Entrance / About the artist

The artist

Coldie

I am a stereoscopic 3D and kinetic artist in Sacramento, California. I have spent more than fifteen years working in depth, the inch in front of and behind a flat surface where an image stops being flat. On May 7, 2018 I minted the first stereoscopic artwork recorded on a blockchain. Since then my work has been brought to auction at Christie's, Sotheby's and Bonhams. Filthy Fiat is what happened when I buried $200 and the ground rewrote it.

First, by date

The Day We've All Been Waiting For went on-chain through R.A.R.E. Art Labs on May 7, 2018: an astronaut climbing toward the moon under a billboard that reads HODL, above photographs I took of Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is the first stereoscopic artwork ever recorded on a blockchain. One of the two editions was held by Coinbase and hung in its lobby from 2018 to 2020.

I mention the date because in this field it is the only credential that cannot be rewritten later. The block it was minted in is still there.

The auction arc

All three major houses have taken the work to the block, and each time they took the dimensional work.

• Sotheby's, September 14, 2022. 3D Light Painting 03 was included in Inside the World of MaxStealth, the first single-owner NFT auction held live in its salesroom, alongside Beeple, XCOPY and Pak.
• Bonhams, 2021. Proof of Work · Genesis, conceived in 2018 and minted June 16, 2021, was featured in Bonhams and SuperRare: CryptOGs, a sale honoring the early artists of the space.
• Christie's, New York. Warren Buffett · Filthy Fiat sold in First Open: Post-War and Contemporary Art, lot 286. It is a portrait of the most famous investor in America, assembled entirely from fragments of the buried bills, magnetic on Dibond so it never hangs the same way twice, and paired with a 1/1 recursive Ordinal inscribed on Bitcoin.

Money has been the subject for a long time

Filthy Fiat is not a detour. The argument has been running through the work since the beginning, and the materials keep getting more literal.

• 2018 · The Day We've All Been Waiting For. A billboard reading HODL over two cities. A portrait of belief in a currency that had not proven itself yet.
• 2021 · Proof of Work · Genesis. Titled after the mechanism that makes digital money expensive to fake, and sold at Bonhams in a sale about who was early.
• Decentral Eyes. An ongoing portrait series of the people who changed the argument about money and privacy online, built by recombining many source images into one face. Michael Saylor, Edward Snowden and Jack Dorsey are available as signed editions.
• 2020 to now · Filthy Fiat. Here the currency stopped being the subject and became the material. I buried two hundred one-dollar bills as emergency preparation, dug them up two years later as a brick of mold, and turned what survived into the collection. Fifty whole notes are graded, sealed and catalogued bill by bill.
• 2024 · Warren Buffett · Filthy Fiat. The buried bills became the face of the most famous investor in America, and Christie's sold it.
• 2025 · Filthy Fiat Flag. The American flag and the Bitcoin logo composed from scans of the ruined notes, debuted at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas and released as a print edition of 21.

Galleries, exhibitions and the work before the chain

For nearly a decade I photographed live music in stereoscopic 3D with a camera I built myself, including two years as the official 3D photographer of the Coachella Festival in 2009 and 2010. That archive was exhibited as Front Row 3D at Gazelli Art House in London. My kinetic and interactive work is shown at Eterno Gallery in Lisbon. Anaglyph 3D canvases of mine were selected for national juried exhibitions in 2016, juried by Jenny Gheith of SFMOMA, and in 2018, juried by the Los Angeles critic and curator Mat Gleason.

The wider practice, with the full catalogue and provenance, lives at coldie3d.com.

Why I keep making work out of money

A dollar is a promise printed on cloth. We agree it is worth something, and that agreement is the only thing holding it up. I buried mine to be safe and the ground showed me exactly how fragile the arrangement is, in a way no chart ever did. Everything I make now is a version of that sentence, and the bills say it better than I can.

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