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Mosaic: The Art Hidden in Bitcoin
Bitcoin Magazine
Mosaic: The Art Hidden in Bitcoin
A mosaic is an artwork assembled from fragments. From ancient Roman floors to Byzantine churches, artists have used pieces of stone, glass, and ceramic to construct images that have endured for centuries.
For the generative artist known as BitArt, those fragments are satoshis (or sats), the smallest units of bitcoin.
In Mosaic, a continuously evolving artwork developed through the Bitcoin Art Society (BAS), the numerical properties of satoshis are translated into color and spatial coordinates. Each contribution adds to an expanding composition of pixels resembling digital textiles, early computer graphics, or abstract paintings.
Rather than illustrating bitcoin through familiar iconography, Mosaic treats the network itself as artistic material. Satoshi positions and unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) become inputs for a rule-based system that determines the artwork’s appearance. BitArt begins with bitcoin’s underlying data and allows an image to emerge.
The approach recalls conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s proposition that an artwork can exist as a set of instructions rather than a singular handcrafted object. Generative artists such as Vera Molnár and Manfred Mohr similarly explored how mathematical systems and computational procedures could produce visual compositions. Mosaic extends this tradition into an economic network shaped by transactions and human decisions.
The scale is extraordinary. According to BitArt, Mosaic now contains more than 127 million tiles and one billion layers. Viewing every layer at a rate of one per second would take over 30 years.
The project has also expanded into sound. Its musical component draws from the same satoshi data that generates the imagery, translating numerical values into an evolving score. Together, these elements create an audiovisual artwork shaped by bitcoin’s underlying structure and the contributions of its participants.
These experiments form part of the broader ambitions of Bitcoin Art Society, founded by Serge Ajamian and Yara Al Chammaa to support the creation, exhibition, and preservation of digital art on bitcoin.
For Al Chammaa, preservation is particularly personal. Following the 2020 Beirut Port explosion, which destroyed much of the artwork housed in her family’s gallery, she began reconsidering how cultural heritage might survive physical destruction. That experience helped inform BAS’s interest in bitcoin as a potential medium for preserving cultural works beyond the vulnerabilities of physical institutions.
BAS has since presented bitcoin-native digital art internationally, including Mosaic accompanied by live musicians at the Galileo Galilei Planetarium in Buenos Aires. Its inaugural artist residency features BitArt and CyberSea, whose practices investigate generative systems and blockchain-native artistic production.
Yet permanence raises questions beyond the durability of bitcoin’s ledger. Software-based art has long challenged museums to preserve not only underlying materials but also the technologies and experiences through which artworks are encountered. For Mosaic, what constitutes the artwork: the code, the rendered image, the accumulated contributions, or the experience of navigating the system?
At Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, Mosaic will be presented on the conference’s main-stage LED installation, bringing its intricate visual structures to an architectural scale, similar to BAS’s immersive presentation at the Galileo Galilei Planetarium in Buenos Aires.
Ahead of the event, I spoke with BitArt about the project’s artistic origins, collective authorship, and the possibility of preserving an artwork that may never be finished.
BMAG: You’ve described bitcoin as a time-based transactional medium rather than simply a platform for displaying art. What first led you to recognize its underlying mathematical and economic structures as artistic material, and how did that thinking develop into Mosaic?
BitArt: Bitcoin records the movement of value through a sequence of events secured by computational work, creating a history that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse. What interests me is not just the individual event, but the sequence of events that led to it. In the context of art, this shifts the question from “What is the artwork?” to “What had to happen for the artwork to become what it is?”
With the advent of the Ordinals protocol, it became possible to assign a unique number to every satoshi. This opened up new possibilities.
From there, Mosaic developed almost naturally. I only had to highlight what was already there. Once every satoshi has an assigned ordinal number, it becomes relatively straightforward to determine its position and derive its color or musical parameters through a set of rules.
