Alien Insects

Armour made of curves

Alien Insects by Shvembldr places an invented creature inside something resembling a specimen card. A thin border, dot matrix and illegible glyphs surround folded wings, shells and pointed appendages. The creature can seem metallic, papery or translucent, yet its apparent surfaces are built largely from accumulated lines. A click exposes a sparse skeleton; another removes the surrounding card furniture.¹²

This is Art Blocks Playground project 137, released on August 17, 2021, with 1,000 minted tokens on Ethereum contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270.³⁴ The AB5D artist dossier provides a route into Shvembldr's wider practice.

The project statement describes military insects that exist across dimensions and gain abilities through a collective mind. Those propositions supply a fictional world for the images. The inspected renderer itself draws an individual specimen and offers viewing modes; it does not simulate combat or communication between tokens.³⁴ Its strongest visible ambiguity is between body and diagram. The same paths can look like a solid carapace in one mode and a hovering network of curves in another.

An invented species and its audience

In a July 2021 interview with Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez, Shvembldr recalled drawing imaginary monsters as a child and giving them names packed with consonants. The artist also described moving from frontend development and small games into generative drawing, with learning resources from Joshua Davis and Daniel Shiffman. That account predates Alien Insects and helps explain a practice comfortable with both software and invented beings. It does not establish a direct development history for this particular series.⁵

Shvembldr's current website emphasises generators as artworks in themselves, inviting visitors to click and make new outputs.⁶ Alien Insects gives that participation a more bounded form. Clicking does not request an unrelated specimen: it changes how the same token's structure is shown. Its fictional identity remains recognisable through a change in representational density.

The community surrounding these works also supplied a context for speculation. In an August 24, 2021 podcast, collector Roy discussed possible connections between Alien Insects and the artist's TBOA club, while the hosts wondered about the dots in the upper corner.⁷ Their conversation records contemporary curiosity, not a definitive decoding of the work.

The present collection statement links a separate Insect Battle site. Its inspected landing page calls itself a pre-alpha and offers a wallet connection.⁸ That establishes a current outward link, not a tested game or proof that its present implementation accompanied the original release. The image, the community's interpretation and later software remain related but distinct objects of research.

Dense paths, sparse skeletons

The complete artist script retrieved from the official index contains 11,168 characters. It was read end to end and its SHA-256 digest recorded. The runtime is p5.js 1.0.0, using both p5 functions and the browser's two-dimensional drawing context. This inspection used the indexed source, not a block-pinned direct chain retrieval.⁴

The script parses the opening sixteen characters of the token hash, including its prefix, into a JavaScript number. Subsequent bitwise operations reduce the working state to signed thirty-two-bit arithmetic. A xorshift routine supplies values on a thousand-step scale, while p5 noise receives the initial seed. This is a particular reduction of the hash, not use of every bit as independent visual information. The invocation number is not separately read.⁴

The program selects among nine named palette families, with labels such as xcudlez, xiurq and yumg. Selected colours are shuffled and interpolated into a much longer list. Random branches then govern line weights, dashes, ornament, colour selection and geometric parameters. The metadata's fictional race and type labels provide a taxonomy, but the code's compact internal variables should not be casually equated with every published trait.⁴

A square canvas fits the smaller window dimension. Before drawing the insect, the program builds a radial background and a laborious texture. A loop runs 100,000 times, producing different arrangements of small marks for paper, rain and canvas backgrounds. A rare branch instead constructs a recursive field containing TBOA text. Dark overlays temper these grounds. The thin frame, upper dot matrix and lower glyph-like marks give the finished drawing its specimen-card character.⁴

The body is generated around the canvas centre after a rotation of forty-five degrees. Sine, cosine and noise determine positions and control points; repeated Bezier curves connect them. In the standard and avatar modes, the main loop advances in steps of 0.0005 through approximately half a turn. Thousands of closely spaced strokes build the apparent panels. Additional branches introduce dotted chains, circular marks and dashed interruptions.⁴

This mechanism explains an important visual deception. Large pale regions can resemble filled, shaded surfaces, although the main body uses strokes without fill. Slight changes between neighbouring curves accumulate into bands that look like folded material. Dark gaps and dashed runs cut across those bands, suggesting seams or segmented armour. The impression of depth emerges from overlap, density and colour rather than a three-dimensional mesh or lighting calculation.⁴

Skeleton mode increases the loop's step to 0.025 and suppresses much of the dense body and ornament. It is a deliberately coarser drawing of related geometry, not a transparency slider applied to a finished image. Avatar mode restores the dense creature while removing its frame, corner dots and glyphs. On #0 and #966, these transformations were visibly confirmed.¹²

The draw function is empty. The image is generated during setup and regenerated in response to controls, rather than animated continuously. Clicking or touching cycles standard, skeleton and avatar; number keys from one to nine change pixel density. Before regeneration, the custom random state is restored so the modes remain tied to the token. The inspected code contains no audio machinery and no resize handler.⁴

The held #966 initially produced blank captures, including after reloading and pressing 1. Clicking subsequently rendered its skeleton, then avatar and standard views successfully. The cause of the initial blank was not established. The later successful modes are direct observations; the code supports interpreting them as alternate views of a stable specimen, not successive stages of an animated animal.²

A release with an earlier first token

The index records #0 on August 12, 2021 at 11:43:51+00:00 and project activation on August 15 at 20:52:07+00:00. The official page gives August 17 as the release date. Token #1 and the indexed start field both read August 17 at 18:00:05+00:00. These are different events, and the first token's earlier timestamp does not establish its allocation or purchase conditions.³⁴

Sampled #10 followed at 18:03:08 and #20 at 18:04:53. Completion is recorded on August 18 at 18:28:12, matching the last invocation, #999. The interval from #1 to #999 is twenty-four hours, twenty-eight minutes and seven seconds. This describes the sampled endpoints; it is not independently verified as the duration of an uninterrupted public sale.⁴

Current invocation count and maximum both equal 1,000. The current price field reads 1.75 ETH. A near-contemporaneous collector account offers additional, qualified evidence: in the August 24 podcast Roy recalled a Dutch auction and a sale level of 1.75 ETH. The phrasing itself was tentative, and the discussion also mentioned club-member access.⁷ It supports a historical lead but does not settle the starting price, decrement schedule, reserved allocation or exact public opening.

