Iterative Shifts are a generative NFT series by Zemm and Shelderr, made in the last days of 2021. They were created on the ethblock.art platform, on the Ethereum network. This essay catalogs some thoughts on the work.
SPIRALS
When William Burroughs conjures time loops, it is by the apparatus of symbolic persistence. The veil of linear history is pierced by signs, and synchronicities of meaning are what knits them together between moments. “Time is a human affliction. Not a human invention but a prison,” ¹ he says. Yet within time arrives an imperfect geometry that is eminently present: the “Big Picture … is there for anyone to read.” These readings locate nodes that upset the regular, that rupture temporal stasis and are counterposed to concrete forms.
Loops in time, which describe the notional quality of our conscious trace (the Big Picture) are reflected as spirals. “Unlike closed loops, spirals always have loose ends. This allows them to spread, making them contagious and unpredictable.” ² In the context of geometry, the spiral might reveal a consistent, orthogonal force upon the revolving curvilinear. In the context of time, the linear (time’s arrow) or closed loop (the ouroboros) might expand outward if pulled toward gravitational centers. Time is not bent only by space, but, experientially, by value, which is how we sense the Big Picture. We remember some but not all, we go to one place but not others. In The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, mundanity is measured by “fossils,” perspicuity by the “Garden of Lost Chances,” where experience is potentiated by symbolic monads.
For the individual inhabiting the spiral, that force may not be experienced fully, but the trajectory obeys its will. This is easy to sense by simply thinking about time and how it is traced by memory. Outside of experience, the fractal is nature’s way of employing the spiral. Its patterns of growth are self-actuating: from the interior, the seed, to the exterior, the widest manifestation of the seed’s influence. The handles of a Mandelbrot set entrain by the same force as the time spiral. Perhaps the fractal knows the Big Picture, by some panpsychist effect.
DAOS
Spiral or fractal forms of growth are notable in Web3, where the seed and the tree are common metaphors, reflecting the rhizomatic expansion of networks. In Web3, we see this essence playing out in our decentered organizations: DAOs, which may be new inheritors and conductors of the spiral force. DAO consciousness is the passage of value through interior motion, and it can be the driver of the spiral’s articulation. It is an essence that allows organic thought to emerge from erratic systems, sometimes archetypal, sometimes retro-causal, sometimes synchronistic. Sustenance (tokens), consciousness (contributors) and a framework for interaction (the DAO) allow for a life to emerge, and the DAO can move along the spiral, just as any sentient being.
DAOs that are able to do this effectively establish their culture, which is a marker by which their health is intuited. Jordan Hall remarked on this in a recent interview, when asked about the challenge of organizing DAOs into successful articulations of energy. He remarked that every DAO would “need receptor sites in the interior of the DAO,” ³ and that everyone in Web3 must become “artists, in a deep sense.” For Hall, this means finding techniques to “to feel richly and with clarity and subtlety — and behave accordingly.” Like musicians playing together, contributors would interact at a level of trusted, symbolic exchange, allowing subtle communication that would flow naturally along hermeneutic ethical grounds. DAO contributors could become the seeing, feeling, sovereign organs of their collective bodies, coordinating primarily in the space of imagos.
SYMBOLS
Iterative Shifts is an experiment in symbolic emersion, where signs are let to congeal along the harmonics of the Ethereum network. Using the simple mantic technique of pairing symbolic clusters, well known to Chaldean numerologists and Delphic oracles, the hashes of the ledger blocks become a body seeking voice. This voice can only be manifested by the listener. Each minter of an Iterative Shift is recording the poetry of the network, deducing that which announces clarity by their own relationship to its symbols. The process of formalizing the 400 Shifts is an exercise in attunement.
The chosen lexicon for the Shifts are the elements contained in 75 drawings which reference the triadic structure of time in the vernacular of some speculative philosophies. The Mystery Traditions (past), the Every Day (present), The Singularitarian (future) intermingle to create outcomes by which a useful liturgy might be established. By pairing and mixing the ideas in this small dictionary of terms, a greater collection of articulated verse can be brought into lasting clarity. For those that desire it, further hints are buried within the console metadata, as an “inscription,” proposing Metaversal (fantastic, science fictive or game-world) locations for the poetics instantiated in the Shifts.
SHIFTS
Protocol is inherent in network substrates. When offset, protocols are inert, and one can exit from their control systems. The Iterative Shifts espouse that this process of detuning might reintegrate with the voices of the mentalist radar.
Disruptive abstraction has long been employed as a technique and companion for hermeneutic reception. When Joseph William Mallard Turner’s varnished paint brush daubed a sea toward misty unclarity, his desire was to introduce a state of miasmic half-seeing. Turner preferred that “liquid zone” to the concretion of formal painting, the history genre of the time, and from it conjured his own experiments as poems:
“for the bottom that to waves unknown
That binds the world in with a liquid zone…
Who can recount the names, or toil
Thro labyrinth himself to only coil” ⁴
Like Turner’s permutations of sea-mist into metered verse, the modulations available in Iterative Shifts can be reflective. They distend the labyrinth into the spiral, allowing for oneiric passage integral to the viewer “himself only to coil.” Rather than the glitch, which is primarily deconstructive, the Shift provides a subtle constructive movement, as colored pixels stray from their locations toward impermanence, hinting at motion for the characters they inhabit. Watching their motion, a semiotic unclarity at the brink of our own psionic mechanisms takes over. We can possibly hear, as if listening to a spiral shell, the utterances of the chain by which we seek to gain or dictate guidance. One might push the sliders as far as they are willing, for the oblique imposition of static, in the face of coherent information, is a marker of our humanity.
FUTURE
These NFTs do not have utility. They merely hint at a system, and any game that is elaborated from them would be impressively arcane. They are not clearly useful as profile pictures, though it could be managed with some photoshopping. They are not made available to gate entry to a DAO, though one could be formulated from them.
If you would like context or ideas about your NFT, please visit Zemm’s Cave for a prognostication.
- William Burroughs, The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, Omni Science Fiction 103 Apr 1987
- Ccru. Ccru: Writings 1997–2003 (Kindle Locations 457–460). Time Spiral Press. Kindle Edition.
- Web3: Tech vs the Human Condition, Jordan Hall — YouTube