CENTURY 2052

The work and its context

CENTURY 2052 is Art Blocks project 369 on the contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. It has fifty outputs, a square format, the runtime p5@1.0.0 and the licence label CC BY-NC 4.0 ¹. The collection page gives the same record ². Its mint text begins with a date: "This artwork will 'die' on 20 October 2052." Then Reas writes: "Today I'm 50. Will I live to be 80? Will I outlive this artwork? Will this artwork outlive me?" ³

The fifty editions are "one for each year since I was born", and the text closes by saying what kind of release this was: "This isn't a commercial or public release. It's a gift to others who have shaped the world of art that I inhabit" ³.

The title looks back to CENTURY, Reas's Art Blocks Curated project of June 2021, a thousand-edition homage to twentieth-century painting built on Ellsworth Kelly's cut-and-reassembled pictures and the slow motion of George Rickey's sculpture ⁵. AB5D's essay on that project traces those sources in detail ⁶. The 2052 text calls that project "autobiographical" and says the new work "brings the endeavor to the 21st Century" ¹. On REAS.com, CENTURY 2052 sits in the CENTURY group beside the METACENTURY homages and the CENTURY-XXX sketch series, whose first series includes studies after Malevich, Molnár, Morellet, Riley and Kelly ⁴.

Where CENTURY slices a composition into shuffled strips, CENTURY 2052 lays three screens of straight lines over one another at nearly the same angle and lets them drift. What the eye reads is the interference between them: bands of denser colour, fine beading where the lines cross, and a surface that looks woven more than drawn. The closest relative in Reas's own list is probably Morellet, whose superimposed grids tilted a few degrees apart "animate the canvas with a shimmering flicker" ⁹. That comparison is this essay's reading, not a reference Reas names for the project.

A gift of fifty

The index gives the project's release clock. The first token was minted on 12 October 2022, the project was activated later that day, and the start time is 20 October 2022 at 22:45 UTC, which is 6:45pm in New York. The fiftieth output was minted on 21 November 2022 ¹. The price field on the project now reads 0 ETH, and no sales notes are stored ¹.

The transfer records show how the gift worked. Twenty-five of the fifty tokens have never left the wallet they were minted to. Six others were minted to the project's artist address. Four of those (#0, #1, #39 and #47) moved on 16 December 2022 to the wallet linked to Reas's Art Blocks profile, where they still are. The other two (#48 and #49) went to other wallets on 6 December 2022 ¹. The other nineteen have changed hands at least once since mint. The index records transfers, not prices, so this essay cannot say which of those moves were sales ¹.

The names attached to the holding wallets make the "gift" legible. The wallets that still hold their editions from mint carry the ENS names or Art Blocks profile names of artists who work with code, among them Marius Watz, Golan Levin, Joshua Davis (PrayStation), Robert Hodgin (flight404), Rafaël Rozendaal, Kim Asendorf, LIA, Matt DesLauriers, Maya Man, Dmitri Cherniak, deafbeef, Anna Carreras, Refik Anadol, Rick Silva, Jonas Lund and Matt Kane. The writers and curators Domenico Quaranta and Jesse Damiani are there too ¹⁰. A wallet name is a self-declared label, not proof of identity, but the pattern matches Reas's description of the people who "shaped the world of art that I inhabit".

How it is drawn

The program is a single p5.js script of 6,802 bytes, SHA-256 1770ad5783f63828424ffbec61a464e437a4f7c6a54e9b256898269b0280f6c5. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full ¹. It is not reproduced here. To check the reading, its random number generator and the order of its random draws were re-implemented and run against all fifty token hashes. The re-implementation reproduces all 150 published F1, F2 and F3 Angle values, which are the field angles in degrees with the decimals cut off (own computation) ¹.

The token hash seeds two small generators, and each one is run half a million times before any value is used ¹. The first draw sets an angle anywhere on the circle. The second and third fields take that angle and add up to fifteen degrees either way. That is why the three published Angle traits always sit close together: across the fifty editions, the widest spread between the three fields is about 24 degrees, and the narrowest is under two ¹.

Each field is 700 vertical lines, spaced evenly across a span twice the width of the window, then rotated to its angle. The lines are coloured along the field. Saturation rises from 30 to 90 from one edge to the other, and brightness stays at 85. The hue follows one of two rules. About a third of the time the field runs once around the colour wheel, a clean spectrum. Otherwise the hue formula folds back on itself, so the field reads as two or three gradients with hard seams where the hue jumps ¹. Across the edition, 17 outputs have no full-spectrum field, 20 have one, 9 have two and 4 (#5, #15, #21 and #42) have three (own computation) ¹.

The background is a pale grey at brightness 96 on a 0 to 100 scale. On every frame each line is nudged sideways by a random amount of up to one pixel, and each field turns by its own small speed, clockwise or anticlockwise. The lines shimmer constantly while the three screens slide through each other, so the moiré bands travel slowly across the picture ¹. The stroke weight is scaled to the size of the window, and the canvas fills whatever window it is given ¹.

The Art Blocks media proxy stores a PNG for each token. Those images show the work alive at one moment. They cannot show the shimmer, the drift, or the ending ¹.

The clock

At setup the program creates a date, new Date(2052, 9, 20, 23, 44, 0, 0). JavaScript months count from zero, so 9 is October ¹. On every frame it compares the viewer's clock with that date. Before it, the work is alive. After it, the work is dead ¹.

