256 pieces ยท Vanitas for the consumer age
Three sequential phases. Each opens only after the previous closes. All prices exclude the 0.0008 ETH platform fee charged by highlight.xyz. Minting on Ethereum Mainnet.
BASE-HEDZ by @greencrosslive is a separate low-price collection on Base. Minting it is one of the ways to earn Phase 02 Scamlist access for ๐๐๐๐๐๐_๐๐๐๐๐.๐๐๐. Your wallet gets automatically added to the list.
Mint BASE-HEDZ → Unlock Phase 02This checker covers Twitter-submitted wallets only. If your wallet is not found here but you hold one of the partner collections above, or you minted BASE-HEDZ, you are automatically eligible for Phase 02. No action required โ access is verified on-chain at mint time.
DITHERVOID holders do not need to check here. Phase 01 access is not list-based โ it is enforced at the contract level. The smart contract verifies DITHERVOID ownership directly on-chain at mint time. If you hold, you're in.
The vanitas painters were documentarians before the word existed. Claesz, de Heem - arranging skulls and overturned goblets and fruit at the precise hour of ripeness going wrong were not, primarily, making a point about death. They were recording what was in front of them. What happened to be in front of them was a table covered in things that were ending. ๐๐๐๐๐๐_๐๐๐๐๐.๐๐๐ starts from the same place.
The table is different. A Walkman whose batteries corroded inside the case while it sat in a drawer. A PS1 memory card wedged under a skull. A Furby face-down in a pool of light with no apparent source. Fast food packaging that outlasted the appetite that put it there. The collection takes inventory of a specific generation's accumulation - the things it loved most intensely and put down fastest, alongside the things it spent real money on and then left in the rain. The argument is already in the objects.
The ZX Spectrum palette comes from early home computing's inability to render subtlety. Limited hardware, images at maximum saturation, every value compressed into its most essential form, nothing left over for nuance. Applied to still life that compression does something unexpected - it makes objects look more final, more exactly themselves, than photography manages. The neon at the edges is accurate in a way that's almost embarrassing to admit: that is what late-stage consumer culture looks like from inside it. Vivid. A little unstable. Already losing signal.
They are, in every sense of the phrase, still lives.
I've been thinking about dead things for a long time without calling it that, which is its own kind of useful. You notice different things when you're not yet sure what you're looking for.
The image that started this collection: a luxury watch face-up in a pool of seawater, crystal cracked, still technically telling the time. I wanted to make that exact image. It took me a while to realize I already had two hundred and fifty-five others sitting behind it.
What pulls me toward the vanitas painters isn't the skulls, though honestly the skulls are fine. It's that they were willing to put beauty and rot in the same frame and trust the viewer to sort out what that meant. Jan Davidsz de Heem arranges a lobster and some grapes and a guttering candle and leaves it there without explaining what you should take from it. That's what I'm after. The objects on my table are the ones my generation accumulated: phones abandoned mid-contract, luxury goods that outlasted the relationships they were bought for, bank notes from currencies that don't exist anymore, things that carry the residue of a decision someone made once and quietly stopped standing behind.
The dithering started as a constraint and became something I couldn't get rid of even when I had the option. When you reduce an image to what a palette of that size can hold, you find out fast what the image is actually about. With most of these subjects it's the same thing: the gap between what the object promised when it was new and what it turned out to be once it was owned.
The collection falls across four bodies of work.
Brings the skull - still life's oldest recurring figure - into direct contact with the technology of contemporary life: cracked screens, dead devices, an answering machine still blinking in an empty room. Mortality relocated into infrastructure, which is, practically speaking, where most of it actually lives now.
Follows desire past the point where it stops being comfortable. Corroding watches, fractured crystal, designer goods left outside to weather. What an expensive object is worth once the status has fully drained from it is a question these works hold open without resolving.
The collection's most generationally specific thread. Walkmans. Pokemon cards. PS1 memory cards. Furby. Pog slammers. Each one was, for a window that felt longer at the time than it turned out to be, the most coveted thing a child could own. Each one is now inert and slightly bewildering, placed here alongside a skull that was always sitting somewhere behind the wanting of it, even then.
The quietest work in the series. An empty chair at a set table. A single shoe. A jacket in a hallway, keys still in the pocket. Something was in each of these spaces and left without making a ceremony of it, and what remains is just the arrangement it left behind.