# Gazers by Matt Kane

*Art Blocks Curated, project 215 · 1,000 outputs · minted 6 December 2021 · CC BY-NC 4.0*

![Gazers #271: a pale octagonal moon glowing at the centre of nested olive and brown squares of fine cross-hatched lines on black](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/215000271.png)
*Gazers #271, held by AB5D: an Octa moon with the "No Sale" Origin Moon. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## The work and its context

Gazers is project 215 on the Art Blocks contract `0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270`. The index records 1,000 invocations against a maximum of 1,000, the runtime `p5@1.0.0`, a square aspect ratio, a price field of 0.25 ETH and the licence `CC BY-NC 4.0` [^S01]. Kane's project text says Gazers functions "as a lunar calendar, algorithmically synching closely with Moon phases in the sky" [^S01].

Each output is a moon, drawn as a polygon or near-circle, floating in a stack of square frames. Every surface is built from thin parallel lines, and the colour comes from how those lines overlap [^S01]. Unlike most long-form works, a Gazer is not one image. The same token looks different at noon and midnight, on a new moon and a full moon, on the artist's chosen anniversaries and during eclipses. It also runs faster every month. The token hash fixes the rules; the clock decides what you see [^S01][^S02].

The Museum of Crypto Art (MOCA) wrote in 2023, as quoted on Kane's press page, that Gazers "positively ooze[s] secrecy, with hidden algorithmic triggers" [^S03][^S04].

## Conception and development

Kane trained as an oil painter and taught himself to code. His "Right Place & Right Time" (2020), a work driven by Bitcoin's volatility, became the first NFT artwork to sell for over $100,000, according to his own biography [^S05]. He told MOCA's Maxwell Cohen that Gazers followed "some really poor news about my health", which made him believe he "had a limited period of time to really create a masterpiece" [^S04].

He framed it as the opposite of the Bitcoin work. That piece reacted to market chaos; Gazers was to move at the Moon's pace [^S04]. On the Gazers site he gives a personal origin: the moon "always brought my father and I together to share a moment of crooked neck wonderment" [^S05]. He also noted that both his record sale and his Sotheby's sale fell under new moons [^S05].

That observation became the **Origin Moon** trait. Each token is assigned one of twelve new moons between 2001 and 2021 that "shaped my path as an artist". Kane calls the series "in part a conceptual self portrait" [^S01]. MOCA reports that the dates include his first sale and "the infamous day in which a Sotheby's buyer backed out of a sale" of *Meules after Claude Monet* [^S04]. Kane told nft now that Gazers has "a 'No Sale' Origin Moon trait, which was the origin of that collection" [^S06]. The code dates "No Sale" to 10 June 2021 at 10:52 UTC [^S01].

Kane asked for patience. His Art Blocks interview, as quoted on his press page, reads: "Give me 10 years. 20 years. 60 years. 200 years. 1000 years. Then understand Gazers" [^S03]. MOCA's later essay says the "frankly-confounding amount of unique traits" was partly "a response to those arbitrary rarity rankings" applied to earlier Art Blocks projects [^S07].

## How the work was constructed

The program is three script parts that concatenate to 29,083 bytes, SHA-256 `9dc23ee4e642a6d4d1f55c27decdaf540f6e66b4ed09a2de3e5820d67acba503`. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full [^S01].

The program seeds an xorshift generator from the first 14 hex digits of the hash. For this draft the start of its set-up routine was re-implemented in Python and run against all 1,000 hashes. It reproduced twelve published traits exactly for every token: Origin Moon, +1 Frame Every, Clock, Clock Style, Full @, Celebration Window, Eclipse Max, Default Hemisphere, Seed Counter, the Reflect trait (💭), Visualize (🔭) and the artist-gift trait (✍️) [^S01].

