#4be5ff: FAREWELL, GOLD!
The "Farewell, gold!" video project is a study of the new relationship between humanity and money, which is being crystallized under the influence of the global network. During the previous era, gold served as the projection of the emanation of light into the material world. In the current era of Internet culture, the ray of this emanation moves into the zone of activity of the global network, being projected into it in the form of computer code, which is turned into new money before our eyes.
We assert that this new projection possesses the meaning of new gold, and has a greenish-bluish nature. We define this color as #4be5ff.
The video is built on the idea of converting the traditional concept of the nature of money into a new format.
Cryptocurrency has certain features, such as: decentralization, transparency, and openness on the basis of a "public key" system. All these attributes are characteristic of the global network, and they correspond to powerful seismic shifts in the system of social relations.
The language of the "Farewell, gold!" video project
Our protein bio-neurons are nodes in a neural network, and they interact with the artificial computer nodes, which supply ready-made net content into the neural network and process it.
All this will be the visual language of our video installation. In the same way that gold has the nature of the material world and its objects, cryptocurrency has the nature of the digital world. This feature unites it with all the content of the global network, which consists of similar digital codes.
Our video project creates a collision and a contrast between two different models of monetary relations. Until recently, the value of money used to be backed by gold, which was obtained from gold mines. In the new Internet model of monetary relations, the money is created and mined through the generation of computed code.
The hardware and software of the "Farewell, gold!" video project
For our video project, we use computer resources to the exclusion of everything else. Computerization turns the media into computer data. But media products are no mere sequences of signs; rather, they are imbued with a certain meaning: the images depict recognizable objects. For this reason, the new media which we use consists of two layers: a cultural layer and a computer layer.
The cultural layer is the plotline, the composition and point of view, and the genre.
The computer layer is the process of transmitting the data through the networks; the sorting, placement, and structure of the data, the computer language.
The computer and cultural layers are influencing each other. As a result, a new computer culture emerges, which is a mixture of human and computer meanings.
© Galina Bleikh & Elena Serebryakova