Diego Tonus and Anonymous
Business Related Strategy
Performance
Performers, microphones, LED display, customized PC programmed for mining cryptocurrency, documents of the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property
2019

In collaboration with professors Stefano delle Monache and Maximiliano Romero, IUAV University Venice

Courtesy MAMbo Museum Bologna (Permanent Collection) and the Artist

 

Business Related Strategy is a performance in which a series of unemployed workers – having agreed on being publicly recognised as such – enter the exhibition space at scheduled moments and begin to pronounce their names, trying to make them noticed and recognisable. A customized PC, installed in the selected room of the exhibition space, is programmed to research the names pronounced by the performers on the web. This data is then translated and used to mine an Altcoin, which will determine the actual (still fluctuating) monetary value they will be paid. The more often each performer pronounces his or her name – or the louder this is done -, the higher their wage will be, according to the stock value created.

Business Related Strategy is part of Fragments of a Conversation with a Counterfeiter. The project contributes to a discussion about the transformation and transportation of value, questioning the valorization of time and space in time of crisis. The series of new works derives from an assumed conversation between Diego Tonus and a forger (anonymous for practical reasons) revealing controversial thoughts related to contemporary systems that deal with the definition of value. Each artwork is the visual translation by the artist of this conversation manifested through the act of presenting objects, actions and words experienced by the forger within his practice of reproduction of value and ways of transporting it, hacking system of controls and dealing with the definition of individuality. Each artwork is presented in co-authorship with the forger. Tonus approaches the thoughts of the counterfeiter as if they were his intellectual property, questioning the ‘counter’ of counterfeiting and appropriating his ideas.

 

In order to share the appropriated forger’s ideas with the international audience, to activate and perform them, the artist has registered the works as trade secrets at the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property. The validity of the trade secret is international and lasts 10 years.

 

Realized thanks to the support of Italian Council (2018), Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.