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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 network activity 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 replacement with moments yet-to-come is now anticipated in our screen lives. This experience is also reflective of a mentality found in the NFT and crypto space.

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.

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. 
More about 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.’

Benjamin H Bratton
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