Single coin

Mining gold in Indonesia. The value of gold measures its unique qualities, its rarity and above all the amount of work needed to get it! Photo © unknown

Is there anything beyond reality? Well, yes: death!
by ANTÓNIO CERVEIRA PINTO

Title: Single coin
Head: a gold coin with my mother’s image and an algorithm.
Deck: art and money were born the same year — speculation on a single coin.
Lead: art and money have found themselves in the same deadlock. So if we want to save money we have to save art as well, and the other way around: if we want to save art we have to imagine a new protocol for love and for value exchange too. Accumulation has always been a menace for societies, and the thin air of debt is even worse. We happen to be already inside a new cave — kind of a run-out of fuel spaceship. Big time for smart guys and for the artists too!

What does valuable money mean? Trust! How can we rebuild trust once we have jeopardised it on bad bets? Can we do it without a deep symbolic reconstruction of the Self? Can we accomplish that necessary reconstruction without coming up with a new image, and a new narrative about fair exchange and love?

Let’s begin with a new memory tale about genes, motherhood and Gaia, and for this purpose let us discuss technology, what we know about knowledge, conscience and reality.

Cognitive art is something new. It means that post-contemporary artists either need a substantial body of logic knowledge, and proficiency in more than one formal language, be it a classical discipline of Academia (Physics, Mathematics, Biology, History, and so on) or some sort of computational cocktail, or he or she will stay somehow off tune and loosing the main conversation that is going on among the new post-contemporary art practitioners. My point of view on this particular issue though is that in the end if we expect artists to create artworks this still means techne (τέχνη). Cognitive representation without craftsmanship and holism, is not art. The difficulty though is to know where does conventional knowledge, technology and science stops to aesthetic representation begins. I am since the last two years in the mental process of conceiving a new form of local currency, of symbolic bartering. In the end I will have to design, model and mint a new coin that may respond to the huge collapse of trust that is presently destroying so many things we cherish for so long. It is not a practical solution I am working on though. It is a cognitive-symbolic one! In the beginning money and art were the same trade. I’m wandering the way back to Paradise.

Obs: this is a keynote to the 12th Consciousness Reframed International Research Conference, presented at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisboa, on December 1st, 2011.

Copyright © 2011 by António Cerveira Pinto

The following is a collage of previous texts of mine revised and edited for this seminar and a theoretical background for the ongoing art project, Single coin.

Single Coin Collage by António Cerveira Pinto