Decentralised Embargo (2022) is a provocative installation involving an electricity contract with EnBW (a known client of Gazprom Germania), a rack-mounted open-frame server with four Nvidia 3090 GPUs, a custom water-cooling loop, and Ethereum blockchain mining software.
Presented initially at alexanderlevy gallery in Berlin, the artist requested the gallery to sign a supply contract with EnBW, one of Central Europe’s major energy providers. EnBW sources part of its electricity from Gazprom Germania—a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom, notorious for its geopolitical entanglements and its role in fueling the war in Ukraine.
The server hardware, continuously mining Ethereum during the exhibition, consumed electricity derived—at least partially—from Russian fossil fuels. These fuels, through a chain of thermodynamic conversions, eventually powered the GPU-intensive mining rig. All mined Ethereum tokens were directly transferred to the official wallet address accepting cryptocurrency donations for the Ukrainian government.
Through this process, the work enacts a form of infrastructural détournement: converting Russian-sourced energy into digital capital in support of the country its origin nation is actively warring against. Decentralised Embargo highlights the paradoxes of European energy dependence and raises sharp questions around political accountability, technological agency, and the circulatory logic of power—both energetic and economic.
