Video transcription

I’m an artist. I make pieces mostly from Lego bricks. Bitcoin is an intangible currency, but we found an artist who’s using it to make physical works of art. We met up with Andy Bauch at his studio in LA. I make art that tries to sort of shine a spotlight on the connections between humans and technology and Lego bricks are a really great medium for that.

They’re sort of these little digitized pixels that you can make real-world mosaics out of. I’ll take either a pre-existing image or something that I’ve generated using an algorithm, or something that I’ve designed. I’ll imbed data in it a lot of the time. And then I actually create the work after that.

What exactly is bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a virtual currency that is maintained and tracked via a decentralized system. In the case of these pieces, this software actually fully generates a pattern from these secret keys to the bitcoins. I want to show people, visually, what something invisible looks like.

Bitcoin Art

The pieces I’ve made take a bitcoin secret key and they expose it for all the world to see. The money is actually hidden in the pattern created by the Lego.

There’s a possibility that the bitcoin imbedded in the works of art could actually be worth more than the price I sell the art for. When I initially bought the bitcoins, they were worth anywhere between $20 and $90. Now, the bitcoins are worth between $300 and $1,500. Someone that’s clever enough could reverse engineer the works and actually take the value out of the bitcoin wallet. The pieces that I’m making are breadcrumbs in our trail of approaching the singularity.

The singularity is this concept that artificial intelligence may be created that is more powerful than the human mind. I don’t think there’s anything really about art that artificial intelligence can’t eventually do as well as humans can.

There’s actually a system that I’m working on which may replace some aspects of my job, in more the physical sense. There are a lot of interesting artificial intelligence advancements that people should be aware of and maybe freaked out by…