Consensus Wet is a collection of 15 works created as a tribute to the Opepen / Visualize Value universe, and more specifically to Consensus Met and Set 079 Play.
The starting point was a simple pun.
A few months ago, while collecting Consensus Met, it occurred to me that if I flipped the “M” upside down, the word ‘Wet’ would appear instead of “Met,” so I gave it a try.
Plus, “Wet” sounds like “Weth,” the wrapped form of Ethereum— so things were starting to get interesting.
Consensus Wet.
From there, the idea became to take the visual language of Consensus Met—Opepens transformed through burning—and imagine the opposite physical condition: what if the burned Opepen was frozen instead?
The result is a collection of Opepen figures embedded inside transparent, wet-looking ice cubes. The ice is not simply a container. It becomes another temporary state for the same underlying symbol. It's a remix of Consensus Met, made with
Fire becomes ice.
Burning becomes freezing.
Destruction becomes preservation.
And preservation, inevitably, becomes another form of impermanence.
Permanence is temporary.
Freezing is temporary.
Every state is temporary.
You can find the works here—one mint a day— on networked.art
Consensus Met is one of the projects that made me think differently about the relationship between an artwork and the system surrounding it.
In Consensus Met, minting a new work requires burning an existing Opepen. The original is removed from circulation, and with it goes its voting power within the Opepen project. The new artwork therefore comes from an irreversible decision: one state has to disappear for another to exist.
That mechanism is what interested me most.
The work is not only an image.
It's a transition.
Something is given up, transformed, and replaced.
Consensus Wet takes that idea and changes its physical metaphor.
Instead of burning the Opepen, I freeze it.
The flames of Consensus Met become frozen water, ice, bubbles, condensation and electric-blue filaments. The Opepen appears trapped inside a material that looks permanent but isn't.
Because ice only appears stable.
Eventually, it melts.
The five visual groups explore different states of the same idea.
The first group is the most direct interpretation of the concept: Opepens suspended inside clear ice.
The forms are quiet, almost preserved. The ice acts like a temporary archive, holding the symbol in a state between presence and disappearance.
This is where the relationship with Consensus Met becomes explicit.
The original “burning” language is brought inside the frozen cube. Fire and ice coexist in the same object, creating a contradiction between two opposite states.
The fire is no longer consuming the Opepen from the outside.
It's burning inside the ice.
Here the intervention becomes more minimal.
The ice almost disappears as a subject, leaving the Opepen's eyes suspended inside it.
It becomes less about transformation as spectacle and more about what remains after transformation.
The fourth group pushes the material language further.
The Opepen becomes almost entirely composed of frozen electrical filaments—blue, luminous, unstable. The ice contains something that looks simultaneously frozen and alive.
This is probably the closest point in the collection to the idea of a state that cannot quite settle.
The final work reduces everything even further.
Rather than adding another transformation, it removes information.
Negative is also my small homage to one of my favorite Opepens from Set 010/ Ed.40.
I wanted the collection to end not with another spectacle, but with an image that feels almost like a memory or an afterimage.
"Negativezed" evokes a sounds connection to "Ice."
It's simply an ice cube in negative form, nothing more, with a nod to the "Latent" collection.
The collection contains 15 works, divided into five groups:
5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 15
The structure is intentional.
It follows the logic of Opepen sets—multiple interpretations of the same underlying symbol—but introduces a descending mathematical structure of its own.
The number 15 is the fifth triangular number:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15
Triangular numbers are numbers that can be represented geometrically as progressively growing rows of points. 15 is therefore literally a number that can be built into a triangle.
But for Consensus Wet, the more interesting connection is not the triangle.
It's the handshake problem.
Six people in a room can each shake hands with every other person exactly once. The number of unique handshakes is:
5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 15
Each new participant creates fewer new connections because the previous connections have already happened.
Six participants.
Fifteen connections.
One network.
That is why the number 15 became particularly meaningful to me in the context of consensus.
A consensus is not something that exists in isolation. It emerges from relationships between participants.
Every handshake is a connection between two points.
And Consensus Met is fundamentally about that same idea: a collective system in which individual works participate in a larger process of voting, selection and agreement.
So the 15 works are not only a mathematical constraint.
They are a small model of a network.
5 → 4 → 3 → 2 → 1
Different groups.
Different states.
One collection.
And, underneath them, the same symbol.
There is another Opepen reference embedded in the structure.
Set 079, Play, is one of the Opepen sets that I enjoyed most. Its central visual language revolves around the cube/die—a simple object associated with chance, play and decision. The set itself describes its premise through the line: “Unless you own the system, you are just rolling the dice.”
That cube became an important part of the visual construction of Consensus Wet.
Consensus Wet pays homage to Playing through the language of the cube.
A cube has six faces. Consensus Wet, however, unfolds across five different states: five faces, five temporary conditions, five variations of the same underlying form.
The missing sixth face is not another state. It is the totality of the five — the complete set, the object formed by their coexistence.
In this sense, the sixth face exists only through the other five: it is not an additional image, but the consensus that emerges when all states are considered together.
The same basic geometry therefore carries two different ideas:
Opepen describes itself as “One Symbol. Infinite Remixes.”
"Consensus Wet" is simply another remix, another move, another roll of the dice.
Ultimately, I don't see these 15 works as 15 completely different objects.
I see them as 15 states of the same idea.
The Opepen can burn.
It can freeze.
It can become electrical.
It can disappear into a negative.
It can be preserved inside a cube.
But none of these states is final.
That is the connection I wanted to make between Consensus Met, Play, the mathematical structure of the collection, and the idea of impermanence.
Consensus is temporary.
Permanence is temporary.
Freezing is temporary.
Every state is temporary.
If you have come this far, I thank you for taking the time spent to read about Tempeporary. For any information, you can write to me in DM on X. Sometimes I can’t answer right away, but I always reply.
Networked.art:
X: @Hans__AI
Farcaster: @hansai
I greet you with my motto:
Compass Beats Map!
Mirko