remanence about
the lab sequencer prizes

Sixteen paintings live on-chain, each made of sixteen fragments. What you mint is a memory of a painting: it contains only a few of them, and it has already begun to fade.

Can you save it?

1 mint

For 24 hours, the mint is open: pick a painting and mint a memory of it for Ξ0.001, one that contains only a few of the sixteen fragments that make up the whole. Mint as many as you like; other collectors are minting too.

2 the mint closes

Conservation cannot begin while the mint is open. When the 24-hour window ends, the mint closes for good and the bench opens.

3 restore, or splice

Combine memories to pool their fragments; duplicates are lost, and the memories you combined are gone. Gather all sixteen fragments of one painting and the true original returns. Mix paintings and you make a chimera: unrestorable, and yours alone.

4 the prizes

Twenty pieces carry something beyond the token. The first restoration of each painting earns its conservator a reserved mint from Machine in the Ghost, and four chimera gene maps match framed physical works: assemble one and the frame is yours. See the prizes.

the paintings

Sixteen public-domain paintings are committed to Ethereum in full. Not links, not hashes pointing somewhere else: the images themselves, stored inside the contract. Each painting is divided into sixteen fragments: the feature layers of a small neural codec that also lives on-chain and repaints the work from whatever fragments a token holds.

memories

Minting gives you a memory of the painting you choose: a token holding a few of its sixteen fragments, drawn at random. A memory renders as an abstract field in the painting’s own palette: the painting is in there, but you can’t quite see it. Hover any painting in the gallery to watch it dissolve into one possible memory; the preview rolls the same lottery the mint does.

A memory does not have to be saved. Each one is a finished work in its own right, and keeping it exactly as it was minted is a perfectly good way to collect it. Restoration never closes, so nothing forces your hand: the bench will still be open in a year, or in ten.

restoration

When the mint closes, conservation begins. Combining memories burns them and mints a single token holding every fragment between them; duplicates are lost forever. Gather all sixteen fragments of one painting and the token stops rendering an approximation: it returns the stored original itself, the true painting, kept whole on-chain. Every restoration consumes the memories that made it.

chimeras

Combine memories of different paintings and you splice a chimera: a painting that never existed, woven from the fragments of several. Chimeras take spliced names, like Starry Crest and Great Night, and a token drawing on twelve or more paintings earns the reserved title The Congress. A chimera can never be restored; purity, once mixed, is gone for good.

Four chimeras already exist off-chain as framed physical works: the relics. Their exact gene maps are published on the prizes page, and the first collector to splice a memory that matches one claims the framed original itself.

the mint

Open edition: Ξ0.001 per memory, for 24 hours, then closed forever. Each memory carries a small fixed number of fragments, assigned at random. Scarcity is not manufactured at the mint; it accumulates afterward, because every restoration and every chimera burns the memories it was made from.

fully on-chain

There is no server and no metadata host. When a token is viewed, the contract runs its neural decoder and returns the image it computes: byte-for-byte the same, forever, from nothing but the chain. The previews on this site come from the same codec, ported to your browser: what you see here is what the chain renders.