Bent

The work and its context

Bent makes straight lines behave like folded surfaces. Coloured strips turn through a small family of angles; dark adjoining faces suggest depth, while pale gaps keep the construction open. A line can be followed confidently until a junction makes it seem to change plane. The pleasure lies in that unstable reading. The image remains flat, but its parts repeatedly offer the eye an object to assemble. ¹²³

The series is project 214 by ippsketch, released in Art Blocks Curated on 29 November 2021. Its 1,023 works share an interest in bending, scale and colour without repeating one fixed arrangement. The ippsketch dossier places it within the artist's wider practice. In this project, the original renderer also lets viewers move through stages of construction, exposing the triangular organisation beneath the finished surface. ⁴⁵

That openness changes the role of the apparent illusion. The finished work does not depend on keeping its procedure secret. Seeing the underlying grid can sharpen the experience of returning to the coloured version, where relationships that were plainly geometric become spatially suggestive. On AB5D's #154, the switch from the finished work to the base grid and back was directly tested. ³

Conception and development

In his release interview with Jeff Davis, ippsketch said Bent emerged while he was experimenting with triangular subdivision rather than from a fully planned picture. Different ways of filling those regions produced the forms he chose to develop. He worked on the project daily over several months, extending its range. The account identifies a concrete development process: an unexpected structure became the subject of sustained iteration. ⁵

The artist highlighted bending mechanism, size and colour as the main variables to watch. He also explained that the keyboard stages were intended to share the process of making the work. These remarks support a reading of Bent as both a finished abstraction and an invitation to understand its construction. They do not supply a complete version history or establish how often every available mechanism occurs in the minted edition. ⁵

The inspected outputs make the importance of scale particularly clear. Large strips leave little room for a viewer to overlook their angled endings or changes in shade. Smaller strips can become a dense field in which individual turns matter less than the direction of the whole. Both experiences arise from the same triangular vocabulary. Variation changes the level at which the eye can comfortably follow it. ¹⁶⁷

How the work was constructed

Bent begins by deriving four integer state values from hexadecimal portions of the token hash. A compact sequence of bitwise operations supplies repeatable pseudorandom values, with helper functions for ranges, integer choices and chance tests. Those values select the grid, subdivision rules, line proportions, colour relationships and texture settings. The hash therefore determines a set of decisions, rather than serving as a picture to be displayed directly. ⁸

The program constructs a portrait canvas with a height-to-width ratio of four to three. It creates two additional drawing surfaces: a WebGL surface for filled shapes and a second surface for texture. The final image combines these layers on the visible canvas. The use of WebGL does not mean that the artwork builds and lights a complete three-dimensional object. The inspected geometry is made from flat vertices and deliberately varied colours. ⁸

A triangular lattice provides the starting field. The recursive subdivision function can split a triangle into four smaller triangles, continuing according to limits and the selected rule. Those rules can depend on position, distance from the centre, random comparison or noise. Large and small regions can consequently coexist while their edges remain compatible with the same basic grid. The program retains both the starting lattice and the final subdivided triangles, which allows the viewer to inspect them separately. ⁸

Each resulting triangle receives an orientation choice that determines how strips cross its interior. The choice can follow several spatial procedures, including directional, radial, patterned and noise-based arrangements. Adjacent triangles can continue a strip or turn it onto another direction. The apparent bending is thus assembled from relationships between local flat pieces. It is not an animation of an initially straight physical ribbon being deformed. ⁸

The strips are built as narrow quadrilaterals between interpolated positions on triangle edges. Their widths and alternation affect whether coloured bands dominate, whether a secondary line remains conspicuous, and how much ground separates the parts. These small choices have large visual consequences: a broad band readily suggests a surface, whereas a slender one can remain legible as a line even when its direction changes. ⁸¹²

Shading strengthens the spatial reading by adjusting the lightness of selected pieces according to their orientation and a chosen rule. This creates the impression of faces catching different amounts of light. The code also offers colour changes across the field. It specifies colours in hue, saturation and lightness, then uses a power-based conversion when mixing RGB values between selected endpoints. The transition is therefore a calculated relation between colours, not a photographic lighting map. ⁸

Texture is added on the separate drawing layer through many short marks whose placement, length, width and transparency vary. They follow the strip geometry and temper the hard precision of the boundaries. In the larger shapes of #0, the marks are readily visible as a surface grain; in smaller arrangements, their contribution is more cumulative. A description of paper or brushwork here concerns visual effect, not evidence that the image was physically painted or scanned. ⁸¹

The normal finished state is stage seven. The program stops its ordinary draw loop and redraws when a recognised key changes the selected stage. Keys 1 to 7 expose the grid, subdivisions, tiling, bending, shading, colour and texture; the arrow keys step between stages. On #154, pressing 1 produced the base triangular grid and pressing 7 restored the finished coloured image. These successful tests concern those two controls on that token, rather than an exhaustive test of every stage on every browser. No custom audio implementation was found in the full script. ⁴⁸³

The mint

The platform lists 29 November 2021 as the release date. The current index records an earlier first mint on 21 November at 17:13:16 and activation on 24 November at 01:25:14. Its scheduled start is 29 November at 18:00:00; the second mint follows at 18:02:00, and completion at 18:51:46. Current invocations and maximum both stand at 1,023. These are separately named index observations, with complete timestamps retained in the research record. ⁴