Art Blocks' September 9 charity report associates Alien Insects with $1,383,050 for the Processing Foundation.⁹ The report's methodology combines donations, amounts set aside and pledges valued in dollars. Its figure is therefore reported fundraising context, not an independently verified receipt or a calculation of the project's gross sales.

A licence that permits noncommercial adaptation

The official index reports CC BY-NC 4.0; its separate licence-link field is empty.⁴ The identified Creative Commons terms permit noncommercial sharing and adaptation with attribution, relevant notices and an indication of changes. They do not grant commercial rights or endorsement, and they do not remove other applicable rights or copyright exceptions.¹⁰ There is no NoDerivatives condition in this reported variant.

The artist script contains no separate software licence notice. Its public availability makes its procedure inspectable, but does not by itself settle the scope of permission to redistribute modified source. The intended application of the artwork label to the complete artist program remains a research gap.⁴

The p5.js 1.0.0 distribution carries the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1. Its provisions concern the library and covered distributions; that dependency licence is not an automatic licence for Shvembldr's independently authored artwork or complete script.¹¹ Token ownership likewise does not itself transfer copyright. The original prose of this essay is CC0, while the artwork retains its reported Creative Commons conditions.

Five specimens, three ways of seeing

The inspected originals are #0 (137000000), #1 (137000001), #10 (137000010), #20 (137000020) and #966 (137000966), all on Ethereum contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. Their token records and canonical pages were checked. The four early invocations provide a focused comparison, while #966 is a freshly verified AB5D holding; this selection is not a statistical sample.⁴¹²

Token #0 sets pale white and cyan folds against a teal, finely scratched ground. Two upright pale lobes rise from its upper body, while broader cyan panels extend sideways. Beneath them, dark grey folds converge around a narrow downward appendage. Thin teal gaps cut through the darker surfaces. The resulting form is balanced around a vertical centre without becoming a simple mirror-image butterfly.¹

Its skeleton view changes the terms of that balance. The apparent solid wings become sparse arcs and angular loops; the upper lobes are now largely empty outlines. The background texture, border and notation remain, making the contrast particularly legible. It feels less like an animal stripped of skin than a construction drawing offered alongside a finished object. Avatar mode then removes the surrounding notation and lets the dense creature occupy the field by itself. The same specimen moves between diagram, card and emblem without requiring a new seed.

Token #10 is more crowded and decorative. Coral, pink and peach folds mingle with green patches over a dark brown canvas-like ground. Tall upper lobes meet wide angular wings; dotted arcs pass above and through the body, while bead-like chains continue along its lower structures. Dark stripes interrupt the pale surfaces.¹³

Those dots perform two visual jobs. From a distance they can suggest rivets or joints, reinforcing the military-insect fiction. At closer inspection, their repeated spacing reveals a drawn ornament following a curve. They sit beside broad bands that look smooth and continuous, so the eye alternates between reading armour and reading the marks that construct it. The indexed camouflage and modification traits name aspects of the specimen, but the visible complexity is richer than a checklist of attributes.

Token #1 uses a navy grid-like field and a more saturated combination of cyan, blue, magenta and yellow. Broad upper arms and rounded lower panels create a compact, almost mask-like silhouette. Yellow corner dots and a matching frame bind the specimen to its surrounding card.¹⁴

Token #20 instead sets coral and red segmented bands against a burgundy ground. A wide upper shell crosses a dark central opening; pointed lateral extensions and a bead-covered lower fan lead into another broad segmented band. The figure looks heavier than #0, yet its open centre and looping fine lines prevent it from becoming a solid block.¹⁵

The fresh AB5D profile links three wallets, and #966's indexed owner matches one of them.¹²⁴ This specimen has a nearly black grid-like ground and a predominantly white and grey body. Broad upper and lower shells are crossed by diagonal breaks, while fine loops surround a dark central opening. Its skeleton reveals a wide hourglass of crossing curves. Avatar mode removes the frame and notation; standard mode restores them. These successful views followed the initial blank captures and establish the held work's actual interactive appearance.²

A specimen with a removable explanation

Alien Insects makes recognition provisional. Its forms suggest wings, armour and joints, yet a click reveals how much of that reading depends on dense strokes occupying adjacent positions. The skeleton does not cancel the creature. It shows another coherent way to see it, preserving the tension between a fictional organism and a mathematical drawing.

The surrounding dots and glyphs deepen that tension by resembling information without immediately yielding an explanation. Contemporary collectors treated such details as possible clues, while the renderer presents them as part of a repeatable visual system. The work's significance lies partly in this productive distance between what can be inspected in code, what can be seen in the image and what its imagined world invites viewers to believe.

Unresolved research questions:

• What development materials explain the choice of three viewing modes and the relation between the fictional taxonomy and specific geometric branches?
• What contemporaneous artist or platform records establish the original auction schedule, allocation rules and treatment of #0?
• What transaction-level evidence resolves the charity report's mixture of completed, reserved and pledged amounts for this project?
• What separate permission, if any, governs redistribution and modification of the full artist script?
• What browser or loading condition caused the initial blank #966 display before its successful mode cycle?