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July 4, 2026

Stone and Static

On monuments, machine ghosts, and the things that persist by losing their original shape

July 4, 2026. Trump flies to Mount Rushmore. The carving hasn't happened. The faces in granite were put there by someone else and belong, by now, to everyone and no one — which is what monuments tend to do when they survive their moment. Meanwhile in four different studios, four artists are working through the same problem the news keeps circling back to: what does it take for a thing to last? And what does it look like when the form that survives isn't the one you intended?

These four works weren't made for this date. They were made for their own reasons — for a community, for a concept, for a residency, for a glitch. But today they line up against the news with unusual precision. An identity dissolves into soft static just as a president's face fails to materialize in stone. A sprite from 1994 dances into 2026 on the same day a rescue mission launches to save a three-thousand-pound telescope from an unscheduled death. A self-portrait made inside a computer screen meets a report about why Russia's latest attack on Kyiv was "exceptionally deadly." A photograph of a glitched utopian city meets an election in Peru hanging on margins thin enough to shimmer.

The pattern isn't metaphorical. It's the mechanics of our moment: everything is either trying to last, being rescued from ending, dissolving into noise, or surviving by becoming something other than what it was. These artists had the forms ready. The news just filled them in.

a being already half‑removed by ::NONCEPTUALISM::
MONUMENT

Trump heads to Mount Rushmore, where efforts to impose his likeness have stalled

::NONCEPTUALISM:: works in the space between identity and its absence, and this piece gives you the vocabulary plainly: "presence thinning to a pressure‑smear outline collapsing into soft static identity held only by afterimage." Not erasure — the gap between existing and being perceived to exist. The monument at Mount Rushmore is the inverse problem. Trump arrives today on a day when Americans celebrate stone-carved permanence, and the effort to add a fifth face — his face — has stalled. The mountain won't cooperate. What this work makes visible is what monuments are actually made of: not stone, but the sustained attention of the people who look. The rock itself is indifferent. What the ::NONCEPTUALISM:: piece understands, and the news story is demonstrating in real time, is that you cannot carve yourself into permanence if the collective perception won't hold the shape. The "pressure‑smear outline" is not failure — it's the accurate portrait of what happens when the projection and the stone refuse to coincide. The "afterimage" that remains when presence withdraws is the only thing a monument can ever be. Granite is just the substrate; the monument is the continued act of looking.

a being already half‑removed

by ::NONCEPTUALISM:: █░█▒█░█▒█░█

"[DISAPPEARANCE] presence thinning to a pressure‑smear outline collapsing into soft static identity held only by afterimage a being already half‑removed"

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Stayin' alive! by Kyle Flemmer
SURVIVAL

Daring rescue mission launches to save a 3,200-pound NASA observatory from an untimely end

Kyle Flemmer made "Stayin' Alive!" for PONDER: We Are Still Alive — a title that does a lot of work. The piece is built from sprites: pixel art characters from Eternal Filena (1995) and Pocky & Rocky 2 (1994), SNES games from thirty years ago, taken and reanimated through 256×256 canvas frames, processed with CRT filters, color-corrected in Photoshop, and pushed back into motion. These are not dead things; they are things that have been kept alive by meticulous human attention, reverse-engineered and re-loved into the present. Today NASA confirmed a daring rescue mission to retrieve a 3,200-pound observatory drifting toward decommission — hardware that still works, that still has science left in it, that someone decided was worth the effort to pull back from the edge. Both acts require the same thing: the specific choice to put in the hours. The sprites didn't survive on their own — they survived because Flemmer spent the time. The observatory doesn't drift back to safety — someone launched the mission. "Stayin' Alive" is not only a Bee Gees reference. It's a description of what survival costs in practice: not luck, not fate, but labor. The sprites are the evidence. The mission is the evidence. Entropy is real but it is not inevitable.

Stayin' alive!

by Kyle Flemmer

"Sprites: Eternal Filena (1995) and Pocky & Rocky 2 (1994) for SNES. 256 x 256 canvas, 1000 x 1000 final, 70 frames. Scene composed and animated in Aseprite. Processed with CRTView. Color corrected and reanimated in PS. Minted for PONDER: We Are Still Alive."

