About

A gallery of things set to go

Every piece here is ephemeral by design — content that expires, hides, re-labels and rearranges itself. Below: the philosophy, the ephemeral arts, working frontend and backend examples, the planner, and a way to make contact.

Philosophy

Why forgetting might be the feature, not the bug — from poets, from physicists, and from your own hard drive.

No man ever steps in the same river twice.
Heraclitus

Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” — carved on a statue now reduced to two legs in the sand.
Shelley · ‘Ozymandias’

Your hard drive will comfortably outlive your interest in most of its contents. Storage is cheap; attention is the thing actually expiring.
Ephemerall

Ars longa, vita brevis, they said. These works reply: here, ars brevis too — and we mean it as a kindness.
after the Latin

Permanence is localStorage. Memory is meaning. Forgetting is just good garbage collection — shipped as a feature.
Ephemerall

Even black holes are temporary — they slowly radiate away and evaporate. Nothing in the universe is exempt from going.
after Stephen Hawking · Hawking radiation

Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow.
Shakespeare · Macbeth

To see a World in a Grain of Sand — and Eternity in an hour.
William Blake · ‘Auguries of Innocence’

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.
Omar Khayyám · Rubáiyát

The flow of the river is ceaseless, and its water is never the same.
Kamo no Chōmei · Hōjōki, 1212

Everything changes, nothing perishes.
Ovid · Metamorphoses

Ephemeral, everywhere

Nomad life

Home is wherever the tent stands tonight — pitched, lived in, and folded away by morning.

Clock culture

We built the clock to watch time leave; every tick is a small, ceremonial goodbye.

Live shows

A concert exists only while it is played — the encore ends and the room is just a room again.

Symbolic actions

A handshake, a toast, a bow — gestures that mean everything in the moment and nothing once it passes.

Fireworks

Months of craft spent in ten seconds of light, loved precisely because they cannot be kept.

Stories (24h)

Posted to vanish by tomorrow — a feed admitting most moments were never meant to be archived.

Sandcastles

Built against the clock of the tide, made to be unmade by the next wave.

Pop-up shops

Here for a season, a weekend, an afternoon — then the shutters come down for good.

Flash mobs

A crowd assembles, performs, and dissolves back into strangers within minutes.

Cut flowers

A bouquet is beauty with an expiry date, given exactly because it will fade.

Soap bubbles

A whole sphere of colour that exists for a single breath, then is simply gone.

Seasonal festivals

Carnival, Diwali, Hogmanay — the year's joy boxed into a few unrepeatable nights.

The news cycle

Today's headline, tomorrow's lining — relevance with a half-life measured in hours.

Memes & trends

A joke the whole internet shares for a week, then can barely remember.

A shared meal

Hours of cooking gone in an evening — the point was the table, not the leftovers.

Snowmen

Rolled up in an afternoon, melted by the thaw, surviving only in a photo.

Arts

Famous ephemeral arts — built to be witnessed, not kept.

Frontend

Everything here is set to go — by time, by your clicks, or by your hand.

Backend

Make information expire server-side — by TTL, by retention, by design. Clear snippets and live demos below.

Strategic Persistence Planner

Plan different ephemeralities for the contents of your project — and compare them against other projects’ settings. The full tool is embedded below.

Contact

Reach someone with a cryptic, expiring link and an ephemeral room.