opaque/covert, always inherently problematic environments set between the user and the algorithms. 

Still, as the hype around decentralised protocols made way for a bubbling market for tokenised digital objects, and platforms were developed to host this market, it was hard not to pick out their whitish, e-commy, functional and neutral design, inevitable for the goal of hosting streams of unsortable images, be it gifs™ or multilayered transmedia projects. Meanwhile, the very idea of the primacy of ownership through a unique contract, regarding a work of art (an object, or a *collectible*) leads back to practices in the history of conceptual art.

What dimension exactly has been stripped off of a modernist white cube in a Web3 interface (or has not — set aside, why rebuild it)? Hyperplatformisation introduced new types of maps of interactions between artists, producers, audiences, collectors etc., through regulatory mechanisms such as online social capital, randomised gatekeeping and pure speculation. Such irregular maps often create a non-navigable, exclusive space for economic and affective agents, once again with labour unseen, and profits centralised. 

These several (well-known) artistic practices have been looking into this for a while now, engaging with the media and market itself.

Inside the White Square

Already meta, but still modernist interfaces.

First Transaction (Bitcoin Raw Transaction)

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