Artist and IAMA Coin creator Kevin Abosch has taken working across mediums to a new level by tying together physical art, digital art on the blockchain, and his own blood. To be more specific, he created 10 million pieces of digital art with blockchain addresses, which he insists is not actually cryptocurrency even though people are buying and selling them as such. For 100 of these, he has created physical art pieces that correspond to them, then printed the blockchain addresses of those 100 IAMA Coin pieces on the physical art pieces with his own blood. This marriage of physical, digital, blockchain and biological art all started with a potato.
According to Abosch, this stunt is the apex of a long meditation on the value of art that was all spurred by a single unusual happening; in the course of his artistic pursuits, he took a simple, albeit well-composed photo of a potato. This artfully shot spud earned him the rough equivalent of $1 million USD, and he began to think hard about the value of art and the concept of value in general. He said that he felt “commodified” in that the heart and soul he put into his work had been given a concrete, number-based value. When he created digital blockchain tokens that would otherwise be just another mostly valueless name in the cryptocurrency crowd, collectors jumped all over it, and he again felt commodified. This time, however, that was his intention, and he felt he was “fighting back” against the system that he perceived as overemphasizing value. This led him to tie it all together and inject a bit of his literal physical being by creating physical art pieces, which would sell well on their own merits, and printing blockchain addresses on them in his own blood. These addresses each lead to one of the 10 million pieces of IAMA Coin that he created.
It speaks volumes on Abosch’s stance on the matter that he refuses to reveal what collectors are paying for IAMA Coin, or how much pieces are being resold for. To him, blockchain is just another medium to create some form of art, which by definition lies within the soul of the artist and cannot be concretely defined. Naturally, he wouldn’t say how much his bloodstained pieces went for, either, whether that’s a further extension of his stance or simply because each one included one IAMA Coin. All told, this entire saga says something profound about human nature and our connection to both the digital world and its wonders, and the concept of value.