In a few minutes, electronic music will start pulsing, stuffed animals will be flung through the air, women will emerge spinning Technicolor hula hoops, and a mechanical bull will rev into action, bucking off one delighted rider after another.

I remember reading about Geraldine Juárez’s 2014 bitcoin-burning experiment at the time and getting immensely impressed by its boldness. Back then, crypto seemed like a fringe phenomenon – worthy of radical artistic interventions but not earnest policy debate – so I didn’t make much of it.

A text written for IOCOSE‘s exhibition “All of Your Base” held at Aksioma Project Space in Ljubljana, 1 December 2021–14 January 2022.

Published as a PostScriptUM PDF and print-on-demand publication.

► WHY I WANT TO FUCK ELON MUSK ► eBROCHURE (PDF)► PRINT ON DEMAND [coming soon]► LIST ON ISSUU

In their space race the gurus of the NewSpace movement are expanding an imaginary that hybridizes individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, counterculture and utopianism. “Why I Want to Fuck Elon Musk” plays with these cultural references, taking inspiration from the most emblematic statements spoken or tweeted by Elon Musk in recent years. Daniel Rourke, a London-based writer, artist and academic, has resorted to working with the OpenAI Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) language model to imagine and narrate chronicles from a near future in which blockchains have materialized and the deepfakes of Bezos and Musk have colonized Mars. The fictional universe thus created by human and non-human imagination builds a literary counterpart to IOCOSE’s latest works – the video animations Pointing at a New Planet (2020) and Free from History (2021) – presented on the occasion of the “All of Your Base” exhibition at Aksioma | Project Space in Ljubljana.

Download PDF (eBROCHURE) View on Aksioma website

On May 4, “Ethereum Classic” popped onto the trending section of my Twitter page. I narrowed my eyes and I laughed.

Vanuatu is an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, with an estimated population of just over 300,000.

When Christie’s auctioned for $69 million a “nonfungible token,” or NFT, linked to the digital collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days, many people asked WTF was an NFT? And why was a relative unknown artist by the name of Beeple now the third-highest selling living artist—for a digital work

In an interview with The New Yorker, Beeple said that as soon as he received his stash in ETH, he became concerned regarding Ethereum’s volatility, hence the immediate move to convert everything to US dollars. “Boom, 53 million dollars in my account.

The same fascistic tendencies Walter Benjamin saw in the rise of mass media are at play in the NFT "revolution," too.

I recently created a thread that on Twitter regarding the lower-bound estimates for how much electricity the Bitcoin blockchain consumed using publicly available numbers. The first part of this post is a slightly modified version of that thread.

When businesses latch onto a buzzword, it quickly becomes the solution to everything. Not long ago, in the era of “big data,” companies scrambled to add chief data scientists to their ranks.

Bitcoin “miners” are electromagnetic alchemists, effectively turning megawatt-hours of electricity into the world’s fastest-growing currency.

In this text, we introduce Txtblock, a decentralized tool for publishing and distribution of digital text in a format called the block—a squarely defined, eternally immutable unit of information. The block is the successor of the book. Cryptographically bound, the block is given a name that is directly derived from its content. In this way it is made tamper-proof and resistant to censorship. We see this proposal as a small contribution to the internet renaissance.