ABOUT THE SERIES

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The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase

Jorge Luis Borges, Library of Babel, 1944

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A new body of work made in direct response to the French national collection of the Monnaie de Paris, the Blueprints hijack original blueprints and architectural drawing from the museum’s collections and rework them into large scale abstractions.          

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Taking these archival blueprints as a starting point, they have been interwoven with diagrams, patents, network maps and literature taken from the history of blockchains. Rewired using AI, generative softwares and the artist's hand, they present imagined structures that speak to the collision of these two competing systems of thought - the centralised and the decentralised.

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The series focusing on the varying impact of blockchains in developing countries, from conservation in Republic of Congo to political ideologies in El Salvador. 382181_Garden City (2023) speaks specifically to the recent El Salvadorian designs for an ideal blockchain city, comparing it with the British satellite concept of a Garden City and its roots in science fiction and the philosophy of time. Garden cities were inspired by Edward Bellamy's landmark science fiction novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888). 

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The resultant works speak to the cultural and philosophical rewiring of value systems in the age of blockchain while also forging aesthetic and conceptual links with the past. The works reference art history as diverse as seminal neuron drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) to early ASCII graffiti on the blockchain such as Len Sassaman’s ASCII Bernanke.

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The designs by El Salvador's urban planners centred around the form of a hexagon. Entitled BABEL, Alice's show at the Monnaie de Paris was broadly a meditation on Borges' Library of Babel and its prefiguring of blockchains, in which Borges describes his infinite library as built by discreet hexagonal blocks. 

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The NFT part of the work includes a custom website secured on Ethereum and Arweave, that updates itself every three Ethereum blocks forever. Referencing the idea of the blockchain as a Borgesian's infinite archive, the NFT includes a large and growing library of texts surround the history of blockchains that are pulled from in infinite combinations. The NFT has been architected to function as a large scale installation, where the Pompidou was the space to celebrate the scale of the work.

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382181_Garden City is therefore a site to explore these disparate links: the architectures of the centralised and the decentralised, the history of monetary systems as prefigured by the Monnaie de Paris, the decentralisation of monetary power away from such sites and towards developing nations, the histories of science fiction and publishing that plays a philosophical backbone to the advent of blockchains. 

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