{origins;}
//artists
halluciphile
Bio
halluciphile (or Duncan van halluciphile as he is sometimes known) is an experimental sonic artist and musician. Born in 1980, this xillennial followed his calling at an early age by pursuing collage, digital art and psychedelics as well as fortifying a multidisciplinary career including web design. He embraced blockchain technology in 2012, and he had formulated plans for his own token system by 2014. That year, he registered many emoji domains as punycode entries on the Namecoin blockchain as well as a mixtape titled (m/eow). He joined the RarePepe community in 2017 and took an active role in other early collections such as Bitcorns, Mafiawars, and KaleidoscopeXCP. He was also the developer behind TheWojakWay. In 2022, halluciphile was welcomed into the Punycodes community and he registered new punycodes on Namecoin whilst working with the Punycodes DAO on ways for the project to embody his original aspiration for the collection. For him, the new Punytoken collection was an opportunity to combine the iconography of the digital age with the empowerment that self publishing tokenized art can provide. In January 2024, he created two commemorative pieces and is excited to share them with an audience who appreciates the forward trajectory this artist has been on by living on the edge of technology and art.
​
Click here to register interest / bid in the Sotheby's auction
m/eow b-side
Punytokens Debut Dozen Decennial
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy
Bio
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are media artists whose works extends from the moving image and software to drawing, painting, and installation. Their projects often seek to situate new technologies within our culture, using contemporary tools and questioning their impact both on the individual and on the social sphere. Early projects include database sculptures of television clips filtered into categorical frameworks and diorama like miniature film sets activated by live cameras and software. In their work, technology serves as a mediator between the human and the world, and as an active force which not only shapes its material but reframes the entire project of what we choose to see. Recent work refigures mid century images of the American west with collaged databases of AI generated landscape photography.
​
Enquire to anna@morrow-collective.com
Cars, Hive (still)
Mussaffah (still)
Jonathan Monaghan
Bio
Jonathan Monaghan examines elements of art history and contemporary culture through an interdisciplinary approach. Drawing on a variety of sources ranging from ancient mythologies to art history to science fiction, his highly-crafted, fantastical works uncover subconscious anxieties associated with technology and consumerism. Drawing from his background in video game design, Monaghan’s artworks utilize digital technologies to create visually extravagant and immersive experiences that engage in critical dialogue about the digital age. With a satirical edge and sense of humor, Monaghan’s works challenge viewers to examine their own complicity in the perpetuation of a society dominated by technology and conspicuous consumption. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Spazio Ridotto in Venice, and Market Gallery in Glasgow. Group exhibitions include The Palais de Tokyo in Paris, New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival, Lehman College Art Gallery in New York, Ars Electronica, and Postmasters Gallery in New York. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, VICE, The Wall Street Journal, and The Village Voice. Monaghan received his BFA from the New York Institute of Technology in 2008 and his MFA from the University of Maryland in 2011.
​
Click here to register interest / bid in the Sotheby's auction
Temple of Optimisation (still)
Mothership (still)
Marguerite deCourcelle
Bio
Marguerite deCourcelle, professionally known as "coin_artist," is a vanguard artist, creative technologist, and game designer who has been at the forefront of the blockchain creator economy since 2014. A visionary in crypto art, her ingenuity is recognized by global institutions like BBC, MIT, NASA, and Bloomberg. Her inaugural cryptographic puzzle "The Dark Wallet" in 2014 marked the beginning of her journey into this innovative art form. “The Dark Wallet” featured a unique and notorious Minecraft Server as part of its cryptographic experience.
The pinnacle of her career thus far is the cryptopuzzle "Torched H34R7S" also known as "1Flamen6," a collaborative work with Rhea Myers in 2015. This artwork, inspired by Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle," features a Bitcoin wallet's private key ingeniously encoded within its design. The puzzle challenged the public for three years, its value appreciating alongside Bitcoin's rising worth, until it was finally solved by an anonymous programmer. The complexity and allure of this piece cemented deCourcelle's reputation as a pioneer in crypto puzzles. Expanding her digital artistry, deCourcelle made a significant impact with "F473 (FATE)," a digital-born game with generative elements sold during Christie's first NFT group show in 2021. This work underscored her innovative approach by featuring cross-chain interoperability, a decentralized cooperative gamified story-telling experience, and a physical painting with a hand-painted private key to a cryptocurrency prize, offering an interactive narrative that redefines art engagement. Currently, as the CEO of Blockade Games, deCourcelle continues to push the boundaries, leading a team of technologists and futurists at Blockade Labs to democratize creative expression. They are developing cutting-edge technologies that enable creatives to generate digital environments efficiently, marking the future of digital environment development. Through her career, Marguerite deCourcelle has not only pioneered new forms of artistic expression but has also championed the democratization of creativity, enabling a wider audience to unlock and celebrate their unique creative talents.
​
Click here to register interest / bid in the Sotheby's auction
TORCHED H34R7S
Nili Lerner
Bio
Nili Lerner is a painter and a conceptual and media artist living and working in New York and in Tel-Aviv. Since 2008 she has worked on projects dealing with the concept of money creating currency as art. Between 2009 and 2011 she harnessed the emerging technology of social media to interact with and create her art. Lerner explored the intersection between art and tokenomics with her NILIcoins project in 2014, through which “minted” global corporations like Coca-Cola, Apple and ebay as coins via 11 Counterparty tokens. The gesture derived from an influence of pop art and the commodification of art as well as the artist’s vision of a future in which crypto-currencies would break the state’s monopoly on currency. NILIcoins used Bitcointalk forum - where the crypto community were virtually gathered - as an integral part of her project, where she started pages dedicated to her individual coins and recorded the dialogs for artistic use.
