One Thousand And One Market Caps is an installation including printed wallpaper, two large books, a series of printed coffee mugs, a coffee machine, a surveillance camera, a table, and chairs. The two custom printed books (A3 format) list the first 1001 most valuable cryptocurrency coins. Visitors are invited to browse through the books and to get a coffee served in custom printed mugs. A surveillance camera with auto-tracking function is overlooking the whole scene, which is set up in the local tourism office of the city of Melle.
Intro from the book: “A collection of Blockchain tales in times of extreme hype and digital gold rush. Each page of this book represents a single cryptocurrency project with a screenshot from its related website. All one thousand and one coin tales are listed in the order of value (market capitalization, as of June 10, 2018). The page numbers can be used as a reference to find the market value and charts on the according page in the separate charts book”
The success of the first and most well-known digital currency Bitcoin and its underlying open source technology ‘Blockchain’ encouraged hundreds of thousands of developers to create their own new currency system based on the same model but with different and ‘better’ functions. In a gold-rush-like run, every day new players with specialized coins, tokens and adapted Blockchain systems go online with all kinds of promises to help, improve, or disrupt. With colorful animated websites full of marketing speak at its best possible investors are lured into the belief that this one will be the next top coin in the market. Often it is hard to say which of these projects have serious intentions and which are just in the game for quick money before they drop everything and run off with the capital.
One Thousand And One Market Caps was commission and produced by the ‘Biennale d’art contempoirain de Melle – Le Grand Monnayage‘, on view at the ‘Office de Tourism’ of Melle, France, June 30 – Sept 23 2018
Credits: Christopher Casper, Geraldine Juarez
