Geometry Runners

A race that keeps its place

Geometry Runners gives simple solid forms a surprisingly legible sense of effort. Boxes tip, rounded bodies roll, and segmented structures lift themselves into arches before extending again. The ground travels beneath them. Their movements suggest progress, but the group remains available to inspect: the race does not carry its participants permanently beyond the screen. In the five originals examined here, animation makes differences between forms more consequential than a still catalogue of shapes could show.¹²³⁴⁵⁶

Rich Lord released the thousand-work series through Art Blocks Curated in August 2021. It is project 138 on the original flagship contract used for this release. The official description frames its participants as racers with different attitudes and invites viewers to drag the scene. That playful account fits an important visual fact: these objects can seem eager, awkward or indifferent without receiving faces or limbs. Their character comes from how a geometric body moves.⁷

The Rich Lord dossier provides the wider practice context. His own portfolio includes procedural architecture, articulated creatures and animation made outside Art Blocks. That broader work helps situate Geometry Runners as an animation problem pursued through generative methods, rather than a still image given a decorative moving effect.⁸

Reworking a walking system

In his release interview with Jeff Davis, Lord contrasts this project with his earlier, static Octo Garden. He describes revisiting walking systems previously explored through physics and reworking them for real-time presentation. The conversation names Karl Sims and Theo Jansen among his influences and connects the work with his teaching of mathematical tools for animation. It also stresses arrangement and phase: a group can produce a wave-like relationship when similar actions occur at different moments.⁹

This account establishes an artist-led development connection. It does not mean that the deployed program contains a physics engine or reconstructs a Jansen mechanism. The inspected script instead prescribes motion through transformations and mathematical functions. Earlier experiments and the eventual implementation are related stages with different technical means.¹⁹

That distinction improves the reading of the work. A moving block need not solve gravity and contact forces to communicate weight. A pause near an upright position, a quick change of angle or the order in which segments bend can supply the necessary impression. Lord's authorship lies partly in deciding how little machinery is needed to make an abstract form appear to exert itself. The resulting movements are economical but far from interchangeable.¹⁶

Giving geometry a gait

The complete indexed program contains 25,470 UTF-8 bytes and declares Three.js 0.124.0. Its hash was recorded after a full reading. The first eight hexadecimal digits of the token hash initialize a shift-and-XOR pseudorandom generator whose returned values fall in thousandth-sized increments. These repeatable choices organize the scene; later animation uses elapsed time rather than requesting fresh token randomness at each frame.¹

Ten class definitions support thirteen selectable motion types, with some alternatives reusing a class. The possible arrangements include a scattered field, a grid, a line, a triangle, a leader with followers and a single participant. The scattered arrangement performs an initial series of separation adjustments. Those adjustments establish spacing before the animation; they do not amount to a continuing collision simulation between moving bodies.¹

Each runner receives a phase derived from elapsed time, travel distance and speed. Positions, pivots and quaternion rotations then describe its action. Different powers of the phase change the pace within a movement: tipping can accelerate, a translation can ease differently, and the segments of a stack can acquire their angles successively. Describing all this as a generic rotation would miss the difference between a rolling whole and a body that appears to fold itself forward.¹

The segmented forms make the procedure particularly readable. Their parts remain individually visible while their collective outline changes from a low run into a tall or curved construction. Successive changes along the body give the eye something to follow. In the inspected held work, several such structures can be compared with simpler blocks at the same moment, turning the scene into a compact study of different ways to move.⁶

The sense of travel also depends on a coordinated deception. Most runners subtract their phase-related travel from their local forward position, while two ground meshes move according to elapsed time and speed. The field thus behaves like a moving stage. A participant can perform a forward action without steadily disappearing into the distance. This keeps the individual configuration recognizable over repeated cycles.¹

The meshes are built from geometric procedures for faceted spheres, boxes and complete or partial cylinders. Vertex colours and dark edge strips help distinguish their surfaces. An outline option omits interior faces and changes the material treatment. These choices affect how motion reads: a strongly marked edge makes a turning face easy to track, while visible segmentation exposes the relation between a component and the body containing it.¹

Twenty-four six-colour palettes provide the ground, outlines and runner colours. Light and shadow further separate objects from the plane. The camera has a narrow perspective angle of 3.8 degrees. Although the view can resemble an axonometric drawing, calling it orthographic would be technically wrong. The deployed scene uses perspective, with a restrained difference in apparent scale across depth.¹

Pointer movement while dragging supplies horizontal displacement to an easing camera rotation. This control is advertised by Art Blocks and present in the code. A browser-input drag attempted during this review did not produce a sufficiently clear camera change to count as a successful interaction test. Continuous automatic motion, however, was directly observed in all five originals. No audio calls or separately downloaded artwork assets were found in the artist script.¹⁷

Several dates and two ways of measuring a short mint

The current index reports one thousand invocations against a maximum of one thousand. Its first mint is August 12, 2021 at 05:57:20; activation is August 25 at 02:23:01. Art Blocks gives August 27 as the public release. The first token therefore precedes both activation and the public date. Its existence does not establish that public buying began on August 12.¹⁷

