# Anticyclone by William Mapan

*Art Blocks Curated, project 304 · 800 outputs · minted 29 April 2022 · CC BY-NC 4.0*

![Anticyclone #106: orange and electric-blue bands swirling across a black ground, a Night output with a single cell](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/304000106.png)
*Anticyclone #106, a Night output (Emmeline) with Guide 1: one undivided cell. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## The work and its context

Anticyclone is project 304 on the Art Blocks contract `0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270`. The index records 800 invocations against a maximum of 800, the runtime `three@0.124.0`, an aspect ratio of 0.7071 and the licence `CC BY-NC 4.0`, linked to the Creative Commons deed [^S01]. That ratio is 1 to the square root of 2, the proportion of an A-series sheet of paper.

The project text opens: "Anticyclones are a weather phenomena. They pierce through darkness to instill peace and calm." It says the rendering "borrows its aesthetics from traditional and organic media like paper and crayons, to lend an analog/archival look" [^S01]. It then asks the question the series is built around: "Can a computer draw like a human?" [^S01]

Each output is a sheet of cream paper, or on a Night output a black one, crossed by marbled bands of colour that swirl like weather over a map. The bands look drawn in wax crayon or coloured pencil, with grain, hatching, stains and a ragged hand-cut border. Many outputs are divided by a pencilled grid, and some cells of the grid are left bare [^S01]. The index lists five traits: a Name (the palette), Time (Day or Night), Guide (the grid), Paper (hot or cold pressed) and Graphite [^S01].

Art Blocks gives Mapan's birth year as 1988 and says he lives and works in Paris. It calls him an artist "who codes, creates, and teaches" and cites his "passion for pigment, light, and textures" [^S02]. Anticyclone was his Art Blocks Curated release. His other Art Blocks-platform projects are DOS (Art Blocks Studio) and 1935 (Bright Moments) [^S02].

## Conception and development

In his Art Blocks interview with Jeff Davis, published two days before the public sale, Mapan traced the work to the sky: "This will sound very cliché but: nature. I very much like looking up, contemplating the sky and the clouds" [^S03]. He read about anticyclones and weather systems, then stopped consulting references so that the generative process could lead. He wanted the series to convey "air flow, rotations, vastness, air pressure" [^S03].

He described the grid as deliberate: "This guide has two functions: this is an attempt to bring some structure to an organic drawing and at the same time it will play with your perception" [^S03]. He also left room at the edges: "that's why I left some space on the border to let the air in" [^S03]. Long-form work, he said, "did bring a lot of mental charge. I can't stress enough how challenging it is" [^S03].

The same interview traces his route from Flash and Processing through advertising to teaching creative coding at Gobelins in Paris, and names Vera Molnár and Manfred Mohr among his models [^S03].

The palette names have a stated meaning. A 2023 profile in The Monty Report says "each palette is named after an inspiring woman who changed the world or your world". Mapan says of the Camille palette, named for his partner: "She continues to inspire me day after day, like a very bright sun" [^S04]. The profile also records him describing how he turned "the color wheel a bit" to make palettes work over the night background [^S04]. It calls Anticyclone Mapan's "most famous collection" [^S04].

## How the work was constructed

The program is ten script parts that concatenate to 86,194 bytes, SHA-256 `4da3aff13f942586c7b75361ae1af17acd0c8172d288290b3371e5763d3040ea`. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here [^S01]. It is a minified JavaScript bundle for three.js. Most of its bulk is GLSL shader source (noise functions, blend modes, edge detection and the main paper shader) and one large embedded data table, described under the quirks below.

