Made in collaboration with Phoebe Jenkins

A prevalent online phenomenon in recent years has been a great number of young people looking to philosophical texts as a means of contextualizing our current historical moment. These texts range in content from the strictly materialist to more esoteric, abstracted works. This interest in critical theory is documented appropriately enough on social media platforms, such as the Theorygram subculture on Instagram, where accounts post memes laden with references to philosophical concepts, texts, or the philosophers themselves.

Concurrent to this has been another trend where people, exhausted or demoralized by their limited economic opportunities, pivot to alternative means of becoming financially stable. Crypto-mining makes use of a significant amount of computing power to validate transactions (generating hashes) within crypto networks, rewarding the miner with cryptocurrency for each successful hash. This process of mining hashes provides the owner of mining rigs to generate a steady stream of ambient income.

Both the desire to become more intellectually nuanced and financially stable are attempts at establishing a greater degree of autonomy within the chaos of the contemporary world.

The artwork Mining Meaning makes use of the proof-of-work technology implemented in crypto-mining but transposes its purpose from the generation of hashes to the generation of new critical theory. Taking as its basis texts popularized on Theorygram such as Capitalist Realism, Fanged Noumena and others, ‘Mining Meaning’ utilizes hashing to synthesize these works while simultaneously generating new critical theory in the process. The subtitle Quest for Validation is at once a reference to the mining rig’s function of validating transactions in its network, while also calling to mind the crypto miner’s attempts at financial (or in this case intellectual) validation by using the mining rig in the first place..