A beautifully produced anthology of crypto-artist, writer, and hacker
Rhea Myers's pioneering blockchain art, along with a selection of her
essays, reviews, and fictions.
DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto-artist, writer, and
hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a
day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently
explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain.
Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at
Sotheby's, Myers embarked on her first art projects focusing on
blockchain tech in 2011, making her one of the first artists to engage
in creative, speculative, and conceptual engagements with "the new
internet."
Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers's
blockchain artworks along with her essays, reviews, and fictions--a
sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the
artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always
generously demystifying and often mischievous.
Her deep understanding of the technical history and debates around
blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto
movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied
its ascendancy. Remodeling the tropes of conceptual art and net.art to
explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value,
culture, and currency, Myers's work has become required viewing for
anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and
collectivity.
