I love my dogs. But not once over the past eleven years of caring for them have I wondered what it would be like to be microchipped. Artist Lans King did just that, leading him on a transformational journey that merged his body with technology.

When my Zoom opened up for my interview with King, I was struck with “background envy.” Behind him was a wall covered with simple black and white drawings, not what I was expecting from this multidisciplinary artist who is not afraid of a bright palette. But then again, King is known for keeping audiences guessing. He challenges our notions of art by juxtaposing his painted 2-D artworks with digital creations that jut out from – or are embedded within – the frame. King describes this as creative tension, forcing the viewer to acknowledge that one cannot have the physical without the digital. The way the works are presented and collected are as one - the painted canvas with its accompanying device embedded with the non-fungible token (NFT)  artwork. 

Over two decades as a visual artist, King has wanted his art to “be a conversation about human-machine interaction, to create a new aesthetic. This is what I call The New Synthesis. It is commentary on what happens when you transform something digitally, and then try to retrieve its essence. What comes out on the other side? Can we combine analog and digital, so that both humans and machines have something important to contribute?”

“Art leads and art stays. Art is what remains after civilizations are gone. Art has always had a sort of moral core that asks humanity to look in the mirror and consider what we’re doing.”

— Lans King

Let’s get back to dogs and their microchips, and throw in blockchain for good measure, which King began researching in 2017 at the height of the initial coin offering era. He thought he could fund his art via his own artist coin. Hearing of his efforts, Codex Protocol co-founder Jess Houlgrave contacted King, wanting to include his example within her master’s thesis on the topic of art and the blockchain. It was at this point that King merged the many ideas he was forming.

“I thought, Okay, I can implant this chip and then register myself on the blockchain on Codex Protocol. And then I'll use this code in all of my other work, physical or digital, so that they all connect to me. That's how the project started,” he said to me recently.

Two years later, King travelled to Sweden to have a tiny capsule containing a near-field communication (NFC) chip implanted in his hand, courtesy of Jowan Österlund of BioHax International. In late 2018, NFC chip implants became a trend within the Swedish tech community as a means of storing personal data to such an extent that “chipping parties” became a thing. To date, approximately 4,000 Swedes have this chip embedded in them while worldwide that number is estimated to be more than 50,000.

An NFC chip is the same technology that is used to tap a credit card for payment or get on public transport. Once the chip is implanted, you can load data of your choosing onto your personal chip. On its own, the chip is passive, in that it cannot transmit any information. However, when paired with another device, such a smartphone, it is activated. What is stored on King’s microchip capsule is a cryptographic code that represents an Ethereum blockchain registry of the artist-self. The first major piece to come from this was the aptly titled This is my Body (of Work). It quickly expanded into what has become his life’s work, Network of Self, an ongoing performance artwork that extrapolates the data generated by his body. 

Implanting NFC chips into humans “could be something that becomes obligatory, something that we will be forced to do, potentially, in the future,” he said.

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King admits that even four years on from the implantation he’s still “freaked out” that he has a chip in his hand. The size of a grain of rice, it is visible and bumpy to touch. Despite this, he feels that the passive nature of the chip continues to challenge him to expand his practice by pushing him to discover what other technologies it can be paired with. 

The possibilities for collaboration and co-creation are endless, he believes, and he’s constantly exploring ways to broaden the use of his own data sets. Currently he’s working with a roboticist to develop a brain-computer interface for his latest work - a performance-generative art piece titled, Cyborg Manifesto, due to commence touring in 2023. In this work, the viewer will watch King generate 3-D sculptures with his brain waves in real time as part of a 24-hour performance. He hopes to take his installation around the world and experiment with different experiences and forms at each location.  

“What I'm trying to do is to have us consider our relationship with technology, whether it's our relationship to screens, to AI, to cyborgism, and self-augmentation,” he said. “These are things we really need to think about." 

The NFC chip inside King’s hand