In January 2015, physical recreations of digital images of dialogs from the Coca-Cola Coin forum and Disney Coin forum were displayed in a solo show at New York’s Bitcoin Center titled On The Shoulders of Giants. Throughout the following years, Lerner expanded on her theoretical explorations which she continued to express on the Bitcointalk forum through an expanded cast of fictional characters, including Satoshi Nakamoto and Mark Zukerberg. In these dialogs she covers many current social and technological themes through deliberations regarding these characters' expressions and identity. During 2019 and 2020 when Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as art fully emerged, Lerner referenced the 2014 Disney Coin’s topic dialogs, which explored concepts of identity being defined and authenticated using the blockchain, and harnessed NFT technology to take to realize that concept in ‘real life’. In recent years, Lerner expanded her practice and concepts through interaction with AI applications, exposing the function of LLM (Large Language Models) as a giant consensus machine which “assesses” the corpus of information based on the hegemony values guidelines to produce the most likely output of the collective’s cultural mind. For her exhibition with MORROW collective at Art Dubai and corresponding Sotheby’s auction, she used the characters’ dialog lines as prompts for two artworks. The first, Real Toons, was produced using an AI image generator. The second, The Architecture, is a text piece for which the AI chatbot was instructed to narrate a fictional story, thus using the collective brain to decipher these texts within the framework of average consumer culture. In cooperation with an LLM scientist, Lerner plans to take this vision one step further, to pin down the core components for the architecture of an actual decentralized autonomous and self-sustained AI agent. Their first mockup she intends to name Mickey Mouse which she hopes will eventually make legal claims regarding its own IP. First, however, she predicts that, using their own judgment, such autonomous synthetic entities are likely to invest heavily in blockchain based assets and in the historical crypto art assets in particular. Thus closing the value loop started 10 years ago with the minting of her NILIcoins token collection.
​
Click here to register interest / bid in the Sotheby's auction
Real Toon
The Architecture
Primavera De Filippi
Bio
Primavera De Filippi is an artist and legal scholar at Harvard University, exploring the intersection between art, law and technology, focusing specifically on the legal and political implications of blockchain technology. Her artistic practice instantiates the key findings of her research in the physical world, creating blockchain-based lifeforms that evolve and reproduce themselves as people feed them with cryptocurrencies. Her works have been exhibited in various museums, galleries and art fairs around the world including Ars Electronica and Francisco Carolinum (Linz, Austria), HEK Museum of Digital Arts (Basel), Kate Vass Gallery (Zurich), Furtherfield Gallery, Gazelli Art House, and Kinetica Art Fair (UK), Centre Pompidou, Grand Palais, Gaité Lyrique, and Le Cent Quatre (Paris, France), Palazzo Cipolla and Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture (San Francisco), as well as festivals such as Burning Man (Nevada), Fusion Festival (Germany) and Synesthesia (Portugal), and online galleries like Feral File.
​
Click here to register interest / bid in the Sotheby's auction
Primavera De Filippi, Bespoke Seedling Of An Imagined Future, see listing
Rhea Myers
Bio
Rhea Myers was born in the 1970s in the South-East of England. In the 1990s she attended Canterbury College of Art, and Middlesex University’s Centre for Electronic Art where she later taught. Since 2005 she has been involved with the Furtherfield art collective in London, a unique meeting of art, technology, and society. In 2013 she married a Canadian and moved to Vancouver, BC where she has worked with blockchain organizations including Blockade Games, Dapper Labs, DCTRL, and Dogecoin. She makes art to understand the world, placing technology and culture in mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us. Since 2014 she has used the blockchain as a medium for embodying, critiquing, and moving beyond the anxieties of post-financial-crisis society. Inspired by the histories of conceptualism and net art, she has made work with digital imagery, computer code, as well as producing theory, critique, and fiction as the blockchain art world has gone from imagined to mainstream. Rhea's art has been exhibited internationally, sold at Sotheby’s, and collected by Albright Knox Gallery in the US. The book of her collected blockchain art and writings, “Proof of Work”, is now available from Urbanomic Publishing. Her most recent solo show is “The Ego, and It’s 0wned” at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin.
​
Click here to register interest / bid in the Sotheby's auction
Proof Of Existence 1
Proof Of Existence 2
Tokens Equal Text 13
The Opposite Images 13
Sarah Meyohas
Bio
Sarah Meyohas (b. 1991, New York) is a conceptual artist and pioneer in the field of crypto art. Meyohas’s work has been exhibited in New York at Red Bull Arts, 303 Gallery, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art and internationally at institutions including the Barbican Centre, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai. In 2015, Meyohas created Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency backed by her physical artwork, which questioned the speculative value of cryptocurrency and the ineffable value of art. Predating the launch of Ethereum, Bitchcoin is effectively a “proto-NFT.” Today, Meyohas continues to investigate emerging technologies with familiar emblems of biological life: soaring birds, created using augmented-reality software, flock in unison with the frenetic variations of the stock market; rose petals, aggregately identical but individually unique, comprise the dataset for their AI-created equivalents. Meyohas’s practice provides an intelligible visual language to articulate the systems and complex operations that increasingly govern our world.
​
Click here to register interest / bid in the Sotheby's auction