# Cosmodesias by Santiago

## The work and its context

Cosmodesias makes solid forms appear to have been drawn out of darkness. Fine luminous tracks accumulate into curved surfaces, while openings let the black field pass through them. The resulting objects seem substantial without becoming entirely opaque. Their edges fray into individual marks; their centres can be dense enough to resemble polished or fibrous material. A ring may establish an outside boundary while another curve folds back into the object, making containment difficult to resolve. These are observations of the five original renderings examined here, rather than descriptions of a physical sculpture. [^S05] [^S06] [^S07] [^S08] [^S09]

Santiago's project comprises 256 works, released through Art Blocks Factory in February 2022. The artist's own project page presents an imagined space made through light trails and identifies three.js as its rendering environment. That account is a useful starting point because the images do not simply depict objects illuminated from elsewhere. Their visible substance is built through a succession of marks. Light describes the surface and seems to constitute it. The tension between those two readings gives the series much of its character. [^S01] [^S03]

The AB5D example, edition #112, makes this especially clear. A rounded central body appears within a broken hood and several thin enclosing curves. Bright passages compete with dark gaps rather than explaining every connection. The image invites the eye to complete a coherent object, then frustrates that completion with overlapping boundaries. Its strangeness depends on legible differences between ball, opening, rim and surrounding space. It does not require the viewer to attach a name to the imagined object. [^S09]

## Conception and development

The artist's project page offers a concise conceptual account and practical release information. It describes the relationship between token input and the generated work, gives the edition as 256, and states a mint price of 0.15 ETH plus gas. It also announces an intention to donate ten percent of project proceeds to the Multiple Sclerosis International Federation. That last statement documents an intention; this research did not locate a corresponding payment record. None of these details supplies a complete development chronology. [^S03]

The concept can nevertheless be considered against the deployed procedure. A conventional model might first be completed and then photographed or rendered. Here, a mathematical surface is sampled repeatedly, and the marks generated from it are retained as an image develops. The distinction is visible in the work's texture. A curved body is not merely shaded with an even gradient. It is crossed by numerous small paths whose density and brightness describe its orientation and expose its construction. [^S02] [^S09]

The artist provides names for families of forms and material treatments. These names can help a viewer compare outputs, but they should not substitute for looking. Editions #1 and #10 both carry the Aclita shape label and lack an enclosure, yet one appears as a broad white folded body and the other as a narrower, cool metallic figure. A shared family name describes part of their procedural relationship without exhausting their visual differences. [^S06] [^S07]

No detailed primary account establishing the dates of individual experiments, abandoned versions or the origin of each shape was recovered for this essay. The discussion therefore uses the artist's published project statement for conception and the inspected program for implementation. The finished images support interpretation of the results, but cannot establish an undocumented sequence of studio decisions. [^S02] [^S03]

## How the work was constructed

The complete indexed artist script was read for this study. Its token hash is divided into two parts used to seed two pseudorandom generators. A substantial warm-up advances those generators before their alternating outputs are used. Further numeric transformations supply parameters to the shape and rendering routines. This creates a repeatable source of variation for a given token input. It does not mean that every browser or device must produce an identical sequence of pixels. The program itself contains environment-dependent branches. [^S02]

Six named shape functions define the principal families: Viria, Aclita, Arkaria, Chraetia, Naria and Cygnea. They use combinations of spheres, capsules, boxes, tori and cylinders expressed as distance functions. A distance function lets the program ask how far a point lies from a surface, instead of requiring a conventional mesh of explicitly listed triangles. Combining these functions can join volumes, cut one from another, or limit their intersection. Smoothing, grooves, twisting and noise further complicate the boundary. [^S02]

The optional enclosure is constructed from four thin rotated tori. This is a particularly economical way to alter the picture's spatial argument. A torus can appear as an orbiting line when seen at this scale, suggesting a boundary around the thicker central form. Multiple rotations make those boundaries cross rather than resolve into one simple frame. In #112, a diagonal curve passes across the front of the central body, while other arcs extend the apparent enclosure around it. [^S02] [^S09]

Particles are updated through floating-point textures on the GPU. The program alternates between textures so that one state can provide the input for the next. Camera rays are marched through the distance field to locate the surface; a changing vector field then displaces the sampled points. Surface normals, shadow calculations and ambient occlusion affect brightness before the result is projected back into the image. This is a computational account of the inspected operations, not a claim that the program simulates a physical material with measured properties. [^S02]

