Contractions

The work and its context

Contractions is project 3 on the Art Blocks x Pace contract, 0x64780ce53f6e966e18a22af13a2f97369580ec11. The index records 280 invocations against a maximum of 280, a plain JavaScript runtime (js@na), a square aspect ratio and the licence CC BY-NC 4.0 ¹. It was Loie Hollowell's first NFT project, released through Pace Verso, Pace Gallery's web3 hub, with Art Blocks. The index credits the technical work to "Owen Moore of Digital Practice" ¹²³.

Hollowell (born 1983) is a New York painter known for what have been called "abstract body landscapes": symmetrical, often sculptural paintings about sex, pregnancy and birth ⁴¹. The project text says Contractions is "based on Hollowell's Split Orb sculptural paintings, which she began creating following the birth of her second child". Each output shows "two bifurcated orbs situated one on top of the other", the upper one her brain and the lower her "pregnant belly and cervix" ¹.

The edition size is itself part of the concept. The 280 works reflect "the average number of days in a full-term pregnancy" ¹². The series has "11 scenes": closed orbs for the final stage of pregnancy, then ten openings for the ten centimetres of cervical dilation before pushing begins ¹. Colour, the text says, carries "the artist's shifting state of mind and body during childbirth", and runs from greyscale, "which Hollowell has never previously incorporated in her work", to neon ¹.

The release also had a political purpose. The index records that "25% of artist proceeds will be donated to Midwest Access Coalition and ARC Southeast" ¹. Pace's announcement describes the donation as 25 per cent of net proceeds ². In an interview on release day, The Art Newspaper tied the pledge to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and reported Hollowell saying: "Roe v. Wade isn't just about abortion" ³.

Conception and development

The Split Orb paintings came first. In March 2022 Pace showed five of them in Palm Beach in an exhibition already titled Loie Hollowell: Contractions ⁵. They are made from oil paint, acrylic medium and high-density foam on linen over panel, 48 by 36 inches and almost four inches deep, so the halves of each orb physically project from the wall ⁵. Pace's text for that show says: "Each split opening was representative of the nine centimeters of dilation the cervix must undergo" ⁵. The NFT series extends the count to ten openings plus a closed state ¹. When Pace Verso announced its autumn programme in September 2022, Artnet News still called the project Hollowell's "Split Orbs", produced through Pace's partnership with Art Blocks ⁶.

The digital version keeps the painting's anatomy almost exactly: two stacked orbs, a vertical seam, and concentric bands that radiate from each orb. Hollowell described the change of medium in a Twitter Spaces conversation hosted by TRLab, which Pace published on 8 November 2022. She said she could "move into this space in a creative way if I just opened myself up to the RBG spectrum". She also admitted that she "would be so nervous about putting onto a painting like a neon green" ⁷. It also meant ceding control: "as soon as I let go of the control, everything expanded" ⁷. She compared the generative process itself to "giving birth to these images" ⁷.

How the work was constructed

The program is four script parts totalling 40,580 bytes, SHA-256 9f3afae402da77b2d15f9f2514a4c58a1a1aa72b1550ae9c4babba2b57357dfb, read in full from the index ¹.

The work does not use p5 or any other library. It is raw WebGL2: a fragment shader draws each shape as a signed distance field, so orbs, rings and the central opening are computed pixel by pixel from equations rather than drawn as strokes ¹. Each pixel is sampled nine times (a three-by-three grid) for anti-aliasing. A film-grain layer of layered noise is added, and a second pass grades the colour through a 64-by-64-pixel lookup image embedded in the script, mixed in at 80 per cent ¹.

The token hash seeds two small generators, one from each half of the hash. The program alternates between them and runs each 500,000 steps before drawing anything (code reading) ¹. It then draws about thirty parameters. The published traits come from the platform's separate features data, not this script, but re-running the draw for all 280 hashes shows each trait matches one parameter in every token (own computation) ¹.

