Oh, blockchain… There are dudes out these who’d get hard just from seeing our subject line. Like, any subject line with the b-word in it. This week’s piece of art is for those of us who stay dry.
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People have been scribbling dicks for centuries. Every era has its dicks [and may I add, vulvas are finally gaining much-deserved attention]. Dicks of every era are represented within a certain narrative of power relations, economic circumstances, availability of tools, and freedom of expression. Every dick is just a surface of the mind and the society behind it.
So, when conceptual artists Ida Jonsson and Simon Saarinen created their Permanent Phallus on Ethereum blockchain, they did what artists do best: communicate a human thought, thousands of years old, in a novel way; the way that personifies our times.
While there is plenty of hype surrounding blockchain and many of us still don’t fully, viscerally, grasp the workings of the technology, this artwork aims to communicate a couple of things about our times.
One, the technology in use stores data permanently and immutably. You can’t just go in and change Simon and Ida’s work without a sweat. In a way, it’s a cave painting of our time.
Two, it is childish, with a purpose. We live at a time when expertise is highly valued, for better and for worse. While blockchain did enter the mainstream narrative, it still is far away from ordinary users and creators. Even Ida and Simon collaborated with an expert who encoded the dick into Ethereum blockchain for them. As Ida put it in one interview, ‘[b]lockchain is a very sophisticated and intellectual platform, and making something that seems like a pointless drawing on such platform felt very liberating’.
See other pieces from the Permanent Art series here: https://ida-simon.com/Permanent-Art