« The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future. »
— Jacques Derrida
In 2011 I wrote a system poem. In 2024 I inscribed it into the Bitcoin blockchain. In 2025 I finished a photographic work, ICE | July | 1982, built around William Gibson’s concept of Black ICE: the cryptographic membrane that, in Neuromancer, wraps data against intrusion.
In 2026 I returned to the same poetic structure with Sun: Triptychs for Solar Eclipses, which is a generative work keyed to Saros 126.
This page draws those dates into one thread: system poetry as an archive that does not merely preserve language, but continues to produce it. The poem is not mimesis, not a representation of an already existing world, but poesis: a making of relations through selection, combination, recurrence, inscription, and future reading.
interpretants / flow / rhythmically
phases / infer / conclusively
conscience / projects / vertically
—
walk-through / assimilate / authenticate
dichotomise / diurnally / referentiate
refer / transfer / illuminate
—
The 2011 System Poem
The first poem, beginning with interpretants, phases, conscience, would theoretically generate 216 distinct full-poem variants if the noun phrases were harmonised to a uniform number, whether singular or plural, in an adverb-last configuration, and another 216 in an adverb-first configuration.
As it stands, however, the poem is a machine that can only “run” in twelve grammatically congruent configurations before agreement breaks down. The noun column mixes plural forms with a mass-noun singular, and the system stalls.
That breakdown matters. It shows the poem as a structure rather than a lyric utterance: not one finished expression, but a constrained field of possible relations. Its interest lies partly in what it can generate, and partly in where its grammar begins to fail.
The 2024 Blockchain Inscriptions
In 2024, I inscribed the 2011 poem into the Bitcoin blockchain using Ordinals. Thematically, the poem is not about Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, and it was not originally written for the medium of Ordinals, since that technology was not available in 2011.
The focus is on practical permanence: giving the poem a durable cryptographic address by burning it into a distributed ledger. The gesture also connects to Jacques Derrida’s long engagement with writing, trace, archiving, and the challenge to the idea that speech is more authentic than writing.
Inscription Lineage
William Gibson and Cyberpunk Aesthetics
The image is titled ICE | July | 1982, and the caption calls it “William Gibsonian Black ICE.”
ICE stands for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics: the defensive software that wraps corporate data in Gibson’s cyberspace, rendered visually as shifting walls of light and shadow in what the novel calls a consensual hallucination.
Black ICE is the lethal variety: countermeasures that do not simply block the intruder, but feed neural damage back through the deck into the body of the cowboy trying to crack the system.
The image below is therefore not decoration. It is a visual analogue for what the Bitcoin inscription does to the poem. The text has been wrapped in a protective membrane, and the membrane in this case is the Bitcoin blockchain: cryptographic, distributed, and designed for exceptional persistence.
The dark, crumpled, vaguely liquid surface reads as the kind of thing Gibson was reaching for in 1984 when he described ICE: something one can almost see through, something with depth, something that moves and refuses to resolve into a clean shape. The date in the title, 1982, predates the book’s publication by two years and points to the period in which Gibson was drafting the idea rather than the moment it became public.
Gibson’s ICE and a blockchain inscription answer the same problem from opposite directions. ICE protects data from being read. An Ordinals inscription protects data from being erased. Both rely on cryptographic logic. Both replace the single vault with a distributed substrate. Both are, in their way, late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century answers to an older question: how does one keep something — a secret, a poem, a name — intact against time and against other people?
Also see: The Meaning of “The Time Is Out of Joint” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
System Poetry and Linguistics
In 2011, I wrote a series of short system poems composed of three to five lines, with words connected both paradigmatically, along the axis of selection, and syntagmatically, along the axis of combination.
The work was inspired by structural linguistics, including Roman Jakobson’s efforts to connect Saussure’s linguistic structures with cognitive operations. The framework made it possible to generate distinct lines from the same basic structure.
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Permanence
Permanence and impermanence are recurring themes in poetry. My favourite examples are Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and William Wordsworth’s A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal offers a stark model of permanence: not preservation through writing, but absorption into natural process. The dead beloved is no longer touched by “earthly years,” yet is rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks, stones, and trees. Shakespeare, by contrast, imagines poetic language itself as a technology of endurance: “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
The system poem stands between these positions. It is not a single immortal lyric, nor is it merely absorbed into natural recurrence. It persists as a structure: a set of relations capable of being recombined, re-read, reinscribed, and reactivated.
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
Written by William Wordsworth in 1798, during a trip to Germany with his sister Dorothy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and first published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads.
