# Breathe You by raregonzo

## The work and its context

Breathe You fills a pale square with overlapping concentric discs. Soft shadows make them appear raised above the ground, while coloured bands turn within their white rims. The arrangement remains fixed, but the motifs expand and contract. In the AB5D example, #233, crowded chains of small discs interrupt larger, more legible circles. The image alternates between a collection of separate targets and a continuous surface of overlapping relief. [^S05]

Released through Art Blocks Factory in June 2021, Breathe You contains 256 works and is project 75 on its Ethereum contract. Its original credit is raregonzo; the current collection page links the artist as Shane Richardson. The work uses the browser’s own layout and animation facilities, a construction that gives its rounded forms and movement a close relationship to the medium in which they are seen. [^S01][^S02]

## Conception and development

Richardson’s project statement connects the circular motif to affection and shared existence. He invites viewers to bring their breathing into rhythm with the work. This is the artist’s framing: it establishes an intended emotional association without prescribing what every viewer must experience. [^S01]

The same statement claims priority for using HTML, CSS and JavaScript alone on Art Blocks. The inspected program does use those technologies without a drawing library, but a historical first would require a separate comparison with preceding releases. This essay does not establish that priority. The statement also announces four possible special treatments, Birth, Death, Rainbow and Golden; their implemented selection rules can be examined directly. [^S01][^S02]

No dated development account or project interview was recovered in this review. The indexed interview field is empty, which describes the available record rather than proving that no interview exists elsewhere. The program reveals how the work operates, but cannot by itself establish why the artist chose each rule. Its construction and the artist’s account remain distinct forms of evidence. [^S02]

## How the work was constructed

Breathe You is built from browser elements rather than a drawing canvas. Its program creates nested discs as HTML elements and injects three stylesheets containing their colours, shadows and animation rules. It requests no external drawing library. The load handler builds the composition once; CSS then keeps it moving. This division between construction and motion is central to the work: a fixed arrangement of circles can repeatedly expand and turn without the program choosing new positions. [^S02]

The program sizes its square to the smaller window dimension. Each circle receives an independently selected top and left position, from minus eighty-nine pixels through the square’s edge, and a diameter selected in whole percentages from two to sixteen percent of that square. The negative offset is a fixed pixel allowance, while diameter scales with the viewport. Consequently, changing the viewing size need not preserve precisely the same cropping relationships. Overflow is hidden at the square’s boundary. [^S02]

A small xorshift generator supplies these choices. Its seed is parsed from the first sixteen characters of the hash string, including the initial `0x`, leaving fourteen hexadecimal digits. Some values in that range exceed JavaScript’s safe integer range and may be rounded; it is inaccurate to say that every seed necessarily does. The bitwise operations subsequently coerce the state to thirty-two bits. The returned fraction occupies thousandth steps rather than a continuous range. These are properties of the inspected procedure, not measurements of the distribution across the minted edition. [^S02]

Two hash bytes are read separately. With zero-based indexing, byte 16 supplies the circle count by adding 256, allowing 256 through 511 circles. Byte 15 is halved and floored to select one of 128 possible regime values. Four of those values select special treatments: background grey, gold, black or a rainbow gradient. Other values let the outer and inner coloured layers each choose from 180 numbered CSS classes. The numbered classes include linear and radial gradients and layered backgrounds; they should not be treated as 180 proven unique palettes. [^S02]

If the relevant hash byte were uniformly distributed, each special regime would have probability one in 128 and an expected count of two in an edition of 256. That conditional calculation does not establish the observed supply of any special treatment. Nor does the modulo-based random generator by itself prove that its later choices are perfectly uniform. The distinction matters because a compact selection rule is easier to establish than a rarity claim about the complete edition. [^S02]

Each positioned block contains five nested discs: an outer blank disc, an outer coloured disc, an inner blank disc, an inner coloured disc and a dark grey pupil. Successive diameter settings are 100, 75, 62, 51 and 42 percent of their respective parents. These percentages compound; the pupil is not 42 percent of the whole circle. Four discs receive paired light and dark shadows, while the pupil has no assigned box shadow. The shadow dimensions also use a truncated integer derived from the circle’s size in em units. The soft relief therefore comes from a specific arrangement of CSS effects, rather than from a simulated light source or a three-dimensional model. [^S02]

The outer blank disc carries an infinite pulse with a declared three-second duration, scaling from 0.85 to 1 and back with ease-out timing. Its descendants inherit the enclosing transformation, so the whole nested motif breathes. The outer coloured disc separately chooses whether to rotate through a full turn on a three-second linear cycle. Its nested children turn with it, including their directional backgrounds and shadows. This is more than a change to the outer ring alone. The chooser uses a slightly shortened numeric interval, so even under equally weighted thousandth-step draws its two options are not exactly balanced. No measured frame rate or exact observed population of spinning circles is inferred from these declarations. [^S02]

