Collapsed Sequence

The work and its context

Collapsed Sequence is Art Blocks project 318 on the contract at 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, credited to toiminto. The index records 400 invocations against a maximum of 400, the runtime p5@1.0.0, an aspect ratio of 0.75, the Factory category, the licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 linked to the Creative Commons deed, and the website toiminto.swaeg.net ¹. The collection page shows the byline "toiminto.eth", calls the project "An Art Blocks 500 release, in the Factory category", shows a fixed edition of 400 and lists fourteen attributes ².

The mint text is one sentence of description: "Abstract impressions of alien landscapes, aerial photographs and geometric structures sequence into being, collapsing onto itself" ¹. Each token builds itself on screen in a few seconds, row by row, out of thousands of small rotated marks. As the sequence completes, the whole image is displaced and smeared by its own brightness, so the picture tears into horizontal and diagonal streaks ¹³. The results range from mottled terrain seen from the air to dense diagonal constructions of shards and girders.

The text lists three keys: 'h' for "full internal resolution (intense)", the space bar to relaunch the animation, and 'e' for "endless displacement mode". It adds that the work is "Best viewed with Chrome and a modern desktop. Reduced animation on Firefox." ¹

Conception and development

The only statement about this project is the mint text ¹. The index's artist_interview field is null ¹. The artist's website of record, read on the research date, presents a different series, Augmented Sequence. It describes that series as "Simple shapes generate complex and chaotic snapshots of a larger form, still image with a sense of rapid motion", made "through repetitive sequencing of parametrized mathematical functions, rotations and placement of objects" ⁴. The site says the aim was to capture "the rapid and chaotic motion and the strong colors I use in my VJ/installation work and bring that aesthetic to a large print", and mentions audiovisual performance work ⁴. The shared word "Sequence" and the method of placing rotated objects suggest the two projects are related, but no source inspected says so, and no dated development account of Collapsed Sequence was found.

The display notes give the artist's preferred presentation: "Best displayed as a giclée print on a high quality paper, or as endless mode in 9:16 ratio digital display". Viewers are told to add "?hires=true&endless=true&pwide=true" to the live URL for a high-resolution, endless, 9:16 version ². Those three URL options are implemented in the program ¹. The mint text records that "10% of the primary sale net proceeds will be split with a charity focusing on environment and a local art nonprofit" ¹. Several palette names and many variable names in the program are Finnish words, such as Vesi (water) and Utu (haze) ¹⁵.

How the work was constructed

The program is two script parts that concatenate to 17,209 bytes, SHA-256 7feb20c5f0103a5d75c43fe2416629edb616f456227d04a0acaef22adbf6ad61 ¹. The renderer serves an inline script with the same digest and loads p5.js from a public CDN ³. It was read in full; no code is reproduced here.

Randomness comes from Art Blocks' standard two-stream generator with a million warm-up draws ¹. On load the program detects mobile browsers, Firefox and headless Chrome, and reads the three URL options ¹. Headless Chrome, and the hires option, force a 6,000-pixel-high render. That is presumably meant for the platform's still renderer, though the code does not say so. Firefox gets the displacement pass only every thirtieth frame, which is the "Reduced animation" of the mint text ¹. The program then draws about seventy parameters in one run: a density of 110 to 440 grid rows, one of 30 three-colour palettes (two of them rare), rotation modes, glyph styles, background treatments, and the displacement amount and direction ¹.

When the sketch starts, a fresh generator from the same seed builds a colour map, one colour per grid cell. It combines vertical gradients between the palette colours, a noisy horizon band, blocks of diagonal hatching, straight or wavering dark stripes, and, one time in twenty, columns shuffled out of order. This is the hidden "landscape" ¹. Each frame then adds one row of the grid to a drawing layer. Every cell becomes a small glyph (a bar, a cut plate, an arc or a cluster of ticks) whose size follows the cell's brightness and whose angle follows Perlin noise. The angle is quantised to 22.5 or 45 degrees, left free, or set to zero ¹. A vertical band down the middle may use a different rotation rule, bounded by thin "split lines" ¹.

After every frame a WebGL shader reads the drawing layer and shifts each pixel by an amount proportional to the layer's own brightness. It optionally flips the source vertically or horizontally and mixes in 10 per cent static ¹. The shift factor falls from 1 towards 1 minus a random amount as the rows complete. It can end near zero, above zero, or negative, which reverses the direction of the tear ¹. That is the "collapse". The build then stops, and the last frame is held. The 'e' key keeps the factor cycling, the space bar rebuilds from the first row, 'h' rebuilds at 6,000 pixels high, and 's' saves a PNG ¹. There is no sound ¹³. One small defect is harmless: a branch meant to give some tokens four-fold rotation steps can never be reached, because its condition is covered by the branch before it ¹.

