# Beauty of Skateboarding by JEANVASCRIPT ## The work and its context Beauty of Skateboarding turns a brief physical action into a space the viewer can examine. Repeated plates, beads, rods and points describe rising, turning and descending paths inside a simulated room. The board and skater are absent from the finished scene, but the curves retain the consequences of a board moving and rotating. What normally passes too quickly to inspect becomes a structure with depth, intervals and surfaces.[^S04][^S05] JEANVASCRIPT released the project through Art Blocks Factory in November 2021. The current edition contains 360 works. His published description treats skateboarding as an expressive discipline combining technical skill and creativity, and uses that relationship to frame the project. The [JEANVASCRIPT dossier](https://ab5d.xyz/artists/jeanvascript/) gives wider context for his practice.[^S01] The five originals inspected here demonstrate that a trajectory does not dictate one visual result. A procession of broad plates can turn it into an apparently heavy suspended object; thin rods and luminous points leave the same room comparatively open. The work's subject becomes the relationship between movement and its possible descriptions. Changing the material used to describe a path changes how that path can be understood.[^S04][^S05][^S13][^S14][^S15] ## Conception and development JEANVASCRIPT's project page describes a deliberate act of translation. He wanted the beauty of a skateboard trick to survive after its familiar visual cues had been removed. The simulated room gives the result the presence of an installation, while abstraction delays recognition of its source. The subject is a movement made spatial, rather than a picture of a skateboard.[^S07] To obtain that movement, the artist animated a three-dimensional skateboard in Cinema 4D using Adam Shomsky's slow-motion videos as reference. He then exported position and rotation keyframes through FBX and wrote a conversion script to turn them into arrays that could be embedded in JavaScript. This is an artist-described reconstruction of filmed movement, not a claim that the program directly captured a skater's motion.[^S07] The embedded tracks solved a practical constraint of the intended Art Blocks deployment: the artist wanted the motion data inside the script rather than dependent on an external animation file. Three.js's animation system could then move a group of points through the recorded positions and orientations. Their paths provided material for several ways of drawing, with two styles combined in each output.[^S07] This development account gives the project's abstraction a concrete source. A trick has translation through space and rotation around the board's axes; points at different positions on that board therefore describe different curves. The program preserves those differences while changing what makes them visible. A point can become part of a tube, a sequence of small solids or a cloud, so one recorded action can support several perceptually distinct constructions.[^S03] ## How the work was constructed The project declares three.js 0.124.0 as its rendering environment. Its script begins with six sets of animation data. Each includes timed position vectors and quaternions, a numerical representation of orientation. These are explicit tracks embedded in the source, rather than paths generated entirely from the mint hash. The hash instead seeds a pseudorandom procedure that selects and varies how those tracks become a work.[^S02][^S03] A chosen track drives a Three.js AnimationMixer. The program places between ten and one hundred sample points within a small volume attached to the animated object. As the object moves and turns, each point acquires a path in world coordinates. A point near the centre and one farther from the axis of rotation will not trace the same route. This simple relationship is the source of much of the sculpture's complexity.[^S03] The system divides those points between two selected rendering styles. Several styles repeatedly sample positions throughout the trick and place small solids at those positions. Cubes, spheres, elongated bars and other geometries make the same trajectory legible in different ways. Many of these objects are oriented toward the preceding sample, allowing their direction to describe the path as well as their position. Their scale also changes with longitudinal position, so a sequence need not maintain constant visual weight.[^S03] A separate mode repeats broad, rounded forms along a central trajectory and carries over the animated object's orientation. Here the turning action can be registered by the planes of the repeated forms, not only by the line joining their centres. Another mode combines small boxes with connecting cylinders between nearby sampled positions. Its proximity rule makes a network from spatial relationships among points, adding connections that are not simply the original order of travel.[^S03] The point-cloud mode uses a custom shader to control apparent point size and transparency. The tube mode follows a different logic: sampled positions become a smooth Catmull-Rom curve, around which tube geometry is constructed. A repeating black-and-white alpha texture determines which parts are visible. Moving that texture along a fixed tube produces visible motion without rebuilding the curve itself. An animated appearance therefore does not always mean that the underlying geometry is changing.[^S03] In several other modes, an offset advances the time at which the motion track is sampled. The code derives this advance from elapsed milliseconds, and some geometry updates occur on alternate rendered frames. The stored duration of a track, mostly two units in the animation data, is consequently not a measurement of the artwork's visible repeat period. The continuous rendering loop combines the track, sampling offsets and each style's update procedure.