Mine Your Own Business, 2018 – ongoing. Microcomputers, live data, found objects, displays, fruits, batteries and wires, dimensions variable.

Mine Your Own Business is an ongoing series of networked contemporary still lifes examining the capitalist-colonial entanglements behind promises of interconnectivity, technological decentralization, and financial autonomy.

The series began in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane María in 2017, amid a speculative wave of cryptocurrency businesses seeking opportunities in a place in crisis. Early works featured functioning Bitcoin miners scattered among the waste of everyday objects associated with performance and pleasure. These miners challenged Bitcoin's immense appetite for energy and computational power by using as little of both as possible—and consequently being barely “successful.”

The series has since expanded to incorporate personal data, real-time global statistics, cryptocurrency and financial markets, carbon trading, and the valuations of military and energy corporations alongside crude oil prices. Bringing these seemingly abstract systems into contact with consumption waste, everyday objects, and decaying tropical fruits, the works revisit the still life as a form historically entangled with commodities, colonial trade, and the transience of material life. Mine Your Own Business traces continuities between colonial histories of extraction and contemporary technological and financial systems, confronting their promises of immaterial progress with the physical infrastructures, resources, and geopolitical relations on which they depend.

Mine Your Own Business / Mine Your Own Business living sculptures