Over the past few years, the habitual checking of crypto prices has hardened into something like obsession, intruding on personal and even intimate moments. The reflex mirrors the fast-paced commercialization, commodification, and consolidation of the crypto space itself.
Modus Operandi – Zero emblematizes the inevitable evolution of this obsession by embedding a fully functional chart and live data visualization within a painting. The work sets out to transform the anxiety-inducing candle chart into a serene animation, one capable of claiming a permanent place in the most intimate sphere, the personal living space, and of blurring the distinction between physical and digital art.
The painting is the first of a planned series of twenty-one works, a cap that once again borrows Bitcoin’s own number. Each new piece in the series unlocks a new visualization mode, and every existing piece can be upgraded to receive it; the works form a small network that grows in capability together as the series expands. The title names the viewer’s role. Each collector chooses their own modus operandi, deciding which metrics move them and which matter enough to live with.
Two visualization modes exist to date. The first is a Bitcoin trend curve, translating the 24-hour change rate, as a percentage, into a slowly moving line. The second is a dollar visualization in which one turquoise LED turns white for every ten thousand US dollars of Bitcoin’s value: at USD 66,000, six LEDs burn white; at USD 110,000, eleven.
Beyond financial metrics, the system is designed to grow toward entirely non-financial ones, global adoption measures such as active wallets among them, so that the question of what moves the holder need not be a question of price at all.
Created in collaboration with Pascal Le Pesant.
