Currency

Innovative show by international artists tackles the financial world – money, markets and more.

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When something has value, we say it has currency. Today, it’s money. In the past, it was shells, tokens or tulips. Currency, a group show on view at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, B.C., until Dec. 6, suggests currency doesn’t have to be a physical commodity. The ethereal, psychological and symbolic also have value.

Belgian artists Bénédicte and Laure-Ann Jacobs, a.k.a. the LarbitsSisters, start things off with an audacious call to arms. Their real-time interactive installation, Bitsoil POPup Tax and Hack Campaign, asks viewers to log on from home or at the gallery, create a digital wallet for themselves and help the sisters virtually redistribute big tech wealth. 

“It’s this idea that every time someone clicks on something or “likes” something, someone else is making money off it,” says gallery director Gordon Duggan, noting that Google, Facebook and others make their money from user interactions. Duggan says the campaign aims to level the playing field. “It’s creating a tax on clicks,” he says.

The work consists of a website, bots the artists have created to troll the Twitterverse for relevant keywords, such as Apple, cash or data, and four black modules to process the results. Once the bots have attached themselves to the keywords, a tweet sets the redistribution mechanism in motion, which in turn activates the processing modules. Smoke appears and the modules spit out bitsoil paper tokens that are, in a sense, cryptocurrency. Those tokens are redistributed into the digital wallets of the campaign participants.

“So as the exhibition progresses this room will start to fill up with paper,” says Duggan.

Out of the Abyss, by American Jonathan Monaghan, is a three-channel digitally animated triptych that highlights our interactions with luxury goods. Ornate mansions and familiar shops float through the atmosphere flanked by the four horsemen of the modern age. One carries a yoga mat, one a laptop, one a bag of organic groceries and one, a smart phone on a selfie stick. The artwork is stunning.

With Flashcrash, A Perfume, Italian artist Fabio Lattanzi Antinori has taken the hourly data from a one-day market crash in 2010 and used a forensic process (gas chromatography) to turn an event into a commodity. After matching the spikes in the chromatography graph with fragrance notes, he worked with a perfumer to create a scent. Visitors can lift a bell jar and smell a ceramic disc infused with perfume. 

With Vancouver-based Byron Peters’ Untitled, a digital rendering of the sky above Hong Kong, the work itself isn’t as relevant as the means of payment. When the piece was delivered to Peters, the Hong Kong architectural firm that supplied it asked for payment in Facebook “likes.” 

“For them, 50 Facebook likes was more valuable than money,” says Duggan. “This piece speaks about the idea of influencers and how that idea of collecting likes is so critical to social media.”

The Value of Art (Cat) by Christa Sommerer and The Value of Art (Lady) by Laurent Mignonneau, both based in Austria, are two pleasant but unremarkable paintings. A sensor on each tabulates the amount of time viewers stay in front of the work. The longer someone stands transfixed, the higher the dollar value.

 “It’s based on the idea the popularity of the work increases its value,” says Duggan.

Animal Spirits, by Australian Daniel McKewen, is perhaps the sharpest statement in the exhibition. Taken from news footage, it features Alan Greenspan, former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and 11 other financial leaders trying to explain the global financial crisis and their role in it. It’s simple and direct. Digitally separated from their bodies, they look like heads on spikes as they squirm and obfuscate. As with other pieces in the show, Animal Spirits shows us that currency, in this case power and the ability to shape economic policy, has many faces and takes many forms. ■ 

Currency is on view at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, B.C., from Sept. 2 to Dec. 6, 2020.  

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