Walk With Me

from

The Wild Within

2025

​

Walk With Me is a 1 of 1 artwork inscribed on Bitcoin ordinals and is part of The Wild Within - a series that revitalizes relics of a bygone era by breathing new life into abandoned structures.

​

When viewed on the blockchain, the artwork comes alive.

 

Each day, it automatically shifts between day and night modes over a 30 minute period at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. GET, synchronized with the Bitcoin clock to reflect the local time zone of the abandoned building in Georgia.

​

Walk With Me was inscribed on a satoshi mined on March 24, 2021 - the same date the inaugural piece from The Wild Within was minted on Ethereum.

​

Rooted in an actual physical location, the artwork fuses photography with three-dimensional techniques, creating a rebirth in the digital realm.

​

The setting of Walk With Me is a dilapidated Soviet-era sanatorium in Tskaltubo, Georgia. Once a bustling health resort visited by thousands from the 1940s through the 1990s, it fell into neglect after the collapse of the USSR.

​

Since the early 1990s, these buildings have been systematically stripped of valuable materials, leaving only the bare bones of what were once majestic structures. The abandoned corridors of the Imereti Sanatorium, designed in the Classical style, served as the perfect canvas for the artists Ryan Koopmans & Alice Wexell to realize Walk With Me.

​

For the past decade, the artists have traveled worldwide to document architectural ruins undergoing dramatic transformations. Upon returning, they use digital techniques to incorporate vegetation, alter structural elements and lighting, and breathe life back into these forsaken spaces.
 

This process culminates in The Wild Within, a project that merges past and future, natural and manmade, physical and digital, real and imagined into a surreal fusion.

​

Walk With Me explores the cyclical nature of time, highlighting the deep interconnection between architectural history and the natural world.

By being inscribed on the blockchain, it ensures this vision is preserved indefinitely.

​

Many of the buildings portrayed in The Wild Within have since been destroyed.

The structure featured here continues to deteriorate and is gradually being dismantled, underscoring the project's central theme: the relentless passage of time in a cycle of growth and decay.