Sophie Auger is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and visiting professor at the UQAM School of Design.
She works across video installation, hybrid publishing, photography, and circuit bending.
Her research focuses on the beliefs and superstitions generated by digital technologies, and on how their invisible systems shape the ways we see, interpret, and inhabit the world.
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Coded on June 9, 2026.
IF A TOKEN COULD SPEAK
ELEKTRA, Montreal
May 12 – June 18, 2022
If a Token Could Speak explores the status of the image and its experience within the then-emerging context of blockchain technology and NFTs. The project examines how these technologies reconfigure mechanisms of value attribution in digital space by transforming freely circulating images into exchangeable assets.
At the center of the exhibition is a video featuring personified NFTs. Given voices and personalities that are intentionally adolescent, capricious, and self-centered, these characters celebrate the blockchain’s defining feat: enabling any image—even one of low quality and infinitely reproducible—to acquire the symbolic and economic value of a work of art. This staging raises a central question: what exactly is being assigned value here, and why?
The exhibition also includes a holographic video conceived as an auction catalogue. Every element of the project is recorded on the blockchain as an NFT: the artworks, the video characters, the exhibition title, the exhibition design, the press kit, and the promotional materials. A website allows visitors to bid on these various assets. In several cases, the NFT is linked to a pre-existing physical object; the purchase therefore concerns not so much the object itself as its digital trace, certificate, or archive.
By assigning market value to every component of the exhibition—artworks, documentation, context, and archives—the project pushes the speculative logic of NFTs to its limit. The exhibition experience is reduced to a system in which everything can be bought, sold, and monetized, to the point that the very notion of value becomes unstable. The blockchain emerges as a mechanism of speculation and legitimation capable of artificially producing scarcity, credibility, and desire.
Through this approach, If a Token Could Speak offers a critical reflection on how blockchain technology shapes our perception of what matters in digital environments: which images are valued, how value circulates, and through what mechanisms attention and trust are directed.
ELEKTRA, Montreal
May 12 – June 18, 2022
If a Token Could Speak explores the status of the image and its experience within the then-emerging context of blockchain technology and NFTs. The project examines how these technologies reconfigure mechanisms of value attribution in digital space by transforming freely circulating images into exchangeable assets.
At the center of the exhibition is a video featuring personified NFTs. Given voices and personalities that are intentionally adolescent, capricious, and self-centered, these characters celebrate the blockchain’s defining feat: enabling any image—even one of low quality and infinitely reproducible—to acquire the symbolic and economic value of a work of art. This staging raises a central question: what exactly is being assigned value here, and why?
The exhibition also includes a holographic video conceived as an auction catalogue. Every element of the project is recorded on the blockchain as an NFT: the artworks, the video characters, the exhibition title, the exhibition design, the press kit, and the promotional materials. A website allows visitors to bid on these various assets. In several cases, the NFT is linked to a pre-existing physical object; the purchase therefore concerns not so much the object itself as its digital trace, certificate, or archive.
By assigning market value to every component of the exhibition—artworks, documentation, context, and archives—the project pushes the speculative logic of NFTs to its limit. The exhibition experience is reduced to a system in which everything can be bought, sold, and monetized, to the point that the very notion of value becomes unstable. The blockchain emerges as a mechanism of speculation and legitimation capable of artificially producing scarcity, credibility, and desire.
Through this approach, If a Token Could Speak offers a critical reflection on how blockchain technology shapes our perception of what matters in digital environments: which images are valued, how value circulates, and through what mechanisms attention and trust are directed.
Video projection on wood panel, website, and holographic display mounted on a wooden pedestal. 
