Sensors. Proof of photographic space. They exist as much for the viewer as for the tools used to make them. They emanate from the world, but tell nothing about it. They are drawings of the map in the machine. They have neither subject nor depth. They aren’t meant to be read but seen up close. They show what the camera sensor sees, what is normally invisible. Digital noise. Salt.

For SALT, 0xmons and Figure31 combine smart contracts and digital photography to create a series of time-based artworks, each of them unique, each essentially the same. Starting from a base of 180 photographs, the NFTs in SALT will first display a different image in this set and cycle to the next on a daily basis. In sum, the underlying smart contract sets all 180 NFTs into an endless, asynchronous loop.

The sources of these images are low light digital photographs of architecture. The raw files show nothing but a densely packed pile of barely visible black pixels. Through different post production tools, they obtained textures and colors, in what Figure31 described as a “game of chess between images and myself.”

The cyclical functionality provided by the smart contract was conceived to be associated with JPG’s first exhibition, Deep Time. By introducing programmed time to trigger the changing of the images, stored on Arweave, 0xmons was able to use blockchain technology as a complementary medium and as a new element through which images can be transformed and represent time.

Images: Loucas Braconnier/Figure31
Smart contract: 0xmons in collaboration with JPG