The picture is assembled from up to ten layers: background frames, a "sky", a bevel, the moon itself, overlays, and special layers for anniversaries and eclipses. Each layer is filled with bands of lines at an angle. The spacing, stroke weight and opacity of each band drift continuously [^S01]. The moon's shape is chosen from a short list of vertex counts, and the published weights follow it closely [^S01].

| Moon (vertices in the code) | Weight | Published count of 1,000 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 🌑 (33, a near-circle) | 6/13 | 462 |
| Block🌑 (4) | 2/13 | 152 |
| 🌑Cube (6) | 2/13 | 146 |
| Dodeca🌑 (12) | 1/13 | 86 |
| Octa🌑 (8) | 1/13 | 74 |
| 🎲 (a new random shape at each new moon) | 1/13 | 80 |

The Origin Moon is drawn by a chain of tests. The probabilities are themselves playful: The Dream is picked with probability 0.008162001, and First One Person Show with 0.03172006, which read like dates (code reading) [^S01]. Anything that falls through the chain gets "Gazers Sale", the new moon of 4 December 2021, 07:43 UTC. That is why 373 tokens carry it [^S01].

### How time drives the work

Everything below comes from the code. Figures for dates were computed for this draft from the program's constants [^S01].

- **The lunar clock.** The program counts lunations since the token's Origin Moon, using a fixed month of 2,551,443 seconds (29.5306 days). The moon's crescent is drawn from the fraction of the current lunation [^S01]. Because the count starts from each token's own origin, tokens with different Origin Moons wax and wane slightly out of step, as the Gazers FAQ describes [^S02].
- **Frame rate.** The frame rate is the number of lunations since the Origin Moon divided by the "+1 Frame Every" value, never below 1 frame per second. Kane's text gives the idea: a 20-year-old Origin Moon "might run at 20 frames per second" [^S01]. Nearly three-quarters of tokens (736) add a frame every 12 lunations; one adds a frame only every 1,068 and one every 1,728 [^S01].
- **The day.** Local time of day sets each layer's opacity through rising and setting curves. The moon's size swells towards noon or midnight ("Moon Zoom"). At local midnight every layer draws "a new set of rules" for the next 24 hours [^S01].
- **Rendering modes.** Keys 1 to 4 switch viewing modes. Mode 2 unlocks after 33 lunations, mode 3 after 66 and mode 4 after 99. The FAQ calls this "every 33 months" [^S01][^S02]. Every 33rd lunation the work also spends a whole month in a special state in which the moon swells to about 70 per cent of the canvas and takes the frame's shape (code reading) [^S01].
- **Anniversaries.** Each year, within the token's Celebration Window around its Origin Moon's date, the work jumps to 60 frames per second. It draws one extra ring for every lunation since the origin (code reading) [^S01].
- **Eclipses.** The program carries a table of 132 eclipse times in three classes, from 19 November 2021 to 12 November 2152. Within the Celebration Window of an entry, extra moons appear and the layers dim towards the eclipse's peak [^S01]. From 2032, owners can add eclipses of their own through the page's URL [^S01].
- **Special days.** On 14 November and 22 May every Gazer switches into an alternative line style. Kane named these the "Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt modes" [^S04]. The code also hides the moons on 1 April and 8 January, removes outlines on 8 January, adds strong flicker on 30 July, and counts down the final hour of 31 December [^S01].

### Gazers #271 over time

#271 is an Octa moon with the No Sale Origin Moon (10 June 2021). It adds a frame every 12 lunations and has the longest Celebration Window, 144 hours [^S01]. The schedule below was computed from the code's constants.

| Date (UTC) | Lunations since origin | Frame rate | State |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 6 December 2021 (mint) | about 6 | 1 fps (floor) | mode 1 only |
| 9 February 2024 | 33 | 2.75 fps | mode 2 unlocks; a 33rd-lunation month begins |
| 20 September 2026 (retrieval) | 65.3 | 5.4 fps | modes 1 and 2 |
| 11 October 2026 | 66 | 5.5 fps | mode 3 unlocks; second special month |
| 11 June 2029 | 99 | 8.25 fps | mode 4 unlocks |
| 10 June 2050 | about 359 | 29.9 fps | |
| 10 June 2100 | about 977 | 81.4 fps | |

Each June, for three days either side of the anniversary, #271 runs at 60 fps with a ring for every lunation it has lived through (code reading) [^S01]. The next eclipse entry is on 6 February 2027. From 3 to 9 February 2027, #271 will show its eclipse state [^S01].

