ConsenSys in a Photo: An Artist’s Take
In February, engineer and artist Tal Danino created his own artistic depiction of ConsenSys and its work in blockchain technology.
Communicating Concepts in Blockchain, Ethereum, and ConsenSys Through Art
The power of art to communicate and deliver new, complex, and sometimes inaccessible concepts in all fields, especially emerging technology, is not heavily debated. People learn and relate to new concepts in a variety of ways; art inserts personality and humanizes aspects of society and innovative development in a way that other mediums do not.
Artists who create within the fields of blockchain art and BioArt (both of which are part of the broader category of media art) are actively addressing a question that often arises for those building the blockchain ecosystem: How can the blockchain community universally and cohesively message the creations in their ecosystem to audiences that come from any background or any level of technical understanding? Blockchain art will be a key component in clarifying misconceptions about blockchain, decentralization, Ethereum, and ConsenSys.
Characterizing a Company Through Culture
Aside from highlighting a company’s products or the services that it provides, most attempts to identify that which make a company what it is revolve around organization and culture. In essence, culture is a company’s personality; the attitudes, beliefs, and values that influence how its vision is translated into reality and its organizational behavior is established. ConsenSys culture is characterized by the desire to take risks, test, and create in a decentralized but productive way — ultimately, an emphasis on the importance of experimentation.
ConsenSys has been described as an organism; as a whole with interdependent, distinct, and textured parts. ConsenSys circles (teams) and spokes (products/startups) all address different questions and provide different solutions, but ultimately work together to create in and build up the Ethereum ecosystem. Discovery, hypothesis, and demonstration of known facts or features of the Ethereum blockchain are core to establishing the field of blockchain technology that is still in its nascency. This emphasis on discovering, hypothesizing, and demonstrating findings are the same concepts that drive the ConsenSys experiment forward.
Capturing Culture: Depicting a Company’s Identity
After conversations with ConsenSys employees about how they would describe their company culture, engineer and artist Tal Danino endeavored to create a visual depiction of ConsenSys and its work in the field of blockchain technology. He decided to hone in on and clarify the meaning of words like “circle,” “sub-circle,” and “spoke,” which are ConsenSys speak for teams and sub-teams at the organization. He wanted to incorporate engagement from the community at ConsenSys to construct a medium he would eventually photograph for the final art piece. His team created a photograph of a petri dish that contains plated bacterial samples that were gathered during a company retreat. The final image is memorialized on the ConsenSys website.
More specifically, Danino sent two bottles of phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) — a saline for preserving human bacteria — to ConsenSys’ company retreat. Approximately 400 ConsenSys employees dipped their fingers into the saline to donate their bacteria. That saline solution was then sent back to Danino’s lab where all of the bacterial samples were isolated. Finally, twenty isolated samples were preserved with silicone and plated onto a glass petri dish.
Danino’s photographic depiction of ConsenSys circles, sub-circles, and spokes as bacteria plated in silicone is the first featured image on the ConsenSys company homepage. Check it out at consensys.net.
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
