Untitled Stills

Having sensed some metaphorical resonance between the ways that sonograms were being tokenized as evidence of life, and the ways that NFT's were speculated to be the end all, be all of digital sovreignty, I minted "Roe" on the Ethereum blockchain the day Roe vs Wade fell. Then I got kicked off DALLE with no explanation as to why.

A corpus of sonograms conceived with artificial intelligence, minted on zora and editioned in 15 for Social Photography X, Carriage Trade. While commercially available in the context of the gallery , my dreams and desires for this work are tactical.

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avail for Social Photography X (Carriage Trade)

December 8, 2022 - January 29, 2023

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The Heartbeat Acts that began with the Texas Heartbeat Bill ban abortion at the moment embryonic and fetal cardiac activity can be visualised. In doing so, the political and aesthetic designations of life and personal sovereignty, will and have shifted.

The act authorizes members of the public to implement the law by filing action against anyone suspected of performing or facilitating the termination of a pregnancy, including but not limited to personal support. This means that the person who drives a woman to the clinic has the same criminal liability as the doctor who provides for her.

This will have been first abortion restriction to rely solely on enforcement by private individuals through civil lawsuits, totally disintermediating the role of the state: "cutting out the middleman", as they say.

When "decentralization", "autonomy", "encryption" and "tokenization" are the watchwords of the day, this is a metaphor.

The textual content in the NFT's hash echoes that of the Bitcoin Genesis Block.

are.na .

I began minting images of embryonic activity with machine learning software on June 24, 2022, when the humiliating effects of the Heartbeat Bills saw the sweeping fall of the legislation that provided my mother, an immigrant, and those of her generation, their civil and economic opportunities. are.na