The program seeds a small 128-bit generator from the two halves of the token hash. It then draws, in order, a palette, the Graphite switch, a second "night" palette, the Time, a density, the Guide and a set of rendering parameters [^S01]. I re-ran the trait-deciding part of the program in Node.js for all 800 hashes and compared its output with the published features. Graphite, Time, Paper and Guide match on every token. Name matches on 787 of 800; the 13 exceptions are explained in quirk 2 [^S01].

| Trait | Rule in the code | Published count of 800 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Graphite | 4% chance; forces the grey palette, a sketch mode, and Name and Time "Unknown" | Yes 33 |
| Time | 15% Night (of non-Graphite outputs) | Day 656, Night 111, Unknown 33 |
| Guide | 1: 10%; 3, 4 or 5: 67% split evenly; 10: 11%; 30: 10%; 100: 2%. Night caps it at 30 | 3: 191, 4: 170, 5: 165, 10: 96, 1: 82, 30: 82, 100: 14 |
| Paper | Night always cold pressed; Day cold pressed 30% | Hot 482, Cold 318 |
| Name | one of 24 palettes, each tied to a woman's name | Sonia 59 to Marie 21, Unknown 33 |

Published counts track the weights closely (my computation) [^S01].

The picture is built in layers of shaders [^S01] (code reading):

- **Shapes.** One hundred flat rectangles in palette colours are laid out in a band across the middle of a hidden texture, then scattered.
- **The weather.** The rectangles are pulled through a curl-noise field and rotated around a swirl centre. The field is not free: each token picks one of 88 hand-chosen positions in the noise, grouped in nine families that each have their own formula, then nudges it slightly. This is where the anticyclonic whorls come from.
- **The guide.** The sheet is divided into Guide × Guide cells: one, a 3 × 3 grid, and so on up to 100 × 100. Each cell's content is shifted and offset, so colour can change or jump at a cell boundary, which is the play on perception Mapan describes [^S03].
- **Drawing and paper.** Hatching, pencil strokes, contours, grain, stains, dirt, scratches and a torn frame are composited over cream paper, whose type changes the hatching and brightness.
- **Night.** A Night output swaps in a second palette and removes the paper colour from the drawn areas, so the colour sits on black.

The canvas is fixed at 4,961 × 7,016 pixels scaled by 0.3, so every output is about 1,488 × 2,105 pixels whatever the screen. 4,961 × 7,016 is an A4 sheet at 600 dots per inch [^S01] (my identification). The keys described in the project text work as stated: left and right step through 19 build stages (0 to 18), down jumps to the first and up to the last. The space bar or E redraws [^S01].

## Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 800 published token records, turned up the following. Points that rest on the code alone are marked as code reading.

1. **A hand-made table of empty cells, written after the mint.** The largest data structure in the script is a table keyed by the last three digits of the token number. It covers 634 of the 800 tokens, from #1 to #797 [^S01]. For Guide 3, 4, 5 and 10 tokens an entry lists grid cells by column and row. Those cells are left empty: the drawing is removed and only the paper and a faint cell outline remain. For Guide 30 and 100 tokens, where cells are too small to list, an entry instead holds one to three numbers that set a threshold for a trigonometric pattern of empty cells [^S01]. The table fits the published Guide exactly. Every list-style entry falls on a Guide 3 to 10 token. Every threshold-style entry falls on a Guide 30 or 100 token, and no Guide 1 token has an entry [^S01]. Only one listed cell, on #785, falls outside its grid. Since the Guide comes from the hash, which exists only after minting, the table must have been written after the mint with each output in view (inference from code and data). On average a listed token has seven empty cells. #292, a Guide 10, has 70 of its 100 cells emptied, leaving three bands of colour [^S01].
2. **The script's own trait label is wrong for Guide 100.** When the Guide comes out at 100, the program re-picks the palette from four candidates (Madeleine, Bertha and the two Sonias). It does not update the name it has already stored, and it logs the old name to the browser console [^S01]. The published Name follows the palette actually drawn. On 13 of the 14 Guide 100 tokens the console label and the published trait therefore disagree; only #364 happens to match (my computation) [^S01]. All 14 Guide 100 outputs are Madeleine (2), Bertha (4) or Sonia (8) [^S01].
3. **Two palettes called Sonia.** The list of 24 names has "Sonia" twice, for the last two palettes. They differ in one colour: the second has a pink where the first has a warm grey [^S01]. That is why Sonia is the commonest Name, 59 against 44 or fewer for every other name [^S01].
4. **Only ten names can be Night.** A Night output takes its palette and name from a second draw, and that draw only accepts palettes without a certain flag. Ten names qualify: Emmeline, Jeanne, Hedy, Margaret, Sonita, Ellen, Billie, Yvonne, Junko and Sirimavo [^S01]. The published data confirm it: all 111 Night outputs carry one of those ten names. No Night output is Guide 100, and every Night is cold pressed [^S01]. The density and stroke settings of a Night output are still worked out from the first, discarded palette (code reading).
5. **Graphite overrides everything.** The 33 Graphite outputs switch to an all-grey palette, a sketch mode and different contrast. Their Name and Time are published as "Unknown" [^S01]. The same grey palette can also be drawn in the ordinary way, as the Name "Elizabeth" (30 outputs), without the sketch settings [^S01]. In the code the Graphite switch is called "issqusse", apparently the French *esquisse*, a sketch.
6. **A fixed number of shapes, despite a hardware check.** At start-up the program asks the graphics card how many shader uniforms it supports and sets 400 shapes on capable machines, 100 otherwise. The count had already been copied into a constant when the script loaded, so every machine draws 100 (code reading).
7. **Two identical generators.** The bundle contains two copies of the random-number class, both seeded from the same hash and both warmed up by discarding the first million values. They therefore produce the same sequence. A swirl setting from one therefore always agrees with a palette setting from the other (verified for all 800 hashes) [^S01].
8. **Settings that cannot vary.** A paper setting draws a random number and then always takes the same value, so every output is cross-hatched. A condition tests a `density` field that is never set, and a "sun colour" is never read. Two form families misplace the brackets in a random pick, so their swirl offset is always -0.5 (code reading).
9. **Mirrors and a colour key.** The final pass mirrors the whole image left to right half the time and top to bottom half the time (code reading). The Margaret palette alone gets a chroma-key step that replaces ochre tones with a pale grey-blue [^S01].