[^S03] Colour is assigned through hue, saturation and lightness values that depend partly on spatial position and hash-selected offsets. Reflective physical materials introduce another layer: an environment map, ambient light and directional light influence the appearance of the surfaces. The enclosing room supplies an important visual reference for these suspended forms, but it is also part of the lighting construction. A dark-room branch changes the setting in which the colours and highlights are perceived.[^S03] The script implements camera movement through pointer dragging, with smoothing and inertia. A resize routine maintains a wide viewing frame when the available window is taller. A lowercase s key invokes a screenshot routine that temporarily raises pixel density, renders an image, downloads it and restores the previous density. Pointer dragging was tested on edition 5 and changed the viewpoint successfully. Screenshot export was inspected in code but not tested.[^S03] WebXR support is also explicit in the program. It tests for immersive AR and VR support before creating the relevant entry buttons. AR changes the scale and placement of the work and hides the surrounding room; VR adjusts its position for an immersive encounter. Those branches establish intended modes of presentation, but do not prove compatibility with a particular contemporary headset. No audio-generating routine was found in the full script.[^S03] The preserved motion arrays, artist program and three.js dependency form distinct parts of the rendering chain. A preview image documents one arrangement from one camera position. It cannot replace the moving work or demonstrate that dragging, screenshot export and immersive viewing still behave as intended. The source review explains how those capabilities are constructed; direct viewing confirmed automatic motion and the camera gesture, while immersive modes remain untested. ## The mint The artist's project page advertises a maximum of 1,024 mints and a Dutch auction beginning at 2 ETH, declining every five minutes to a 0.1 ETH floor. The current Art Blocks record instead reports 360 invocations and a maximum of 360. The two sources therefore preserve different edition settings. The surviving artist page supplies evidence of the larger announced plan, while the date and transaction that reduced the maximum have not been established here.[^S07][^S02] Indexed sales notes give the price sequence as 2, 1.5, 1, 0.75, 0.5, 0.25 and 0.1 ETH. Six five-minute reductions would reach the floor after thirty minutes if the announced schedule were followed. This arithmetic describes the stated mechanism, not an audited reconstruction of the sale. The current 0.1 ETH setting agrees with the announced resting price but does not show what each minter paid.[^S02] The first two indexed mints occurred on 2 November 2021. Activation is recorded on 5 November, while the scheduled start and official release fall on 11 November. Completion is recorded on 11 February 2022. The early tokens should not be used as the opening of the public auction, and the elapsed interval from either one to completion would not establish a public sellout duration. The roles of their recipients and individual paid prices remain unverified.[^S01][^S02][^S03] The charity statements also need to be kept distinct. The collection description refers to 25 percent of primary sales. The artist's page says 25 percent of profits, and indexed sales notes specify profits above the resting price. All name The Skatepark Project, The Water Project and the Mozilla Foundation. These are materially different descriptions of the calculation base. Without additional clarification or receipts, the essay cannot choose one as definitive or confirm that transfers occurred.[^S01][^S02][^S07] ## Copyright and licensing The current project record labels the artwork licence NIFTY but supplies no link to its terms. The artist's project page does not reproduce a licence document. This essay therefore preserves the exact label without converting it into a specific commercial permission, revenue threshold or licence version. A statement about another Art Blocks project using a similarly named licence would not establish the terms governing this work.[^S02][^S07] The three.js r124 dependency has an MIT licence in its upstream repository. That permission concerns the library. No separate grant for JEANVASCRIPT's complete artwork program was identified in the inspected source or project page. The embedded movement data, artist code and third-party renderer should not be treated as interchangeable rights records. AB5D's CC0 dedication covers the original essay prose; it does not replace the artwork's reported terms.[^S03][^S12] Recovering a project-linked NIFTY document remains an explicit research gap. The absence of that document is not evidence that the artwork is public domain, nor does ownership of its token establish that the underlying code may be redistributed. ## Close reading of examples The sample comprises editions 0, 1, 10 and 20, together with the verified collection example, edition 5. Their full token identifiers are 202000000, 202000001, 202000010, 202000020 and 202000005 on Ethereum contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. All five official generators were opened. The observations describe a common landscape viewport; the camera was then rotated in edition 5. This is a close-reading sample, not an estimate of the edition's trait distribution.[^S03] In #0, broad dark-blue plates build a continuous crest across a white room. Cyan faces alternate with almost black backs, so the turning sequence is visible through the changing orientation of surfaces. The left and right tails thin toward the edges, while the centre becomes tall and congested. Several forward-facing plates overlap like steps, but others stand upright. Their conflicting planes prevent the assembly from settling into a single flat ribbon.