# Alan Ki Aankhen by Fahad Karim

## The work and its context

Alan Ki Aankhen is a 500-edition generative art series by Fahad Karim, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 333. The registry records the heritage placement "curated series 8", and the artist's own project page says the project was selected for Art Blocks Curated Series 8.[^S01][^S07] Each output is an other-worldly cityscape drawn in the aesthetic of Karim's pen-and-paper work: dense black linework, towers, domes, arched windows, and watchful eye motifs, almost always in black ink on a pale ground.[^S01][^S10]

The title translates as "Alan's Eyes" and alludes to Alan Turing's machine intelligence test, "a thought experiment foreshadowing a moment in which we can no longer differentiate between the real and the artificial". The description continues: "The algorithms and decision-making encoded into this generative art project intentionally imitate Fahad's approach on traditional mediums - composition rules, textures, and overall themes. The visual elements are inspired by Fahad's memories from his nomadic life. You'll find intricate windows from Rajasthan, massive Egyptian pyramids rising from the horizon, a density of civilization only seen in New York, and the moon - a comforting and shared sight no matter where you stand."[^S01]

The AB5D dossier describes Karim as an artist "coding memory into imaginary cities", whose programs "encode habits acquired through drawing: how an arch rises, how a building overlaps its neighbor, how a line accumulates texture". Born in 1990, he has lived in Switzerland, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, the Philippines, Mexico, and the United States, studied computer science at Cornell University, and is the son of the artist Vinita Karim.[^S06][^S08] Alan Ki Aankhen is his only work in the AB500 set; his collector-metric rank stands at 172 of 308.[^S06] The series runs on p5.js 1.0.0 at a 1.5 landscape aspect ratio with zero external assets, under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.[^S01]

## Conception and development

The conception is autobiographical cartography: an imaginary city assembled from a life of movement. In the Art Blocks interview published five days before the release, Karim credited his mother, the artist Vinita Karim, with "a life-long education in art", traced his digital beginnings to Flash animations and DeviantArt in the early 2000s, and described a drawing style that converged in college into "a whimsical, surrealistic blend of creatures, machines, and structures", developed across a decade of working in tech in New York while moonlighting as an artist.[^S08] The dossier frames the same trajectory as carrying embodied knowledge forward through computation.[^S06]

The Turing reference in the title sets the work's question: the eyes scattered across the towers ask who is watching and whether the drawn world could pass for a human one.[^S01] The eye motif is literal in the outputs: circular watchtowers, sun-like emblems and balloon-like forms all carry pupils.[^S10]

Karim's own project page discloses the work's hidden taxonomy: each of the 500 editions takes "the overarching look of one of eight compositional styles: ancient city, crowded city, eyescape, maze of windows, ocean towers, pencil city, rooftops, or upside down".[^S07] The page emphasizes that the series "is generated entirely using code, without any human input or curation", the long-form premise stated in the artist's own words.[^S07]

## How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug alan-ki-aankhen-by-fahad-karim and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 333. The retrieved script is 48,525 bytes with SHA-256 digest d719089d4484daf5857db56f8ded93c3bcc73a9879bd18fe1aa46192e2f56241, and it was read in full.[^S01][^S02]

The script runs p5.js 1.0.0 in instance mode.[^S01][^S02] Deterministic randomness comes from the same dual-stream sfc32 arrangement seen elsewhere in this Curated Series 8 cohort: two generators seeded from the two 32-character halves of the token hash, run through a one-million-pair warmup loop, and alternated on successive calls. The p5 noise field is seeded from the same deterministic stream via noiseSeed.[^S02] The drawing surface is defined as 2700 by 1800 pixels with 50-pixel margins, matching the registry aspect ratio of 1.5, and the canvas scales to fit the window.[^S02] Composition variables visible in the code include weighted picks for pen width (weights 0.4, 0.42, 0.18 across three widths) and paper tone (seven off-white shades with individual weights), plus flags for dark mode and black background.[^S02]

The work is static: the script calls noLoop, and frames captured twelve and twenty-seven seconds apart in the live renderer are identical.[^S02][^S09] There is exactly one interaction: a keyPressed handler for the P key (keyCode 80) that saves a PNG named AlanKiAankhen followed by the zero-padded edition number, an artist-provided export for printmaking.[^S02] The live probe pressed P against token 333000266 and the frame was unaffected; the page holds zero audio or video elements, and the reported hash matched the chain record exactly.[^S09]

## The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, shows a three-week runway and a twenty-four-minute sale.[^S01][^S04] Edition 0 was minted on July 6, 2022 at 20:40:09 UTC, and the project was activated on July 22, 2022 at 04:13:09 UTC.[^S01] The registry's sale-start timestamp reads July 27, 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC, and the official collection page and the artist's site give the release as 27 July 2022.[^S01][^S03][^S07]