The desktop branch uses a 256-by-256 particle texture, while a mobile branch uses 128 by 128 and adjusts scale. The visible drawing range grows during the opening frames. An afterimage operation retains the stronger values from successive images, allowing marks to accumulate rather than disappear as soon as the next state is drawn. Its decay changes during the process. Additional light and grain treatments help turn a collection of points into the appearance of a continuous, unevenly illuminated surface. [^S02]

The work has a finite rendering duration. The frame sequence runs through 1,024 steps and then stops requesting further animation. This is an image that builds and holds, rather than an endlessly moving object. Reloading starts the construction again. The time required depends on the rendering environment, so a fixed duration in seconds would be misleading. No custom pointer or keyboard controls and no audio implementation were found in the inspected script. [^S02]

A separate branch selected for a headless Chrome environment changes sampling and light treatment. This matters for preservation and comparison: an automated preview and an ordinary browser rendering need not follow exactly the same path. The five works discussed here were inspected through their official original generators in Chrome. The source record preserves the retrieved script's digest and query, while the essay distinguishes that inspection from an independent retrieval at a pinned blockchain block. [^S02] [^S05] [^S06] [^S07] [^S08] [^S09]

## The mint

The current Art Blocks index records 256 invocations and a maximum of 256. Its first indexed mint occurred on 28 January 2022. Activation is recorded on 3 February, followed by a second mint on 10 February at 16:59:06 and a scheduled start at 17:00:00 that day. Completion is recorded on 11 February at 01:11:20. The collection's public release date is 10 February. These fields describe distinct events, and the earlier first mint should not silently replace the public release date. Exact timestamps remain in the evidence record. [^S01]

The artist's project page states the original offering as 256 editions at 0.15 ETH plus gas. That gives the price stronger historical support than the current index setting alone, which also reads 0.15 ETH. It remains an artist-published price statement, rather than an audit showing what every token recipient paid. Reserved allocations, administrative mints and any changes in configuration would require transaction-level investigation to establish independently. [^S01] [^S03]

Likewise, the interval between the scheduled start and the completion field is not automatically an exact public sellout measurement. The second indexed mint precedes the scheduled start, illustrating why the fields should be named rather than collapsed into a single story. This essay preserves the recorded sequence without assigning all transactions to a public sale. The announced charitable allocation is recorded separately from both mint price and verified payment. [^S01] [^S03]

## Copyright and licensing

The artwork licence label in the inspected project index is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The artist's project page also displays a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike notice, accompanied by the year 2021. The year is not itself a licence version. The named version-four deed supplies the terms linked here: attribution, a noncommercial condition and a ShareAlike requirement for adaptations. The index did not provide its own terms URL, and a full history of any earlier notices was not reconstructed. [^S01] [^S03] [^S10]

The rendering dependency, three.js release 124, carries an MIT licence in its upstream repository. That permission applies to the dependency and does not establish a separate licence for Santiago's artist script. No separate artist-code grant was identified in the inspected project material. The code was examined to explain the work, but its public availability is not treated as unrestricted permission to republish it. AB5D's CC0 dedication applies to the original essay prose. [^S02] [^S04]

## Close reading of five outputs

The comparison uses editions #0, #1, #10 and #20 as an early-edition group, plus AB5D's #112. Their full token identifiers are 258000000, 258000001, 258000010, 258000020 and 258000112 on Ethereum contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. Each was inspected through its official original renderer. This is a deliberately small comparison, not a survey establishing the frequency or distribution of features across all 256 works. [^S05] [^S06] [^S07] [^S08] [^S09]

In #0, a white hollow body recalls an egg or shell without settling into either. Its upper-left rim is especially bright and broken, pulling attention toward the opening. A rounded form appears recessed within it, and curved grooves help the eye imagine a continuous surface. Yet the fine paths composing that surface remain visible. The image oscillates between a substantial object with an interior and an accumulation of white scratches whose density creates the illusion of volume. Thin enclosing rings add another boundary outside the uncertain shell. [^S05]

