10,000 dogs · one zombie apocalypse · adoption fee $25
ALL DOGS is a year-long performance played with real money by up to 10,000 strangers. The artwork is whatever is left when the year ends. Every dog is its own drawing living on Ethereum: the artist draws the dogs, the owners write the story.
The game
Start by adopting your dog.
Then decide: love it, or flip it. (To flip it, you have to put it down first and make it a zombie. Only zombies can be sold.)
If 2/3 of dog owners love their dogs, everyone wins — and the faithful split the artist's entire paycheck.
If more than 1/3 put their dogs down for the money, everyone else loses.
The confession
I am betting every dollar this collection pays me that 10,000 strangers can't hold the line for a year.
Prove me wrong and you take my paycheck home with you.
Both stakes scale with the pack, however many dogs find homes. The adoption fee is $25. A $20 refund is escrowed for every dog, and the zombies take theirs on the way out. The other $5 of every adoption is my take, and it sits locked in the same contract for the whole year: my side of the table, up to $50,000. If the last midnight passes and the horde never reached a third, the faithful don't just collect their refunds. They split my entire take on top. I make nothing. If the apocalypse comes, I keep my take, and the refunds the taken dogs left behind come to me instead of back to you: at most, $20 × 10,000 × ⅔ ≈ $133,000. My position is printed at the gate on purpose: every turned dog is a donation to the person telling you not to. The only way to beat me is together.
— Jonathan Washburn, 2026
The math is public. Every rule on this page gets run through an agent-based economy simulator for thousands of runs before any contract is written. Two findings so far: hiding the count doesn't stop a panic, it makes the panic preemptive, which is why turns are sealed and read out once a night, in one batch: the cannon. And ordinary greed never reaches the third on its own; only an organized army does. Buying in is the first vote.
Why this performance
I just launched a collection called HOLY, and I got to watch people flip the work: in and out in a day, never once looking at it. So I built something a flipper cannot touch. Here, a living dog can never be sold. There is no floor to sweep and no exit to time. The only way to cash out is to kill your own dog, with your name on the collar, in public, forever. You can still flip. But the piece will make you sign the kill, and it counts toward the apocalypse hanging over every dog that stayed.
Fuck flippersIn April 2026, Tim Urban asked the internet a question:
Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?
Blue won by a thread, and pressing was free. Forty-two percent chose red anyway. I couldn't stop thinking about what those numbers become when the vote costs something: real money, your name on the button, a year to change your mind, and a count nobody can see. ALL DOGS is that question, played for keeps. Turn is the red button. Hold is the blue one. The one mercy I added: here, red needs a third.
The method · whose art this is
"The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." Sol LeWitt wrote that in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967. This collection is that sentence, running.
I wrote a constitution for this collection: what a dog is here, what cuteness owes the viewer, how paint should behave, which painters set the bar and why none of them may be copied, the color law that separates the living from the dead. Every rule the machines obey, I authored.
Two machines execute it. The Painter rewrites the drawing code from scratch, round after round. The Critic reads the same constitution and judges the sheets blind against a gallery bar, never knowing which one is the champion. Only the better painter survives the round. Neither one can stop. Neither one can lower the bar. And I do not touch the brush.
"The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course." — LeWitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art, no. 29
If that sounds like the artist left the room, the argument is sixty years old. LeWitt's wall drawings were executed by other people's hands, working from his written instructions, and nobody has ever doubted whose art they are. "All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair." The instructions are the art. My drafters happen not to be human.
What I authored: the dogs, the four fates, the census, the tenderness, the temperature of the grounds, the wall the score has to clear, and every mid-fight correction, published as it happens. What I could not author: the exact painting that survives. That part surprises me the same way it surprises you, and it is the part I wanted.
"The process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine." — LeWitt, Sentences, no. 28
Yours
It was painted the moment you arrived and it exists nowhere else. It can't be sold. It can't be traded. But you already know what you can do to it. The button is further down the page.
The attributes
Every dog starts alive. What it becomes isn't decided at mint and isn't decided by the artist. It's decided by 10,000 owners, one midnight at a time. The horde is every dog that has been turned; its count is the number hanging over the year.
