Corpse Flower

This work was inspired by the corpse flower, a rare plant that blooms only once every decade and is most often encountered in botanical gardens as a moment of spectacle. Named for the odour it releases which resembles rotting flesh, the corpse flower draws crowds who invest significant time and resources for the brief chance to witness it in bloom. I was interested in the parallel between this phenomenon and the spectacle-driven economy of NFTs, where visibility, rarity, and signalling often take precedence. The work asks whether a digital counterpart, encountered through a token rather than a physical garden, can provoke a similar intensity of attention. Once purchased, the piece exists only for a few days before disappearing entirely. This deliberate finiteness challenges assumptions about permanence that are often associated with blockchain technologies. While digital works are frequently imagined as lasting indefinitely, the idea of decay and digital rot is inherent to any technological material. Like all materials, digital systems are subject to degradation, obsolescence, and collapse. By allowing the work to vanish, the piece foregrounds impermanence as an active condition rather than a failure, aligning biological cycles of bloom and decay with the material realities of digital production.