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Right now on a 50-foot screen in the lobby of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, blockchain is being used to hide things from you. "To Be Perceived, Against Evil" is the third installation in MoMI's ongoing series with the Tezos Foundation, a collaboration between Linda Dounia and Rhea Myers. It borrows its framework from Édouard Glissant's "right to opacity" — the idea that people, cultures, and forms of knowledge do not need to become fully visible, translatable, or explainable in order to survive. Glissant wrote this in the context of Caribbean post-colonial thought, arguing that the demand for transparency is often a demand to possess, to objectify, to extract. Dounia brings this through her research with the Serer community in Senegal, whose cosmology centers five sacred trees tied to creation, burial, ancestry, and memory. Some of those trees haven't been sighted in decades — absence itself is part of the work. Myers connects it to the double-edged nature of trans visibility, the systems that demand proof, categorization, and exposure. Her practice asks what it means to prove you exist without surrendering yourself entirely to the proof. The installation encodes this into mechanics. The media wall starts submerged in blur. Passersby are captured as encrypted branching data — trees function as both the visual metaphor and the literal data structure. Tezos smart contracts decrypt "proof of presence" and select which images to reveal. A single visitor uncovers only fragments. Groups that stay together bring more into view. The more attention and trust you offer, the more the work gives back. What stays blurred is what the work intentionally withholds. This is a different use of blockchain than the space is used to. Most blockchain art uses the chain as a record — a ledger of ownership, provenance, existence. Transparency is the selling point. "To Be Perceived, Against Evil" flips that. The smart contracts aren't documenting; they're gatekeeping. The blockchain isn't making things visible — it's deciding what remains hidden, and under what conditions. In a medium that has spent a decade insisting that everything should be on-chain, verifiable, and transparent, a museum installation is using those same tools to argue that some things should stay opaque. MoMI has been running this Tezos partnership since 2024, with five artist pairs cycling through the Media Wall through January 2027. Free process images from each installation are minted on Tezos through objkt. The previous installation, "Contingent" by James Bloom and Gottfried Jäger, transposed generative photographs from 1967 into blockchain-controlled digital art — completing a cycle from light to data and back to light. On view through August 2.

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