Bootleg

Bootleg explores the idea of giving full ownership of an instruction set and giving the collector control of the distribution of the potential output space.

Bootleg is self-aware of context, meaning it will behave differently when viewed directly vs. loaded into a child inscription. When viewing the inscription directly it will render as a HTML page outlining the concept and intended scope of the work, recording the artist intent immutably as part of the algorithm. When the inscription is loaded into a child inscription through recursion it will behave as an algorithm to generate a specific output defined by the hash supplied in the child inscription. This gives the new owner of the inscription full control of distribution of the algo; they can choose to leave the inscription as is and keep it a purely conceptual artwork or decide to either curate or randomize hashes and generate an arbitrary amount of outputs from the algorithm. Because of the parent/child relation used in Ordinals for provenance, the collector can generate child inscriptions which become part of the full artist provenance tree.

The “Tijd” algorithm used in Bootleg is visually inspired by Partituur, a work by Ulises Carrión, displaying the units of time from the Gregorian calendar in an abstract form along a grid structure. This grid structure is constantly updating the relative values that decide where the time units are placed, whilst connecting different units of the same denomination. This creates both order and chaos in the work and helps the viewer understand and read the current time displayed within the piece.