## The most coveted variants

Market commentary on Anticyclone is thin, and no collector-named grails were found. nft now reported in October 2023 that the series had generated "more than 6,600 ETH ($11.9 million) in total sales volume" [^S05]. Sotheby's offered three outputs in its online Digital Art Day Sale, 28 March to 9 April 2024, each estimated at $5,000 to $8,000: #337 (Yvonne, Guide 4, lot 20), #231 (Hedy, Guide 3, lot 21, from GSR Blue) and #154 (Cécilia, Guide 3, lot 24) [^S06][^S01]. The results were not publicly visible [^S06]. A third-party tracker read on 20 September 2026 gave its highest recent sale as #253, a Night Guide 30 Emmeline, at about $47,900. Its next-highest sales included two more Night outputs, #792 and #704, though it dated them only in relative terms [^S07][^S01]. That hints at a Night premium. Collector's Corner's hour-long "Anticyclone | Into The Collection #1" analyses traits, rarity and price premiums [^S08]. At retrieval the lowest listing was 1.69 ETH [^S01], and the collection page showed 17 listings [^S09].

**Guide 100 (14 of 800).** The rarest Guide breaks the sheet into a 100 × 100 mosaic. It is limited to four palettes, and each cell carries its own shift, so the swirl reads as a woven, pixelated field [^S01]. #2, a Madeleine, was the first one minted.

![Anticyclone #2: a dense mosaic of tiny orange, blue and cream cells](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/304000002.png)
*Anticyclone #2, Guide 100, Madeleine palette. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Graphite (33 of 800).** The grey sketch outputs look most like pencil studies, the closest the series comes to its "can a computer draw like a human" question [^S01].

![Anticyclone #14: grey graphite swirls in a 5 by 5 grid with several blank cells](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/304000014.png)
*Anticyclone #14, Graphite, Guide 5, with three cells left empty by the per-token table. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Night (111 of 800).** Colour on black, from ten possible palettes. Night Guide 1 and Guide 30 outputs number 10 and 17 [^S01].

![Anticyclone #52: a fine grid of electric blue and grey cells on black](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/304000052.png)
*Anticyclone #52, Night, Guide 30, Margaret palette. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Emptied grids.** Given quirk 1, the heavily emptied outputs are the ones most shaped by the artist's hand after the mint. #292 keeps only 30 of its 100 cells [^S01].

