WHEEL
The wheel keeps rolling beyond our control. The wheel tracks millennia, seasons, sun and moon cycles, the phases of human life, memory, legacy, each second of the present.
This is a card about time, and homage to the exploration of time in two thoughtful NFT projects: Exodus 2 by David Rudnick and Unix Days by Jake Allen.
The card takes inspiration from the ordered chaos of Unix Days, each second showing a different randomly generated colour. It’s a poor tribute because I’m not clever enough to connect the colour to time in code. The card also takes inspiration from Rudnick’s ideas about the Van Eyck index of time, symbols, text, cultural motifs, reading and parsing meaning - the QR code itself is a symbol, it has a function and meaning (linking to the Exodus 2 webpage), and its components read superficially as text we almost understand.
***This is a card about time, and homage to the exploration of time in two thoughtful NFT projects: Exodus 2 by David Rudnick and Unix Days by Jake Allen.
The card takes inspiration from the ordered chaos of Unix Days, each second showing a different randomly generated colour. It’s a poor tribute because I’m not clever enough to connect the colour to time in code. The card also takes inspiration from Rudnick’s ideas about the Van Eyck index of time, symbols, text, cultural motifs, reading and parsing meaning - the QR code itself is a symbol, it has a function and meaning (linking to the Exodus 2 webpage), and its components read superficially as text we almost understand.
Unix Days charts three timeframes: the fantasy of technological permanence (Van Eych index > 1), the fragility of human attention spans, and the reliable 24-hr colour cycle, set to PST, completely outside of human control.
Exodus 2 is a series of 19 pangram haikus, locked in a custom smart contract in an inverse fibonacci sequence. The final work will be unlocked June 5, 2061, 40 years from the first. Added to the creator’s current age this roughly spans a human life.
Rudnick describes the work here:
Unix Days autonomously paints the color of each day. It runs on the Ethereum blockchain, without dependencies or human intervention. Each color is calculated by hashing the number of days since the Unix epoch (midnight on January 1st, 1970) and interpreting the first 6 bytes as a hex color. This means the color is materially connected to the day itself—it is the color of that day, in some sense. The rhythm might intuitively recall the experience of passing days: infinite gradation, monotonous repetition. Beauty and boredom. Finding meaning even with little room for choice.
The fantasy of technological permanence often obscures the fragility of human attention spans and lifespans. Maybe we can appropriate decentralized technologies to subvert that effect. You can mint a color as a memento (free, unlimited) and check back from time to time to see what color today is.
Exodus 2 is a series of 19 pangram haikus, locked in a custom smart contract in an inverse fibonacci sequence. The final work will be unlocked June 5, 2061, 40 years from the first. Added to the creator’s current age this roughly spans a human life.
Rudnick describes the work here:
They were written about a rubicon I felt our generation would cross in our lifetime; that I think we are crossing now. Where the collective dream of the default bedrock of our world is no longer infinite, experiential, but finite; code-based. An exchange of a soft sublime for a new, hard, incompatible one.
What pushes us across this line that the texts attempt to speak to, is simply time. The coming of the inevitable point where more people exist for whom the dominant weight of value in their lives is no longer physical, but tied to a digital source. Where their default notions of identity, value, community, image, text, currency, ideas of past and future, are drawn from digital space.
The poems are a time gambit. They sit at the lenticular flux of the point between the two generations, between nostalgia and the future. Maybe some themes and motifs will become more recognisable in time to some readers. Or maybe they are on a doomed voyage; they will grow boring and irrelevant, or some aspect of the underlying tech will never reach their final unlock, crashing. What technological defaults are readily accessible today that survived the last 40 years? Who reading this will still be here to read the last unlock, let alone care to do so?
NEXT (JUSTICE)