LOS ANGELES
22TUESDAY · FEBRUARY 2022
21:28:11 · UTC−08:00
An on-chain artwork, read closely · Ethereum / February 2022
One record.
Two dates.
Catch-22 is a work built around 22/2/22: a Tuesday made of twos. Its smart contract defines a supply of 222 tokens, with their imagery and metadata stored on Ethereum.
The work entrusts one exceptional date to a system built for agreement. The record that preserves the occasion also puts its promise to the test.
The occasion.
FOLLOW THE RECORD ↓
A visual essay based on
an essay by Q. Sterling
The catch. What happens when a system built for agreement preserves an event whose date changes with the observer?
Essay & primary sources ↗NEW YORK
23WEDNESDAY · FEBRUARY 2022
00:28:11 · UTC−05:00
BLOCK 14260472 · 23 FEBRUARY 2022 · 05:28:11 UTCBoth local dates are correct.
Consensus holds.
The date divides.
A blockchain is built to establish consensus: a shared record of transactions and state. Everyone reading this block can agree on its timestamp. Reading that timestamp through different time zones yields different dates.
This is the catch in Catch-22. The work invokes a system of agreement to secure one exceptional date. That same system secures the record through which the date’s dependence on convention becomes visible.
02 / Try the thoughtA map of civil dates
Move the instant.
Watch the dates.
Start with the actual deployment. Then move the slider: could another moment have put the whole world on February 22? Select a place to see the local reading of the same record.
Land is shaded by its local date.Equal Earth projection · Not a daylight map
The shared reference / UTC23 FEB 202205:28:11 UTC
Los Angeles / UTC−08:00TUESDAY, 22 FEB21:28:11 local time
Dates at this instant222 + 23 FEBRUARY
22 FEB · 00:00 UTC23 FEB · 09:00 UTC
The slider explores thirty-three hours around the deployment. Black land is February 22; ivory land is February 23; hatched land is February 21. The reset button restores the recorded deployment timestamp.
A small place. A whole day apart.
Look at Samoa and American Samoa, close together in the Pacific. Apia and Pago Pago have the same clock time in this window, but different dates. The line between dates follows civil decisions, not a neat meridian.
PAGO PAGO · UTC−11TUE 22 FEB18:28:11
APIA · UTC+13WED 23 FEB18:28:11
How to read this map
This is a stylized map of civil time zones, not day and night. The shapes come from the 2021c Timezone Boundary Builder, clipped to Natural Earth land. Historical UTC offsets are fixed for this 33-hour window in February 2022, including half-hour and quarter-hour zones. Coastal detail is simplified; very small islands are represented by enlarged location markers. Neutral areas have no mapped zone in the source.
The date count includes the extremes UTC−12 and UTC+14. Their twenty-six-hour spread means at least two calendar dates coexist; for part of the cycle, three coexist. UTC−12 includes uninhabited islands. Moving the slider changes the hypothetical instant, not the historical contract record.
Map data: © OpenStreetMap contributors / Timezone Boundary Builder, ODbL 1.0. The embedded derived geometry is available under the same licence. Natural Earth: public domain. Projection: Equal Earth.
The boundary moves.
The difference remains.
With civil offsets stretching from UTC−12 to UTC+14, February 22 starts to disappear in the earliest zones before it has fully arrived in the latest ones.
Everyone could agree to display the record in UTC. That would establish a shared convention. It would not make their local civil dates identical.
Agreement on a record and a shared calendar present are different kinds of unity.
The occasionNumber / notation / weekday / word
Why this
particular day?
“Twosday” joined a visual pattern to a calendar rule and an English pun. Together, these conventions turned a date into an occasion.
22/2/22DAY / MONTH / YEAR
2/22/22MONTH / DAY / YEAR
22022022THE FULL DATE IS A PALINDROME
TWOSDAYTHE TWOS FELL ON A TUESDAY
2422
The next February 22 on a Tuesday
in a year ending in “22”
The short numerical pattern returns in 2122, but that February 22 is a Sunday. The abbreviated date and its Tuesday coincide again four centuries after 2022. Even then, 22/02/2422 will not reproduce the full palindrome.
