Nguyen Wahed is pleased to present the debut New York solo exhibition of 0xfff, an artist whose Transaction Sculptures (2018–2026) propose that the contract itself, not the image it might certify nor the object it might authenticate, constitutes the material of the work.
What does it mean to sculpt with execution rather than with matter? The transaction sculpture offers no form until a participant supplies one. An arrangement of smart contracts, written and then relinquished, receives any quantity of value and passes it between them with to a logic that resists anticipation,
To situate this practice we must reach back half a century, into a lineage the last decade of digital art discourse has been curiously reluctant to claim. Sol LeWitt's wall drawings subsist as instruction, realised by hands not the artist's own. Yves Klein's Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility located value not in an object but in a ritual of exchange and in the willingness of two parties to honour a receipt. Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube was set in motion and abandoned to its own indefinite performance. 0xfff inherits each of these propositions and introduces a condition none of these artists could have specified: the score is enforced by consensus rather than by trust. A sculpture of arrangements occupy space - that space being the shared state of a ledger maintained by tens of thousands of machines that have agreed, improbably and continuously, to agree. They hold form as a sequence of instructions whose execution any observer may trace precisely as it occurred.
Performance lecture
September 25, 6 - 9:00pm
For the opening night, 0xfff addresses the world as a systems problem. What money became at the moment it became software. What a network owes those who live inside it. Who is permitted to agree upon value, and by what authority they do so. And why a decade of argument about digital ownership was conducted, almost in its entirety, in the wrong vocabulary.
Over the course of the evening the artist will pass one billion dollars of transaction value through the contract of a work on view. A desired body of capital settled on Mainnet and legible on any screen in the room or anywhere on earth.
Evening co-hosted with Rhizome on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, and held alongside the concurrent basement residency of Kim Asendorf.