Can code be art? Or can art be code
Into the world of Rhea Myers, originally published on MORROW collective medium page
Rhea Myers, Is Art, 2014/2015, Ethereum DApp.
by Anna Seaman
In a 2014 essay titled ‘Artworld Ethereum — Identity, Ownership and Authenticity’, Rhea Myers expounded upon the concept of smart contracts, a term that was coined circa 1993 by computer scientist Nick Szabo. In doing so, she drew upon Lawrence Lessig’s 1999 argument that “code is law”, cleverly and swiftly moving to the notion of truth. The phrase ‘code is law’ had become popular in the blockchain era with suggestions that code should replace law for blockchain based transactions due to its technological prospects for certainty. Or as Myers says: “it is a libertarian attempt to reduce the costs and uncertainty of having to trust human beings and interpret ambiguous human language, or possibly a dystopian replacement of rights and safeguards with binary logic.”
Transferring trust from humans to the immutable ledger that blockchain created is something that has fascinated Myers since the nascent days of cryptocurrency. However, overlay that with conceptual art and you initially arrive at nothing. “As art is defined by its inutility, a contract that does nothing must be art,” she wrote ironically. She then went on to create a series of smart contract programs that represent all aspects of art making — starting from that code that does nothing (equating to a blank canvas). After implementing small changes to that code it then symbolised a single work, later a body of work, then, an exhibition and finally, a catalogue raisonné. It is conceptual art so deeply philosophical that one must pause to understand its significance.
Take a step back to Lessig and ponder upon the notion that if code is law, then the current system is fallible — creating fault lines in the structures upon which the modern world exists. If the laws that govern our lives are mutable, then where can we place our trust?
“The Bitcoin whitepaper came out immediately after the 2008 financial crash,” she explains. “When a generation of people (millennials) were facing the possibility that the dollar was in jeopardy. Bitcoin’s cultural reception was both a reflection of anxiety at the prospect of the collapse of economic order and an alternative to it. It was an attempt to recreate a security and a form of proof that was mathematical, logical, philosophical, and reliable.”
Rhea Myers. Proof of Existence, 2014. Bitcoin transaction.
A crypto artist, writer, and hacker, Myers’ takes an artistic approach to rules where she follows them even to the point of absurdity. Her earliest blockchain works toyed with the mathematical certainty that blockchain promised. In Proof of Existence (2014), she produced an encrypted hash of her own genome and encoded it onto the Bitcoin blockchain. For a second part of that project, she did the same for the word “God.”
Myers makes art to understand the world, placing technology and culture in mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing. For her, blockchain is a medium for embodying, critiquing, and moving beyond the anxieties of post-financial-crisis society. Inspired by the histories of conceptualism and net art, she has made work with digital imagery and computer code, as well as producing theory, critique, and fiction.
“I started by crafting raw transactions to model intangible forms before moving on to smart contracts and then NFTs that create ironized forms of property and control. Along the way I focused increasingly on the anxiety of ownership that blockchain property embodies, and the pairing of absolute identity with absolute secrecy that it is infused with due to its cryptographic foundations.”
In short, it pokes at something that she calls “the aching need for certainty,” which blockchain offers but rescinds at the same time.
The works she presents are code but to present code as art is problematic, because code has precise meaning and art, inherently, does not. In that way, Myers straddles a gap that we experience but have trouble pinpointing.
“For Proof of Existence I was not trying to prove or disprove anything,” she says. “The point is precisely that it doesn’t prove or disprove anything, and what are you going to do about it?”
It is this satirical sense of humour that underlines Myers’ stance and her criticism of society whilst simultaneously offering a point from which to understand it. She has fun but in doing so reaches uncomfortable realities.
Rhea Myers. Tokens Equal Text / Type Opposite Images.
Tokens Equal Text (2019) 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, which 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.
Misreading or misuse is at the heart of this work. Tokens Equal Text is essentially a creative misuse of the Ethereum standards to comment on the genre of appropriation art. She wanted to “create a critical circuit between blockchain technology and art theory.” To be clearer, the works are a written description of an imagined artwork rather than a digital image file itself and succeed in subverting the idea of what is art as well as the idea of ownership. “Its subjects are those of past promises of the satisfactions of ownership and consumption of commodities which are then ironized by an economically precarious later generation.” They place into uncertainty the idea of belonging as well as critically commenting upon the worlds in which they are embedded.
Type Opposite Images (2023) is a reversal of the Tokens Equal Text project. It translates the original colorful aesthetics into what she calls a “grim monochrome of its other’’ or, in other descriptions, an “evil twin”. The mirror writing text in black and white further interrogates her initial concept and highlights the gaps between aesthetics and ethics.
It is never clear where Myers sits in terms of morals and that is deliberately so. “There will always be some injustice caused by your good intentions,” she says. “’Code is law’ sounds like a cry to a utopian world of clarity and transparency and lack of corruption and ambiguity but in fact it’s just another thing you can exploit or get wrong.
“I am here to do something that only art can do, that sort of looks real and tricks your mind into thinking that you are really looking at this. That here is an actual thing and you are encountering it. But this state of encountering, is that with the work? Of course, no, it isn’t.”
Rhea Myers, courtesy of the artist.
This editorial is part of a series of essays and interviews contextualizing MORROW collective’s {R(Evolutionaries);} project, exhibition and sale commemorating a decade of blockchain art. Launched at Art Dubai Digital 2024 and brought to market in collaboration with SuperRare and Sotheby’s.
For more info www.morrow-collective.com/revolutionaries