I am thrilled to announce my partnership with LaCollection, a Paris-based marketplace, to launch my latest artwork series titled Cloud Wallets. This series falls within the crypto art group show In-Valuable: The Short History of Crypto Art curated by Marlène Corbun and Fanny Lakoubay and is part of a larger exploration of Art & Currency on the LaCollection platform. The recent cryptocurrency boom offers a conceptual base for contemporary artists to question and expose the intricate systems of power behind money, while also using blockchain technology as a creative medium. Collectively, the exhibited works intend to challenge the complicated relationship between art and currency.
Cloud Wallet Series
With his digital wallet series, new media artist Martin Lukas Ostachowski highlights the misconception of how digital wallets carry digital assets and how they have become new digital identities. Their association as wallets, falsely suggests digital wallets are vessels for cryptocurrency, crypto art, or any form of digital assets. More accurately, wallets can be seen as virtual bank accounts with the right to execute transactions of assets that reference them. As such, digital assets never leave the blockchain. The continuous creation of transaction blocks merely tracks how these rights are redistributed between wallets, conceptually similar to DNA and whose rhythm of creation acts as the metronome of the Web3 ecosystem.
On the other hand, the demand for interoperability in the web3 environment across metaverses, decentralized applications, and communities led digital wallets to become one of the primary forms of identification. Although digital wallets consist of only alphanumeric strings, the contents are accessible to anyone, and so are all associated transactions. Consequently, the permanent ledger concept of the blockchain, which documents every transaction since its inception, reveals the identity of a wallet’s owner in most cases. This renders a seemingly private environment as pseudo-anonymous, and the owners’ true identities emerge despite the many layers of encryption. Nevertheless, the digital wallet concept, paired with the permanence of the blockchain, fuels abstract concepts of futurism and posthumanism.
The digital wallet series also borrows from the artist’s recognizable Exclamatory Intermezzo series patterns, which he has developed for over 20 years both inter- and interdisciplinary. The series examines the artist’s questions around identity as a global citizen and digital nomad, finding personal constants in the sky rather than geographically. This conceptual fit of uniting these series can be seen in the digital wallets through the abstracted encryption layers and cut-outs, which render the conceptually folded cloud wallets transparent.
Download the Exhibition Catalogue
View the artworks on the LaCollection marketplace
About the Curators
Marlène Corbun is based in Switzerland and has been navigating the contemporary art market for 10 years. She worked for White Cube Gallery and Christie’s in London before launching her own art advisory boutique in the fields of Post-War and Contemporary art and digital art. Since one year, she has been working as Head of Contemporary Art for the Web3 art platform, laCollection, leading contemporary art projects such as the online show “Web3 Aesthetics” with Annka Kultys
Gallery. She is a graduate of The Courtauld Institute in London with a post-graduate diploma in Art History and EM Lyon Business School in France specializing in the Art Market.
Fanny Lakoubay is a French-born digital art collector, advisor and curator with 14 years of experience in art, technology and finance, with most of her career in New York City. Since 2018, she has been advising many NFT projects, crypto artists and collectors via LAL ART. She is also involved in Web3 initiatives, such as GreenNFT, RadicalxChange Foundation, WAC Fellowship (Web3 for Arts and Culture), CADAF (The Crypto And Digital Art Fair) and BAD (The Blockchain Art Directory). She lives with her family between France, the US and Argentina.
