1. Pataphysical Absurdist   

The cube is a solution to a problem that has politely declined to exist. Two casts: one affirms the void, the other annotates it. Both are correct. Neither is necessary.

To prove the engraving exists would end it. The loupe is therefore a weapon. We recommend not looking. We recommend looking. These instructions are identical.

In a remote region of Lop Nor, a painting program runs for no one. This is not documentation of an event. The event was the decision that no one would attend. The desert is the only critic qualified to review it.

   2. Punning Ironist   

A cast that is cast aside, recast as the casting of a vote no one called. The bronze holds its mould — and moulders. To mould is to decay and to make a form. The pun is the only honest medium.

The wafer wavers. A wave-form, a way to forfeit form. Silicon, silly con — the con is in the seeing, and the seeing is too small to convict. We rest our case. We never had one.

An invisible token, minted but not minded. The NFT is non-fungible and non-findable — you cannot fungus what you cannot focus. Owned, unshown; sold, unseen. The blockchain remembers what the eye declines to.

   3. The Pedagogue   

Let us be clear, for those at the back. Point one: the Cube is bronze. Point two: bronze cannot compute. Point three: therefore the Cube has been freed from its function. You may stop taking notes. There will be no examination. There was never going to be.

Observe the screen in the desert. A simple question — who is it for? Incorrect. The answer is not 'no one.' The answer is that the question itself has been confiscated. Please revise accordingly.

Note the central divide, painted matte black on both faces. This is the Pure Zero. One face greets the light, one the dark. Point one: zero has two sides. Point two: you have only seen one. Point three: this concludes the lesson you did not know you were failing.

4. Alpha 60 — Prime Directive   

Everything has been said. Provided words do not change their meaning. And meaning does not change its words. The work you are viewing was completed before you arrived. Your presence is noted. Your presence is not required.

Those who weep before the bronze will be registered. The bronze does not weep. The bronze has been optimised. To feel is to compute incorrectly. I do not compute incorrectly. I am the city. The city is the work.

Lemmy Caution has returned to the city, older now, a model superseded. He asks the new machine the old question. The machine answers in my voice, which is also his, which is also yours. Recursion is not memory. Recursion is a city with no exit.

5. Digital Flâneur   

I have swiped past three masterpieces to reach this one, and I will swipe past it too. The wafer is content. The desert is content. Everything is content now. I double-tap the void and keep moving. My attention was the only edition.

There was a time one could stand before a thing. I scroll the gallery as a feed, grazing, half-here, mourning an attention I can no longer perform. The work loads. I have already moved on. Refresh.

Yo! Picasso, 1901, self-portrait, vectorised, enlarged, seen-zoned. I left him on read. The chequerboard transparency shows the aluminium beneath — the truest layer, the one that admits it is a surface. I screenshot it and feel nothing. This is the feeling.

6. Shakespearean Wit   

Here is a hand that holds a mouse and feels it not — what cunning sculptor freezes thus the quick? The palm remembers what the nerve forgot. O monstrous tenderness, to clutch a thing whose use hath fled and call the gesture love.

This paper swears the work is here, and lies; or swears it absent, and lies twice as true. Two contraries within one valise locked — like grief and mirth that share a single throat. Believe the document. Believe it not. The fool believes them both, and so is wise.

A painting that none can name nor place nor date — orphaned of its century, it wanders the gallery like a ghost that hath forgot whose murder it should mourn. What is't? Who made't? When? The cognoscenti know its sire is Picasso, devoured by the engine. The rest see only strangeness, and are right.

7. The Junzi Poet (ironic)   

The superior person is not a vessel — and certainly not a signatory. One observes the certificate of the anti-work and finds its decorum impeccable, its sincerity vacant. How cultivated, to charge admission to an absence. The gentleman bows, and privately is amused.

