Bitchcoin #05.075 pressed petal

In 2021, Sarah Meyohas relaunched her 2015 project Bitchcoin, which is widely recognized as one of the earliest examples of art on the blockchain. The 2021 update captures another significant moment, when NFTs exploded into the popular consciousness. The project is notable for its critical reflection on the blockchain-based art market, which serves as both its medium and its subject. 

The original Bitchcoin is often described as a “proto-NFT.” Meyohas, who had studied business at the Wharton School in Pennsylvania before pivoting to photography, was interested in exploring how blockchain technology intersected with trends toward the financialization of art, including through fractionalization. (The token’s title was a joke mocking the male-dominated world of crypto.) 

The project began with an installation in Where Gallery, a storage container in Brooklyn, where the mining of around 100,000 Bitchcoins on a fork of Bitcoin was livestreamed via webcam. The token key pairs were printed on certificates, which sold for $100 and were “backed” by (i.e., could at any stage be traded for) a printed section of a work in Meyohas’s photographic series Speculations. 

For the relaunch, Meyohas migrated the project to Ethereum, by then the dominant blockchain for tokenized art. Precisely 3,291 Bitchcoins were minted as ERC-1155 tokens, again backed by a physical artwork. This time, buyers could burn the token in exchange for a framed pressed rose petal from Meyohas’s 2017 project Cloud of Petals.

For Cloud of Petals, Meyohas had hired 16 men to photograph 10,000 petals at the former Bell Labs in New Jersey, to use as the dataset for a GAN model that could produce virtual petals. She also asked them to select the most “beautiful” petal from each rose, which was pressed and mounted on archival paper. In the context of _Bitchcoin, _the framed petals serve as a witty commentary on the crypto term “proof-of-work”—they are literal proof of the photographers’ labor—as well as the broader question of how value, whether aesthetic or financial, is assigned to assets.

“Bitchcoin was about use value and exchange value, both as an artwork and as a financial mechanism,” reflected Meyohas in a later interview. “Because it wasn’t a performance; it was real.”