無常 · impermanence · live ink on screen · 2020 to the present

Mujō

Rivers and Mountains of a Restless Market

Classical Chinese landscape scrolls were never meant to be seen all at once. They were unrolled slowly, a forearm's width at a time, and the viewer travelled through them. This scroll has no end. It is painted continuously by the trading of a single asset, Solana, from its first day on the market in August 2020 to this second.

The nearest ridge is the price itself. Behind it stand the last hour, the last day and the last week, each paler and further away, the way memory softens what came before. When the market grows nervous the valleys fill with mist. When it is busy, boats come out onto the water. When it climbs higher than it has ever been, a red seal is pressed into the paper, as collectors once stamped the scrolls they treasured.

Nothing in the land is invented. Every hill is a number. The weather is volatility, the trees keep the season of the day you are looking at, and the moon is the moon. It is a chart that has forgotten it is a chart.

Every day since the first is a numbered plate. Its title is read from how that day closed and the season it fell in, and a short verse is set beside it. When a single trade of a hundred thousand dollars or more passes through, a drop of ink falls on the water and spreads. At night, lanterns are lit in the huts and on the boats.

Mujō is the Japanese word for impermanence, the old teaching that nothing stays as it is. Mountains wear down, rivers change course, and a price never holds still long enough to be painted. So the painting never stops.

Leave it running. It changes while no one is watching.

Reading the scroll

• The skyline is the price of Solana, live, eased between trades.
• The hills behind it are the last hour, the last 24 hours and the last 7 days.
• Mist is volatility. Boats are trading activity. Red seals mark all time highs. Rain falls on days the price moved sharply, up or down.
• Move along the ridge to read the date and price at any point. Ink drops on the water show the size of the trade.
• Drag, or use the thin line along the bottom, to travel back to August 2020. Captions mark the moments that shaped it.
• Journey unrolls the whole scroll, from the first day to now, in about three minutes, pausing at each caption. Any touch stops it.
• Fullscreen and keep awake turn a spare screen into a window that never goes dark. Left alone for ten minutes, the view wanders back to a past day, lingers, and comes home.
• At midnight UTC each plate is sealed and the next one is brushed in.
• If the prices ever stop for good, the scroll ends on a last plate and the land stays as it was.
• The address bar always holds the date you are looking at, so a moment can be shared.
• Paper, ink and sky follow the time of day where you are. Sound is optional, and quiet.

Price data from public market feeds, fetched privately. Painted in the browser by its own brush, from nothing but the numbers. Set in IM Fell English, a revival of seventeenth century Oxford types.