This digital artwork consists of 2 NFTs that function together as an ‘NFT-installation’: a 3D-model + its plan minted as an on-chain NFT that allows lossless reconstruction of the 3D-model.
‘Inverse Ziggurat’ is a monument to the mine of Chuquicamata and its riches that enable this very artwork. Like the copper extracted from Chuquicamata over the past century, this artwork is decentralized (IPFS-hosted 3D-NFT & its on-chain blueprint) and exists in thousands of computers around the globe.
The spiral shape of the artwork fuses two landmarks: the Chuquicamata (Chuqui) mine in the Atacama desert, Northern Chile and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The two are connected by M. Guggenheim and Sons mining empire’s 1910 purchase of the mountain with its “hundreds of millions of tons of porphyry copper ore”. Though hardly a mountain after being mined by people as far back as the indigenous Atacama people in 500 AD, the Guggenheims started copper production and sold the highly profitable enterprise in 1923. Money from this sale financed Solomon Guggenheim’s art collecting in the late-1920s and 1930s in Europe and financed the building of the museum.
The artwork’s general form is that of a ramp encircling the center of an open-pit mine while the exact geometry adheres to the floor count and plan of the Guggenheim Museum. The title stems from Wright’s own description of the building’s shape as an “inverse ziggurat”, a Mesopotamian burial mound (particularly suitable as ‘museum’ and ‘mausoleum’ share etymology). The colors of the artwork are taken from satellite images of the mine and its surrounding leaching heaps & pools. The digits in the four corners express the relative scale of the two spirals. At 4.5 km (2.8 mi) long, Chiqui’s below-ground absence is roughly 100 times larger than the Guggenheim’s above-ground presence (40 m or 131 ft).
This artwork will co-exist and co-mingle with traces of copper from the mine due to the fact that Chuqui mine has the world’s largest lifetime total production with over 30 million tonnes of copper. In other words, the mountain is distributed around the world and it is highly likely that some of the computers involved in maintaining, accessing and viewing ‘Inverse Ziggurat’ will do so using copper from Chuqui – thereby completing the monument by connecting the sign to the signified.
Special thanks to Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña whose work Tres espirales (Three Spirals) (2022) introduced me to the common history of the two spirals.
To see the rest of the NFT installation, see the artist’s 24x24 pixel artwork minted on 8bidou. In the event that IPFS no longer hosts the metadata of this 3D-model, you can recreate it based on the metadata of an on-chain blueprint in the form of a multicolor 8bidou 24x24 pixel NFT: https://ui.8bidou.com/inventory/?tab=1&addr=tz1g5GtyBrzjFdtsh6C8cKeXw6wRG5BeyWME. If 8bidou is no longer accessible, the blueprint and instructions for assembly can be accessed on the blockchain: contract KT1VikAWA8wQHLZgHoAGL7Z9kCjgbCEnvWA3 & token #1565.