A tribute to the people who defined cypherpunk, articulated its ideas and wrote the code. Eleven physical collages portray key figures in the movement. Thirty years after the May 1993 Wired article, they put on masks again — this time as raw painted profiles. Satoshi Nakamoto stands at the center with open eyes; the others surround him with their eyes closed, as if dreaming of digital freedom.

The project takes several forms:
Physical collages
Screen print series
NFTs
Augmented reality
Lightbox

PHYSICAL COLLAGES

The series comprises eleven original collages framed under glass. Each consists of four parts, from top to bottom:
1. mask — black ink and white tempera,
2. cypherpunk’s name — inkjet print,
3. head silhouette — black ink and inkjet print,
4. background — black ink and screen print.

Each part sits beneath a separate pane of glass, creating space between the layers. Each frame contains five panes with a total depth of 1 cm.

SCREEN PRINT SERIES

Eleven portraits, each in an edition of 21.

NFTs

The animated GIF NFTs are backed by physical collages. They were available through Raretoshi, a platform that has since closed.

AUGMENTED REALITY

Augmented reality through the Artivive app reveals the individual layers of the collage.

LIGHTBOX

The portrait of Satoshi Nakamoto was also produced as a screen print on milk glass. The panel is set in a solid wooden frame beneath glass, backlit with LEDs and connected to augmented reality through Artivive. It measures 79 × 108 × 5 cm and weighs 14 kg. Two lightboxes were made: the first was auctioned on Scarce.city; I traded the second with crypto artist Robness for one of his NFTs.

The project refers to the Wired article and presents the principal figures who shaped cypherpunk thought:

Satoshi Nakamoto

the anonymous creator or creators of the decentralized cryptocurrency bitcoin and blockchain technology.

John Gilmore

the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, co-founder of the Cypherpunks movement and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and leader of the FreeS/WAN project.

Timothy C. May

former assistant chief scientist at Intel, author of The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and the Cyphernomicon, and a founding member of the Cypherpunks mailing list.

Eric Hughes

a founding member of the Cypherpunks and author of A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.

David Chaum

author of “Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete” (1985), which laid technical foundations for cypherpunk ideas about anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation systems.

Hal Finney

cryptographer, principal author of PGP 2.0 and key cryptographic libraries for later versions of PGP, and creator of RPOW.

Phil Zimmermann

original creator of PGP v1.0 (1991), co-founder of PGP Inc. (1996), and co-founder of Silent Circle with Jon Callas.

Julian Assange

founder of WikiLeaks, inventor of deniable cryptography and journalist; co-author of Underground, author of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, and a member of International Subversives.

Wei Dai

computer engineer, developer of the Crypto++ cryptographic library and creator of b-money.

Adam Back

inventor of Hashcash and the NNTP-based Eternity network, and co-founder of Blockstream.

Nick Szabo

originator of the smart contract concept and creator of bit gold, a precursor to bitcoin.