Soft Eulogies: Portraits from the Mempool, 2025-26

Release Details

Title: Soft Eulogies
Works: 10,080 - one for every minute of a canonical week, each with a unique “[something] is dead” phrase
Format: Custom software, p5.js generative HTML
Date: Monday April 20th, 2026 - 10AM EDT
Price: 0.00021 BTC (≈ $15)
Structure: 1440 images released each Monday over seven weeks between April 20 - June 01.

Platform: Gamma
Chain: Bitcoin Ordinals
Data Each portrait is tied to the data of a specific Bitcoin transaction
Seven Domains: Light, Code, Earth, Time, Media, Society, Rest
Silos: 21 skull profile bases (algorithmically distorted so no two are the same)

Statement

Soft Eulogies: Portraits from the Mempool is a series of 10,080 digital portraits, one for every minute of a canonical week. Each work is a time-based vigil for everything that has been declared “dead” in our feeds, markets, and lives. Details are tied to specific Bitcoin transactions from the mempool. It takes the length of that transaction’s confirmation time to draw, then settles into a minimal portrait built from a colored background, a faint skull silhouette, and the phrase “[something] is dead” at the bottom.

Over the span of the project, thousands of small “deaths” accumulate into a larger meditation on value and loss in a media environment that constantly declares things over: “Bitcoin is dead,” “Portraits are dead,” “Truth is dead,” and so on. Each portrait is built from a p5.js, code-based walker line that traces a transaction’s waiting time. The line wraps around a faint profile trace of a skull and a minimal field of color. If a transaction was estimated to confirm in 5 minutes and 24 seconds, then the walker draws a continuous line within the portrait bounds for exactly that amount of time.

Examples of subtle drawings and text as each inscription leaves the mempool. Drawing time is based on transaction time. So if a transaction takes 10 minutes 25 seconds to pass, it will draw for 10 minutes and 25 seconds.

The profile being traced is based on a series of twenty-one skulls that echo the side-on faces found on coins and medallions. Where a coin preserves the profile of a symbolic figure, these works replace it with a skeletal silhouette, as if the currency itself has passed into an afterlife.

ANIMATED VIGIL MODE

animated works, dimensions are variable based on browser window, one minute vigil animation, loop.

A “soft eulogy” is not the grand speech at a funeral, but the small, casual obituary one writes without thinking every time “X is dead” is posted online. It is the half-ironic, half-sincere way people bury ideas, technologies, and communities. Soft Eulogies treats those throwaway phrases as actual memorials. Each portrait takes one of these everyday obituaries such as “Artist statements are dead,” “Attention is dead,” or “Rest is dead” and gives it a skull and a trace of labor, turning a casual dismissal into a slow, persistent mark on the chain.

The release plays on a Genesis-inspired sequence: 10,080 works, one for each minute across seven days. Soft Eulogies unfolds as a continuous vigil structured around seven domains of death—Light, Code, Earth, Time, Media, Society, and finally Rest. Where the Book of Genesis describes the emergence of systems that make life possible, this project stages a reversed creation myth, charting the symbolic destruction of everything. A small number of 42 ‘historical’ transactions will be spread out: from the Bitcoin genesis block to the first transaction between Satoshi and Hal Finney, and onward to the present.

The series is built on a tightly constrained technical system that echoes Bitcoin’s own limits. Twenty-one base skulls that reference the 21 million BTC cap. Each is hand-drawn by the artist as SVGs, converted into javascript paths. The skulls serve as silo-containers for the walker drawings. These skulls borrow from both historical and contemporary iconography, from coin profiles to pop-cultural memento mori, and are algorithmically distorted according to each work’s transaction data so that no two silhouettes are the same. A p5.js script reads various Bitcoin parameters such as fee rate, transferred value, block height, and inputs/outputs to subtly modulate different aspects of the image. Some portraits resolve into sparse, almost monochrome heads; others become busier and more colorful, reflecting the varying intensity of the transactions that shaped them.

Soft Eulogies extends two key trajectories in Southworth’s practice: the time-based line of The Continuous Work Drawings (2012) and the obituaries-for-Bitcoin logic of The Revenant (2024). In The Continuous Work Drawings, a single unbroken line recorded the duration of the artist’s own labor, turning time spent working at the screen into a fragile, accumulative mark. In Soft Eulogies, that logic is shifted onto the Bitcoin network: each portrait becomes a continuous work drawing of a transaction’s confirmation time, measuring the chain’s computational labor instead of the artist’s hand. The Revenant reclaimed headlines that declared Bitcoin “dead,” transforming them into uncanny portraits that visualized the currency’s repeated returns from supposed extinction.