In every gallery now, a QR code hangs beside the work: the wall label made digital - the link, the certificate, the price. The most useful thing in the room, and the least looked at.
What if it is the work? What if the image is the code, and the only thing it points to is itself?
The Work
An autonym is a sign that names itself - the word noun is a noun. A self-resolving portrait is its picture: an image that is its own address. Not a picture laid over a code, but a portrait solved into the code's own equations - solved, not drawn. Scan it, and it resolves to itself.
The image is the address; the address is the image.
Lineage
Magritte painted a pipe and wrote beneath it: this is not a pipe. A self-resolving portrait is the reply, a century on - this is not a picture of the link. It is the link.
In 2019, Autoglyphs put the algorithm on the chain; in 2021, the punks' pixels followed. Autonym closes the loop. The work no longer points to itself through a server or a marketplace: it is the pointer - held on the chain, permanent, resolving only to itself.
The Genesis Series
QRPunks. Ten thousand CryptoPunks, each solved into the modules of its own code, each resolving to its own page. The first Self-Resolving Portraits.
Next
Then, any image. Bring a picture; it becomes its own address.
- gwendall