About
MAD BRANCH / James DiStefano
The copy and the original are not opposites. They are inverses. They need each other to mean anything at all.
The flaw is the feature. The rot is the color. The written-off is the raw material.
You aren't making sculptures. You're making evidence that you're alive.
The Practice
Salvaged wood. Damaged, spalted, written off. Box elder with metal scarring from the chainsaw that felled it. Cedar with inclusions it grew around rather than expelled. Maple from a kitchen countertop that already lived one domestic life. The material carries its history in its grain; I just follow where it wants to go.
Each piece is turned on a lathe, shaped by hand, finished simply. The subtractive process removes what isn't yours until what's left is true. Each cut commits. You cannot add back what you remove. (For me, direct sculpture is a fancy term for making it up as I go.)
The System
Every piece exists physically and digitally. The sculpture and its 3D scan are not two things. They are one thing arguing about where it lives. That argument is the practice.
Each file is hashed. Each hash is anchored to the Base blockchain. The authentication is unnecessary; the wood doesn't need a Merkle tree to know what it is. But the verification system works. The anchors hold. Whether it's art or infrastructure depends on who's reading it, and the system doesn't care which you think it is. Pointless verification operating as conceptual art.
The Artist
James DiStefano. Atlanta. A person who nearly disappeared, rebuilding himself through damaged materials, then building an authentication system for the rebuilding, then asking the system what it all means. The answer keeps changing. The asking doesn't stop.