THE INVITATION01 / BREATH
Take a breath.
At your own pace.
Accounts of Being
A study of what cannot be captured
in the Intelligence Age.
WRITTEN INSCRIPTION01 / 06
Avery Lake · ink on paper.
PRINT02 / 06
One setting. Several impressions.
THE IMAGE ACCOUNT03 / 06
The shared image.
BINARY04 / 06
Text encoded as bytes · UTF-8
THE ENCODED ACCOUNT05 / 06
I took a breath.
TOKENS / cl100k_base
● 1 ○ 0
Text divided into tokens · IDs shown as bits.
YOUR PERSONAL ACCOUNT06 / 06
Your personal account.
The lived encounter stays with you.
Adjust the traces
Combine the traces. Let each be faint or vivid.
Your choice becomes the artwork you keep.
Breath · Avery Lake
Accounts of Being
New to collecting?
The encounter and downloads are free. A paid mint would support Avery Lake’s practice and let you keep a public record of your particular artwork.
Minting creates an NFT: a unique digital token linked to the artwork. Ethereum is the shared public ledger, or blockchain, that records who owns that token.
- Set up an Ethereum wallet: an app that holds your keys and lets you approve transactions.
- When public collecting opens, you would need ETH, Ethereum’s currency, for the artwork price and a separate network fee.
- Connect your wallet here, review the files you choose to make public, then check the price and fee before confirming the mint.
The artwork price supports the artist. The network fee pays for the blockchain transaction. Connecting a wallet alone does not make a purchase.
A previous mint is awaiting confirmation.
From tokens to artwork
Keep the other representations
Artist statement
We live through our tools. Handwriting, print, images and code each record something of an experience while flattening it in a different way. They help us remember, communicate and make meaning.
In Accounts of Being, I follow a lived moment through these forms. I am looking for what even the Intelligence Age cannot fully capture: what it feels like to breathe, to be present, to inhabit a body, to relate, to find meaning. What exceeds the record is part of what makes us human.
An ongoing inquiry
Accounts of Being brings together earlier experiments with language, traces and the human signal: how our tools record us, shape us, and leave something of lived experience outside the record.
- Mirror Making of a ManifestoThe wider framework: seeing ourselves through the media of our time.
- Signatures Through TechnologiesA human trace passing through different technologies of inscription.
- Answering CirclesThe circular forms and exploration of language beyond the alphabet.
How the work is made
Accounts of Being studies the distance between a lived moment and its records in the Intelligence Age. It begins with Breath, Presence, Embodiment, Relationship and Meaning.
A statement becomes tokens, numbers and bits. Artist-authored rules translate that account into layers drawn from the visual language of Answering Circles.
Breath has one shared illustration. The final artwork combines shared source materials with artist-authored code and the participant’s chosen traces each time someone acknowledges an encounter. Neither image is a measurement of the breath. The tokens shown here encode the statement and drive the coloured artwork.
The dot columns show token IDs written in binary, padded with leading zeros. The separate Binary frame shows the sentence’s UTF-8 bytes. The inscription is the artist’s photographed handwriting, shared across accounts. Its final full stop is supplied in the typed statement. Print is a digital study of uneven ink impressions from one setting of type. These are different representations, not a reconstruction of one file through history. The image download below contains the actual bytes of the shared illustration.
Participation & collecting
The encounter and downloads are free. No wallet or purchase is needed to take part.
Avery Lake authors the invitation, visual language and rules. Your acknowledgement activates a particular artwork.
The series begins with five encounters. Each can give rise to many personal accounts. Collecting would issue one token for your artwork within this ongoing series. It would record your account, not own or verify your lived experience. Downloading an image does not mint it.
Collecting is not open yet. You can choose your rendering and keep the PNG or MP4 for free.
What is kept
Your acknowledgement time, identifier and image stay in this browser unless you choose to download or share them. We do not request your location, camera or microphone.
The browser remembers your appearance preference and a small duplicate index. Hosting providers receive ordinary web requests when serving the site. There is no analytics or visitor login. A wallet is requested only if you choose to mint. Preparing a public mint would publish the selected artwork, account and wallet address.