A reimplementation of the parameter sequence reproduces all fourteen published traits on all 400 tokens ⁵. Most traits name one parameter: Palette, Density, Background (gradient or solid), Color mixing, Draw from, Sidecut, Stroke style, Background tint and Background grid. Displace is "Inverted" when the shader flips its source vertically ⁵. Three traits combine switches. Objects is "Sparse" only when a rare cell-skipping switch coincides with unshuffled columns and a density above 150. Rotation reads "No" when noise rotation is off, unless the 45-degree central cut overrides it. Rotation split distinguishes the double, 45-degree and free cuts by whether noise rotation is on ⁵.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 31 May 2022 at 20:17:22 UTC, before the index's activation on 2 June at 00:35:01 UTC ⁵¹. The recorded start is 27 June 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC, which the collection page shows as 28 June in a browser ten hours ahead ¹².

The sale had an unusual rhythm. The first public mint came 36 seconds after the start, but only three public mints were made in the first thirteen minutes. Minting picked up from 17:20 and peaked between 17:38 and 17:43, with 57 tokens in the minute from 17:43. The edition sold out at 17:45:02 UTC, 45 minutes after the start, which is also the recorded completion ⁵¹. The index's current price field reads 0, and neither the collection page nor the mint text gives a price or mechanism, so the sale terms are not documented in the sources inspected ¹². At retrieval the 400 tokens were held by 218 addresses ⁵.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed ¹. The deed permits sharing and adaptation with attribution, prohibits commercial use, and requires adaptations to be shared under the same licence ⁶. The images, including the prints and 9:16 displays recommended in the display notes, may be shared and remixed non-commercially with credit, under the same terms. The licence grants no commercial right, so selling giclée prints would need separate permission ⁶².

The program carries no licence statement for the code, so its terms are unknown ¹. It embeds no third-party code; p5.js is loaded by the platform at view time ¹³.

Close reading of examples

Four tokens were rendered side by side in the official renderer on the generator's own origin, with the browser pane displayed. Their build progress and live displacement factor were sampled every three seconds, and the three documented keys other than 'h' were tested on the holding ⁷³. They cover the AB5D holding, a sparse high-density token, a dark-flip token with the 45-degree cut, and a token in one of the two rare palettes.

Collapsed Sequence #321 (token 318000321, held by an address in the AB5D linked-wallet set ⁸) uses the Seashore palette with flat colour mixing, no rotation, an X background grid and inverted displacement ⁷. Its grid is 248 by 330 cells ³. It was observed for about a minute and a quarter. The build finished within about twelve seconds, with the displacement factor settling at 0.215. The result is a dark field of teal, rust and slate, mottled like terrain from the air, with pale speckled clouds, a light grey border and horizontal smears along the right edge ³. Pressing 'e' switched on endless mode: the factor moved to 0.918 after two seconds and 0.847 after four, and the image tore into wide horizontal bands ³. Pressing 'e' again and then the space bar restarted the build from the first row. A second and a half later the lower part had rebuilt, topped by a fringe of coloured vertical bars like a skyline against a pale ground, and the upper part was still empty ³. The rebuild ended on the same factor, 0.215 ³.

Collapsed Sequence #200 (token 318000200) has high density, sparse objects, free rotation and a free central cut, in the Grain palette ⁷. It is a sandy yellow field crossed by a dense diagonal mass of dark slate shards, with glitch streaks at the edges. Its final factor was 0.831 ³.

Collapsed Sequence #148 (token 318000148) has low density, the dark-flip background and the 45-degree cut, in the Utu palette ⁷. It is the most architectural of the four: black, white and pale blue plates and girders stacked at 45 degrees, with a white block down the left side ³.

Collapsed Sequence #152 (token 318000152) uses Rare lila, one of the two rare palettes, with a double cut and a gradient background ⁷⁵. Its displacement factor ended negative, at −0.192 ³. It shows violet, magenta and purple ground with diagonal pink bars and a dark gold mass, inside a lilac border ³.

None of the four made sound ³.

Significance and limitations

Collapsed Sequence stands out for making the build part of the work. The viewer watches a landscape assemble from glyphs, then shear under its own brightness. Endless mode keeps that collapse going, and the artist recommends it for 9:16 displays ¹³². The program also shows unusual care for how the work is displayed, with device detection, a headless high-resolution path and URL options for print and screen ¹. All fourteen traits reproduce ⁵.

The sources say little about the artist's intentions for this project or about the sale. The artist's website presents a different series.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What was the mint price and mechanism? The per-minute pattern, slow for twenty minutes and then fast, is not explained by any source inspected.
2. How does Collapsed Sequence relate to Augmented Sequence, and which came first?
3. Was invocation 0, minted in May 2022, an artist mint?
4. Which charities received the 10 per cent share of net proceeds?