This is Rhizome Today for Monday, November 10, 2014
Lot 48 in the contemporary art evening sale at Phillips this Thursday includes a sculptural work by Constant Dullaart that is being described as a treasure map. A 3D-printed steel cylinder is nestled inside a pologygonal case, a "treasure chest;" it contains a string of data that, when unencrypted, is said to reveal the GPS coordinates of another chest. That chest, which contains 40 works by notable contemporary artists, is buried in an undisclosed location on the Isla del Coco. The proceeds of the sale will benefit Pelagic Research and Conservation Project for Isla del Coco for the purposes of shark conservation.
The Isla del Coco is said to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, which is another way of saying that it has an important place in the capitalist historical imaginary. "It was frequented by pirates, and later by whaling ships. Treasure supposedly buried there includes $100,000,000 worth of gold evacuated from Lima by the colonial authorities," reports the Historical Dictionary of Costa Rica. "Its permanent three-man garrison has been unable to prevent illegal inshore fishing, particularly of lobsters and sharks (for shark-fin soup)."
The sale of this lot is already an intervention into the flows of contemporary global capital that have certainly shaped the Isla del Coco, a mustering of elite art world resources in order to mitigate the effects of an environmentally destructive practice that is fueled by an emerging moneyed class in China. Dullaart's piece is a kind of trickster intervention within this. He's designed the map so that it can only be solved with great effort, and only with the aid of keys which he is releasing, but only in encrypted form, including this one:
Dullaart seems to be proposing that people online can solve the clues and sell their solutions to the buyer of the map. It does seem likely that a group effort will be required to solve this puzzle. "We have encrypted the treasure map in such a way that brute forcing it would take an unimaginable amount of time," Constant told Sleek magazine. "The amount of possible keys is larger then the amount of atoms in the universe. The clues might help to single out the galaxy in which to look for the atom." In 2014, this kind encryption can be thought of as a luxury craft object, time-consuming and labor-intensive to produce, inaccessible to most of us citizens of the cloud. And of course one's immediate desire is to break it. In fact, this is the only way to truly appreciate the complexity of the code.
Add "Dug back up for $15" and you've described the current state of computer security, 0days and all... pic.twitter.com/VoRaD5FJ75
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) November 8, 2014
Contemporary artists in the past few years have been very much interested in the idea that the artwork is experienced in the gallery and through its online documentation. But is the image, as Christopher Kulendran Thomas recently asked me, just the human readable aspect of the network? What's interesting about "Treasure of Lima" is that as long as it stays buried, it can't even be experienced as an image; it can only be experienced through discussions of the mechanisms through which it might become visible: the reputation of the artists, the contemporary art auction, the online code-breaking and sharing.
So I wonder if the best buyer for this lot would be someone who understands the poetry and the weird humor of leaving the treasure buried. But I also want to know what was in Constant's long email that crashed my phone this morning. So get cracking.
Whatever happens, I'm on the side of the sharks.