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abstract

currency: from the latin word "currere," which means "to run" or "to flow."

the reference image for this work features a piece of inflation art photographed at a 2020 march for better living conditions in caracas, the capital of venezuela. culminating in the united states military unlawfully abducting their head of state under the direction of donald trump, the citizens of this south american nation have faced over two decades of continuously worsening material hardship as a consequence of sanctions, piracy, and military incursions devised to undermine their self-determinative efforts. this sculpture comprises a paper cutout skeleton with a hat on its head and several units of paper money - four bolívares fuertes (“strong/hard bolivars”) and one bolívar soberano (“sovereign bolivar”) - clothing its torso.

these banknotes constitute two out of three iterations of currency reform (the third being electronic) that chavista governments have implemented to counter the ruinous impacts of foreign intervention. one example of the ensuing institutional destabilization is hyperinflation, a kind of economic "glitch," indicating that the exchange value of a given medium in the semiotic order of high-fidelity representations (i.e., the class society of images) has “slipped” due to excessive circulation. acknowledging the virtually asignifying nature of these items as an opportunity to productively “misuse” them, craftspeople in the region began repurposing the bills as elements of commercial media or agitative propaganda.

in a 2022 journal article, dr. lucie chateau describes the process by which some exploited workers "willfully degrade their images to make a commentary on their own act of objectification." in this case, the "purposefully-poor image" in question is of decaying human remains covered in increasingly worthless cash, emphasizing the loss of meaning and agency experienced by its producer(s) under global capitalist hegemony. i contributed to this movement of creative praxis by digitizing and further degrading the picture.

reference(s)

process

seeking to apply the techniques discussed in chateau's article, i utilized the glitch image generator hosted on https://glitchyimage.com/ and adobe photoshop. after processing it using the former, i dropped the distorted png file into the latter and used it to add noise, contrast, and saturation to the final deliverable. finally, i blended two separately edited instances of the photo and layered zeros over all other visible integers to emphasize the themes of depreciation and absurdity.

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