The strongest contrast is not simply between white and black. It lies between the densely drawn lip and the dark interval beyond it. That interval makes the inner form appear separated from the outer rim, although the image does not provide a complete diagram of their connection. The viewer supplies spatial continuity from partial cues. Because the surface is made of trails, looking more closely can undo the solid reading that seemed persuasive at a distance. [^S05]

Edition #1 removes the enclosure and presents a folded white body divided by a deep central cleft. A tall curved lobe on the right balances a narrower oval on the left. The bright inner transition draws the two toward one another, while the black gap keeps them apart. Without the orbit-like lines seen in #0, the figure feels more self-contained. Its delicate scribbled texture still prevents it from becoming a smooth diagram. [^S06]

Edition #10 also lacks an enclosure and shares the Aclita family label, but its cooler blue-silver appearance changes the emphasis. A tall, diamond-like opening runs through the centre. Side lobes and small ridged tips create a more angular silhouette, while a bright lower edge suggests a glint on metal. The comparison with #1 shows why a feature label cannot stand in for the work: width, opening, contour and distribution of brightness alter the experience within a shared procedural family. [^S07]

In #20, purple and blue folds overlap inside thin enclosing curves. Lavender light concentrates toward the upper-right and central passages, while cooler teal appears toward the left and lower areas. Colour helps separate regions that might otherwise merge into one bright mass. The black channels remain equally active, interrupting the apparent continuity between lobes. The enclosure supplies a larger outline without explaining the complicated interior. [^S08]

AB5D's #112 returns to white on black. A central ball, a smaller oval at the left and a broken upper hood are held in an ambiguous relationship. One diagonal ring cuts across the front, making it tempting to read the whole as an apparatus containing a suspended body. Other arcs resist that tidy interpretation by changing the apparent boundary. Dense scratched passages carry the light, while the dark gaps stop neighbouring parts from merging. The composition is held together as much by those interruptions as by its bright surfaces. [^S09]

Beside #0, #112 exposes a difference between two kinds of containment. The first suggests a hollow body around something recessed; the second distributes containment among a hood, a ball and crossing rings. Both make the eye construct depth from incomplete evidence. Their shared monochrome treatment sharpens rather than erases this difference, because attention falls on the arrangement of openings and the order in which curves seem to cross. [^S05] [^S09]

## Significance and limitations

Cosmodesias makes the construction of an image part of its subject. The viewer encounters something resembling a solid object, but its substance remains visibly composed of accumulated trajectories. Distance functions give the program a surface to seek; repeated sampling gives that surface a graphic character. The achievement lies in joining those operations so that the result retains both spatial coherence and the unsettled appearance of a drawing. [^S02] [^S05] [^S09]

The finite build also gives the work a particular temporal structure. Activity produces a still image, and the still preserves traces of that activity without continuing indefinitely. A screenshot can document one completed rendering, but cannot by itself preserve the process, its token input or its environment-dependent decisions. Those distinctions matter when displaying and conserving the series. [^S02]

Further research should establish a fuller development chronology, independently compare the indexed program with a pinned chain retrieval, and examine more of the edition under documented rendering conditions. Transaction evidence would clarify mint allocations and the announced charitable payment. The five inspected works support the close comparisons made here; they do not justify claims about every possible form or the rarity of a particular visual effect. [^S01] [^S02] [^S03]

[^S01]: Art Blocks. [Cosmodesias project record](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/cosmodesias-by-santiago). Accessed 2026-09-19.
[^S02]: Santiago. [Cosmodesias indexed artist script](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-19.
[^S03]: Santiago. [Cosmodesias artist project page](https://proper-code.com/cosmodesias/). Accessed 2026-09-19.
[^S04]: three.js contributors. [three.js r124 licence](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mrdoob/three.js/r124/LICENSE). Accessed 2026-09-19.
[^S05]: Santiago. [Cosmodesias #0](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/258000000). Accessed 2026-09-19.
[^S06]: Santiago. [Cosmodesias #1](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/258000001). Accessed 2026-09-19.
[^S07]: Santiago. [Cosmodesias #10](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/258000010). Accessed 2026-09-19.
[^S08]: Santiago. [Cosmodesias #20](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/258000020). Accessed 2026-09-19.
[^S09]: Santiago. [Cosmodesias #112](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/258000112). Accessed 2026-09-19.
[^S10]: Creative Commons. [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 deed](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Accessed 2026-09-19.