The Transformoney Tree will be the next stage of our Art as Money project, and the follow-up to the Exchanghibition Bank installation on the Playa in 2011. It will again deal with the value(s) of Money and Art in that vast moneyless desert. We are really happy that we received a Burning Man Art Grant, but we will still need your help! We won’t need money, but we will need lots and lots of one-dollar bills……..Does this sound a bit cryptic? Please read on and we will try to show, explain, and hopefully get you involved!
Our current form of currency has turned from a neutral medium of exchange into a belief system, that mortgages the present moment for a seemingly never arriving future payoff.
Participants will be able to pick Exchanghibition Banknotes from the tree, while decorating its bark by gluing one-dollar bills onto it. In the process of interaction the dollar bills will lose their financial value, but will add value to the artwork.
Are the roots of this tree the roots of all evil or the roots of all happiness? Hopefully they’ll become the roots of a new consciousness!
Money has become almost a part of our Nature, so it’s difficult to realize that for a big part of their history humans have lived without Money, and maybe this will be the case again in the future. But even long after Money will be gone, Nature will still be there and we might still be able to pick things of real value from trees.
For this project we will need a lot of one-dollar bills and we will need your help: we are going to ask you for money – not as a financial instrument though, but as a material to create art……..
Interested to help us collect one-dollar bills? Send us an email at inartwetrust (at) artasmoney (dot) com , or PM me. Any suggestion of how to collect the physical banknotes are appreciated as well.
(Please realize that since we are based in Amsterdam collecting physical dollar banknotes might be a bigger challenge than you think……..)
Yours Bankingly and Dreamingly and Paintingly
Dadara
PS we posted the same text and image on the project blog, so it can be shared easily via your social networks, after all we will need the community to make this work
link is here:http://blog.artasmoney.com/art-as-money ... -man-2012/
And another cool thing about getting those bills straight from the hands of burners is that people giving the banknotes could also draw and write things on the banknotes and thus make it personal and give it a bit a Money 2.0 feel!
The 'financial results' from this one night were pretty cool, here are some examples:
