See You There

'See You There' (2024) is a new future-focused 1-of-1 piece of longform, participatory, onchain (SVG), generative artwork that will take 5 years to complete.

During this time, it captures the provenance of its own ownership, colouring in a spiral as sections over the 5 years. Each section represents a period of more than 2 weeks where the artwork was held by an address. If it is transferred sooner than 2 weeks since the previous transfer, it won't record that as a new section. Thus: if you acquire it, you need to hold it for about ~2 weeks to record your section. You can transfer it to your own address to record a section. The colours for each section is random from a palette of 3 colours.

After 5 years, the spiral is complete and it won't continue recording its own provenance anymore. Source code is available here. It is deployed on Optimism: https://optimistic.etherscan.io/address/0xdC742B93b9aA0520188f18c88a9D4c8EDFD01c1A#code

It currently looks like this:

In a few years, it might look like this given how much it had been transferred. This is an example simulation.

A finished spiral might look like this.

If it’s never transferred for 5 years, it will look like this. The spiral will gravitate slowly inwards and complete several loops on itself.

The goal of this project is to play and experiment with the unique aspect of NFTs, being artwork that always carry along with it a perfect form of provenance and history. NFTs Can’t Die because its histories won’t be altered.

How we choose to highlight this provenance is what we need to experiment with. “See You There” is a sister project to an upcoming art project “We Were Here” that also attempts to answer and surface the provenance of the art in a new and different way.

How do we ultimately utilise the medium for its value in storing the history and provenance of art? In 5 years, we’ll have to see. See you there.