At Manila, our studio is interested in understanding NFTs and how they can connect to the real world. One way we are doing this is by exploring money as a canvas. In the digital world, NFTs are “minted” like money, but that are visual or audio art. Often visual still art, like paintings, are created on a canvas surface stretched over a wooden frame. So we are exploring ways that money can be used like a canvas. This creates a visual yet abstract connection between the physical use of money for creating art and the digital use of cryptocurrency to create art as NFTs.
In the images above, we have placed dollar bills and coins in various arrangements on top of canvas. These explorations allowed us to find ways to incorporate physical money, as US dollar bills and coins, into the art creation process. The idea is to visualize money as a part of the artistic process, instead of as an abstract concept of value of exchange or other economic definition.
The use of dollar bills as a canvas presents several challenges to the art creation process. Without modification, dollar bills are not well suited as a canvas with their printed surfaces with uneven colors. We explored “bleaching” the dollar bills, and while this provided a more even background color, we also felt it was important for some works to retain the uneven background coloring, as an artifact of the “money as a canvas” concept.
