Simon Denny

Dunkunsthalle is pleased to present Read Write Own, an exhibition of Simon Denny’s recent landscape paintings of digital land plots, alongside sculptures made of whiteboards decommissioned from the Twitter offices when Elon Musk took over and rebranded the company. The artworks resonate with Dunkunsthalle’s space—a disused Dunkin’ Donuts in the financial district—as they are all objects that carry histories of earlier usages, previous lives, and participation in other economies.

Each painting portrays a tokenized visual representation (often resembling a simple stylized map or plan) that the owner of a piece of “metaverse” property receives when they purchase a plot of digital land in virtual world projects like Decentraland, The Sandbox, or Voxels—some of the earliest and most popular ventures invested in during the recent crypto/metaverse boom.

Whiteboards from the offices of Twitter’s campus in San Francisco, many with residual markings from Twitter’s developers, have been sculpted with a laser-cut that slices a “plus” symbol (the exact “plus” used when mobile tweeters begin a tweet in the current X user interface) into the center of each board. The negative space produced in the center of each board by these “plus” extractions resembles a window, a graph, even arrow slits in castles or heraldry from shields—or a targeting system. These altered boards are hung between each painting, perpendicular to the walls of the old Dunkin’ Donuts, forming a kind of viewing division with a cross-shaped window throughout the space.

The title of the exhibition, Read Write Own, refers to entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon’s description of the evolution of the internet from a “read only” series of brochures, through the advent of user generated written content (social media), to the current rhetoric advancing a new stage of ownership possibilities enabled by web 3. As technologies change the way we see the world, ownership and shifting notions around what and how we own property (real estate, virtual property) shift in kind. Dixon’s book of the same name has been published this year, and works from Denny’s landscape series will appear alongside an a16z book event at SxSW in Austin in March.