## Quirks in the algorithm

1. **A background choice that collapses to one grey.** The rare "Aluminum" background is meant to be picked from a list of four greys. A misplaced comma in the index makes the expression always return the fourth, `#cbcfd4`. Two warm off-whites in the list can never appear (code reading) [^S01]. The published data fits: only three backgrounds exist, Night (886), Aluminum (58) and Slate (56) [^S01].
2. **A limit with no limits.** One branch of the "gap chance" setting calls p5's `constrain` with only one argument. That returns NaN, so the setting silently behaves as zero. In the initial set-up this happens for 375 of the 1,000 tokens (code reading, computed) [^S01].
3. **Eclipse approaches mirror the departure.** The value the program computes before an eclipse runs from 2 down to 1, not from 0 up to 1. The separate "approaching" branches in the moon-sizing code can therefore never run. Eclipse effects rise and fall symmetrically around the peak (code reading) [^S01].
4. **A 29-day phase dial.** The phase counter maps the 29.53-day cycle onto 29 days, then wraps. It therefore wraps about 12.7 hours before each lunation ends, and the moon design is rebuilt twice around every new moon (code reading) [^S01].
5. **Time zones everywhere.** Daily curves, special days and the midnight reset follow the viewer's local clock. The anniversary is built from the Origin Moon's UTC date read as local time, so the Celebration Window shifts with the viewer's time zone. Only the lunar count and eclipses use absolute time (code reading) [^S01].
6. **The Gazers Sale origin moved.** The code picks the 4 November 2021 new moon if the clock reads earlier than 4 December 2021, 07:43 UTC, and the December new moon after it. A third date, 7 September 2021, is declared and then overwritten on the first frame [^S01]. Invocation 0, minted on 27 November, has the No Sale origin, so no minted token was affected [^S01].
7. **A generator with 10,000 values.** Each random draw is reduced to four decimal places, so every draw takes one of 10,000 values. The 14-hex-digit seed also exceeds JavaScript's integer precision before it is cut to 32 bits. All 1,000 tokens still receive distinct seeds (computed) [^S01].
8. **Dead and duplicate data.** A computed colour table is built and then replaced by the full palette on the next line. The eclipse table lists 22 May 2077 twice (code reading) [^S01]. Three late entries fall on 22 May 2096, 8 January 2103 and 1 April 2103, the very days the program treats as special (computed) [^S01].
9. **Keys, mouse and URL.** Beyond keys 1 to 4, key 0 switches the clock tokens between clock and calendar. Keys 7 and 9 tilt the moon, 5 and 6 (or the arrows) step back through past moons for Reflect tokens, and up and down change resolution [^S01][^S02]. Eleven URL fields can fix phase, moon size, rotation, mode and more [^S01].

## The most coveted variants

Collectors have little public price data to go on per token. VERSE records a highest sale of $102,364 without naming the token [^S08]. DappRadar reported in February 2022 that "three of the five top value sales in the last 24 hours" were Gazers, together worth about $100,000 [^S09]. The traits that the community discusses most are those that change behaviour, not appearance [^S02].

**Early Origin Moons.** The oldest origins run fastest. The six Dream tokens (#351, #354, #568, #613, #770, #919) date from 21 July 2001 [^S01]. At retrieval those adding a frame every 12 lunations ran at 25.9 fps (computed) [^S01]. The artist's own wallet still holds #354, as well as invocation 0 [^S01].

![Gazers #354, a Dream Origin Moon token held by the artist's wallet](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/215000354.png)
*Gazers #354: The Dream Origin Moon, 🌑 moon, one of the fastest Gazers. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

![Gazers #0: a faceted, glassy moon in pale green on a bright green square field](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/215000000.png)
*Gazers #0, minted on 27 November 2021 and still in the artist's wallet: a 🎲 moon with the No Sale origin. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**The slowest clocks.** At the other extreme, #815 adds a frame every 1,728 lunations and #873 every 1,068 [^S01]. #873 has the First Record Sale origin (28 October 2019). It will not pass 1 fps until March 2106 and will reach 2 fps only in 2192 (computed) [^S01].