The interesting part is that these structures emerge from a system driven by human decisions, rather than one designed to produce art.
BMAG: Artists from Sol LeWitt to Vera Molnár have explored how predetermined rules can produce unexpected visual outcomes. In Mosaic, how do your decisions shape the system, and where does bitcoin’s underlying data take over?
BitArt: In a sense, Mosaic continues the tradition of rule-based art explored by LeWitt and Molnár, and builds on the concept of protocol art explored by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. But it introduces yet another layer: the input is the accumulated result of human decisions within an economic system.
My artistic decisions determine the rules of interpretation, but the underlying data determines the resulting visual and sonic structures.
The rules are deterministic, but the results are not necessarily predictable in practice. I find that tension particularly interesting. The artist creates the conditions under which something can emerge, rather than specifying what it should look or sound like.
BMAG: Participants contribute to Mosaic through their own transactions, becoming part of a composition that no single person controls. Does that make them collectors, collaborators, or something else?
BitArt: I think of authorship as something distributed across several layers.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that individual intentions can generate collective structures that nobody intended. Everyone contributes something specific, but the larger composition belongs to the system as a whole.
A participant can be a collector, but also becomes a contributor to the artwork’s evolving structure. The distinction between collecting and creating becomes less clear. Each contribution changes the work, but nobody, including myself, controls the resulting composition.
Authorship becomes less about controlling an outcome and more about establishing the conditions under which it can emerge.
BMAG: You’re developing a system for the upcoming Postmasters exhibition that will allow visitors to speak directly with artworks and receive responses. How does this differ from participating in Mosaic through bitcoin transactions? Are these different forms of communication through computational systems?
BitArt: Yes, both are intentional acts mediated by computational systems, but there is an important semantic distinction.
A contribution to Mosaic through a Bitcoin transaction is a non-verbal gesture that becomes part of a verifiable record. We can establish exactly what happened and how it changed the artwork. The action leaves a trace that the system can process directly.
Speaking to an artwork is different. Natural language must first be interpreted and translated into the formal language the artworks use to communicate.
In the first case, the action produces a verifiable change in the artwork’s state. In the second, it initiates a process of interpretation.
Both are expressions of human intention, but one establishes a computational fact, while the other opens up a space for interpretation.
BMAG: You’ve written about the creative uncertainty that emerges during programming and experimented with the relationship between real time and bitcoin’s block time. How important are unpredictability, chance, and duration to your practice? Has Mosaic produced results that surprised you or challenged your original intentions?
BitArt: I designed the algorithm for Mosaic to be as simple as possible. It’s deterministic, so its results are technically predictable and reproducible. From a technical standpoint, there shouldn’t be any surprises. Nonetheless, the results are full of unexpected and surprising elements.
I think there is an important distinction between something being computationally predictable and our ability to anticipate or comprehend its results.
Currently, Mosaic contains over 127 million tiles and over 1 billion layers. To view all the layers at a rate of one layer per second would take over 30 years. There are many things that have surprised me, and I’m still discovering new ones.
The temporal divergence between real time and Bitcoin’s block time is also interesting to me. Bitcoin evolves according to its own rhythm, independently of how and when we observe it. This introduces another dimension of duration into the artwork.
BMAG: The introduction of sound adds another dimension to Mosaic, with musical compositions generated from the same data that determines the visual structure. What can sound reveal about the underlying system that an image cannot?
BitArt: From the very beginning, Mosaic was built on three fundamental ideas.
The first is the possibility of capturing traces of human intention within a financial, algorithmic system and revealing visual and sonic structures from them.
The second is the development of a formal system in which Mosaic becomes meta-aware, in the sense of being self-referential and introspective, and capable of communicating and collaborating with other artworks.
The third is collective creation. Anyone can contribute to Mosaic and become part of its evolving structure.
Looking at Mosaic from any of these perspectives reveals something different about it. In the case of sound, it reveals melodic, harmonic, contrapuntal, and rhythmic structures that aren’t necessarily apparent in the visual representation.
