BURNER #42

BURNER is a dynamic cryptoart series based on live Ethereum gas price data. A total of 256 interconnected artworks dependent on the state of the blockchain. As Ethereum network usage increases, due to price volatility, NFT sales or other factors, a more forceful artwork develops.

Gas price data is made from the competing desires, intentions and beliefs of millions of entities. Transactions on Ethereum create overwhelming amounts of information in block time, cyclically revealing unforeseen states. BURNER pictures this continuous decentralised process. The artwork is never finished, there's always a new variant.

It’s common to fetishise technology and we can easily become hooked on the network systems we use. The Ethereum blockchain is influential on our lives and this artwork tries to reveal some of its underlying behaviour through abstraction.

The image files in BURNER begin as pictures of true physical gas. They’re extruded into a third dimension, rotated and processed until they’re unrecognisable. These new forms interact differently with one another in each digital artwork.

Every BURNER has a unique base image, unique seed and 60 million potential states. Rarer ‘dark’ and ‘bright' types can have over 1 billion states. Apart from the base, all layers are shared between all collectors, then mixed uniquely in each piece. The layers are stored as separate files across IPFS. Slower pieces have higher rarity.

BURNER isn’t controlled by the artist, but by the Ethereum Virtual Machine and its users.