The second mint is timestamped August 27 at 15:59:42, while the scheduled start is 16:00:00. Completion is recorded at 16:02:54. These fields produce different intervals: three minutes and twelve seconds from the second mint, or two minutes and fifty-four seconds from the scheduled start. The eighteen-second difference should remain visible in the research record rather than being silently resolved into a single supposedly exact sellout duration.¹

Bailey Reutzel's first-person account for The Defiant describes watching the August 27 release and reports that it sold out at a starting price of 5 ETH in under three minutes. This provides contemporary witness evidence for the opening price and perceived speed. It is consistent with the scheduled-start interval, but does not itself audit the allocation or payment attached to every token.¹⁰

The current price setting is also 5 ETH. Agreement between that setting and Reutzel's account is useful corroboration, not proof that the configuration never changed. The inspected records do not reconstruct all announced auction steps, distinguish every reserved allocation or recover the original maximum from a launch-era contract state. Network fees are separate from the stated mint price.¹¹⁰

Artwork permission and software preservation

The current artwork label is CC BY-NC 4.0. The project record has no separate terms URL, but the named Creative Commons deed supplies the corresponding attribution and noncommercial conditions. Sharing or adaptation under that licence requires appropriate credit, licence information and an indication of changes. The observed label does not establish the complete history of the project's terms.¹¹¹

The header uses the unchanged official original for the verified AB5D holding, edition 863, with the artist credit and artwork licence identified separately from AB5D's prose. Retaining the live view matters because the object's movement is part of what the essay discusses. The current token owner matches one of the three wallets in the freshly retrieved AB5D profile.⁶¹²

Three.js r124 carries the MIT licence. That permission belongs to the rendering library and does not establish a separate licence for Lord's artist program. No such artist-code grant was found in the inspected material. The research record retains a digest and analysis rather than republishing the code. Token input, the artist script and a compatible library environment remain distinct components of future reproducibility.¹¹³

Five arrangements in motion

The comparison uses editions 0, 1, 10 and 20, plus held edition 863. Their exact token identities were checked against the project record, and their official original renderers were viewed in more than one state. This is a small, deliberately identified sample, not a survey of trait frequency or a claim that the selected works exhaust the series' range.²³⁴⁵⁶

In #0, a large lavender segmented body stands apart from a group of much smaller lavender, cyan and cream bodies on a brown-grey ground. At one observed moment the large form curled upright; at another it extended into a low sequence of six angular segments. The disparity in size makes the small group appear almost social beside a conspicuous individual. Yet the relationship is also formal: the same kind of articulated movement becomes differently legible when enlarged. The giant shape exposes construction, while the smaller group emphasizes collective timing.²

The space between those scales matters. It prevents the composition from becoming an undifferentiated crowd and lets the eye alternate between one body's changing outline and several bodies' changing relationships. The large participant can look imposing when upright and comparatively passive when spread low. Nothing needs to be added to the geometry to create that shift in apparent temperament; orientation and proportion supply it.²

Edition #1 distributes a wider mixture of forms across the field. Yellow, teal, red and pale bodies include spheres, blocks, curved forms and segmented chains. A faceted sphere turns as a continuous whole, whereas an articulated form changes its outline through relations between parts. Watching them together makes those different procedures available to ordinary perception. The scene is not just a collection of differently coloured runners. It is a collection of different definitions of a step.³

In #10, broad red, pale, teal and yellow half-round or trapezoidal-looking forms share the field with much smaller bodies. Their rocking and tipping bring large faces into view, then diminish them. The streaming grid reinforces forward travel even as the group retains its overall organization. Compared with #0, the contrast depends less on a single detached giant and more on the repeated interruption of the field by several substantial masses.⁴

Edition #20 is close and comparatively restricted: large peach rectangular blocks occupy a regular arrangement against a dark grey ground. Black faces sharpen their edges. Changes of position and rotation alter which surfaces carry the light colour, making an apparently simple repetition temporally varied. Cropping keeps the scene from resolving into a complete diagram of all its participants. It feels like a view into an ongoing procession.⁵

Held edition #863 sets cream, muted cyan and dark forms against charcoal green. Segmented arches, slabs, boxes and triangulated spheres remain distinct within a broad mixed field. Across observations, some articulated bodies rose into near-vertical columns and then bent again, while adjacent simpler shapes tipped or rolled. The palette restrains the scene without suppressing its variety. Dark outlines make the different modes of construction especially easy to compare.⁶

Character through repeated action

Geometry Runners finds expressive variation in the relation between a body and its permitted movement. The geometry remains abstract, but duration encourages the viewer to attribute effort, hesitation and coordination. Its achievement is not that the objects become realistic creatures. Their simplicity keeps the mechanism visible while allowing a rudimentary character to emerge from it.

The moving ground gives this character room to persist. Rather than ending when the participants leave the frame, the composition remains a place for comparison. A single work rewards sustained viewing; another changes the cast, distribution and rhythm. The inspected examples show how much of the series' identity lies in those relationships, beyond the appearance of any one captured frame.¹²³⁶

Unresolved research questions include:

• Which dated prototypes document the conversion of the earlier walking experiments into this real-time system?
• What explains the first token's allocation and the second mint preceding the indexed scheduled start?
• Which launch-era records establish the full price schedule and original maximum?
• Is there a separate licence for the artist program or an earlier artwork-terms record?
• Can drag behaviour and rendering after resize be reproduced consistently across current devices?