[test]#4

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

John Provencher

2024

NFT/Digital

Description

Just how recognizable is the _Mona Lisa? To find out, John Provencher distorts Da Vinci’s masterpiece to the limit of identifiability in his series [test]. _

In the work’s 64 iterations, Provencher limits the work’s palette to a dull green and lowers the resolution in order to determine the minimum number of pixels an image can have and still look like the _Mona Lisa. To reflect the experimental procedure of [test], Provencher includes a grid of images in each piece of the collection. In [test] #4_, there are 18 versions at varying resolutions, grouped in grids of varying sizes.

_[test] was commissioned for an online group exhibition of works using the Ordinals protocol, which was created early in 2023 to inscribe media files on the Bitcoin blockchain. Large files can only be inscribed as Ordinals with very complex or expensive procedures. Thus [test] _is both a practical response to the conditions of the medium and a creative reflection on those conditions.