The friends’ portraits are part of an ongoing project about friendship, ownership, and the importance of understanding data protection. You need to understand technology as it increasingly impacts all our lives. Our data is bought and sold under our noses and impacts what we see, what we are offered, credit limits, and many more things.
Each portrait is hand-drawn on heavy-weight watercolour paper, the individual portrait drawing is 7.5”x11.5” (19cmx29cm). Each sitter is given their own digital version of their portrait. The individual portraits are grouped in blocks of 14 and made into huge banners and large digital prints.
Each sitter will be issued joint ownership of the larger banner pieces that use their image, they will be part of a profit-sharing scheme that enables them to have part ownership of large scale original artwork and profit from it when it sells.
Ownership and sales are recorded using a similar form of cryptography that Blockchain uses to record transactions, this means that each owner and sale is recorded in an immutable form.
By involving people in this process I hope to lift the lid on some of the more complex forms of data collection and increase the number of people who own large scale artworks, after all, everyone can be a collector of art.
