“Most of my work deals with social consensus”

An interview with Nili Lerner, originally published on MORROW collective medium page

Depiction of Nili Lerner’s ICOKE coin, part of the NILIcoin currency, through which she envisioned a new financial model against the grain of centralized capitalist economy

by Anna Seaman

Nili Lerner experienced an ‘aha’ moment in 2008, in the wake of the global financial crash when she realized that her artistic practice could delve into the subject of money. She was interested in the role of money in society and how one’s financial attributes represent the productive potential of each person. However, while she saw money as a superpower in the capitalist economy, she was also interested in the potential of technology to build a new kind of world.

“It was the realization that we already have everything we need to create a new world based on the full potential of each person, rather than the economy,” Lerner said.

From the late 1980s to early 2000s, Lerner was primarily a painter, living and working in an art center in New York. She was an active studio artist but never entered into the commercial structure of the art world. “Most of my art exhibitions and sales took place in my studio, with no need to look for art dealers or a gallery to present my work to the public,” she said.

Nevertheless, the strength of economic systems impacts all society and it was this notion that drew her Lerner move away from painting and mixed media and into conceptual art.

“Most of my work deals with social consensus; deconstructing what everyone is taking for granted, and figuring out the building blocks to reconstruct it in a way that presents an alternative configuration” she said. “In the 90s, I thought the stock market was the root of all evil but whilst it is nice to be against the corporations, all of our life depends on profit eventually. This fascinated me and the 2008 monetary crisis presented an opportunity to offer a critical analysis upon what may have been considered an ‘expert only’ matter.”

Nili Lerner’s The Dollar Ribbon was a performance piece made in New York in 2008 during Lerner’s first explorations into the meaning of value and money.

Since 2008 and her moment of self-confessed clarity, Lerner has worked on projects dealing with the concept of money, first by re-shaping a dollar bill to question its social meaning and function. The Dollar Ribbon was executed as a performance piece during the Gowanus Studios Tour weekend in Brooklyn in October 2008.

“I was sitting at a table folding a $1 bill into a ribbon and stitching it onto a safety pin,” she explained. “Then, I pinned a ‘for sale’ sign onto a piece of newspaper from that weekend’s stock market listing. Each ribbon sold for two $1 bills from which $1 paid for the work and the other was used to craft the next ribbon.”

Later, when smartphones landed in the markets and Twitter was still an esoteric social app, she integrated technology into her art, manipulating social media as an art form. “Social media emphasized for the first time, the social factor as a direct economic factor,” she said. On Twitter, she constructed tweets under a user handle @whatar (which she conceived as the start of a question — ‘what are you doing?’) For six months in 2009, she tweeted conceptual responses to this cryptic handle calling them “art tweets”.

“The fact that I could create a piece to be published on different timelines simultaneously, sometimes using the comments as part of the evolution of that piece, was incredible,” she said. “And even though apparently only a few people could figure out what the hell I was doing, it allowed the creative process to continue flowing out of me into the vast world of digital exposure.”

During the social unrest of 2011 when the Occupy Movements took root all over the world, Lerner’s art came back to focus on money and the abuse of social value. “Money created as credit takes the social value of trust and transforms it instantly to an asset one can trade in order to buy an existing materialistic product,” she explained. “Credit is a future that doesn’t exist yet but still materializes into being instantly.”

Around that time Lerner learned about Bitcoin and the technical decentralization enabled by the blockchain innovation. She was also exposed to the Colored Coins whitepaper as a concept of tokenization over an existing blockchain, this was when she realized that her ideas could be actualized on BTC. And, when the Counterparty protocol was released, she started planning her token mints. Not being a native to the crypto culture and technology, it meant a steep learning curve. She began that learning curve on the social network of the crypto community, Bitcointalk. There, on a thread named NILIcoins opened on September 14th 2014, she announced her tokenized art project, describing her intent in a few sentences: “These coins are created as art that can gain collector’s value after initial distribution”. Then she described her views regarding crypto tokens becoming a viable alternative to bank credit and explained, “the project itself was conceived as a result of the need to illustrate this concept in real terms.’’

The original announcement of NILIcoins in September 2014 on the Bitcointalk Forum.

By the end of September 2014, Lerner issued all 10 tokens. Seven of them adopted brand names to demonstrate the monetary schemes suited to the industry they represent. Two of them were social tokens and the token named [NILI] was backed by her existing physical paintings.

