Eternal Boy Playground: an artistic critique of cryptocurrency, colonialism, and gender in a post-Maria Puerto Rico

As crypto-rich investors relocate to Puerto Rico to build a new crypto-utopia called “Sol” (formally, “Puertopia”), how can contemporary artists consider their utopian vision within the larger historical context of colonialism and exploitation on the island?

This talk explores Eternal Boy Playground, a new experimental media art project by Anxious to Make – the artist collective comprised of Liat Berdugo (Oakland, CA) and Emily Martinez (Los Angeles, CA). Eternal Boy Playground explores the cultural tropes surrounding cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, particularly as they relate to the utopian ideals of the new “crypto-paradise” that a growing group of self-proclaimed “Puertopians” have moved to Puerto Rico to realize after Hurricane Maria. The work addresses technological rituals, disaster capitalism, crypto-colonialism, whiteness, maleness and Western perceptions of tropical landscapes as sites of luxury and indulgence. The work asks, what does it mean to re-colonize Puerto Rico in the image of a crypto-based, techno-utopian fantasy?

The work features a new, experimentally designed, robotic Bitcoin ATM, which prints “crypto-prophecies,” as if it were a fortune telling machine. A new video work explores the influx of digital wealth into disaster-strewn areas such as Puerto Rico, with text drawn from online comment-thread arguments over the consequences of entrusting the future of the island to newly minted cryptocurrency millionaires. As a whole, the Eternal Boy Playground considers the intersections of colonialism, technology, wealth culture, race, gender, economics, altruism, and exploitation through the lens of neoliberalism and crypto-utopic ideologies.