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.

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