'The Best friends’ portraits are part of an ongoing project about friendship, ownership, and the importance of understanding data protection. Understanding technology as it increasingly impacts all our lives is important. 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 drawings are 7.5”x11.5” (19cmx29cm). Each sitter is given their own digital version of their portrait with the option to buy the original for a nominal fee. The individual portraits are grouped into a block and made into a large fabric banner and digital prints at certain times depending on numbers. The number currently stands at 18 portraits with several friends and aquantancies on the list waiting to have their portraits drawn.
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 an original artwork, after all, everyone can be a collector of art.
