What is trying to do? Can someone expalin it?
Geraldine Juarez has set fire to Bitcoins before, and she's about to do it again. On January 29, Juarez will repeat her incineration of a Bitcoin wallet at Transmediale "Afterglow," where Berlin's art, technology and culture festival is plumbing the depths of big data, surveillance, and privacy.
"The real aspect making it into a currency is not when it is spent, but when it is burnt," declares Juarez on her Transmediale page. It's an appropriation of a comment made by her friend on a Bitcoin IRC (Internet Chat Relay). It was this phrase, and other conversations, that inspired Juarez to offload a Bitcoin wallet with nine milibitcoins (0.00977616 BTC) onto an SD memory card and barbecue it.
Born in Mexico, but now based in Sweden, Juarez is currently involved in various art collectives and studios. Juarez's participation in The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab, for instance, finds her navigating netpolitics issues in experimental ways. According to its website, F.A.T. Lab is aimed at "enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media." Juarez is also a member of ElectroKKV, which is part of Konstnärernas Kollektivverkstad, an artist collective workshop located in the Klippan district of Gothenburg. There, Juarez and others work on projects using "rapid fabrication machines, programming and electronics as tools" as well as "wires, circuits, electricity, sound, code, video, light as well as wood, textiles, paper, rocks and fire."
Juarez also cut her teeth in Forays, a duo she started with Adam Bobette in 2007. "A foray must be compelled by the ethics of copyleft, hacking, alternative forms of exchange, and released within the public domain," reads the Foray website. "Our investigations have tended towards creating and researching open-ended minor architectures and the modification of everyday infrastructure." Juarez is also part of another duo with Raquel Meyers called Dataslöjd ("data" + "craft"), where she goes deeper into the increasingly blurred boundaries between art and hacking.
A day before Juarez set off for Berlin, I spoke with her about her reasons for burning bitcoins, and about the artist-hacking culture that gave rise to her idea. While Juarez didn't characterize the performance as an act of protest, I did learn that there is a clear set of politics behind the planned burn.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-is-this-artist-burning-bitcoins
