The BTC art print by Vibeke Bertelsen (Udart)

I have hidden an amount of bitcoins in a digital wallet and I encourage people to go find them. To get the passphrase that unlocks this treasure people will have to decode the hidden meaning in this artwork.

The first person to solve the quest gets the Bitcoins.

Buy the BTC art print

You can buy the art print called BTC. Please note that the mini and small sizes of the print are too small to be useful for solving the quest. So please buy at least the medium size.

Buy at society6.com

How does the treasure hunt work?

The artwork I sell is a collage of many images. Each image corresponds to a word. There are 12 special words and once a person has collected them they will be able to gain access to the Bitcoin wallet where the treasure is stored.

This is done by entering the 12 words in the right order into the Bitcoin wallet software called Electrum. It is up to the public to figure out how to connect the images to the special words. Note that it is a very hard quest to solve and it will be almost impossible to solve without the aid of a custom made computer program.

Once the quest is solved the winner gains access to the Bitcoins and is able to move them to their own wallet. After that the treasure is empty and there is no prize for subsequent users that may solve the quest.

Currently the bitcoins are worth 150 USD (January 2018) — Hey I’m a struggling artist, so that’s all I could spend, but maybe value will go up like bitcoins have done until now.

Introduction to the bitcoin treasure hunt

Bitcoin speculation vs. art world speculation

“I have created this artwork to be speculative on purpose. As the price of Bitcoin rises of falls so will the value of this artwork. In this way my artwork becomes a commentary on how the artworld is a speculative economy just like the Bitcoin economy. People invest in Bitcoin in the hope of reaping a quick reward and some commercial parts of the art economy are certainly driven by similar motives.”

“There’s an unhealthy environment in the artworld where hype and celebrity becomes important than the quality of the art itself. This happens because the underlying economy of the art world is highly speculative and some people buy artworks purely as an investment thereby driving the prices of certain artworks to astronomical levels.”

“I invite people to buy my art print (which comes in a limited edition of 100 copies) and solve the quest to unlock the Bitcoin treasure.”

The art print is a mosaic of many images

The small print

As the artist I promise not to move the treasure at any time. The art print is sold in a limited edition of 100 copies through society6.com. I do not refund the cost of the art print and all queries regarding the delivery of the art print should be directed to the staff at Society 6.

You can check if the Bitcoin treasure is still there. Enter this address in the search field at blockchain.info:

xpub661MyMwAqRbcFNh1qRaGbcMG13tqim9MvFuCDEqEjj6byF1GYuCmTzEhbLt4s2QvpeXnu3ZEEAedbtpmsRnAm8yxYQ6kzDGcjpiA2zZXKGf

How to restore a wallet based on the 12 word seed using Electrum (order of words are important).

docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html

Vibeke Bertelsen (Udart)

About the artist

Vibeke Bertelsen is a digital artist and creative coder living in Copenhagen, Denmark. Since 2010 she has been a part of artist collective Obscura Vertigo creating large scale visual installations and lighting design projects domestically and internationally. Apart from these large projects she creates web based experiences and short animations for Instagram (attracting several thousands of followers).

Vibeke is fascinated with the way the human experience is transformed by digital technologies. Her art questions the gap between real and virtual, flesh and data. Vibekes work is post internet art showcasing her use of digital visuals to investigate the human experience in the internet age.

Vibekes work has been displayed at multiple film festivals and her previous interactive piece Valley of Uncanny #01 received positive attention from idN Magazine and Prosthetic Knowledge when it was released online.

instagram.com/vibeke_udart

twitter.com/vibeke_udart

udart.dk

Buy the BTC art print

You can buy the art print called BTC. Please note that the mini and small sizes of the print are too small to be useful for solving the quest. So please buy at least the medium size.

Buy at society6.com