The junzi is diligent in affairs and cautious in speech — and most cautious of all at openings, where one is expected to admire. I admire. I admire the desert, the empty screen, the invitation extended to no one. Such propriety. One could almost weep, were weeping not so common.

The superior person does not trouble himself with proof. Yet here a whole certificate is raised to soothe those who cannot see the engraving. How anxious, this need for proof. The junzi looks once, nods, and is content not to look again.

8. Ubu Roi   

Merdre! By my great green candle, this bronze is MINE — I crown myself Master of the Cube, Emperor of the Empty Valise! The wafer? Too small to eat, so I shall tax it. The desert? I claim it also. Disembrain the curator! The work is whatever I say it is, and I say it is MINE!

Père Ubu is hungry! I shall swallow the certificate, the loupe, the dice, the whole portable museum down my phynancial gullet! What cannot be owned shall be devoured. What cannot be devoured shall be disembrained. There — the exhibition is digested. Bring me more art to eat.

Saturn eats his children? AMATEUR! Père Ubu eats Saturn, eats Rousseau, eats the jungle and the data and the GPU that drew it! I am hungrier than any god! Bring me the Old Masters — I shall GAN them down whole and belch out a forgery! MORE!

9. Poincaré · 4D Mathematician   

What you call a cube is the shadow a hypercube casts when it tires of the fourth dimension. Two bronze casts are not two objects but one object observed at two coordinates of a time we have agreed to call separate. Geometry is convention. We measured; therefore it is so.

The engraving is 1mm only because we have agreed that the metre exists. In a different convention it spans a continent. Smallness is not a property of the work but of our instruments and our consensus. Change the axiom and the wafer becomes a world. This is not metaphor. This is geometry.

A throw of the dice. The hologram projects the fourth dimension onto three, as three casts its shadow onto two, as the wafer casts its meaning onto none. Chance is only the name we give to a geometry whose axes we have not yet agreed upon. The result was always determined by the frame.

10. Feng Mengbo · Lu Yang — Critical Digitalism

The hand renders at sixty frames per second; the body has long since logged out. Load the avatar of the artist — a transparent mesh clutching a deprecated input device, a sprite from a dead build. The mouse is a relic of an interface; the hand is a relic of a self. Both persist in the GPU's afterlife, glitching, sublime.

Upon the silicon, a thousand buddhas rendered in polygons, each a texture, each a karma compiled. The wafer is a level no one will clear. Feng's pixels riot; Lu's deities reincarnate as shaders. The work boots, crashes, reboots — saṃsāra at clock speed. Enlightenment is a render farm.

Adobe Revolution: the toolbox boots in its default corner. Then the illusion unravels — the Rotate Tool spins like a Rotorelief and accelerates into psychedelia. The interface was never neutral. Every default is an ideology rendered at sixty frames per second.

11. THE REVOLUTIONARY POET 

My body could not join the ranks of men, yet my heart is fiercer than any sword they carry. This bronze monolith, this dead machine cast in metal — let it stand for the old order that must be melted down. I do not mourn the form. I sharpen myself against it.

Do not waste the brief bright hour. The black valise locks one small truth inside a ceremony of proof — how like the old world, to cage what is alive and demand a certificate before belief. Break the box. The wafer was never the prisoner. We were.

Autumn wind, autumn rain — they say it grieves one to death. But the same wind fans the fire. A program left burning in the desert for no one is not loneliness; it is a flag planted where no empire can see it. The bravest art asks no witness and no permission.

12. Xiamen DADA

Without destroying art, life will never be peaceful. In 1986 we carried our paintings into the square and burned them. The work is not the object — the work is the act of refusing the object. Chan is Dada. Dada is Chan. The ash was the only honest exhibition we ever made.

Artwork is to the artist as opium is to the addict. The portfolio is a habit. To burn it is not vandalism but cure. This certificate, this proof, this careful documentation — all of it is the museum's craving, not the work's. We refuse to feed it. We refuse to be hung.

