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Robert Alice: Bitcoin's First Code, in Paint, Heads to LACMA

A BLOCK from Portraits of a Mind, Robert Alice's 40 paintings of the code that launched Bitcoin, is part of the landmark digital art gift LACMA announced on October 22.

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On October 22, LACMA announced that members of LACMA Digital Leaders and other donors have offered the museum more than 200 works of digital art over the next several years, from pre-internet pieces of the mid-20th century to recent work made with AI. Robert Alice is among the artists named, and the next day he confirmed that the gift includes "a BLOCK from Portraits of a Mind." "Coordinated generational gifts at this scale get the attention of every museum in the world," he wrote. "They become the bedrock for exhibition, for research, and for further gifts."

Portraits of a Mind (2019) is a full transcription of the code that launched Bitcoin. The 12.3 million digits of version 0.1.0 are spread across 40 circular paintings, each holding exactly 322,048 digits raised out of the surface of the paint. The paintings are distributed to collectors around the world so that no one holds all the code, a decentralized network made of paint. In each one, 32 digits are encrusted in gold to form a latitude and longitude tied to the making of Bitcoin, "from the codebreakers of Bletchley Park to the exact location of Hal Finney at the time of the first Bitcoin transaction." Together the 40 sites cover 5,000 years of history.

The work is also a portrait of someone who cannot be found. The circles recall cipher wheels, rai stones and old coinage, but where a coin would carry a ruler's face, each painting has a void at its center. Crossed target lines aim at it and stop short, so "an X is never formed. No one is found," as the Christie's essay put it in 2020. Each painting is secured on the Bitcoin blockchain: a unit of BTC sits in a wallet unique to that work, held in an OpenDime key on the back, with the name and section of code recorded in its OP_RETURN. Block 21, the first block made public, also came with an NFT built on Async Art's layering protocol that encodes every global time zone.

LACMA will not be the first museum to hold a block. The Centre Pompidou acquired BLOCK 10 (52.5243° N, -0.4362° E) in March 2024, and LACMA already holds an NFT from Alice's generative series Source [On NFTs], #124, donated by TASCHEN with a copy of the Hard Code edition of On NFTs, the book he edited, for the museum's library. "Part physical, part digital, it has a foot in both the traditional art world and the NFT space," Alice said of Portraits of a Mind in 2024. Now another fragment of the code goes to Los Angeles.

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