**Otherness: Fall**
To make an image is to separate something from itself: to turn continuity into distinction, reality into representation, the self into an image of the self. *Otherness* follows that separation through the image, the token and the act of exchange.
*“We lose oneness, unity, and our home in the real, but gain the world.”*
— Gideon Jacobs, SPIKE
The original image was made in 2021 through early experiments with VQGAN + CLIP, when generative synthesis could not resemble anything convincingly and so produced abstraction instead: unstable, ambiguous, closer to the act of picturing than to the thing pictured. Newer models resemble almost perfectly and refer to almost nothing. The image becomes more real and less true at once. Looking at early AI now, its abstraction may be closer to the real, much as our own early image-making, and even our state of being, once was.
Five years later, the work returns in three states. *Oneness* is the non-tokenised print: the whole image, in its right order. *World* consists of twenty-one editions, each a region cut from the image when it sells, chosen not by the buyer but by their wallet. Each World token is paired with a physical print of the region it contains. *Fall* is the tokenised protocol through which these states become entangled.
*Fall* is also paired with a physical print. The print depicts the initial state of the Fall token at the moment of its creation. Unlike the token, however, the print remains fixed.
With every *World* sale, a region leaves the original image. The space it leaves behind does not simply become empty. It fills with the rest of the image, spliced back in, out of scale and out of place. The *Fall* token updates as these transactions occur, so the image held on chain progressively diverges from the physical print that accompanied it.
The two physical prints therefore function as records of different moments within the same system. The *World* print fixes a fragment at the moment it leaves the whole. The *Fall* print fixes the remainder before it begins to change. Both remain materially unchanged while the relationship between them continues to evolve on chain.
As the work disperses, its remainder becomes increasingly dense. It does not empty. It thickens.
*Fall* is not an archive of what was lost, but a changing state produced by loss itself. Each transaction alters the image, and each alteration becomes part of what remains. The more the work is divided, the less stable its distinction between whole and fragment, original and remainder, absence and presence becomes.
Made for ./spiral, an eleven-artist exhibition presented by SuperRare at Fondazione Aversano, New York, September 2026, curated by Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel. Each artist was asked to return to a formative work, tool or unresolved idea, on one condition: that the return not be a repetition.
Proceeds from this work support IKLECTIK’s artistic programme and operations.