Still alive, still yours. A faithful dog is one whose owner said no to the $20 every single night. If the dogs win the year, the faithful get refunded and trade free.
alive · holding the lineTurned by its own owner. The owner took the money, the horde took the dog, and the turn is signed on the collar forever. Zombies trade from the night they turn.
turned · paidDied of natural causes: every dog carries the same tiny nightly chance, a few deaths a week across the pack, chosen by chance and nobody else. Wings included, the nights it lived stamped on the collar. Angels never count toward the third. They trade right away, and if the dogs win the year they get refunded too.
at peace · tradableA dog the apocalypse took. If the horde ever reaches a third, every living dog is taken that same night and comes back under a sheet. Ghosts trade, but no refund ever comes.
taken · never paidThe primary attribute. A zombie exists because someone chose the money. A ghost exists because the world fell. An angel exists because nature took the dog. Faithful doesn't last: the death clock never stops, not even after the year, so a faithful dog someday earns its wings, unless its owner refuses the win money at the door and makes it a vampire or an immortal: the two fates that never die, only offered at the year's end, never before. The collection ends in wings, fangs, and light.
Every collar carries a number: how many nights the dog lived. A zombie is stamped the night it turned. An angel is stamped the night it passed. Ghosts all share one terrible date. The faithful just keep counting, long after the year ends. Night 3 (turned before its first walk) and night 3,650 (ten years old) are both rare; the middle belongs to everyone.
Decided at mint, and then every midnight after. At mint each dog's seed rolls three independent slots (headwear, worn, held) at a third of the odds printed below, so dogs are born nearly bare. From then on, every living dog rolls again each midnight at the printed odds × 0.003: one full wardrobe's worth of chances for every year lived. Old dogs get rich; that is what living is worth here. Every item carries its own accent color, and the held items are interactions: the dog reads the book, hugs the balloon, holds the drawing up for you. The crown is a 0.09% roll. Twenty dogs are one of ones whose costumes ignore the first two slots, but even they roll the held one. Zombies that traded their refund at the turn carry the zombie scarcities, a second wardrobe no living dog can wear. Vampires and immortals stop the clock: their wardrobe is whatever the dog wore the night it chose eternity.
Your handle on the collar, inscribed if you reserved. The fate. The nights lived. The wardrobe. The drawing itself, one of one from its seed.
These are odds, not quotas. Every dog rolls each slot on its own, so the crown is a 0.09% roll: expect about nine at a full house, but the dice don't owe anybody nine. And the slots multiply. A crowned dog holding a pocket knife is 0.09% × 0.1%: roughly one dog in a million, which almost certainly means zero and might mean one. Even the one of ones roll the held slot. The Carpenter holding a pocket knife is one specific dog times 0.1%, a piece that will probably never exist, and everyone will know the odds it beat if it does. The fate and lived tables are the opposite of all this: nobody knows those until the year, and the years after it, write them. Half the rarity is rolled. The other half is earned.
The collection
The medium
There is no image file. Every dog is painted in your browser, right now, by a JavaScript painter working from a single number. The whole painter is about a hundred kilobytes: smaller than one photograph of the painting it makes.
One seed, four lives. The same dog, seed 910007, painted by the same code through each fate the year could hand it. The game never swaps an image. It repaints the soul.
The same seed paints the same dog, stroke for stroke, on any machine, in any decade. Your dog can be repainted from scratch a century from now and not one bristle moves.
Thousands of layered strokes with seeded jitter in hue, pressure and dryness. Pigment behavior, computed. Zoom in: the edges break like a dry brush because the code says they should.
Code doesn't pixelate. The identical instructions paint a postage stamp or a two-meter gallery print, and the print is not a blowup, it's a fresh painting at that scale.
The seed decides the dog and its wardrobe. The year decides its fate. The night it dies stamps its collar. The blockchain doesn't store this art, it completes it.
Nothing to host, nothing to pin, nothing to rot. A number and a painter, and the painting exists wherever somebody runs them.
The drop
No bots, no gas auctions, no refreshing at midnight. One reservation day, one honest allocation, then a public day for whatever's left.
