Zeblocks

Artist

Zeblocks · zeblocks.com ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/zeblocks ↗

Practice

Collaborative generative art combining code, geometry, animation, sound, blockchain storage, and interactive virtual environments

Current

The duo’s current Lumens site lists its dual-layer generative and AI-enhanced light project as “Minting Soon” and a sound-focused third chapter, Vibration, as “In Development.”¹⁵

In the set

Beatboxes ↗ · 841 editions
Unigrids ↗ · 421 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Zeblocks is the collaborative identity of Guillaume and Sebastian, two artists whose complementary backgrounds connect visual composition with software engineering. Guillaume studied Arts and Multimedia, developed an early commitment to abstraction and oil painting, then founded a web and marketing agency. Sebastian began working with computers as a child and later developed software across PHP, C++, Python, mobile applications, and blockchain systems. Within Zeblocks, Guillaume has been associated principally with aesthetic direction and Sebastian with technical implementation, although the work is presented under their shared name.¹ This structure is important because Zeblocks does not use code merely to distribute finished images. Code determines how an artwork appears, moves, sounds, and responds.

Their first Art Blocks project, Unigrids, established the grid as both an image and an interface. The official Art Blocks record identifies 421 unique artworks and a release date of January 26, 2021.² Released through Art Blocks Playground on August 28, 2021, Beatboxes enlarged that audiovisual proposition into 841 distinct virtual rooms.¹⁴ Each room can be entered through a browser or compatible virtual reality device, making navigation part of the encounter.³ Together, the projects describe a rapid expansion in scale, from the finite plane of the screen to an environment that seems to surround it.

The resulting practice belongs to generative art, yet its most distinctive feature is the refusal to separate visual output from duration. A Zeblocks work is not exhausted by its still image. It can disclose animation, rhythm, spatial movement, or responsiveness after the initial composition appears. Sotheby’s described Unigrids as a fully on-chain long-form series in which each work combines a printable static image, animation, and a companion beat.⁴ This layered construction asks the viewer to move from looking to listening and, eventually, to acting.

The grid as audiovisual score

Unigrids begins with a disciplined visual grammar: tiled fields, contrasting colors, repeated modules, and patterns that can read as textiles, diagrams, mosaics, or early computer graphics. Zeblocks’ project account traces the idea to Guillaume’s attraction to grids and tile patterns, followed by experiments with animated SVGs stored on Ethereum.⁵ The edition contains exactly 421 works. That number defines a bounded family, but variation within the system allows each output to establish its own balance of density, palette, symmetry, and pulse.

The grid is not simply a compositional scaffold. It coordinates several states of the artwork. Zeblocks programmed the visuals and animation with SVG, generated sound through the Web Audio API, and used pure JavaScript to bring those elements together without external libraries.⁵ These choices make technical economy an aesthetic condition. Vector geometry is compact enough to support detailed patterns, while procedural sound lets a visual arrangement unfold as a temporal event. What first resembles a stable modernist abstraction can therefore behave more like a score.

This compound identity explains why marketplace thumbnails offer only partial evidence. The static view provides a recognizable signature, but interaction exposes the project’s full structure. Sotheby’s emphasized that the series requires active exploration, since every work contains a still, animation, and generated beat.⁴ In this sense, ownership preserves access to a programmatic performance rather than only a file. The artwork remains capable of executing its relations among color, motion, and sound.

Unigrids also occupies a significant chronological position in the early Art Blocks catalogue. Sotheby’s timeline places it after foundational 2020 projects such as Chromie Squiggle and immediately before Ringers, recording the January 26, 2021 release within a sequence that helped establish long-form on-chain generative art.⁶ A work from the series was included in Sotheby’s 2021 Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale as part of a nineteen-work Art Blocks lot.⁷ That presentation situated Zeblocks within a broader account of code-based art whose output is generated and registered through blockchain transactions.

