Unfinished Past: Seven Years On-Chain

SuperRare drops Dalos Dov’s Unfinished Past today at 17:00 UTC: 150 participatory, time-based AI artworks, 105 of them available at release across presale and public. The premise is simple to state and strange to own: each work begins as a recognizable moment of lived experience and then transforms for seven years according to a single variable — whether its owner engages with it or not.

The mechanic

From the artist’s project text at dalosdov.com:

“Once a year, a short question about the piece surfaces (to be answered on-chain). Owners can respond, or they can choose to do nothing. That decision, repeated or avoided year after year, determines how it changes.”

The final piece, per the artist, becomes “a record of a seven-year relationship between a collector and their work of art.” SuperRare’s framing is remember or let go. Neglect is a valid input here. Silence is one of the piece’s possible curves, and it shapes the output differently than answering would.

Duration is the practice

Unfinished Past is not a one-off experiment. Dalos Dov’s earlier series point the same direction:

  • For Friends — 360 portraits generated from photography, code, and AI, planned to run “for a period of at least 13 years.”
  • Do Machines Dream of Human Bodies? — an exploration of how AI attempts, and fails, to understand embodiment, turning its misreadings into theatrical images.

An artist whose previous series already commits to 13 years is making a different kind of bet than a drop that promises a roadmap. The work’s form is distributed across time, and the collector’s calendar becomes part of the medium.

Why now

The drop lands in a market that just learned how fragile the platform layer is. Over the past year Nifty Gateway announced closure with roughly 650,000 NFTs needing withdrawal, Foundation’s founder handed the platform to Blackdove, and this month three chains — Abstract, Blast, Kadena — shut down or announced shutdown, with $76M still sitting on Abstract. Unfinished Past assumes a different risk entirely: it needs its owner to keep showing up for seven annual answers. Platform continuity is necessary; collector attention is the scarce input.

Details as of writing

  • Artist: Dalos Dov (@dalos on SuperRare)
  • Drop: Thursday, October 15, 2026, 17:00 UTC
  • Series: 150 works, 105 available at release (presale + public)
  • Pricing and allowlist: not announced at time of writing
  • Mechanic: one short on-chain question per work per year, seven years, answer or abstain

The open question

If a collector sells in year two, does the new owner inherit the relationship — the seven-year record continuing under new custody — or does the record break and the piece become something else? The mechanism is on-chain. Whether the relationship transfers with the token is something the contract can decide and the artwork cannot.

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