What does it mean to render the invisible tangible: the three bodies of work presented here approach that question from irreconcilable material positions, and yet they rhyme: volcanic stone lit from within, light folded into hologram, the ghost of a cursor raised in braille.
Nicolas Sassoon's Prophets refuses the myth of technological immateriality at its root. Pumice, formed in geological violence, riddled with lobes, cracks, crevasses and voids, is coupled with LCD screens whose pixelated animations evoke flowing lava, suggesting a magmatic life silently contained within the stones: a volcanic unrest hinting back at chaotic origins. The assemblages invoke the contemplative tradition of Gongshi and Suiseki, from which electronic hardware and screens emerge to form heads and figures, technology becoming a vessel through which inert rocks appear to express another state of existence. The work proposes a speculative geology of our digital condition: from the minerals forming microprocessors to the machine-spun threads of sand that connect us online, our digital culture remains completely dependent on geological earth, despite the persistent fallacy that media is immaterial, invisible, in the cloud.
Sarah Meyohas first encountered Bitcoin in 2014 as what she called a radically creative act, value conjured collectively, anonymously, from nothing but consensus. Nine years later she returned with holography: a medium that is hyper-physical and completely virtual in equal measure, an image that exists only in the movement between viewer and light, suspended in silver-halide emulsion as both presence and disappearance. Each hologram's image is inscribed as an ordinal onto block 9 satoshis; the physical work follows the ordinal's collector. The ledger and the emulsion become one object.
Marcel Schwittlick's Caltech Studies recovers an earlier founding gesture: the cursor movements of scientists who spent years annotating thousands of images so that machines might learn to see. Those traces of sustained, institutional attention are rendered here in braille embossing, which translates the mouse paths into tactile relief readable only by touch. What taught the machine to see becomes, here, something the machine cannot see at all.
Presented with GoMining, each work in the exhibition is accompanied by a digital companion that pairs physical ownership with an active Bitcoin mining node.