As included in the NFCastle exhibition 2022, this piece challenged me to think about my identity and answers the exhibition's question: 'With the ability that blockchain technology gives us to preserve all sorts of media in an immutable manner, what culture or identity close to your heart would you choose to distill to a single work (or series) to live on forever'

I realize now that 'freedom of speech' is what partly defined me, as I was born and raised in the Netherlands. And a lack of 'freedom of speech' works against cultural preservation in other places. This piece contains the text of the Dutch constitutional article 7, describing freedom of speech, in both Dutch and English. Since the entire piece, including the text is 100% on-chain, this message will be preserved for as long as the Ethereum network is operational.

This artwork is an HTML page: every little square contains one character of text and has a specific background color. It is designed to be displayed on a monitor with ratio 16:9 (landscape), but it will adapt to any screen ratio. After the artwork has been loaded, the squares have a fixed size. This means that whenever the window dimension is changed, the original artwork will fall apart in new patterns. While the visual appearance changes, the text stays unchanged.

This is a generative piece, the pattern in the gray area will be different on every page load. In the Firefox web browser, users can press CTRL and click to generate random variations. It is recommended to watch this piece in full screen mode, on a desktop device. Refreshing the page is necessary to make the artwork fit the new screen dimension. In Firefox: F11 for full screen mode, F5 to refresh. F11 to leave the full screen mode. On some platforms, you might need to allow script execution, or simply right click on the image to open the frame in a new tab, or reload the frame.

Creating this piece took a lot of artistic freedom. Creating an HTML file with so many elements is absolutely not performant nor a good practice. It was chosen to be able to display text on a page, that can be selected, just like regular text on a web page. Proper rendering on mobile devices is not guaranteed.

Adding the artwork in it's entirety on-chain (wrapped in a data uri) can also be considered experimental, since not all platforms will display this correctly. This choice is made, so the artwork can render without any intermediate website, bypassing any platform. Whenever you have access to the on-chain metadata, the piece can be rendered in a web browser.

Created by Jos Vromans, October 2022