Robert Alice’s multidisciplinary work combines conceptual engagement with the blockchain through a formal focus on code, text, and encryption. As an artist, their work straddles not just NFTs, but painting and sculpture, curating and writing.

Influenced by conceptual artists such as Roman Opalka (1931–2011) and On Kawara (1932–2014), alongside artists such as Jasper Johns and Julie Mehretu, Alice’s practice and intellectual engagement with the blockchain focus on the idea of the fragment and the whole, the node and the network within decentralized ecosystems.

In Portraits of a Mind (2019–), Alice sees the blockchain as a kind of history machine and vast archive where a blockchain’s original codebase stands as its own form of portraiture, both infinitely knowable and unknowable at the same time. An abstract portrait of Satoshi Nakamoto, the work explores ideas of anonymity and identity through the aesthetics of open-source code.

Playing with nodal structures and the histories of cartography, cryptography, and numismatics, the work uses major historical coordinates as a form of history painting — inspecting the histories of crypto to suggest that its roots stretch deeper into history than commonly thought. Combining 40 paintings and NFTs together, the project was exhibited in 2022 at one of the coordinates of the project: Sealand, a micronation and former cypherpunk data haven 12 kilometers in the North Sea.

Part of a solo show at the Monnaie de Paris, a new body of work, The Blueprints (2023), is an exploration of the competing thought systems of centralized and decentralized structures in an artistic investigation of the Monnaie’s collection, itself the world’s oldest continuously running minting institution, founded in 864 AD.

Drawing from both the past and present, the works “hijack” archival blueprints and architectural drawings from the institution’s collection, colliding and re-networking them with diagrams and aesthetics that draw from the histories of blockchains.

Tracing the re-networked drawings with the letters M, C, V, Alice infuses the drawings with Jorge Luis Borges’s (1899–1986) Library of Babel (1941) as a philosophical meditation on the concept of the infinite archive, encryption, and its relationship with contemporary blockchain structures.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST
Artistic Director at Serpentine Galleries

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