Artist statement
ONES AND ZEROS is a series of artworks about money, value and the strange collective agreements, calculations and derangements we enter into that make either of them real.
Each work consists of 96 two-pence coins arranged in a grid. Heads and tails act as ones and zeros, encoding a different twelve-character message: MONEYISFRAUD, TRUSTINTRUST, PROMISETOPAY, FALSEECONOMY...
There are 96 possible works in the series. But they don't exist yet.
Instead, each is represented by a unique digital Coincoin, issued as an NFT. Every Coincoin has exactly the same nominal value: £20,736.66 — a deliberately over-engineered calculation of the accumulated value generated by 96 circulating 2p coins over their working lives.
Buy a Coincoin and its corresponding physical artwork is minted and sent to you. In return for your £20,736.66 Coincoin, you receive a physical artwork containing 96 physical two-ps which, according to exactly the same calculation, have generated £20,736.66 of value. By the magic of double-entry accounting, neither of us has gained anything.
You may think that valuing 96 2p coins at their accumulative lifetime value is ridiculous. But perhaps not fundamentally more ridiculous than a 2p coin being worth 2p, a Bitcoin being worth £70,000, a painting being worth £20 million, or a string of ones and zeros in a database being your life savings. While money becomes more abstracted and constructed, we continue to organise material reality around its supposed availability.
That's where the experiment begins.
Every Coincoin enters circulation at the same price, despite containing a different message. After that, its owner can value or trade it however they like. Perhaps MONEY IS FRAUD becomes more desirable than DEPRECIATION. Perhaps WORTHLESS ART becomes the most valuable work in the series. Perhaps nobody buys any of them.
All are legitimate outcomes.
The 96 Coincoins are issued eight at a time over the course of a year. Each Coincoin is issued either heads or tails. Taken together, the complete currency at the macro level forms another 8 × 12 binary artwork. No one knows what that says yet…