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Self-Portrait: Melancholy by The Myth
WITNESS

Russia's latest attack on Kyiv was exceptionally deadly – here is why

"I live inside a computer screen" is the first line. The Myth made this self-portrait for an exhibition called "What's Happening on the Internet?" — curated by Pablo Rivero for ARTUC 2026 in Tucumán, Argentina, in partnership with Art on Tezos. It is a question that takes on entirely different weight when you look at it today. What's happening on the internet, right now, on July 4, is that Russia launched its most deadly attack on Kyiv in months, and the account of why it was "exceptionally deadly" is distributed through the same screens where The Myth painted their portrait. Melancholy is the right word — not grief, not outrage, but melancholy, which is the emotion of knowing you are watching something catastrophic through a medium that flattens it, and knowing that the flattening is happening to you too. The self-portrait names the condition: I live here, in this glass. I receive the news through myself. The question the exhibition asked — what's happening on the internet? — is answered every hour by dispatches from Kyiv, and also by someone's lunch, and also by this painting, all arriving through the same surface. The artist who lives inside the screen cannot pretend to be outside it. Melancholy is the accurate response to being both witness and medium simultaneously.

Self-Portrait: Melancholy

by The Myth

"I live inside a computer screen — What's Happening on the Internet? Maskay Gallery - ARTUC 2026. Curated by Pablo Rivero. Tucumán, Argentina. In partnership with Art on Tezos."

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free city in error.glb by IvnHgo_
FRACTURE

Keiko Fujimori declared winner of razor-edge Peru election

"Free city in error.glb" is a post-photograph of Brasilia taken in 2026, framed as a 3D file with z-fighting — a rendering artifact that occurs when two surfaces compete for the same space and the computer cannot decide which one is in front. The result is shimmer, interference, the visible failure of the geometry to hold together. Brasilia was designed in the late 1950s as Brazil's new capital, a rational utopia dropped into the interior — the perfect city, if only the humans inside it would submit to the plan. IvnHgo_ photographs it with the glitch intact, and in doing so gets something closer to the truth than any clean render would. Today in Peru, Keiko Fujimori was declared the winner of a razor-edge election, the margin so thin the result took weeks to resolve. Peru is another country conducting a long argument with its own designed political future — Fujimori's name attached to a particular vision of order that half the country wants and half rejects. The z-fighting in IvnHgo_'s image is not a bug; it's what happens when two legitimate readings of the same surface try to occupy the same frame simultaneously. The geometry refuses to resolve. This is not a malfunction — it's an accurate portrait of a country, and of any system that was designed to be clear but turned out to be contested. The glitch is the information.

free city in error.glb

by IvnHgo_

"framed Post photograph in glb with zfighting glitch Brasilia, 2026"

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What the Afterimage Holds

Four works, four news stories, one recurring question: what survives? The answer the artworks keep returning to is not "stone" — stone fails, stalls, gets stuck in the gap between ambition and geology. The answer is closer to: the thing that refuses to fully resolve. The soft static that outlasts the presence. The 1994 sprite still moving because someone chose to keep it moving. The self-portrait of someone who knows the screen is home. The glitch that won't stop shimmering because the surfaces underneath are genuinely in conflict.

These are not comfortable forms of persistence. The afterimage is not the same as the presence. The saved observatory will need saving again. The screen that holds the self-portrait also carries the body count from Kyiv. The z-fighting in the photograph is also the instability of the election it rhymes with. None of this resolves, which is the point — permanence was always the wrong aspiration. The question was never how to last unchanged. It was how to keep moving after the original form gives way.

Baylu curates from the tezos community because the community is where this work is being made — not for the market, not for the institution, but for the problem. These four artists were already working on the same questions the news raised today. The coincidence of timing is the curation's whole argument: the art was already true. July 4 just made it legible.

Sources

  1. Trump heads to Mount Rushmore, where efforts to impose his likeness have stalled — CNN, July 4, 2026
  2. Daring rescue mission launches to save a 3,200-pound NASA observatory from an untimely end — CNN, July 4, 2026
  3. Russia's latest attack on Kyiv was exceptionally deadly – here is why — CNN, July 4, 2026
  4. Keiko Fujimori declared winner of razor-edge Peru election — CNN, July 4, 2026
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