The idea behind the [NILI] token was that a buyer would be investing in the value of Lerner’s physical art by holding the tokens representing its value as a share. Indeed, it was an early precursor to the concept of fractional art investment (which came much later) as well as an embrace of decentralization that could enable everyone to profit from a perceived and, as she calls it, “moral value.”

“We, the public, who value the work, should be able to share profit,” she stated on the Bitcointalk forum. “A painting on the wall of a museum could be owned by thousands of people, who are not rich enough to buy it outright but want to be invested in the art and benefit financially from its intrinsic value and the public appreciation of the art — just as they would if they invested in any other kind of product.”

For the seven branded tokens — (the brand names she appropriated included Disney, Coca-Cola, eBay, Toyota and Apple) — Lerner described a unique monetary model as her statement: “the coins are an illustration for the real coins these industries may create one day”. It was a model, she said, that would enable these organizations “to capitalize directly on their commercial power.”

She also created a topic on the public forums for each coin considering the responses as part of the art. In January 2015, a solo show at the NYC Bitcoin Center titled On The Shoulders of Giants displayed physical objects and prints created from some of the dialogs recorded on the Coca-Cola Coin [ICOKE] and the Disney Coin [IDISNEY] threads.

Nili Lerner, self portrait. Courtesy of the artist.

The work however, did not stop there. The driving force of Lerner’s now-years-long project was to continue to create dialogs around the work on the forum that she considered as part the output of her art. On the topic dedicated to the Disney Coin, where she began a fictional dialogue between Mickey and Minnie Mouse acting as the fictional presenters of the token, Lerner continued to generate dialogues while adding more characters to the “team” with Satoshi Nakamoto, the presumed pseudonymous developer of Bitcoin and author of the Bitcoin white paper, being the first one to be added. Through these dialogues Lerner constructed the concept of identity, suited for the digital age of virtual extension and predicted an age where fictional or artificial beings would interact with human beings.

For the latest phase of her work, Lerner brought in yet another technological tool — AI, which in itself is powered by the mind of the consensus — the conceptual starting point for her project. AI is now utilized in most of her contemporary work to prove her original claim regarding major cultural assets such as Disney characters.

“AI generates content using information it has been trained to interpret using an algorithm generating new content based on the most likely emergent consensus regarding the meaning of the collection of terms used,” she said. “Thus the ‘Mickey’ and ‘Minnie’ of my dialogs never noted as “Mickey Mouse” or “Minnie Mouse’’, were generated as the Disney characters once their dialogues were fed as prompts to the DALL-E image-generator.” Another comment then on the power of corporations in forming the consensus which as such turns into a “public domain” as profoundly demonstrated by the AI generated content.

For the MORROW collective exhibition and ensuing Sotheby’s auction, Lerner minted Real Toon, tangible ownership over the fictional dialog created by the artist in 2018 on the Bitcointalk Forum. These lines, each fed to DALL-E as a prompt, autonomously generated high resolution images of the classic Disney’s mouse cartoon characters. The minted piece is a low resolution screenshot construct of the dialogs displaying the generated images next to the prompt.

The Architecture, is a sequence of 47 dialog lines that recount a conversation between fictional characters — Mickey, Minnie and Satoshi — and that were written in 2018. In 2023, Lerner instructed an LLM AI chatbot to narrate a new fictional story based on its understanding of the dialogues. She then created a handwritten “original’’ manuscript of the story.

The conceptual framework of the pieces demonstrates, using the most contemporary AI tech, the concepts and claims that the artist made when originally creating her tokens and dialogs. “When the image generator autonomously chooses to depict the names in the dialogs as the Disney characters it proves my earlier claims regarding public cultural assets made by influential large corporations,” she says. “The sci-fi narrative generated by the chatbot on the other hand, is an interpretation of the potential of AI as hinted by the characters in these early dialogs. The Language Model understands these dialogs in which the characters detail the path for becoming an autonomous AI entity.”

The story hints at intriguing future possibilities where sentient AIs or virtual beings attempt to establish their digital rights and personhood through technology that is independent of human law but in full cooperation with human beings. In a way, Lerner is transferring the power that she attempted to reclaim with the NILIcoins over to the machines. In them, it seems, she has always had more confidence than the fallibility of humankind.

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