export_ofoct.com (2)

[00:00.41] I'm glad you guys think it's funny.

[00:02.54] I thought it was horrifying.

[00:04.13] So it wasn't enough for us to just make this.

[00:06.52] We had to put it in the right place.

[00:08.11] Does it go outside our studio in Brooklyn?

[00:10.50] Do we put it in Times Square?

[00:12.63] My colleagues and I conferred for a little bit, and we realized there's only one place that this thing can ever go.

[00:17.67] It's Art Basel Miami.

[00:21.13] So we take it to Miami.

[00:22.72] Somehow, we get our way into a gallery and we get into a booth.

[00:25.91] And on day one, people were actually a little bit hesitant to engage, which I totally get it.

[00:30.96] It's a little bit shady.

[00:31.75] It's participatory, I understand.

[00:34.14] But eventually people would muster up the courage to swipe their card.

[00:37.33] They would clock in at like 100 dollars in their bank account balance, maybe 1,200 dollars in their bank account balance.

[00:42.91] By the end of the day, however, someone ended up swiping and clocked in at 12,000 dollars in their bank account balance.

[00:49.28] And then things started to get a little bit weird.

[00:51.94] The next day, a famous celebrity DJ named Diplo showed up with his entire entourage, pulled out his debit card, swiped it in the machine, clocked in at three million dollars in his bank account, and shot to the top of the leaderboard.

[01:04.69] And honestly, the rest is kind of hazy because a crowd amassed so huge around the ATM machine for the following three days that the art fair actually assigned five extra security guards not to protect the ATM machine, but to keep the crowd from bumping into the artworks of the neighboring galleries, which was actually very funny.

[01:24.35] But the most interesting thing that I got to observe here was this unexpected crowd dynamic where when people with astonishingly low bank accounts would swipe their cards, in front of this captive audience, by the way --

[01:37.63] and I'm talking really low, like two dollars, concerningly low --

[01:41.62] They would swipe, they would get ranked at the bottom, and then they would turn around to face the audience, and the audience would lose their minds --

[01:51.18] they were cheering and screaming and celebrating and clapping and taking pictures.

[01:55.69] And it was sincere.

[01:57.29] It was actually like this wholesome "one of us"-like celebration, which was not anything that we expected.

[02:03.93] And then to sort of wrap up that week, the funny thing is, a buyer ended up acquiring the ATM machine as a sculpture for a whopping 75,000 dollars.

[02:13.49] But the funny thing to me is, I don't think that person ever realized that the artwork was not the ATM machine.

[02:19.07] The artwork was the act of people engaging with the ATM machine.

[02:23.59] The actual artwork was the relationships that people developed with one another via the ATM machine.

[02:30.23] See, when we made this thing originally, we were pretty sure it was going to reflect all the worst parts of humanity at Art Basel Miami.

[02:36.07] But we were wrong.

[02:38.20] It ended up just being a random crowd of total strangers having a great time together in one big awkward, shared moment of financial transparency.

[02:50.95] Oh, I'm not done yet.

[02:52.01] I'm not done yet.

[02:53.34] So