In 2023 the Museum of Crypto Art ran a fundraiser it billed as "the largest artistic collaboration in the history of crypto art": more than seven hundred artists, their contributions assembled into a colour-saturated mosaic echoing, intentionally or not, The Million Dollar Homepage of 2005, which sold a million pixels as screen real estate, and which, two decades on, is still reachable, even as most of the links its pixels point to have died.
My contribution ran against the mosaic's grain: Vault of The Museum of Crypto Art
is a classic black-and-white photograph, made in the Copenhagen Metro in June 2023 with a seventeen-year-old Nikon D3 and a 55mm lens from around 1989, set deliberately against the AI- and CGI-driven colour it expected to accompan.
Every mental process, Siegmund Freud wrote in 1917, exists first in an unconscious phase and passes from there into consciousness "just as a photographic picture begins as a negative and only becomes a picture after being turned into a positive; nor is it necessary for every negative to become a positive."
Photography is light-writing, phōs and graphē, and the Copenhagen metro is one of the few underground systems in the world designed to be written on by daylight: its deep stations are lit through glass pyramids at street level, prisms that pour sun twenty metres down onto the platforms, so that a person waiting for a driverless train stands in weather
A separate, supplementary version exists, one that was lost, or perhaps rather orphaned, when the Foundation platform closed down on August 27th.
It is kept, of all places, by a museum: the ZKM (Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe) in Karlsruhe, Germany runs a project called the Net Art Extinction Timeline, and its entry on the Foundation shutdown is a small masterpiece of the death-certificate genre.
Category: Platform Shutdown. Impact: Major. Affected artwork: Vault of the Museum of Crypto Art, Kasper Bergholt, status Degraded.
A camera is a small vault with a hole in it. The camera obscura was a dark room before it was an instrument. So the picture is a vault, made by a vault, inside a vault.
Source: The Vault of the Museum of Crypto Art, 2023.
