Still Alive, Or Not

"Still Alive, Or Not" was made for The Latency Ledger, an analog mail-art relay initiated by Æther Cavendish that links twelve artists across five continents, with the Tezos blockchain as its witness. The work exists in three simultaneous forms: a poem handwritten in ink on paper, the same poem rendered on an ePaper display, and the same poem deployed on Tezos as a smart contract. The code is valid Michelson, and its comments form an English poem.

parameter string /* from the living */ ;
storage (pair timestamp string)/* remains */ ;
code { CAR/*ved into the word */ ;
       NOW /* is not mine */ ;
       PAIR/*ed with time */ ;
       NIL operation /* changes nothing */ ;
       PAIR }/* or not. */

Anyone can call the contract with a string. The words are stored with the block's consensus time, and the previous record is overwritten. Your message becomes what remains. Its first inscription reads "still alive."

octez-client transfer 0 from <your_wallet> to KT1DTdeD27wygvkjBCqEi1K5gVLKYXeE3VRh \
    --arg '"your message"' --burn-cap 0.1

The paper may decay. The ePaper will ghost. The chain depends on its protocol. Which survives longest is indeterminate. I rewrote the poem on paper again and again until my hand ached, then sent the letter and the ePaper piece by post from Japan to the Postmaster's Desk in Oakland, California. On Kawara proved his existence with telegrams reading "I AM STILL ALIVE." Today a block timestamp proves existence more precisely than any handwriting; the person who receives the letter has no way to verify that the hand was mine. Writing by hand should be the more human act, yet even that is now doubtful. Two weeks after the package left the post office, the contract's storage changed: "Still Alive in the Californian sunlight. The hand tires, the ledger remains." The mail had arrived, and its arrival wrote itself back into the ledger.