Self-Identifying (2025), PostScript code and NFTs/floppy disks.

Self-Identifying is a series of images created by programs written in PostScript, formerly the lingua franca of design and printing. They have been turned into self-referential and self-reproducing “Quine” programs that print their own source code. While doing so, the programs create a cryptographic identity not just for but of themselves, and cryptographically sign the results. This mirrors the cypherpunk conceptions of personhood and political subjectivity that gave us Bitcoin.

Bitcoin secures the being of its value and its users from state intervention with cryptographic identities managed by a simple scripting language, Script, that curiously resembles PostScript in both name and structure. Unlike Script, PostScript is “Turing Complete” - it has loops. This is why it can access other resources on the computer it is running on, such as command-line cryptography tools.

The crypto community’s statement “Not your keys, not your coins” is the “I think therefore I am” of the blockchain age. Through its self-verifying programs, Self-Identifying asserts these historical philosophical ideas about selfhood against the contemporary backlash against self-determination.