peter burr


boom town



BOOM TOWN is a fictional neighborhood built on the ethereum blockchain. Each piece in BOOM TOWN represents a unique, living artwork comprised of 1,000 images that will change over time, evolving as a kind of durational stop motion animation over an undetermined period pegged to Ethereum’s block time—that is, the length of time it takes to add another block to the blockchain.

As Julia Kaganskiy wrote on the occasion of the artwork's launch in December, 2022, "Utopian architecture and the built environment hold a particular fascination for Burr, whose work frequently mines the poetic tension between the architect’s idealism to remake the world, and lived reality. Lofty aspirations that a particular configuration might produce certain relationships between people and their environment tend to falter confronted by emergent forces that govern the real world. Inspired by the boom and bust cycle of capitalist-driven locales, Burr’s BOOM TOWN is galvanized from the landscape of the American West, when makeshift settlements, or “boom towns”, sprung up wherever valuable resources were to be found. Informed by the ideals of Manifest Destiny, colonialist expansion, and get-rich-quick schemes, these towns attracted prospectors, speculators, and those in search of a fast track to a better life. 

Online, architectural metaphors are often invoked when discussing information and systems architecture, or in the form of digital real estate like domain names or plots of virtual land in the metaverse. Importantly, unlike much of Burr’s recent work, the locations in BOOM TOWN are devoid of people. The streets outside the factory and shopping plaza are empty. The windows of the apartment blocks show no signs of life. Burr is interested in drawing attention to the vacancy of these spaces and their potentiality as sites of projection and collective imagination. On day one of the exhibition, BOOM TOWN is little more than a collection of empty structures, yet through the process of collecting, the town becomes populated and inhabited, in a sense, by the proprietors of its NFTs. At a time when Web3 is still, by and large, a vacant space to be developed and designed, Burr seeks to underscore that it is we who will come to determine what kind of social and civic life it will ultimately enable and support. Not only will we be the ones who come to populate and activate these spaces, to breathe life into them, make them vibrant and give them their unique character and vibe, but the most potent promise of web3 is that we can choose to build them differently, with a different set of principles and values."

View the exhibition here.   

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ADDITIONAL PRODUCTION CREDITS
- programming by Dave Tandem
- production by Julia Kaganskiy and Feral File

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