The code contains no audio mechanism or user interaction controls beyond its page-load handler. That finding does not claim an audio audition. It also contains an unused size helper. The indexed program was independently retrieved and read in full for this review; its byte count and digest remain in the research record. This inspection establishes the implemented rules, while the separate visual observations establish what was actually seen in the renderer. [^S02]

## The mint

The indexed record separates the events that a single release date would hide [^S02]. The first token was minted at 2021-06-03T21:30:52Z, which is roughly four hours before the project was activated at 2021-06-04T01:27:22Z. The second token was minted at 2021-06-04T12:06:23Z, and `start_datetime` carries that same value. The project completed at 2021-07-05T15:27:17Z. In UTC the first mint falls on 3 June 2021 and completion on 5 July 2021. The live page renders its own release date as 4 June 2021 [^S01], which is consistent with activation rather than with the first mint.

The interval from the second indexed mint to completion is 31 days, 3 hours, 20 minutes and 54 seconds, computed from those two timestamps and covering invocations 1 through 255. It is not presented here as a public sale duration, because the index does not establish when minting opened to the public, and because `start_datetime` duplicates `second_token_minted_at` rather than marking an opening independently.

The project record reports a price of 78000000000000000 wei, that is 0.078 ETH [^S02]. This is the value presently configured on a long completed project and is recorded as reported, not as the price paid at mint; no primary announcement fixing an original price was located. 

The AB5D token discussed below, invocation 233, was minted at 2021-07-05T07:56:55Z [^S03], about seven and a half hours before the project completed, placing that token near the end of the recorded mint chronology. This does not identify its transaction as a public purchase.

## Copyright and licensing

The current indexed artwork licence label is NIFTY, with no linked terms document. The exact label is retained in the research record. A label alone does not establish which version of a licence the artist intended or supply the operative terms. The review therefore leaves the artwork’s specific reuse permissions unresolved rather than deriving them from a similarly named licence. [^S02]

A submitted census found many differently spelled licence labels across this contract. That wider inconsistency is useful context, but cannot settle the rights of this particular work. Neither the absence of a link nor a resemblance between labels supplies permission to modify or commercially reuse the art. The project-specific terms remain the missing evidence. [^S09]

No separate artist-code licence was found in the inspected program. The code can be studied without treating its public availability as a reuse grant. The program requests no external drawing library, so no such library licence is asserted here. AB5D’s CC0 dedication applies to the essay’s original prose; it does not change the rights in Richardson’s artwork or software. [^S02]

## Close reading of examples

The following readings centre on four original renderings: #233, #4, #141 and #32, with token identifiers 75000233, 75000004, 75000141 and 75000032 on the project’s Ethereum contract. Their identities were checked against indexed token records. The fresh linked-wallet check confirms #233 as the AB5D holding. Canonical token links are retained with their submitted access checks. [^S10][^S11] The selection includes that holding and three contrasting special treatments; it is a deliberate comparison, not a representative sample of the edition. Earlier submitted preview observations are retained separately in the research record. [^S03][^S04][^S05][^S06]

In #233, a large purple-ringed disc right of centre provides a temporary anchor among many smaller circles. A chain of closely overlapping discs crosses the lower-left area, repeatedly interrupting the possibility of reading any one circle in isolation. White rims keep the coloured interiors distinct, while shadows make later layers seem to stand above earlier ones. The eye moves between these two scales: a target with a dark centre, and a crowded accumulation whose edges continually obscure one another. The work does not need to change its positions to keep attention moving. Its overlap already supplies competing routes through the field. [^S05]

The pale ground in #233 is not simply leftover space. It appears both outside the discs and within their nested blank layers, making the difference between ground and object less secure than the shadows initially suggest. A small circle can resemble a pupil inside a larger one even when it belongs to a separate positioned group. This is an interpretation of the visible overlap, not a claim that the artist programmed eyes or a biological model. The code establishes nested circles and independent placement; the associations emerge from viewing those relationships. [^S05][^S02]

The original renderer for #233 contained 338 positioned circle blocks and 166 rotating elements. Two observations just over eighteen seconds apart showed different scale and rotation transforms, alongside visible changes in the rendered bands. They confirm active animation during this review without establishing a measured cycle duration: the three-second cycle is the stylesheet’s declared duration. No audio was auditioned, and the program inspection found no sound mechanism. The artwork ran automatically when opened. [^S05][^S02]