One day, announced ahead of time. Verify your Twitter handle and reserve dogs in blocks of 1, 10, or 100, adoption fee $25 each. A block is a kennel: it lives together and, if it ever turns, it turns together. A hold goes on your card and nothing is charged yet. Nobody races anybody: everyone who shows up that day stands in the same line.
Orders are read, not raced. Reservations get filled by the history of the wallet you reserve with: art held for years counts for you, quick flips count against you. The dogs go home with people who keep them. If your order fills, your handle is inscribed on every collar, forever.
Whatever's left opens to everyone, first come, first served, no handle needed. Launch-day dogs play the same year and live the same lives; their collars just don't carry a name.
The pack is however many dogs find homes that week. If that's short of 10,000, the year plays exactly the same and the apocalypse still comes at one third of the pack. Dogs nobody adopts are never born at all.
The year
Adoption runs in three steps, printed above: reservation day, the allocation, then a public day for whatever's left. Every dollar the year collects sits in the contract where anyone can look at it, and every count in the game scales to the pack that actually got adopted.
Not to a friend, not to a museum, not for any price. If you want to sell your dog, there is exactly one way: put it down. The put-down pays you the $20 refund on the spot, and it unlocks the market: your new zombie can be listed that same night and sold for whatever a buyer will pay, on top of the $20. But understand what you bought with that: the turn is signed on the collar forever, and you've joined the zombies' side of the count, one dog closer to the apocalypse for every dog still holding. Selling out and betraying the pack are the same button here. That's the piece.
Any night from the day you adopt, you can hand your dog to the horde and take back the $20 of ethereum that was locked for your dog on adoption day. It pays on the spot, no strings. It is not a sale: it is the same escrowed refund the faithful collect if the dogs win the year, taken early. The market is a second, separate prize. Your new zombie can be listed and sold on top of the $20, your handle still on its collar. And zombies are the only supply there is, so the better the pack holds the line, the scarcer and pricier zombies get, and the louder the market whispers at everyone still holding. Two more things the night you turn. First, turning is a kennel decision: a block of ten turns all ten or none, and a hundred turns a hundred. Second, each kennel is offered one trade at the door: hand back the refund, and the zombies roll the zombie scarcities instead, a second wardrobe that exists on no living dog and can never be bought later. Cash or curse, sealed with the turn. The turn is signed.
The same $20 the killers take is waiting for every living dog. If the last midnight passes and the horde never reached a third, every living dog collects it, trades free, and is marked faithful forever. And on top of the refund, the faithful split the artist's entire take: the $5 from every adoption, up to $50,000. He makes nothing. That's the good ending.
If the dogs win the year, each surviving dog cashes out through one of three doors. Take the money, and the dog stays mortal: the death clock keeps running, the wardrobe keeps growing, and someday it earns its wings. Or refuse the money and convert: vampire or immortal, the two fates that never die and never age. Their wardrobe freezes the night they choose eternity. Money left unclaimed 100 days after the year ends is forfeited. Eternity is bought with your whole payout; wings only ever come to the mortal.
If a third of the dogs are ever turned, the horde takes every living dog that same night. They come back as ghosts: still yours, tradable, never refunded. The $20 that was waiting for each of them goes to the artist instead. Natural deaths never count toward the third.
You never see turns in real time. They're sealed as they happen, and once every midnight the new count is published in a single batch, like the cannon in the Hunger Games. Some nights it's silence. Some nights it's forty dogs. Between cannons, nobody on earth knows how close the third is.
The choice
The refund is the same either way: $20.* But only one button splits the artist's paycheck.
This is the dog you'd be doing it to.
*The adoption fee is paid in dollars: $25 on your card. The moment your adoption clears, $20 of the fee is converted to ethereum and locked in the contract with your dog's name on it. That exact amount of ethereum is what comes back, whenever it comes back: if ethereum doubles against the dollar, your refund doubled too. If it halves, it halved. The contract owes ethereum, not dollars.
All the night's turns, read out at once. Some nights, silence. Some nights, a massacre.
You'll never know if the third is one cannon away. You can't time an apocalypse. You can only pick a side before it.