SHL0MS - SECURITY

I was once again approached by Shl0ms and the team at SOLOS Gallery to create a promotional video for the launch of the digital portion of their Security project mid-2025. SECURITY is an ongoing work of financial performance art that began in Q4 2024. A makeshift trading desk operated by the SOLOS team out of a very old and very worn-out van illegally parked outside of various illustrious fine art fairs such as Frieze and Art Basel offered patrons the dubious opportunity to purchase a paper certificate on an exponential manually-tracked bonding curve, with the promise that they could sell it back at any point during the trading window.

Unlike the world inside the fair doors, which presents a veneer of conviviality and slowness and in which patrons often hoard art for decades as if to suggest that they feel a deep bond with the artist’s work (at least until it can fetch a hefty multiple of their purchase price at auction), SECURITY presents a cold and hyperfinancialized interactive spectacle in which collectors may ruthlessly dump the work on each other in a no-holds-barred trading environment on an aggressive exponential bonding curve facilitated by the artist and gallery.

Now, the performance has now migrated into the digital realm, coalescing blockchain technology with a manual ledger directly custodied by a plausibly human digital artist. Once-paper certificates are now tokenised digital non-shares, allowing market participants to trade online with the same volatile immediacy that characterised the original guerilla exchanges. There are no secondary-market restrictions for digital non-share certificates; they are bound to the SECURITY bonding curve only in arbitrage potential, their value is now governed by the market’s collective appetite for satire and speculation.