![Anticyclone #292: three horizontal bands of coloured cells floating on an otherwise blank gridded sheet](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/304000292.png)
*Anticyclone #292, Guide 10, Sonia palette, with 70 of 100 cells emptied. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**The AB5D example, #544.** AB5D holds #544, a Day Marie on cold pressed paper with Guide 3 [^S01]. Marie is the scarcest Name (21 outputs), and all of them are Day [^S01]. Orange and slate-blue bands swirl through the upper two rows of a 3 × 3 grid, and the table empties three cells, which leaves the lower third close to bare paper [^S01]. It was minted at 17:35:45 UTC on 29 April 2022, in the auction's final tier [^S01].

![Anticyclone #544: orange and slate-blue swirls in the upper two thirds of a 3 by 3 grid, the lower third almost bare paper](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/304000544.png)
*Anticyclone #544, held by AB5D. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

At retrieval the 800 tokens were held by 420 addresses. The largest single wallet held 46, mostly Guide 3 to 5 Day outputs, and the next held 18 [^S01]. No source inspected names these wallets. Invocation 0 is still held by the artist's address [^S01]. Among named collectors, a Kate Vass Galerie interview reproduces #303, a Guide 1 Sirimavo, "Courtesy of thefunnyguys Collection" [^S10], and GSR Blue consigned #231 to Sotheby's [^S06].

## The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 22 April 2022 at 15:18:19 UTC to the artist's address, a week before the sale [^S01]. The sale opened at 17:00 UTC on 29 April. #1 was minted seven seconds before the start [^S01]. The sale was a Dutch auction that fell every five minutes through 3, 2.5, 2, 1.75, 1.5, 1.25, 1 and 0.75 ETH, with lower tiers down to 0.12 ETH that were never reached [^S01]. The project record also states that "25% of proceeds will be donated to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital" [^S01].

Bucketing the mint times into the five-minute windows (my computation; the prices are inferred from the schedule, not from transactions) gives this pattern [^S01]:

- one mint in the 3 ETH window, one at 2 ETH and two at 1.5 ETH
- 42 in the 1.25 ETH window
- 384 in the 1 ETH window
- the last 368 in the first 76 seconds of the 0.75 ETH window

The edition sold out at 17:36:17 UTC, 36 minutes after the start [^S01]. The index's price field, 0.75 ETH, is the tier at which it sold out [^S01].

## Copyright and licensing

The index records `CC BY-NC 4.0` with a link to the Creative Commons deed [^S01][^S11]. On that licence, images may be shared and adapted non-commercially with attribution. Commercial use needs the artist's permission [^S11]. The program carries no separate code licence, and three.js is loaded by the platform at view time [^S01]. No print programme or physical edition of Anticyclone was found. Mapan's CV lists a 2022 showing, "Anticyclones, Artblocks Curated, New York" (dash replaced) [^S12], and his UNIT London print editions of 2022 were for a different series [^S13].

## Significance and limitations

Anticyclone is Mapan's best-known long-form work and a clear case of "can a computer draw like a human" pursued through shading rather than geometry [^S04][^S01]. Its most important technical fact is not in any trait. A 634-entry table, which fits the traits exactly, shows that the empty cells of most outputs were composed token by token once the hashes were known [^S01]. That changes how the series should be read: part algorithm, part hand-edited suite.

The market record is still thin: three Sotheby's lots with unpublished results, a volume figure from 2023 and tracker data without firm dates [^S05][^S06][^S07]. No museum holding of an Anticyclone was found.

Unresolved research questions:

1. When was the empty-cell table added to the on-chain script, and did Mapan describe this post-mint curation anywhere, for example in Art Blocks' "After Dinner Mints" episode 55 [^S14]?
2. What did the three Sotheby's lots of April 2024 realise, and when exactly did #253 sell?
3. Who are the 24 women behind the palette names, and why is Sonia used twice? The Monty Report confirms only Camille [^S04].
4. Do the Right Click Save interview and the PROOF "Artist Spotlight" discuss the empty cells? Neither could be read or watched [^S15][^S16].
5. The Monty Report quotations came from an automated WebFetch extraction and have not been checked against the page by eye.

