WAVES
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We surf the internet. Waves arrive and recede, content comes and goes, sites appear and vanish. Over decades, internet culture and our memories of it slowly fade into the past.
In both storms and silence, remnants of websites drift on the surface. Layout shapes, coloured shards, barely readable fragments of text all bob around like waterlogged debris, The text bleached and worn to fragments. You can still faintly recognise the original source, but by now all detail is lost.
Waves is about our fading memories of the internet, but it also contemplates the ever-changing continuity of the internet itself. The internet was never a place. It was always this.
Jan Robert Leegte — www.leegte.org
Waves is a closed edition of NFTs. Each token contains a frozen snapshot of a webpage: a selection of its DOM elements, computed colours, and typographic fragments stored permanently on the Ethereum blockchain. A wave engine animates these as floating debris on a travelling sine wave.
The sine wave has appeared before in earlier work. In Broken Images (2022), compositions of absent images were arranged in wave-like formations, making the rhythm of presence and absence visible. In Rise and Fall (2023), 12 channels of white noise were shaped into the sound of ocean waves traversing a room: something emerging from nothing, pure static organised into the most ancient pattern of movement.
Waves signifies a long sequence. The hand-authored web of the 1990s, made of static source files, was already dismantled by web 2.0. Platforms replaced individual pages, dynamic apps replaced URLs, and content became generated by systems rather than written by people. What AI now threatens is the next layer, not just authorship but the stable artifact itself. Content generated on demand per request leaves no fixed URL, no canonical source text, no archivable object.
These shifts run through the practice. Web (2023) responded to the first loss: a machine-generated network of a thousand empty HTML pages, created and stored on-chain, populated the abandoned landscape of web 1.0, the machine moving into the space that human authors had left behind. Waves responds to the second. It reaches into web 2.0 and pulls out what that era actually produced: the platform page, the dynamic app, the corporate site. It captures not the content but their character and suspends it in a wave, at the precise moment that even these are beginning to dissolve into AI-generated content with no fixed form.
The gesture reaches back further. Around 2000, a series of netsquats copied the source code of existing websites — Altavista, Rhizome, Hotmail, Playboy, Etoys — and stripped all content by hand, leaving only the skeleton of the interface. What those early works did manually, Waves now does programmatically and makes permanent.
The work captures the existing DOM elements of a webpage: their size, position, colour, and fragments of textual content. After capture, these elements are scattered over the surface of a travelling wave like debris on a surf.
The wave engine and all snapshot data live entirely on the Ethereum blockchain, stored using SSTORE2 for gas efficiency. There are no external servers and no code dependencies. Each token's wave parameters are stored on-chain as well, making every piece unique in its physics: amplitude, frequency, particle behaviour, and drift are all specific to the token.
Each token begins with a default snapshot of a Wikipedia article on waves. Collectors may keep this, or update it at any time from any URL of their choosing.
Waves is released via a Verse sale end of April. After acquiring a token, collectors receive it with the default Wikipedia snapshot. To personalise it, transfer the token from the Verse wallet to your personal wallet and visit waves.leegte.org:
Collectors can return and update their snapshot and wave form as often as they like.
Since 1997 I have been making art on the Internet in the form of websites and digital-related work, resulting in websites, apps, installations, videos, prints, sculptures, audio works and drawings. The networked computer is the central muse in my work, exploring all its wonders and peculiarities.
I don't use software to make art, I make art about software.
My work has been exhibited at The Whitechapel Gallery, Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, ZKM and the Ludwig Museum and acquired by various private and institutional collections. Waves is my 13th NFT collection, after Ornament, Window, JPEG, Broken Images, Buttons, Coin, Web, Mountains and Drop Shadows, Selection, Bas-relief, Walled Garden and Wanderer.
Check out my work at www.leegte.org.
The primary sale takes place end of April on Verse. Exact start time to be announced.
To be disclosed asap. Gas fees are paid by the collector at the time of minting and vary with network conditions. The personalisation transaction will also require a gas fee.
Waves is on Ethereum mainnet.
The sale takes place on Verse (verse.works). The collector interface for personalising your token is at waves.leegte.org.
A small number of tokens are reserved as Artist's Proofs, pre-minted by the artist.
This will permanently store your wave snapshot for token #1 on the Ethereum blockchain. This action cannot be undone — the snapshot will be stored forever.
You can update your token as many times as you like, but each update is a permanent on-chain transaction.
💡 Tip: check gas tracker and store when fees are low.