Descent
Descent
2025
1/1 of 166 pieces, launched in October 2025. p5 generative, digital & AI art on Bitcoin Ordinals, inscribed on sequential Block 666 sats with parent-child provenance, listed on Gamma and ord.net.
Descent is a generative visual journey through Dante’s Inferno. The piece begins with a human heart beating, failing, and falling silent. With death as the threshold, the viewer crosses into the afterlife and stands before Rodin’s Gates of Hell. From there, fate takes control, pulling the soul downward into the Nine Circles of Hell: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery. Each output lands the holder in a different circle, where the punishment matches the sin. In Descent, death is only the beginning and fate decides where you end up.
Every circle is framed by its own engraving, drawn in the style of a 1500s woodcut and composited by hand: the sin depicted in the border, the soul burning inside it.
Descent was a timed edition collection that ran for the length of the Gamma Spooky Season contest.
Death and Descent into Hell
A heart beats in the dark. Its colour changes from output to output, because no two people arrive the same. It falters, flatlines, and the Gates open ahead of you: Rodin's doors in a grey-green marble surround, burning from the inside. Then you are pulled toward them, and they break apart into grain as you pass through.
Circle 1: Limbo
The frame is a landscape, not a punishment. A level horizon runs the whole way round, with castles on the ridgelines, small groves, and a ferry drifting slowly along the bottom edge, its passengers standing. It is the only border here with sky in it. Inside, the field is colourless: grey, grainy, drifting, nothing happening to anyone. Most of them do not know yet.
Circle 2: Lust
Long hatched wind-lines sweep diagonally across all four sides of the frame, and the bodies go with them, tumbling, upside down, never touching ground. The linework is the wind. Inside, the field is violet and sinuous; it curls up on itself, reaches, and is pulled apart before it can hold a shape. Nothing here is allowed to settle.
Circle 3: Gluttony
Nobody in this frame is standing. Bodies lie prone along the bottom and down the sides, half-sunk in the muck, limbs splayed where they fell, rain hatched in above them. The field inside is brown and heavy, billowing and low, more weight than light.
Circle 4: Greed
The frame is an amphitheatre in perspective, tiers of stone seating curving around all four sides, and along the bottom the figures shove their boulders past heaps of rubble. A crowd's architecture, built for watching. The field inside is olive-gold and dim, the faintest of the nine, the colour of money with the shine gone out of it.
Circle 5: Wrath
The frame is nothing but bodies. No ground, no sky, no architecture. Nude figures grapple and tear at each other, packed edge to edge on all four sides, the densest border of the nine. Inside it the field runs blue, because this is the Styx and not a fire. A combed cyan form gathers, rakes itself into filaments, and comes apart. Then does it again.
Circle 6: Heresy
A necropolis: arched mausoleums, sarcophagi and broken slabs crowd every band of the frame, and fire burns live inside several of them. The tombs are open and still occupied. The field inside is ochre and dirty, thick with a smoke that has nowhere to vent. This is the only circle where the frame gives off light of its own.
Circle 7: Violence
Bare thorn trees run along the bottom of the frame with birds settled in their branches, waiting. Above them, bodies laid out flat; at the sides, crowds still struggling. The field inside is the only true red of the nine: crimson, branching, arterial, moving like something pumped rather than blown. This is the river, and it is warm.
Circle 8: Fraud
Down both sides of the frame, bodies are bound upright to crosses and posts, each in its own niche, arms stretched and held. Top and bottom, a churning heap of limbs. The field inside is acid yellow-green, and it takes up more of the canvas than any other, roiling, sick with its own brightness.
Circle 9: Treachery
The frame is built as a descent. Satan sits at the top centre, wings spread, sunk waist-deep in a flat plain of ice and breaking the border's edge. Columns of figures run down both sides. Across the bottom, a frieze of bodies packed shoulder to shoulder beneath the surface. The field inside is ice blue, diffuse and voided. It is cold all the way through, and the only circle that has stopped moving.