One of the winning entries in ClaireSilver’s 8th AI Contest, why/cycle weaves together ancient Chinese literati culture and blockchain to probe my impulse to create. Inspired by the literati’s “Three Perfections”—poetry, calligraphy, and painting—the work is anchored by its custom sigil, flipped 8–∞, which embodies both the cycles of creation and the ongoing lineage of Claire’s contests.
Unfurling like a traditional landscape scroll, the piece encodes every contest from August ’22 to February ’25 using historical $ETH data. The AI-synthesized calligraphies shift gradually from legible to expressive scripts, mirroring my own creative evolution. Provenance is woven into the scroll as each contributor answers “Why do you create?” in their own words—Claire herself, contest winners, and co-creators DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Grok—each sealed with a custom chop.
And the cycle doesn’t end there—you can mark your provenance!