![]() ![]() Death, it seems, is soulbound.ĭeath Clock was announced in late March 2022, and in the three months since, crypto really did just nuke and bleed, with the price of ETH down some 65%. But in the original wallet, after the transfer, a new commemorative NFT spawns with the original death date, and this NFT cannot be moved. After the NFT is transferred, as in a secondary sale, the clock resets and prompts the new owner with a new survey. We may be our own protagonist, but when our life is viewed from another scale, we barely exist.Īs DIS’s Boyle put it, describing the overall project, “Time is not on our side.” Death Clock makes this fact inescapable. While the personal countdown has a pixelated style reminiscent of early computer displays, evoking an era of brimming scientific confidence, the light-speed clock is more abstract, almost resembling ancient hieroglyphics. Lest the Death Clock seem to overstate its holder’s place in the cosmos, though, its visual design also features a secondary clock that endlessly counts and recounts the 8 minutes and 20 seconds it takes light from the sun to reach Earth. Cioran describes in The Trouble With Being Born: as an object to glance at before making an important decision. In any case, one’s Death Clock might function like the painting that Pope Innocent IX commissioned of himself on his deathbed and kept in his bedroom, as E.M. Or maybe it’s part of a highly considered art collection that will someday be inherited by someone’s children, or gifted to an institution. Maybe the Death Clock sits in a holder’s wallet alongside hundreds of degen mints that flopped so badly that the NFTs can’t even be resold. ![]() ![]() Based on the responses, Death Clock will predict their time of death down to the second, store that date in its metadata, and render the animated art that, in many cases, will take decades to play out: a countdown to zero. It’s kind of like the painting of coding.”) Within the app, owners will first take a short survey that’s meant to be more playful than punitive, with questions about their screen time and flossing habits but not, for example, their BMI. (When I asked about the realistic prospects for the work’s super-long-term conservation, Roso replied, “It’s Javascript. There will be 500 initial Death Clocks, each its own IPFS-hosted web app so the code can live forever on-chain even if its holders won’t. It was Rozendaal, more recently, who introduced DIS co-founders Lauren Boyle and Marco Roso to their Death Clock production partner Chain/Saw, best known for collaborating with Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie. The issue’s contributor list is full of future NFT artists: Holly Herndon, Ed Fornieles, Rafaël Rozendaal, and Simon Denny, who would later present the exhibit “Blockchain Visionaries” at 2016’s DIS-curated Berlin Biennale. Take, for example, the 2015 Data Issue of DIS Magazine, which presaged PFP discourse in articles about self representation in network society, on the one hand, and cults at scale on the other. What if, in the markets or elsewhere, the apocalypse never really comes?Īn illustration accompanying DIS’s Death Clock, 2022ĭeath Clock is the inaugural NFT collection of the New York collective DIS, which has been circling the crypto art space since before NFTs existed. Somehow Kierkegaard foresaw the mental stress of trading crypto back in 1849: “When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life,” he wrote, “but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death.” And yet, how often does one get what they want? What if, in the markets or elsewhere, the apocalypse never really comes? What if instead of collapsing together we all die alone, marginal characters in a story with no ending? Now, here’s an unusual form of NFT utility: making you think about that. Everything will go to zero, and it’ll finally be over. Downward price action is either “bleeding out” or “nuking” fast, with the occasional relief found in a “dead cat bounce.” Even in good times, though, winners manage their disbelief over what they’ve supposedly earned with a pessimism so fatalistic that it can feel like masochistic hope: the collapse is coming, they say, when all these scams built on Ponzis will unwind in a violent total market collapse. On the subreddit for TerraUSD, the stablecoin that catastrophically imploded, a moderator listed suicide hotlines for dozens of countries, a bleak reminder of the newly expanded reach of web3 since the last time we went down.īut casual allusions to death are part of the everyday language of crypto traders. This spring, as another bull market turned to bear, the hotline posts were back. In January 2018, with the price of Bitcoin plummeting from what were then all-time highs, the very existence of a post on the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit advertising the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline made headlines in Newsweek and Yahoo News. ![]()
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