In #4, the repeated pastel spectrum gives a more unified colour field. Instead of each larger disc asserting a separate palette, warm and cool bands recur throughout the square. Their orientation changes as selected groups turn. The repetition makes rotation easier to compare: the viewer can follow how the same sequence of colour occupies different directions, rather than repeatedly identifying a new combination. The motifs still overlap freely, so chromatic consistency does not produce a regular grid. Some discs remain almost complete while others survive as arcs between their neighbours. [^S06]

The live #4 rendering fills the lower as well as the upper part of the square, and its document contains 397 positioned blocks. This matters because the submitted research reported a stored preview with a large blank lower region. The current live observation independently confirms a populated composition; it does not establish why the earlier capture was incomplete. The two representations should not be silently treated as equivalent evidence. Nor should a viewer mistake the sampled still for the complete experience of a work whose orientations and sizes continue changing. [^S06][^S07]

In #141, black rings make the nested construction more emphatic. Pale rims and grey centres divide the darkness into targets, with larger isolated forms competing against densely stacked groups. A comparatively open patch toward the lower right slows the otherwise busy field. Although the selected colour class is black, the visible interiors are softened by the shadows of the nested elements. Describing them as entirely flat black would miss this distinction between the background colour assigned in code and the resulting layered appearance. [^S03][^S02]

In #32, the same construction nearly dissolves into the pale ground. Small grey centres remain easy to locate, while the surrounding circles are established by low-contrast shadows and overlapping scalloped rims. Dense stacks at lower left become a relief pattern before they become individual targets. Beside #141, this example shows how strongly contrast governs the reading of an unchanged structural vocabulary. One rendering state of each of these two works was inspected for these descriptions; the independent observations of changing states concern #233 and #4. [^S03][^S02]

A fresh retrieval of all 256 token records supports a separate edition-wide finding. Applying the inspected hash rule yields four Rainbow tokens, at #4, #186, #237 and #251; four Birth tokens, at #32, #65, #116 and #226; two Golden tokens, at #160 and #171; and one Death token, #141. The indexed Special labels agree for those eleven records. This is a reproducible classification from token inputs and the program, not a visual inspection of every output. It answers the artist’s open-ended announcement that special versions might be minted without turning their scarcity into a judgement of artistic merit. [^S04]

## Significance and limitations

Breathe You makes its medium part of its visual character. Nested browser elements produce rounded relief; parent transformations let those layers breathe together; directional colour and shadows make rotation perceptible. Its fixed placements remain busy because overlap repeatedly changes which whole the viewer attends to, from a single target to a chain of discs to the complete field. The independently observed examples make that relationship between construction and appearance more persuasive than a general claim about the novelty of generative art. [^S02][^S05][^S06]

The special treatments expose different aspects of the structure. Black strengthens the targets, near-white foregrounds relief, and a repeated rainbow directs attention toward orientation. These differences are available to ordinary looking without consulting a rarity table. Richardson’s invitation to associate the pulse with shared breathing supplies another way into the work, but its emotional success remains a matter of encounter rather than a property proved by code. [^S01][^S02][^S03]

Unresolved research questions:

- Recover dated development material explaining the choice of browser elements and the evolution of the composition.
- Establish the original public mint price and distinguish public purchases from other mint allocations.
- Locate the operative artwork terms behind the NIFTY label and any separate licence for the artist’s program.
- Compare the indexed program against a pinned retrieval from chain storage.
- Investigate the reported incomplete preview capture without assuming that its cause or prevalence is already known.

[^S01]: Art Blocks. [Breathe You by raregonzo, project page](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/breathe-you-by-raregonzo). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S02]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index. [Art Blocks indexed project record for breathe-you-by-raregonzo (GraphQL projects_metadata, including script)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S03]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index. [Art Blocks indexed token records for Breathe You sampled and special tokens (GraphQL tokens_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S04]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index. [Art Blocks indexed token sweep of the complete Breathe You edition (GraphQL tokens_metadata, 256 rows)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S05]: Art Blocks. [Breathe You #233 original renderer and independently observed animation](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/75000233). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S06]: Art Blocks. [Breathe You #4 original renderer](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/75000004). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S07]: raregonzo (Shane Richardson). [Rendered preview images for Breathe You invocations 0, 1, 10, 20, 4, 32, 141 and 160 (platform media proxy)](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/75000000.png). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S09]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index. [Census of the licence field across all projects on the Art Blocks contract (GraphQL projects_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S10]: Art Blocks. [AB5D collector profile and linked wallet set](https://www.artblocks.io/profile/ab5d). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S11]: Art Blocks. [Canonical token page checks for Breathe You sampled tokens](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/75000233). Accessed 2026-09-18.