Blockchain Records
According to traces of footprints found in public records, the photo odyssey was revived in the Francophone city of Bastogne. The small town, deprived of a train station, had on its main street an electronics shop. A shopkeeper facilitated human access, without asking for proofs of human identity, to an automated banking machine exchanging paper bills with blockchain currencies.
After verification at the end of 2020 of token conversion operations nearby a tax heaven kingdom, what the photographer dreamt of was earning banknotes in cash form. His greedy dreams used to take place on a king-size bed, adjacent to a smoking chimney, below the wooden roof of a six-person Burundian family that was naturalized as Belgian by laws of the 20th century.
Throughout months of unemployment, little to no free time was wasted away from executing entrepreneurial moves across public networks of cyberspace or wandering kilometers of walkways built on dismantled railway tracks, RAVeL. As soon as the Sun rose up on his November birthdate in 2021, romantic ties woven in French were severed by a Belgian girlfriend who battled everyday an autoimmune hindrance to her walks in the city of Verviers. The last surprise du jour unwrapped a present: a digital stack of ENS governance tokens parachuted into his public wallet.
awalkaday 173-2021
awalkaday 173-2021 → An old cobbled road in Bastogne, shot from near ground level looking up toward sunlight breaking through clouds. The angle refuses to survey the territory. From down here, the road and the light are the same thing.
As a reward for earlier transactions using an Ethereum protocol to name his account’s numerical identifier as daqhris.eth, the equivalent of a European engineer’s four-months salary was granted all of a sudden with no strings attached. Out of his freelancing pocket, end-of-year donations followed suit within the Bitcoin network and a crypto-assets growth fund established to further the next milestones inside the Ethereum realm.
By keeping in mind the unrelenting spirit of a town associated with a USA-led victorious offensive during the Second World War, Chris expanded the range of skills to be hired as a local handyman who can do-it-all. One job here, one call there, on call all four seasons, until landing an offer from the city’s computer boutique in the spring of 2022. The promise of employment carried benefits: a business owner’s letter to support the regularization of the geek’s legal status.
To the astonishment of his social network in the provincial town, the delayed response from a Brussels tower housing a federal office governing non-Belgians smashed down the financial offer for community integration through computer repair in the summer of 2022. Then, despair showed up again in a fog of dark emotions, uncolored digital snapshots, mental screams for bank-free miracles, and pedestrian retreats into the Ardennes forests.
Later, the blockchain publication of the photo collection was achieved in subsequent steps. First off, the creation of an eponymous smart contract occurred in August 2022. The contract creation was followed by the registration of awalkaday.art as an Ethereum domain name in September 2022.
About half a year onward, in the midst of his desperate migration to a nomadic lifestyle sheltered by refugees in Brussels, 263 WALK tokens were minted on Ethereum in February 2023, marking a significant moment in the history of the photo series. A month prior, the artist’s wallet had left behind its digital fingerprint at a cryptographic ceremony when contributing a random number to secure the future of Ethereum’s upgrades.
In the virtual realm of blockchain-based art platforms, the artist created a profile on behalf of his work, then listed artworks on Coinbase, Foundation, Rightclick, The Hug, Zora, SuperRare, Manifold, Highlight and OpenSea starting from the second half of 2023.
As an artist, coder and hacker with published work on a blockchain, he participated in a 3-day international hackathon and gathering of Ethereum software developers organized by ETHGlobal and held for one time only in Brussels, Belgium (July 2024).
It’s uncertain if the Goddess of unpredictable fate and luck had to intervene for an undocumented person tethered to one country, in order to gift his timeline with three last-minute acts of good fortune. Firstly, the relocation of large-scale events out of Paris due to lodging reasons linked to concurrent Olympic Games.
Secondly, the recovery of a biometric passport requested for event attendance, which was discovered by the ex-girlfriend in a discarded bag under her queen-size bed. The passport was kept at all costs from being withheld by agents working for advanced nations on his exile path from East to West, and was the keeper of years-old records about entry into the Schengen area.
Thirdly, weeks before ending on a colorful note the visual art project, a tri-colored jacket made for cyclists attracted his shopping eyes at a second-hand clothing store in Les Marolles, the artistic heart of the capital city. With Bastogne printed at the back of the sportswear worn during the last day, different kinds of eyes could notice the hilarious exporter of Belgian pixels walking around swarms of hackers.
Since then, after honing his skillsets as an Ethereum app developer and overcoming the learning curve of hackathons, his next blockchain-based artistic projects began: Zinneke Rescue Mission, to be preceded by Mission Enrollment.
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