Seal is a fully on-chain artwork exploring the relationship between ancient Sinosphere collector seals and blockchains.
Seal is about the art of collecting. Using Chainlink oracles, Seal will read your wallet history to decide the rarity of your output. The larger your collection, transaction count, or ETH balance, the rarer your output.
Mint your custom seal to participate and join the infinite digital scroll. The scroll is an immutable chain of provenance recording each seal in the order they were minted. Seals act as blocks in the scroll's “blockchain.” Different seal levels grant you different lengths of scroll. While your horizontal position is fixed, you can infinitely grow your section of scroll vertically by getting other people to sign it.
Upon minting a seal, you will own one seal and one section of scroll. The master scroll is also available for acquisition. While each participant owns the “ink” of their section, the full “paper” can be owned by one collector.
One thousand years before blockchains, Sinosphere collectors inscribed their seals of provenance directly onto the front of artworks. Unlike Western traditions, where only the artist signs their work, these seals transformed artworks into living records of ownership. Unique to the East, ledger and artwork are bound together in shared materiality—a tradition that foreshadows blockchains by millennia.
Collectors are invited to create custom cryptographic digital seals that are automatically inscribed onto an infinite collaborative scroll. Upon mint, the collector will receive two NFTs: their seal and their section of the scroll. Different rarities of seals grant collectors different lengths of the scroll. Traditionally positioned at the margins of scrolls, seals here now function as the compositional centrepiece, creating a chain of provenance and an unending generative landscape shaped by successive acts of inscription and cross-cultural collaboration.
Closing after a month, the horizontal chain of provenance will be fixed, yet the full scroll can grow infinitely—not horizontally, but vertically. Given the dynamic smart contracts, if a collector acquires an original section of the horizontal scroll, they can sign their seal to that section and grow it. Forming a tree architecture, with a fixed-length trunk but infinite branches, each section will become its own infinite chain of provenance, as collectors compete for the longest section of scroll.
Alongside the digital work, Seal includes a series of commissioned, customizable paintings that treat the algorithmic seal simultaneously as a technology and as an art object in itself. Building on the engraving techniques developed in Portraits of a Mind (2019– ), each painting is engraved with the collector's own cryptographic seal, composed of characters derived from the I Ching. The seal becomes the painting, and the painting becomes the seal. Inscribed directly into the painted surface, the paintings become working seals, scaled up to take full territorial control of the art object. From 6.25cm to 2m square, the paintings correspond to different rarities of seals and mix Western and Eastern philosophies of scale, provenance, and the sovereignty of the artist.
Seal attempts to break new ground in the history of Chinese landscape painting both aesthetically and technologically. Placing seals as the compositional centrepiece is a radically different structure from the 2,000-year-old tradition of shan shui. Traditionally separate, this fusion of seals and landscape—and its live indexing on the blockchain as a generative digital artwork—is novel. Using the language of microchips and circuitry, the networked nature of this landscape proposes that the new territory to explore in landscape painting is not the physical world, but the nanometric world of silicon wafers, seen explicitly in an East-meets-West geopolitical context. These wafers are securing not just AI, but the blockchains that create and secure this very artwork. While inspired by masterpieces such as Guo Xi’s Early Spring, the use of a circuitry algorithm to build a traditional landscape format makes Seal speak to a distinctly contemporary moment, as the world grapples with the new landscape of AI-charged silicon. Seal presents, for the first time, a blockchain-based reimagination of the Chinese landscape tradition.
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