Alternative video on view:
Nguyen Wahed New York
504 East 12th St
1009 New York, NY
Main video on view:
Art Basel Miami 2025
Booth Z5
Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139
3 - 7 December 2025
Pease constructs video works where everyday urban environments achieve hypnotic density through temporal manipulation. Parking lots, crosswalks: spaces capitalism renders purely functional, become surreal revelation sites through obsessive post-production layering. People move in impossible synchronization, multiple instances flood frames, objects appear according to inexplicable yet inevitable logic. Loops refuse narrative progression, suspending viewers in perpetual present-tense, generating perceptual oscillation between immersion and critical distance. VHS-textured aesthetics evoke memory's phenomenology.
The new work Zero Dollar Man, commissioned for the solo presentation by Nguyen Wahed at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, extends this investigation through blockchain's probabilistic architecture. A custom smart contract enables public interaction, where viewers can attempt to trigger an alternate video version, yet with its agency remaining illusory. Employing Chainlink's decentralised oracle, the switching mechanism operates on pure randomness, indifferent to human intention. The work's protagonist, like the public, discovers that desire for transformation doesn't guarantee manifestation, where chance governs outcome. This technological fatalism mirrors the video's internal logic: a man who wants to change his destiny confronts systems, structural, algorithmic, existential, that remain fundamentally unmoved by individual will, where pressing one's luck to process might change nothing at all at the first attempt.
The contract governing the work's behaviour is deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. Anyone can provide funds for the Chainlink calls by sending ETH to the contract.
Live version and website: https://www.zerodollarman.com/