A digital dong is the world's first blockchain artwork

“Ever since I heard about the blockchain and its immutable character, I’ve been insanely intrigued by the thought of embedding art on it,” says New York based Swedish conceptual artist Ida Jonsson.

“For as long as art has existed people have been obsessed with portraying penises,” Ida says, going on to cite everything from ancient Egyptian carvings to Keith Haring’s Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks book, via Judith Bernstein’s dick-heavy back catalogue of paintings and the possible billions of willies clogging up walls across the globe as proof that scrawling schlongs and doodling dongs is as fundamentally human as worrying about the weather.

Working alongside creative partner Simon Saarinen, Ida has decided to cement a phallus in the blockchain. No mere prick-based prank, it is, in fact, the world’s first-ever immortal blockchain artwork.

This penis-in-perpetuity is an ASCII artwork “coded on to the Ethereum blockchain using Smart Contracts,” and is joined by two other pieces, Permanent Meme and Permanent Tag.

Talking about the work Ida says, “as new technologies, such as the blockchain, emerge the society move forward in directions we can’t even imagine. However, some things never change, and people’s interest in penis-art seems to be one of them. Maintaining this important piece of culture just felt like the right thing to do.”

The duo – who work under the Ida-simon banner – have previously collaborated with the likes of IKEA, H&M and Instagram.