Rhea Myers stands out as perhaps the most important and overlooked artist in the crypto art movement; few have quietly offered more to the medium. Myers was one of the earliest creatives to adopt blockchain technology as an instrument for artistic creation. With her unquestionable influence, conveyed through her explorative and educational research, Myers’ pioneering role in the digital art space is yet to be fully recognised. This Contract is Art, an Ethereum smart contract created by Myers in 2014, was the art world’s initial introduction to the blockchain, allowing artists to register and sell works digitally via the Ethereum network. Myers’s continued experimentation sits at the cutting edge of conceptual experimentation of the NFT form, and Myers herself stands as one of the leading voices and experts on the conceptual possibilities of the medium.



Myers was first inspired by computational art forms as a child when exposed to Harold Cohen’s “AARON” bot drawings. After working on remix art, generative art, 3D printing and social media art bots at the Centre for Electronic Art at Middlesex University, her interest has shifted to the culture, ideology, and technology of the blockchain when she moved to Vancouver in 2013. Myers saw the potential of blockchain art in how it represented an ideological bridge between 1960s Conceptual art and the net.art scene of the 1990s. She explored how both movements challenged the established aesthetics and ontology of art via new means of production, communication, and organization. The visionary Secret Artwork (Content) ties directly to such themes.

Myers’s cryptic work derives its name from the conceptual art group Art & Language’s Secret Painting from 1967, while the aesthetics of the data visualization are reminiscent of net.art's retro-futuristic style. In Secret Artwork, an Ethereum contract stores the cryptographic hash (salted sha256) of the work, though the contents will forever remain a mystery to everyone but Myers. The Daedalian artwork is “ownable” as an Ethereum ERC721 token, though the owner is no more aware of its contents than the wider public. The presentation of the token takes the form of a dapp, a decentralized application that runs on the blockchain, revealing all the artworks details bar its contents. Its owner, when it was created, stored the hash of the content in the public domain, though the work itself is infinitely elusive. The hyper conceptual artwork that we are presented with displays each of these datasets in multifarious ways — text, colors, shapes, even musical notes — all stored through the dapp.

Myers takes the dematerialization of the art object to a realm far beyond what the Art & Language group could ever have conceived. The dialectic of absolute identity and absolute secrecy that public key cryptography lends to blockchain is rendered critically, if not aesthetically tractable. Art history and the freshness of cypherpunk technology are placed in mutual interrogation.

Ever traceable but never knowable, this work presents an opportunity to acquire an infinity of artistic interpretation and possibility, shrouded by a mysterious yet impenetrable matrix of cryptographic code. An unbreakable bond between artist and owner locked on Ethereum’s digital ledger. Myers is, and should be considered henceforth as, one of the most explorative artists in the field.