a heart and a soul

Work and context

In a heart and a soul #186, the AB5D-held example inspected for this essay, a circular centre contains a symmetrical arrangement of green, black, and yellow compartments. Small yellow blocks punctuate longer muted-green bars; thin gold outlines make the divisions emphatic. Beyond the circle, dark sinuous bands and corner arcs weave across black. The title names two contrasting kinds of organisation inside one frame, rather than depicting an anatomical heart or a figure with a soul.¹

Roman Janajev’s Factory collection comprises 1,024 works on Art Blocks, under project 158. Its project statement identifies the centre as the heart and the outer intertwining field as the soul. It also specifies an important constraint: the central corridors should maintain a constant width. What can initially look like free ornament is therefore the product of a deliberately restricted spatial problem.²

The current AB5D profile links three wallets. Fresh token records place #186, #226, and #490 in one of them. The header uses #186 because its actual original was inspected alongside four early outputs. This establishes a current collection example without confusing token ownership with copyright or presenting every held token as visually examined.¹³

Conception

Janajev published a detailed development account on 12 October 2021. He describes wanting a central decorative image for an imagined geometric church, and recalls a grid game involving chambers and walls as a useful model. He began with the Fresco palette, then accepted more contemporary colours while retaining pronounced outlines and gold edging. That near-contemporary account gives a specific intention for the antique effect described on the project page, rather than leaving viewers to invent a historical source.⁴

The same account explains that a polygon-traversal fault could introduce diagonal cuts in looped chambers. Janajev chose to retain it because he liked the result. This is a documented editorial decision within the generative system. The account’s estimated rarity figures are not independently recounted here; the more consequential point is that an initially unintended feature became part of the accepted visual vocabulary.⁴

The tension between heart and soul is visible before any technical explanation. The centre asks the eye to follow corners, repeated junctions, and mirrored counterparts. The perimeter asks it to track curved bands passing across other arcs. Neither region is actually ungoverned. Their contrast comes from different geometric rules, different placement, and the way one contains the other. The thick circular boundary gives their meeting a third character: it is simultaneously an outline, a frame, and a barrier.²⁵

The work’s evocation of older decoration does not require it to reproduce a named church, ornament tradition, or sacred diagram. No such specific historical derivation was established by the inspected sources. It is more precise to say that the project constructs a fictive architectural feeling through symmetry, a circular centrepiece, a surrounding border, and repeated lining. The original outputs support that description without assigning a religious function to the tokens.²⁶¹

Construction

The complete 7,143-byte artist program was retrieved, read, and hashed. It uses p5.js 1.0.0 and a square two-dimensional canvas sized to the smaller viewport dimension. A custom integer generator initialises state from chunks of the token hash and alternates between state blocks as it supplies values. The script ends with a short note identifying a modified generator, but that note alone is not a complete dependency provenance or licence statement.⁵

The centre starts from a four-by-four root grid. Its cells record relationships to their top, right, bottom, and left neighbours. Internal connections are listed and shuffled. The program then tries opening them one at a time, checks local configurations, and restores an opening when it violates its rule. A recursive region count measures the resulting connected chambers. The target minimum is selected from three to six, but exhausting possible changes can leave more regions than that target.⁵

This is not a maze generator designed to give a player an entrance and exit. Its purpose is to produce closed coloured regions with controlled widths and suitable outlines. The root grid is a compact source of variety, subsequently enlarged through reflection and repetition. The many visible chambers in a completed image should not be mistaken for the small target region count selected at the beginning.⁵

The renderer traces region boundaries into polygons. It then draws them in several passes, combining fill, dark separation, and fine gold-coloured lining. Reflection flags reverse coordinates across the horizontal and vertical axes. The ordinary branch places additional reflected groups around the first set; alternative branches either leave a smaller central formation or enlarge the cell size. A circular boundary masks and frames the resulting rectilinear structure. The same underlying root can therefore establish repeated motifs at several positions without separately inventing each one.⁵

The outer region follows another procedure. Its beam count is always even, ranging from 20 to 34. Each beam advances along a radial direction with a sinusoidal deviation, stopping when it passes beyond the canvas bounds. The angle changes along its path, producing the bends visible in the originals. Alternating beams are placed on two separate graphics buffers. Between them the renderer inserts one to three sets of corner-centred circular echoes, creating an apparent over-and-under relationship without a physical knot simulation.⁵

The palette code contains sixteen branches, including an all-black colour array. It shuffles the selected colours, allocates chamber fills, chooses two beam colours, and can override the echoes with dark values. A single gold-like outline colour is maintained across those choices. The central geometry and outer curves thus share a graphic edge even when their fills strongly diverge. The result is not merely a coloured centre pasted into an unrelated decorative surround.⁵

The p5 draw function continues to execute, but the geometry has no time-driven parameter. The heart and beam buffers are cleared and redrawn in fixed positions; the echo buffer is repeatedly drawn without being cleared. This may matter to edge rasterisation, but it is not authored geometric animation. The original #20 showed the same composition in successive observations. No audio, pointer or keyboard controls, external images, or resize handler was found. A static presentation is appropriate; the mere existence of a draw loop is not a reason to advertise movement.⁵⁷

