The ink inside would still be alive. The pigment has not degraded, the solvent has not evaporated, the head is not clogged. But the chip carries a date, and on that date it says no. The cartridge is declared dead by a counter, not by a chemical reaction. It is deliberate obsolescence: an object built to stop working on a day somebody else decided.

⟦ EXPIRY ⟧ takes that mechanism and hands it to the collector. The work is the machine itself: an inkjet printer assembled out of the shapes of its own casing, its panels, its vents, its labels. It prints itself, row after row, top to bottom, at the real speed of a carriage pass. And it carries its own expiry date printed on top.

For thirty days the colour is there, and it is the most beautiful thing the work will ever do. Then it drains. Not at once: a little less every day, like a cartridge that is really emptying. On the thirtieth day the colour is gone and the drawing is left — black and white, the whole plate, every contour in place.

The machine doesn't know. It keeps printing for another thirty days, on empty, with identical precision. The counter in the top right stops saying how many days are left and starts saying how many days it has been dead.

On the sixtieth day it stops. What is left on the sheet never changes again.

The collector buys the colour and receives its ending. They know from the first day that they are watching something that will finish, and they cannot stop it. They can only watch it finish — and print, whenever they want, the exact moment they were watching.