Rhea Myers
Koala Noosphere
January, 2026
Koala Noosphere is a series by Rhea Myers composed of museum-placard–style descriptions of artworks that do not exist. Each work is constituted entirely by its metadata: a densely written textual account rendered as an image, describing an imagined artwork only through its relation to others in the series - how it resembles, diverges, or deviates. No work is ever defined in absolute terms. Meaning is produced relationally, suspended within a network that appears to promise comprehension while continually deferring it.
Ownership is placed in tension with knowability: the collector possesses the token in full, yet the artwork it refers to remains inaccessible, existing only as an ekphrastic construct within a closed system of references. The project unfolds as an internally consistent but ultimately ungrounded field, where differences of differences accumulate without resolving into a stable image, extending Myers’ earlier explorations of possession, encryption, and textual equivalence in works such as Secret Artwork, Tokens Equal Text, and The Cybernetic Artworld.
Ownership is placed in tension with knowability: the collector possesses the token in full, yet the artwork it refers to remains inaccessible, existing only as an ekphrastic construct within a closed system of references. The project unfolds as an internally consistent but ultimately ungrounded field, where differences of differences accumulate without resolving into a stable image, extending Myers’ earlier explorations of possession, encryption, and textual equivalence in works such as Secret Artwork, Tokens Equal Text, and The Cybernetic Artworld.
The title operates as both metaphor and constraint. The koala - “a bear in the same way that a smart contract is a contract” - signals a familiar form emptied of expected cognitive depth. Paired with the noosphere, a term historically linked to early network culture and the collective space of ideas, the project imagines a flattened cognitive ecology: a smooth field without fixed reference points. Drawing loosely from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of smooth space, the work adopts these concepts as an operational framework rather than an illustrative one. What emerges is a system that is locally navigable but globally unknowable, where description itself becomes the primary site of aesthetic production.
Across her practice, Myers has consistently treated technical systems not as neutral tools but as cultural substrates - materials that encode belief, authority, and speculation. Long before blockchain infrastructure was understood as a medium within the arts, she was working directly with its underlying mechanisms, testing how protocols, transactions, and contracts might function as aesthetic and conceptual forms. Rather than presenting technology as innovation or spectacle, her work traces its psychological and ideological pressure points, using language, structure, and repetition to expose how value is constructed, circulated, and internalized. Within this context, Koala Noosphere reads less as an isolated project than as a continuation of a longer inquiry into how meaning persists - or collapses - inside self-referential systems.
Bio
Rhea Myers is an artist, hacker and writer originally from the UK now based in British Columbia, Canada. Her work places technology and culture in mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us.