If death arrives while the page is open, it happens on screen. Three things fade at once: the background drops by 0.1 per frame from 96 towards 10, the colour drains by 0.1 of saturation per frame, and the sideways jitter shrinks by 0.001 per frame. The fields also stop turning. At 60 frames per second the background reaches its floor in about fourteen seconds and the jitter stops in about seventeen ¹. What remains is a still image of grey lines on near black.

If the page is opened after the date, the program goes straight to that state. The background is set to 10, the lines are drawn without colour or jitter, and the draw loop stops after one frame ¹.

The date in the code is built from local time. The JavaScript Date constructor, given separate year, month, day and time values, reads them in the time zone of the device running the page ⁸. Reas's text gives 6:44pm EST, which is 23:44 UTC ³. The code agrees with that moment only on a machine whose clock is set to UTC. A viewer in Melbourne on daylight time will see the work die at 23:44 local, about eleven hours before 6:44pm EST. In Los Angeles it will be about seven hours after. As written, the death travels round the world with the local clock, like midnight on New Year's Eve (own reading of the code and the constructor's documented behaviour) ⁸.

One more detail sits in the numbers. The release opened at 6:45pm New York time on 20 October 2022. The death is set for 6:44pm on the same date thirty years later, one minute earlier on the clock face ¹.

Quirks in the code

The work can be brought back. After death, pressing R revives it: colour, jitter, the pale background and the rotation all return, and a flag named zombie switches off the death check ¹. The revival lasts until the page is reloaded. Then the clock is read again and the work is dead again ¹.

Three other keys are live. The space bar steps the background brightness by 5, reversing direction at 0 and 100, so a viewer can walk the ground from white to black. N replaces the three fields with new ones drawn from the continuing random sequence, which are no longer the token's own composition until the page is reloaded. D prints the milliseconds left before death to the browser console ¹. To use them on this page, click an artwork first.

Each field has a parameter called density, set between 0.1 and 0.4. Read literally, it should be the share of lines shown. In practice a line is drawn when its test value is above the density, so the parameter sets the share of lines removed. Each field shows between 401 and 635 of its 700 lines, and the lowest density settings give the fullest fields ¹. The on/off decision is also shifted by one line, so the first line of each field is always suppressed (own reading of the code) ¹.

The published Angle traits are not wrapped to the circle. #25 has an F2 Angle of 370 and #22 an F3 Angle of -1, because the second and third fields add their offset to the first angle without taking the result back into the range 0 to 360 ¹.

The script opens by computing a variable named seed from the hash, marked "ADD FOR LIVE NET". Nothing later reads it ¹.

Four editions, running live

Each artwork below is the token's own program, running in the Art Blocks generator. These are not recordings ⁷. Each one needs the browser to draw 2,100 lines per frame, so a slower machine may lag.

In #11 the three screens run almost parallel, so their interference is broad and slow. The picture divides into long diagonal bands of yellow-green, cyan and violet, and the bands move as the fields turn at slightly different speeds ¹.

#8 is the opposite case. With the third field turned well away from the other two, the crossings are tighter and the texture reads as a mesh. All three fields use the folded hue rule, so the colour arrives in blocks of green, yellow and cyan with visible seams ¹.

#42 stands almost upright, which makes it the most textile-like of the four. Three complete spectra overlap, and the result is a pale, greyish plaid threaded with salmon, green and violet ¹.

#40 has the highest density settings and so, because of the inverted parameter, the most gaps. More of the pale ground shows between the lines, and the beading where the fields cross is easy to follow as it drifts from cyan into violet and magenta ¹.

The header image at the top of this page is #6, held by AB5D, also running live ⁷.

Holders

The table lists the current holder of each edition, as indexed on 23 September 2026 ¹. Names are ENS reverse records or Art Blocks profile names where either exists. Otherwise the address is shortened ¹⁰. "At mint" means the token has never left the wallet it was minted to. Otherwise the date is when the current holder received it. Fifty editions are held across 47 wallets. The wallet linked to Reas's Art Blocks profile holds four ¹.

AB5D holds #6 in ab500dao.eth, received on 17 October 2025 ¹.

Copyright and licensing

The project record stores the artwork licence as CC BY-NC 4.0, the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licence ¹¹. No separate licence is stored for the artist's code, so the code's terms are treated here as unknown. The runtime, p5.js 1.0.0, is a third-party library under its own licence ¹². This page does not copy the program or the library. The live artworks are served by Art Blocks' own generator, and the essay's prose is dedicated CC0.

Significance

CENTURY 2052 is a small project by AB[500] standards, fifty editions, and by its artist's account a gift rather than a sale ³. It extends CENTURY, a work about the painters Reas spent his life looking at, into a work about the artists he works among, and most of the fifty went to them ¹.

It is also written to change state on a fixed date. The program counts down to a single evening thirty years after its release, at the end of the span Reas asks about in his opening lines, and then stops ¹. Until then each edition is a living surface of shimmering lines. After it, the same program will show a grey still on near black, unless someone presses R.

The questions it poses in 2022 are unanswerable for now: whether the artist outlives the work, and whether the Art Blocks generator, a browser and a p5.js library from 2020 will still be running on 20 October 2052 to carry out the ending. The work's claim is that a generative piece can have a lifespan, and that the lifespan belongs to the program rather than to the market.

Bibliography