![Gazers #873: a large octagonal moon, half in shadow, with a bright yellow crescent edge on an orange and green ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/215000873.png)
*Gazers #873: +1 frame every 1,068 lunations. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Reflect.** Nine tokens carry "Reflect" outright, and 113 more carry "Reflect After" a number of lunations, from 12 to 144,000 [^S01]. Reflect lets the owner step back through past moons. Kane's line in the FAQ is that some of us "reflect back within our minds" [^S02]. #520 will unlock after 708 lunations, in August 2074, and six tokens only after 144,000 lunations, about 11,600 years (computed) [^S01].

![Gazers #520: a Block moon turned on its point, a violet diamond in a pale olive square on a slate ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/215000520.png)
*Gazers #520: Block moon, Slate background, Reflect after 708 lunations, and the Monet gift. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Artist gifts, Visualize and clocks.** 136 tokens carry the Monet gift (👨‍🎨🎁) and 104 the Cassatt gift (👩‍🎨🎁). From 2022 these could switch the painter modes on with the "m" key on any day, not just the birthdays [^S01][^S04]. Fourteen Visualize tokens let the owner drag the moon's size with the mouse [^S01][^S02]. 208 tokens are clocks as well as calendars. Nineteen are Hour, Minute & Seconds clocks, the rarest kind [^S01].

![Gazers #422: a small half-lit moon on a plain pale grey Aluminum ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/215000422.png)
*Gazers #422: Aluminum background, 24 Hour Clock, Reflect after 12 lunations. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Rare placements.** Thirteen tokens have the Equator hemisphere, which turns the moon's lit side by 90 degrees [^S01]. Aluminum (58) and Slate (56) backgrounds are the rarest grounds [^S01].

## Notable collectors

No sourced institutional holding was found. The Edicurial Collection shows #859, recording its acquisition on 8 December 2021 [^S10]. At retrieval, 377 addresses held the 1,000 tokens. The largest wallet held 85 and the next 67; no source inspected names either [^S01]. The artist's address holds 13 [^S01].

## Gazers in exhibition and on video

In 2022 MoCDA showed twelve Gazers, one per Origin Moon, in *Not Only RGB*. It released timelapses made from a screenshot taken each day for a year [^S11]. The exhibition page asks how we would appreciate the work "if it were allowed to run uninterrupted while a screenshot is snapped daily" [^S11]. Kane gave a MoCDA artist talk in November 2022 [^S12]. He also released a launch video [^S13] and took part in DMINTI's 24-hour colour and time programme in 2023 [^S14]. Vanity Fair Italy's MetaVanity featured Gazers in April 2022 [^S03].

![Gazers #807: a tiny dark diamond moon at the centre of nested teal and olive squares](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/215000807.png)
*Gazers #807: a small Block moon with the Cassatt gift. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 27 November 2021 at 14:39:38 UTC. The project was activated on 2 December and opened at 18:00 UTC on 6 December [^S01]. The first public token followed at 18:21:29 UTC. Only 17 were minted in the first hour; 976 were minted from 19:10 onwards, and the last at 19:30:41 UTC [^S01]. That pattern suggests a falling-price auction reaching its resting price, but the index keeps only the price field of 0.25 ETH [^S01]. MOCA recalls a floor of 0.7 ETH that "had doubled" the next morning [^S04].

Kane pledged 25 per cent of primary sales to charities "concerned with the arts, neurological & mental health, suicide prevention" and other causes [^S01]. The project record promises "a full and transparent reporting" on gazers.art; no such report was found on the site [^S01][^S15].

## Copyright and licensing

The index records `CC BY-NC 4.0` with a link to the Creative Commons licence [^S01]. On that label the images may be shared and adapted for non-commercial purposes with attribution. Because the work changes with time, any still render is only one state of it. The program carries no separate code licence, and p5.js is loaded by the platform [^S01].