These conventions made the date exceptional. Catch-22 makes the passage from that symbolic occasion to a technical record part of its form.
03 / Read the work’s own languageA promise and its qualification
The sales pitch
contains a question.
Catch-22 speaks the promotional language of its era: scarcity, immutability, uniqueness. But its website also places this sentence inside its argument about the date:
“The chain does not know Tuesdays.”Catch-22 project website ↗
The claim and its qualification occupy the same text. Read together, they invite a test: what does the contract preserve, and what does the calendar add?
The bright generated images are one part of the work. Its description directs attention toward the contract itself. That makes the wording, the deployment and the record available as artistic material.
The culturally charged date22/2/22A pattern, an occasion, a word.
The block’s Unix timestamp1645594091A shared coordinate to be interpreted.
Unix time is also a convention; UTC is a standardized human rendering of it. The distinction is between what the record fixes and what a particular way of reading it makes meaningful.
Look closerThe reader enters the construction
Twenty-two.
Count again.
The date is not the only place where 22 meets 23. Two small pieces of language let you perform a related operation yourself.
01 / A change in wording
Catching the moment
22WORDS
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who catch the moment.
The bio shortens the closing phrase in the Pears–McGuinness English translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 6.4311. Four words become three. The sentence becomes twenty-two words long.
Read the corresponding English translation ↗02 / A change in the counting rule
How well-defined?
22WORDS
The trajectory may be chaotic, but the attractor is well-defined.
We are in no hurry.
The question is: will you be there?
The complete March 30, 2022 post has twenty-two words if the hyphenated compound counts as one; twenty-three if it counts as two. The written sentence stays exactly the same.
Read the complete project post ↗CHANGE THE WORDINGThe bio changes a sentence. Twenty-three words become twenty-two.
CHANGE THE COUNTING RULEThe post stays fixed. The result is twenty-two or twenty-three.
CHANGE THE TIME ZONEThe timestamp stays fixed. The local date is the twenty-second or twenty-third.
These are different operations, but they bring the reader back to a related question: what belongs to the inscription, and what belongs to the rules used to read it?
The supply of 222 establishes the motif. The bio and broadcast support a reading of deliberate numerical composition. Twenty-two becomes something the reader can produce, stabilize or unsettle by applying a rule.
A few ways into the workBeyond the image
A familiar shift
of attention.
Conceptual art offers useful ways of looking at a work made from dates, words and records. On Kawara and Joseph Kosuth open two paths into this field of attention.
A date as material
On Kawara
Today, 1966–2014
Kawara painted the date of making according to the language and calendar of the place where he worked. A painting unfinished at midnight was destroyed. The date was part of how the work was made.
Catch-22 opens a related question: what happens when one recorded event belongs to different local dates?
Explore the work at Dia ↗Meaning between representations
Joseph Kosuth
One and Three Chairs, 1965
A chair, its photograph and a dictionary definition sit together. Looking means moving between the object and its different representations.
Catch-22 invites a similar movement of attention: from image to claim, from claim to record, and from the record to the conventions that make it legible.
Explore the work at MoMA ↗Historical relation
as artistic material.
In Catch-22, provenance bears directly on the work’s promise. Its artistic force lies in how the date, wording, title and record give the viewer several ways to examine the same tension. Their particular relation makes history part of the work’s form.
What remainsA common history / different local dates
The ledger keeps
the question open.
A blockchain is a system for reaching agreement. Catch-22 turns that function back on its own promise: the agreed record preserves the distinction between local dates that the promise of one global Twosday would overcome.
The project’s adaptation of Wittgenstein asks us to “catch the moment.” Its infrastructure preserves a position in a sequence. Recorded duration and timelessness remain different things.
Somewhere between the date humans wanted to preserve and the timestamp the system inscribed, provenance begins to behave like material. The work’s language asks the viewer to read across that gap: to count, to translate, and to test the promise against the record.
That is where the work sits:
not in the promise alone,
not in the record alone,
but in the distance between them.