“A Bitcoin key turned money into poetry.”
An interview with Edwin Rosero, originally published on MORROW collective medium page
One day in early 2014, Edwin Rosero, a self-taught digital artist and graphic designer who had been tinkering about in Photoshop since a friend gave him an early Wacom tablet in high school, saw an online open call for a pop-up exhibition slated for later that year at London’s Tate Britain museum. The event Loud Tate: Code was a one-day event of art, music and performance exploring how code in language, fashion and technology shape culture. The work he created for that show was a digital derivative of English-born artist Peter Monamy’s 18th century painting Ships Distress in a Storm and was part of a wider series where he used a synthesis of 3D modeled geometry, digitally painted texture mapping, algorithmic pixel sorting and color-channel processing. His conceptual framework — an exploration of technological singularity, and the continuum of consciousness — is still topical today and speaks of the surprising prescience that Rosero also had about the way blockchain technology could impact the art market. In 2014, as he was learning and reading about Bitcoin, he had the idea to hide a public key in the color channels of his art, then send funds to that key, thus proving its provenance using blockchain’s immutable ledger.
“I thought it would be fun to use the color channels to hide information but then I realized that the digits of a Bitcoin key turned money into language, into poetry. And that was a way of interacting with art in a way that fascinated me.”
Rosero, who was born in Colombia but moved to Los Angeles in early childhood, calls himself a curious person. Although he started education with dreams of becoming a scientist it was when he discovered digital painting, design and photo manipulation that he turned his attention to art.
“I had curiosity for the technical aspects and wanted to know how things worked, like how the computer rendered pictures or how the software is made but I also wanted to understand the aesthetic impact it had on me.”
With a style that marries the photorealistic to the surreal, Rosero’s art is a dialogue between the tangible and the imagined, often infused with technological and science fiction elements. His command of color, light, and composition is rooted in classic artistry, yet his approach is scientific. “It is interesting to me that pictures and sounds could stir things inside me and I wanted to understand that as well as reflect it back.”
Rosero’s piece The Soul Of Money, a composite image of physical and historical coins in the shape of the Bitcoin symbol, has the artist’s public key hidden in the blue channel of the image. During his time working in broadcast TV he learned that blue channels are not perceived clearly by the human eye, therefore those channels can be compressed to an even greater degree than the others without losing image quality. Using that information, he realized that if he placed the key only on the blue channel of his digital art, it would be invisible. “The key would be hidden in plain sight and I thought that was an interesting way to bring value to the art.”
A year later, when ascribe.io (a protocol, backend, and app for blockchain-secured digital art) was launched, Rosero was ready and waiting.
“I heard about it in the forums and I created an artwork called Cardinal. I was watching and waiting for the day they launched as I wanted to be the first artist to mint on the platform. I’m not sure if I was but I do believe that I was the first one who successfully initiated price discovery of the artwork during a live auction on the Bitcoin subreddit.”
Part of his cubist portraits series, Cardinal depicts two red birds as lovers, is a celebration of Human sexuality and of the romantic feelings we experience as young adults. This Neo-Cubist depiction inspires feelings of seduction, warmth, playfulness, and sincerity, through the use of vibrant colors, loose strokes and digital image processing artifacts. After minting it on Ascribe, Rosero went to Reddit to initiate a price discovery.
“This was a great opportunity to show price discovery of digital art in the real world,” he said. “I went on Reddit and said I would sell it for 5 cents in bitcoin and it did start to climb in popularity. All I wanted was for more artists to really understand how important this was and to take the leap, but that took some time.”
In 2016, the physical The Soul Of Money painting was shown in a group exhibition in New York and consigned to Partial Mystery Gallery using ascribe and in 2023, the original 4K resolution file will be up for sale at Sotheby’s New York as part of MORROW collective’s {R(Evolutionaries);} exhibition.
“When I started hiding Bitcoin keys in blue channels, it felt like sending secret messages in bottles out to sea. I hoped they’d be found someday,” the artist said. “Now, a decade later, my early blockchain artwork washes ashore with MORROW collective as relics of a forgotten era.”
“Reflecting on the evolution from The Soul of Money or my ‘Bitcoin’ JPG to my ‘Cardinal’ on Bitcoin via Ascribe and now, Ordinals directly on Bitcoin, it’s clear we’re witnessing a renaissance in the foundational layers of digital art. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of its inception, it’s remarkable to see how Cardinal was the harbinger of a new era, and its spirit is now perpetuated through the pioneering technology of Ordinals. A testament to the enduring interplay between art and innovation. The world has caught up, but the journey is just beginning. “
This editorial is part of a series of essays and interviews contextualizing MORROW collective’s {R(Evolutionaries);} project, exhibition and sale commemorating a decade of blockchain art. Launched at Art Dubai Digital 2024 and brought to market in collaboration with SuperRare Labs Team and Sotheby’s.
For more info www.morrow-collective.com/revolutionaries
