Cryptosteel Gaining Attention During Art Exhibit at BWA Studio Wroclaw

Cryptosteel has been gaining attention in connection with an art exhibit at Wrocław’s BWA Studio called Strategie Niewidzialności (Policy of Disappearance*), which deals with the issue of our online existence and its implications for culture, society and everyday living. In fact, the show has been named The Event of February 2018 by Polski Portal Kultury and Cryptosteel has been lauded the exhibition’s wow piece.

Our decision was to speak volumes about our concerns and passions connected to the very mission behind Cryptosteel. The result was even better than we had planned, and it’s been shining a spotlight on our project ever since.

Here is what some of the critics had to say:

„Policy of Disappearance* reveals what lies beneath all those pretty interfeces, or beneath what we don’t understand. Most revealing of all is Wojtek Stopiński’s Cryptosteel. (…) The digitality, ephemerality, invisibility of the cryptocurrencies are burdened here, made real. It’s ironic that this complex technology winds up needing a passcode stored offline, because that is where it is safest. And of course Cryptosteel is the safest kind of storage of all.”
— Agnieszka Słodownik, dwutygodnik.com

„Invited to contribute his product, Stopiński sent it in as part of a sculpture. The Cryptosteel is held by a plaster hand sticking out of the dirt. That may seem simple, but the associations it awakens are interesting and include the idea of live burial straight from Edgar Allan Poe, notions of durability and longevity (the wallet is eternal, the user isn’t), and the language of „underground” movements and technologies.”
— Emilia Chorzępa, czaskultury.pl

Quoting from the introductory curatorial exhibition text:
Policy of Disappearance* is an exhibition and series of texts bringing up the issue of our existence online. The traces we leave there on a daily basis have become for the […] information economy what coal was for the industrial age — its essential raw material. On its basis, the increasingly efficient sets of algorithms decide which snippet of the universe we should see and what to desire. Their efficiency is to a large extent a consequence of our own activity. The artists and researchers present at the exhibition attempt to escape this logic in various ways: they test the man/machine boundaries, intercept the activity of algorithms, look for new forms of corporality or establish an alternative network of information flow.

Nowadays, for corporations like Google, Facebook or Amazon, you are the log quantified by the invisible army of specialized algorithms. They hone their skills thanks to you. (…) Turning you into a beam of patterns and anomalies which may be monetized. Should you be worried if at this moment three billion other users are sharing your fate? You are plankton, but perhaps this is precisely your strength: dispersion against concentration. Cryptography against privacy policies. A blockchain instead of the black box of algorithms. Satoshi Nakamoto -the man who wasn’t there – instead of Mark Zuckerberg.

Artists: Pedro Barateiro, Sabrina Chou, Zuza Golińska, Lidia Grabe, Tomasz Hartman, Cyanne van den Houten, Piotr Kopik, Silvio Lorusso & Sebastian Schmieg, Manu Luksch, The One Minutes, Wojciech Stopiński, Amy Suo Wu