I am pleased to announce that POW-3: A Brief Crypto Punks History in 45,360 Marks (2024) is included in Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon, presented by ArtMeta and curated by Georg Bak. The exhibition will be on view at the ArtMeta booth at Art Basel Zero 10 in Basel, Switzerland, from June 17 to 21, 2026, and online at masterpieces.artmeta.org. This exhibition marks ArtMeta’s inaugural participation in Art Basel’s Zero 10 initiative.
Digital Masterpieces brings together one hundred works spanning seventy years of digital art history, structured in seven chapters and explicitly framed by the curator as canonical rather than comprehensive. Approximately one quarter of the works are presented in person at the ArtMeta booth in Basel. The catalogue extends the physical presentation online, featuring additional works and an accompanying essay. POW-3 is included in the online catalogue.
The Seven Chapters
The exhibition is told in seven chapters, moving chronologically from electronic signals to contemporary blockchain practices:
- SIGNAL, the birth of computer art.
- SYSTEM, mainframes, programs, and the logic of rules.
- GRAPHIC, screens, synthetic worlds, and digital image culture.
- NETWORK, from connected machines to networked art.
- GENERATIVE, the rebirth of code.
- INTELLIGENCE, machine learning, agency, and the question of authorship.
- PROTOCOL, tokens, provenance, and digital ownership.
The Protocol Chapter
POW-3 is presented in the seventh chapter, PROTOCOL, which Bak introduces as a section dedicated to blockchain as a new artistic infrastructure as opposed to solely a market mechanism. The chapter’s essay is organized in six parts that outline the conditions for the emergence of crypto art: from Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta’s cryptographically secured timestamps, through the Cypherpunk manifestos and the Bitcoin white paper, to Ethereum and the formalization of the ERC-721 standard. Bak then traces the field’s initial artistic experiments between 2014 and 2017, the establishment of platforms and exhibitions from 2018 to 2021, the 2021 NFT boom and entry into auction houses, and finally what he terms the Real-time Canonization of crypto art.
The artists featured alongside me in the Protocol chapter represent the full arc of the field: Larva Labs and DADA, Mitchell F. Chan, Harm van den Dorpel, Sarah Friend, Rhea Myers, terra0, Hackatao, Alejandro Hurtado, Kenny Schachter, and XCOPY. Several of these works had a significant impact. Harm van den Dorpel’s Event Listeners (2015) was acquired by the MAK in Vienna as the first museum acquisition paid for in Bitcoin. DADA’s Creeps & Weirdos(2017) established the artist royalty model that later became a core promise of the NFT ecosystem. Mitchell F. Chan’s Digital Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (2017) transposed Yves Klein’s idea of immaterial possession into a tokenized register.
A Note in the Catalogue Essay
Notably, my work appears in this chapter in two registers: as the artist of POW-3, and again by name in Bak’s catalogue essay itself. In the section titled Real-time Canonization, Bak writes:
The canonization of crypto art took place from the outset in a hybrid constellation: Jason Bailey’s Artnome (from 2018), publications such as Right Click Save and Outland, chronologies such as Martin Lukas Ostachowski’s timeline and those assembled by White Rabbit and Jediwolf, emerged parallel to the art itself.
The crypto art timeline I have maintained on mlo.art since 2018 originated as an artist’s research practice. To see it now described by the curator of a canon-defining Art Basel exhibition as part of the infrastructure through which crypto art’s history was written represents, in the most precise sense, an unforeseen recognition.
POW-3 in Context
POW-3: A Brief Crypto Punks History in 45,360 Marks is a physical installation composed of archival hand-stamped ink on 21 acid-free paper notebooks with thermoplastic polyester (PLA) supports, measuring six metres wide by 2.3 metres tall when displayed. Each of the 45,360 marks is individually hand-applied. The work compresses the history of CryptoPunks—technically the first algorithmically generated PFP collection on Ethereum and, culturally, the project that established the visual and economic logic of the field—into a chronicle rendered in paper, ink, and manual labour.
Notably, within a chapter otherwise composed of tokens, smart contracts, NFTs, and on-chain works, POW-3 moves in the opposite direction. It functions as a material chronicle of a digital phenomenon. This reversal is integral to the work’s argument: the canonization of crypto art has not occurred solely on-chain. It has also taken place through writing, archives, timelines, exhibitions, books, and physical artefacts that translate the digital into material form. POW-3 belongs to this second register of canonization, as does the timeline.
There is another connection worth noting. Georg Bak curated the first physical CryptoPunks exhibition at Galerie Kate Vass in Zurich in 2018, and later organized the important Sealed CryptoPunks sale at Sotheby’s. POW-3 records the history of the same subject that Bak has focused on in his curatorial work. Including POW-3 in this chapter, along with mentioning the timeline in the essay, fits with this ongoing curatorial story.
Digital Art Program
In addition to the exhibition, ArtMeta presents the Digital Art Summit, bringing together artists, curators, and collectors to discuss the past, present, and future of digital art. The summit will take place on June 15, 2026, at Kult.Kino Camera in Basel. I will attend the conference and the Art Basel preview on June 16.
Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon proposes that digital art has reached a new stage of historical legibility and provokes questions about how the canon is formed, who shapes it, and which works will define it. I am excited that the inclusion of POW-3 in the Protocol chapter, alongside the recognition of my timeline in Bak’s essay, signifies the recognition of both studio and archival practices within the same context.
The full catalogue is online at masterpieces.artmeta.org.
