Casey Reas: the first implementation audit

Status: public implementation crosswalk; reviewed against canonical records

What can the Museum already say, and what must it build next?

The seven works in the Casey Reas gift are the Museum's first full test of this architecture. Each work is at once an artwork, a token on the Ethereum blockchain, a running software system, a displayable image, a collection object, and a subject of research. The records must connect those aspects without treating one as a substitute for another.

The Museum has accepted and accessioned the gift. It retained the Art Blocks metadata responses, verified the seven token identities and shared custody transfer, recorded title and rights conclusions, completed technical and curatorial reviews, and published the accession dossier. The live generators rendered during the Museum's observations; a complete, self-contained copy of each generator and its dependencies has not yet been preserved.

This crosswalk measures the canonical records against eleven standards. It marks what is already evidenced and what still requires a generated export, validation report, or preservation package.

The seven collection objects

The seven tokens moved to the Museum in transaction 0xbdde33b32d4b70335b10cbd37c0b00a027844f14c900d82aa4f75b7a7b390498 at block 25,660,311. The shared transaction does not merge the seven Museum objects or their separate mint histories.

Where the first accession stands

The table uses five implementation states:

One work through the architecture

CENTURY #31

The Museum object is 6529NM.2026.001.01. Its external asset identifier is eip155:1/erc721:0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/100000031. The retained Art Blocks metadata response has SHA-256 e193e1436718786aac6e96aac69d70b3ecbb224576626378137683bbf6916e74. The recorded generator route uses p5.js 1.0.0 and rendered changing output in the controlled observation.

Those facts become several linked records:

• Spectrum records how the Museum received, accepted, accessioned, checked, catalogued, and continues to care for the object.
• CIDOC CRM links the work, token, artist, donor, transfer, title record, accession, condition observation, and publication as distinct entities and events.
• LIDO provides a reviewed public catalogue record suitable for exchange.
• PREMIS distinguishes the intellectual work, retained metadata file, observed environment, documentation surrogates, preservation Events, and the still-incomplete autonomous Representation.
• PROV-O connects the published account to the source records, the activities that produced them, and the agents associated with those activities.
• Getty vocabularies give stable identifiers to artist, work-type, medium, and technique terms.
• IIIF presents retained visual resources, sequence, annotation, rights, and links to the live work.
• C2PA can bind a signed Museum assertion to a Museum-created still or other derivative.
• BagIt verifies the completeness and fixity of a transferable evidence snapshot.
• OCFL preserves that snapshot and later versions without rewriting the earlier state.
• CAIP-19 identifies the external token while the Museum ID continues to identify the institutional collection object.

What is preserved today

All seven objects are accessioned. The Museum has verified their token identities and retained metadata fixity; the official generator routes rendered during observation. Preservation remains in progress because the Museum has not yet retained complete, self-contained generator and dependency packages for autonomous rendering, and it has not produced BagIt or OCFL preservation objects. The machine preservation status for all seven works is in_progress.

The current record therefore treats:

• retained metadata responses as candidate PREMIS File records in the planned mapping;
• generator routes and observed digests as dated observations until the corresponding bytes and dependencies are retained;
• screenshots and videos as documentation surrogates;
• no current resource as a complete PREMIS Representation;
• no current directory as a validated BagIt bag or OCFL object; and
• the current JSON records as Museum records that can support future CIDOC CRM, LIDO, PREMIS, and PROV-O projections, not as validated exports of those standards.

The accession is complete as an institutional act; digital preservation work continues.

Exact machine schedule

The closed Casey Reas machine schedule binds each Museum object ID to its title, CAIP-19-shaped asset ID, custody log, retained metadata digest, observed generator digest, accession state, and preservation state. It also records the shared custody transaction and block and states that generator response bytes were not retained. CI compares every field to the seven canonical object records; presence somewhere in the document is not sufficient.

Machine checks for this crosswalk

The canonical profile is profile.json. A release validator checks that:

1. exactly eleven standard entries are present;
2. every standard slug is unique and resolves to a public document;
3. every implementation state belongs to the closed state vocabulary;
4. this crosswalk exists and is release-manifest-declared;
5. the exact seven-row machine schedule agrees one-to-one with the canonical object records, including titles, CAIP-19 identities, custody transaction, block and log, metadata and generator-observation digests, accession state, preservation state, and generator-byte retention status;
6. operational is used only for the implemented Spectrum procedure layer;
7. no unbuilt serialization is presented as validated or operational;
8. the profile, machine schedule, both schemas, tests, introduction, standard pages, and crosswalk are present in the deterministic release manifest;
9. Stream is absent from the normative profile and is handled only as a later interoperability mapping.

Canonical Museum evidence

• Casey accession control
• Accession certificate
• Public technical and condition review
• Visual observation record
• Post-accession diligence
• Evidence manifest
• Seven object records