The dilation is drawn in two ways (code reading). First, each half-orb is rotated by an angle proportional to the Centimeters value. At 10 centimetres each half turns 18 degrees, so the orbs splay apart. Second, a tapering central shape, bounded by Bézier curves, widens with each centimetre. It is visible as the pale or dark wedge that rises from the bottom edge in the renders ¹. In the Pre Labor outputs the orbs stay whole and no wedge appears, as #2 shows.

The traits read like a labour chart. Mind/Body names the split between the upper orb (the brain) and the lower (the belly). When Mind/Body is "Connected" the two orbs share one palette. When it is "Disconnected" the lower orb is shifted in hue and lightness away from the upper (code reading) ¹. The "Pre Labor" Intensity is the greyscale mode: the final pass removes all saturation. The six renders checked have no colour at all (own computation) ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 280 tokens and four full-size renders, found the following.

1. A background mode that never happens. The background style is meant to be chosen 70 per cent of the time from two gradient styles, vertical and radial. The line that does this indexes the chooser function with square brackets instead of calling it, so it returns nothing. The empty value reaches the shader as zero, which falls through to the radial branch (code reading). Re-running the draw shows 190 of the 280 outputs take this path and 90 get the two-colour gradient (own computation). The four-colour vertical background exists in the shader but no Contractions uses it ¹.
2. Every output is an exact mirror image. The shader renders only the right half of the canvas, and the second pass reflects it into the left half (code reading). Four 2,400-pixel renders (#0, #46, #141, #157) are identical to their mirror images, pixel for pixel (own computation) ¹. The seam of each work is the axis of reflection, as the physical split is in a Split Orb painting.
3. Ten centimetres goes past the design range. Several shapes are scaled between a minimum and a maximum opening defined as 0.045. Ten centimetres corresponds to 0.05, so those scales are extrapolated beyond their intended top value. The 20 ten-centimetre outputs are slightly more open than the program's own maximum (code reading) ¹.
4. Trait labels merge distinct modes. Breath Sync combines four ring settings into two labels. One of the two hidden variations, a swap of the lower ring palettes, is invisible in the traits. Mental Focus likewise merges five line modes into two labels (own computation) ¹.
5. A likely copy slip in the rings. When the program interpolates the lower rings' colours across the eight rings, it blends their saturation towards the upper rings' final palette, not their own, while their brightness uses the lower palette as expected (code reading) ¹.
6. Unused slots and parameters. Nine ring slots are allocated for each orb, but only eight are ever filled. Two debug uniforms are looked up but do not exist in the shader. The program generates 80 ring random values, and the shader holds 72 (code reading) ¹.
7. "Pre Labor" names two traits, which never coincide. Both Centimeters and Intensity have a "Pre Labor" value. No token has both (own computation) ¹. At 5 and 2.5 per cent, fewer than one would be expected, so this is chance.
8. Resolution and display. The canvas takes the size of its window and is redrawn on every resize. The grain is computed in screen space, so its texture scale changes with the display (code reading). There is no animation or interaction. The display note recommends "Chrome or Firefox running on a modern desktop computer" ¹, which fits a shader that solves cubic equations nine times for every pixel.

The most coveted variants

No source consulted ranks Contractions variants or names a grail. The following families stand out from the program and the counts, and the few recorded prices suggest the greyscale works do trade above the floor.

Greyscale (Intensity "Pre Labor", 6 of 280). These are the only outputs in greyscale, the palette the project text singles out as new to Hollowell ¹. They are #46, #48, #126, #157, #181 and #271 ¹. #157 combines greyscale with the fully open 10 centimetres, so the wedge fills much of the lower canvas. Etherscan gave its last sale as 2.69 ETH, and #46's as 1.4888 ETH, when read on 21 September 2026; neither page dated the sale ⁸⁹. Both are well above the floor recorded in the index ¹.