The public sale ran about twenty-four minutes: edition 1 minted at 17:18:37 UTC, edition 10 at 17:21:21, edition 20 at 17:22:09, the AB5D treasury's edition 266 at 17:23:53 UTC, and the final edition 499 at 17:24:10 UTC, the recorded completion time.[^S01][^S04] The minted count equals the maximum of 500, and the project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.[^S01] The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price.[^S01] The AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 266, held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.[^S04][^S05]

## Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0" for Alan Ki Aankhen, with the terms URL recorded in the record.[^S01] This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.[^S01] The deed grants the freedom to Share, to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, under three conditions: Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes; NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes; and NoDerivatives, sharing only the unadapted material. The deed forbids applying additional legal or technological restrictions.[^S11]

The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.[^S02] The registry lists zero external asset dependencies; the sole runtime dependency is the p5.js 1.0.0 library noted in the script type.[^S01][^S02] The artist's site offers print ordering for editions, a separate commercial service that does not alter the artwork licence.[^S07] Owning an Alan Ki Aankhen token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.[^S04]

## Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.[^S09][^S10]

Edition 266 (token 333000266, minted July 27, 2022 at 17:23:53 UTC, twenty-three minutes into the sale), the AB5D-held header, is a full skyline under a vast black sun: dozens of towers with domes, arches and crenellations in fine black linework, eye-bearing watchtowers on tall poles, and one rosette emblem with an eye at its center.[^S04][^S05][^S10] In the live view the renderer reproduced the same composition from the chain hash, sat still across timed captures, answered the P key with a save action, and kept silent.[^S09]

Edition 0 (token 333000000, the July 6, 2022 pre-activation mint) is the densest of the sample: a fabric of facades packed edge to edge, balconies, portholes and stippled stonework, with dark sunflower-like emblems rising above the roofs.[^S04][^S10] Edition 1 (token 333000001, the first public mint) is the sparsest: slender towers on poles over rolling wavy ground, eye discs and spiky rosettes, a single black moon high in a field of concentric stipple.[^S04][^S10]

Edition 10 (token 333000010) centers a pyramid against a giant black disc, with wispy contour clouds, a floating eye balloon at upper left and eyes set into windows below.[^S04][^S10] Edition 20 (token 333000020) is the night scene, the script's dark mode made visible: a black sky textured with concentric rings around a crescent moon, above a dense pale city with large eye medallions.[^S02][^S04][^S10] Across the five, the ink grammar is constant; density, skyline height, and the position of the black sun or moon vary.[^S10]

## Significance and limitations

Alan Ki Aankhen is the batch's most literary object: a city built from a nomadic biography, titled after the Turing test, drawn by a program trained on its author's own pen habits, and offered in eight hidden compositional styles that only the artist's site enumerates.[^S01][^S07][^S08] Its twenty-four-minute sellout closes the July 2022 Curated Series 8 sequence documented across this batch.[^S01][^S04]

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

- The original mint price at the July 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.[^S01]
- The registry's raw curation_status field reads "factory" while its display and heritage fields read "curated" and "curated series 8", and the artist's site confirms the Curated Series 8 selection; the raw-field discrepancy is recorded, not resolved.[^S01][^S07]
- The eight compositional styles are documented only on the artist's own site; no on-chain feature registry was inspected to corroborate the labels.[^S07]
- The registry records script_count 5 for this project; the meaning of the count (likely on-chain script revisions) is not documented in the inspected sources.[^S01]
- The sample of five previews includes one dark-mode output; the prevalence of dark mode across the 500 editions was not measured.[^S10]

[^S01]: Art Blocks. [Alan Ki Aankhen by Fahad Karim: project registry record (projects_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:03Z.
[^S02]: Fahad Karim. [Alan Ki Aankhen full artist script (projects_metadata.script)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:03Z.
[^S03]: Art Blocks. [Alan Ki Aankhen: official collection page](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/alan-ki-aankhen-by-fahad-karim). Accessed 2026-09-20T12:50:00Z.
[^S04]: Art Blocks. [Alan Ki Aankhen token records (tokens_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:52Z.
[^S05]: Art Blocks. [AB5D linked wallet set (user_profiles query)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:22:10Z.
[^S06]: AB5D. [Fahad Karim artist dossier](https://ab5d.xyz/artists/fahad-karim/). Accessed 2026-09-20T12:50:30Z.
[^S07]: Fahad Karim. [Alan Ki Aankhen: artist's project page](https://www.fahadkarim.com/projects/alan-ki-aankhen). Accessed 2026-09-20T12:50:45Z.
[^S08]: Jeff Davis. [In Conversation with Fahad Karim (Art Blocks artist interview)](https://www.artblocks.io/info/spectrum/in-conversation-with-fahad-karim). Published 2022-07-22. Accessed 2026-09-20T12:51:00Z.
[^S09]: Art Blocks. [Alan Ki Aankhen live renderer, token 333000266](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/333000266). Accessed 2026-09-20T12:55:00Z.
[^S10]: Art Blocks. [Alan Ki Aankhen static preview media, tokens 333000000/333000001/333000010/333000020/333000266](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/333000266.png). Accessed 2026-09-20T12:52:00Z.
[^S11]: Creative Commons. [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International deed](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:23:00Z.