Absence
In Absence, the systems that usually work invisibly—memory, labor, care, digital preservation—are rendered slow, visible, and fallible. Absence is an experiment in memory under pressure: a system designed to observe what disappears, and how. The piece exists between sculpture and system, between gesture and machine. Its beauty is contingent, its logic indifferent. But within its fragile protocol, something emerges: the way a person returns each day, or forgets to. The way the grid accumulates gaps. The way the flower appears, or doesn’t.
Visitors to the physical exhibition at Galerie Yeche Lange encounter a 6x6 grid of glass vases, each holding a single peony. The flowers are fresh at first, arranged in rows, but over the run of the show they wither and are partially replaced, row by row. This controlled progression of decay reflects the passage of time across the grid: a living and dying, slow-moving clock.
Embedded in the flower grid, is a thermal printer and loudspeaker. From the installation, a live running generative music piece creates a shifting atmosphere for contemplation. Visitors can purchase a flower scroll for $10. A gallery attendant initiates the printer, which produces a custom receipt: a QR code and a strip of four bitmap flowers.
The receipt is fragile. The flowers will die. Visitors are asked to wait.
A Protocol for Remembering
After July 1, 2025—weeks after the gallery show has closed—visitors may follow the QR code to a digital interface: the Absence explorer. There, they will see a 32x32 grid of virtual flowers. Some flowers will be bright and visible, remembered by their keepers. Others will remain dimmed, their keepers absent. Over time, this shared visual matrix becomes a portrait of collective attention and forgetting.
Each participant must return daily to visit their digital flower. The flower’s image begins fully obscured. With each visit, the flower is revealed. Forget a day, and some obscuring elements become permanent. The final state of the flower becomes a personalized map of attention and neglect.
The participant receives their flower as an NFT on Ethereum but it remains untradeable until the end of the experience. The NFT contains not only the final state of a flower and its interaction history but also its preservation logic. The artwork may remain on a centralized server where it eventually will disappear or, for those who choose, fully committed to the Ethereum blockchain —an irreversible act. Each choice mirrors the earlier decisions of attention and care. What do you preserve? What do you let fade? What is worth committing to the shared memory of Ethereum?
Flowers, Protocols, and the Possibility of Memory
The peony is a deliberate choice. Long a symbol of beauty, transience, and memorialization, the peony’s bloom is brief and dramatic. Its presence in the gallery is both vivid and doomed: already cut, already dying, even as it radiates softness and color. The flowers’ decay mirrors the user’s own digital task: slowly losing, slowly tending, never completely in control.
The project places viewers inside a protocol: a set of rules, permissions, and obligations. It is not enough to look. You are asked to act, and to act repeatedly, over time. You are invited to care for something whose value is defined almost entirely by the fact that it is easy to forget. The flower offers no utility. Your effort becomes the shape of the thing you ultimately receive.
Absence is part of Material Protocol Arts’ ongoing investigation into protocol art: artworks that are not only mediated by rules, code, and systems, but which explicitly foreground those systems as the substrate of meaning. Where earlier generations of conceptual art located form in idea, protocol art locates form in execution over time; an aesthetic of interdependence between rules and behavior.
Preservation as Burden and Gesture
The NFT at the end of this process is not the “product” of the work. Rather, it is the residue. What’s minted is a compressed record of interaction, compressed again by storage constraints, compressing once more the user’s own motivations, their lapses, their diligence, their idleness.
Even in its final form, the NFT resists permanence. Stored on-chain, it becomes expensive and irreversible. Stored off-chain, it requires ongoing maintenance. Every option is a form of failure delayed. Like the peony, like the receipt, like memory itself: it can only be tended, not permanently preserved.