Archetype

The work and its context

Archetype is project 23 on the Art Blocks contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 600 invocations against a maximum of 600, the runtime p5@1.0.0, a square aspect ratio, a price field of 0.2 ETH and the licence label CC BY-NC 4.0 ¹. The project text is short: Archetype "explores the use of repetition as a counterweight to unruly, random structures" ¹.

Each output is an isometric field of raised slabs, ridges and small blocks. Seen from above, most read as a city or a circuit board. A few turn the same system into a corner of a room or a single floating cube. The key idea is that a random partition, chaotic on its own, is copied across a grid, so the eye reads the repeats as intent ¹².

Golid is a generative artist and system developer from Trondheim, Norway, whose work begins from home-grown algorithms and the question "What would it look like if ...?" ³⁴. Archetype was one of the earliest Curated releases. The Floor is Rising podcast later called it "Fidenza before Fidenza" ⁵, and a 2021 newsletter survey described it as having "the quintessential generative art look" ⁶. It was shown on the ZKM Cube in Karlsruhe in 2021 and has been offered twice at Sotheby's ⁷⁸⁹¹⁰.

Conception and development

Archetype grows out of Golid's "Apparatus" sketches, which build machine-like shapes by walking a grid and deciding at each cell whether to extend, turn or start a new block. The sketches are listed on his site, generated.space, and the underlying code is published as the open-source apparatus-generator library ¹¹¹². The Archetype script contains a class of the same name with the same option names and defaults as that library, so the project can be read as an Apparatus turned into a three-dimensional, repeated structure (code reading) ¹¹².

On the day after the mint, Golid published "Archetype 101", a guide to the 600 outputs. He describes the algorithm as rectangle partitioning in three steps: random "sections", a regular grid of cells inside each section, and a new partition inside each cell, where identical sections receive matching partitions ². He calls Scene "probably the property with the highest impact" ². He also names features the metadata does not record: contrasting shape sizes, near-monochrome outputs, long thin cells, and a group he calls "By the Sea", with a large clear grid that he pictured as industrial landscapes beside a calm sea ².

Golid has long shared his tools openly. He says "programming is a wonderful platform for creative expression" and publishes much of his code ³. In a 2020 interview with Jason Bailey he explained why: "I kind of owe it to the world since my own progression has been so dependent on the generosity of others" ¹³. He has since discussed his practice in filmed conversations for Verse and AOI ¹⁴. The palettes in Archetype come, with adjustments, from his own open-source palette library, Chromotome (see Quirks) ¹⁵.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 13,911 bytes, SHA-256 df11271ee0703061323471035a0360a08ff7624482568aba043414da04c1e45d, retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹.

It seeds a xorshift generator from the token hash and draws, in order, a layout, a shading, a scene (only in some cases), a colouring strategy, a palette, a frame switch and a palette rotation ¹. I reimplemented these draws in Python and reproduced all six published traits for all 600 tokens with no mismatches (own computation) ¹.

The three scenes are three sizes of the same box. Flat is a 30 by 30 plane with no height, pushed down the canvas so that only its top surface fills the view. Corner is a 12-unit cube, and Cube a 5-unit cube drawn at a smaller scale ¹. For each visible face the program builds an Apparatus of sections, fills each section with a grid of cells, and fills each cell with a smaller Apparatus. Neighbouring faces are passed each other's edges so that blocks wrap round the corners without a seam (code reading) ¹.

Every block gets one of eight depths and is drawn as three projected polygons. Its sides are then washed with the stroke colour at the shading opacity. A topological sort of the overlap graph fixes the drawing order so that nearer blocks cover further ones ¹. There is no WebGL; the three-dimensional effect is two-dimensional drawing with projected vertices, as the earlier AB5D essay noted ¹⁶.

The colouring strategies are the library's colour modes. Single gives every block in a section the same colour. Main uses a section colour and departs from it a quarter of the time. Group departs and then keeps the new colour. Random picks each block's colour afresh ¹².

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 600 published token records, turned up the following.

