Fermented Fruit

The work and its context

Fermented Fruit is a 140-edition generative art series by the San Francisco artist cyberia, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 321, in the factory category.¹² Each output is a tall panelled composition of cellular automata textures: maze-like patterns in two or three fruit-named color schemes evolve down an asymmetric grid until every panel has finished growing and the picture freezes.¹³

The conceit is stated in the first sentence of the description: "Just as food is transformed by microorganisms during the process of fermentation, the substrate of the HTML canvas is broken up into parts and transformed by cellular patterns."¹ The artist's own project page opens with a Richard Brautigan epigraph about mixing sentences with dirt and punctuation with rain, and presents the series as "designed to live on the Ethereum blockchain and to be rendered in real-time by the browser."⁴ The AB5D dossier describes cyberia as a generative artist whose practice centers on "the creation of form through algorithmic processes", built on daily iterative sketching in Processing and p5.js "with emphasis on cellular automata and simulated lifeforms", and Fermented Fruit is his only Art Blocks project.²

The series runs on p5.js 1.0.0 at a 2:3 portrait aspect ratio with zero external assets, carries the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, and its artist script is 8,717 bytes.¹³

Conception and development

The conception is a deliberate analogy between two kinds of transformation. Fermentation takes a neutral substrate and lets microorganisms rework it into something with more character; the program does the same to the blank canvas, seeding cellular automata that "evolve and shape-shift down an asymmetrical grid" until the composition has fermented into its final state.¹ The Brautigan epigraph on the artist's page, with its worms passing through question marks and dew forming on paragraphs, frames the series as organic process applied to a structured medium, which is precisely what a cellular automaton is.⁴

The dossier situates the series inside a sketching practice: cyberia works through daily iterative studies in Processing and p5.js, and the project's concentration on cellular automata is the distillation of that habit into a single released system.² The fruit naming of the palettes, Lemon, Plum, Currants, Apple, Gooseberry and others, is not decorative whimsy but the fermentation conceit carried into the trait layer: each scheme is a different culture feeding on the same substrate.³ No Fermented Fruit-specific interview was located; the registry interview field is empty, so the conception account rests on the description, the artist's project page, the dossier and the script.¹²⁴

Notably, the work is one of the finite animations of this batch: the automata grow row by row in front of the viewer and then stop, so the traded image is the end state of a visible process rather than a frozen frame of a perpetual loop.³⁵

How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug fermented-fruit-by-cyberia and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 321. The retrieved script is 8,717 bytes with SHA-256 digest feef33106d85d0e95ee12fbb42d401699bf399ba6e2686d1f69c3531e637eced, and it was read in full.¹³

Randomness comes from a compact xorshift32 generator seeded by parsing the first sixteen hexadecimal characters of the chain hash as an integer, with helper functions mapping further hash bytes into normalized ranges.³ The script chooses a weighted color scheme from a named table, Lemon, Plum, Currants, Apple, Gooseberry among others, where the weights make some fruits rarer than others, and picks a background color from the chosen scheme.³ It then lays out an asymmetric grid of panels, each panel hosting an elementary cellular automaton whose ruleset is drawn from a curated list of rule numbers (62, 77, 94, 105, 106, 108, 115, 124, 125, 126, 135, 141, 146 and others), the same Wolfram-rule family behind decades of generative art.³

Each animation frame advances one automaton by one row, so the panels grow visibly and at different speeds, and when every automaton reports done the script calls noLoop() and the composition freezes permanently.³ Surface texture comes from a scattering of small semi-transparent ellipses color-mixed between the background and the cell color, which gives the finished image its fermented, granular bite.³ There is no interaction and no audio.³ The live renderer confirmed the behaviour on token 321000059: the reported hash matched the chain record, frames captured at roughly 4, 34 and 124 seconds all differed as the automata grew, and two frames captured five seconds apart near the three-minute mark were byte-identical, the settled end state.⁵