Pre Labor orbs (Centimeters, 23 of 280). These are closed orbs with no opening, the "final stage of pregnancy, just before childbirth" ¹. #2 is one of them: two dark red spheres on a crimson ground, cut only by the thin central line.

Ten centimetres (20 of 280). This is the stage at which pushing begins ¹. Among the ten-centimetre works, #25, #133 and #180 also have the rarest Breath, "Controlled" (own computation) ¹. #25 sits in the wallet Etherscan labels owenmoore.eth ¹¹⁰.

Sets. No source describes collectors assembling all 11 scenes. The largest holding, 17 tokens, covered 9 of them, lacking 6 and 9 centimetres (own computation) ¹. 254 of the 280 outputs have a trait combination no other output shares (own computation) ¹.

Invocation 0. #0 was minted on 12 October 2022, before the project was activated, and at retrieval it was still in the artist's wallet, which Etherscan labels loiehollowell.eth ¹¹¹. That wallet held four tokens: #0, #80, #175 and #252 ¹.

Notable collectors

No museum, fund or DAO was found holding Contractions. Beyond the artist's own four tokens, what sources support is modest:

• owenmoore.eth, the ENS name of the address holding #25, matches the creative credit to Owen Moore, a Vancouver algorithmic artist who works as OWMO Studio ¹¹⁰¹².
• #46, a greyscale work, is held by an address that OpenSea displays as "LazarVault". Etherscan shows it was first funded by mikelazar.eth ¹³¹⁴.
• #157, the greyscale ten-centimetre work, is held by jasonoutland.eth ¹⁸.
• The second-largest holding, 14 tokens including the greyscale #271, sits in a Safe multisignature contract rather than a personal wallet, according to Etherscan ¹¹⁵. No source names its owners.

From NFT back to painting: The Third Stage

The project text promised that Hollowell "will create several new paintings of Contractions NFTs" ¹. That promise was fulfilled at Pace Geneva. The Third Stage ran from 6 September to 28 October 2023, and Pace presented it as the last part of a three-part series that began in spring 2021 ¹⁶. Pace states: "Each of the six new paintings in The Third Stage are inspired by one of the NFTs originally minted in the Contractions project" ¹⁶. Art Vista's report of the show says the paintings were "inspired by the colours in specific Contraction NFTs" ¹⁷.

Neither source consulted names the token behind each painting. Pace notes the NFTs let Hollowell explore her colour palette further ¹⁶. That fits her own remark about neon, and it closes a loop: the paintings produced the code, and the code's colour produced the next paintings ⁷¹⁶. The Geneva paintings keep the Split Orb format and dimensions of the 2021–22 works ⁵¹⁷. Pace also showed Contractions on its booth at West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai from 10 to 13 November 2022 ²⁷. The Art Newspaper reported that "a number of these" would be on the stand, "each offered for $10,000" ³. The sentence does not make clear whether it means tokens or physical works.

The painting market puts the NFT prices in context. On the day of the mint, The Art Newspaper put Hollowell's highest auction price at "$2.1m at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2021" ³. A month later, on 1 December 2022, Split Orbs in gray-brown, yellow, purple and carmine (2021) sold at Phillips Hong Kong for $1,605,500, according to Frame & Flame ¹⁸. MyArtBroker describes it as one of the Split Orbs series about "the physical pain of labour and childbirth" ¹⁹. Etherscan prices ether at $1,555 when #141 was minted ¹¹, which puts the whole primary sale of about 239 ETH near $372,000 (own computation). One painting in the source format fetched more than four times that.

