Closed digital Circuit, 2021
In 2021, the 100th birthday of Joseph Beuys arrived in the midst of Coronavirus lockdown and a brink of economic crisis. Simultaneously, the crypto currency has shot up in value and Jurgen Ostarhild examined its principles in the light of the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys, venturing on a new series of work to develop a visual depiction of a blockchain.
Coming from the roots of photography as the first source of image automation and transforming his work through the digital revolution to arrive at the hexadecimal colour code as the fundamental building block of contemporary images, Ostarhild found an excess of this code mined and circulated by the blockchain servers, ready to be up-cycled into art work. Moreover, the principles of crypto production and its multi-source legitimised through code contribution, maintained by blockchain and connected by the Internet (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations, aka DAO) are remarkably reminiscent in their structure of “Organisation for Direct Democracy by Referendum” described by Joseph Beuys.
What Joseph Beuys had envisioned as the ideal human society is currently taking place on the Internet and it can produce artwork from the available data with the help of automated continuously running algorithms, the image machines designed by Jurgen Ostarhild. Regularly supplied with data by the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, those machines produce its visual representation, but are also themselves a part of the non-narrative art production process. In our reality, this process becomes the art work, inalienably connected to the informational and financial online exchange, forming a closed digital Circuit.