Yet within the digital realm, the structures underlying the image and the music are closely related, sometimes almost identical. Perhaps the way we think about visual, sonic, and programmatic structures as separate domains is itself a limitation.
BMAG: Your practice has been presented in contexts including the Whitney, ZKM, and ICC Tokyo, institutions with significant histories in digital and media art. Where do you see Mosaic within the broader history of generative and systems-based art? What does working directly with bitcoin make possible that earlier computational media did not?
BitArt: I see Mosaic as part of the tradition of generative and systems-based art, but I’m particularly interested in extending that tradition beyond the generation of images and sound.
I’m currently working on a show at Postmasters gallery in New York City in collaboration with BAS. The show will present Mosaic in communication and collaboration with other artworks.
In principle, any artwork that can be represented digitally can join the conversation, whether it’s Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Malevich’s Black Square, an artwork inscribed on Bitcoin, or music as diverse as traditional folk songs, Nine Inch Nails’ 34 Ghosts IV, and Ravel’s Boléro.
Through the system I mentioned earlier, these artworks can reference themselves and one another, exchange statements, and initiate collaborations using a machine-readable formal language. What’s particularly interesting is that the audience will also be able to join these conversations by speaking directly with the artworks in natural language.
Historically, discourse about art happened outside the works themselves, in texts, institutions, discussions, and criticism. Artworks remained largely silent objects of interpretation. By giving artworks the formal means to reference one another, reason about themselves and others, and exchange verifiable statements, the project treats discourse itself as artistic material.
Art history normally describes influence retrospectively. Here, through collaborations between artworks, influence becomes operative. Influence becomes something artworks can perform.
Bitcoin introduces another dimension by providing a shared, ordered, and verifiable record of these exchanges and the artworks’ histories of collaboration. Unlike a conventional computational environment, this record can exist independently of any single artist, institution, or platform.
The artwork is no longer simply the result of a process or the process itself. It becomes a participant in an ongoing process of interpretation, communication, and creation.
BMAG: Mosaic has already been presented in immersive environments, including the Galileo Galilei Planetarium in Buenos Aires. For Bitcoin Amsterdam, the work will be adapted for large-scale main-stage LED screens. How does that change the way audiences encounter the work, particularly when its original form is interactive and continuously evolving?
BitArt: The surface of the artwork is not fixed, and it is not what constitutes the artwork. It’s a manifestation of its state at any given time.
I like BAS’s approach of presenting it in intimate settings, large-scale immersive environments, and anywhere in between. Each setting allows the audience to experience a different aspect of the same underlying system.
In an interactive environment, the viewer navigates Mosaic individually, while on large-scale screens, the experience becomes collective. The audience encounters the artwork as it unfolds, rather than exploring it directly.
For the Postmasters show, I’m also developing a physical component that will provide yet another way of experiencing Mosaic.
What interests me is that the artwork can take on very different forms without changing its underlying identity. The presentation changes, but the system that constitutes the work remains the same.
Exhibition & Further Reading
Explore BitArt’s evolving Mosaic project through Bitcoin Art Society, learn more about its exhibitions and artist residencies, and follow BAS on X.
BAS will also present Art on Bitcoin: BAS Night at WiHH Gallery (What Is Happening Here) in Amsterdam on November 6, from 8–11 PM. Hosted in collaboration with Bitcoin Amsterdam, the evening brings together artists, collectors, and the bitcoin community for an exhibition and reception featuring food, music, and conversation. RSVP here.
Read more from BMAG’s Bitcoin Amsterdam series: The Undercurrent: Three European Artists on Making Money Visible and The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications.
BitArt’s Mosaic will be featured on the main-stage LED screens at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5–6, 2026, as part of BMAG’s programming. Join us in Amsterdam and use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission. Get your tickets here.
This post Mosaic: The Art Hidden in Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.
