If a Token Could Speak

I was invited by ELEKTRA gallery to present a solo exhibition of my work around blockchain, NFTs and the notion of provenance. I created a projected video using 3D animation, holographic video and a website.

Project description:
The NFT departs from the traditional diffusion structure of the exhibition, which is often defined by a future (announcement of the exhibition), a present (opening of the institution's doors) and a past (archive). Rather, the work, its archive and its sale are flattened into a single experience. Indeed, the NFT is not an image, but an assembling of all its metadata. It is in a way an archive, and it is this archive that is sold on the blockchain markets. The works in the exhibition If a Token Could Speak question the status of the collectible object : is it a work of art or an archive?

The NFT embodies a balancing act between mass media entertainment and the arts; the vocabulary used to describe it belongs to both. Through her experiments in cryptography and the new context of diffusion offered by the blockchain, Sophie Auger is interested in the following questions: at what point does the life of a work begin, continue and end? At what point does the audience experience the work? When and how does an experience become past?

In the video If a Token Could Speak (2022), an NFT celebrates the neoliberal tour de force of the blockchain that allows any quality-less image, a hundred times downloaded, shared, and reformatted to gain the same value as a rare work of art. Catalog (2022) is an auction catalog in the form of a holographic video. All the elements that make up the exhibition at ELEKTRA Gallery have been registered on the Tezos blockchain network as NFTs: the various stages of creation of the works, the characters in the If a Token Could Speak video, the press release, the exhibition archive and its documentation have been given an individual value and are being auctioned. Holographic devices are usually intended for commercial use (in stores, gyms or fast foods) and present products in a visually dynamic way to attract consumers.