Perpetual ... by Takens Theorem

Creator and collectors are woven into a little machine. And unlike its patrons, that little machine lives forever.

🚧 The collector's interface is undergoing a major overhaul during October 2024. Please visit Perpetual's GitHub repo containing details about all matters. Because Perpetual is on chain, the repo includes instructions explaining how to mint using Etherscan.

Quick overview ☕

Playful & consistent with my prior themes. I may sometimes release updates without announcing them. Everything, including the allowlist for minting, is on-chain. On a monthly interval, holders of prior projects can mint new works. Perpetual will continue forever.

See "More overview" below for more summary and links to the work of others who've inspired this project. You can also visit this live GitHub repository that I will use to share project notes, activities, etc.

Perpetual's little projects

New visuals and interactive contracts will populate Perpetual. Like prior work, a theme will be the underlying potential of decentralized, programmable ledger technology, its associated data, its curious histories and cultures and more. I am inspired, as many have been, by the intrinsic aesthetics of structured data and its referentiality. Some pieces will reach back into history, making use of contracts and materials already latent on the chain.

NFT (ERC-721) collection: Perpetual, vol. 1 // 0xbBCfC...f73ce

Project #1 (complete): "Archival Nodes of the First Experiment Machine" [details]
Project #2 (complete): "compose[d]" [details]
Project #3 (mintable): "Filtered" [details]

More overview

Perpetual is an on-chain infrastructure, built out of a growing system of contracts. It is an on-chain, contract-based platform for Takens Theorem to disseminate new and completely on-chain projects.

Blockchain facilitates new kinds of creation. Public, permissionless interactivity and co-creation. New ideas, new metrics - and so new subjects of expression. Perpetual is inspired by such ideas, especially the concept of permanence ‐ of smart contracts coded to create forever. A contract is always on, ready to be engaged. It can be coded using the time of the blockchain to implement a schedule. And that schedule can dictate when and how interaction takes place.

For these reasons, this perpetual infrastructure itself is intended as an expression. We are impermanent. In all our futures, our presence will eventually cease. This vanishing may be years away. But on a decentralized permissionless and programmable ledger, little morsels of our minds persist. Our ideas are coded on the chain. We can code these ideas to create. And if that creating persists... we are still here, in some very small but measurable way.

So the infrastructure of Perpetual is a modest morsel of one mind, equipped to last forever, coded to produce pieces on chain. Perpetual will do this even after a period of time when the contract infers Takens may have, somehow, wandered away.

Minting on Perpetual is gated: Only collectors of certain prior projects by Takens Theorem can mint new pieces on Perpetual (see eligibility below). Minting is governed by an on-chain allowlist mechanism. Using calls to prior ERC-721 contracts, Perpetual can determine whether a minter holds past projects. So the allowlist, the assets and minting are perpetual on chain.

Framework features

Perpetual is not a collection. It's a contract infrastructure. Its core is a main coordinating contract (C, shown above). This coordinating contract oversees scheduling, token creation and renderer distribution and more. Perpetual is an invitation to an experience for supporters. The experience is made possible only by programmable blockchain. A creator can modestly settle their minds into the chain. They encode some mental process of creation. Prior collectors can interact with that process. This interaction creates anew. Creator and collectors are now interwoven into a little machine. And unlike its patrons, that little machine lives forever.

Joining collector set: If you are not yet a Takens collector, acquiring a layer_two token may be the easiest way to join because it is the largest eligible collection. See notes under "Eligibility" below about layer_two registration.

Basic details

Network: Ethereum mainnet
First minting interval: monthly; 1 per prior Takens piece
Dead man's switch: 1 year (see details below)
Allowlist: prior holders; see eligibility section below
# of generated collections: unknown
Asset storage: 100% on-chain
Asset content: code, various languages
Theoretical issuance: infinite; fee throttled
Mint fee: 0.025 ETH (subject to change)
Delegation: allowed, built-in

Collections emanate from Perpetual

Perpetual is not itself an NFT collection. It's an infrastructure headed by a coordinator contract. This coordinator is a focal point for computation, making new fully on-chain assets by calling other contracts. Takens will intermittently release new renderers. These renderers are registered on Perpetual and collectors of prior projects can mint new pieces by summoning a separate ERC-721 contract. Perpetual is the name for this integrated construction and associated experience. It's a little machine with latent potential.

Forever machine

Perpetual uses a network of contracts to control allowlist mechanisms, minting schedules and more. By integrating ownerOf(uint256) and balanceOf(address) across many prior works by Takens (see eligibility below), Perpetual can forever gate minting, without an off-chain allowlist or fixed Merkle tree mechanism.

Artist + collectors, encoded

Perpetual's main contract decodes ownership on a mix of various prior projects, including an ERC-1155 (OPENSTORE), standalone ERC-721 contracts, specific tokens on KnownOrigin and a SuperRare space and more (see list below under eligibility). It is an on-chain encoding of creator-collector relationships by leveraging many prior smart contracts.

Updatable framework

I can "tune" the machine as we use it together. Sometimes I may use this feature playfully, but I will also update renderers and other parts to maximize longer-term post-Takens viability of Perpetual.

On-chain forever minting

Owners of prior projects (see eligibility below) can mint according to a schedule controlled by Perpetual's main contract. The first release of this infrastructure will include a monthly schedule. Each month a collector can mint a new token by calling an ERC-721 collection contract that interacts with Perpetual's coordinator. Perpetual issues new tokens after checking elibility, schedule, etc., and assigns it to that separate ERC-721 contract. And minting intervals go on forever.

Built-in delegation

The main contract of this infrastructure allows collectors to mint from any wallet. The recipient of the mint must be a prior collector (see eligible Takens projects below). Many hold prior Takens projects in cold storage. The built-in delegation will allow collectors to mint directly to this storage from a hot wallet.

Schedule & dead man's switch

Perpetual's main coordinating contract specifies a schedule with a variable mint_period. This allows the contract to specify "minting intervals" using block.number. When minting, the contract summons renderers on the basis of time. It also includes a "dead man's switch." If too many intervals have elapsed, the contract infers Takens may have wandered away. The contract then selects randomly from all of his prior renderers for a mint. So if that switch goes off, the coordinator contract samples from these moments of its life history.

On-chain, recursive creation

A long-term feature of Perpetual will be the interwoven quality of the collections that emanate from it. This infrastructure will allow Takens to summon a wide variety of contracts in rendering visuals and other media and experiences. These will recursively summon each other. So each subsequent project can become more complex, as the growing network of contracts that Perpetual uses are summonable by future contracts.

But what will Perpetual encode? Takens Theorem has many renderers planned and partially completed. They will be rich new visuals using on-chain coding of SVG, p5.js creations and so on. But there will be more. Due to the flexibility afforded by the infrastructure, some collections emanating from Perpetual will be interactive and experiential, inspired as all Takens's projects by concepts and data relating to our new digital, decentralized realities.

At some point in the future, years perhaps, the network of contracts will cease growing. But the machine will still create. The creation will be limited to the conditions at Takens's departure. That is its purpose. Perpetual is a modest little encapsulation of creative computation that will persist.

Creator and collectors are woven into a little machine. And unlike its patrons, that little machine lives forever.

More overview

Framework features

Eligibility, terms, caveats, ...