Sarah Meyohas

The artist.

Sarah Meyohas is a conceptual artist whose practice considers the nature and capabilities of emerging technologies in contemporary society. Using the familiar emblems of biological life, Meyohas investigates the complex operations that increasingly govern our world: soaring birds, created using augmented-reality software, flock in unison with the frenetic variations of the stock market; rose petals, aggregately identical but individually unique, comprise the dataset for their AI-created equivalents; Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency backed by physical artworks, questions the speculative value of cryptocurrency and the ineffable value of art. Meyohas creates an intelligible visual language to articulate the systems and technologies that increasingly influence our world.

In February 2015, Sarah Meyohas launched a social token, Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency which could be exchanged in perpetuity for her work. Meyohas backed each original Bitchcoin with a five inch by five-inch portion of her Speculations photographs. These works, created through the manipulation of physical reflective surfaces and water in a traditional photographic studio set-up, portrayed perspectival tunnels extending into infinity. The series is continued to this day, existing both as physical editions and unique NFTs on Ethereum. Functioning as a visual and poetic interpretation of the blockchain technology itself, they hold up a mirror to the alchemical ways in which value is created by the artistic gesture and embodied in art as a financial asset.