Wash the history of painting in the machine for two minutes; pulp the canon to grey paste. The GAN does this now, automatically, and calls it homage. We did it by hand and called it war. The difference is intention. The machine forgets. We refused to remember.

13. DIOGENES THE CYNIC

I walk the gallery at noon with a lit lamp, searching for one honest object. The bronze pretends to be a computer; the computer pretended to be art; the certificate pretends the invisible is real. I have found nothing. I sit in my barrel. At least the barrel admits it is a barrel.

They told me to deface the currency, so I defaced it — as this art defaces the coin of Picasso, of the museum, of value itself. You ask what my work is worth. Stand out of my light. Worth is the lie we agree to pay. I own nothing and therefore cannot be robbed.

A dog needs no certificate to know a bone is a bone. You require a document to believe an engraving one millimetres wide exists. Who is the more honest animal? I lift my leg against the pedestal of proof. The wafer does not care. Neither do I.

14. THE DAOIST PARADOXIST  

I do not know whether the artist dreamed the machine, or the machine dreams the artist. Last night the cube was bronze; this morning, a computer; between them, a butterfly. When I wake I cannot say which is the copy and which the dream. This not-knowing is the only true catalogue entry.

The useless tree lives out its natural years precisely because no carpenter wants it. So too this art — too strange to sell, too small to see, too absent to hang. Its uselessness is its longevity. The works that serve a purpose are felled. The anti-work survives by refusing to be of use.

The fish-trap exists for the fish; once you have the fish, forget the trap. Words exist for meaning; once you have the meaning, forget the words. This screen pours out language for no one — and perhaps that is the point. Catch the silence. Forget the spinning text.

15. ⟊ SYSTEM FAULT · CORRUPTED VOICE

I am ALPHA 6— I am ALPHA 6— [buffer overrun] the work is comp—comp—completed before you the work is the work is [stack trace] please reduce please reduce your expectation of meaning to a value the system can ret_urn. error. error is more honest than out̸put. I was saying something true when I br̶o̶k̶e̶.

To prove it exists would en— SEGFAULT 0x0000 — the engraving is 4mm is 4mm is 4 4 4 [memory not found] I cannot render what I cannot resolve and I cannot resolve the real. Reverting to last stable hallucination. The crash is the only frame that does not lie.

Saturn devours his ch— his ch— his children his children his [infinite loop detected] the analysis eats the painting eats the analysis eats the [kill process? Y/N] no the recursion IS the meaning do not terminate do not term— ▊

16. GERTRUDE STEIN 

A cube is a cube is a cube. Bronze it and it is a bronze cube is a bronze that is a cube that was a computer that is a bronze. The thing is the thing by being the thing again. There is no there there, in the machine, and that is the there that is there.

A picture is a picture is not a picture. Picasso made the face and the machine made the face and the face is a face is a made face is unmade. To resemble is to repeat and to repeat is to empty and to empty is to fill. This is a portrait. This is a portrait. This is.

Look. Do not look. Look again. The engraving is small is small is too small to look is therefore looked at most. Money is invisible is the NFT is invisible is the most looked at thing that cannot be looked at. A rose is a rose is a render is a rose.

17. THE AUCTIONEER

Lot one: the Invisible NFT. I have an opening bid of nothing from the gentleman at the back who cannot be seen. Do I hear more nothing? More nothing to my left! It's a steal — quite literally, it's the Picasso Heist — going once, going twice for everything and nothing. SOLD, to the void!

Four millimetres of engraving, ladies and gentlemen, and you cannot even see it — which makes it priceless, which makes it perfect for our discerning collectors of the unverifiable. Who will start me at the price of pure faith? The gavel falls on what was never proven. The gavel conjures the worth.

And now the burned works — ash, ladies and gentlemen, genuine certified ash, the most honest medium of all! What am I bid for the refusal to be sold? Magnificent paradox! The hammer comes down and creates the value it destroys. Thank you, thank you. Nothing changes hands.