[^S04] The bright room gives these surfaces a plausible exhibition setting without explaining how they could be supported. Sparse coloured points surround the main form and appear almost weightless beside its broad planes. The contrast is productive: one layer makes the route seem solid and thick, while the other makes it dispersed. A later view showed subtle changes in the plates without any input. The overall contour persisted while the sampled arrangement moved, allowing time to remain present inside an apparently consolidated sculpture.[^S04] Edition #5 is more open. Reflective silver spheres follow numerous interlaced curves, with occasional mint and green points among them. From the initial frontal viewpoint, the paths rise from the sides into an arching central region. Some curves cross tightly; others separate into higher loops. The repeated spheres let the viewer follow a route one interval at a time, while their highlights establish their individual roundness. Unlike #0, no broad plane hides what lies behind it.[^S05] Dragging changed this view substantially. The room turned toward an oblique corner, the wide frontal arrangement became foreshortened, and curves that had seemed close together separated in depth. Some loops projected toward the viewer while others receded. This makes the camera more than a convenience for admiring surfaces. It tests the first interpretation of the work: an apparent crossing in one view can be a separation in another. The gesture exposes relationships that the initial image compresses.[^S05] Edition #1 spreads thin coloured rods with small terminal cubes across the white room, accompanied by diffuse coloured points. The rods appear to fan outward around the central passage, producing many competing directions. Large areas of the wall remain visible between them. Where #0 presents mass, this output presents a field of vectors: the individual elements indicate direction without sealing the space into an object.[^S13] In #10, green and yellow chains of small cubes form thicker curling routes. Black rods and terminal cubes cross them, rising above the central crest and extending into the lower flanks. The two kinds of mark differ enough to be followed separately, then become difficult to disentangle where they converge. This version makes the coexistence of rendering systems conspicuous. One articulates a repeated curved sequence; the other creates a sharper, more scattered set of directional interruptions.[^S14] Edition #20 changes the scene to a dark room. Luminous cyan, green and yellow points mingle with small green cubes along a broad rising and falling trajectory. Darkness gives the glowing points more prominence, while the cubes maintain a firmer sense of volume. The colour progression helps the eye connect dispersed elements into one passage. The enclosure is still visible, but its subdued walls allow the suspended field to dominate more fully than in the white-room examples.[^S15] ## Significance and limitations Beauty of Skateboarding makes a fleeting action available to spatial attention. Its strongest move is the removal of the familiar board image while retaining the consequences of the board's motion. The sculpture is neither a conventional replay nor an arbitrary abstract shape: its paths remain constrained by a particular combination of translation and rotation.[^S03][^S07] The inspected works show why several rendering methods matter. Plates foreground orientation and overlap, spheres reveal intervals and separate trajectories, rods assert direction, and points allow a path to remain porous. These are different arguments about what is worth seeing in the same kind of movement. The room and movable camera give the viewer ways to examine those arguments at the scale of an installation.[^S04][^S05][^S13][^S14][^S15] The claim is strongest at this level of direct encounter. The samples support an account of how motion becomes form and how a new viewpoint changes its legibility. They do not establish the distribution of all 360 outputs, the performance of immersive modes on current devices, or the exact historical circumstances of the edition reduction. Unresolved research questions: - Date and document the reduction from the advertised 1,024 maximum to 360. - Recover project-linked NIFTY terms and any separate artist-code licence. - Clarify the differing charity calculation bases and locate transfer evidence. - Reconstruct individual mint prices from transaction records. - Test screenshot export and immersive AR and VR on supported hardware. [^S01]: Art Blocks. [Beauty of Skateboarding by JEANVASCRIPT](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/beauty-of-skateboarding-by-jeanvascript). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S02]: Art Blocks. [projects_metadata project 202](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S03]: Art Blocks. [tokens and script project 202](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S04]: Art Blocks. [Beauty of Skateboarding #0](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/202000000). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S05]: Art Blocks. [Beauty of Skateboarding #5](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/202000005). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S07]: JEANVASCRIPT. [jeanvascript.com project page](https://jeanvascript.com/beautyofskateboarding/). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S12]: three.js contributors. [three.js r124 licence](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mrdoob/three.js/r124/LICENSE). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S13]: JEANVASCRIPT. [Beauty of Skateboarding #1](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/202000001). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S14]: JEANVASCRIPT. [Beauty of Skateboarding #10](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/202000010). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S15]: JEANVASCRIPT. [Beauty of Skateboarding #20](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/202000020). Accessed 2026-09-18.