“Value and art — a specular relation”
Interview with Sarah Meyohas, originally published on MORROW collective medium page
Sarah Meyohas. BITCHCOIN, Public Key: BAyq44Aa7btZBJ7RLHUnLC8MoDNe6gETTw, 2015 (no professional photography available). Courtesy of the artist.
by Anna Seaman
It was a play on words that sat atop another play on words. When Sarah Meyohas envisioned Bitchcoin (2014) and launched the project in January 2015 as a physically-backed asset on a fork of Bitcoin, she was fusing art and tech with a clever metaphor. Bitchcoin was a spin off from Bitcoin, itself a name that references the financial worlds of gold, mining and speculation but Meyohas added another layer — gender.
“The intention was to make an explicitly financial instrument — currency, which is already a masculine construct — and gender it as feminine and bitchy,” she said. “And I also wanted it to be backed by something that has matter to it, a body, not just a free floating currency.”
Bitchcoin was originally backed by the artist’s photography at a fixed rate of one token to 25 square-inches of one of the artist’s current or future photographs and it was one of the first instances of a physical work of art being put on a blockchain. Speculations — the artist’s ongoing series of photographs — depict infinite reflections using mirrors, where reflection is a metaphor for value. “Value is created through replacement,” reads her artist statement. “In an exchange, one is in the place of the other. As a result, the metaphor of reflection goes both ways… The light is caught bouncing between mirrors in an endless exchange — a specular relation.”
Sarah Meyohas, Liquid Speculation #25 (2021). ERC-1155 token.
In 2015, it felt natural for Meyohas to use the blockchain alongside her art to express these ideas of value. “It was fascinating to me because it put together economics, currency and technology and in some way politics. It offered a new way to think about value especially in relation to art. Artworks are cultural assets that don’t really have cash flow, that are purely speculative.”
With these parallel conceptual projects, Meyohas straddles economics, philosophy, technology, social constructs, gender, seduction and infinity. It is this kind of deep thinking that underpins all of Meyohas’ practice, which provides an intelligible visual language to articulate the systems and complex operations that increasingly govern our world. It takes a multifaceted approach and mindset to achieve this goal.
Born in New York in 1991, Meyohas attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a BS in Finance from The Wharton School and a BA in International Relations. In 2015, Meyohas earned an MFA from Yale University and in 2017, she was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. That same year, she presented Cloud of Petals at Red Bull Arts New York. The exhibition consisted of a mosaic of 3,291 rose petals, a gallery of sculptures made up of two way mirrors and discarded wires, a basement full of virtual reality programs playing on headsets suspended from the ceiling, and a 30-minute 16mm film that captured Meyohas’ process in creating the work.
Still from Sarah Meyohas’ Cloud of Petals, 30min 16mm film.
The project began in an abandoned warehouse — the site of the former Bell Labs — where Meyohas hired 16 workers to photograph 100,000 individual rose petals. She then harnessed this massive dataset to train a Generative Adversarial Network, otherwise known as a GAN, an artificial intelligence algorithm that was able to learn to generate new unique petals forever, turning the physical petals into digital pixels. The contracted workers were also asked to select one petal from each rose that they deemed the most beautiful petals, according to their own, subjective notions of beauty. This resulted in 3,291 selected petals that were pressed and subsequently tokenized to each back an individual Bitchcoin. The sculptures in the exhibition were made from discarded wall paneling and wiring from the Bell Works switchboards and used mirrors to recreate the effect of the Speculations photographs. The virtual reality headsets allowed the viewer to interact with AI-generated rose petals. The corresponding film, Cloud of Petals “traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence,” she said. It also charts the transformation of the delicate, vibrant and colourful flowers into nothing but data.
It was also a kind of performative piece, that made a commentary on the capitalist economy without landing at any conclusion. “In performance art you are mimicking the trends of society, showing people what the world really is — in this case it was about capitalism and pushing it to its limits to show its faults — and for me that is an interesting way to work.
“For me, the commercial outcome didn’t matter, it was just pushing for the most radical thoughts to come forward.”
Cloud of Petals did however gain critical praise. In 2021, the artist migrated Bitchcoin from its native chain to Ethereum and now, each Bitchcoin is minted as an ERC-1155 token and is backed by one of the 3,291 pressed rose petals. In 2023, the film as well as two Bitchcoin NFTs and an original Bitchcoin certificate were acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
By linking the organic with the man-made and notions of value and beauty coupled with the infinite space that is our digital world, Meyohas’ practice allows us to see so much more than is normally possible and for that, her concepts deserve speculation.
The project began in an abandoned warehouse — the site of the former Bell Labs — where Meyohas hired 16 workers to photograph 100,000 individual rose petals. She then harnessed this massive dataset to train a Generative Adversarial Network, otherwise known as a GAN, an artificial intelligence algorithm that was able to learn to generate new unique petals forever, turning the physical petals into digital pixels. The contracted workers were also asked to select one petal from each rose that they deemed the most beautiful petals, according to their own, subjective notions of beauty. This resulted in 3,291 selected petals that were pressed and subsequently tokenized to each back an individual Bitchcoin. The sculptures in the exhibition were made from discarded wall paneling and wiring from the Bell Works switchboards and used mirrors to recreate the effect of the Speculations photographs. The virtual reality headsets allowed the viewer to interact with AI-generated rose petals. The corresponding film, Cloud of Petals “traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence,” she said. It also charts the transformation of the delicate, vibrant and colourful flowers into nothing but data.
It was also a kind of performative piece, that made a commentary on the capitalist economy without landing at any conclusion. “In performance art you are mimicking the trends of society, showing people what the world really is — in this case it was about capitalism and pushing it to its limits to show its faults — and for me that is an interesting way to work.
“For me, the commercial outcome didn’t matter, it was just pushing for the most radical thoughts to come forward.”
Cloud of Petals did however gain critical praise. In 2021, the artist migrated Bitchcoin from its native chain to Ethereum and now, each Bitchcoin is minted as an ERC-1155 token and is backed by one of the 3,291 pressed rose petals. In 2023, the film as well as two Bitchcoin NFTs and an original Bitchcoin certificate were acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
By linking the organic with the man-made and notions of value and beauty coupled with the infinite space that is our digital world, Meyohas’ practice allows us to see so much more than is normally possible and for that, her concepts deserve speculation.
Sarah Meyohas. 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/revolutionaries