BEFORE
24.02
40 Machine Portraits of Vladimir Putin
A complete forty-work sequence recorded on OpenSea across five days in February 2022.
The archive is not presented as prophecy. It is presented as evidence — of a machine trying to stabilize a face, and of a date that later changed how the images are encountered.
The First.
The Last.
Two works establish the temporal span of the series: the first recorded mint event on 18 February 2022 and the final recorded event on 22 February 2022.
Machine
instability.
The strongest works are not necessarily the smoothest. Distortion, anatomical failure and hybrid form are part of the archive’s historical character.
40 works. One archive.
At a technological threshold.
The series belongs to a narrow moment in generative-image history: Midjourney V1 was in its first documented phase; OpenAI's DALL·E 2 red-team preview period had not yet begun; Stable Diffusion would not be publicly released until August 2022.
Collection created; first recorded mint event, Putin #001, at 10:10:39 UTC.
Putin #002 through #017 recorded.
Putin #018 through #040 recorded; final event at 12:53:37 UTC.
On 24 February 2022, Russian armed forces began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The project makes no predictive or causal claim about this chronology; the date is presented as documented historical context.
Recorded,
not reconstructed.
The public chronology is built from preserved OpenSea API responses. Platform records and curatorial interpretation are intentionally separated.
The original collection metadata described the works as “created by artificial intelligence.” That wording is preserved as contemporaneous metadata rather than added retrospectively.
provenance source — no endorsement implied
Private
inquiry.
Prices are intentionally not published. Selected works may be considered for acquisition by inquiry. Institutional, curatorial, research and press requests are welcome.
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