"Trust me enough to download the text document. Open it. Read it, or don’t read it. Erase the text, add your own text to it, save it, or don’t. Open it in any application. It will format correctly or it won’t. It’s yours, and now you have an ongoing relationship with it (and with me, sort of). It can be edited, or saved, or trashed, or printed, or lit on fire, or recycled, or deleted, or not."
moreToMe.txt was made as a response to the hype and boom of NFT marketplaces and cryptocurrencies on our collective artistic practices, as it stood in spring of 2021. The humble text document serves as an examination of what it means to share a reproducible file in a time where many consider it appropriate to burn large amounts of fuel in order to mint and sell, further escalating the climate crisis.
You may download the work by clicking below ↓
DOWNLOAD
Visit the show "Pieces of Me" with TRANSFER Gallery.
See moreToMe.txt in context.
This relationship is
worth more to me than
money
moreToMe.txt is a text document containing 9 words. Each word has been chosen carefully. The relationship between the artist and the viewer, between the opener of the text document and the contents of the document, between the community engaging with the work and with myself, and all of the moments that brought us together in this way, are worth more to me than money.
Any truly “valuable” revolution - in the arts, in our communities, on our planet - will come from the strength of our relationships and the level of care we have for each other. Cryptocurrency may be disrupting some parts of the art ecosystem but it’s definitely not threatening the underpinnings of capitalism itself or even the perverse influence of the super-rich on our artistic practices.
This is not the world that I want to live in. Why create or participate in an ever more fucked up version of capitalism, when we can simply… not.
For the last 1500 years the single biggest predictor of the use of currency in a region is the level of generalized violence there. In peaceful periods, people generally did things on credit through networks of mutual aid. You and your neighbors would work together and, while there was some specialization, there were rarely exact equivalences between, say, the labor provided at harvest time vs. the amount of chopped firewood shared around. Mostly, people were just obliged to get along and sustain relationships with each other because they would be living in the same community for their entire lives. Everyone’s survival was interdependent.
We still live in that place but it has become obscured by the math of money; by the anonymity of modern financial products; by the discrete process of ending a relationship after the transaction is over. Certainly, this is a violent as hell time and maybe it’s fitting, then, that we’ve created a kind of super-money to match it, one whose value isn’t merely upheld by the violence of the world’s #1 polluter, the US military, as American greenbacks are, but which is built on top of it, exporting the violence of climate disaster to the global south.
moreToMe.txt examines these dynamics by asserting that the worth (the value equivalence) of the relationship between me and my work, between me and my audiences, between me and my gallerists and other artists and other beings with whom I share this earth (human and not), are greater than what money can supply, and hopefully greater than what money can end.
Trust me enough to download the text document. Open it. Read it, or don’t read it. Erase the text, add your own text to it, save it, or don’t. Open it in any application. It will format correctly or it won’t. It’s yours, and now you have an ongoing relationship with it (and with me, sort of). It can be edited, or saved, or trashed, or printed, or lit on fire, or recycled, or deleted, or not.
Notes & References:
How to make your own editions of moreToMe.txt
Debt: The First 5000 Years David Graeber, 2011.
moreToMe.txt was made as a response to the hype and boom of NFT marketplaces and cryptocurrencies on our collective artistic practices, as it stood in spring of 2021. The humble text document serves as an examination of what it means to share a reproducible file in a time where many consider it appropriate to burn large amounts of fuel in order to mint and sell, further escalating the climate crisis.
You may download the work by clicking below ↓
DOWNLOAD
Visit the show "Pieces of Me" with TRANSFER Gallery.
See moreToMe.txt in context.
Full description:
This relationship is
worth more to me than
money
moreToMe.txt is a text document containing 9 words. Each word has been chosen carefully. The relationship between the artist and the viewer, between the opener of the text document and the contents of the document, between the community engaging with the work and with myself, and all of the moments that brought us together in this way, are worth more to me than money.
Any truly “valuable” revolution - in the arts, in our communities, on our planet - will come from the strength of our relationships and the level of care we have for each other. Cryptocurrency may be disrupting some parts of the art ecosystem but it’s definitely not threatening the underpinnings of capitalism itself or even the perverse influence of the super-rich on our artistic practices.
This is not the world that I want to live in. Why create or participate in an ever more fucked up version of capitalism, when we can simply… not.
For the last 1500 years the single biggest predictor of the use of currency in a region is the level of generalized violence there. In peaceful periods, people generally did things on credit through networks of mutual aid. You and your neighbors would work together and, while there was some specialization, there were rarely exact equivalences between, say, the labor provided at harvest time vs. the amount of chopped firewood shared around. Mostly, people were just obliged to get along and sustain relationships with each other because they would be living in the same community for their entire lives. Everyone’s survival was interdependent.
We still live in that place but it has become obscured by the math of money; by the anonymity of modern financial products; by the discrete process of ending a relationship after the transaction is over. Certainly, this is a violent as hell time and maybe it’s fitting, then, that we’ve created a kind of super-money to match it, one whose value isn’t merely upheld by the violence of the world’s #1 polluter, the US military, as American greenbacks are, but which is built on top of it, exporting the violence of climate disaster to the global south.
moreToMe.txt examines these dynamics by asserting that the worth (the value equivalence) of the relationship between me and my work, between me and my audiences, between me and my gallerists and other artists and other beings with whom I share this earth (human and not), are greater than what money can supply, and hopefully greater than what money can end.
Trust me enough to download the text document. Open it. Read it, or don’t read it. Erase the text, add your own text to it, save it, or don’t. Open it in any application. It will format correctly or it won’t. It’s yours, and now you have an ongoing relationship with it (and with me, sort of). It can be edited, or saved, or trashed, or printed, or lit on fire, or recycled, or deleted, or not.
Notes & References:
How to make your own editions of moreToMe.txt
Debt: The First 5000 Years David Graeber, 2011.