Museum of Unaccessible Accessible Art
*40 digits of PI
MoUAA is a manually-generated wallet without a seed phrase made to publicly archive NFTs. Without a seed phrase, it is a near mathematical impossibility to own, or remove, any of the wallet’s contents. Instead, members of the web3 and Metaverse community gift items live on-chain and access them with any front end that can view a wallet. It is a public archive, it is a one-way valve, it is a blackhole—for art.
MoUAA is an archive for everyone, curated by no one. Anyone in the web3 and metaverse community can donate or gift a piece to this archive, but once it is in, there is no way to use or retrieve it. The only way to control what is in the archive, what direction the archive goes in, and what viewing the archive feels like, is by adding art to the blackhole address.
The space is for artists, independent curators, NFT projects, and anyone with a work they want to display.
While you cannot remove art from the archive, anyone with a front end capable of viewing a wallet can explore the archive. Put in MoUAA’s wallet address and explore the assets. The archive is public domain, and all pieces can be accessed and used without ownership.
All wallets have an address, a string of 40 alphanumeric characters that differentiate one wallet from another. To access these wallets, owners must also have a seed phrase, a string of words that act like a key to open the wallet.
Since wallet addresses are just a string of characters, all wallets technically exist. You may see this when you make a typo while trying to send an asset to a wallet. The asset will go to the address as typed, whether that wallet exists or not.
By creating an address, but choosing to not generate the associated seed phrase, we are creating a space to send, and view assets, without any ability to access or remove them.
We love a heist, but we mean it when we say we don’t have access to the archive. To confirm this, we are creating a public video to document how we create the wallet address, reject a seed phrase, and build MoUAA to preserve chance and community trust.
While we don’t have a seed phrase for the wallet, if someone generated a wallet, and happened to randomly generate this exact address and could assign a seed phrase to it, they would gain access to, and ownership of, the entire collection. The odds of generating this address randomly are astronomical, a near mathematical impossibility, but there is a chance. And we love chance.
As the archive gains value, individuals may try to force their way in by finding some way to strong arm a seed phrase. If they were successful, they would not only gain access to the archive, they would illuminate a major security risk in the entire system of web3 wallets.
It is possible that someone gets in, but they’d either have to break the system, or be the luckiest bastard in the world.
When it came time to manually generate an address, we chose the first 40 digits of pi. It is both random, and recognizable. It will remove any controversy around reasons to pick a specific wallet address, without increasing the chances that someone will randomly gain access to the wallet. The chaos never solidifies into pattern, just a nebulous familiarity.
Like Pi, our archive will live on forever, until some sort of human existential crisis puts the validity of either in doubt. We aren’t reinventing the wheel, we’re reappropriating it.
Lorem Ipsum.