1. Most of the hash is ignored. The seed is read from the first 14 hex digits of the hash, and the generator then works in 32-bit integers. Only the lowest 32 bits of that number survive, and JavaScript's number rounding can clear the last few of those. In effect hex digits 7 to 14 of the hash, with some influence from the size of the leading digit, decide the whole image; the other 50 digits do nothing (code reading) ¹. The Python reproduction above uses exactly this seed and matches every token ¹.
2. Rooms and cubes need bright light. The scene draw happens only when the shading is Bright, Bright Morning or Bright Evening. In the data, all 27 Corners and all 10 Cubes carry one of those three shadings, and none has Noon, Morning or Evening ¹. Golid states the same rule in "Archetype 101" ².
3. Tops are never shaded. Shading has only two components, for the front and left faces. The third is fixed at zero, so upward faces are always drawn in pure palette colour (code reading) ¹. Morning and Evening are one-sided shades, and the "Bright" variants are the same at 15% opacity or none.
4. Order is "pattern" in the code. The layout the metadata calls Order is named "pattern" in the program. It uses one large section and is the only layout that forces every cell to contain a block ¹².
5. Palettes borrowed from Chromotome. Many of the 42 palettes match named palettes in Golid's MIT-licensed Chromotome library, sometimes with the dark colour moved from the fill list to the outline. Verena, Sprague, Revolucion, Miradors and Hurdles keep their Chromotome names. Shelter matches "foxshelter", Punk matches "yuma_punk2", and Ducci matches "ducci_q" (own comparison) ¹⁵¹.
6. Spider King and its five children. Spider King is a six-colour palette with a weight of 0.1, the lowest of all. The Yellow, Blue, Red, Green and Pink Spider palettes each pair its cream with one of its other colours, at weight 2 each. The five Spiders account for 119 outputs; Spider King appears once, on #419 ¹.
7. A "Mono" that is not monochrome. The palette published as Mono has three fill colours (salmon, red and beige) on a green ground in the program ¹. The name may refer to its near-single-hue fill, but it disagrees with a literal reading.
8. Twin palettes. Hotshot and Hotspot, both at the top weight of 3, use almost identical orange, yellow, blue and cream sets; they differ mainly in background ¹.
9. Dead options. The Apparatus class keeps the library's roundness, solidness, symmetry, simplex and rate-of-change options. Because every call sets the "simple" flag, the elliptical boundary test that uses roundness can never run. Two helper functions only forward to a third, and the default background grey can never be used because every palette defines its own. Four palettes define no outline colour and fall back to black (code reading) ¹¹².
10. A silenced cycle check. The topological sort still contains the line that would report a cyclic dependency, but the error is built and thrown away. If two blocks ever overlapped each other circularly, drawing would continue in an arbitrary order rather than fail (code reading) ¹.
11. Metadata twins. 87 sets of tokens share identical metadata, covering 229 of the 600 outputs, with up to seven in one set (own computation) ¹. #0 and AB5D's #244 are one such pair.
12. Display. The canvas is a square sized to the shorter window side, and the frame and line widths scale with it. There is no animation and no interaction ¹.

The most coveted variants

No public ranking of Archetype grails was found. Collector attention, and the artist's own guide, point to the following families ²¹⁷.

Cube (10 of 600). The rarest scene: a single floating cube with the section pattern wrapped round three faces. The ten are #122, #213, #216, #250, #327, #397, #457, #471, #582 and #596. All ten are framed ¹. #122, above, is a Giftcard Cube with Order layout.

Corner (27 of 600). Two faces of a large cube read as the inside or outside corner of a room. #520, a Revolucion Corner, was one of two Archetypes shown on the ZKM Cube in 2021 ⁷¹.

The single palettes. Golid pointed to three palettes that appeared once: Ducci (#379), Mono (#137) and Spider King (#419). He wrote that he was "a bit sad to see Spider King only getting a single piece, as it is one of my personal favorites" ²¹. Miradors, on a black ground, appears twice (#424 and #548) ¹.

Unframed (25 of 600). Without the border the pattern runs to the edge of the canvas. #6, a Main Course output with Balance layout in pinks, mauves and pale green, shows the effect ¹.

The AB5D pair. #244, held by AB5D, is a Red Spider output with Balance layout, Bright shading and Group colouring: wide red slabs and small cream blocks. Its metadata is identical to that of #0, the first mint, which shows how far one trait set can vary in scale and density ¹.

