essentialism: An On-Chain Generative Work That Forgets Two Photographs

essentialism is a generative artwork of 44 editions whose program is stored on the Tezos blockchain. It carries two of my photographs inside its code as 28x38 grids of 16 gray levels. Each edition samples its grid at a weight fixed by the edition number, 100% at edition 1 falling linearly to 12% at edition 44, mixed with value noise whose weight rises as the photograph's falls, and each token states that weight in its trait line as its "memory". The ledger keeps the program, and in its block history every superseded version of it; the editions are where the work forgets. Over 1,000 seeds and all 44 editions (44,000 renders) I measured how strongly each photograph still shows in the generator's internal darkness field and in the ink of the drawn dots. The field keeps a median correlation of at least 0.94 with the photograph through edition 21 and loses 0.43 (tree) and 0.44 (sky) of it between editions 34 and 44: a signal weight that falls linearly against a rising noise weight gives a correlation that holds and then drops. A closed form with two measured variances reproduces the field curve to within 0.010 for one photograph and 0.021 for the other. Counting every render, the dots' ink keeps a median rank correlation of 0.82 with the tree photograph at edition 1 and 0.14 at edition 44, against medians between 0.00 and 0.104 for a counterfactual null in which the other photograph drives a re-render of the same seed. The decline is orderly in the medians, not token by token, and the memory percentage printed on each token is above the median drawn correlation through edition 11 and below it from edition 12, with one exception. Nine editions are minted; the latest states a memory of 84%, and renders at its edition number have a median drawn correlation of 0.79 (tree) or 0.81 (sky). The ledger also kept something I would have chosen to forget: the first published version of the code claimed an algorithm that was not mine. Separately, the platform's image of a minted token could not be reproduced from the seed data it stores on chain. The generator, measurement scripts, data and this paper's source rebuild from one command; they are archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23333266 and maintained at https://github.com/TheBenMeadows/essentialism-preprint.