Description:

‘TIMESTAMPS | Bi(t)ological Clock’

▶ Concept:

“Bi(t)ological Clock” bridges biological, scientific, and financial market cycles, exploring their shared rhythms and transitions. Over 10 artworks, evolving every 1008 Bitcoin blocks and mimicking a woman’s 28-day cycle, Ivona Tau reflects on life’s impermanence as the pieces deteriorate toward an endpoint akin to menopause. The project also discusses challenges lived by women in science, linking each artwork to Bitcoin blocks commemorating pivotal yet controversial achievements by women, highlighting the obstacles they face in male-dominated fields.

▶ Tech:

• The project aligns with both natural and technological cycles. Using Bitcoin’s 10-minute block times, each artwork changes every ~7 days (1008 blocks), shifting through 4 coded image transitions, reflecting the four-week cycle.

• By integrating Bitcoin’s irregular block time, the project reflects how cycles don’t always align with rigid timeframes. Bitcoin’s block time, which can differ from typical measures of time, mirrors the irregularity of natural cycles in the human body.

• Each artwork has a unique end date in the future, when it stops being dynamic, reflecting the statistical probability of the biological clock’s end, such as menopause, or more generally, death.

• ‘Specific Date’ Sats strengthen the connection between blockchain timestamps and real-world events, with each artwork inscribed on a piece of Bitcoin from the exact dates of historical events involving women in science.

Example: Timnit Gebru’s forced departure from Google over ethical concerns in AI highlighted ongoing issues of bias and diversity in tech. Katie Bouman, key to capturing the first black hole image, faced online harassment. Other works address Alexandra Elbakyan’s controversial creation of Sci-Hub, sparking global debates on knowledge access, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding CRISPR-Cas9, co-discovered by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, showing the persistent challenges women face even in groundbreaking achievements.

• Custom AI Model - Trained on corrupted and damaged film photographs, often blurry or overexposed, bridging analog faults with a glitch aesthetic. Pulling features from errors in physical, digital, and algorithmic spaces symbolizing the natural process of decay. Ivona trained over a dozen custom AI models, refining them into four distinct architectures, each generating one of the four images in every artwork. This creates varying degrees of distortion, chaos, and noise outputs.

▶ Aesthetic:

Dynamic and layered, the works transition from figurative clarity to digital noise in four distinct frames representing the four parts of the 28-day cycle. Visually embodying biological and technological decay, female figures emerge and are then distorted, revealing an aesthetic that echoes the imperfection and unpredictability of cycles. This draws parallels between the fragility of human life and the abstract nature of blockchain systems while celebrating resilience amidst disruption.