Summer Comes
Undone

Alright, so Summer Comes Undone, a title that wandered in late from a song after the work was already underway. Undone Gallery x Forever Library, twenty-one artists handed nothing but the phrase itself and the promise of blockchain immortality. No brief, no shared palette, no house style to lean on. Whatever they made of it is theirs alone.

Take Shaun Keenan's Manbulance and Humdrum's s/t - two video works that couldn't look more different yet both map the same slow-motion takeover: Artificial Intelligence chewing through our reality byte by greasy byte and quietly assembling its own version while we're still blinking at the screen. It's the digital equivalent of watching the furniture rearrange itself overnight and pretending not to notice.

Then the older tools get their turn. Eloy's seventy-four-year-old sewing machine is still doing the stitching, but the hand, the wit, and the decision to 3D-scan the whole operation are entirely theirs—domestic machinery pressed into service for something much more universal. Elsewhere Kamau Kamau, Shojiro Nakaoka, and Anton Dubrovin are bending code, plotters, and the browser itself to their will, dreaming up pieces that embrace chaos in beautiful ways, the tools seemingly fully conscious of their own part in the proceedings.

Yamada and Frances Skomra whisper softly through their work. Ernesto Asch prints his own full-throated manifesto on the sleeve of his. Underneath Summer Comes Undone runs the same old set of questions artists have been wrestling with for decades—body, gesture, colour logic, the formal habits inherited from painters most of these kids never shared a planet with. None of it reaches 2026 unscathed. It mutates. It adapts. It finds new ways to keep breathing, the way every good idea eventually gets remixed until even its mother wouldn't recognise it.

What holds the whole thing together is the present tense: twenty-one people working with the tools that happen to be lying around right now, the results minted onto the world computer by Forever Library with the explicit hope of it outliving us all.

So in the end, summer comes undone, the machines keep grinding away in their indifferent mechanical glory, and the body of work sits - stitched, coded, plotted, pixel-pushed - waiting for somebody, anybody, to claim it and call it home before the season fully collapses into whatever comes next.

— zlaser
Founder, undone.gallery

It is an honor to host this eclectic mix of works on the Forever Library Protocol. We hope to demonstrate that there are new opportunities to preserve art onchain that are truly durable, and that we can come together across our preferred blockchains to pursue this in a unified way.

We fundamentally believe in tokenization as one of the best methods of digital media preservation that exist today — and what better way to explore these new possibilities than Summer Comes Undone!

Tom (@musiconchain)
Founder, Forever Library