𝚜𝚞𝚗𝚜𝚎𝚝 // 𝚜𝚞𝚗𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚎

on Feb 22, 2024, i created and propagated a performance art piece which sparked a worldwide panic over the impending sunset of the world's most widely used email service. this led to dozens of confused articles, elon musk considering launching a gmail competitor, and a reassuring viral tweet from the official gmail twitter account. the purpose was to call attention to the extent to which our society and economy rely on Gmail, which is a centralized service owned and operated by a capricious corporate monolith. people rarely reflect on this and mostly take it for granted, so the prospect of losing access unlocked a primal and latent terror that fueled the ensuing panic.

i followed up this performance with both a 1/1 and an open edition free mint:

𝚜𝚞𝚗𝚜𝚎𝚝 is a 1/1 which presents the original fake shutdown announcement image, which is now hosted on Google's servers. as such, it is therefore mutable and may disappear temporarily or permanently at any point for a variety of reasons related to Google's future product decisions and/or policies. the metadata however is fully onchain, so the token itself will live as long as the Ethereum blockchain does.

this was accompanied by 𝚜𝚞𝚗𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚎, an open edition commemorating the culmination of the sunset saga (a reassuring tweet from the official @gmail account which received 92,000 likes).