TIME IS THE CANVAS

[Originally published to Twitter October 2023]

What does blockchain-native art look like?

I don't mean art stored and transferred onchain. I mean art whose very essence is entwined with the onchain medium.

On December 31, 2022, my wife Alicia and I were off to ring in the new year with a friend at Queen's English, my favorite restaurant, in Columbia Heights, DC. Alicia, her biological timer running uncharacteristically late, decided to take a pregnancy test.

It was positive 🤯.

As midnight approached, my three Gazers - which I keep tabbed on my phone - behaved increasingly erratically. They were manifesting "potential lunations," palettes that might arise in future months based on the color theory embedded in their onchain DNA.

Gazers, a collection of 1000 dynamic onchain moons by artist Matt Kane, ebb and flow with the day and mirror our own moon’s phases. Their palettes shift monthly, and their frame rates increase over the eons. On special days, they celebrate. See more at gazers.art.

With my wife’s induction scheduled for tomorrow, I wonder:

Which of those lunations will I share with my daughter?

Which will remain obscured by the whims of code and chance?

What meaning will future generations find in these works long after we are all forgotten?

Gazers can pose these questions because they live onchain, letting humankind trace each work’s evolution alongside our cosmos.

And while the Ethereum blockchain amplifies Gazers' artistic expression, Gazers showcase the profundity of something that might otherwise at first blush seem mundane: an immutable public ledger on which our history and progress can be indelibly etched.