Copper Clouds is a new animation and an homage to Rutherford Chang’s Cents, the richly symbolic collection of 10,000 scanned one-cent coins inscribed as Bitcoin Ordinals. The penny makes the homage fitting. Across more than a hundred years in circulation, inflation has drained it of practical worth while collectors have learned to treasure it. The coin survives its own value: still metal, barely money.
For this piece, I applied the Cents dataset to my cloud translation work, amending the Python script so that the individual cents serve as tiles. Frame by frame, the pennies assemble into drifting clouds of copper: the smallest units of value, behaving like pixels and the weather.
