One day in early 2014, Edwin Rosero, a self-taught digital artist and graphic designer who had been tinkering about in Photoshop since a friend gave him an early Wacom tablet in high school, saw an online open call for a pop-up exhibition slated for later that year at London’s Tate Britain museum. The event Loud Tate: Code was a one-day event of art, music and performance exploring how code in language, fashion and technology shape culture. The work he created for that show was a digital derivative of English-born artist Peter Monamy’s 18th century painting Ships Distress in a Storm and was part of a wider series where he used a synthesis of 3D modeled geometry, digitally painted texture mapping, algorithmic pixel sorting and color-channel processing. His conceptual framework — an exploration of technological singularity, and the continuum of consciousness — is still topical today and speaks of the surprising prescience that Rosero also had about the way blockchain technology could impact the art market. In 2014, as he was learning and reading about Bitcoin, he had the idea to hide a public key in the color channels of his art, then send funds to that key, thus proving its provenance using blockchain’s immutable ledger.

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