Live on Art Blocks: unigrids-by-zeblocks ↗

From composition to environment

If Unigrids makes a picture behave like an audiovisual instrument, Beatboxes makes that instrument architectural. The project consists of exactly 841 editions, each conceived as a generated room. Zeblocks’ video documentation calls the series fully immersive, virtual-reality audiovisual generative art on Ethereum and describes access through virtual reality hardware.³ The official collection record, echoed by contemporary coverage, also supports access on an ordinary computer.¹⁴⁸ In live view, arrow keys move through the room and the spacebar starts its music and animation; the record notes that its A-Frame implementation was not optimized for iOS mobile or Safari.¹⁴

Inside these rooms, recurring geometric forms become floors, walls, lights, screens, and sculptural presences. Color is no longer contained by a rectangular composition. It defines atmosphere and orientation. Sound similarly moves from accompaniment to environmental cue. The browser becomes a threshold, and viewing becomes a small act of navigation. This shift matters because it turns traits that might otherwise function as catalogue metadata, such as palette, light, tempo, scale, or shape dominance, into perceptible qualities of a place.

A project development log describes Beatboxes as rooms made with A-Frame and outlines possible extensions involving multiplayer avatars, live mixes, animated speakers, and social gathering.⁹ These unrealized or exploratory proposals should not be confused with the mechanics of every issued work, but they clarify the conceptual horizon around the project. The room was imagined not as a sealed display case but as a composable setting, capable of supporting performance and shared presence. Even in its released form, Beatboxes tests whether an on-chain generative artwork can be simultaneously collectible object, audiovisual composition, and inhabitable world.

The work emerged during an intense period for Art Blocks and the larger NFT market. Reporting from August 2021 listed Beatboxes among Art Blocks projects associated with substantial charitable fundraising during that month.¹⁰ That context locates the collection within the platform’s Dutch-auction era, when generative releases drew attention not only for their formal invention but also for the economic and philanthropic structures surrounding their launches. Such circumstances are historically relevant, though they remain distinct from the work’s enduring artistic proposition.

Live on Art Blocks: beatboxes-by-zeblocks ↗

Interaction, permanence, and sensory feedback

Across both collections, Zeblocks uses on-chain storage to address permanence while designing experiences that are fundamentally changeable in perception. The apparent contradiction is productive. The program and its assets aspire to persistence, while animation, generated music, navigation, and user attention ensure that the encounter unfolds differently over time. Permanence belongs to the instructions and resources. Variation belongs to execution and experience.

The duo extended this inquiry with Sensthesia, a later Fingerprints Studio project that uses microphone input to shape dynamic visual output in real time.¹¹ Fingerprints records its launch on December 14, 2022 and characterizes it as a collection of audio-sensitive generative artworks.¹² Zeblocks built the work in JavaScript without external libraries, using frequency analysis to connect ambient sound with movement.¹¹ Although Sensthesia sits outside the two AB[500] collections considered here, it makes their trajectory legible: first sound accompanies the grid, then sound inhabits the room, then sound from the viewer’s environment modifies the image.

In an interview conducted for the release, Guillaume explained that music adds another dimension to computer-based artwork and that the duo seeks to make its projects as interactive as possible.¹ He also identified Unigrids as a major influence on Sensthesia and described Beatboxes as an intervening experiment in immersive virtual reality. The statement confirms that these collections are not isolated technical demonstrations. They form a sustained inquiry into how generative systems can coordinate senses and distribute agency among artist, program, collector, and environment.

The duo’s current project site extends that inquiry with Lumens. It describes an on-chain flowfield paired with a custom-model AI-enhanced layer, allowing collectors to toggle between the generative core and the alternate view. The site places Lumens after the completed earth-themed Pebbles and before Vibration, a sound-focused chapter listed as in development.¹⁵

Auction and archival records have reinforced this historical reading. Sotheby’s 2023 presentation of Unigrids #366 identified the work as unique within the 421-output series and emphasized its interactive, fully on-chain construction.⁴ The auction house also included Unigrids in an educational overview of generative art’s development from early computer practices to blockchain-based long-form systems.⁶ An independent digital-art archive has likewise maintained a dedicated entry for the collection, evidence of continued cataloguing beyond active marketplaces.¹³

The critical value of Zeblocks’ work lies in this expansion of what a generative edition can contain. Unigrids retains the clarity of geometric abstraction while embedding animation and beat. Beatboxes transforms related concerns into navigable, audiovisual architecture. Neither project abandons the image, but both insist that the image is an entrance rather than an endpoint. Their strongest proposition is therefore experiential: code can compose not only forms, but also conditions for attention, movement, and listening.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Zeblocks links page ↗.