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It’s the end of July, and Absence by our studio Material Protocol Arts is moving into its last phase.
In the first phase, from May 17th 2025 to June 22nd 60 visitors purchased thermal prints at Galerie Yeche Lange in downtown Manhattan. Each visitor was allowed to purchase one per visit. Many had never interacted with crypto or NFTs before.
In July, collectors were invited to visit their digital flower daily and leave a short message. As they did, the rectangles obscuring the flower were removed. Rectangles for days with no visit became permanent and will never open.
Now, July is over. The next and last step is for collectors to decide whether or not to persist their flower, planting it on Ethereum mainnet. To do this, they’ll need to pay for the gas cost to upload their flower and the messages they wrote to it to the blockchain. They’ll have a year to do this. If they choose to persist their flower, it will become transferable and can be transferred out of the smart wallet it was created in and can be vaulted, sold or burned. After a year, the centralized server holding the data for the flowers that have not been persisted will be shut down and those flowers will be replaced with an image saying “this flower is absent”. Those flowers will also become transferable in that state at that time.
Absence was issued with an initial supply of 128 pieces. 32 of those were held by Material as artist editions, 16 were given to Galerie Yeche Lange. 80 were made available for sale and of those 60 were sold to gallery visitors. Of the 60 sold, 21 were never visited and claimed. Only one flower was visited every day in July and completely revealed. Two were visited only once and then forgotten.
Absence is an experiment and a provocation. It challenges crypto art’s obsession with permanence, frictionlessness and networked attention. It makes demands on the audience, is fragile, geographically local and imperfect. It asks collectors to decide: is this worth paying attention to? Is it worth preserving?
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