One of the reasons the intersection of art and technology is such an exciting space to be is its sheer vivifying complexity, with each side of the dyad containing long histories of innovation that can take a lifetime to appreciate on their own, but when married together flower into something close to magic. If you really want to get complicated, however, there's a third force involved that you can’t ignore if you hope to get the full picture, and that’s capitalism.
The artist, technologist, and venture capitalist Sarah Meyohas has been doing remarkable things at the center of this trinity for over a decade.
A graduate of both Wharton Business School and Yale’s vaunted MFA program, she first made headlines in 2015 when she forked bitcoin to create Bitchcoin, a token (now we’d call it a memecoin) backed by the value of her art. In 2016, she took over 303 Gallery to trade stocks in order to move markets, using an oil stick to chart the changes in the companies’ performance on canvas: paintings. A few months later, she took over a former Bell Labs facility to photograph 10,000 rose petals and use them to train an algorithm that could infinitely create new versions.
So, Meyohas has always been dramatically early to harness her art to revolutionary tech. And for years, she has been capitalizing on her vision, literally—working as a venture capitalist to fund deep-tech startups that align with her moral and aesthetic values.
How do all of these things braid together? And what frontiers is she exploring today in both her artwork and VC work?