## Bibliography

### Primary

[^S01]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index, `projects_metadata` for project 304 (including the full program) and `tokens_metadata` for all 800 tokens. Retrieved 2026-09-20 via https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql. Trait simulation and counts are my computation from this data. Collection page: https://www.artblocks.io/collection/anticyclone-by-william-mapan
[^S02]: Art Blocks, "William Mapan" artist page. https://www.artblocks.io/artists/william-mapan
[^S03]: Jeff Davis, "In Conversation with William Mapan", Art Blocks, 27 April 2022. https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-william-mapan (original: https://medium.com/the-link-art-blocks/in-conversation-with-william-mapan-92f8027c4837)
[^S11]: Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

### Video and audio

[^S14]: "Episode 55 Art Blocks After Dinner Mints w/ William Mapan", Art Blocks Official, YouTube, July 2022 per the artist's link page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjI-M1MfQls. Other video: "TechArt - EP1 feat William Mapan - Art, lifestyle & NFTs", TechArt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-Zr14IJuoo; "Dragons : fxhash, with William Mapan" (the title's dash replaced by a comma), threedashes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yhlKFW_Ptk. Titles and channels confirmed with YouTube's oEmbed service on 2026-09-20. Not watched for this draft.
[^S16]: "Artist Spotlight: William Mapan and The Uncertainty of Art", PROOF, YouTube (title and channel confirmed by oEmbed). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZWBt8XtDCk. Episode page: https://podcasts.proof.xyz/artist-spotlight-william-mapan-and-the-uncertainty-of-art/
[^S08]: Collector's Corner, "Anticyclone | Into The Collection #1", podcast (Audible listing; the show says a YouTube video version exists). https://www.audible.com/pd/Episode-1-Anticyclone-Podcast/B0B7SJCLCQ

### Criticism, collecting and market

[^S04]: Monty, "Artist William Mapan Finds His Voice", The Monty Report, 14 August 2023. https://www.themontyreport.com/p/mapan
[^S09]: Art Blocks, Anticyclone collection page, listings as viewed 2026-09-20. https://www.artblocks.io/collection/anticyclone-by-william-mapan
[^S15]: Jason Bailey, "An Interview with William Mapan", Right Click Save, 29 August 2022. https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/an-interview-with-william-mapan
[^S05]: Arthur Parkhouse, "The Rise of William Mapan: From Sketchbooks to $650K Sale", nft now, 31 October 2023. https://nftnow.com/features/the-rise-of-william-mapan-from-sketchbooks-to-a-650k-sale/
[^S06]: Sotheby's, "Digital Art Day Sale", New York, online, 28 March to 9 April 2024, lots 20, 21 and 24. https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/digital-art-day-sale (lot pages: /anticyclone-337, /anticyclone-231, /anticyclone-154). Also listed on Artnet: https://www.artnet.com/artists/william-mapan/
[^S07]: NFT-Stats, Anticyclone collection page, read 20 September 2026. https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/anticyclone-by-william-mapan
[^S10]: Kate Vass Galerie, "The Interview I Art Collector thefunnyguys". https://www.katevassgalerie.com/blog/the-interview-i-art-collector-thefunnyguys
[^S12]: William Mapan, CV and Anticyclone page. https://william-mapan.com/cv-1 and https://william-mapan.com/anticyclone-1
[^S13]: UNIT London, "William Mapan: COMPUTE: Sinking Patterns", 20 to 23 October 2022. https://unitlondon.com/exhibitions/william-mapan-compute-sinking-patterns/

### Further reading

- William Mapan, link page listing works, press and video. https://linktr.ee/williamapan
- Efrain Ortiz, "William Mapan: Creative Chaos, Patience & Enjoying The Ride", Dalos Dov (illustrated with Anticyclone #470). https://www.dalosdov.com/writing/william-mapan-interview
- AB5D, earlier essay on Anticyclone. https://ab5d.xyz/series/anticyclone-by-william-mapan/
- UNIT London, "In Our Code" group exhibition. https://unitlondon.com/whats-on/113-group-exhibition-in-our-code/
- William Mapan, Dragons on fxhash. https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/slug/dragons