I am pleased to share that I recently joined John for episode #950 of NFT Morning, the French-language podcast that has been covering crypto art and Web3 culture for years and has built one of the most dedicated communities in the francophone space. Reaching nine hundred and fifty episodes is a remarkable feat of consistency in a field that moves as quickly as this one, and it was a pleasure to contribute to the series.
A note before you press play: the conversation is entirely in French. It was a welcome opportunity to discuss my practice at length in French, something I rarely have occasion to do in this depth.
What We Discussed
The episode is titled l’artiste qui voulait documenter l’histoire du Crypto Art, the artist who wanted to document the history of crypto art, and that framing carried through the whole conversation. John and I covered a lot of ground over the hour:
From painting to crypto art. We began with my path from painting to discovering Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology in 2017 and 2018, and the realization that shaped everything since: blockchain is not merely financial infrastructure but a new artistic medium, one that changes our relationship to artworks, data, and digital ownership.
Why clouds. We spoke about how clouds became the signature of my practice, as a metaphor for Bitcoin and the blockchain: borderless, living, distributed, fragile yet remarkably resilient. That reading is inseparable from my own history of relocations, in which the sky was often the only constant.
Writing the history of crypto art. A substantial part of the episode is devoted to my research and my doctorate at the University of Zurich: why it matters to document the origins of the movement, to distinguish blockchain art, crypto art, and NFTs as terms, and to move beyond the shorthand narrative that reduces the field to CryptoPunks, Beeple, and Bored Apes. In a sentence, the goal of the dissertation is to recontextualize crypto art within the history of contemporary art.
The boom, revisited. We looked back at 2020 and 2021 with some distance: the arrival of speculators, the extraordinary opportunities, and the excesses that have clouded perceptions of crypto art since then. My sense is that the ecosystem has found a healthier rhythm again, carried by the artists who were here before the hype.
Institutions, Ordinals, and CBDCs. We closed on the threads that occupy me now: exhibitions and research entering museum contexts, including my CryptoPunks history mosaic POW-3 A Brief History of Crypto Punks in 45,360 Marks and the current Inner Voice exhibition at Danae in Paris. We spoke about my recent works inscribed directly on Bitcoin, where the satoshi itself becomes artistic material charged with history. This new series on Central Bank Digital Currencies asks what programmable state money means for control, privacy, and individual liberty.
If one line from the episode stays with me, it is the one John highlighted in the show notes:
« Le problème, c’est que la discussion sur l’art sur la blockchain est devenue une discussion sur les NFT. »
The problem is that the discussion about art on the blockchain has become a discussion about NFTs.
That sentence is, in a nutshell, the reason the research exists.
Watch and Listen
Please note the conversation is in French.
Watch the episode on YouTube:
Listen on Spotify:
The full episode page, including show notes and links, is at nftmorning.com.
My thanks to John and the NFT Morning team for the invitation, the thoughtful questions, and the care they continue to bring to documenting this space, episode after episode.
