IOU — Narrative Projects, London (2015)

Solo exhibition, Narrative Projects, 110 New Cavendish Street, London, 10–19 November 2015. Text by the artist: IOU (also on harm.work).

The works

Ten works, each thermopaper mounted on canvas, 80 × 120 cm: Fastener, Bottle Cork, Bacteria, Instrumentation, Pin, Leucocyte and Sonogram (2014), and Agent, Nail and Ant (2015). They hang as wall works.

Three canvases hang in a white room with a concrete floor, two on the far wall and one, seen at an angle, on the right. Each is white with black marks that thicken into blots and smears and thin out into speckles and fine scratches.

The text describes how they were made: "These new works, made of large sheets of thermosensitive paper, mounted on canvas, resemble paintings. My traces are engraved with hot air and I barely touched their surface." Thermal paper darkens where it is heated, so the marks are a record of where the hot air went. No paint or ink was used.

Leucocyte is covered in rounded grey and black blots of different sizes, soft at the edges, some flecked with white where the coating has broken.

The online press release presented the works as ten thumbnails in a file window, labelled with lowercase file names from agent.jpg to sonogram.jpg. The titles name small things: organisms (Bacteria, Leucocyte, Ant), hardware (Fastener, Nail, Pin, Bottle Cork), a medical image (Sonogram) and two abstract nouns (Instrumentation, Agent). An earlier version of this page recorded that the titles were generated by Wolfram Alpha's image-recognition software reading the marks; no source in the archive confirms this, and it is an open question for the artist.

The text

The text moves by association. When Quake came out in 1996 its soundtrack by Trent Reznor was "the first time my love for software development and pop culture collided". In 2008 he found Reznor's Ghosts tracks on archive.org, "released under a Creative Commons License". Creative Commons, Markdown and RSS "were developed with involvement of internet hacktivist Aaron Swartz", who "committed suicide after he was indicted" for downloading much of the JSTOR database: "He would have gotten 35 years+." "A few months after Aaron's death", Google announced the end of Google Reader, its "hugely popular" RSS reader. Germans, he notes, prefer cash; the receipt is "a thin strip of paper", its numbers "not printed with ink but heated, and when not treated carefully, they wash out, causing great despair to my tax advisor". The new works are made of that paper.

Each step follows from the one before: the soundtrack leads to the free Ghosts tracks, their licence to Creative Commons, Creative Commons to Swartz, RSS to Google Reader, cash to the receipt, the receipt to the canvases. The text ends on the works and their provenance. The title IOU, "I owe you", a note of a debt still open, is not explained in the text; set against paper made for receipts, it names the opposite of a settled payment.

The paper over time

Calor Scripturam is not one of the IOU works but was made the same year in the same way. Its marks are now dark red-brown on cream: clouds, rings and branching lines, with a small paper label at the lower left. Filing it in his are.na channel emo in December 2023 (block), he wrote: "Love how this one aged: it used to be b/w. I made it by applying heat + water to shopping receipts paper (no paint or ink) and called it "Calor Scripturam"". The receipts in the text wash out; these canvases change colour and stay legible, and the artist welcomes the change.

The provenance line

"Their provenance resides in a ghostly transaction, timestamped in the supposedly perpetual blockchain, our only hope."

The text hedges its own claim with "supposedly". IOU opened seven months after the MAK Vienna bought Event Listeners with Bitcoin through Cointemporary (April 2015); in 2021 he wrote that he "minted my first NFTs in 2015 with the help of the now defunct ascribe.io" (Tokenising Sustainability). Whether the IOU works were registered on ascribe is not recorded. The same essay gives the outcome for the ascribe tokens: "although the token provenance information that ascribe stored on the immutable Bitcoin blockchain will always remain there, in practice, we have lost access to it, as their web interface to retrieve it was discontinued." The record persisted; the means of reading it did not (→ Tokenising Sustainability, left gallery, Mediation and the Archive).

A dim photograph from the exhibition page: two of the canvases on a wall in low, violet-tinted light, with dozens of lit tealights scattered across the floor beneath them.

See also

• Tokenising Sustainability (2021) — the artist's account of ascribe.io, Event Listeners and the lost interface
• left gallery — founded in 2015, the same year, after the MAK purchase
• Process Legibility — marks that record the process that made them
• Mediation and the Archive — records that outlast the means of reading them