The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, is the fastest sale in this batch.¹⁶ Edition 0 (token 321000000) was minted on June 3, 2022 at 16:41:47 UTC, a week before the project was activated on June 10 at 23:01:22 UTC, a pre-activation artist mint.¹⁶ The registry's sale-start timestamp reads July 6, 2022 at 16:00:00 UTC, and the official collection page carries "Released Jul 6, 2022, 4:00 PM UTC".¹⁷

The actual minting ran slightly ahead of the announced opening: edition 1 minted at 15:59:30 UTC, thirty seconds before the official start, and the AB5D treasury's edition 59 at 15:59:54, six seconds before it.⁶ The final edition, number 139, minted at 16:00:23 UTC, twenty-three seconds after the announced start and fifty-three seconds after edition 1.¹⁶ Whether the early mints reflect a slightly open gate or clock skew between systems is not determinable from the inspected sources; the timestamps are reported as recorded.⁶ The minted count equals the maximum of 140, and the project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.¹ The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price.¹ The AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 59, held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.⁶⁸

Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC 4.0" for Fermented Fruit, with the terms URL recorded in the record.¹ This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC 4.0.¹ The CC BY-NC 4.0 deed grants the freedoms to Share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to Adapt, remix, transform and build upon the material, under two conditions: Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes; and NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes. The deed also forbids applying additional legal or technological restrictions.⁹

The Adapt freedom pairs naturally with this work: its automata are deterministic given the hash, so a non-commercial reimplementation of the same rules would produce the same images, an unusual case where the licence's remix permission meets a fully reproducible medium.³⁹ The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.³ The registry lists zero external asset dependencies, and the only runtime dependency is the p5.js 1.0.0 library declared by the platform itself.¹³ Owning a Fermented Fruit token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.⁶

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.⁵¹⁰

Edition 59 (token 321000059, minted July 6, 2022 at 15:59:54 UTC, six seconds before the announced opening), the AB5D-held header, is a pink-ground composition: one large green panel filled with a dense orange-and-black maze automaton, and two smaller panels beneath, a black panel carrying a green-and-orange maze and a green panel with a sparse black geometric pattern, the fruit-bowl palette at full saturation.⁶⁸¹⁰ In the live view the panels grew row by row, the large automaton finishing well after the small ones, until the whole composition locked still at roughly the three-minute mark.⁵

Edition 0 (token 321000000, the pre-activation artist mint of June 3, 2022) shows a cooler culture: a tan ground with a pink panel of blue-green automaton above a large blue panel of dense pink-and-green maze.⁶¹⁰ Edition 139 (token 321000139, the final mint, twenty-three seconds after the announced start) is the sparsest of the sample: a pink ground with a large, loose stepped automaton in orange and pale blue, and two small panels below, one a pale pink maze, one green bars.⁶¹⁰

Edition 1 (token 321000001, first public mint) is the warmest: an orange ground with a tan panel of orange-yellow automaton, a dark olive panel carrying a striking orange-and-purple stepped pyramid, and a small tan diamond.⁶¹⁰ Edition 100 (token 321000100) is dominated by purple: an orange ground with purple-and-tan panels and one small ochre staircase form at center.⁶¹⁰

Significance and limitations

Fermented Fruit is a compact proof that the oldest trick in generative art, the elementary cellular automaton, still has texture left in it when the automata are treated as cultures rather than patterns: weighted fruit palettes, asymmetric panelling and a granular noise wash turn the Wolfram rules into something closer to a food photograph than a math plot.¹³ Its mint is also a small piece of Art Blocks history, an entire 140-edition factory series gone in fifty-three seconds, timestamps slightly ahead of the announced opening.⁶

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

• The original mint price at the July 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.¹
• Editions 1 and 59 minted thirty and six seconds before the announced 16:00:00 UTC start; the cause (early gate or clock skew) is not determinable from the inspected sources.¹⁶
• No Fermented Fruit-specific interview was located; the registry interview field is empty, and the conception account rests on the description, the artist's page and the dossier.¹
• The probe observed settle at roughly the three-minute mark on one token under software rendering; on faster hardware the fermentation may complete sooner, and no per-edition timing is published.⁵
• The weighted rarity of the named fruit schemes is code-derived; the script publishes no feature data, so palette frequencies could not be cross-checked against a traits index.³