On-chain hardcoded NFT experiment to preserve a text message for Humanity

On-chain or Off-chain.

The difference between on-chain art and off-chain art has been adressed in a couple of articles these last months. e.g. hereorhere

The issue relies on some technical understanding of the blockchain technology : NFT's are usually sold with the idea that permanence and immutability of the artwork is preserved.

Looking deeper at the transaction records on the blockchain we can see that all pictures and animation are stored externally to the blockchain database with the risk as time goes by that one day whatever the root cause, the file will disappear.

This picture shows the .png file is hosted at the following urls :

https://cdn.nftshowroom.com/QmTnTbSYJS8MAY7iomyeDAto753QEpgAsRW1jNK8Q1kjWd.png

On the other hand, the memo in the picture above is part of payload stored in the hive blocks. So this data field is written 'inside' the blockchain, so probably more resilient.

Resilience, permanence, preservation

Nowadays, this might look like a technical nuance but think of it. 15 years ago, i had a Myspace Music personal page. It was a kind of prehistoric bandcamp social network where a lot of artists, amateurs and professinnals, were promoting and sharing their creations. In 2019, 50 millons songs all disappeared. No blaming at all, this is a normal lifecycle at the age of internet, but still the question remains : How can we guarantee an artwork will be accessible 5, 10, or 100 years into the future, moreover if it is digital by nature ?

4 years ago, ++my very first post++ on Steemit was, in fact a piece of music called "the Rise of the third Web" stored on Dsound. I tought it was stored within the blockchain, at that time i did not know those technical 'details'.

If this post still exist https://steemit.com/dsound/@dbddv01/rise-of-the-third-web, Dsound and its storage disappeared, and i never succeeded to recover the file, even if it seems to exist on the ipfs.

Dsound disappeared

History is volatile in digital universe. Value in art is often linked to its cultural weight over time. And lack of Storhistory leads to revisionim and all its consequences...

Storing on-chain

In this context, i wondered how we could keep an artwork inside the blockchain, and correct me if i am mistaken, it looks like we can grave some kilobytes of data ( about 8kb )** into the memo field payload** of the nft transaction. By querying the blockchain, you can easily fall back to this code

Htlm animation hardcoded into the payload

Digging into some programming techniques, my first affordable technical skills was to sketch a text animation encoded in an html file using some CSS logic inspired by some snippet code i found on the net. The idea would be that, even if the gif link is broken, it would be a matter for anyone to recover this animation by copy/pasting the code visible in the blockchain into a notepad, save it as an .html file and let it play into any nowadays browser. Hoping this technology will be sustainable for a couple of year ahead as Html exists now since the beginning of the net as largely adopted standard. So i hardcoded this in a minified style, for less than 2kbytes into the payload, just by filling the description fiel on NftShowRoom.

If you copy paste this code into a notepad and save it as html, you would be able to load it into your browser and see the animation. I converted afterwards this html animation into a gif file, for the sake of minting something but in fact, the gif file is just a representation of the code while it renders through a browser If the gif link is broken, you would always be able to recover the animation program on the blockchain.

The rendering of the code.

Engraving a message.

If i would not dare call this nft an artwork, let's consider it as conceptual experiment. Thinking of a textual message that would have value, i choose the first article of the Declaration of the Human Rights to be displayed in a loop in a smooth cinematic style animation. Just to be visually clear. No other real beauty than the value of the wording here and the ideas behind.

In case such a text would become politically incorrect or illegal, censored by hypothetical mighty arbitrary dictorial power, i would consider personnally the value to keep this message as unvaluable asset to be preserverd, engraved into the layer2 of the hive blockchain for future generation in case basic human rights would be denied by others to ever have existed. And, as i like science-fiction stories, i like to think it could be a valuable information for an AGI looking for ethical balance.

So, yeah, this small thing is a kind of experiments now on NFTShowroom.

https://nftshowroom.com/gallery/dbddv01_on-chain-conceptual-experiments_universal-declaration-of-rights-art1

Don't hesitate to tell me what you think. Abusive idea, not useful, misunderstood or mindbending.

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My previous posts are here.

Now also some periodical chirping news via https://twitter.com/Dbddv01

My Greetings to all the Alien Art Community for their encouragement.

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