Mint and release

The current official collection page reports release on 23 September 2021. The fresh indexed record reports both 1,024 invocations and a maximum of 1,024. The first token predates that release, having been minted on 17 September at 10:14:53 UTC; activation followed on 21 September at 17:28:44 UTC. These are separate milestones, and the first token’s purpose was not established.²

The indexed start setting is 23 September at 16:00 UTC. The second mint occurred at 16:40:57, and completion at 14:36:22 on 26 September. The second-to-completion interval is two days, twenty-one hours, fifty-five minutes, and twenty-five seconds. This describes the indexed events, not a verified period of uninterrupted public availability. It also distinguishes the series from a narrative of every 2021 release selling out immediately.²

The current price setting is 0.25 ETH. No inspected contemporaneous sale announcement or transaction-value analysis established it as the original opening price, and it is not labelled as such here. Reserved allocations and any intervening price changes remain unresolved. The evidence supports an exact edition size and chronology more strongly than it supports a complete reconstruction of mint terms.²

Rights and preservation

The reported artwork licence is CC BY 4.0, with the project’s licence-link field unpopulated. The named Creative Commons terms allow sharing and adaptation, including commercial use, subject to attribution and the other conditions. They do not impose a NonCommercial or ShareAlike restriction. Reuse should preserve supplied notices, identify the creator, link the original and licence, and indicate modifications. The licence does not imply the artist endorses a particular reuse.²⁸

No separate licence for the entire artist script was established. The p5.js 1.0.0 dependency is LGPL 2.1, whose provisions distinguish library use from rights in the surrounding program. The short generator note needs further provenance work before it can support any broader permissions claim. This research records the complete script’s digest and an explanation of its behaviour, without distributing the raw artist source.⁵⁹

For the collection header, the reported artwork licence supplies a basis for attributed display; the verified holding supplies collection context. Those are distinct facts. The essay’s original prose is designated CC0 independently and does not relicense the artwork. Preservation should also retain the correct runtime and original token link: a preview alone cannot explain the relationship between a small root grid and the rendered, mirrored composition.⁵⁸¹

Four outputs

A heart and a soul #0 is subdued. Blue-grey rectangular regions sit among navy and near-black purple compartments, all sharply traced in gold. A small four-part square anchors the centre. Horizontal blue-grey bars recur above and below it, while darker upright and stepped shapes interlock around them. The circle crops the repeated structure at its edge, suggesting that the pattern could continue beyond the boundary even though the displayed composition is firmly enclosed.⁶

Outside that circle, nearly black-purple beams twist through the corners and the surrounding field. Their colour is close to the background, so the gold edges do much of the descriptive work. The piece makes outlining more conspicuous than saturation. Looking from the central right angles to the wavy perimeter reveals the heart-and-soul distinction even within this narrow tonal range. The thick ring holds that difference in place.⁶

The original #1 is much brighter: a red central field contains coral-orange horizontal bars, paired yellow squares, and turquoise accents. Black diagonal cuts link some of those areas, disturbing the otherwise orthogonal logic. Their repetition makes them look intentional within the finished ornament. The artist’s account supplies the missing historical qualification: he retained a traversal fault. Visual confidence in the pattern is therefore compatible with a known computational irregularity.¹⁰⁴

The outside of #1 alternates yellow and orange wavy bands across black, with corner arcs crossing behind or in front of them. The relation between the small turquoise interior blocks and the warmer surrounding field makes the centre more punctuated than #0. Their shared format does not produce the same rhythm: a few highly contrasted small shapes can redirect attention within an otherwise repeated system.¹⁰

In #10, peach-coloured rectilinear regions meet teal channels, with muted purple squares at the centre and along the edges. The broad enclosing ring is teal. Beyond it, teal and blue-grey curves visibly overlap the corner arcs. The larger continuous colour fields make this version feel more open than #0, despite the similarly insistent subdivision. Gold lining keeps the pastel colours from dissolving into an undifferentiated soft field.¹¹

The original #20 uses a green ring around a mostly dark-green and black interior. Yellow paired squares form a strong horizontal punctuation through the middle, while black stepped regions repeat above and below. Its outer green curves are broad and flowing. The held #186 shares a related green-and-yellow situation, but long muted-green bars carry more of the interior and the enclosing ring is dark. The comparison shows that a similar colour family can distribute weight differently across the same centre-and-border structure.⁷¹

Significance and open questions

A heart and a soul achieves variety through a small, legible disagreement between systems. The central grid’s constraints create repeated architectural shapes; the outer paths create an impression of looseness. Gold lining, the enclosing circle, and the rectangular border hold them together. The work rewards both immediate pattern recognition and slower inspection of how a small asymmetrical root becomes an emphatically symmetrical image.⁵⁶¹¹

Its anomalies are particularly useful evidence of authorship. A generator is not only the successful execution of an initial plan. It can also preserve an unexpected result that the artist judges worth keeping. The collection places that decision inside the same stable framework as its regular outcomes, so an exception is experienced as part of the work’s vocabulary rather than automatically dismissed as a failed render.⁴¹⁰

Unresolved research questions:

• What were the original opening price, subsequent price changes, and reserved allocations?
• What was the first token’s purpose, and what explains the gap between the indexed start and second mint?
• What exact provenance and permissions apply to the modified generator and whole artist program?
• How do repeated echo-buffer drawing and display density affect fine edges across browsers?