Versus Sonnet 18 and Wordsworth
The structure of the Bitcoin poem contrasts with standard English metrical lines. It favours short, loose, four-syllable structures, unlike A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, which moves between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Sonnet 18, by contrast, consists of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, though the exact count depends on the pronunciation of words such as temperate, ow’st, wander’st, and grow’st.
Inscription Data
Inscription number: #74,857,184
Inscription ID: 8898f1b3ed9fd16c476bc34ee9e778debec4b9a949…eab5b0i0
Owner: bc1qrjw0…anh9eqlq
Content size: 262 bytes
Sat number: 492,655,752,995,728
Creation date: August 24, 2024, 5:18 PM
Creation transaction: 8898f1b3…62eab5b0
Creation block: 858,264
Sat 492,655,752,995,728 is not just metadata; under ordinal theory it is the satoshi’s mined position since genesis. It places the inscription within a finite ordinal field of 2.1 quadrillion possible satoshi positions., just as the forty-eighth eclipse places the poem within Saros 126. The poem is therefore indexed twice: astronomically by eclipse sequence, and cryptographically by sat sequence.
Blockchain Inscription Versus NFTs
It is important to differentiate. Many NFTs on other blockchains, such as Ethereum, do not store the artwork file directly on the main blockchain ledger. Instead, they store a token and metadata that point to where the art is stored, often on decentralised storage such as IPFS.
Bitcoin Ordinals are notable because they generally involve inscribing the content itself directly into the witness data of a Bitcoin transaction. In that sense, the file is on-chain, not merely referenced by an external pointer.
Earlier Uses of the Bitcoin Blockchain for Art
Bitcoin Ordinals were used by Chinese artist Yue Minjun for The Human Collection in May 2024. The collection used Ordinals for storing metadata such as titles, descriptions, and mantras.
In his art, Yue Minjun reinterprets significant historical and cultural events, including the moon landing, Woodstock, and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. His collection has been described as one of the first major contemporary art projects on the Bitcoin blockchain. As the saying goes, the street finds its own uses for things — a phenomenon now extending into the world of art and technological infrastructure.
Neuromancer and Unauthorized Images
One footnote. Neuromancer was published in 1984 and has remained, remarkably, un-filmed for more than forty years. Options have come and gone; adaptations have been announced and abandoned; and an Apple TV+ series has been in development without, at the time of writing, reaching a screen.
The novel’s images — the matrix, the Sprawl, Black ICE — have circulated instead through other people’s work: The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, countless lesser imitations, and the covers of countless paperbacks. They have never had an authorized picture.
Appendix: Etymological Glossary
- Assimilate — Latin ad- (“to”) + similis (“like”); absorb and integrate.
- Authenticate — Greek authentikos (“genuine”); verify as real or true.
- Conscience — Latin con- (“with”) + scire (“to know”); moral awareness.
- Dichotomise — Greek dichotomia (“cutting in two”); divide into two parts.
- Diurnally — Latin diurnalis (“daily”); occurring during the day.
- Flow — Old English flōwan; to move smoothly or continuously.
- Illuminate — Latin illuminare (“to light up”); to clarify or enlighten.
- Infer — Latin in- (“in”) + ferre (“to carry”); derive logically.
- Interpretants — Latin interpres (“interpreter”); meaning generated by a sign in Peircean semiotics.
- Phases — Greek phasis (“appearance”); stages in a process.
- Projects — Latin proicere (“throw forward”); planned work, or to extend outward.
- Refer — Latin referre (“carry back”); to mention or relate.
- Referentiate — From referent + -iate; to treat as a referent.
- Rhythmically — Greek rhythmos (“measured flow”); in regular beats.
- Transfer — Latin trans- (“across”) + ferre (“carry”); move from one place to another.
- Vertically — Latin vertex (“top, turn”); upward or perpendicular movement.
- Walk through — Old English wealcan (“roll”) + þurh (“through”); a step-by-step guide.
Appendix: Glossary for A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
- Slumber — Old English slumerian, related to sleep; light or gentle sleep.
- Spirit — Latin spiritus (“breath, soul”), from spirare (“to breathe”); life force or soul.
- Seal — Latin sigillum (“small signet”), diminutive of signum (“sign”); to close or fix.
- Human — Latin humanus; of or relating to mankind.
- Fears — Old English fǣr (“sudden danger”); anxiety or dread.
- Thing — Old English þing (“assembly, entity”); object or concept.
- Touch — Old French touchier, from Vulgar Latin toccare; to make physical contact.
- Earth — Old English eorþe; ground, soil, world.
- Years — Old English gēar; unit of time.
Was the Poem Written by AI?
None of the poems presented on this page were generated by AI.
