Tsu-Wei Lu

Installation

Minting rests on a material and historical equivalence: a cold wallet, here, is a deconstructed Ledger taking the form of the first wallet in human history — the flint Ötzi carried in his pouch 5,300 years ago, the tool that allowed him to make fire, and therefore survive.

The metal — tin, electronic solder, the substance that connects circuit boards — is melted onto real coins from around the world, forming a film across the sculpture's surface: a liminal material, caught between the tangible economy of physical currency and the immaterial economy of circuits and signals.

At the top, a robotic arm strikes or celebrates according to the real-time prices of BTC, ETH, XRP, BNB, and SOL — re-enacting the gesture of striking flint, or the victory dance of fire caught. Inside this physical cold wallet, the artist's cognitive key — her own brainwaves — is encoded into a token on the blockchain.

Every era imposes its own specific demand on human survival. This is not a choice — it is a condition. The visitor, detected via computer vision and taken as data, is merely the condition that activates a system sovereign unto economic interest — a system in which price, never value, is the only signal that survives.

Tsu-Wei Lu

Découvrir le profil

Tsu-Wei Lu, born in Taiwan, lives and works in Paris and Tourcoing. She trained at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (postgraduate programme), at Paris 8 University (ATI/EUR ArTeC) where she obtained a Master’s degree in Image Arts and Technologies, and at Villa Arson. She holds a Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique (DNSEP). She has taken part in a group exhibition at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris and at the Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition in Linz, Austria, and undertook a research placement at G.tec Medical Engineering on the subject of brain-computer interfaces.

Production

Credits