XY of Inverse Ziggurat (1 Chuqui : 100 Guggenheims)

________ //intro: This NFT is a part of a larger artwork. To see the full artwork, visit the artist’s profile on a Tezos-NFT-marketplace like OBJKT.com. If none are accessible, or in the event, that IPFS no longer hosts the metadata of the “master” 3D-NFT, check the instructions at the end of this description to re-create it using this on-chain NFT. ________ //artist statement: ‘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. ________ //instructions: This on-chain NFT depicts the XY-plane of the 3D-artwork. It shows the structure from above (its plan). The Z-axis, depth, is represented by the value of the colors used (from white in the front to dark in the back). The two dots in the upper right corner are an exception – despite their lightness, they are at the back with the adjacent numbers which are of the darkest color. There are no multiples or overlaps of voxels along the Z-axis, so the shape can be reproduced losslessly.