Bitcoin's Data Becomes Art in BitArt's 'Mosaic' Project

A mosaic is created by combining small fragments. For centuries, artists in ancient Roman floors and Byzantine churches employed stone, glass, and ceramic pieces to build lasting images.

Generative artist BitArt views satoshis—bitcoin's smallest units—as his fragments.

Through the Bitcoin Art Society (BAS), BitArt's ever-changing work Mosaic converts satoshis' numerical characteristics into color and spatial positions. Each new contribution enlarges a pixel-based composition that evokes digital textiles, early computer visuals, or abstract art.

Instead of using typical bitcoin imagery, Mosaic employs the network as its artistic medium. The artwork's appearance is dictated by a rule-based system that takes satoshi positions and unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) as inputs. BitArt lets images surface from bitcoin's foundational data.

The method echoes Sol LeWitt's idea that art can be a set of instructions rather than a single handmade object. Vera Molnár and Manfred Mohr also investigated how math and computation could generate visuals. Mosaic carries that tradition into a transactional, human-driven economic network.

The work's size is remarkable. BitArt reports that Mosaic currently has over 127 million tiles and one billion layers. Watching each layer for one second would require more than 30 years.

Sound has been added to the project as well. The music uses the same satoshi data as the visuals, turning numbers into a changing score. The result is an audiovisual work influenced by bitcoin's structure and participant input.

Such experiments fit into the larger goals of Bitcoin Art Society, which Serge Ajamian and Yara Al Chammaa established to foster digital art creation, display, and preservation on bitcoin.

Preservation has personal meaning for Al Chammaa. After the 2020 Beirut Port explosion wrecked much of the art in her family's gallery, she started thinking about how cultural heritage could endure physical ruin. That event influenced BAS's focus on bitcoin as a way to safeguard cultural works outside fragile physical institutions.

BAS has exhibited bitcoin-native digital art globally, such as Mosaic with live musicians at Buenos Aires's Galileo Galilei Planetarium. The group's first artist residency includes BitArt and CyberSea, both of whom explore generative systems and blockchain-based art.

However, permanence involves issues beyond bitcoin's ledger durability. Museums have long struggled to preserve software-based art, needing to keep not just materials but also the technologies and experiences for viewing. For Mosaic, what defines the artwork—the code, the visual output, the collected contributions, or the act of navigating it?

Mosaic will appear on the main-stage LED installation at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, scaling its complex visuals to architectural proportions, much like BAS's immersive planetarium show in Buenos Aires.

Before the conference, I discussed with BitArt the work's artistic roots, shared authorship, and the challenge of preserving an artwork that might never be complete.

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.