Soft Eulogies: Portraits from the Mempool is a time-based vigil for everything that has been declared "dead" in our feeds, markets, and lives. Across the series, thousands of casual dismissals accumulate into a larger meditation on value, loss, and attention in a culture that is always announcing endings. What is usually said as a quick post, slogan, or passing reaction becomes a small memorial recorded on the Bitcoin chain.

Each portrait begins with a phrase such as "Bitcoin is dead," "Portraits are dead," or "Truth is dead," drawn from the way people try to bury ideas, technologies, and communities online. These everyday declarations are transformed into portraits, giving casual dismissals a skull and a trace of labor so they persist as small memorials on the chain. Across the collection, 10,080 unique phrases correspond to the 10,080 minutes in a seven-day week. Organized across the seven domains of Light, Code, Earth, Time, Media, Society, and Rest, the series echoes a Genesis-like structure in reverse. Where Genesis describes the making of a world, Soft Eulogies imagines its symbolic undoing, one minute at a time.

The series exists as browser-based generative art built in p5.js and JavaScript, using WebGL and responsive code so each portrait adapts to the screen while remaining shaped by its underlying Bitcoin transaction. A directional color gradient sets the atmosphere, while scattered dots mark the estimated size of the Bitcoin network at that moment. A code-based walker line traces the duration of a transaction's confirmation time, gradually forming a minimal image of color, a faint skull silhouette, and text.

Built on a tightly constrained system that echoes Bitcoin's own limits, the project uses twenty-one base skulls — a nod to Bitcoin's 21 million coin cap — with three skull types assigned to each domain. Originally SVGs created by the artist, these forms were converted into JavaScript paths and algorithmically distorted using transaction data so that no two silhouettes are the same. Extensive metadata is available on-chain, with additional details accessible through the console of each work, including ID, TX Type, TX #, Date, Block Height, Passage, Skull Type, Skull Rarity, and Phrase. The visual and structural elements of each portrait are determined by 10,080 specific Bitcoin transactions pulled from the mempool between 2009 and 2025.

Each domain follows a different layer of the world as it is gradually named, measured, and pronounced dead.

Soft Eulogies extends two key trajectories in Southworth's practice: the time-based line of The Continuous Work Drawings (2012) and the obituaries-for-Bitcoin logic of The Revenant (2024). In Soft Eulogies, the time-based line shifts onto the Bitcoin network: each portrait becomes a continuous work drawing of a transaction's confirmation time, measuring the chain's computational labor instead of the artist's hand.

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