The installation completes an existing room setup at the tourism office of Mellewith with a few tweaks and inserts.

One Thousand And One Market Caps

2018
installation
wallpaper, books, printed coffee mugs, coffee machine, surveillance camera, table, chairs
570 × 410 x 270 cm

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

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One thousand and one cryptocurrency projects in the order of value each represented with a website screen shot in a single book.

State of the art crypto marketing speak to convince possible investors.

Visitors are invited to have a coffee in a custom printed mug, to sit down and to browse the books

A surveillance camera with auto tracking function is overlooking the scene.

The charts book shows the market values of each 1001 related cryptocurrencies.

All values reflect the moment of capture, June 10, 2018 obtained from the online listing service coinmarketcap.com