Iconoplasm X Live Trap

Iconoplasm X Live Trap is a curated set of 1/1 NFTs documenting Iain Ball’s earliest experimental artworks, 2007–2009. The series stages public interventions, object arrangements, and process interactions in the Richard Hamilton Building at Oxford Brookes, in hired rooms and institutional corridors, and in liminal non-spaces — shopping centres and motorway service stations — before developing into later Live Trap iterations during his exchange at RMIT, Melbourne. Materials are synthetic, bodily, and organic: semen, Prozac, painkillers, toilet cleaner, food colouring, dead slow worms, alcohol, tequila, octopi, household products, and consumer detritus. Ball uses these to work through anxiety, alienation, heartbreak, crisis, confusion, disorder, and the collapse of art, life, meaning, documentation, and capitalism — by repurposing objects, time, waste, and energy into new forms of production and context. Canonical works include Oxide13, in which he repeatedly drove a 130-mile round trip to a motorway service station tethered to jars of tequila and octopi; and Those Men In Fruit / A SILENT Tremble (2009), in which five men were paid to sit in silence for two hours in a hired conference room wearing 3D glasses.