## Significance and limitations

Gazers puts time inside the token more thoroughly than almost any other Art Blocks project. It has a lunar count, a daily cycle, annual anniversaries, an eclipse table running to 2152, and a frame rate that climbs for centuries [^S01]. Its traits describe behaviour more than appearance. The static renders that marketplaces show are single moments of a work designed to be lived with [^S01][^S02]. That also limits this essay. Every picture here is one frame, taken at an unknown time.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Did Kane report the charity donations promised in the project text, and where?
2. What were the mint pricing schedule and the starting price?
3. What do the traits "The Attainable", "The Disremembered", "Transfer Value" and 🚀 control? The FAQ calls the first two unknown [^S02].
4. Why are 8 January, 1 April and 30 July special? Kane's nft now remark about October special dates does not match anything found in the code [^S06].
5. The three eclipse classes appear to be total solar, total lunar and annular, judging by known dates. The Art Blocks interview on Cent could not be fetched to confirm this or the quotes relayed from it [^S03].

## Bibliography

### Primary

[^S01]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index, `projects_metadata` for project 215 (description, sales notes and full program) and `tokens_metadata` for all 1,000 tokens. Retrieved 2026-09-20 via https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql. Collection page: https://www.artblocks.io/collection/gazers-by-matt-kane
[^S02]: Matt Kane, "Frequently Asked Questions about Gazers NFTs", gazers.art. https://gazers.art/faq/
[^S05]: Matt Kane, "About the Artist", gazers.art. https://gazers.art/about-the-artist/
[^S15]: Matt Kane, Gazers website. https://gazers.art/
[^S03]: Matt Kane, "Featured Press", listing and quoting the Art Blocks interview on Cent (11 December 2021, https://beta.cent.co/artblocks/+psy7wo), ARTnews (20 June 2025) and Vanity Fair Italy (25 April 2022). https://mattkane.com/press/
[^S11]: Matt Kane, "Not Only RGB", gazers.art, on the MoCDA exhibition. https://gazers.art/not-only-rgb

### Video and audio

[^S13]: "Gazers by Matt Kane - Curated on ArtBlocks", Matt Kane, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qppoHurxibI
[^S12]: "Artist Talk: Matt Kane", MoCDA: The Museum of Contemporary Digital Art, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ek-Datx9n4
[^S14]: "Color, Time and the Blockchain: A 24 hour celebration of Ricci Albenda's Universal Color Clock", DMINTI, YouTube live, 27 June 2023. https://www.youtube.com/live/828iiQfMZ_A. Titles and channels confirmed with YouTube's oEmbed service on 2026-09-20; the videos were not watched.

### Criticism, collecting and market

[^S04]: Maxwell Cohen, "Matt Kane is Eternal", Museum of Crypto Art, Medium, 30 March 2023. https://museumofcryptoart.medium.com/matt-kane-is-eternal-5d8489b8945a
[^S06]: Arthur Parkhouse, interview with Matt Kane on *Contractual Obligations*, nft now, 12 October 2023. https://nftnow.com/features/matt-kane-contractual-obligations-interview/
[^S07]: Maxwell Cohen, "An Exhaustive Reenactment of Matt Kane's Moral Performance", Museum of Crypto Art, Medium, 11 May 2025. https://museumofcryptoart.medium.com/an-exhaustive-reenactment-of-matt-kanes-moral-performance-bcbc87b8e961
[^S08]: VERSE, "Gazers by Matt Kane" series page. https://verse.works/series/gazers-by-matt-kane
[^S09]: Ian Kane, "New NFT Collections Push Trading Volume on Art Blocks 800%", DappRadar, 2 February 2022. https://dappradar.com/blog/new-nft-collections-push-trading-volume-on-art-blocks-800
[^S10]: The Edicurial Collection, "Gazers #859 by Matt Kane". https://www.edicurial.com/collection-gallery-3/gazers-859-matt-kane

### Further reading

- Matt Kane, Gazers project page. https://mattkane.com/projects/gazers/
- nft now, "NFT100 2022". https://nftnow.com/nft100-list-2022/
- Feral File, "Source" exhibition page (listed on Kane's press page; not read). https://feralfile.com/exhibitions/source
- ARTnews, "ARTnews Polled 10 Digital Art Experts to Find Out Their Favorite Digital Art Works", 20 June 2025 (paywalled; not read). https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/best-digital-art-works-picked-by-experts-1234745683/