Written on-chain

The Reading Room

Fourteen essays about the work in this gallery, written by critics between 2023 and 2024 and inscribed permanently into Ethereum transaction logs from March 2024. No marketplace displays them. They have been sitting there, unread, ever since.

XCOPY · Right Click and Save-As Guy

Saints of Scarcity: XCOPY’s ‘Right-Click and Save as Guy’

1,239 words · XCOPY · KnownOrigin hangs here

Claire Silver · Genesis

The Mother of the Muses: Claire Silver’s Genesis

1,546 words · Genesis by Claire Silver hangs here

Larva Labs · CryptoPunk #1478

All Roads Lead to Punks

1,960 words · CryptoPunks hangs here

Mathcastles · Terraforms Level 7 at {22,3}

The Republic of Dreams: Mathcastles’ Terraforms

2,585 words · Terraforms by Mathcastles hangs here

Snowfro · Chromie Squiggle #9951

The Rainbow Soul of Generative Art

2,790 words · Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro hangs here

Kim Asendorf · Cargo #793

Order from Noise

1,726 words · Cargo by Kim Asendorf hangs here

Emily Xie · Memories of Qilin #600

Chimeras of Qilin: Emily Xie’s Memories of Qilin

1,543 words · Memories of Qilin by Emily Xie hangs here

Deafbeef · First First

Clean Slate: Deafbeef’s First First

2,018 words · Deafbeef hangs here

Roope Rainisto · Life In West America

Frames of Reference

1,842 words · Life In West America by Roope Rainisto hangs here

Tyler Hobbs · Fidenza #479

The Flow Fields of Fidenza

2,333 words · Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs hangs here

Botto · Interpret Complete

Making Intelligence: Botto

1,788 words

Vera Molnár x Martin Grasser · Themes and Variations #495, #445, #99

Machine Imaginaire (Themes and Variations)

2,087 words · Themes and Variations by Vera Molnár, in collaboration with Martin Grasser hangs here

Lethal Aesthetics: The Poetics of nameless dread

1,704 words

Fragments of Familiarity: Joe Pease, Filming Life

1,640 words

Inscription #1

307 words

Why these and not more

Transient Labs' contracts let anyone attach text to a token permanently. We read every one written on Ethereum, 2,725 of them across 876 contracts, to find out whether that had produced a literature. Mostly it has not: a quarter are a single line, and only three percent run past five hundred words.

One collection is the exception. glitch gallery's E30D carries fourteen commissioned essays, each between 1,200 and 2,800 words, footnoted and sourced, on a specific work by a specific artist. Eleven of the fourteen are about collections hanging in this gallery.

The rest of this room is ours. When we publish a work we inscribe its story on the same kind of contract, in the same permanent way, and read it back here from the chain rather than from a database. Those pages say so plainly: writing we did not do carries a line explaining that we only render it.

We would rather run a small room of good writing than a tab that is empty on three hundred collections.