The interval from scheduled start to completion is 51 minutes and 46 seconds. That calculation does not establish the timing or classification of every public purchase. In particular, the first token's earlier date is not enough to identify it as a reserved or artist allocation. The current configured price is 0.7 ETH, but the inspected material does not establish that setting as the original opening price or the price paid by every recipient. ⁴

Copyright and licensing

The current artwork label is CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The named Creative Commons deed allows noncommercial redistribution with attribution, while restricting distribution of modified material. The project field supplies no terms URL; the corresponding deed is therefore cited separately. A complete history of previous terms has not been recovered. ⁴⁹

The declared p5.js 1.0.0 dependency has an LGPL 2.1 licence record. This is separate from the artist program, for which no distinct reuse grant was identified in the inspected material. The essay analyses the program without redistributing its source. The original essay prose is CC0; that dedication does not change rights in the artwork or its software. ⁸¹⁰

Close reading of examples

The comparison uses early editions 0, 1, 10 and 20, selected before inspection, alongside AB5D's verified #154. The five original renderers were examined at their finished state. The sample supports comparison of individual constructions, not a claim about the frequency of traits across the whole edition. The collection example also supplied the directly tested construction-stage interaction. ¹²⁶⁷³

Bent #0 uses large violet strips on a pale grey field. Their predominantly vertical runs are interrupted by much darker angled faces, suggesting folds, flaps or the ends of upright planes. One thin dark strip near the middle does not carry the same weight as the broad purple elements around it. Its isolation makes it a small disturbance inside an otherwise regular family of forms. ¹

The scale leaves each interruption exposed. A long strip seems to continue until a gap and darker face force the eye to reconsider where its surface ends. The fine grain follows the geometry rather than dissolving the edges, so the forms remain crisp while their interiors look less mechanically uniform. The image can be read as columns, but that reading never becomes a fully consistent building. The spatial attraction lies in the local persuasiveness of each turn, not in a single recoverable object. ¹

In #1, narrow green, ochre and rusty strips are distributed among many fine dark lines. The upper-left region is greener; warmer colours accumulate toward the right and bottom. Compared with #0, the ground has more opportunity to pass through the image. Some parts are only outlined, while others suddenly become broader, shaded strips at a turn. This alternation keeps the image poised between drawing and construction. ²

The bends gather into several nested angular groups, including a conspicuous cluster around the middle. They pull attention away from the prevailing vertical direction and then return it to that direction. Thin lines continue through relatively empty passages, linking the heavier groups without filling every gap. Colour reinforces this pacing: the gradual shift across the field holds dispersed events together, while the dark shaded faces create local interruptions. It feels more dispersed than #0 even though many more lines are present. ²

In #10, the field is crowded with blue-grey strips against an almost black ground. Pale vertical faces and darker diagonal planes form a tightly interlocked arrangement. Thin lighter lines run inside many of the broader strips, making an additional route through the construction. The eye repeatedly assembles a plausible corner or channel, then encounters a neighbouring turn that undermines its sense of continuous space. Unlike #1, the dark ground feels like a narrow interval between solids rather than the dominant support of a drawing. ⁶

In #20, thin blue-grey lines describe a repeated hexagonal pattern on a pale ground. Small hexagons sit within larger, often incomplete ones; breaks and occasional changes of direction disturb the regularity. Here the bands are so narrow that the illusion of a substantial folded surface recedes. The result is closer to a patterned drawing, with local deviations becoming conspicuous precisely because the surrounding arrangement is so consistent. This example is an important counterweight to #10: the shared triangular basis need not produce the same density or apparent depth. ⁷

AB5D's #154 favours dense diagonal stripes. Blue and purple dominate above, moving toward teal below. Dark vertical faces interrupt the slanting runs, especially on the left, while longer passages on the right give the eye a clearer direction to follow. The narrow secondary lines sharpen this distinction between continuity and interruption. Revealing the base grid with key 1 removes colour, texture and apparent folds together; returning to 7 makes their cumulative contribution immediately legible. The collection example can therefore serve both as an individual picture and as a demonstration of the system's stages. ³

Significance and limitations

Bent makes its construction available without exhausting its visual ambiguity. Knowing that triangles organise the field helps explain the consistent angles, but it does not dictate whether a particular turn looks like a fold, a channel or a broken line. The five examples range from broad isolated strips to crowded interlocking surfaces and sparse hexagonal outlines. Their differences concern how strongly a surface emerges from a line, not simply which palette is applied to an otherwise fixed design. ⁸¹²⁶⁷³

The stage controls make that range unusually approachable. They permit a viewer to remove operations and then restore them, treating colour, shading and texture as decisions whose effects can be compared. The finished image remains the work's normal presentation, while the earlier stages provide a second way of attending to it. This is a specific contribution of the project: a generative image that also lets its viewer examine how its spatial persuasion accumulates. ⁴⁸⁵³

Unresolved research questions:

• Recover launch-era price and maximum-edition announcements rather than infer them from current settings.
• Classify early and public mint transactions before asserting a public-sale duration.
• Establish any separate artist-code licence and earlier artwork terms.
• Compare the indexed script against a pinned chain retrieval and test the remaining keyboard stages across supported environments.