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.
UNKNOWNARTINDEX.COM
BOOKED, MUU Contemporary Art Center, Helsinki
Octobre 2021
unknownartindex.com is a digital archive containing artworks by unknown artists from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The objects in this archive range from 3000 BC to AD 1990. Each line corresponds to an artwork, presented as a CSV (comma-separated values) file.
Using the open-access archive made available by the Metropolitan Museum on GitHub, unknownartindex.com uses blockchain to transfer ownership of the Museum’s art objects to a unique cryptographic address: UnknownArtist.eth. The highlighted entries are hyperlinks to the cryptographic token created for each object.
There is a distinction between two types of cryptographic tokens: one corresponds to a digitally created file, while the other corresponds to a digital archive associated with a physical object. This archive refers to the latter. However, once tokenized, the physical object becomes a digital object. It is then digitally born and its provenance becomes digital: according to this new archival principle, the object no longer has a physical past.
unknownartindex.com is an experimental and speculative archive that imagines a world in which blockchain becomes a means of preserving and transmitting artworks, and in which the value of digital archives surpasses that of the physical objects from which they originate.
BOOKED, MUU Contemporary Art Center, Helsinki
Octobre 2021
unknownartindex.com is a digital archive containing artworks by unknown artists from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The objects in this archive range from 3000 BC to AD 1990. Each line corresponds to an artwork, presented as a CSV (comma-separated values) file.
Using the open-access archive made available by the Metropolitan Museum on GitHub, unknownartindex.com uses blockchain to transfer ownership of the Museum’s art objects to a unique cryptographic address: UnknownArtist.eth. The highlighted entries are hyperlinks to the cryptographic token created for each object.
There is a distinction between two types of cryptographic tokens: one corresponds to a digitally created file, while the other corresponds to a digital archive associated with a physical object. This archive refers to the latter. However, once tokenized, the physical object becomes a digital object. It is then digitally born and its provenance becomes digital: according to this new archival principle, the object no longer has a physical past.
unknownartindex.com is an experimental and speculative archive that imagines a world in which blockchain becomes a means of preserving and transmitting artworks, and in which the value of digital archives surpasses that of the physical objects from which they originate.
