HAPPY B-DAY KEVIN ABOSCH!
On this day we want to wish happy birthday to great artist Kevin Abosch!
“Self portrait?” (2019-2020) fine art print, series “Nascent Space”
Kevin Abosch (born 1969) is an Irish conceptual artist known for his works in photography, sculpture, installation, AI, blockchain and film. Abosch's work addresses the nature of identity and value by posing ontological questions and responding to sociologic dilemmas. Abosch's work has been exhibited throughout the world, often in civic spaces, including The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, The National Museum of China, The National Gallery of Ireland, Jeu de Paume ( Paris), The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, The Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien) and Dublin Airport.
In 2018, his Forever Rose work sold for US$1 million worth of cryptocurrency. With the sale, the Forever Rose is the world’s most valuable crypto-artwork ever sold, and marks the historical merging of blockchain technology, fine art, and charitable causes. All proceeds from the sale have been donated to The CoderDojo Foundation, whose mission is to ensure that every child around the world should have the opportunity to learn code and to be creative with technology in a safe and social environment.
Later in 2018, Abosch neon- sculpture of 42 alphanumerics “Yellow Lambo” sold for US$450,000, more than the cost of a new Lamborghini Aventador motor car.
Abosch has been developing many projects, including IAMA Coin and PRICELESS (this one together with Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei), from which we had the pleasure to feature selected works in our exhibition ‘Perfect & Priceless - Value Systems on the Blockchain’ . In 2019 Kate Vass Galerie exhibited his ‘Nail S2’ piece within the extensive show on the history of generative and AI art 'Automat und Mensch’.
The IAMA Coin Project is a blockchain crypto-art project where the artist has created 100 physical artworks and a limited edition of 10 million virtual artworks entitled "IAMA Coin".
The physical works are stamped (using the artist's own blood) with the contract address on the Ethereum blockchain corresponding to the creation of the the 10 million virtual works (ERC-20 tokens).
Kevin Abosch
© 2018 ABOSCH ! I am a coin.
“We come into the world like newly minted coins -- perfect and priceless. Yet we are constantly being ascribed a value. The most unfortunate are deemed "worthless" by those who exploit human currency.
At times life may seem reduced to the transactional. I often have difficulty discerning where I end and the person before I begin, while photographing my various subjects—a sense of oneness staves off the call to market.
If I could only bleed for the blockchain, its ledger, for all to see, would reveal that I am a coin.
This project consists of an edition of 100 physical works whose meaningful existence is predicated by the existence of the virtual works. Through my blood, a blockchain contract-address and ten million divisible crypto-tokens, the very nature of value shall be redefined.”
As per the PRICELESS project, Kevin Abosch and Ai Weiwei ‘have attempted as an exercise, to make the priceless more relatable to those who find it easier to view everything as a commodity.’
‘I have been using blockchain addresses as proxies to distill emotional value for some time now, and with Weiwei we “tokenized” our priceless shared moments together. Some of these moments on the surface might seem banal while others are subtly provocative, but these fleeting moments like :”Sharing Tea” and “Walking In A Carefree Manner Down Schönhauser Allee” or “Talking About The Art Market” are the building blocks of human experience. All moments in life are priceless.
Kevin Abosch & Ai Weiwei (2018)
Image courtesy of the artists.
Each priceless moment is represented by a unique blockchain address which is “inoculated” by a small amount of a virtual artwork (crypto-token) we created called "PRICELESS" (symbol: PRCLS). Only 2 ERC20 tokens were created for the project, but as they are divisible to 18 decimal places, these works of virtual art could potentially be distributed to billions of people. Furthermore, a very limited series of physical prints were made.
One of the two PRICELESS tokens will be unavailable at any price. The remaining token will be divided into 1 million fractions of one token and made available to individual collectors and institutions. These artworks of course may be divided into much smaller artworks as the PRICELESS token is divisible to 18 decimal places. It is not unusual in the art world for large works to be priced higher than similar smaller works so should a larger fraction of PRICELESS have a higher price than a smaller fraction. One of those peculiar ways we value things — Greater size/quantity = Greater value. The question is, if one token is priceless and truly unattainable, then how do we value the other token which is made available?
How and why do we value anything at all?’ - Kevin Abosch.
The artist’s latest projects include Hexadecimal Testimony (2020), Nascent Space (2019-2020)and line work - where he generates a digital line on a computer server that grows at a fluctuating rate (pixels per minute) determined by the processing of input data (images, audio, etc) through a chain of deep-learning algorithms. The artist treats this ritual as necessary to reconfirm his understanding that the emotional value of the input data is immeasurable and can therefore be represented by any segment of the line or the line in its entirety. The segment is synecdochic and serves as final proxy in these works while the underlying photographic image is chosen by the artist to represent the synecdochic relationship between any individual image from the complete dataset upon which each work is based.
//line work //kevin abosch
One day you won’t be able to pull that rabbit out (2019)
Additionally, Kevin Abosch is the creative director for Japanese anime/manga brand CRYPTOSENSHI. Coinciding with the public announcement of the manga (comic book) which will be released Spring 2021, Abosch has created two limited edition digital artworks in the form of NFT(Non-fungible token) on the blockchain.
The two artworks “Impossible” and “Reigai” are both editions of 20 and are available through Kate Vass Galerie both NFT and prints.
As creative director of CRYPTOSENSHI, Abosch is responsible for the development of the characters and artistic direction of the brand’s anime and manga departments.
ABOUT CRYPTOSENSHI
CRYPTOSENSHI (暗号戦士, pronounced “Ango-senshi” in Japanese) are cryptographic warriors that battle in the digital realm while a proxy war takes place in the “real world.”
Abosch explains: “We are living in a world in which truth can be subverted by those leveraging technology to weaponize data — Humans with the help of benevolent AI are in the midst of a war to mitigate the deleterious effects of disinformation. It’s epic, it’s romantic and it’s our future. Cryptosenshi are heroes that empower us to find a truth, even if it’s fleeting.”
World-renowned visual artist Kevin Abosch has created 100 physical artworks and a limited edition of 10 million virtual artworks entitled IAMA Coin.
The physical works are stamped using the artist's own blood, with the contract address on the Ethereum blockchain corresponding to the creation of the the 10 million virtual works. The virtual works are standard ERC-20 tokens and token owners are free to share these artworks and even divide them into smaller pieces before sharing.
From time to time Abosch will make various physical artworks available to collectors of IAMA coin virtual works. Therefore, aside from their intrinisc value, they may be utilized as a means to trade, in various quantities, for certain physical works as the artist's studio permits.