The Flood

Installation

Three-channel video,

digital prints

2018 - 2019

The Flood is on the one hand research about the crypto-currency, its mining and energy needs, on the other abstraction based on its forms, concepts and ideas.

The work resonates between documentary style of images and simulated 3D objects in environment. Although the cryptocurrency is something immaterial as a part of the code, it needs powerful material infrastructure to exist – graphic cards and specialized devices to encrypt and decrypt the transactions and keep the network running; huge amounts of often carbon based energy to keep these machines working; rare earth minerals to create the devices and so on.

The work is an installation - a combination of three videos, objects and digital prints. Each part of the work provides a different insight. A continuous shot from one of the biggest Estonian crypto mines, which is located in the former prison shows the character of this kind of spaces. The work is accompanied with audio track, which in the end switches to experimental electronic music to resonate with science fictional images of the space in the dark. The arbitrariness of the same space in the daylight is controverted.

In the second video footage from the cryptocurrency and oil shale mines in Estonia are mixed with 3D animations. This material is connected because oil shale is main energy resource in Estonia, also to create cryptocurrencies. Unperfect 3D models of the crypto mines among other environments and objects give reference to “original” use of graphic cards.
The third video contains interviews with various people, who were operating small scale mines. It is made before and after the boom.

At Taxed to the Max, Noorderlicht International Photofestival, Groningen, Netherlands, 2019

Photography: Hanne van der Velde

At #Material4.0, Stadtgalerie Sindelfingen, Germany

Photography: Henning Krause

At Taxed to the Max, Noorderlicht International Photofestival, Groningen, Netherlands, 2019

Photography: Hanne van der Velde