Build the Future: Balaji Srinivasan

The past year, I’ve been exploring historical aesthetics of fiat currency, joining back up with a series I originally created in 2006. A question my work has asked is what it could mean to shape society’s values if the paper money we transact with carried messages from leaders who are concerned with reshaping present systems in order to construct a better future for the many. In creating these portraits, I sought to discover how I could treat this as a legitimate part of my larger series and not just an outlier piece done for CoinDesk Most Influential 2020.

Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor and entrepreneur. He’s formerly the CTO of Coinbase and and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Balaji’s initials are B & S. As an angel investor to Bitcoin, the B naturally uses the Bitcoin logo. The S references Standford University where he earned his degrees and occasionally teaches a class. This stylized S is known as the “Block S.” My choice to emphasize this version of the S played the purpose of a visual pun; the “Block S” for someone with such close ties to “Blockchain.”

Since my earliest self portraits made as a teenager, I’ve sometimes used the color green to symbolize freshness, new beginnings, vision, or future growth. These are qualities I felt represent Balaji well, so I chose to begin his portrait with green, targeting the tone of current U.S. currency. This design is largely informed by my practice of “tuning” into colors, seeing colors in my mind’s eye. As I set one color down, the colors around it tend to change within my mind’s eye, creating a playful “call and response” symphony of color and pattern.

On January 13th, 2017, Balaji famously deleted all his tweets, leaving only one. It read, “Don’t argue on Twitter. Build the Future.” I see in my own #cryptoart community on Twitter how so much energy is sometimes spent on fighting or drama. It requires such vision, strength, and creativity of individuals to be on the ground floor of these paradigm shifts we’re participating in. I understand when individuals care a great deal about something and passions flare. Some arguing and debating are necessary to get where we’re going. But in some instances, our most precious resources and talents can be wasted on toxicity when they could be constructively energized toward building. I felt Balaji’s legendary tweet deserved commemoration within an artwork and the message fit in well with the thesis of my larger series.

I wished to keep Balaji’s message straight forward and not dilute it by much more than a portrait of Balaji and his initials taking the place of denomination or seals. In my mind, I saw the composition I wanted to target with one line arching over a portrait and the second line appearing straight and true below. I searched through currencies, broadening my research to foreign bills until I found the backside of the Bolivian Bolivar which perfectly fit my vision.

Reading through Balaji’s tweets and listening to him speak in interviews, I couldn’t help but be reminded of 20th century architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist, Buckminster Fuller. Both Balaji and Buckminster understand and explain systems so well. Earlier this year, I included one of Bucky’s quotes in a work commemorating our NFT art industry’s inclusion of minimum 10% secondary sales royalties for artists, baked into smart contracts. “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” Finding this relationship for myself between these two future oriented thinkers, this portrait of Balaji Srinivasan fits well for me in the context of this larger series exploring messages and values I think would be positive for society to transact.

This NFT is part of SuperRare’s Auction Week, finishing the early afternoon of Friday, December 11th. Please consider bidding on the work here: https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/build-the-future—balaji-srinivasan-17043

50% of proceeds will be donated to International Medical Corps in ETH via The Giving Block.

The CoinDesk Most Influential 2020 story on Balaji Srinivasan can be read here: https://www.coindesk.com/balaji-srinivasan-most-influential-2020