burner
BURNER #10: live dynamic view
The disappearance of the current moment is a common experience. Its replacement with a moment yet-to-arrive is now anticipated. People fetishise digital images and networked markets, which in turn are designed to keep us hooked.
BURNER dynamically reacts to people’s activity on the blockchain. It harnesses network processes to create a neverending stream of dopamine-triggering visual stimulation. It demonstrates disappearing states, the burning away of moments in time.
All 256 pieces are interconnected and all are dependent on the live state of Ethereum. As network usage increases, increasing gas prices as a result, a more forceful artwork develops. As such, BURNER strives to picture a kind of sum total of the inscrutible processes happening on the chain.
Ethereum gas prices are made from the competing desires, intentions and beliefs of millions of entities. Digital transactions create overwhelming amounts of this information in block time, cyclically revealing fresh states. Likewise BURNER is never finished, there's always a new variant.
Taking found imagery of real gas and digitally processing it to the point where the original forms break down, BURNER pictures an unending network process we participate in but which escapes our comprehension.
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
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
We look at it, but does it look back at us? Does it shape us as we shape it?’
Loucas Braconnier
Essay on BURNER
