BY MANU SHARMA
Sarah Meyohas is a conceptual artist who activates cutting-edge technologies to explore intersecting themes of nature, femininity and the forces that shape contemporary society, such as market economics. She is currently presenting work at Desert X, an international site-specific art festival at the Coachella Valley in California, from March 8 – May 11, 2025. STIR caught up with Meyohas to explore some of the major works she has created over the years, culminating with a discussion around Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams (2025), on view at Desert X now.
When Desert X reached out, I knew the desert, where the sun is a constant, was the perfect setting for this project. This was where the material could shine, in harmony with the elements, both technically and poetically.– Sarah Meyohas, artist
Meyohas was raised in a home that was attuned to art. Her mother would paint and take her to art classes and museums because she saw these as essential parts of a well-rounded education. As the artist grew older, she developed a parallel interest in finance, enrolling at the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, aiming to pursue a practical career in finance. Yet, after being introduced to photography in her sophomore year, her interest in artmaking was rekindled, and by her senior year, she decided to pursue a Master’s in Fine Arts at Yale University in New Haven. She completed her degree in 2015, in the middle of Bitcoin’s first decade. Meyohas would take inspiration from the currency’s meteoric rise, leading her to create the breakout artwork Bitchcoin (2015), which gained significant traction.
Bitchcoin is regarded as the first example of art being tokenised on the blockchain, a decentralised digital ledger of transactions for digital and physical assets. Bitchcoin predated NFT (Non-Fungible Token) culture, which took the art world by storm during the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half a decade after Meyohas’ digital coin. NFTs are unique or non-fungible pieces of digital media that can be purchased with cryptocurrency. These are typically bought and traded with a cryptocurrency called Ethereum, which Bitchcoin also predates. Meyohas also created her own blockchain on which the currency would be tradable, giving early investors access to its software through certificates that each held encryption key numbers.
Initially, Bitchcoin was backed by the photographs in Meyohas’ Speculations (2015 – ongoing) series, which feature geometric images created through the recurrent reflection between two mirrors. The multidisciplinary artist sees this endless reflection as a metaphor for speculation in value-based exchange, where the assumed value of one article or currency influences how much the other is required in return—and vice versa—in an endless cycle.
Meyohas tells STIR, “By tying each ‘Bitchcoin’ to a physical photographic print, the project became the first tokenisation of physical art on a blockchain, exploring the financialisation of art and the emergence of tokenised ownership. In doing so, it foreshadowed many of the conversations that now define NFTs—about scarcity, provenance and the role of digital assets in creative economies.” She adds that she appreciates that Bitchcoin is widely recognised as an early precursor to NFT art and that it was acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in February 2023, solidifying its place in the art historical canon.
In 2021, Meyohas migrated Bitchcoin from its own blockchain technology to the widely-used Ethereum, with the remaining coins now being backed by images in her series Cloud of Petals (2017). The series involved sixteen male workers photographing 100,000 rose petals individually before uploading their images to the cloud. Additionally, each worker would set aside a single petal per rose they felt was the most beautiful and upload its image separately. This would then allow an AI (artificial intelligence) to algorithmically create new, unique images of petals indefinitely.
Meyohas hired an all-male team of workers to handle the rose petals for the conceptual art piece for two reasons. First, to explore male perspectives on feminine beauty, as roses—and flowers in general—are traditionally associated with femininity. Second, as a nod to computer programs, which are often feminised and yet predominantly created by men. The process was undertaken and filmed on the floor of The Bell Works in New Jersey, formerly known as Bell Labs. This site is of great significance to Information Technology (IT) as the birthplace of many essential elements of computing, such as the Unix operating system and the C programming language.
Cloud of Petals explores concepts of beauty and human subjectivity through AI. As Meyohas explains, it also examines how the systems of labour, data collection and automation shape our perception of value. In her words, “The project shed light on the very human labour that is often involved in the massive data collection endeavours required for cutting-edge work in artificial intelligence.” This labour may be invisible in the finished product, i.e. the images of petals; however, it appropriately shapes the value of each image.
Coming to the art festival Desert X, Meyohas’ Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams takes the form of an undulating wall that snakes across the desert floor, along with six adjustable mirrored panels that are used to reflect light onto it. The light patterns caused by the mirrors are called ‘caustics’, an optical effect that can be observed at the bottom of swimming pools. In the case of Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams, the light shed onto the wall spells out the title of the installation art piece.
Meyohas tells STIR, “I’ve long been interested in how technological structures can be encoded, processed and reinterpreted through natural phenomena and vice versa.” The mirrors used in the artwork have been created algorithmically for precise light manipulation, developing an interesting dichotomy with Cloud of Petals. While Meyohas’ earlier project used natural elements to train an AI model, her artwork at Desert X instead allows audiences to use hi-tech tools in order to manipulate sunlight—a foundational facet of nature.
The artist continues, saying, “What fascinates me most is that the end result is entirely self-sufficient—no power source or digital mediation is required. Because of this, it felt [it was] essential to work with sunlight rather than an artificial light source. When Desert X reached out, I knew the desert, where the sun is a constant, was the perfect setting for this project. This was where the material could shine, in harmony with the elements, both technically and poetically.” Meyohas’ artwork brings a fluid element to an arid environment, creating a link between the desert and water bodies, along with the poetics she develops between nature and technology.
‘Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams’ is on view from March 8 – May 11, 2025, at Desert X in Coachella Valley, California.
