HARVEST Visualization

HARVEST is an artwork by Julian Oliver (we had worked together before on Border Bumping and The Deep Sweep), commissioned by the Konstmuseet i Skövde, where it ran for two months from September 2017. At its core is a working cryptocurrency miner, powered by a 2 m wind turbine, whose Zcash rewards are donated to non-profit climate-change research organizations — and the question of what that labor, normally hidden in data centers, actually looks like. Julian has since stopped exhibiting HARVEST: he now considers proof-of-work mining computationally and environmentally wasteful.

I designed and developed the data visualization for the exhibition: a live feed straight from the miner, rendering the data of the mining process — hashrate, payouts and the Zcash price, next to wind speed and outdoor temperature from the turbine’s sensors — in real time across two projections in the museum space. Numbers that machines normally exchange only among themselves become the visible activity of the room.

In 2018 HARVEST returned in a new commissioned iteration for The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea in Mississauga, Canada, and I adapted the dashboard for it, with a hashrate gauge for each mining worker and a Zcash price chart covering the last 300 minutes.

The visualization code is open source on GitHub, and an archived version of the dashboard, the 2018 build, is still online; with the mining long over, it no longer receives live data.

Photo: Alexandra Magnusson.