The count of dilation went on after Geneva. Dilation Stage at Pace New York, 8 March to 20 April 2024, showed ten pastels, One Centimeter Dilated to Ten Centimeters Dilated, drawn in 2023 ²⁰. Pace says Hollowell "assigns light colors to minimally painful contractions, while intensely painful contractions take on dark colors" ²⁰. It is the same scheme as the NFT series: ten centimetres, with colour carrying the intensity. Pace's text does not mention the NFTs.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted to the artist on 12 October 2022, a week before the project was activated on 19 October ¹. The public sale began at 16:00 UTC on 28 October 2022 as an exponential Dutch auction ¹²¹. The index records a start price of 5 ETH, a half-life of 711 seconds and a floor of 0.15 ETH ¹. The Art Newspaper's figure of "5ETH (around $1,555)" appears to give the price of one ether, not of five ³¹¹. The first public mint, #1, came at 16:00:59 UTC. Etherscan shows a 5 ETH payment for it ²². The 280th token was minted at 16:33:23, 33 minutes after the start ¹.

Nearly all of the sale happened at once. Only 18 tokens were minted in the first 30 minutes. Then 261 were minted between the 31st and 33rd minutes (own computation from mint times) ¹. Applying the auction's decay to each mint time puts the clearing price for most of the edition at about 0.74 to 0.83 ETH, and total primary sales at about 239 ETH (own computation) ¹. The AB5D token, #141, bears this out. Etherscan shows it was bought at 16:32:47 UTC with 0.8 ETH, of which 0.0291 ETH was refunded, a price of about 0.771 ETH. Of that, 0.4232 ETH went to loiehollowell.eth ¹¹. The index's price field reads 0 ¹.

At retrieval the 280 tokens were held by 140 addresses, 90 of them holding a single token. The largest wallet held 17 ¹. The index's lowest listing was 0.57 ETH ¹.

The secondary market has been thin. OpenSea's collection page, read on 21 September 2026, gave a total volume of about $1.9 million, 10 of the 280 items listed, and no sales in the previous 24 hours ²³. A market roundup of 18 December 2024 recorded one sale at 0.98 WETH ²⁴. Grail Capital's April 2026 market report put the floor at "0.4 ETH (~$900)" and set it against Hollowell's $2.2 million painting record, calling the gap "the biggest arbitrage of the decade" ²⁵. So the floor at retrieval sat below the auction's clearing price of about 0.77 ETH (own computation) ¹.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed ¹²⁶. On that licence the images may be shared and adapted non-commercially with attribution. Commercial use needs permission. The program carries no separate code licence ¹. The painting photographs above belong to Pace Gallery and to Melissa Goodwin via Art Vista, and the paintings are © Loie Hollowell. They are linked, not re-hosted.

Significance and limitations

Contractions is an unusual case of a blue-chip painter translating her own format into code, then back into paint. The Split Orb paintings supplied the anatomy. The program supplied a colour range she could not have reached in oil, and six Geneva paintings were then made from particular outputs ⁵⁷¹⁶. The work is also closely argued. The edition is the length of a pregnancy, the scenes are the stages of dilation, the trait names describe labour, and the proceeds went to reproductive-access funds ¹³. Its code has one real flaw, a background mode lost to a bracket, and one elegant fact: every output is a strict mirror image, like the seam of the paintings. Its market has not followed the paintings. The floor sits below the mint price, while a single Split Orb painting has sold for about four times what the whole edition raised ¹⁸²⁵.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Which six tokens inspired the six paintings in The Third Stage, and who owns those paintings?
2. The quotations here from The Art Newspaper, the Pace/TRLab transcript, Pace's Dilation Stage page, MyArtBroker and Grail Capital came from automated extraction. A second extraction matched the Art Newspaper and Pace/TRLab wording, but all should be checked against the pages.
3. What were the highest secondary sales, and when? Etherscan gives undated last sales for #157 and #46 only. OpenSea's activity tab, and X posts by Pace Verso and the holders named above, are the leads. Did the 18 December 2024 sale at 0.98 WETH involve a particular token?
4. How were primary proceeds split? The index gives an additional payee of 20 per cent, while the #141 transaction paid about 39 per cent of the post-platform amount to that address. How much reached the two charities?
5. Did Owen Moore or Digital Practice document the build, and did the artist know about the unreachable vertical background?

Bibliography