Why Is This Artist Burning Bitcoins?

Geraldine Juarez has set fire to Bitcoins before, and she's about to do it again. On January 29, Juarez will repeat her incineration of a Bitcoin wallet at Transmediale "Afterglow," where Berlin's art, technology and culture festival is plumbing the depths of big data, surveillance, and privacy.

"The real aspect making it into a currency is not when it is spent, but when it is burnt," declares Juarez on her Transmediale page. It's an appropriation of a comment made by her friend on a Bitcoin IRC (Internet Chat Relay). It was this phrase, and other conversations, that inspired Juarez to offload a Bitcoin wallet with nine milibitcoins (0.00977616 BTC) onto an SD memory card and barbecue it.

Born in Mexico, but now based in Sweden, Juarez is currently involved in various art collectives and studios. Juarez's participation in The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab, for instance, finds her navigating netpolitics issues in experimental ways. According to its website, F.A.T. Lab is aimed at "enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media." Juarez is also a member of ElectroKKV, which is part of Konstnärernas Kollektivverkstad, an artist collective workshop located in the Klippan district of Gothenburg. There, Juarez and others work on projects using "rapid fabrication machines, programming and electronics as tools" as well as "wires, circuits, electricity, sound, code, video, light as well as wood, textiles, paper, rocks and fire."

Juarez also cut her teeth in Forays, a duo she started with Adam Bobette in 2007. "A foray must be compelled by the ethics of copyleft, hacking, alternative forms of exchange, and released within the public domain," reads the Foray website. "Our investigations have tended towards creating and researching open-ended minor architectures and the modification of everyday infrastructure." Juarez is also part of another duo with Raquel Meyers called Dataslöjd ("data" + "craft"), where she goes deeper into the increasingly blurred boundaries between art and hacking.

A day before Juarez set off for Berlin, I spoke with her about her reasons for burning bitcoins, and about the artist-hacking culture that gave rise to her idea. While Juarez didn't characterize the performance as an act of protest, I did learn that there is a clear set of politics behind the planned burn.

MOTHERBOARD: You're involved in a number of art groups and studios—F.A.T LAB, Forays, Dataslöjd studio, and ElectroKKV. What sort of work are you doing in these areas?

Geraldine Juarez: F.A.T Lab is a group of friends and acquaintances that share certain interests and each of us tackle them from different perspectives. F.A.T is a place where I can experiment and react to issues around netpolitics in a faster way, and where I try to put the F.A.T ethos in between politics and fun. Forays is a duo I started with Adam Bobette in 2007 that tried to combine many interests around copy culture, open source, and the law into architecture. We haven't done anything in awhile but we never disbanded. I'm just waiting for another foray to happen at some point.

ElectroKKV is the electronics studio at this incredible artist collective and cooperative from the 70's in Göteborg. We have workshops for metal, glass, ceramics, textile, and silkscreen. I got involved very early in the creation and organization of this studio, which is equipped with rapid fabrication machines, cool materials plus super skilled and inspiring artists. Dataslöjd is a part of my studio in Kulturlagret that I share with my friend Raquel Meyers. We have very different practices but we were both interested in research on the possibilities of data and slöjd (slöjd is Swedish for "craft"—mostly traditional craft techniques), which is a huge everyday practice in Sweden.

For me, it's a space for artistic research mostly, in which I learn new techniques, collaborate with Raquel, and experiment a lot with techniques that I incorporate in my own work or in the workshops I teach at ElectroKKV.  We also have a little space there that works as a great gallery space, so we also organize exhibitions and performances.

Did Transmediale ask you to repeat the burning of the SD memory card of Bitcoins?

Yes. I applied to the exhibition open call for Afterglow, and they invited to me to perform the action again for the opening.

How did the idea originally come to you?

We were just talking in IRC about Bitcoin a year ago when a lot of the discussion was focused on the silly question of whether it was "real money" or not. A friend of mine said, "The real aspect making it into a currency is not when it is spent, but when it is burnt." I just thought, "How can I actually burn the bitcoins the same way you burn fiat money?"

Any other motivations?

I also was obviously trying to insert my performance into this tradition of burning things as a way to end one stage of a discussion and move forward. The same way that Piratbyrån did it around the old and already redundant question of copying and file-sharing, and similar to KLF's burning of a million quid from copyright royalties. My action was a way of recognizing Bitcoin as just money; another currency that you use to exchange for the goods and services you need. You can burn traditional currency by buying a Ferrari, drugs, or to make a fire to grill some marshmallows for your friends.

Does your friend's comment on the burning of currency relate at all to "proof-of-burn" in Bitcoin mining parlance? ("Proof-of-burn" is the act of sending Bitcoins to an unspendable address to prove that difficult work has been done in Bitcoin mining.)

Yes, it is related, but it's also about making clear that the digital is material. All data is material in one form or another.

Do you have any strong opinions one way or another on cryptocurrencies? 

Oh, I have very strong opinions. When I first noticed Bitcoin, like many people I recognized that the protocol of exchange and the whole technology around it was obviously very interesting; but, naively, I was not thinking about all of the financial behavior that is normalizing it. Also, I know some people are just interested in the technology, but it's kind of naive at this point to support the idea that technology is neutral. I keep reading that Bitcoin empowers people, creates benefits through its decentralization, and that in theory it will take control from big banks. There is even a video of this super famous populist alarmist Max Kaiser shouting in RT that "Bitcoin frees us from fear!!!" [laughs] Horrible.

There is definitely no shortage of Bitcoin proselytization. 

I do not feel comfortable with the glorification of Bitcoin and the libertarian ideology behind it. The saddest development on the internet in the last few years for me, together with many other new and current public issues, is the rise of libertarianism as a default position in many social movements related to netpolitics.

Is the burning of the Bitcoins in any way related to the currency speculation and culture surrounding it?

Well, one thing that I like about Bitcoin is that you can actually reduce the overall supply of Bitcoins available if you want. With fiat money it's more difficult since central banks can just invent any excuse or economic sophism to justify it. Bitcoin, like any other kind of financial system, is about speculating and increasing the value of your assets for profit. This system is not fair and is really not working for most of the people. I am no longer interested in revolutionary technologies that leave so many people behind. How many people own most of the Bitcoins? I think like 40 people.

Not as utopian as many Bitcoin cheerleaders imagine it to be. 

I do not think accumulation of lots of money by a few—as opposed to mining your own Bitcoins or exchanging fiat for cryptocurrency—is something that empowers society at large, and is not something that most of the vulnerable sectors of society can benefit from.

What do you expect to happen in the near future with Bitcoin?

I expect that Bitcoin is going to get even more traction, and will probably be widely used especially for micropayments via the web; and obviously, it will become a more popular protocol with rich people to hide their wealth. The more and more mainstream it goes, the more this will happen. I do not think that Bitcoin will liberate us from anything or empower us in any positive way, giving the twisted libertarians politics that are embedded in it, and that I do not support in any way.