THE, draws on Brian Droitcour’s 2009 review of Dullaart’s Readymades. The review proclaimed it to be a ‘study of the relationship of the index to its referent’.
The work asks us to contemplate the relationship between the inscription from the blockchain to the artwork, and vice versa. Can the work exist beyond a single inscription? One can be nostalgic for a time in which we regarded the future differently. At the same time we can imagine a future where we see the past in a different light. Can we publish an artwork in a reverse order? Not like a prequel to a movie, more like ending a sentence now but starting it in the future? The immutable will not be immune to a change of context, nothing lasts forever.
THE reflects on the nostalgia and future visions of this last decade, and can only be completed by going back in time, looking at the versions of rewritten history within the structure of the Bitcoin blockchain, while remembering the now, or was it the future? The work is a celebration of versioning. It is composed of a series of images, inscribed one after another on the same ordinal. You can view one inscription at a time, but the work will only appear in its full form if you look at all the inscriptions that came before.