There is a moment in every art purchase when the unknown disappears. You walk into a gallery and see the painting. You open the catalogue. You watch the video. You meet the artist. By the time you decide to buy, you already know what you are buying. HATA begins somewhere else.
Its Founding Collection consists of 26 Time Capsules created by 26 artists between 2023 and 2026. The works exist, they are permanently recorded, and they are waiting to be collected. But until a capsule is claimed, its contents remain unseen - even the artist is unknown. For the collector, the first encounter with the artwork comes after ownership.
A Mint Pass guarantees its holder one of the 26 Time Capsules. Which one is another matter. When a Mint Pass is redeemed, a capsule is randomly assigned from those still unrevealed. There is no preview, no shortlist and no opportunity to select a favourite. The collector knows they are entering the Founding Collection; they simply don’t know where they will enter it. That uncertainty is not a game added to the collecting experience. It is the collecting experience.
When the capsule is assigned, its holder becomes its First Witness - the first person to discover the artist and the complete work inside. Until then, the capsule has existed as a promise of an artwork rather than an artwork publicly encountered. For everyone else, it remains sealed. The First Witness decides whether that discovery stays private or is shared publicly.
It creates an unusual form of ownership: for a moment, a work can be permanently recorded yet known only to the person who owns it. The technology matters here not because the artwork needs a blockchain to exist, but because the blockchain makes this relationship between ownership, permanence and secrecy possible.
The First Witnesses appear one by one, until the last capsule is claimed. That is when HATA’s Founding Collection reveals itself in full. The Collective Reveal makes all 26 Time Capsules visible together - bringing into view the artists, their artworks, and the different materials, ideas, stories and digital experiences they chose to preserve inside them.
The collection does not follow a predetermined reveal calendar. It does not build toward a chosen star. It waits for its final collector. And then it becomes complete.
There is another layer to the Founding Collection that could not have been planned when many of the works were created. The Time Capsules span 2023 to 2026. What artists captured at the time now sits within a different historical context. A work that once seemed like an individual artistic response can, a few years later, become a witness to something larger - a change in technology, culture, society, or simply the artist’s own life.
Seen together, the capsules begin to resemble something more than a collection. They become a record of a period through the eyes of artists.
This is at the heart of HATA: to collect and preserve unique witnesses of art in time.
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