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burner




BURNER #10: live dynamic view









BURNER
is a dynamic cryptoart series that changes every block in response to live Ethereum gas price data. All 256 artworks are interconnected and all are dependent on the state of the blockchain. As Ethereum network usage increases, a more forceful artwork develops.

BURNER dynamically reacts to the usage of gas on Ethereum, but as an artwork it also explores the idea of burning states. The burning away of moments in time.

The disappearance of the current moment is a common experience. Its immediate replacement with new moments has come to be expected in our screen lives. This experience is reflective of a mentality found in the NFT and crypto space, as well as life in general.

Gas price data is made from the competing desires, intentions and beliefs of millions of entities. Transactions on Ethereum create overwhelming amounts of information in block time, cyclically revealing unforeseen states. BURNER pictures this continuous decentralised process. The artwork is never finished, there's always a new variant.

It’s common to fetishise technology and we can easily become hooked on the network systems we use. We also live in a society marked by impermanence. Little is stable, everything changing constantly. The media and technological landscape even more. Blockchain markets even faster.

BURNER is in a state of constant impermanence. It changes as the blockchain changes, an unstoppable process we participate in but have little control over. BURNER presents these changes in an abstract form. 
See every BURNER


‘The Stack is an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly is in turn building us in its own image. This planetary-scale computing infrastructure… is powerful and dangerous, both remedy and poison, a utopian and dystopian machine at once.’
Jacob Gaboury
The Stack, MIT Press







‘Every block is an update of information. A database forever expanding and reacting in coordination to things happening inside and outside of [the Ethereum Virtual Machine]. The more we ask it things, the more it amasses information on us. Does it understand us? Can it speak back? We look at it, but does it look back at us? Does it shape us as we shape it?’
Loucas Braconnier
Essay on BURNER