The artist's unlisted favourites. Golid singled out contrasting shape sizes (#8, #185, #246, #491, #564), near-mono outputs outside Order (#266, #274, #326), long cells (#22, #141, #203, #282) and "By the Sea" (#24, #70, #81, #440, #448) ².

Auction lots. #270, a Yellow Spider, was one of 19 Art Blocks tokens in lot 4 of Sotheby's "Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale", which closed on 10 June 2021 ⁹¹. #46, a Green Spider Order with Single colouring, was lot 15 in Sotheby's "Grails: Property from an Iconic Digital Art Collection Part II" on 15 June 2023, estimated at $10,000 to $15,000 ¹⁰¹. ARTnews reported that an anonymous bidder "ultimately won the artwork for $30,480" ¹⁸. The result of the 2021 lot was not visible without a login. VERSE's series page gives a highest sale of $119,524 but does not name the token ¹⁹.

Notable collectors

At retrieval, the 600 tokens were held by 316 addresses; 226 held one each, and the largest wallet held 22 (own computation) ¹. The two ZKM tokens, #455 and #520, sit in the same wallet, which holds ten Archetypes ⁷¹. Sotheby's gave the 2023 lot's provenance as "Minted by 22e" ¹⁰. No source inspected ties the largest wallets to named collectors, so they are not named here.

Exhibitions and prints

ZKM, 2021. "CryptoArt: It's Not About Money" ran on the ZKM Cube screen in Karlsruhe from 7 April to 18 July 2021 ⁸. Kate Vass Galerie reports that Archetype #455 and #520 were shown there, alongside CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties ⁷.

Signed prints. Kate Vass Galerie announced the drop with an offer of unique signed prints for token holders, verified against ownership ²⁰. The gallery's artist page gives the terms: 25 by 25 cm on Permajet Portrait Rag 285 g paper, hand-signed, at CHF 1,250 including shipping. A print stays bonded to its token: "If you sell the NFT, you are expected to send/sell the new buyer the associated print" ³. No public list of printed tokens was found.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 26 February 2021 at 21:17:31 UTC, before the project's activation at 07:17:09 UTC on 27 February ¹. The public sale opened at 17:59:49 UTC. The other 599 were minted by 18:03:37 UTC, under four minutes, across 18 distinct block timestamps (own computation) ¹. A contemporary Medium post said the mint briefly spiked Ethereum gas fees ¹⁷. The indexed price is 0.2 ETH ¹. The lowest listing at retrieval was 1.352 ETH ¹. At the 2021 peak the entry price was far higher: in September 2021 Forbes gave Archetype "a current price floor of 65 ETH or ~$255,000" ²¹. A post on Golid's X account, dated 5 March 2021 by its ID, reportedly said secondary sales had passed 1,000 ETH; it could not be fetched (see below).

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC 4.0 without a link ¹. On that label, images may be shared and adapted non-commercially with attribution. The Kate Vass print programme is the route to an authorised physical work ³. The code borrows from Golid's own MIT-licensed libraries, apparatus-generator and Chromotome ¹⁵¹². The earlier AB5D essay also identified a toposort helper resembling an MIT-licensed package, and p5.js is licensed under LGPL 2.1 ¹⁶.

Significance and limitations

Archetype is an early Curated project that sold out in under four minutes and set a look, of tight isometric grids and restrained palettes, that later long-form work built on. It also makes its method visible: the Apparatus library, the Chromotome palettes and a guide written by the artist the day after the mint are all public, so the work can be traced from sketch to output ²¹⁵¹². Its limitations are those of the documentation. The 2021 Sotheby's lot result, the highest recorded sale and any named grail trades were not found in the sources read.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What did lot 4 of "Natively Digital" (2021) sell for, and which Archetype holds the $119,524 record on VERSE? No named grail sale was found.
2. Golid's X post of 5 March 2021 (date from its ID) on 1,000 ETH of secondary sales (x.com/kgolid/status/1367854596190834688) needs a quoting source to cite.
3. How many Archetype prints were made, and which tokens have them?
4. The "Archetype 101" counts came from an automated extraction, which gave 300 for Noon against 326 in the data; the page should be checked by hand.
5. What did Golid say in the Art Blocks artist interview linked from the project record, which could not be read?

Bibliography