Memorylessness is a property of a random process: knowing that an event has not yet happened does not change the distribution of the time still to wait. Among discrete trials only the geometric distribution has it; in continuous time only the exponential. Past failures neither raise nor lower the chance of the next success.
For works executed as code, the term separates decay that accumulates from decay that does not. In exonemo's Hatch/et (2026) a small computer mounted on a board keeps "randomly attacking" a set passcode and, the moment it succeeds, destroys the work with a hatchet. The published lifetimes are "under a minute on average" and "150,000 years on average": averages, not limits. If each guess is independent, a unit that has failed for ten years has the same expected remaining life as a new one. Gustav Metzger's 1960 manifesto gave auto-destructive art an upper bound ("not to exceed twenty years"); a memoryless agent can only state a mean. By contrast, 0xDEAFBEEF's Entropy counts transfers and 0xfff's Diminishing Returns subtracts lifetime bits and defers corrosion by the day: these works carry a past and approach their end. Whether Hatch/et is in fact memoryless depends on whether "random" means uniform guessing with replacement or sequential enumeration from a chosen start, which only the device's code can settle.